Update after a long absence

It has been a very long time since I last wrote on this blog. As is often the case after a long absence, there have been a lot of changes to my life in the intervening period.

The two biggest changes are:-

1) I got a job and went back to work

2) C, my youngest, started nursery 3 days per week.

The Job

I started working as a class teacher for the organisation Rhythm Time in April this year. This has been a great job for me. It is just 2 mornings a week at the moment. Whether that will change or not in the near future I don’t know. What I do know us how very much I enjoy the teaching. As a music student in the late 90s I remember thinking that the only thing I did not want to do was teach, so it is rather poetic that I find myself teaching mad loving it now.

Not only do I love the teaching and watching g the faces of the small children I teach, but the job has had all sorts of expected and unexpected benefits- I now have colleagues; I get some adult company every week. I have something in my life other than my own children and I am starting to feel like myself a bit more.

Unexpectedly, I am getting back into music so much more. I listen to more music, I play more music and think about it more. I studied music for many years and it is lovely to be using it again. The degree was not a waste!

Nursery

C has started goi g to nursery 3 days a week. She does not like it and does da quite a bit of each day saying “I not go cool” (I’m not going to school). It is a pre-school nursery attached to the school her brother goes to, and that she came to every day to collect him. I thought, therefore, that she would find it easier to get on with than her brother did as she was used to going into the building. I was wrong.

The poor girl is so unhappy when we drop her off. Hopefully she will get used to it soon and she won’t be quite so upset in the car!

I find myself with quite a bit of time free in the day. I am trying to sort out a routine for myself, and have a lot of jobs I want to get done in the time I have- I am finding motivating myself to get on with those jobs quite difficult though!

That is all for now. I hope to return to blogging more regularly again, but I am not making any promises as they always go a bit wrong….

Sleep problems rear their head again!!

I am stuck in a dark room with white noise on at the moment. It’s nearly 10pm. We are having some sleep issues with my daughter again- what a surprise!

We thought we had actually turned a corner with her recently and she was largely sleeping through the night. We turned her cot into a bed and she was excited. She had the best sleep She had ever had waking up even after her brother at gone 7am when she is usually a 5.30/6am waker. For 2 nights.

Then for the rest of the week bedtime has been awful for everyone involved. She is fine if I put her to bed- takes a long time to go to sleep but does eventually go off. But for Daddy she just will not go to sleep. She screams, she stamps her feet, she escapes the room to come and find me- she is so good at opening doors- she has tried hitting, pinching and biting Daddy. It must be so hard for him. Even though he knows she is just 2 and it will be a phase that passes (soon hopefully) it must be quite hurtful for him.

It’s no fun for me either to be honest as I have to go from one child to another and rarely get downstairs for some time not being mum until at least 9.30pm.

If we just had our daughter then I would say we should pick our battles and just do her bedtime together every night for a while. But we have a nearly 5 year old too. Since before his sister was born we have been taking it in turns to do his bedtime. And it’s a lovely chance to have some one on one time with him which is tricky to get otherwise. I’m not entirely sure how we will manage this phase to be honest. I am repeating my mantra “This too shall pass” to myself at the moment though!

Tuff Tray Tuesday – Jan 22

We sadly have not done Tuff Tray Tuesday this week as my poor little girl has not been well the last couple of days. She has had a tummy bug and has just wanted me to hold her and to sleep.

Usually she is a little live wire and I sometimes say to people that I wish she would sit still for 5 minutes! But it’s been so sad to watch her struggle these last couple of days and to be so tired and lethargic.

My mum and sister cane to visit us today and C was initially so unhappy to see them she cried whenever they even looked at her. My mum held her at one point while I went to the bathroom and she just sobbed the whole time! Generally I leave her with my mum twice a week and she doesn’t look back! Later on mum held her again to give my arms a break and she was so tired she couldn’t summon the energy to get off my mum’s lap and come over to me. So she just looked at me, whined and then resigned herself to staying there for another minute and then tried again!

Poor girl has spent most of the last 2 days like this

Or this

I hope she is back to her lively self very soon!

Happy New Year!

It is New Year’s Eve. I have had my traditional NYE morning of giving the house a bit of a tidy (not the playroom which still looks like a bomb has hit it. And despite having done a lot of clearing out before Christmas I still have no idea where half of the stuff will go to!), vacuuming, changing bedsheets and towels and putting washing away and more washing on. It always feels good to start the year this way- fresh pyjamas are out for everyone as well.

