At dinner:
Alex: (quoting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) Look out! Behind you! It’s a Dementor!
Abi: (refusing to look behind her) I doubt it.
Alex: You have to look behind you!
Abi: No, I don’t
Alex: Yes, you do. Otherwise you’re cheating.
Abi: No…going off of the script isn’t cheating. It’s called improvising.
Alex: It’s called ANNOYING.
Rident omnes
I’m not sure we’re doing right by the kids, in fannish terms. I think we may be giving them a less than complete basic grounding in SF&F types and memes. This will harm them in later life, in certain circles.
Fiona is fine. No worries there. She, contrary to most stereotypes, is clearly a science fiction girl. Whenever she sees a hooded and cloaked figure, she exclaims “Star Wars!” We don’t know if she’s thinking Obi-Wan Kenobi, Emperor Palpatine, Jawas, or Anakin Skywalker, but she’s definitely got the dress code crystal clear. She also calls all explosions “Star Wars”.
No, it’s Alex who seems to have missed out. I first noticed this when I was talking to him about Hagrid, from Harry Potter, and he hadn’t realised that Hagrid is a giant. He wasn’t clear what a giant was, either. I explained that it was a special kind of person who was very, very tall.
I explained that giants appeared in a lot of stories, from the Bible (Goliath) to Narnia (I’m trailing the film heavily around the house, having brought it up in light of the centaur that appears in the first Harry Potter film as well.) Then I explained that other special kinds of people in these stories were dwarves, who were very, very small.
“Other special people [my attempt at nonhuman character for the four year old set] in stories are elves, who are, um….foofy.”
Alex heard the word “elves” and put his arm over his head, with his forearm hanging down from his nose like a trunk.
Oh…dear…
Fridays are usually adventure days around the Sutherland household. I’m home from work, the kids are home from nursery, and we tend to go out and find something fun to do in town.
For two reasons, we didn’t do that today.
This little darling was up and down between 3:30 and 4:30 am, coughing her wee tiny throat out. Even cough syrup couldn’t settle her. I finally got her back to sleep by lying in bed with her singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and my own version of Rockabye Baby. She was no better in the morning, moving slowly and eating little.
Lovely, isn’t it? First snow of the year, falling thick and fast in the midmorning. The chilly air meant that it lay on the ground for several hours, looking peaceful and bright. I love the snow and the light that comes with snow, particularly from inside a nice warm house.
So we stayed in and watched Harry Potter DVDs. It was kind of a disparate day, one I would like to remember because it was so unfocussed.
I took snow photos out the windows.
Alex needed a quiet day, too. It’s been a busy and exciting time for us lately, and he decided he wanted to lounge around in his pyjamas for most of the morning. He wasn’t in the mood to be photographed, but I got some good shots of him as he watched the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Fiona watched the snow.
About midmorning I popped popcorn.
This is a fine art, by the way, popping on a stove. My mother taught me how years ago. You cover the bottom of a pan with kernels, then pour enough vegetable oil to well coat the kernels. Cover the pan and heat it over a high flame, shaking the pan constantly. The trick is knowing when to stop, so that all the kernels are popped and none burned. Like this!
In the afternoon, while Fiona napped, I made Alex a new shield, as I’d been promising for ages. (He loves playing with swords and shields, and just got another wee sword in a parcel from California. Thanks, Trish!) The shield is made of medium-weight bookbinding cardboard, with coloured paper over it and a leather strap. The whole thing is protected with sticky-backed plastic. Alex loves it.
In between all these activities, I got some cooking in – goulash for dinner tonight, and a chickpea soup for Saturday. That recipe, from the ever magnificent Oswego Tea site, has been tempting me for weeks. Unfortunately, it came out bitter and bland at once. I think I’ve rescued it with some sausage and some balsamic vinegar, but the soup was the point of the day when things started to turn.
