Thursday 26 February 2009

More disgusting boy habits

Felix has taken to eating dirt out of the plant pots.

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Felix 1st birthday is a total cakefest





Musings #2

Mama Musings on Mamahood

2. Raising a toddler is a constant battle between toddler's growing need for self-expression, discovery and independence and mama's need to get stuff done

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Sackboy has arrived

Bloody Royal Mail have been totally crap at delivering my Amazon book. Firstly, it's way late. And when it does arrive I get not one but two slips saying it's too big for the letterbox but the lazy post-person can't be bothered to fill out any of the boxes telling me where it is, when to expect it and whether to wait for redelivery or go to the sorting office.

Eventually, I schlepp to the sorting office. Illegal parking. Kids screaming in car. Huge queue. Yadda. Who needs this? Until the parcel ain't no Amazon book, but some mystery white box from abroad.

Get home, rip it open in anticipation and... (Caveat: Polly Filler moment will ensue. Apologies in advance to anyone, like me, who thinks exclamation marks should be banned from copy)

...I have a sackboy! I have a sackboy! I HAVE A SAAAACK BOYYYY!!!!!

And not just any sack boy.

Custom-made, hand-knitted, all the way from Hong Kong!!!!!!!
And it comes complete with beret, tie, shoes and boa.


The story behind sackboy is that as soon as I discovered the cute little blighters had been translated into a knitting pattern by renowned soft toy designer Alan Dart, I politely asked (=instructed) my incredibly talented French friend, Jessica (otherwise known as La Gitane in London Bridge, currently masquerading as a monkey) who just happened to have taken up knitting last year, to knit me one.

And she did!!!!!!!!!!!

Jessica now officially tops the global cool list. Well ahead of Arsene Wenger. Sliding past Nelson Mandela. Move over Thierry Henry, there's a new dude in town.

Two most excellent pieces of post in a week. How sick is that?

Doubts about discipline

Just thinking out loud here.

Jasmine, we hope, is over the worst of her diva-phase, and some semblance of peace, happiness and normality is restored.

For those tantrums that still occur, I remain unconvinced we are dealing with them consistently. In my mind, I want to be from the zero tolerance school of discipline. In practice though it's bloody exhausting and time consuming. You just can't get anything done. So we tend to try and be more reasonable when she's having a paddy. But that feels like appeasement more than anything else.

Not easy.

Still don't know what the answer is.

Friday 20 February 2009

Who tall are you?

For those of us not blessed with height extra fractions of an inch are of the utmost importance. Particularly to those of us who are neither 5'2" nor 5' 3" but a very important 5'2 and three quarters of an inch tall.
Like my friend Emma. We worked together for a few years and shared a mutual obsession with our precise height which we both quoted in exactly the same way, despite the fact we don't actually look the same height at all. (We never did find a tape measure long enough, so we eventually resorted to the comparative method using book, pencil and office wall. Emma, it transpired, was a slightly shorter 5'2 and three quarters of an inch than my own 5' 2 point seven five inches but since neither of us wanted to give up having to say we were any other height than 5'2 and three quarters of an inch we declined a more scientific pursuit of the truth and agreed we were close enough in height, particularly to the short sighted, to basically call it the same.)
So it's fitting that it was Emma what saw this and thought of me. And even sent it to me in the post.

Only those of us obsessive about our own mediocre height could possibly understand how brilliant this is. And in my book, anyone who can be arsed to get up, put things in envelopes and do snail mail is extremely cool indeed. Particularly when it's snail mail to me. And when I got it I went all kiddy-excited at getting mail, as you do.

The centre section of the chart is a total baddy-trap of dictator/killer types that goes: Charles Manson, Slobodan Milosevic, Peter Sutcliffe, Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, Benito Mussolini, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler, Myra Hindley.
Bf totally sailed above it, squaring up with Prince William, just shy of Samuel L. Jackson, but above Boris Yeltsin.
Despite falling well below the baddy-trap I still snagged height parity with Kim Jong-Il.
Not sure how I feel about being on the Axis of Evil, but hey, for a whole day Emma was my NBF, it's great post in the midst of a crappy week and made me feel less invisible in the world.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

More poo

Felix and Jasmine are both being very difficult at the moment.

Felix is The Unstoppable Baby. He's started to climb - onto stools, sofas, toy chests - which inevitably means falling off too. And despite some pretty nasty tumbles he just doesn't learn what is safe and what isn't. Add to that his fondness for sticking fingers in shredders, pulling on lampstands, playing with dustbins, chewing cables, pulling out plugs, tugging the shower curtain and pulling encyclopaedias off the shelves he is basically a walking suicide mission who can't be left alone for more than a few seconds. The only safe environment for him at the moment is a padded cell.

