Why?

"Come on, Nina, let's brush your teeth"
"... whhhyyyy?"
"Because we need to get them clean."
"why?"
"Because there's still a little bit of dinner on them, and they aren't clean yet"
"... whyyyyy?"
"Well, we need to clean them because clean teeth will grow up healthy, and help you have strong teeth when you're a grownup. Otherwise you might not have such good teeth..."
"...why?"
"Well ... um ... because ... little tiny tiny tiny bugs will grow on your teeth and hurt them" (wait: was that just a little creepy for a two-year-old on the verge of bedtime? whoops)
"...why?"
"Ummm ... because they can...?" 
   


  

argh

Since I posted last we've made sushi - figuring it was time to illustrate what this mat was actually for. It was fun. Nina liked playing with the rice and then using a bowl of water to get it off her hands. She ate a bit of it. She likes asparagus. I really liked not paying 4£ for each little avocado roll, though I admit that despite various seaweed purchases, and having scoured the city for actual miso paste, my miso soup is not up to the standard of the local high-end Japanese restaurant. Surprised? not so much.

We went to Cornwall for three days, stayed in a pub in Looe, and enjoyed one beautiful sunny perfect day and one very wet, expensive and somewhat miserable day. We walked along the South West Coast trail to a tiny fishing village, sat on the beach, made sand castles, took a couple of little boat rides, and generally had a great mini-vacation. These pubs are great, not just because all pubs here tend to be pretty great, but because the rooms are all behind a locked door (and are themselves locked) and the baby monitor works from the pub downstairs. Brilliant. Looe itself is cute, if a bit overrun with touristy things. Lots of kids sink little bags of whatever fishy stuff, and then pull them up again, usually with a crab attached. They collect the crabs in buckets and then throw them back in. Nina liked watching the crabs. 

Then ... we came back. And started toilet training. I'll spare you all the details, but OH MY GOD. I wouldn't say it's easy. And it's not that it's not going well - actually we haven't had any yucky accidents and have had a manageable number of (as they say here) wee's. It's just that it's a lot of running back and forth to bathrooms, of trying to convince a wriggling child to sit there, and mainly, I think it's a bit stressful for Nina and she's acting out in other ways. It doesn't help that her appetite has taken a nose dive, but that last night she demanded more food at 9pm and we ended up giving her shreddies (what SUCKERS!). She's into this thing of saying she wants something, then she doesn't, then she does, then doesn't. She refuses her dinner, then the minute it's gone, wails about how it was HER dinner and she wanted to EAT it (after refusing it countless times). She's stopped going to bed like the little dream child that she was until we came back. She wants to go to the bathroom, but then when we finally get through a line, refuses to enter the stall, or try the potty which I'm now obliged to carry everywhere. She was such a delight just a few short days ago - eating fine, sleeping fine, agreeable (well, ok, we had a brief playground-related tantrum in Cornwall but other than that I don't remember many whiny moments), she was so patient at the Eden project (don't go there with a toddler, it's an expensive and pretty boring disaster with 11,000 other people) ... So is she not ready for this yet? Every online potty-related checklist, and there are a LOT of them out there, claims she is, both physically and cognitively. It's stressful for all toddlers, I know that. But, but, but ... well, maybe H-, her childminder, will sort her out. Maybe we'll wait. Maybe she'll learn. This is only day 3. What did I expect?

Sushi mat

I've mentioned the sushi mat before. Ages ago, Nina noticed that there's a fence that looks like it, on the way to one of our local pubs (the jumping pub; don't worry, it's the toddler, not the pub, that does the actual jumping). It's funny because when we walk there with people she points it out. And it really does look like an enormous sushi mat.

Anyway, Nina's started telling little stories, often somewhat incoherently, to anyone but us (and, to be perfectly honest, often to us too). These tend to be sequences of things we did or things that happened, occasionally out of order. One was about a birthday party we went to: 

"I did a big fast slide, went up steps, then on a slide, then crash in a balls, then on a slide, then slide CLOSED, then outside, then shoes off then play SAND play playground OUTSIDE, saw horsies ... " and so on. Or "Went to beach, then picnic, then bouncy castle, then choo choo train, then slide, then ... then ... went home OUR house" (Yes. It was a perfect, perfect toddler day, every stage a new toddler delight). Anyway some of the slides at "soft play" places have mats. You go up, then they give you a mat to slide down on; it's faster, I guess. So today's story was 

"Went uppa slide, up steps, then sushi mat, then slide down fast, then say: WHEEEEEE!". 

Really, darling? A SUSHI mat? 