In contrast to the rest of the day, dinner was decidedly not peaceful. Alex decided he wouldn’t eat the goulash (though he had promised me he would earlier in the day). I decided I was tired of his fussy eating. So I took him upstairs and put him in his bed. He apologised, came downstairs, and still wouldn’t eat it. So his dad took him upstairs, forcibly dressed him in his pyjamas, and put him to bed. It was an epic wrestling match, with screaming, hitting, and numerous bolts for freedom. He shouted and carried on for 10 or 15 minutes after the bedroom door was closed, too!
Having Alex get that fussy took much of the joy out of the memories of the day. But our lives are rarely unmixed tragedy, any more than they are unmixed comedy. The light relief in this case was provided by Fiona, who decided, halfway through Martin putting Alex to bed, that she wanted to go to bed too. She climbed down from her seat, toddled upstairs, and clambered into her bed on her own, barely attending to the tantrum going on a few feet away. While her brother howled and carried on, she laid her head onto her pillow and pulled up her duvet (my offer of assistance was spurned with an “I do it!”). By the time Martin had left the room, she was asleep.
Alex has been going to his nursery, Mother Goose, for almost four years now. As he has become more verbal, he’s brought nursery rhymes and songs home with him. Sometimes they’re the standard ones – “Baa baa black sheep” and suchlike. Sometimes, they’re not.
His favourites right now are “Heyyy, baby…I want to know-ow-ow….will you be my girl?” and “Jadda”, which is a string of nonsense syllables I can’t reproduce, but which does NOT finish “bing bop pop.” (I think it should and add it in when he sings that, to his massive indignation.)
He brought home another verse to “Row, row, row your boat” the other month. I understand that it’s become common, but I had never heard it before:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
If you see a crocodile
Don’t forget to scream
AAAAAGH
Now, this is the sort of thing that gets me going on inventing my own doggerel. I quickly added another verse:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
If you see a hippo there
Feed it some ice cream
(slurp)
He loves it. He’s tried to convince Goose that it’s an official verse, with about as much success as he had sellng this rewrite I did of Hey Diddle Diddle:
Hey Diddle Dat
The fiddle and the cat
The moon slid under the cow
The little dog cried ’cause he was sad
And the dish and the spoon said, “What now?”
I can’t wait to see him try to get them to accept my latest offering, invented last night with Fiona in my arms:
Rockabye baby, in your mom’s lap
When the wind blows, your arms go flap flap
When the bough breaks, it’s a good thing you fly
Since otherwise you’ll fall, and then you would cry
And yes, I know I am messing with my descendents unto the tenth generation with this stuff. But it’s so much fun!
Fiona turns one in 2 1/2 weeks. As always, being a parent, I feel two mutually exclusive things. On the one hand, it seems just yesterday that I was sitting at this same table, doing a jigsaw puzzle, when the first contractions started. On the other, I can’t imagine life without her.
That second thought – the inability to even contemplate a life that didn’t include her – is a particularly poigniant one these days, as we watch the families torn apart by the tsunami try to find their loved ones and, too often, discover that those loved ones are dead. What parent doesn’t picture themselves on the beach with their children, with the wave coming, wondering how to save their precious lives? Who can’t empathise with the survivors afterward, wondering where the family members they lost in the maelstrom will turn up? And for the locals, with no safe home to go to to deal with their grief, things are even harder.
So, since Fiona is too young to notice whether she gets a present at all, Martin and I would like to ask her friends and family to give her small gifts this birthday. She’d enjoy a rattle made from a box and some split peas and taped shut as much as she would some Super Magic Whizz-O Gadget with bright sparkly lights. So give her a small toy and a big hug, and give the money to the tsunami victims this year. She’ll never notice the difference, because the hug is what really matters.
And she has lots more birthdays to come, where we can all splash out on gifts for her. Would that the families of the tsunami victims had the same.
Thank you.
Alex, where’s yer troosers?
OK, the short story is: Cameron (Martin’s cousin and a groomsman at our wedding) and Clare (a very beautiful woman) got married last weekend. We all went. Alex wore (in the loosest sense, at times) a kilt, which was cute and funny. We had a great time.
