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...

bubbles and pools and cake, ecstasy

It's great how happy you can make a toddler, how easily: 

A couple of bubbles and a friend, and they are ecstatic. Or maybe not?

I think maybe the streamer (note to self: streamers are not the same as ribbons. One is made of paper, and rips at the drop of a hat) broke off the balloon.

But not all was lost. We still had one of these: 

It was a hit. She's still talking about it, two weeks later. Oreos for wheels, little candies for head- and tail-lights, cookies with icing on them for windows, and white chocolate buttons with fair trade chocolate hazelnut stuff for people ... it was fun. One of our guests commented that chocolate sponge is rarely a material used in large vehicle construction, when I pointed out its structural weaknesses. 

Since then, well, we've changed the bedtime routine (again!). "Mummy say night night. Mummy say last book. Mummy sing a song. Mummy say night night". We have high hopes that eventually this will lead to a short, simple, conflict-free reliably-timed bedtime, reducing the number of long and somewhat awkward interactions with our fantastic teenage babysitters in which we ask them what they are doing lately and try to explain why we can't get our child to sleep reliably by 8:30. My explanations are ... weak.  As usual with these things, we're a few days in, and it appears to be working. So far. Jinx.

Is there anything else interesting? Nina can walk down the street listing things she likes: "I like buses, I like planes, I like puppies, I like bees, I like buses, I DO like SWINGS! I like slides" ... She can use "might", in the context of "we MIGHT see another bus, wait see". She still loves the pool. We went again, now that summer has disappeared. When I said that I hoped our nice weather would last, an English colleague told me that it HAS lasted, that if it ends now we'll have had a really great summer. Hmph. After a week of 20+ (C) weather several English people tell me that they just "can't abide this heat". Heat? 

But at the pool Nina jumps in, she paddles about in her little Konfidence jacket, she is absolutely overcome with joy when I announce that we are going there. She recognises it when we are about 2 blocks away, though we haven't been for months.

 

Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate ....

 Am I getting any useful business skills out of this endless need to negotiate? Shoes on, shoes off, playing with this toy, or that toy, going to childminder, whether we go to the swings afterwards, whether the pajamas go on, teeth brushing, hair brushing, eating now or eating in 3 minutes, eating this or eating that, drinking from this cup or that cup ... the list goes on and on and on and on. Right now I'm at a friend's place babysitting their 2-year-old daughter. She whined just a little, as she realised her daddy was going out, but once she had the milk and I was midway through the Cat in the Hat, she dozed off, a full hour earlier than Nina's been going to bed. No doubt she doesn't wake up at 8, either, seeing as I know my friend drops her off at nursery at 8:30. But still! It's quiet here, and though they were rushed today, it's cleaner than our place. Big challenge. AND it doesn't look like a couple of geeks put randomly chosen decorations up with no thought to a colour scheme or any understanding of decor. It looks like adults live here. The living room is configured so that when you sit on the sofa you don't look in the direction of the toys. Wow. What would that be like?

But that's not the point. What I'm worried about is that Nina was fine until I stood up, at 6, and said I was going to make soup. She wanted one of her treats from the cupboard, not even a sweet treat really, just a baggie of organic fruit/veg puree (the Ella's kitchen ones, for those who know them) and when I wouldn't give it to her, she just LOST IT. COMPLETELY. So after some screaming, I said it was time for a time out, and put her on the time out tile, and sat with her because otherwise she won't stay there. And she screamed for a while, and I said it was over and got up. And then she REALLY lost it. I guess she wanted me to sit there with her - was it my attention she really wanted in the first place? We'd been playing, but I also had to look up which decongestants make you drowsy (that's another story: incredibly irritating rules, no doubt meant for safety, about how pills can't possibly be dispensed in bottles but have to be in little paper individually-wrapped thingies so you never have the actual packet to tell you what this thing actually does to you. Is it safer this way? stupid rules. And it makes you drowsy anyway so I didn't take it, sniffle, sniffle, is this allergies or the 1152nd cold ...? ). 

Back to Nina: was she just too hungry to think? Was it tiredness? I couldn't think, or cook, or do anything. I put her in her cot so I could start making the simplest food possible. Then she kept refusing to get out, but still crying, and this went on, until finally I picked her up, announced that the tantrum was over, put her down in front of some yogurt, and she began to recover. But she was still talking about wanting a time out, and wanting to go back in the bed. What was that? And I love her so much, and all, but ... coming over here to a quiet sleepy toddler who didn't have to negotiate which pajamas to wear and which story to read and whether it's a story or a song and which toys are in the bed and where's payeh and where's pengie (because the two penguins have their own names now) and every damn detail of every step from bath to bed, well ... it was a contrast. A peaceful, relaxing, quiet, clean, contrast, in which almost an hour has gone by, and back at MY house, the toddler probably hasn't even started trying to sleep yet. And there's an entire BOX of kleenex just sitting right here.

Two

Two! How'd that happen?

The other day we went to Caerphilly Castle, in Wales. It's great. It's a 13th century medieval castle, which wasn't actually used for very long (some 20 years at most, I gathered). We went there just under 2 years ago. It was driving, pouring with rain. It looked like this: 

It felt authentic, breastfeeding my screaming infant under the driving rain in a ruined stone tower. 

This year it looked like this: 

Note the sunshine, the lack of crying and the complete lack of infant. It's sad, the lack of infant, in a nostalgic kind of a way, but she's just so much fun these days.

We made cupcakes on her actual birthday and had a few people over from our group of mum/toddler friends. She's still talking about it: "I help Mummy, I make a cake, friend *thank you* Nina, like a cake, Cami have a cake, friend have a cake..." It made a big impression.

I'm going to make a bus-shaped cake on Saturday. I had planned a penguin, but it's clear that buses are the excitement of the month, and maybe of the year. Those and planes, but buses are an easier shape for cakes. If I'm doing extremely well perhaps I'll draw a penguin riding the bus.

Two years old is ... the utter passion with which we talk about swings, and how they're a "bit scary!"; the hugs and kisses and the "no MUMMY do it, MUMMY push stroller, MUMMY take to bed, MUMMY turn change a nappy!". It's the "no MY do it", the "I make a cappuccino, I make a papaccino, I make a mummyccino, ninaccino, that's NINA's!". It's talking about friends even when they're not around: "Cami sit in this chair!", talking about the cakes of weeks ago, waking up in the morning and saying "Mummy take a BEACH today!", being completely DEVASTATED by not being able to climb into the carseat herSELF ("No MY climb in self! MYself! ...  ... TAAAAAAANTRUM"). 

They talk about the terrible twos, and there are terrible moments I guess, but it's hilarious to hear your kid, deep in sleep, say "there's a BUS and a PLANE!".   And awake: "Bye bye broken castle, Nina's going!" and then three days later: "I did a broken castle. Bye bye, broken castle. MUMMY LOOK there's a BUS! a BUS! Round and round, round and round. Bye bus! Nina's going to the SWING!" This was yesterday, after a pleasant afternoon at the zoo with friends, where we saw the penguins being fed. "I see a pengie lunchtime. Pengie lunchtime!". And it's pretty fun to run along the sidewalk and hear your 2-year-old say "I'M running FAST to the PUB".

Happy birthday, baby Nina. If you ever read this, know that we love you beyond what we ever could have imagined. And for today, dream of buses, planes and cupcakes, and we'll take you to the beach again soon.