spooky action

They did warn me. They did say that each time you think you have got this thing cracked, a new challenge would present itself.

I kind of assumed that meant something in the realm of ‘once you’ve got solid food sorted you have potty training to tackle’ - that sort of thing.

So riding high with Snookie’s wonderful linguistic developments and now more or less used to his erratic sleeping habits, you could say I was getting the hang of it.

Even his fierce will (which means that when he is happy he is a delight but try to persuade him into something he does not fancy and he will mount a campaign of non-violent protest which includes running away or making like a plank, thus rendering himself impossible to manhandle) has become easier to manage since verbal negotiations became at our disposal.

He is a happy, healthy, adorable child who tolerates my inability to spot when his teeth are hurting, to the point that he has to stand in front of the medicine cupboard and point to the bottle of Calpol before I twig. (The other teething indicator is a refusal to eat any fruit, which at first I mistook for the early onset of puberty.)

So what I was not expecting was what occurred one night when the Engineer was out for the evening and I was putting Snooks to bed early in the hope of a bit of quiet time in front of some trashy TV.

As we snookled quietly in the semi-darkness of his bedroom – the largest and grandest in our home – he leaned back in my arms and informed me that there was a man at the window.

Of course my immediate reaction was calm, dismissive and kind. No there was no man, I assured him. The thick curtains were closed and shutters behind them prevented anyone looking in.

So he turned in my arms and pointed quite specifically to a spot in the bay window just above head height and said, “Man.”

Now I am a fairly practical person, not easily persuaded by theories which lack evidence (homeopathy, Diana’s murder, Facebook) but also not entirely sure that there may not be more to life than meets the eye.

After further investigation it became clear that a) The Man was not a shadow as he remained in place when the lights were turned on and off and that b) Snooks was not afraid of him and in fact seemed rather delighted by his presence.

I, on the other hand, was not and mentally raced through scenes from Poltergeist and The Sixth Sense and had consequently done what any good Catholic would do – I had prayed.

Before you write me off as a hysteric, I should explain that I managed not to convey my terror to Snooks, happily engaged in some kind of silent discourse with his new friend, and instead tried to glean what information I dare from him about the man’s identity.

But by the time the Engineer returned home about an hour later, although I knew there must be some earthly explanation for the apparition, I had been unable to bring myself to move and was still sitting in the same spot, cradling the now wide-awake Snooks in my arms.

After a hastily whispered exchange about unanswered questions behind the paranormal, the probable existence of good ghosts and the desire never again to watch a scary film, we managed to get Snooks to bed and remove to another room to regroup.

Now if you were looking to get spooked - or to sell the film rights - you could add to this story the fact that Snooks has also recently taken to rolling his eyes to one side and spinning round in circles until he keels over, a jest we nervously laugh off, while trying to stop him from crashing into the furniture.

And to mark a recent visit by his uncle, our little son was seen running triumphantly down the hallway bearing aloft a large painted crucifix which had been unearthed by the removal of his cot to our room for the duration.

Telling the story to my brother over dinner that night, rounding off the tale with the punchline '... and that's where you're sleeping', I mentioned that I had learned from Snooks that the man’s name was Green, leading me to suppose he might have made his way in from the many pelican crossings we use on our regular route to the common.

However my brother offered another, more romantic proposal; that he could be The Green Man - you know, the one adorning pubs and churches, the one who is thought to be a symbol of rebirth, a pagan tribute to fertility, the very essence of masculinity.

My brother’s stay with us passed without any nightly visits by any men of any hue and also seems to have seen off our other guest, as Snooks now informs me each night, before dropping off to sleep, ‘Man gone.’

I wish I could be so sure.

say the word

Snooks is 20 months old. A lot of people have been asking recently how old he is, people in the street and other mums who don’t know him.

“How old is he?” they ask in that tone which implies advance incredulity at the answer, which once given, is met with raised eyebrow polite silence.

I am not sure what this is about. Is it that he is quite small for his age – not perversely small – just cute, neat? He has little or no spare fat and is perfectly proportioned. He can still fit into some 12-month-old sized clothes.

