February 2007 – In At The Deep End

Happy New Year (of the Pig)

One of my colleagues brought in some Chinese goodies to celebrate New Year – my fortune cookie said “Practice friendliness – it is the path to happiness”. There were also little sweets – some labelled Milk Candy that were like Werther’s Originals, and some labelled Eraser Tea Candy! Photo on Flickr when I bring my camera to work (camera phone was too feeble).

Today we headed down to London because the V&A was doing some things for Chinese New Year, and managed to combine it with meeting up with E, O, M and F. The map at the V&A was possibly the least helpful map in English I’ve had to suffer, and the signs weren’t much cop either – we had to resort to Brownian motion plus asking staff when we could see any.

We finally found the correct room, where there were Chinese costumes and masks to try on, musicians to listen to, dragon dancers to watch and a calligrapher to admire (and get blessings from). The cafe was packed, so we used the steps of the Natural History museum to have lunch. Unfortunately it was packed inside, so the planned visit to the hands-on bit had to be turned into a trip to the park (Hyde Park), admiring the clutch of churches on the way (Brompton Oratory, Holy Trinity Brompton and an Orthodox Church) and various cathedrals to capitalism like Harrods and Emporio Armani.

At the park I played the midfielder to Katy’s striker in helping spread the word to another family about the power of slings. The little one was grizzly and then Katy showed his mum how to tie him on with a wrap and he instantly fell asleep! Another convert.

On the way back we stopped off at one of my favourite places to eat – Food For Thought in Covent Garden. Everything plopped onto bowls or plates school-dinners style, jugs of water on tiny tables, mostly downstairs but the food is amazing.

The actual journey back was a game of two halves. L threw a full-on tantrum (screaming and kicking) while in the carrier on my back, which made the packed tube trip nice :roll:. Sanity and calm were restored by the time we got to King’s Cross and we managed to get a set of seats around a table and so could easily share take-away pudding from Food For Thought :). After that we remembered the maths books we’d brought for the journey down (which hadn’t been used as we’d had to sit on the floor all the way :roll:) and the next exercise in each was polished off pleasingly quickly and with good humour. I got my retaliation in first with J ready for the next time he says that maths is boring and pointless as he was doing some division and one of the questions was about dividing some sweets equally among some children – a useful life skill, built on a foundation of maths!

A Night at the Museum

To tie in the film of the same name (nice free publicity) and in honour of the half term holiday, some local museums did a special afternoon / evening event for children. They dimmed the lights and invited the children to bring their torches, stayed open late and had some special activities.

Katy and the children had already done Parents and Tots, drama, a trip to some charity shops and the Sedgwick Museum before I joined them at the Arch. and Anth. museum which is one of my favourite places. Some of the staff recognised our children from the last open day (not sure if that’s a good or bad sign!). As well as shining your torch on a 30 foot grizzly bear totem pole etc. there was making puppets to use as shadow puppets – as ever the staff were great.

We tore ourselves away from there to get to the Zoology museum before it closed. Having had things explained by J+K’s friend S and his dad (who was most impressed by K’s Thunderbird 2 torch, and J’s torch with its red and green filters) we went hunting around the display cases looking for owl signs that would give us the next question to answer, e.g. Whose bedchamber did the Death’s Head Hawk Moth visit?* The lights were so dim that you really did need to shine your torch to read things, and it was great for things like the mother of pearl inside a shell, or the wings of a bird of paradise. Katy and L made a rather nice owl while we men were hunting (for clues).

By chucking out time we’d got all the clues, got the stickers (see Flickr) and were all tired and hungry (and it was passed bedtime for most people). Oh, and the car was a long way away. We wandered in the direction of the car but got side-tracked by Pizza Hut for some haute cuisine. Eventually, after much use of slings, shoulder carries and piggy backs, we got to the car, got home and packed the kids off to bed.

During the short journey home J read the human biology book (How Your Body Works) that he’d got from a charity shop earlier. It includes a fair amount on reproduction (which he read and started commenting on to the others :roll:), so the cat’s out of the bag on that front although we’re hoping we can limit it for now to just J.

* King George III’s. You might recognise the moth from Silence of the Lambs posters.

You don’t expect a computer for that price?!

Katy found the first link, which reminded me of the other two.

Want to spend a lot of money and not buy a computer? You could get a hand-crafted set of monitor, mouse and keyboard made out of your choice of wood or stone. A lot less bling-tastic than a Vertu, I suppose. A wooden mobile would feel nice in the hand…

This is a nice combination of art and technology, and of natural and artificial: a wooden mirror. (Look at the film, although you might find the sound more annoying than soothing.)

