Category: Family

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Alex and the dolls

Treasured moment of the weekend: yesterday evening after Alex’s bath we played around in our bedroom for a while. I went to the bathroom, and while I was in there I heard some scuffling and giggling. When I came back out, I saw that Alex had gone through to his own bedroom, climbed into the rocking chair, and pulled the blanket from his cot over himself. Completely over himself. When he heard me coming towards him, he pulled the blanket down from his face and went, “Boo!”

We both burst out laughing. He loves going to bed these days, and he loves playing night-night games.

He is also starting to role-play with his dolls. At Christmas he got three of them: a Teletubbies Po doll, a Tweenies Milo doll, and a soft plain baby doll. Recently he has been trying to push his noo-noo into baby’s mouth. And this morning, he insisted that Po should wear a bib, and should sit up at his little table to have breakfast with him. He was hugely amused by my attempts to feed her Weetabix.

The Po doll also seems to have another effect. He wanted to take it with him to nursery this morning, and he held on to it all the time while I was taking of his coat and handing him over to the nursery assistant. And he didn’t cry.

Alex has been going to nursery two days a week for over a year now, and every morning I drop him off, he weeps inconsolably when he sees that I’m leaving. As soon as I’m out of sight he cheers up and starts playing quite happily (he does actually love being there), but every morning he puts me through the emotional wringer in he hope that maybe one day I won’t leave him behind.

But this morning, nothing. He clung to Po and let me hand him over without a peep. He looked very solemn, and quite concerned about the matter, but he didn’t cry. I was amazed. I still am. I’m wondering if it was the Po doll, or if he was just too tired to protest (he did wake up quite slowly this morning, and seemed pale and sleepy all through breakfast). If he wants, I’ll let him take Po in again tomorrow to see if it wasn’t just a fluke.

I’d certainly be relieved to see him happier when I leave him behind in the mornings, but possibly a little sad as well. When he cries, and wants to hold on to me so fiercely, I feel the close bond of love between us very strongly. I’m consolde by the knowledge that he has a great time during the rest of the day, but it would be better for both of us (and the staff at nursery!) if he could be a little more relaxed about these partings which, after all, only last a few hours.

My little boy is growing up. I love him so much.

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Smell (or lack thereof)

I can finally breath through my nose again, but my sense of smell still hasn’t returned. It’s only when you lose it that you realize just how much of the sense we think of as “taste” is actually smell instead. Ham and cheese toasties still have a wonderful mouthfeel, though.

In terms of child care, having no sense of smell has an up side and a down side. The good thing is that changing dirty nappies is so much less unpleasant. The bad thing is that you can’t tell when they need changing. Which vastly increases the danger of “creepers”.

(A “creeper” is a poo that rides up the child’s butt crack, emerges from the nappy, and keeps on crawling right up the back. If you’re lucky, the child will be wearing a shirt, which will catch most of the unpleasantness. If not, you end up with a brown sticky trail on the floor.)

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Sleepy time

Earlier this week, pretty much from one day to the next, Alex finally grasped the idea of this whole “sleep” thing. We have a rocking chair in his bedroom, and until now we have rocked him to sleep every night. It usually took about 20 minutes, but sometimes as long as 45 before he would doze off and be sufficiently solid to move him to his cot.

As of this week, he no longer wants to be rocked to sleep. He’s happy enough to sit or lie in Abi’s or my lap for a few minutes, so we can tell him a story or play the eyes and nose game with him. But then he arches his back and starts loocking over at the cot.

“Beh,” he says.

“You want to go to bed? You want to go to your cot?”

He nods his little head.

So we lift him up and lower him gently into the cot. He lies down immediately, and curls himself round onto his stomach, clutching his cuddly toy to his chest. We rub his back, tell him we love him, and say “night-night.”

And then we leave the room, close the door, and walk away…in perfect silence! No screaming, no anguished cries of “dada!” or “mama!” Just the peaceful knowledge that he has learned to go to sleep on his own. I’m so proud of him!