Or it could be his hair? His hair has always aroused comment on account of its rather adult qualities. It is thick and poker straight and during the summer looked as if he has been treated to a half head of highlights. (A few people did actually ask if it was natural).

Or it could be his language, which at the risk of sounding like every other proud parent, is really very good. He has taken to following the Engineer around shouting “laptop” after a lengthy dinner table explanation about a problem with the one at work. He also, to my delight, shouts “cup-a-tea” in a perfect Asian/Yorkshire accent in honour of Ajay, the trusty driver of the Greendale Rocket for whom he reserves a particular fondness.

He can now sing along to Twinkle Twinkle and Wind the Bobbin with accompanying actions and can identify The Beatles after a few bars, whether it’s a song he knows or not.

Inevitably he has also mastered some of the less attractive language he hears yelling “Oh God!” and “Blast!” when things go awry. Mercifully, nothing worse seems to have stuck so far. The child has some standards after all.

And my heart twanged the other morning as I overheard him utter in low serious tones “mess” while watching a CBeebies programme link in which the children were happily painting and gluing. No wonder my attempts to interest him in such arts have fallen on barren soil; I have already crushed his creative spirit with my tidying. Blast!

To be fair (to myself) I have tried to combat my terror of this form of expression, encouraging him with crayons and felt pens to let rip on blank sheets, taking care the while to protect the furniture and carpet with yards of plastic sheeting. I even forced myself to take part in a Pumpkin Painting Party hosted by an American friend who is one of those with a natural born talent for these things.

Snooks and I acquitted ourselves in much the same fashion I recall enduring activities of this nature during my own childhood – over-excitement and high expectation followed by bitter demoralisation and eventually remonstration for disrupting others better endowed with the required talent for the job in hand. While I frantically glued googly eyes and pipe cleaner hair to my less than nimble fingers, I overheard Snooks being removed from someone else’s space and resort to banging the kitchen cupboard doors in bored protest. Oh God!

However, I don’t give up that easily and continue to lovingly display his work in time-honoured tradition on the fridge door, seeing, as only a mother can, the “firework display” in his orange and yellow squiggles. (In fact he produced this particular piece the day after we celebrated Bonfire Night in the back garden with a few fiery fountains and sparklers of our own. No bangs or rockets or anything so gruesome as a Guy, mind. In any case, when anyone got thrown on any of our childhood bonfires, it was usually Cromwell, as a means of evening up the score.)

Of course, his rapidly growing 20-month-old brain is bringing new trials too; toy throwing has just begun; early mornings (like 4.30am) continue; and a new phase of super-hugging smaller babies is proving less endearing to their mothers than it is to his own.

But a friend once told me, back when I was pregnant and wondering how it would all turn out, that just as I reached the point when I was ready to hand him over to social services and say ‘I give up, you do it’ - a point she had reached after unexpectedly giving birth to twins only for the overwhelmed father to abscond for three months - he would finally say the word and all would be healed.

And so he has. Sitting up at the dinner table one evening Snooks looked from one parent to the other. “Daddy!” he announced as he often does, with a combination of surprise and delight. Then he turned to me, the giver of milk and discipline, and finally, at last, put a name to the face.

“Mama,” he said.

things you thought you would never do: part 1

I have called this “part 1” because I have the feeling that this may be a lifelong theme. For instance if I am still breastfeeding when I am 85, we can put that top of the list.

Ok let’s start there. Breastfeeding.

Well ok it’s no surprise that I chose to breastfeed Snooks when he was born, 20 months ago. I mean, you would have to be pretty scary to refuse to breastfeed your own newborn baby when it crawls up your belly and latches on right there, as mine did, all on his lonesome.

But to be honest I would not have had myself down as card-carrying TFW (Toddler Feeding Weirdo) in the years before Snooks’ arrival. I think if someone had asked me I would probably have said what most people now say to me – “It’s good to breastfeed for a bit but not once they are talking” or “Yes it’s lovely and natural but best done behind closed doors” or “I wonder if the mother is really getting more from that than the child?” (To that, I just have to say, ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha and ha!).