Jasmine is being nothing short of a Royal Pain in the Arse. I know it sounds awful to speak of your own children like that, but she's just so bloody difficult. It's almost definitely illness-related. (It had better be...) It brings out the diva in her. She's just so goddam particular. Everything has to be done in a certain way. And if you can't read her mind and understand exactly what that certain way is, then all hell breaks loose. Then she changes her mind and all hell breaks loose again. And currently all hell breaks loose every 5 minutes.

For example - today's lunch saga:
Bm: (Calm and patience personified) Would you like a chicken sandwich or pasta for lunch?
J: (All utterances by J to be spoken on whiny toddler voice, permanently on the brink of a tantrum) Want chicken sandwich. Don't want toast want bread. Want bread. Want breeeaaad. NO. Just ONE slice. Want crusts off. NO. Don't want butter. NO BUTTER. No don't cut it that way. Cut it that way. NO. Don't want chicken. NO. CHICKEN. No tomato (angry and insulted) NO TOMATO. Want CHEESE. Want cheese. No. Don't want cheese. Want cheese. (now very confused - does she want cheese or not?) Want small cheese. (small cheese is Jasmine's phrase for grated cheese. I take out grater - Jasmine hits roof.) NO. Want slices. (I take out slicer - Jasmine hits roof again.) Not that one. NOT THAT ONE. NOTTT THATTT ONNNE
...and so on. She issues an instruction, and doesn't stop to notice it has been immediately obeyed but repeats it in her sub-hysterical voice over and over. By the time I have made her a sandwich to her precise specification she has rejected that too and does want a chicken sandwich with butter and tomato.

I know she's small, and innocent, and very ill at the moment, and she really doesn't mean it - but none of that makes it any easier. I have no purpose in life at the moment other than to be her punchbag, and I certainly didn't sign up to that. I find myself thinking over and over: I deserve more than no income, two ungrateful children for company, a talent left to rot and a whole lot of thwarted ambition.

You just have to be calm and patient. There's no other way of dealing with it. But because I can't take my frustration out on her, and because there's absolutely no one else around to talk to who remotely cares or understands, it's all internalised. So I find myself feeling alone, frustrated, unhappy, but most of all resentful of my children and seriously contemplating selling them on eBay. Joking aside, I fantasise about leaving them to the bf and emigrating about once an hour.

Unable to express myself to a real human being, I have no other outlet than to talk to this blog, paradoxically the vehicle I set up to express how brilliant kids are is now the only place I can talk about how much I want to be able to give them back.

Sunday 15 February 2009

Poo

This week has been totally shit because we've all been ill. And I've just spent the last hour cleaning Jasmine's diarrhoea off the carpet so it's been literally shit as well.

Thursday 12 February 2009

In which the little buggers get the better of babymomma

Today I was determined to ensure Felix and Jasmine (and myself for that matter) ate healthily. That basically means fruit and veg, as opposed to their usual fayre of toast, pasta, toast, pasta, breadsticks and biscuits. (Not that I don't give them fruit and veg. It's just that making them eat it is sometimes a challenge in itself.) So when Felix woke up from his nap screaming top whack and I offered him:
grapes
raisins
banana
apple
salmon and spinach puree
breadstick (compromising now)
and pasta
only for the little gobshite to throw everything away and continue screaming angrily in my ear then I gave in and offered him a biscuit. Which he took. And shut the fuck up.

Then Jasmine came in and insisted she get a biscuit too.

Babymomma 0 - 2 Kids

Has it really come to this?

Witching hour approaches 'il est trois heures' and despite telling myself it will be OK, clearly I am suicidal by about 3.04pm. But no matter, because the shit shield goes up, I ignore Felix (crying), Jasmine (whining), the telephone (my mum) and look forward to the solace of Countdown. Until bloody hell there's no fucking Sky signal. And this is a problem I instinctively know can be fixed by a touch of a button, but I'm arsed if I know which button. And after switching off/ switching on/ plugging out/ plugging back in again returns zero results the awful realisation dawns that I used to be a person who knew how to work a TV, and a video, and a PC, and then, that person met a guy and working a TV, or a video, or a PC no longer was a means to an end, but *with flourish* a CHALLENGE. To be MASTERED. And it got so dull I just backed off and let the guy do his stuff, for about 6 years. And then technology changed and now it's all spaghetti wires to me and oh my God have I really turned into that woman who can't even work a fucking TV???

The thing is, I really really need my Countdown fix. It's the only time of the day I use so much as half a brain cell.


addendum: according to this it's probably due to the snow outside so now i feel a little bit less stupid (as in, at least i still know how to work Google) but only just.