Of course, at Nursery he’s been falling asleep for his mid-day nap on his own for some time now. But that’s not the same as falling asleep alone at home, where he knows he can command mama and dada’s attention, and make us do (almost) anything he wants. It means that what he really wants is to not to play, or have a story, but to fall asleep. It’s a big step.

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Ken MacLeod and Richard Morgan

Abi is down in London for a few days, so Alex and I are on our own for a while. Partaaay!

Well, it is if you call going out to science fiction author readings partaaaying. Ken MacLeod and Richard Morgan were in session at Waterstones this evening. Before it started, I asked them if it would be okay if we sat right at the back, where Alex would have some space to sit and play, and they said that would be fine. I had bought him a couple of new books, and I was hoping that would keep him quiet for at least some of the time.

On the whole, Alex was pretty well behaved. There was some noisy plumbing in the back of the room which probably masked some of his cooings and mumblings, but there were occasions where he got very excited at having nifty plastic chairs to climb on. A couple of times he seemed too energetic, and I took him out of the room. Through the fire escape at the back there was a staff private where he could play a bit more loudly. (Fortunately, the staff didn’t seem to mind.)

Although I am completely smitten with Alex (obviously), I do know that not everyone is quite so fond of children. And when you go along to an author event, you probably don’t want the constant burblings of a toddler interrupting the flow. I do feel bad about possibly having disturbed some people’s enjoyment of the evening. Plus, having to pay half a brain’s worth of attention to Alex all the time (combined with the joys of Obscure Auditory Dysfunction), meant that I probably didn’t even catch half of the conversation between Messrs MacLeod and Morgan. So although it was a fun adventure for us, as an author event it was only a mixed success.

I did, however, get to pick up the last volume of Ken MacLeod’s Engines Of Light trilogy, Engine City, and get it signed. Amazon reckons it isn’t released until 7th November, so that’s a bonus–especially as I’m a quarter of the way through Dark Light already, and will probably finish it in another few days.

And finally, I managed to ask Richard Morgan to sign a book…that he’d signed already. Abi bought a copy of Altered Carbon earlier this year, and it must have been pre-signed when she bought it. Mr. Morgan was game enough to sign it again, though, and add a humorous little message as well.

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Books discarded

What I forgot to mention in my last posting was how many books we managed to weed out. Well, we don’t know exactly, but it’s probably about 500 or so.

We ought to know exactly. As we laboriously went through each box, we marked them off in our spreadsheet. Unfortunately, something weird happened to the spreadsheet about six boxes before we were done, and we lost most of this effort. (Note: we were editing the spreadsheet in OpenOffice on Linux. This may have been an unfortunate accident…but maybe not. On Saturday evening, we almost lost a lot of work when Linux seemed to freeze up entirely. The hard disks were thrashing like crazy, so something was happening–just not in the GUI, which was effectively dead. Yes, I’m having some murmerings of dissatisfaction with this year’s Linux.)

So anyway, we’ll need to go through the boxes of discards (seven of them, plus a large Ikea paper bag) in order to cross them off our list. This isn’t actually a bad thing, because we also need to sort them according to how we want to get rid of them. Some are eBay-able, we think, while some are destined to return to the great charity shop in the sky (or Barnardos, whichever is closer).

I guess that’s next weekend’s activities taken care of, then.

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Weekend workout

Phew. What a weekend. It started off very early on Saturday morning. Alex woke up crying before six. I got up and took him though to the spare bedroom, to see if he would go back to sleep with me there, but he squirmed and moaned and didn’t really want to lie still. I think I dozed off a few times, but at about seven he really wanted to get up.

We went downstairs, and I gave him some juice, and then some Weetabix, and then he threw it all up. Over me, the couch, and himself.