Below are some pictures, as evidence. They aren’t all the pictures from the wedding, nor necessarily the best ones. They’re just what I picked out to get something onto the web.
 Dada and Alex |
 Kissing the Bride |
 All the kilted folk…spot the one whose shirt is coming untucked! |
 Mama & Fiona |
 Sharing a joke with grandda |
 “Everybody look left and laugh! |
 Family portrait 1 |
 Family portrait 2: Kyle is ready to dance! |
 Family portrait 3 |
 Cam & Clare under an onslaught of confetti |
 Kyle jumps the gun on tea |
 Swinging boy |
 William Wallace, eat your heart out |
 “Yeah, the kilt is a babe magnet. I know.” |
 Dada agrees about the babe magnet |
 Dancing with Grandma |
 Dancing with Beth and Anna…wardrobe malfunction immanent! |
 Needing a little help pulling the kilt back up. |
 Fiona takes a break |
 Tired after the party. |
Alex has an interesting relationship with food.
Yucky vs Yummy
Like most toddlers, he’s neophobic. No, that doesn’t mean Keanu Reeves in a black trenchcoat appears in his nightmares. He just doesn’t like new foods.
He has a clear understanding that there are foods one likes (yummy foods) and foods one doesn’t (yucky foods). As we often discuss at the dinner table, “Mama say yum, broccoli. Dada and Alex say yuck, broccoli.” He was discussing the different kinds of food with me yesterday, revealing his understanding of jobs in the process.
“When I’m a little older, I have a new job and you have a new job and Dada have a new job and we make big monies and we buy all the yummy food and we buy all the yucky food and put it in the bin.”
Real Food
Also like most toddlers, Alex loves his sweets. We’ve been drilling it into him that you can’t have dessert until you’ve eaten some “real food” (amount to be determined by the Court of the Parents, from which there is no appeal). We first introduced this in a restaurant, where he was angling to have a chocolate sundae for dinner. We explained that he had to have some peas, fish and chips first, because that was real food.
So one day last week, he brought home a square of the cake they’d made in nursery. He didn’t eat it after dinner (can’t recall why), but the next day I packed it, along with some sandwiches and fruit, for lunch while we were out geocaching. We stopped for lunch and I opened the box. He looked inside, inventoried the contents, and gave me a testing glance. “Sandwiches are real food,” he said. Translation: I eat the sandwich and I can have some cake, right? I agreed that sandwiches were real food, and he tucked in with enthusiasm, keeping an eye on the cake as he ate.
Even funnier was the pantomime he went through yesterday. I had bought a new pair of boots, and had just taken them off in the living room. He put his feet into them (a comic sight) and declared he was off to the shops to get some sweeties. He was halfway across the floor toward the dining room table (the shop in this game) when a thought struck him.
He turned around quickly and rushed back to the living room. Kicking off the boots, he turned to the TV table. “Real food,” he said, and started picking up handfuls of air and stuffing them in his mouth. “Eat, eat, eat…” Then he put the boots on and went to the shop for sweeties.
It’s been over a week since Alex has made any significant mistakes, so I hereby declare him POTTY TRAINED.
If you, gentle reader, are the parent of a recently potty-trained child, you will know the mix of delight, amazement, and exhaustion I’m feeling right now. Delight, because I don’t have to change his nappies any more. Amazement, because I see now what a fundamentally unnatural thing Alex has achieved. And exhaustion because potty training is hard work for a parent as well as a child.
If you are the parent trying to, or contemplating trying to potty train, a child, I know how you feel too. Curious, right? I used to read potty training books and websites, looking for some magic formula that would make the effort easier. Well, sadly, there is no universal magic formula, but let me tell you how we did it.
If you’re not a parent, you’ll have to find your own motivation to read this.
So how did we do it?
For almost a year, we tried rewarding Alex’ use of the potty with little toy cars, stickers, any little titbit that might get him interested in the process. Although I felt at the time that this effort was wasted – his success was sporadic at best – I have realised that this long run-up laid the groundwork for the present success. First of all, it clued him into the fact that potty training was a fertile area for rewards, and secondly, it started him working on his bladder control.
