The British seaside

We did see Saturn! And while it wasn't as detailed as the picture I posted, it was amazing. The rings were so bright and so clear, and we saw Titan, too - one of Saturn's moons. Nina was so excited. It was crowded there, and we had to wait, but we got to see Mars just before they turned the telescopes on to Saturn. Everyone there was very nice to us, and they were charmed to see such an enthusiastic 5-year-old. 
   On Sunday we went to Brighton, had lunch, got a car club car, and drove along the coast. I quite like the car club (city car club), but it turns out that of the approximately 60 million UK residents, a surprisingly high portion of them were in Brighton traffic on Sunday afternoon between 2pm and 5pm. And Brighton has an infuriating one-way system, which together with road closures mean that it was very hard to leave the centre, and then it took us 30 minutes to drive the last km to return the damn thing. And of course you can only extend your booking if no one else has booked, no matter how much fun you are having at the beach. This all causes much stress. Ironic that to avoid being stuck in traffic, central London is actually a very good place to live. Anyway, we had a great time, much fun was had at the beach, and there was only one vomiting incident in the car (Annika, who said so early enough that Amps caught it in the beach bucket). 
    

It was 22 degrees and the ocean was what I would call foot-achingly cold: when you stand in it, your foot starts to ache. Nina was not deterred by this in the least. 

Information

I mentioned the other day about the book I borrowed, and the empathy I found myself expressing over the frustration of wrongly-coloured dinnerware. Another part of the same book describes the idea that giving children information and letting them make a decision is a better approach to getting cooperation than the usual suspects: lecturing them, shouting at them, telling them to pick up their coat RIGHT NOW, saying no to their unwise scheme, etc etc. I've tried it, with some success: "Annika, if toys go to nursery they sometimes get lost!" --"Oh," she says, "... um... maybe Olivia can stay in your bag". "If coats are on the stairs, we might fall" ... pause ... 
     Tonight I'm going to take Nina to the Hampstead Observatory. They have a few telescopes and Saturn is visible tonight (if it doesn't get cloudy in the next 90 minutes). Amps took Nina a few months ago and they saw the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and its bands: pretty cool. Nina was absolutely thrilled. She knows all the planets, which ones are gas giants, which is the hottest/coldest/farthest, the fact that Pluto used to be considered a planet and isn't any more. She likes reading her astronomy books and even watching astronomy documentaries on youtube (a little). I was home with Annika; these things tend to happen after bedtime. For tonight, we've booked a car club car, which I'll go and collect while Amps wakes Nina up from a deep, deep sleep. They're going to start focusing on Saturn at 10:30. Apparently it won't be visible here again for a decade; Nina will be nearly 16 by then. She's been reminding us that it will be visible in May for months now, and saying how she can't wait for May. It's May now, and amazingly, the sky is clear.
      All this reminded me of Mother's day in 2012. Nina was nearly 4. They had a little celebration at her nursery (at my work), and her key worker was reading out things the children had said that they loved about their mummies. The previous week, Nina had given me an invitation to this little party, which I had liked, and put up in the kitchen. That morning I had said I was happy to get the invitation and I was looking forward to coming. Anyway, little Sophie loved her mummy's stories, little Shiv loved his mummy taking him to the park, etc etc. Nina had said "I love my mummy because she gives me information!". Her keyworker read this out, much to the amusement of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends. Yep: it's all leaflets at our house.
     It turned out she meant the invitation, not information. We do, of course, provide plenty of information. 
     I won't be able to take pictures through the telescopes. But if all goes well, maybe we'll see (well, ok, it won't be this detailed, I'm sure - but it'll be cool):

