Relaxed Parents

I’ve been intending to write a long, self-excoriating post about our Not Shouting campaign, dudelet’s current discipline issues and my own failures in coping effectively with him.  That can wait.

Yesterday, I went up to Nottingham to run a short workshop at a conference (I had a mixed response).  I was due back in the office at 2pm, had scored first class tickets for less than a fiver more than standard and generally enjoying the sensation of being waited on hand and foot (seriously - I was the only traveller in the entire carriage!)  Then another train decided to tangle itself up with overhead cables in North London and managed to shut down pretty much every train from Kentish Town to Leicester in the process.

The first I knew about this was when the PA system told us that our train (and my first class seat!) was terminated.  Did I mention it was the hottest day of the year so far?  We all crowded onto a tiny platform whilst a railway employee tried to explain to us what was going on.  We waited.  And waited.  A train came along.  We waited some more.  The railway lady told us to get on it.  So we did.  Then they terminated it and we got off again.  I wandered around and took some random pictures.  The railway lady and everyone else were patient with each other in a mutually aggrieved sort of way (in fact, no-one, no-one took it out on the station staff.  See?  The British still have in them to be polite in times of petty crisis.)

Finally, we all squashed onto another train (an awful lot of people had accrued by this point) and travelled on to the next station.  Then they terminated the train.  By this point, people were starting to get positively cheerful.  I saw a tall young women walk up to an old man, a complete stranger, and give him one of her bottles of water (needless to say, there was no water anywhere).  I took photos of the backs of people’s heads.

Then we got on another train and trundled off again, people practically sitting in each other’s laps.  This time, they began to add stations - Cricklewood, Hendon…West Hampstead!  Hooray! An Underground.  Everyone was freely passing around each other’s Tube maps and the London natives were making suggestions about the best way to travel onwards or the best chance of getting to Heathrow (Victoria line and change at Green Park if you’re on the Jubilee.

I and a vast crowd of fellow-travellers got off at West Hampstead and dispersed.  I was exhausted, a 1.5 hour journey had taken five and half hours but I got home ok.  And I made it to my yoga class (WOYOPRACMO for July - one day down!).

Ages ago, Karen Joy tagged me for a 150 character message to the world.  Punctuation doesn’t count, she says.  Pah, say I - punctuation so does count.  So here’s everything I have to say to the world distilled into 150 characters.  Including punctuation.

Do least harm. Show compassion. Listen to your kids. Listen in general. Work hard on your own salvation. If in doubt, ask “What would Joe Strummer do?”

I nominate the entire planet.

The last would be me. I’m quite thoroughly phoning it in at the moment.

The next-to-last would be dudelet who actually slept until 6:50am this morning.  Recently, he’s been sliding back to waking at six (or even earlier a day or two ago) and coming and waking me up.  Then he’ll go back to his room and start talking loudly or thumping the door (or sawing up the furniture or tap dancing or singing or inventing megaphones).  I’ll point out that dudelette and mummy are sleeping (whether dudelette is actually sleeping is another matter).  Five minutes later, he’ll go to the toilet and want his bottom wiped.  Then he’ll want me to read the label of something he’s just scavenged from the fridge (at least he’s learned to shut the fridge door).  Then dudelette will go off like a fire alarm (or start cooing like a dove hooked up to a megawatt amplifer) and I’ll go and take her off supermum’s hands so of course, he has to come and say “Good Morning!” to his little sister, all of which would be very adorable if he’d actually got up even half an hour later.

Confusingly, none of this happened this morning, for a change.

Anyway, why is it a problem if he gets up early?  Well, he doesn’t nap during the day so if he gets up before six (after going to sleep at around 7:45pm to 8pm, he’s utterly exhausted, stroppy and falling-over-his-own-feet clumsy with fatigue by 4:30 in the afternoon.  So we’ve been trying for the last year to teach him to at least stay in his room and rest or play quietly to 7am with mixed results.  When he’s tired and hyperactive, he gets tiring.  When he gets tiring, he gets annoying.  When he gets annoying, we all get bad-tempered.  Not a great cycle for all concerned.