Need a table for your office, but fancy something a bit out of the ordinary? How about a periodic table? Lots of stuff on the site, including a surprisingly philosophical explanation of why he did it.

I’ve looked at tired from all sides now

I was tired today; this isn’t the first day I’ve been tired. It struck me that there are many different types of tired, but they all get labelled with a standard name: tired. Eskimos are supposed to have many names for snow, so maybe parents at least should have more than one name for tired, to pin-point precisely the particular kind of tired you’re feeling today – a bit like tracking down just the right species of moth in a museum’s display case. Ah yes! It’s an Epiphyas postvittana kind of day.

I’m probably missing a few of these as I’ve not been a junior doctor or used large amounts of mood influencing chemicals stronger than tea. Nevertheless, here’s a few kinds of tired that I’ve thought of:

Cotton wool head – does exactly what it says on the tin. Your head feels like it’s full of cotton wool which stops the thoughts from flowing. No headache or grumpiness.
Border-line psychotic – I am a guided missile heading for sleep NOW. Anything that gets between me and sleep will get flattened. Social interaction usually fails painfully, limited thinking is possible but nothing is pleasant.
Switching off – parts of your brain just seem to not work, but you’re too tired to care. No headache or cotton-wool feeling.
Shredded – unpleasant, as it feels like some important and sensitive part of your brain has been rubbed against a cheese grater.
Grey – a background tiredness that has peaks and troughs added where you can’t concentrate on anything e.g. work. When in the troughs, web browsing – infinitely distracting yourself – suddenly becomes very attractive.
Glandular fever – don’t try this at home, kids.
Head in a vice – head feels squashed, often with an ache at the base of the head.
Spatula – you need to exert a tremendous amount of will power and mentally scrape yourself off the floor with a spatula, then stagger through the day on auto-pilot.
Fading in and out – you’re reading your children bedtime stories and realise you’ve been saying words that aren’t in the book and now your eyes are closed. Awake with a jerk and then carry on with the story. Repeat until the book is finished or the children go and ask Mummy instead.

I think today was a switching off kind of day. Fortunately the bits that didn’t work didn’t seem to matter!

Excuse me while I scream!

The last week has averaged at least an hour a day (often more) of solid tantrum from L. How does she keep it up for so long? What do I do when she starts hitting me, kicking me, pulling my hair and screaming in my face? Or worse, doing it to the boys?
It’s completely unpredictable what will set her off, so it’s virtually impossible to head her off. On Monday it was because she wanted some oat cakes she’d spotted in the car on the way to the boys’ sports session, nothing else would do, and she spent the entire hour sitting on my lap screaming that she wanted oat cakes (having said that, she did get a chair for me to sit on so that she could sit on my lap 😆 because I couldn’t hold her up any more and she wanted to be carried; I couldn’t put her down because she was trying her best to climb up my legs!) – then when the boys came out she was fine and played with them quite happily 🙄 That was in the morning. In the evening she did another big rant because I offered the children a choice of soup or risotto and she wanted pasta. When I’d finally managed to get soup made (stepping over and round her when necessary as she was lying on the floor clinging to my legs) she ate it quite happily and came back for seconds. *sigh*
That kind of set the pattern for the week. It doesn’t help that J is ill, so exceedingly fragile and responding to every little thing in a totally ott way 🙁 The best thing though, is that L has started coming back into bed with us again and then has to be cuddled up to mummy (daddy will not do), preferably with an arm around my neck and her face touching mine, then if I try to turn over (which I do quite frequently now, as my hips start to seize up, especially when she is there so I can’t sleep in the positions I prefer) she screams blue murder, pulls me back, clambers over me etc etc 😥 So Bob and I are both exhausted too :wall:
I’m trying my best to be patient, because I appreciate that things are all a bit unsettled for her atm, with new baby on the way, big brother shrieking at her for the slightest thing, we’ve just been away on holiday and so forth, but I’m really not sure how to handle this; neither of the boys did the tantrum thing and none of the tactics we used to use on L seem to work just now. A friend has at least been pointing out that when she is older and puts her mind to doing something she’ll be able to use that amazing tenacity to get to the top!
Tbh, I kept expecting her to come down with something too, because that was the only time the boys used to behave anything like this, but she’s just as healthy and cheeky as ever – meanwhile I feel like death warmed up and keep finding myself withdrawing from the situation, which I know really doesn’t help; I just can’t cope with this right now 😥
Sorry – I’ll shut up and go to bed now. Couldn’t go earlier, despite being exhausted, because Bob was trying to settle L again, after she decided 11 was a good time to wake up and start shouting…

