Chairs, chairs everywhere

And not place to sit.

Every time I go in the kitchen at the moment I feel like the chairs are trying to stage some sort of revolution . Their choice of weapon is themselves and they aim to trip anyone up who crosses their path….

The First Summer

My son attends nursery at a school that he will stay at, hopefully, until he is 11. So they keep school hours and school terms. He broke up from school in the middle of July and goes back at the beginning of September.

Last year, his last before starting school and being away from me for 3 days a week, the summer was lovely. I was very lucky and we did not experience the “terrible twos” at all. (We have not been so lucky with three!) All our activities ended before school term did, so we had long days with nothing much planned. He had finally started sleeping through the night and so I was much better rested than I had been before. We did activities I found on Pinterest, we went to the park a lot, I took him to the library and swimming and to the art gallery. It was easy and lovely and I dreaded him going off to school.

This year I started the summer with a 2 month old baby and a 3 year old who was not best pleased about the aforementioned baby sticking around still. School had also been very clear that we were to have potty trained our son by September, so I was definitely going to have to tackle that joyous task. It is fair to say that I was dreading the summer a little bit.

The first few weeks were really hard. My son found it hard being around the baby so much, and having to share my attention. He threw quite a few tantrums and I ended many days in tears thinking I had ruined our relationship and wondering what I was doing wrong. After a few weeks, though, we got more used to the new reality of life with a 3 year old and a baby. With a lot of help from my mother and husband, we managed to find time for my son to have 1 on 1 time with not just my husband and his grandmother but with me as well- we had time just the 2 of us whenever the baby slept, but she was just in the other room and I was often telling him not to shout.

I am very lucky that my mum lives down the road and is very hands on with her grandchildren. I know we would have found our way had she not been living nearby, but I am so grateful that she does. It has made this first summer so much easier. My husband working for himself and being able to come home by 5.15 most days has helped enormously as well.

I am hoping that with a little more independence from both children next year that it will be easier anyway. And one day I will feel that the summer was lovely and easy again like it was last year! Until then, here’s to surviving the summer and to my village!

A gendered upbringing?

The topic of a gendered upbringing and whether it is harmful for children is a hot one at the moment. I have a boy and a girl so I have a vested interest in this debate.

I remember when I first found out I was having a boy being a little panicked thinking I didn’t know what to do with a boy as I had a sister growing up and my half brother didn’t come along until long after I left home. When I was pregnant I thought about the sort of boy I would have and assumed, based on me and his Dad, that he would be a rather geeky little boy. Studious, not sporty at all or even interested in sports. I remember having conversations with my husband about him and saying that if he wanted to push a pram or play with dolls then he could.

He is still only 3 so we have yet to see exactly what his personality will be, but at the moment he is such a boy’s boy. He is currently obsessed with dinosaurs, but before that it was trains, busses, the Octonauts, Go Jetters. He likes playing football (as much as a boy can whose parents are not interested and are rubbish at.) We got him a kitchen one Christmas that he likes to play with and he likes to help clean and tidy up, but otherwise he likes all of the traditional “boy’s toys”. We did get him a baby doll when I was pregnant with our second child, but he has not shown the slightest bit of interest in it, much like his soft toys as a baby which have now largely been gifted to his sister. I have always assumed that I am just going along with his interests and not forcing mine on him in any way, but is that true? Do I have an unconscious bias in the way that I treat him and the toys I offer him to play with, therefore shaping his interests not allowing him to find them on his own? I do recall discussing with my mother one day how he is a boy and therefore needed more rough and tumble play, he was only a few months old at the time. Perhaps that unconscious bias is there.

My second child, who is just 4 months old now, is a girl. I wonder who she will be, what interests she will have. I have not bought her many toys yet as she is too small to really be interested and we have some of my son’s toys that I had saved for a second child. Will her presents at Christmas be that different from the ones my son had for his first Christmas? For that we bought him cuddly toys (utterly ignored) and some toys to encourage crawling etc. It will be interesting to see whether the toys I pick up for her for presents are similar to the ones I got her brother or completely different. She will grow up surrounded by her brother’s old toys, so maybe she will be influenced by that? And I have noticed that he enjoys playing with her toys far more than she is at the moment. Will that last too, maybe if we do buy her more traditionally “girl’s toys” he will then start to pick them up too?

As far as clothing goes, I kept all of my eldest’s clothes unless they were ruined from weaning. And I have sorted through those clothes, putting many of them in my daughter’s drawers – I hadn’t realised how many dinosaur clothes my son owned until now, there are tonnes of them and may have sown the seed for his latest obsession. So the clothes I have bought for my daughter have been very pretty dresses and romper suits. I don’t want her to just wear pink, apart from anything else my favourite colour is red so I love both the children in that colour. I do remember lamenting that girls clothes were so much prettier when shopping for my son. I now find myself moaning that too many shops just have pink clothing for girls, not what I want at all!

I was a very girly girl, but was also brought up being told that a woman can do any job she wanted to, be whatever I chose to be. I want that for both my children. If my son wants to become a nurse or a primary school teacher, or a palaeontologist then I intend to support those ambitions. Similarly if my daughter wants to become a mechanic or a computer programmer. I don’t want either to feel limited by their sex, and don’t want to unwittingly limit them through any unconscious bias. Perhaps this will do is serve to make me think more about the options I give to my children.

Potty Training

My son attends a nursery school and he is currently on holiday from school. They advised us at the end of term last year that they did not have nappy changing facilities so he would need to be potty trained by the time he goes back to school.

I would have started his potty training much sooner, but I had a baby in April and have found the transition to having 2 children quite a shock to the system. So our potty training has taken ages.

First we convinced my son to wear pants over his pull ups, then we convinced him to try to keep just one pull up on all day and use the potty. And finally we took the pull ups off during the day. Each stage my son has resisted initially and we have had to give him a date when it would happen and remind him that on x date we would be going on to the next stage.

He has been without pull ups during he day now for 1 week and so far he is good at using the potty when we suggest in the morning, but by 3 or 4pm he gets fed up with us asking him if he needs to use it and tells us he has now run out of wees. We have, a good few times, pretended to order some more for him from amazon!

The thing that is eluding us at the moment is getting him to tell us when he wants to use the potty as he will quite happily sit for a while in his wet pants and trousers. It doesn't seem to bother him that much. If anyone has any tips on how to encourage this it would be great to hear them.

Potty Training

My son is now officially just wearing pants with no pull ups. We have spent the last few days warning him this was going to happen today and trying to get through the day with a dry pull up so I am hoping he is ready. I have taken up the living room rug (east clean floor underneath) and our settees are covered in old towels. Let the soggy games begin!

I shall let you know how we get on but the prospect of only having one child's nappies to change is rather exciting!