To this particular shift in thinking I can only attribute sheer maternal instinct combined with the wealth of scientific evidence about the benefits of extended breastfeeding. Asking why I still breastfeed is a bit like asking why I don’t smoke anymore; in the light of all that I know, to do otherwise would be just plain stupid. And you can call me a TFW, call me a tree-hugger, call me a milky mama but don’t call me stupid. I don’t like that.

So next.

The other day I was out with a friend, her giggly boy, her dad, our Snooks, a bottle of bubbles and a kite.

We were soaking up one of the glorious autumn afternoons we have been enjoying this week and had brought together all the elements of a walk with our boys; stuff to eat, stuff to drink, stuff to put on, stuff to clean up, stuff to chase after and stuff to coax back into the buggy for the journey home. We have long since given up trying to meet for coffee in cafes. We now gather in the dog free zone of the common and let the boys run wild until they conk out.

The bubbles had provided a spectacular show as the low sun illuminated their prismatic effect against the cold blue sky, but the boys were in need of more action, if nothing else, to keep them warm.

And so this is how I ended up running hell for leather across the sodden grass – the only way to keep a kite aloft on a perfectly still afternoon - with the two littl’uns tumbling after me in pursuit of the kite’s zig-zaggily elusive tail.

“I bet you never thought you would do that,” my friend remarked as I returned, gasping for breath, to our buggy-bench base and attempted to resume my former life as a grown woman with a home, a car and a husband.

It reminded me of something the chief midwife said during the ante-natal classes we attended leading up to Snooks’ birth – classes which incidentally told me little I needed to know but instead filled me with such terror that the Engineer had to talk me down from the ledge each week over the tear-filled lunch which followed.

The midwife was talking about something very specific, but used a phrase which could easily be applied to much of the experience of being pregnant, of giving birth, of having a new born baby – and then, indeed, of being a mother.

She was talking about the moment when, you think your waters might have broken during the night but you are not really sure because for some, it is a bit of a non event (mine, to this day, have never been found) and you sniff the bed sheets after finding a strange wet patch on your side, which you can’t attribute to anything else.

“Yes, you will do this,” the midwife said with undisguised glee as we all looked at her in horror.

She need not have stopped there.

separation anxiety

This week marked another landmark.

We left Snookie with a babysitter.

Nothing happened - well nothing much bar my running out into the Chelsea night to shout breathlessly down the phone to the babysitter:

“What’s happened? Is everything all right? You called me twice and I missed the calls. I was talking to someone and it was really loud in there and I just happened to look at my phone – he asked to see a photo of Snookie so I looked at my phone but it had not occurred to me until then to look so I did not know you had phoned – is everything all right? What’s up?”

“Nothing. He is asleep. Why are you calling?”

I like her, the babysitter. She is Portuguese. She is a friend – actually the nanny of one of Snooks little friends. (Why are so many of the people I like not English?) Anyway, she tells it how it is.

“I didn’t call you. Go back inside and enjoy yourself.”

In fact what I had glimpsed in the fleeting two seconds that I looked at the phone was the missed call from hours earlier when she was outside the house and had the good sense to ring my mobile once to let me know that she was there rather than ring the doorbell, anticipating correctly that I had put Snooks to bed early and would lose the plot if he was woken just as we were about to leave. She’s good.
The other missed call was actually an earlier one from the Engineer on his way home from work, which I had missed in the midst of my pandering to Snooks’ demands for Chocolate Buttons and repeat episodes of Postman Pat – demands I was meeting unerringly in a bid to win his love should he ever, ever find out that I left the house without him one night.

Yes, 19 months. It has taken 19 months for The Engineer and I to get out of the house together, childless, and for me to feel confident enough in someone that they would take proper care of him and not leave him to cry while they smoked joints and fooled around on the settee with their boyfriend.

(Look I never did that when I was a babysitter, let’s just get that straight. However I did lose my one babysitting gig when my hilarious friends decided to play a Hallowe’en joke on me – in honour of the film of that name, you know, the one with the babysitter and the psychopath inside the house – by tapping on the windows and other such spooky activity that I rang my mum and asked her to come and sit with me. By the time the parents returned to their quiet, immaculate, middle class semi, myself, my mum and my two renegade friends were all sitting playing cards with the babysittees who had woken, terrified by all the commotion.)