Bordering on the contagious

So, we are now back (but not unpacked) from our first Melrose MuddlePuddle camp. We didn’t fancy doing the whole trip in one go, so we Stepped off the Path with Jan, Jonathan, M, C and J. Lovely company, lovely food – including Jan’s magic trick of producing more tins of scrummy cake than appeared to fit in the cupboards, nice cats, dry stone walls, shaggy cows, an impressive computer-filled office overflowing into the airing cupboard and a suspension-testing drive (home to the shaggy cows).

The music-playing pack of chewing gum and FM transmitter worked well enough, particularly when we realised that turning off the radio’s RDS would stop it trying to be too helpful. There was occasional interference from local stations, but just bumping the frequency up or down by a little usually sorted it. The battery lasted nowhere near as long as we were expecting, so we were glad we’d brought some spares and a charger. We’re solidly working our way through the Roald Dahl canon – Simon Callow reading the Twits and Geoffrey Palmer reading BFG were probably the best so far.

Melrose itself didn’t start well as K and I were both sick in the night, so we quarantined the whole family as no-one wanted a repeat of the nasty pass-the-vomit-bug of previous Melroses. Fortunately we had a room to ourselves and had brought the laptop with us (obvious thing to pack when youth hostelling 😉 ) so I had the very pleasant experience of snoozing on my bunk listening to the children laugh at something (The Incredibles) that I knew was completely suitable for them. We read books and played with plasticine and when the bouncing off the walls got too bad fortunately there had been no repeat performances and the weather was nice, so we headed out (avoiding others) for swings and a walk. We got a bathroom to ourselves for the day, just outside our room, which was a consolation, and all tummies were feeling robust enough to end a day of plain bread and water by enjoying some of the Beans lovely cooking for tea (courtesy of Merry’s room service 🙂 ).

The next day was K’s birthday. We went back to plan A (celebrate on the day) rather than the plan B cooked up when we were poorly (postpone 2 days). So, cake baking and decorating (with help from J and L), J making some posters to let everyone know about the party (including a mysterious request for party-goers to bring a spare pair of clean socks) and preparation for pass the parcel. Katy wrapped lots and lots, and J wanted to help with the music. Laptop to the rescue again, and we chose some music together. Unfortunately at the party itself it didn’t go as planned. My laptop took aaaaages to boot up, I tried to get the MP3 player to start before all the usual start-up crud had finished and as a result it took even longer. The natives were sat in a ring, the parcel wasn’t being passed and they were beginning to get restless. We declined the offer of singing, but the kiddy-keyboard thing which I think belonged to the Beans came to the rescue with one of its pre-cooked tunes. Eventually the MP3 player was ready but even at full volume could not compete with a roomful of excited children. I fast-forwarded to the noisiest track we’d chosen, that I’d thought probably too loud, and this was only just loud enough.

Despite these technical difficulties it went OK, and then we had a properly loud and frantic game of Tidy Your Room and the mystery of the extra socks was solved. Through to the other room for cake and other nibbles (see Flickr).

The only other fixed things were a trip to Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh and swimming in Galashiels. Dynamic Earth was nearly thwarted by poor signs in the City Centre – the SatNav crew got there on time and the rest of us had a bonus tour of the streets around Holyrood with complimentary extra stress. It was almost very good – lots of good content in a nice setting, but just too full-on. The exhibits competed with each other in flashing and/or volume, rather than building on each other. The soft play area was great, and L impressed us with her confidence on the climbing wall.

Swimming was also shortened by poor signs, but still very enjoyable and featured nice staff and interesting rocket pack style floats.

Apart from that there was lots of children playing somewhere or here (doing Fimo, playdough, Hama, dinosaur or boat building…), lots of parents chatting, and it was very nice.

The trip back was broken in York and godparently fun was had. Lots of playing with train sets and bubbles (including some nice bubble mountains by J). More yummy food and lovely company, and for once not being late with presents for my godson 🙂

Today was a very good family service at church which included doing sign-language actions to one of the hymns, and then a mini birthday party at the Grad Pad with K’s godmother Hannah – someone I ought to make an effort to see more. Unpacking still looms, and work tomorrow :).