Musings #1

Mama Musings on Mamahood

1. Kitchen roll held no meaning before children.

Thursday 5 February 2009

Redundancy Day part 1 - the shitstorm

Last Wednesday evening my company officially went into administration. All staff were called into the office on Friday. It was fun at first, seeing everybody. We were all downstairs - twittering, nervously laughing, catching up with people's news. Then our 'meeting' started and a tense silence immediately descended. A young chap - early to mid 20s whippersnapper by the looks of it and clearly a bit nervous introduced himself as being from the administrators. He called out 10 people's names and asked them to go upstairs, the rest of us, about 25 or so, stayed put. It was a real X-Factor moment. A few guffaws of sub-hysterical laughter, and a couple of people shouted out bets on our group being the ones to go. Then Administrator Chap said something like: "As you know, the company is insolvent and that means all of you in this room are being made redundant with immediate effect." Pin-drop silence. It was so sudden and to the point. Then you could feel the change in people's attitudes immediately. To anger. A huge, rising swell of anger.

It started to get a bit messy. Administrator Chap asked if there were any questions. Of course there were some questions. Sensible ones at first - about P45s and letters and government claims and forms. Then some more questions. What about the other group - were they redundant too? How come they get to keep their jobs? What would they be doing? How did complete newcomers decide who was necessary and who wasn't? Where were the directors? Why weren't they here to face their staff? Why couldn't they come down and speak to us for a few minutes?

Then a few people stood up and started to make comments about what had been going wrong at the company. And how the staff believed it had been sorely mismanaged, citing a flurry of examples and frustrations about work, and why it had been so crazy bad. And how they knew who was responsible. How 18 months ago the new management had bought a 'healthy' 'profitable' business and decimated it. Who was going to hold them accountable? Could staff write to someone and give evidence of 'wrongdoing'?

The mood was getting emotional and ugly. And it was going nowhere fast. A lot of empty speculation and unvalidated accusation followed. Administrator Chap did a pretty good job of giving honest answers where he could and facing the flak. They obviously trained him well. In a sense it's totally understandable - everyone had just officially lost their jobs. I just shut the hell up and waited for the first opportunity to get out of that room.

What I learned from that day was that I'm none the wiser. I'm none the wiser about what really happened at the company before I joined to make everyone so bitter about it's untimely demise, but I'm also none the wiser about what happens to a company going into administration. For the whole month of not being a part of the team any more but just sitting at home and twiddling fingers I had somehow believed that at the end of it I would learn a bit more and get some answers to all the questions flying around my head. What do company directors do during the notice to appoint period; what were the options to save the company; who were they talking to and about what; what does going into administration' really mean; what can and can't a business do during this period; what parts of the business would be considered as valuable and saleable, and which ones weren't; how could anything be salvaged from the wreckage?

I realise now I know nothing. I was still on the outside. That month of limbo had been spent just waiting for news, but still I felt a part of something as there were a whole bunch of us also waiting for news. But then, cruelly and swiftly, all ties were severed. We were told to hand in our keys and go. End. Of. Story.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Slugs, snails and puppy dogs tails

Just caught Felix looking very guilty and hovering by his favourite plaything, the organic food bin. At first I thought he had just dropped another toy down it, so I had a look and, sure enough, nestled in amongt yesterday's leftover dinner was a plastic green ambulance. So I dutifully fished it out (g-r-oss), cleaned it, turned my back for a mere second and there he was again with his hand right down the bin, scooping out yesterday's leftover dinner and putting it in his mouth.

Notwithstanding the guilty suspicion that I haven't fed him properly, and putting aside fears of yet another sloppy botty and/or vomiting to come, I would just like to say: THAT IS TOTALLY DISGUSTING.

Monday 2 February 2009

Quality time?

Have just agreed with nursery to take Jasmine and Felix out 3 days a week (thank god for the remaining two...) as of next week. The true impact of unemployment is about to hit. I'm not looking forward to it.

Scar-f-ace the snowman

Worst snow for 18 years, weatherman's field day, everything at a standstill blah blah blah. Just bring on the snowmen:

Introducing scar-f-ace (the one in the middle)

Sunday 1 February 2009

Non Sunday

I'm so fucking bored. We've already done breakfast, second breakfast, nappies, clothes, soft play, lunch and painting and it's only 2 o'clock. Felix is being Curious today, i.e. gets into every nook, cranny and cupboard full of bleach there is. I'm remembering why I wanted him to be a girl. A passive, cooing bundle of sugar and spice. God I'm bored. Sundays have gone full circle.

Sunday

Listening to Bach's cello concerto. Giving Felix lunch. The Snow has started. I dread The Snow.