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2007-03-10 - 11.49pm previous entry next entry
Meals, and then some ranty stuff (sigh)...
Ohhh, so long since my last entry again! And this time I have soooo much to write about, and lots of photos, etc. Urgh! I think this is going to be a really mixed entry. Maybe I should split it all up into several entries, one right after another? Although, the comment system I have really bugs me. I like it, but I don't like how each comments box is restricted to the entry it goes with. Unless I go back and check the previous entries again, I can't see if anyone has come along and left a comment for that entry at a later date. People could ignore the comments boxes in the previous posts and just comment on the lot (if they want to) in the most recent box? But still, it's annoying! I miss just having a long roll of comments dating back from like FIVE years ago when I first set it up! I like to see the continuity. It's so annoying that my guestbook isn't working, and that signmyguestbook.com are so completely rubbish (have been contacting them on and off since May 2005 (!!!!!!) about my pregnancy guestbook going wrong, with not one reply, and now my other one has gone wrong, tsk). But other than that, I DO like the haloscan comments thingy. I just don't like the lack of continuity. Hmph!
Well, let's see. It has been over a week since my last diary entry, and I have so much to write about. I think I will start at the beginning of the 8 days, and work from there! We'll see how much I get done. I guess I'll start with stuff that could turn ranty (warning!) and if that just sucks as an entry then I won't tarnish Jove's lovely birthday party/naming ceremony with that! I will start a new entry for that, if it works out that way :)
Thanks for the nice guestbook entries full of encouragement over my home-cooked meals!! :) That was really nice to read! Except, Shannon, where were you on Sunday?! You said you were buying the plane tickets - I had an extra plate at the table and everything! Hehe! ;) I can't believe another week has already zipped by, and I made that week's Meal Plan last Sunday, shopped for it that afternoon (another blissful Me-on-my-own outing!) and cooked a whole new load of meals all week! I didn't miss a day this week, and I used different recipes to last week. Today I made another Meal Plan for the week ahead, and this afternoon I shopped. I am trying something new again this week that I haven't made before - lasagne. I went specially to the Italian Deli which is a car drive away, just to get the BEST lasagne pasta around. My parents still buy lasagne pasta there and they live in France, hehe! It's good stuff. I hope I can pull it off! If I can, it will be a regular on the menu :)
Arthur is still not eating any of it. Although tonight we had the first meal that was "semi" home-cooked - a bit more to Arthur's taste maybe? And he ate some!!! It was fish fingers, homemade oven chips, peas and sweetcorn. He ate plenty of peas and sweetcorn, and two fish fingers, just like that! He lifted a chip to his mouth on a spoon but shook his head at it with a disgusted look before it got there, and put it back down. That's a HUGE improvement, but then it IS the sort of meal he's more likely to go for, and he used to eat fish fingers and enjoy them months ago. He has always liked peas and sweetcorn, he just hates it when they are smothered in bolognese sauce or part of a casserole.
Matthew still eats everything, but he is starting to give some foods a slightly cheesy look and then bash them around on his highchair tray more than actually eating them. That's our only sign so far that he dislikes anything! He does still put them in his mouth but it's just without the same intense enthusiasm that he gets over other foods! He definitely does not go for sweet foods. He didn't do much with his rice pudding yesterday, and mostly played with it. If he put it on his tongue, he wanted to pull it off again shortly afterwards! How funny. I would have thought he'd be even MORE eager over sweet tastes, as most babies are, but hey ho!
He eats and drinks SO independently now! I mean, with baby-led weaning he has eaten independently from day one, feeding himself - but he barely needs any intervention from us over the duration of the meal now. A couple of times I do need to scoop half his meal back onto the tray from his bib/lap (eww!) but that's it. He did a little gag tonight on some fish finger coating, but that's when I realised that he almost never gags any more. He just totally has the hang of eating and swallowing table food, the same as an adult does. And with only two tiiiny little half-teeth sticking up out of his bottom gum! :) He gagged on a bit of raw carrot at Jove's party last weekend, but he was being held by someone and I think he's used to being completely upright and free to move himself as he needs to for chewing and swallowing, so that's probably why.
