Category: The Parenting stuff

The Chronicles of Vomit

Daniel wasn’t exactly a bundle of joy over the weekend so it came as no surprise when we got a call from the school yesterday.

Followed by Etienne collecting him and his sisters from school.

Followed by the obligatory fever medicine.

Followed by bed-time vomit on the carpet in his bedroom.

Followed by 02h00 vomit all over the bathroom.

Followed by that foul-smelling gastro poo in the same bathroom.

And this is where it gets complicated. See, in our house we have an arrangement:  Etienne does poo and I do vomit.  I don’t do poo.  I gag just thinking about poo. So when we were confronted with poo and vomit in THE SAME ROOM at 02H00 IN THE MORNING whilst we were meant to be FAST ASLEEP we were blinking at each other in the bright light of the bathroom.  And we had that moment of playing mental chicken. Until I started gagging.

Game.  Over.

ps Etienne found Isabel running around naked instead of being in the bath.  He asked what she was doing, “Pappa, ek het my vinger in my hol”. (Daddy, I have my finger up my bum) And she did.  I blame Etienne for this of course, he is forever joking about having your finger, er, you know what I mean.

pps: Isabel came haring into the kitchen last night :”Pappa! Mignon wil nie praat nie!”  This after repeated requests for them to be quiet because there was much singing coming from their room.  This is her, looking very tired as you can see:

ppps: I feel like I haven’t been writing about Mignon lately.  I just love how gentle and caring and affectionate she is.  Here is a little gallery of her and Isabel on Sunday.  She is in the blue dress, always keen for a cuddle.

Isabel looking at the camera

 

Looking at her sister

 

Lemme see your tongue?

Saturday morning

Saturday morning was one of those few Saturdays that we didn’t have to rush off anywhere, so I thought it a good time to go back to bed for a little snooze after all the kids were up and (mostly) fed.

I had just snuggled in and was drifting off after reading a couple of pages of my book when I get rudely awoken by Isabel shouting from the loo: “Paaaapppaaaa, vee my booouuuude af!!!” That girl has a set of lungs on her, let me tell you.

Doefdoefdoef Etienne comes down the passage, the rest of the circus children in tow.  At this point I could still block out the noise. I could even block out Daniel jumping on the trampoline right outside our bedroom window, but I couldn’t block out his frantic screams followed by Etienne trying very hard not to laugh hysterically.  Funny how I know his way of laughing by now.

Doefdoefdoef down the passage Daniel comes, “Mamma? MAAAMMMMAAA daar was ‘n spinnekop op die trampolien!!” (Mom, there was a spider on the trampoline!)  Apparently he was jumping on the trampoline and must have disturbed a little rain spider that must have gotten the fright of his life and dashed across the trampoline for cover.  I asked him how big the spider was:

This big Mom

Then Isabel came into the room to show me how big the spider was:

THIS big Mom

And JUST as I thought the children were simmering down, I had to deal with this little face up close:

Love me!

All this before 08h00 on a Saturday morning..

ps. Daniel is normally very into bugs etc and he had some Millepedes in a jar the other night.  The next morning through the din of the girls I vaguely hear him say he is going to put his Shongololo under the tree for the day. A minute later he is back, completely distraught and crying: Jack (the dog) ate the Shongololo!  He cried all the way to school where they thankfully distracted him very quickly.  Poor boy!

pps. Don’t you just love the word Shongololo?  It’s such an awesome word.

 

Dress me pretty

At the beginning of winter I bought a pile of pants and a couple of dresses, but as it turns out the girls have decided they will ONLY wear dresses.  No jeans, no tights, no tracksuit pants, ONLY dresses.  With stockings.  So, off I went to the shops.  As we are now at the end of winter those dresses are now pretty threadbare and Isabel tore the one over the weekend when we went to Green Point Park (will do a later blog post about that).  Of course, much to my dismay, it ended up back in the cupboard (still torn) and that was the ONLY dress Isabel was going to wear today. I was mentally shaking my fist at our domestic lady for putting that damn dress back in the cupboard!!!

Actually, maybe I should backtrack a little here.  Isabel didn’t get out of bed on the wrong side this morning, she woke up on the wrong side.  It was just One of Those Mornings.