source link

The colour of a plate

I have borrowed this book from a dear friend who recently had to experience me rather losing it with Annika. It's great, actually (the book). I had heard of it, because I'm on mumsnet quite a bit and it's often recommended. The authors begin by making some points that should be obvious, really: children are people, and are likely to respond to situations the way people usually do. In particular, if there is a problem, it's best to offer some empathy, instead of a response that tells them not to feel what they are feeling, trivialises what they are going through, or belittles them. Fair enough. I am trying it, with some excellent results. 
   But it does put me in some awkward positions. Sitting in the forest having a picnic, Annika panicked when a curious dog ran up at full speed. Instead of saying, oh, don't be scared, it's just a little dog, I said something like: oh yes, that can be scary. Cue dog's owner huffing, offended: "she's not scary!". Well, I wasn't going to impress the dog owners of Hampstead anyway. 
   Yesterday at dinner ... let's just say Annika is not a fan of eating. It'll probably be great for her in many ways if she's always like this, but it must be hard for her because the rest of us quite like eating, and food generally, and Amps and I are quite happy cooking food, talking about food, planning more food, and trying out London's plethora of restaurants. We were going to do this yesterday, so we fed the girls some leftovers; it was a rather sparse dinner of plain rice, a tiny bit of broccoli soup, and various bits like carrots, cheddar, etc. I carefully checked with Annika - would this be ok? Yes. I got the soup, heated, in a ramekin. "NOOOOOOO!!!, NOT LIKE THAT!!" ... "But you said it would be ok". --"I want it like THIS:" (motions with two hands, fingers together, all pointing down). "Oh. Ok. You want it on one plate, but separate?" --(crying) "Yeah, uh-huh, yeah". 
  So I got out a plate, got the rice and the (rather thick) soup, got it warmed up, put it down: Annika bursts into tears. Full on crying -- this plate had flowers on it. 
   Deep breath. Don't shout at the toddler.  Don't walk out of the room, leaving the other frustrated parent to handle this (sure to escalate). Don't trivialise; empathise. 
   "Ooooohhhhh", I said. "You wanted another plate". --"Yeah!!" (sniffle sniffle whine whine). "That's really annoying!", I said. "You wanted the Mr Happy plate!". --"YEAH!!" (whine whine). (repeat, x3, with variations). "That plate shouldn't be in the dishwasher!", I said. --"Get it out! Get it out for me!" ... --"Well, we'll wash it. That's what we'll do. And then you can have it next time". --(quiet whining, sniffling, terrible sadness)... "...yeah". "You tell me when you're ready; if you have this food from this plate, then when you're finished you can have a cookie" (bribery). 
   Eventually the food and the cookie were eaten. I don't claim this is a perfect implementation of the strategies in the book. But the fact is, I have reached a point where I regularly need to pretend that it is in some way reasonable to give a rat's ass about whether you have the blue fork that matches the blue bowl, the plastic yellow fork that goes with the blue spoon and bowl, whether the plate on which you're going to eat your miserly dinner of 3 challenging tablespoons of soup and some plain white rice has the audacity to have flowers on it, of all things. However insane this is, it is sane to her. 

Kim Jong Bonk

It's been more than a year since I posted here, and I'm going to start up again. Really. "Last day of 1" - my last post? We recently had the last day of 2, and I am delighted to report that there will be no more 2-year-olds in this family. Not until one of the girls has their own. Let's just summarize a year's missing posts: 2 was rough. The day Annika no longer cares whether her cup, bowl, fork are blue I will buy a bottle of good champagne. Enough said. 

We sometimes call Annika "Bonk". It's originally from a joking "Ank-ster bonk-ster", followed by some bonks when she started walking. After that background, here is a tidbit from today:

Annika: "I want more pasta!"
Amps: "Mummy's turn."
Annika: "Mummy! Get. It. Now!"
Me:
Annika: "... Please?"
Amps: "Kim Jong Bonk has SPOKEN!". 
Nina: "Who's Kim Jong Bonk?"
Annika: "Me! I am!" 
Nina: "You just want to be the boss of the world."

2 has given way to 3. Happy birthday, Bonk. 

The last day of 1.