His new thing is complete independence with drinking! When he's thirsty he makes a sudden decision to have a drink, and that usually means scraping any remaining food off his tongue first with his fingers (yuck! What a funny boy! But at least he's got the idea that it's a good idea to have an empty mouth before filling it with water!) - or sometimes he swallows it as fast as he can, and then needs the drink even more urgently as a result, hehe! Then he simply reaches for his drink (it's a sippy cup with two handles and a soft-ish spout), grabs it by both handles, and it goes straight in his mouth and he tips it up easily and takes four or five BIG swallows before setting it down again. Arthur was always so bad at drinking water. He's much better now, of course! But Matthew is a real guzzler already! I can see myself needing to watch that he doesn't glug down toooo much water and fill his tummy up with that before he's far into his meal, and also I can see him being the child whose fluid intake we need to watch before bedtime after he's potty trained. He's usually so eager to get back to his food after taking a drink, that he simply discards the drink with a flick of his wrist as he lets go the last handle, and it thuds down onto the floor! It is just tossed aside, having served its purpose! He doesn't even notice it hit the floor, because he's already busily piling fistfuls of food into his mouth! He makes me want to laugh so much while I'm watching him eat :) But I don't think it's ALL that fair to sit through all his meals laughing heartily and pointing at him (!!), even though it's only affectionate laughter, so I keep myself to the odd quiet chuckle now and then :) He's such a sweetie. This evening I noticed each time he took a drink during dinner, he held his cup with only one hand and tipped it up just as well as with two. He's learning all the time!
I have some pokey bruisey discomfort that turned out to be stomach ulcer-ish last time. Tsk. It's not bothersome yet, and it only started a few evenings ago, but how annoying that it's there at all. It cleared up completely and I'm annoyed that it's back, because it got really quite unpleasant before and I do not want to have that endoscopy that I managed to avoid last time! I'm thinking maybe I should start back on the repeat prescription of the stuff that I was taking last time. I should see the doctor before I do that, though, and who knows when I'll get time to do that. Pfthth.
I wanted to say some things about a smacking comment from last entry, but I don't know if I can be bothered. Urgh, except I will bother actually. I won't fart around with my words, I'll just get straight to the point so that I can get the ranty bit done and then on with the rest of the stuff that I'd LIKE to write about.
Fi, I really didn't enjoy reading your first comment. The second one was very nice, but it's the same as last time you commented on something in my diary - you left a deflating comment first, one that could only have been intended to make me feel crushed and a bit crap as a mother, or like I don't really know much about little children. And then a nice one (to make up for it??) - or two nice ones, I think it was, last time. While I DO find the nice second comments you leave encouraging, and anyone DOES have freedom of speech I suppose, given that my diary is public and so are my comments - I would much rather you just didn't comment at all than leave a spirit-crushing comment followed by a "see, I'm a nice person really!" one. The second one IS nice, but the first one really deflates me and that feeling lingers even after the niceness of the second one. Am I making sense?!
Also, no, we do not have to agree to disagree on the smacking. That is what we'd have to say if we were in a debating forum, and we are NOT. It's completely irrelevant to me whether someone disagrees with things I'm doing that I write about. If you agree and want to support me over it, by all means, please comment and encourage me! But if that isn't your aim, please don't comment at all. I know Jemma does not agree with smacking, but she managed to leave a positive comment all the same (thank you Jemma!).
Again, like the last time, I feel like I need to re-explain the incident in town with Arthur running away just to justify my actions. I DON'T have to do that, but it leaves me itching to anyway, just to make myself feel better about it. Which is another reason that comments like that aren't nice to post. They make me feel like I should question my choices that I felt happy enough with before, and they make me feel like I must have done the wrong thing. What I chose to do with Arthur in town was NOT up for constructive criticism. I was just writing about it, as an event that happened, like people do in their diaries. At no point did I ask for anyone's advice or opinions on it, to help me do better next time! It's just my diary. That's all.