Meanwhile, we’ve moved dudelette to her own room (she’s now six months old) and that seems to be working well.  She’ll still wake up at approx 10pm, 3am and 4 am and eventually end up sleeping with supermum but it’s a massive improvement on the hourly wake and continuous (and exhausting for supermum) sleep feeding that was going on.  She does like to wake up early though.

Everything just seems to be grinding by day by day…

Kind of how things are seeming round about now. View from my office, late afternoon.

Don’t tell supermum.

Only kidding.  Dudelet has a crush on a girl in the afternoon class.  Apparently he waits at the school gate after lunch for her to arrive.  Supermum was a bit worried (and after she told me so was I) that he might be stalking someone but she found out from the girl’s mother that she’s just as devoted to dudelet.  There are rumours of fairy cake teas.  When he has his birthday, he doesn’t want any girls there - apart from her.

“She’s my best friend,” he told me again at bathtime.  “Who’s your best friend?”

I had to think about that one.  “Supermum” didn’t seem like an acceptable answer.  I’m not sure I’ve actually got a best friend at the moment.  I’ll have to think about that as well.  Thankfully, we were interrupted before I could think of an inadequate fudge.

Dudelette is sitting upright next to chewing on some plastic keys enthusiastically.  I should probably go and get the three of us some breakfast.  Supermum (having done night duty with a still wakeful dudelette) gets the deserved lie-in.

Be warned - this is me in in a bad mood.  I just received this in my moderation queue:

Hello  Unrelaxed Dad:

The following is an excerpt from one of our recent posts on The Frisky:

Five Things About Pregnancy That Will Eff You Up:

You’ve heard about the mood swings, cravings, mania, and general awfulness your wife will be “blessed” with throughout her nine-month journey to motherhood. Here are five things your parent-friends will never tell you about pregnancy, probably because they’d just assume forget about them altogether. Click on the link below to read more:

http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-mind-of-man-five-things-about-pregnancy-that-will-eff-you-up/

Please feel free to link to our post.  If you have any questions or comments please let me know.

Best regards,

Deirdre Sullivan

The Frisky

www.thefrisky.com

Urn

Originally uploaded by unrelaxeddad

Year after year the organisation I work for runs these large events and year after year, a crew of black clad young catering staff deliver lunch for up to 400-500 people in three sittings.

One thing I learned in my time as a barman - if you work in behind the bar or the counter, you’re a warrior.

They were gracious enough to let me snap away at them this year. This is the one I was happy with.

Boring technical note: I was using one supermum’s old manual lens on my DSLR.  I also cloned out an irritating elbow on the right. How I love Aperture.

One of our cats brought in a fledgling that had fallen out of a nest and left it, still alive, on the doormat. Supermum rang me in a bit of a flap.
“It’s still alive - what do we do with it?”
“I don’t know - put it back in the alleyway? It probably fell out of one of the trees there…”
“But the cats will just get it again.
“Well, that’s part of nature. And you’re so much more hardcore about things being part of nature than I am…”
“But what about all your Buddhist principles? Shouldn’t we try and feed it?”
“On what? And how can we manage that and deal with dudelette at the moment? It just wouldn’t survive. And it probably won’t be accepted back into the nest. [See note below]“
Eventually, supermum picked it up with gardening gloves and deposited it back in the nearest we have to the wilds to face its tiny avian karma. There’s probably one cat for every nine square metres around here. We both knew what would happen.
Of course, I’ve now discovered fifty million stories of people who’ve cared for/adopted/transported to the RSPCA millions of baby sparrows and feel like I’ve eaten the poor thing myself. On the other hand, dinner was a chicken pie, so in a way I did. And back in the world of the practical, dudelette was screaming, dudelet was due at a toddler party and we have no scope to open up a wildlife sanctuary.
Answers on a postcard.

[Note - One thing I did learn is that it's a myth about birds handled by humans being rejected - they haven't got a good enough sense of smell. And that a period of time on the ground being fed by parents is a part of a baby birds development. So putting it back where it probably came from (our cats are a bit old to climb trees) was probably the logical thing. There are an awful lot of hungry cats around here, though.]