This is the last day that I will ever have a one-year-old, barring major changes to the life plan. I watched the two girls in the bath this evening, happily playing, and I thought to myself: what if in a couple of years, there was a 6yo, a 4yo and a 2yo in this tub? ... Nope. But this is the exact age Nina was when I got pregnant with Annika, thinking that it might take a year, that I knew I wanted another child, that I wanted a baby... Let's just say it didn't take a year. That was two years and 9 months ago. Tomorrow she will be 2. 

It does feel kind of poignant, until of course she wakes up screaming. Or calling for me at 6:30 am. Well, no more babies here. We're all toddlers/big girls now. And I will, somewhat sadly, somewhat with relief, never have another one-year-old.

For posterity, here are some of the cute things she did when she was one. She matched that blue hat and that pink dress, for one - more fashion sense than I've got! She put her hands out to her sides, palms up, and said "where? ba-bap, where" (bird; replace with anything or anyone else she was looking for). She jumps up and down to express pretty much any emotion. She thinks 'carry you' is a verb (Mummy carry you me?) She loves animals. She sings! She knows that Twinkle Twinkle and Ba Ba Black Sheep are the same tune. She LOVES to put little metal balls in containers and move them all around. She loves it a lot. She can slot circular pieces into a Connect 4 game for an hour (!!?). She loves her shiny pink shoes, the ones she didn't want me to buy for her, for 5£ in a shop (they are nice brand name ones believe it or not...) because it threatened her connection to her wellies, to which she was devoted. Throughout the year she has loved shoes, with their implicit commitment to going out. She loves going outside, being outside, seeing birds, hearing birds. She loves her routine, and her friends at nursery. Woe betide the mother who thinks Annika might put a coat on without a sweater first: think TANTRUM. She loves it when Rosa brings her home. She loves her horsey coat (aka snowsuit), her Matthew jammies, and her owl T-shirt. She flips through Bear Snores On, on the tube; she wants to see pictures of horses, of Susannah, of Annika's funny faces, of my funny faces, on my phone. She says "HI PEOPLE" to people who sit down near us, 'thankoo' when someone gives us a seat, and charms everyone with her enormous smile. She calls her backpack the 'backap'. She and Nina call out: Mummy, we love you, come and cuddle us! in the morning. She wants to do ballet just like Nina. She dances. She loves music. 
  For a month or two I've been thinking of her as my two-year-old; probably since the first tantrum about putting her wellies away, followed by her absolute insistence on putting her wellies away every day thereafter. But I should have been thinking of her as my one-year-old, because now it has already slipped away. 

Happy Birthday, my smaller child. My baby. 

After my good long rant the other day about colds, I have made some decisions. Usually I don't take the view that we can really control things. But this thing needs some extra attention and I am going to make some extra effort. So I'm going to ask people for advice, and I'm going to follow it. I'm going to follow all of it (within reason). There is a hilarious segment on a This American Life episode of years ago where Sarah Vowell gets advice about insomnia and tries to follow it all; it includes dreadful things like not having caffeine (!) or alcohol (!). 
 So, here is what I have collected so far, from myself and others: 
- handwashing: aggressive, regular, vigorous, proper handwashing
- washing of other people's hands, particularly those people under 4' tall who are likely to insert their hands in my mouth/nose/ears/eyes
- hand sanitising/sterilising (especially the small infectious vector-creatures as above)
- multivitamin
- zinc
- echinacea (particularly when getting a cold)
- vitamin C
- oil of oregano (thought to induce mild fever, thus assisting to 'burn' rhinovirus out of the nose, as it prefers a 33C environment)
- on a similar note, using a blow dryer, make the inside of the nose both hot and dry
(what is the half-life of the viral particles, though? Do I need to do this for 3 hours or something? happy to try it for a few minutes - after all, it's unlikely to hurt me unless my hair gets pulled in or something)
- ??? 
If anyone has any more tips, keep them coming. I am (gasp) going to ask on (dreaded) facebook too. That is just how desperate we are here ... 