Nina told her first joke today. An old friend sent us books for her, and one is a beautiful rhyming book (Bear Snores On) about a bear, sleeping, while other little animals come in to his den from the cold and warm up, have themselves a little party. The pictures are lovely, and (unlike, for example, The Little Engine that Could, which I remember fondly from my own childhood but ... is SOOOOO repetitive) it's pleasant to read, to look at the pictures. Anyway, she's got it almost memorised; it even looks like she's reading, which she's not. So we were flipping through it, and she got to a page that reads:

"In a cave in the woods a slumbering bear sleeps through the party in his very own lair" 

except she said:

"In a cave in the woods a slumbering bear sleep a party in a very own ... bouncy castle!"

She looked me right in the eye, testing, eyes glinting. I laughed out loud, surprised, and she then she laughed too, chuckling away, delighted with herself, and I said "did you make a joke?" and she said "Mummy I did a JOKE, I did a JOKE!". She tried the same joke with a few more happy toddler items, like "... in a very own ... treat!".  

It's amazing how early these things happen - humour! The concept of a joke, of saying something that's clearly not right, for the sake of a laugh!  When my parents were here she was teasing my Mum, calling her "grandpa", with a little glint in her eyes. She calls me "mum-bi-dy" which prompted me to call her "Nin-bi-da", which she thought was really funny. But she didn't want A. calling her Nin-bi-da yesterday. And now the bouncy castle joke. What's next?

And one other achievement: I wrote weeks ago, for the zillionth time (or it would have been if I'd been blogging all along here) about bedtime. We have now reached a truly glorious stage of two stories, climb in "self", then a song, then night night. It takes about 15 minutes start to finish, if that, after the teeth get brushed. It's awesome. I love it. Sometimes I have to make my excuses for leaving, explaining that eventually I have to lie down in my own bed and can't stand there singing Coulter's Candy ALL NIGHT, but even then, she accepts it! And goes to sleep! Now all we need is for the teenaged babysitters to come back from holiday. And for writing this proud little summary not to jinx the entire thing, of course; fortunately I don't believe in that sort of thing...

Good boy!

First off, apologies to anyone who might be reading this for not posting for so long. Parents here, stuff going on, excuses, excuses. The parents are gone now, a good time was had by all, despite sneezing. 

There's so much that's already lost, replaced by all the new and exciting things that Nina, and all kids, do every day, every week. Just for the record I thought I'd try to remember some of them before they are so lost in the mists of time that they disappear from my memory forever, though I know that some post somewhere won't ever bring them back, and I know that I want Nina to grow up, and not to stay a baby or a toddler. 

In my opinion, A. has some issues with prioritising. For example: if we are 27 minutes late for something, and Nina has just done a poo, he may decide that it's a good time to wash the shower curtain. Admittedly, I would probably never ever prioritise washing a shower curtain, or updating my ubuntu, or tidying the mail table, over just about anything else I felt was urgent. But still - really? The shower curtain? Right NOW? Another example: before Nina was as reasonable, as articulate, as charming, as she is these days at bedtime, there was a moment each evening when MILK was needed RIGHT NOW or there would be SCREAMING. Screaming, like the kind the neighbours still talk about 10 years later. So I started to use the phrase "priority item", as in, A, can you make the milk as a priority item? This means: please don't finish unloading the dishwasher, wash the shower curtain, and have some indian snacks first; MILK is a PRIORITY. 

This phrase was repeated sufficiently that Nina took it up, but pronounced it: "paya aiya mama! Papa, paya aiya mama!" Now it's changed a little; it's: paya itah mum.  Also poignantly, "gainl!" has been replaced with "again!" and "payay", then "pengie" is finally "penguin" unless referring in particular to payah or pengie; they now have names distinct from their species, you see. It's touching that they are still the favourites, along with a new doll, named Dolly.

Kids don't know which things we say are facetious, or which are specifically in the context of talking to a toddler, or which things are just going to sound a little odd to some other adult. Every morning I get up first, play with Nina for a while, and then we both go in to get A. up. I usually pester him to drag his sleepy self out of bed at about 8:15 and succeed by 8:25, give or take 5-10 minutes. Anyway Nina knows that I want him to get up. Yesterday he finally sat up, at which Nina clapped, and said loudly "Good GIRL papa! Good GIRL!". We explained that Papa is really more of a boy; a man, to be technical about it. We didn't bother trying to explain that when she does something I really want her to do, a perfectly reasonable response is for me to clap and say "good GIRL Nina", but ... when we do something she wants, like say follow her into the bedroom, maybe not so much. So tonight when A. brought in the freshly prioritised milk: "good BOY Papa!" 

There's more, much more .. for another time; remind me to post about the little cartoon I drew...