All my Portuguese friend did was iron the shirts. Snooks slept the whole night through and didn’t even know we had gone.

The next day, I happened to get talking to a mumfriend who is due to have her second any day and is trying to install her first for a couple of mornings at nursery so that she will have one-to-one time with number two, when it turns up.

She thoughtfully decided to try it now, before number two arrives so that number one does not associate the two events – new sibling arrives, I get packed off somewhere else.

However it had not gone well. The first morning, her little boy, who is technically exactly the same age as Snooks, though he arrived two weeks early, had bought it though was a bit out of sorts when she came to collect him. By the second day he was distraught, and had been crying all morning. He has since refused to let go of her hand, day or night.

My friend looked exhausted. She had thought that her happy, confident, secure little boy – very like our Snooks in fact - would glide easily into someone else’s care, loving the chance to play with other children, as people are so often telling me is the main wish of a child that age.

In fact, in my view, his worst nightmare had come true. His mum had left him and he did not know if she was ever coming back.

I feel for my friend, I do. She had wanted to do the right thing for both of her children. Perhaps number two will just have to muddle along with getting a bit less of mum and a lot of older sibling instead.

As number four of four, I can say, it definitely has its pros as well as its cons.

baby bard

Our son is showing poetic tendencies.

It all started when we popped into the children’s section of our new town library.

It was nice - a lot smaller than the lovely children’s section of the old library just round the corner, the one which is being closed down, the one which cannot contain all the mums and babies who turn up for the weekly singing and reading slots, the one which is situated in the middle of a grid of residential streets which makes it a lovely local focal point away from the hubbub of the town centre.

Still. At least we still have a library and it will provide a quiet refuge from the maelstrom of the high street, not to mention a good pee-and-nappy stop.

So we popped in, clocked the children’s reading area and the loos, picked up our recycling bags from the counter (maybe they used all our old bean cans to make their new chairs) and were on our way out when I noticed the poster announcing that is was National Poetry Day. I am not sure what made me stop and say: “Oh look” to Snooks, as if he would know what the poster meant and as if it held any significance for either of us.

It just marked a pleasant change from National (Terminal Illness) Day notices. Also, I have a friend who is a poet and it felt like her name up on the wall there in library. It is just good to be reminded that there is poetry in the world still. Sometimes we forget.

Actually I remember the same event last year when Snooks was just a seven month old bumble and an actor employed by a local café to mark the day, read to him so beautifully, it made me cry.

Anyway I had drawn the attention of the assistant there who told us that by the time we returned we should be talking in rhyming couplets.

So it has been since then, with the library lady’s challenge locked in my soul, that I have started to hear poetry in my son’s wonderful babbling. I say babbling in the most complimentary sense. This is how the experts describe the speech of children his age, but in fact Snooks does not so much babble as assert, in short, very punchy sentences.

He has now started to link adjectives and nouns and even throws in the odd verb, making perfectly respectable conversation, the sparkle of which is only tarnished by the rather too frequent repetition of recurring themes; the crane at the end of our street; the tractor in the local park which the council workers use to ride around the grounds; the bin men and the street cleaners who pass by in sync at around 7am on a Wednesday morning.

So we have: “Crane skip lift high,” and “Tractor man leaves lights” and “Bin truck clean. See!”

I must say I rather enjoy this form of communication and as a jobbing journalist of many years am quite envious of his ability to nail it in so few words. I also find my tolerance for long windy dialogue, which was never great, has diminished considerably since I have been conversing, for at least half of my time, in this way.

Then he seemed to grasp the notion of rhyme, of sorts, experimenting with the words he knew to produce the legends, “Big pig” and a somewhat Shakespearean “Double bubble.”

But it is the gems of his accidental metaphors, which should be stolen and set in poetry.

This thought first occurred to me when he insisted that the geese on the local pond were bears. It got me thinking. Water bears. They are rather like bears – grumpy, lumbering, fast and powerful

And then last weekend the Engineer and I took him to the London Aquarium , a trip inspired by a bath book he was given which has introduced him to the existence of sea weed, sharks and crabs.