It did not, however, convince him to be clean and dry. None of the trinkets on offer were worth the effort of managing his wastes himself instead of lying there while we did it. Not even the thrill of “big boy underwear”, just like Dada’s was enough. So we found two things that he loves best, and used them as levers.
First of all, Alex is a very social boy. He thrives on interpersonal interaction, and values approval very highly. (I’d worry more about how this will leave him prey to peer pressure if he weren’t also stubborn as a mule.) So when his grandparents Sutherland started in on how important potty training was on his first overnight visit to their house, he began to realise that people in general were keen on the endeavour. I think he felt Martin and I were eccentrically obsessed before then. This social awareness also allowed us to use praise as a reward, and mild shunning as a penalty for failure (particularly poo failure).
The second lever we had on him was gaming. Alex loves Playstation and GameCube games. Even PC games, or the Flash games on the CBeebies website, can captivate him for however long we allow him to play them. So we started changing the rules. First, he couldn’t play anything until he peed in the potty once in the day. Once he was reliably peeing first thing, then he could only play until he was wet or dirty, then they went off until he asked to go to the potty and produced somthing, then on until the next mistake, etc. Finally, they were off after a mistake, with no reprieve.
It all took a week or two from the visit to his grandparents’ to being always dry. But poo was still a consistent problem. Then his grandma Foley came over and reinforced the social leverage about stinky poo. So instead of messing his underwear, he clenched. Like a drug smuggler refusing to produce the evidence for the customs officer, he simply held it all in. And we held our breath – would he ask to go to the potty when the peristalsis was too strong to overcome? Or would he let it all out?
He asked to go to the potty. And there was much rejoicing.
Now I’m trying to roll back universal games access, since I don’t actually want him to turn into a couch potato, even one with excellent bladder and bowel control. But I’m also so proud of my boy that I’m rolling it back gently…
We took Mom to Edinburgh Airport this morning. Martin dropped us all off, and Alex, Fiona and I then accompanied her to the security gate (via the exceedlingly long and slow British Airways check-in queue). Then the kids and I took a taxi back to Goose, where I left Alex behind and walked Fi home.
In the taxi, there were a couple of adverts for the manufacturer, Manganese Bronze. One of them showed a classic black cab in a shopping centre, which particularly interested Alex.
First, he explained that “naughty people” drive taxis in shopping centres, and “good people” don’t. When he was a little older, he continued, his new job* would be to tell them “NO” (said with The Admonitory Index Finger, heretofore to be referred to as the AIF, extended), and that I would stay at home.
Then he mentioned that there were sharks in shopping centres, which also needed application of the AIF and a good telling-off, and told me his new job would involve this as well. I pointed out that that was two jobs, and how would he find the time to do them both?
His solution was that I would do both jobs, presumably because as a Mom I have so much time on my hands. So I am now the Official Teller-Off of Sharks and Bad People Who Drive Taxis in Shopping Centres. Armed with my AIF, which I only have by marriage, I go from shopping centre to shopping centre, saying “NO” to large toothy fish and cabs.
The taxi driver was it stitches.
* Martin’s new job, according to Alex, is to fix robots. While being dropped off this morning at the airport, Alex was instructing his dad to fix two small robots first, in the secret area, before starting on the big robot. All this will come as a trememdous surprise to Intelligent Finance, which took Martin on as a contractor to help develop computer systems.
Fiona had her 8-week check and immunisations on Thursday. They measured her weight, height and head circumference, and all of these measurements came out extremely large for her age. Specifically:
| Measurement | Value | Percentile | 50th Percentile at |
| Weight | 6.32 kg (13.9 lb) | 98th | 17 weeks |
| Height | 60.5 cm (25.2″) | 98th | 15 weeks |
| Head Circumference | 41.5 cm (17.25″) | 98th | 16 weeks |
So, in other words, she is a perfectly normal 4-month old baby…at eight weeks.