But back to getting dressed… I don’t often argue about what they wear, as long as their legs and arms are covered I really am not worried about colour combinations etc.  They have all their lives to worry about that.

But this morning Isabel wanted to wear that torn dress and she wanted to wear it without stockings.  She was immovable.

To cut a long story short, we gave her her choices:  Dress with stockings or pants with socks.  She said No.  Out of sheer frustration we suggested that she would go to school in her PJ’s if she did not make a choice.  And the stubborn little Madam thought that was a great idea. So, off she went to school.  In her oldest and most revolting hand-me-down PJ’s that hang down over her butt.  Of course not the nice PJ’s.  Never the nice PJ’s.

I eventually gathered the courage to call the school to see if they managed to get her out of her PJ’s and apparently they went for a walk around the farm this morning, so she had to get dressed for that.  Bless them.

ps.  She has also moved herself to Daniel’s class with older children and is loving it.  I suspect she was bored with the equipment in her old class.

pps.  Mignon is happy as a lark by herself, I think she is loving the extra attention.  I do suspect it won’t be long until she also wants to move though.  But we will just deal with it when we get there..

My week so far

It’s official: I’m going to Mommy Hell.

But I’m hoping I’ll be able to catch up on some sleep when I get there. I calculated this morning that I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in almost 3 weeks.

Week 1 is a long story, let’s just leave it at I was really pissed off for a whole week. Last week it was coming down from being pissed off and overtired and stressed out. This week, well, this week has been just friggin special.

Isabel started with a fever on Friday evening which ended in antibiotics on Monday. We left her with my Mom for the day.

Then Daniel started on Tuesday night, a set of AB’s for him yesterday. He did half-day at home with our domestic lady and the avie with my In-Laws (who couldn’t figure out how to take his temp and offered to give him Panado. The tablet)

THEN Mignon started with a temp last night and spent the day in bed with my Mom as she now has their bug. She now also has her very own bottle of AB’s.

Tomorrow the kids have a school outing that my Mom was going to take them to as both Etienne and I absolutely cannot take any more time off work.

And now my Mom is sick. Which means we have to farm the kids out to friends and teachers to be taken care of on the outing. It goes against every single one of my parenting principles to let someone else take my kids on a school outing, but I really don’t have a choice at the moment.

So kids: please forgive me. I know it sucks.

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Ps: I checked the weather, no rain tomorrow, so the outing will be on.
Pps: Best everyone gets well, Mommy and Daddy need some R&R. Pretty please.

The Toothfairy comes to visit

On Sunday evening Daniel comes into the lounge and shows us that one of his bottom front teeth are loose.  I had my usual mixed feelings of pride and horror whenever something monumental happens to one of our children.  (pride because they are just too cool and horror because they are no longer my babies)

Of course we asked him how long it had been loose for and he proudly tells us that his friend M (that also recently lost her first tooth) had loosened it earlier that day.  With a knife.  Which we hoped prayed knew was just a figment of his very active imagination.  As it turns out it was a plastic spoon, which is just hilarious.

We then asked him to not fiddle with the tooth, which is like switching Disney Channel on in front of a child and telling them not to watch it.  I can only imagine how much fiddling went on through the night and the next day, but needless to say I received a hysterical sms from the school on Monday:  His tooth had come out, but he had swallowed it.  Followed by another sms 5 minutes later: they found the tooth on the floor.  Accompanied by a pic of him showing off the gap in his teeth.  I called to congratulate him, but clearly he had already moved on as he was just not that interested to talk to me. Sins of the working Mother and all that.

Fast forward to home time and I arrive to find this on the kitchen counter:

We had a bit of a conundrum as we speak Afrikaans at home and everything is English at school, so there is a bit of a variation between “toothfairy” and “tandemuis” (toothmouse).  On Etienne’s suggestion we wrote them both a letter and Daniel drew a picture of a pink toothfairy wearing a green dress:

 

 

 

Please note that the note was written verbatim on instruction from Daniel.  We only work here to serve our children.  He went to sleep with his ‘baggie’ under his pillow and we only just remembered to leave our first down-payment to the orthodontist tooth-fairy under his pillow.