But that was the worst of it. He still felt rotten, but he was clearly relieved that his tummy didn’t feel so bad any more. And it kick-started us into the rest of the day: Alex shower-monkeyed with me, and we got clean while Abi got up and whipped the covers off of the couch downstairs and started stuffing them through the laundry. (Big bonus points to Abi for having the foresight to have bought two sets of covers when we got the sofa!) Then after Alex was dressed, I did all the dishes that had been piling up. After that, we put the other covers on the sofa, and suddenly the whole downstairs seemed clean and fresh again!

Alex fell asleep just before noon. Given that he’d had an interrupted night’s sleep, we fully expected him to sleep for a while, so I headed out to do some shopping. Alex was still asleep when I got back two hours later, and Abi only woke up briefly enough to say hello and settle back down again (she was napping, too; it was about two o’clock before we got to bed the night before, so Alex wasn’t the only one who didn’t get enough sleep). I unpacked the groceries, and then started installing Apache on my Linux box. But the tiredness caught up with me, too, so while the make process was running, I lay down on the sofa and took forty winks, too.

And that was just the start of the day. For the rest of Saturday, and most of today, we’ve been weeding the Sutherland library. We have about 2,500 books, most of them stored in boxes (23, before this weekend) up in our loft. A few years ago, we went through a phase of intensive second-hand book-buying. We targeted sections of Edinburgh, and then systematically trawled through every charity shop, picking up almost anything that looked like science fiction or fantasy. We would come home with 60 or 70 books crammed into our backpacks and shopping bags. There was never really any chance we would read all of them. A large proportion of them were junk that, realistically, we wouldn’t even want to read.

Also, over the years, we’ve bought a lot of books, read them, and just added them to the stacks without much really considering whether they’re worth keeping, or whether we’d ever read them again. Abi and I are both love books. They are very important to us, even just the fact of having them. The idea of buying a book, reading it, and immediately selling it on, giving it away, or even (gasp) throwing it out is quite alien to us.

Our habit is to buy books we think we’ll read, and put them on the shelves. Maybe we’ll read them, but then again maybe not. There are more books that we fancy reading (and buy) than we actually have time to consume. It’s a terrible thing, but these days I rarely get through more than one book a week, which is a paltry fifty books a year. I’d guess that when we got married back in 1993, Abi and I had maybe 500 books between us. That means we’ve been buying–on average–about 200 books a year.

But we don’t mind this. We don’t mind the idea that there are book we’ll buy that we’ll never read. They’re books that we might read, or that look interesting. Plus, they’re books. They’re our little paper friends.

But still…2,500 of them is quite a lot. And there really are some of them that we just don’t want any more. Books that we’d never read again, or books that, if we were honest with ourselves, we never had any intention of reading even when we bought them.

We have them all nicely catalogued, of course. A couple of weeks ago, we had both individually gone through the spreadsheet and marked off which books we thought we’d be happy to discard. The final exercise was to bring all the boxes down from the loft, and do a manual sort through them to see if there were any more that sprang out as obvious junkers, or whether any of the ones we’d marked were actually keepers.

We finished the process earlier this evening. Phew. Not only was it tough mentally and emotionally (putting away books is hard), but because we only have a ladder up to our loft, it was physically demanding, too (putting away boxes of books is hard). And of course, Alex wanted to help, so we had him to wrangle at the same time. We’re both going to be sore in the morning.

(In between the sorting and stacking, we found time to have a wee adventure today as well. We walked to Straiton Park, where we stopped of at Tk-Maxx and got me a nice new autumn jacket, and bought some stuff at Ikea. We had intended to just buy some more packing boxes, but they were out of stock. So we came back with a new chopping board, a wooden tray, and a packet of coat hangers instead. I like a fundamental law of nature: it’s not possible to visit Ikea and not buy anything. But we had a very nice walk out there–the haar didn’t close in until after we had got there.)

Phew, again. I think I’m going to sleep well tonight.