In other news, took the bike today after Wednesday's tube tantrum in which Annika spat out bits of a rather nice pain au chocolat I'd bought (after she whined relentlessly), and flicked one of the spat-out bits on some poor sucker sitting next to us. It was pretty bad. We biked, yesterday and today, and got wet today. It was drizzling hard. We were fine though. 

Tantrum on the tube

  
  

Whining, coughing, and snot

Colds. I really hate colds. There's a post somewhere back years ago called something about 1000 colds. We've had, we're having, our first big one of this season. I am looking down the cold, wet tunnel that is this winter, and I'm imagining all the hours I'll spend beside a box of tissue, almost completely incapacitated by endless sneezing; all the nights I'll spend with a roll of toilet paper beside the bed, all the embarrassing hacking chesty coughing I'll do during seminars, meetings, concerts, and I'm filled with dread, with a desire to sell up, buy myself a desert island somewhere and retire. Annika got sent home on Friday, not two hours after I took her all the way over there. I was sick too - that's yet another thing I hate about commuting to childcare: having to go all the way to work when I'm not feeling well because the other alternative is to take care of an active baby when I'm not feeling well. Anyway, she got sent home (as did I, effectively), I took her to the doctor even, and he said her ears were very red and no wonder she was so miserable. I was completely flattened by the damn cold on Saturday to the point of wheezing and chest pain, and I can't even bring myself to describe where that led. Now Nina's showing signs of it and A- has it. 
    All this work I do, all this stuff - some days I feel like turning it all on its head and trying to cure the common cold. I mean, why not engineer some virus that can out-compete the common cold in the host (ie, in your nose)? (not that I can do that but maybe someone else could...). It should have very low virulence (ie it would not make you sick). So you wouldn't sneeze it out, and it wouldn't be transmitted. So it wouldn't survive, naturally - the other colds would win. But, if we all went to the pharmacy and bought the damn thing so we wouldn't get the worse colds, it could win after all - it would transmit by social media, by capitalism, by word of mouth rather than by actual mouth and daycare centres and snot-to-snot toddler contact. And it would make someone very very rich. And it would make me very very happy. And, although I admit that it's kind of creepy, is it more creepy than this? (warning: gross). Actually, the problem isn't creepiness, the problem is that the little thing would mutate and turn into god knows what and recombine with all the flus and whatnot out there and that presents all manner of risks. But what gain, oh, I think it might be worth it. 
    Ok, enough about colds. I'm doing a big grant proposal, it is almost done and I am enjoying thinking about it being done. I actually don't mind writing proposals; it's fun to think about all the amazing stuff you're going to do when everything goes perfectly and you can hire great people and your ideas all work out. It just gets a bit much as you keep writing and re-writing. I've noticed that a very large portion of what I do is writing, oddly enough for someone with my training. In other news, Nina's reading is coming along in leaps and bounds. Annika is talking lots and generally being cute. She has taken up a dummy/pacifier, which she got interested in just before we went to Canada, and which I somewhat indecisively let her have, thinking that anything to ease a 10hr flight was well worth it. She calls it 'game'; I have no clue why. She loves it, and it is so incredibly easy to put her to bed because it's in the bed (it stays in the bed). We joke that she's got game. A- found a wine description on a menu that said the wine goes well with game. We chuckled. Oh - and I'm joining a choir; I auditioned, and I got in. Given that I already had the cold, had to walk 20 minutes in the rain from the tube to get there, had very little time to practice because we had a visitor, and practiced the wrong things because they misinformed me, I feel pretty good about it! (well, either I did well or they have low standards - guess I'll see). I'm hoping Nina can come to the concert in December; she'd have to stay up late, and Annika would have to have a babysitter.
   In the meantime, I am hoping to take up very very frequent hand-washing, vitamins, and I'm going to really try not to go to work when I feel horrible. And maybe I'll get an inhaler or something in case the horrible wheezy thing returns. If anyone reads this and has great cold prevention or eradication ideas, please let me know. Please.