I ran after Arthur in the shop because he was headed for somewhere unsafe (the open door and thus the road) and he was not heeding my call to come back. I had no choice but to run, and I'm sure he DID think it was a fun game, but that doesn't mean the right thing would have been to just wait and let him reach the open door in the next few seconds so that I didn't make it a chasing game. I had to run just to make it there in time to stop him, or else I'd have walked.
I let him out of the pushchair after a while because that's how I chose to do it. I didn't personally want him confined there for the entire outing, no matter that he'd mucked around before. Maybe I'll learn from that and realise that he needs a stronger discipline by being stuck in the pushchair for the whole time after he disobeys me once, but that's not what I'm choosing to do yet. It seems too restrictive for my active little boy, and it would make for a miserable outing for all of us.
He went on the Postman Pat van because he'd seen it on the way from the car park when we arrived and was excited and wanted to sit in it, and we happened to pass it again on the way back from Woolworths once he was in the pushchair for running off. He had never been in a moving toy vehicle before - this was his first time - and had never seen a Postman Pat one before either. In hindsight I could have used it as a discipline issue to really get my point home with him, and it will be an excellent example of something to try another time if the going gets rough, but a) I had no intention of withholding a potential First Exciting Experience as a discipline tool that day, and b) I did not fancy a huge-o meltdown right there and then as a result of doing "a", when it could have been avoided (and was) by the fun distraction of the First Exciting Experience. Next time he ran off again (further down the line), he went back in the pushchair, as before. I don't think getting him out at that point undid the original discipline of putting him in at Woolworths. I don't ever plan to just let him out of the pushchair willy-nilly at his every request after he's put there for something he's done - in fact I denied him countless requests to get out after he'd been put there, explaining why each time - and I don't push the kids deliberately past fun things to do and let Arthur get down and play with them when he wants. As it happens, he was terrified of the Postman Pat van, so it wasn't a First Exciting Experience after all. But it was a "first" for him. If he'd LOVED it and wanted to go there every time we go into town, I could very usefully have that as a bribery thing for the future - "You can't go on the Postman Pat van if you run away from Mummy in the shop." I DO think about stuff like this already, by myself. I felt sort of like Fi thought I was a bit daft, and hadn't thought about stuff like this, when I DO think about things carefully and make my choices after I weigh things up.
That is it, I think. Rant over. I just felt the need to stand up for myself a little. I CAN handle my own children. Sometimes I feel pushed to the limits and like I CAN'T handle them, but I am their mother and I CAN. I know I can. I'm learning as I go along, and I'm going to make mistakes aplenty along the way. Sometimes I don't know if my choices are right or wrong, and I get anxious about that as I only want what's best for them. A lot of the time I honestly don't seem to have a CLUE about what I'm doing, especially regarding discipline and any other things that Arthur is really challenging me on and I can't seem to find a solution for him/me/us. Some of it IS just his age, and yes, little kids DO run off. I do actually know this. I also know about children testing boundaries and the need for consistency. I KNOW stuff, I'm not stupid! I'm human and I'm soooooo not perfect, and never will be either. Please don't squash me for my choices, or my struggles, or basically ANYTHING to do with raising my own children. If you disagree with something I'm doing and it makes you want to give me a piece of your mind, please exercise some willpower and DON'T do it. It damages my self-esteem and brings unhappiness into my day, and it makes me wobble for an anxious moment on the tightrope that is Parenting Confidence. Mothers NEED to feel confident in themselves, and they need to have self-esteem, and if they are blessed enough to finally manage to achieve some while they have tiny kids, YAY for them - please don't rock the boat at that point! It's all so delicately balanced! ;)
And on that note, I think I will post this entry because, as expected, it has ended up being ranty and leaving me feeling squirmy and uncomfy. I want to write about happy stuff, my little boys, and Jove's party! And post a ton of photos. It's getting late already so I don't know how much I will get done before needing to be in bed, but I'll do a separate entry for those things. They don't belong in this entry, I think. It's just been bugging me all week, and I felt the need to write what I just wrote. Now it's done, and I'll start the next entry right now! If you're reading this as the most recent entry, I'm clattering away at the keyboard on the next one as you read this! :) It takes me AGES to write a proper long entry so I'll be an hour or so, but it's coming :)
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