His face when he came into the kitchen this morning was just beautiful, he was SO chuffed!  We put his money in his moneybox, let’s see what he wants to buy with his 20 SA ront 🙂

Here he is, trying to show off his gap:

 

 

 

 

Oh the shame

It’s official: Today we received notification that Daniel has been accepted at the Primary School we chose.

When I got the email I must be honest, I had a moment. My boy is all grown up now. Lots of change for our little family next year (more on that later), but all good stuff.

So it was in this loving and pensive spirit that I came home tonight to find our Broker and Etienne at the kitchen table. Nobody wishes more fervently that we had money than he does, but he is a really good guy. We have unfortunately been a bitter disappointment to him.

But anyway, Daniel and Isabel were in the bath and came through to the lounge so I could cream and dress them and have a conversation with the Broker at the same time.

Pity though that they were more interested in each other’s private parts tonight than EVER before.

You know how you talk (shout) at your normal volume as that is the usual volume you are acknowledged at? I distinctly heard myself saying
‘Don’t touch your sister’s fanny’
and
‘Don’t touch your brother’s penis’, but it probable came out as
‘DON’T TOUCH YOUR SISTER’S FANNY’
and
‘DON’T TOUCH YOUR BROTHER’S PENIS’

And then I also launched into the whole ‘my-body-is-nobody’s-body-but-mine’ speech.

Do I care? Not at all.

And needless to say, the Broker left shortly afterward.

But I think the thing that disturbed me most about today is that when Etienne was reading The Gruffalo to the kids earlier I was in the kitchen reciting it with him. Word. For. Word.

Hide and Seek

I collected the kids from school today for the first time since I started working full day in April.

These days when I get home they are usually already in the process of being bathed or running around or comatose on the couch – weather dependent. So I don’t get that sheer happiness you get when you collect them. Those few minutes when they are genuinely happy to see you and excited to tell you all about their day and you have some time to catch up with their teacher.

I miss those days, probably for selfish reasons more than anything else. But still. I love them extra tonight.

Here’s Isabel playing Hide and Seek:

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Power to the child – Advice Please.

Dear Clever Friends of the Interwebs,

I need some advice.

On Friday night Daniel screamed and screamed and screamed in his sleep.  He eventually ended up in bed with us.  (which, if you know me, is not a regular occurrence in our house, but that’s a whole other blog post)  He couldn’t tell us what was making him scream and he is not prone to night terrors or even waking up at night.

My immediate thought was that there was something that upset him at school, so we
kept a close eye on him the whole weekend.
We had supper at my folks’ house on Saturday night and my parents suggested that if it is a school thing we would know about it come Sunday night/Monday morning.

Trues Bob.  Last night he was quite clingy and this morning it was an epic battle to get him out of bed.  Not a major drama, but he was just not his happy self to go.

We took turns over the weekend to chat about school and ask who his friends are and
what kind of work they do etc, but as a rule he is already not very good at sharing stories, so we couldn’t get much out of him. He is quite a sensitive soul, a very outgoing and gentle little boy.  Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his faults, but in general he is kind and affectionate and will inevitably lean toward being bullied unless we equip him to deal with it now.

I had a conversation with his teacher this morning, but nothing major happened on
Friday that she knows about.

As I left school I was listening to the radio and they were talking about the link between recurring depression in adults and childhood trauma and I realized:
childhood trauma isn’t just all the horrible stuff that can happen to children.  It is the borderline bullies, the random things that happen that can scar a child as much as the big bad stuff.  (which also made me realize that I’m not done dealing with my own shit)

BUT. Life is hard and we cannot protect him against everything, especially as we are facing Grade R next year.

So, here’s what I would like to know:

How do you equip your children to deal with conflict?

How do you teach a child to acknowledge how someone makes them feel AND express those feelings without giving their power away?

What advice could you give me and have you had something similar that you have had to deal with?

Baby stories

I want another baby. I want another baby so badly I am willing to go through IVF again.

But, I think I have to accept that it is just not possible for us, so to console myself I have come up with (almost) 39 reasons not to have another baby. They will never outweigh the gazillion pro’s to having another baby, but hey.