There, the spectacular larger tank included many creatures he recognised - a turtle which swam right towards us and caused him to spin in my arms with fright, a number of really menacing looking sharks and a giant graceful ray which dipped and swooped like a… like a…

“Kite!” shouted Snooks.

A kite. Of course. Has anyone every written a poem about kites and thought to compare them to stingrays? Pass me the pen. I’m going in.

growing up pain

Well I said I would keep you posted and the absence of a post last week says it all.

As Snooks recovered from his bout of whatever it was – we are never fully sure what he is suffering from; parenting involves an awful lot of guesswork - the Engineer went down with the cold he had had and I got the sore throat. Snooks kept the teething pain just for himself.

Considering the misery these inflicted on each of his parents I can only commend Snooks for his courage on having suffered all three at the same time. And indeed this powerlessness to do much about any of his suffering is probably the most painful part of it all for me.

The agony of watching him gag every time he ate, washing sheets stained with blood from his mouth where he had chewed ulcers during the night, bathing him standing with his arms around my neck because immersion in water had become unbearable for him, all surpassed any discomfort caused by my inflamed tonsils.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not good with pain. I don’t suffer in silence and I certainly am not a willing subscriber to the theory that pain is good for you, though I have reluctantly come to believe that some pain in life is necessary.

I remember one mumfriend jokingly telling her six month old, “No pain, no gain” as she yanked a rather tight but very stylish dress over her daughter’s big baby head. She is Italian. The dress mattered.

No. The only venture The Engineer and I made outside last weekend was to buy more paracetamol having crunched our way through all our supplies. We had to make separate trips as supermarkets restrict the number you can buy in one go (as if this is really going to stop anyone taking the lot if they really had that in mind) and we wanted to be really stocked up. This one looked like it was going to last.

Meanwhile, having finally cottoned on to how grim poor Snooks must have been feeling, I was regularly dosing him with Calpol (sometimes interspersed with Nurofen) backed up with Cadbury’s Buttons and breastmilk.

As Snooks appeared to be on the mend by Monday I decided to make our regular trip to the Toddler Gym where he loves to witness the bouncy castle go flat – an event he recounts for days afterwards - only to find the torrential rain I have been waiting for all summer had finally arrived. (I have a soft spot for rain, which I put down to my origins in the north.)

Suddenly filled with a sense of responsibility for all our health (an illusion brought on by lack of sleep) I opted to drive there, believing this to be the grown up thing to do. My natural instinct was to walk, as I always do and as people in Manchester always do when it rains, because it rains there all the time.

However here in London I was right. It was the grown up thing to do and all the grown ups had done it, filling the leisure centre car park to overflowing with SUVs and forcing me to park two streets away, carrying Snooks, coatless, through the driving rain.

At home, as I undressed a howling Snooks, furious at being woken from his rain-soaked slumber in the warm car, I was about to admit defeat and would have burst into tears had my lovely niece not arrived just at that moment with her almost equally lovely boyfriend .

I was expecting them, and had also been expecting to be dressed (nope), dry (nope) with Snooks either asleep (nope) or dressed (nope) and ready to go for a nice walk on the common, kicking the football all the way to a lovely café which serves excellent food and the best coffee in London (nope, nope and nope). I was going for Effortlessly Elegant Mother and Cool Aunt, with a hint of Edgy Londoner thrown in.

Instead, lovely niece found a teapot and tea and put the kettle on our 1950s (not retro, just ancient) stove and lovely boyfriend (he had qualified within seconds of our meeting at the front door) read The Tiger Who Came to Tea to a mesmerised Snooks, while I got dry and dressed.

Later, as we trawled across the common – we did the walk, rain notwithstanding – I told them about the night, when my niece was a very little girl, that I was bunked down in her bedroom and she got out of bed and put a blanket over me because I kept sneezing.

I wonder what they are up to this weekend?

corporal punishment

The week started badly.

On Monday I pulled a muscle in my calf chasing Snooks across the fields. My embarrassment was doubled by the fact that it was in the company of two other mums who are both currently, serenely pregnant with their seconds.