So now as my daughter is fast asleep in my arms, and my son and husband are playing next door my thoughts are turning to the year we have just had and the one ahead of us. It will be a big year as my baby girl, my youngest, should start school in September. I will hopefully start to find enough time to make a little money and turn what I do as a break from being a stay at home mum into a business. I think I found this blog’s aims and it’s voice over the last year- I found the direction I wanted it to take at the moment.

I aim to continue our Tuff Tray Tuesday activities, and if I get a little time later on today I may post a little round up of what we have done in the last 3 months.

Rolling out air drying clay on the Tuff Tray

Over Christmas one of the activities I really enjoyed with my boy was making gingerbread houses out of cardboard.

I want to do a cardboard project each month, starting with making a cardboard aquarium! We will only do one a month because i don’t want to leave a lot of cardboard lying around the house at the moment after we had a rather uninvited and unwelcome guest over Christmas!

I have some projects I want to do around the house as well. Over the next year I want to go through every room in the house and get rid of anything we don’t need or want any more. Then the year after, when C is at school, I plan on painting the whole house. It has needed a little redecoration since we moved in, and while we have done a few bits to the house- and are having quite a big project at the start of the year to replace all our back windows which have rotten wooden frames- I my husband and I just haven’t had the time to redecorate properly. I was pregnant when I moved in so we never stood a chance with the place!

I can see a big change in the relationship my children have with each other. My daughter is no longer just going up to whatever my son is doing and breaking it or messing it up. They occasionally play together, or next to each other doing different things. Each night they put the Hokey Cokey on and dance to it together while my husband and I obsessively clean the kitchen after tea (see the reference to an unwelcome visitor above…..) I love hearing them together. And while they still fight a lot, it is getting easier for them to be in the same room as each other without resorting to pushing or biting the other one.

I am quite excited about what the year will bring. I look forward to sharing it, and the activities I do with my little handed ones with you! x

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone.

We have decorations up, a carved pumpkin, Halloween food and activities for the children all sorted out. To be honest we have done most of them already and today will be the least Halloween like of the week I suspect.

We went Trick or Treating on Sunday, which I wrote a little about on Instagram on the day, if any of you follow me over there. We live on a cul de sac on the outskirts of Birmingham and there are 4 other culs de sac next to us. Each year the residents association organises a Halloween Trick or Treat afternoon. Posters go up on the trees and lampposts on the road and people are asked to put a sign up in their window if they don’t want to take part.

It starts at 3pm on a Sunday near Halloween so it’s nice and light at the start and starting to get dark by the time we get home. Most of the families on these roads have young children (the senior schools are not brilliant here so people tend to move by the time their children are approaching senior school age). It is a very family friendly event with lots of young children and babes in arms all dressed up. Some adults get dressed up too. And there are a couple of houses that go to town on the decoration front- far more than us. My son got very excited about going to see the Haunted House this year which was complete with zombie tape outside and a body in the front garden.

To be honest even without a sign in the window it is very easy to tell who wants to take part and who doesn’t. The houses that want to put bowls of sweets outside or open their doors when the hear us all approaching. We all start off from the bottom of our road and travel through the area more or less together. It always feels safe for the children to be part of.

It’s great for people who don’t have children too. In previous years I have always got some sweets in just in case I get a knock at the door, and often don’t have one. The end up eating all the sweets myself! With this, you know exactly when Trick or Treating will happen so you know when to get stuff in for. There are enough households taking part that if you can’t or don’t want to for any reason it is easy not to without being bothered.

It’s such a lovely thing each year. Something I look forward to as much as the children and oh my goodness did they enjoy it! Both of them. They both came home with quite an impressive haul of sweets that they’d collected. My daughter refused to let us carry the bag for her, she was so pleased with it! The bag is now ruined from being dragged on the floor, but it doesn’t matter because she loved it so much. And the first thing my son did when he got home was count how many treats he got!

As you may know, I am sorting out my daughter’s bedroom after years of it being first a junk room, then a room to change her nappy and store our junk. I am hoping that she will move into her room from ours at some point in the next year. I have a very limited window in which to do this as she is with my mum for a few hours on a Monday and Friday and in the 3 hours before school pick up for my son I try to do everything- sort the washing, clean the house, do a job like this, write at least 1 blog post and prep for the next day’s activities! It is a bit of a slow process then, to get this room of hers sorted out, and a good job I’m not in any hurry to do it!