  1. Poo Nappies
  2. Vomit in any shape or form. Yes, I’m still dealing with vomit, but at least these days when I leave the house I’m more likely to be covered in toothpaste than baby puke.
  3. Not having all my cupboards behind lock and key. Which means that I don’t dislocate a shoulder every time I want to open the cupboard to get the Handy
    Andy.
  4. No more feeding of babies with spoons.
  5. No more cooking of food in bulk and freezing in a gazillion little containers.
  6. Being able to leave a child unattended in the bath for longer than 2 seconds.
  7. The cost of having the baby.
  8. The cost of keeping that baby.
  9. Being able to sit around the supper table and have a conversation. Even if
    it entails more threats (eat your food OR..) than actual conversation.
  10. Not rushing home after an early lunch just so you can get kids down to sleep between 13h00 and 15h00. We lived for those 2 hours quiet time!
  11. Sippy Cups. I abhor sippy cups.
  12. Falling over the pram in the middle of the night.
  13. Potty training.
  14. No more let-down reflux. (my boobs actually flinched as I typed that)
  15. Stomach fat. (ok, who am I kidding, I still have stomach fat, but you get where I’m going with this)
  16. Being able to give a child an instruction and have them on occasion actually do as asked. Very occasionally.
  17. Not dressing a wriggly worm.
  18. Sharp table corners.
  19. Hard tile floors.
  20. Stairs (My stomach still flips at the mere thought of a child falling down the stairs)
  21. Not having to fish toothbrushes and other innocent paraphernalia out of the toilet.
  22. Sleep deprivation.
  23. Sleep training. God how I hate sleep training. Not that we haven’t had to re-train the odd child.
  24. Drool and bibs. They belong in the same place as sippy cups. Hell.
  25. Being able to say to that shadow looming at your side of the bed “Go back to bed, it’s too early yet”
  26. Being able to cuddle with abovementioned shadow because there is no way he/she will go back to bed and you have to wake up in 30 minutes anyway and not get up to put them back into a cot.
  27. No more Purity Banana. Eeuuwww.
  28. No more having to buy formula.
  29. Not having to buy nappies. That shit’s expensive. And no, I’m not ‘that’ into recycling that I would invest in cloth nappies. I’d rather plant a couple of trees.
  30. Not ever EVER crawling around on the floor to retrieve a brown dummy in a far dark corner under a cot off the brown carpet at 03h00 in the morning.
  31. Having to leave that baby at home and go back to work. Don’t think I could go
    through that again.
  32. Immunisations and seeing your baby being injected. Especially when you sport your own phobia for needles.
  33. Growth spurts and not knowing what’s wrong.
  34. Teething (need I say more?)
  35. Ok, teething nappies. Remember, I don’t do poo.
  36. Porridge brain. It’s taken more than 3 years after having the girls to feel like I can have an actual conversation about anything other than children.
  37. Hormones.
  38. Post Natal Depression. I’m a lucky two-time winner.
  39. My age. I’m almost 39.

Sorry if I just put you off having another baby 🙂

Morning times

You know how sometimes you have a magic morning?

One of those mornings when the dog didn’t wake you up barking 10 minutes before your alarm went off and you didn’t drag yourself out of bed like a slug and try to wake up in the shower.

A morning where all the kids wake up in a good mood, they all sweetly eat their breakfast, brush their teeth without complaining, get dressed in the outfit that you picked for them by themselves and sit still whilst you brush their hair and make ponytails.

A day where your hair looks fabulous just right and you manage to apply liquid eyeliner without being bumped by a dog or a child.

One of those mornings when they carry their own bags to the car, get in the car 5 minutes ahead of schedule without banging the car door against the garage wall, sit quietly in the correct seats without any squabbling about whose turn it is to sit where and don’t fight about what music they want to listen to and don’t switch on any lights or wipers or hang off the rear-view mirror. And they don’t demand a last kiss from Daddy as he turns the corner.

And then, when you manage to catch a break at that dreaded right turn into traffic and arrive those critical 5 minutes ahead of your usual screaming late time to find the teachers all on time and beaming to see you children. And they all jump out of the car squealing with excitement and run around to get their bags so they can carry them into school by themselves. And they unpack their own lunchboxes and smile sweetly and raise their faces so you can do your kiss-hug-cuddle-high-5 routine and wave fondly to them from the door and calmly get in your car and listen to some music of your own choice whilst sipping your
coffee in peace and taking a leisurely drive to work?

You don’t?

That’s ok, neither do I.

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