Their firsts were girls. They don’t know…yet. So my sprint to reach Snooks before he reached the path where the commuter cyclists belt along regardless was comically and very suddenly halted and replaced with an agonising hop as I continued the race against disaster.

And it has continued like that ever since.

The injury was actually a recurrence of a recurrence. The original tear was made years ago playing tennis, only in those days, the friend drove me home, found an ice pack to put on my leg, elevated on a cushion and brought me dinner.

The first recurrence happened in the privacy of our own hallway where, in the guise of the Cuddle Monster I took off in pursuit of Snooks rather too suddenly for my old calves to cope.

Having hopped around for a couple of days at home the leg was sort of on the mend when the second incident happened, this time at my mortification in front of an audience.

On neither occasion was I driven anywhere or given any cushions of any sort. I just did the usual stuff, only on one leg.

Tuesday morning was worse. Snooks had been referred by a kind but rather zealous GP to an ENT consultant after having a couple of nasty ear infections. I had learned that my family does a strong line in very narrow ear canals, which can cause complications resulting in slight but temporary loss of hearing. This revelation had helped with a number of unanswered questions about my own childhood, not least why I, and both my brothers spent time in hospital in our pre school years. It also means we all have quite cute ears.

We had already paid the consultant one visit, scorched into my brain with the memory of Snooks throwing up in the back of the car just as we swung into the hospital entrance, causing me to swerve and almost take out a woman just leaving the hospital grounds who glared at me with the understandable fury of someone who has just been given a clean bill of health only to be totalled by some idiot careering about in the car park.

He had suggested a ‘wait and see’ policy, and this was the ‘see’ bit. Whether Snooks remembered the previous visit or was simply demonstrating a family loathing of all things medical (his birth is the only good thing I have ever known happen in a hospital) he took against the whole plan the minute he spotted the place and had to be cajoled, ordered and finally bribed with chocolate buttons into the building.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would have expected that any medic who has ever treated any child before for any condition would have some idea that they may be a) frightened and b) not keen on having things poked in their ears.

But unfortunately both the technician who attempted to carry out the pressure test on Snooks’ ears and the consultant who wanted to look in them were aghast to find Snooks howling like a banshee.

Nevertheless I reluctantly went along with the plan to hold him firmly while things were poked in his ears, right up to the point that the specialist (not a doctor actually; he was a Mr therefore a surgeon. Not the same thing at all) suggested that his frantic behaviour was caused by frustration due to a loss of hearing and therefore was evidence that he needed an operation to cure it.

For the record, Snooks’ hearing is fine. His language is excellent for his age and he has lately been heard to hum Ally Bally Bee reasonably accurately.

Fuelled with tear-filled indignation that Snooks’ distress should be interpreted as a special need and horrified that a doctor should recommend surgery on such flimsy evidence I rejected the advice and left.

By Thursday I had discovered that if I wore high heels I could walk on both legs, which was good because it meant I could finally leave the house (hopping will only get you so far), but bad as it made for some unorthodox wardrobe choices for my weekly Pilates class. However I simply had to go as by now I was in desperate need of realignment, in more ways than one.

Things could have got very complicated at this point as a friend who suddenly needed someone to look after her daughter asked if I could help. Through a rather impressive mums-jungle-telegraph, her little girl was delivered to us that afternoon, fed, changed and tired which meant, mercifully, she fell asleep almost instantly, leaving me to entertain Snooks for two hours without letting him know that someone was sleeping in baby bear’s bed.

By Friday, Fortune seemed at last to be smiling as I was fit enough to take Snooks out to a playgroup where we met up by chance with the same little girl now in the care of another jungle mum and her son whom we joined for lunch.

It did not last. Snooks began to drool ominously, developed a lovely crop of ulcers around his mouth and embarked on a coughing and gagging campaign, which continued pretty much unbroken for the rest of the day.

Many spoons of Calpol and not many hours of sleep later I can confirm that his canines are well on the way. As I write, both he and the Engineer have come in and fallen asleep on the bed where I am holed up with my laptop. I’ll keep you posted.