Today I got together a lot of those foam floor mat things that we used to have in our playroom but took up last year. I wasn’t sure what we would do with them at first, so shoved them in the corner of C’s room. There they sat for about a year, and finally today they are out of the room and off in a charity shop! I have repurposed our playpen, which C kept trying to climb over in the playroom, to separate her from the nappy, and general bin as she just will not leave it alone!

I spent some time sorting out all of hers and her brother’s old clothes. Some will be sold on eBay as they were really nice and still in good condition, some have gone to the charity shop, and some were too stained to be used again. It’s really nice to be decluttering like this, especially as someone who used to be a dreadful hoarder!

Bedtime routine

My husband and I play tag team at bath and bedtime. Usually he uses the bathroom when we get upstairs after tea. Then I run the bath and use the facilities myself while he chases after the children and their toy buses.

I then cajole our son into taking his clothes off ready for the bath (dear god that is a frustrating task!) and he changes our daughter ready for the bath.

R loves the bath. Always has. But lately he stalls so much you would think he hated it. He then gets really annoyed that he can’t spend longer in the bath. One day he will understand that it is up to him how long he stays in the bath and that mummy isn’t saying “Come onnnnnn” to him for no reason.

After the bath we each get a child ready, come together for a story, then one of us takes C off to go to sleep while R gets an extra story, and then told repeatedly to be quiet, lie still, make an effort to go to sleep. Somehow we often finish at about he same time.

I want to get to a point where we only need one of us to do bedtime so we can each have a night off sometimes, or regularly even, but our routine is working well at the moment so I am a tad hesitant to change it.

Tuff Tray Tuesday

I have a poorly little girl today, so there will be no Tuff Tray Tuesday set up.

Instead, here are some pictures of the children playing with the dinosaur world set up on a Tuff Tray at our local museum, Lapworth Museum of Geology at Birmingham University. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that we visit the museum a lot. Usually on a Sunday as it is down the road from where we live. We go for a coffee/hot chocolate at the Costa coffee in the University’s new sports centre afterwards. The children are occupied there watching the swimmers in the swimming pool that the coffee shop looks out over, and my husband and I sometimes get 5 minutes to actually talk to each other instead of talking like my son’s latest obsession (currently SuperTed, I doubt this one will last that long).

The museum has loads to do for a small museum, and is very child friendly. And the last few times we have gone they have had a dinosaur world, complete with a couple of sets of wooden dinosaurs, set up on a Tuff Tray and both children have thoroughly enjoyed playing with it.

They really are versatile things Tuff Trays, I can’t recommend them enough.

“That’s boring” – Ladies and Gentlemen, this is my 4 year old

Ah, the joys of parenting. My son, R, has entered a new and wonderful phase.

 

4 has so far been quite tricky. We have had a return of the tantrums that started the age of 3. We cannot, now, take him into a toy shop without him bursting into tears when we tell him we cannot, or will not, buy him anything on that occasion. We did this the last time a couple of weeks ago to buy his cousin a 1st birthday present, and we had tears for a good 30 minutes that we wouldn’t get him any Paw Patrol toys. If we dare to serve up any dinner that is not plain rice (cheese is allowed with the rice, or ketchup, but nothing else) or plain pasta then we can have lots of tears. Before even sitting at the table. Of course, we do put a variety of foods in front of him so there are tears most evenings. He likes us to play “talk like” games, where we have to talk like his favourite TV characters, but of course we are not in his head and often get the phrase he wants to hear entirely wrong. I ask him not to shout at us regularly. Honestly, his emotions were far easier to deal with during the Terrible Twos, which were not so bad for us, and lulled us into a false sense of security.

 

Lately, he has taken to telling us “That’s boring”, often accompanied by tears, if we want him to do something he really doesn’t want to do. Or even mildly doesn’t want to do! It is said with such vehemence as well. It is enough to try the patience of a saint. And a saint I am definitely not! I am sure this phase will pass soon enough, and something else will come in its place, just please let me have a break before C enters the Terrible Twos in 6 months!!

 

Photo by mohamed Abdelgaffar on Pexels.com

Reading to your child

This is what I thought it would be like when either I or my husband read a bedtime story to put children:

And we do get that when we are one on one with the eldest.

However, when we are reading to both children (every night) the scene looks more like this:

You will note that there is one child missing. He disappeared off god knows where. And the other one was more interested in the floor than the story!

That is, right up until the end, when it was time to go off to sleep when suddenly the story was fascinating…..