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2007-02-06 - 11.22pm previous entry next entry
Many varied ramblings....
No time again - soooo late, but I can't keep NOT writing my diary all the time! I keep having things I want to say! Maybe I should bullet-point this entry, to try to prevent myself getting into a long and waffly entry? Long bullet points, but you know!
* I found this Place the States game the other week, when following links on my "hmmm..." thing about homeschooling. I can't fathom why I then piddled around after midnight doing that when I had a stack of emails owing and a loooad to write in my diary, etc, etc, but I just lost all sense of self-discipline, hehe! I scored 86%, had an average error of just 53 miles (not bad for a non-US resident!) and completed the game in 308 seconds. Fun! :) There it is, if anyone else fancies piddling away a few precious minutes tonight, hehe!
* Matthew pulled to standing for the first time ON ME (how flattered/honoured am I?!) and not his beloved ball blast toy :) For my records: He was 7 months, 2 weeks and 5 days old. A month younger than Arthur was. He was very wobbly and didn't manage to straighten up too well before going back down onto the floor again! I know if he's pulling up by himself then his legs are ready, but he's soooo little and I still have to stifle a worry-worry-worry thing about his tiny little "surely they only just came out of my womb" leggies! *sigh* He is growing up WAY too fast. Waaay too fast. I miss my tiny baby Boo already! But I love where he's at now :)
* Matthew has pulled up to stand against things several times a day since then, not really much more than that. He pulls up most often on either the toy garage, the ball blast, or the sofa - if someone is sitting there with something desirable like food or paper! A couple of days ago he was pretty much only just being propped up by the object he was standing against, at quite an angle! But his "angle" is getting better every day, and he can stand quite upright now, and play with a toy on top of the garage with one hand. He can't stand for long and he is a bit wobbly, but I guess that will improve with practise. He is SO keen.
* Here is Matthew about 4 seconds after he stood for the first time. Neil LEAPT for the camera but Matthew didn't stand for more than a few seconds so he missed it! But it was a sweet little photo anyway - me with my lovely boys in some rather too-bright sunlight, and yet another pair of pink pyjamas! I am the only GIRL in my house. I CRAVE pink these days, hehe! I do wear other clothes than pyjamas, honestly! Most days it takes me HOURS to get out of pyjamas still, though. I don't get the chance till everyone has had breastmilk and nappies changed and then Matthew has gone down for a nap and I've had time for some breakfast. Anyway, I digress - here is the photo (oh, two actually):
* And here is Matthew the next day, finally captured standing at the toy garage:
And starting to sliiide down again!...
* I forgot to show you photos (from 2 or 3 weeks ago now) of Arthur being a cutie with his Very Best Friend, Noddy! He did EVERYTHING with Noddy, but this week he hasn't done quite as much. That might be because Noddy got taken to bed with Arthur and seems to have been forgotten upstairs, and thus not so much a part of the day's activities at the moment. But anyway, it was so sweet while it lasted! Here are some photos of Arthur doing things with Noddy (all set up entirely by him):
* Arthur's "Monkey Incident of the Day", the day after the Rice Incident wasn't quite so funny. We had our new dishwasher delivered that day (hooray!) and the kitchen was a mess with the old machine pulled out (and dripping, ugh) waiting to be taken away when the new one was delivered. The stuff in the cupboard next to the dishwasher had spilled out so Neil had moved some of it while he shifted the old dishwasher before he went to work. I SHOULD HAVE CHECKED the status of the kitchen BEFORE taking Matthew upstairs for his morning nap. Instead I shut the kitchen door (which Arthur can open if he has a mind to) and told him NOT to go in that kitchen till Mummy came back down. Arthur does not mind me. Trust me, we are now working on this with more of a strict approach. *sigh* It was my fault though. Anyway, I was patting Matthew's little bottom after putting him down in his cot, and he was getting sleepy, when I heard this sort of "aaaaaaauuurrrrgggghh" sound in a "HELP MEEEE!" tone, so I left Matthew to take himself off to sleep (he was ready to by then anyway) and RAN downstairs.
Arthur was in the kitchen, of course. He was sitting with his back to me on the floor in front of the old dishwasher, but I could see that he had a box of dishwasher detergent tablets in front of him. He was still making the horrible noise just as urgently, and when I came round him I saw that he had a foil-wrapped dishwasher tablet in his hands and he had BITTEN through the foil and taken a chunk out of the tablet. The rest of the tablet was mostly in the foil packet but some was crumbled on the floor. The stuff in his mouth was foaming up.
I Did. Not. Know. What to do. I grabbed him up and sat him on top of the dishwasher next to the sink, and then ran a quick cupful of water, but as I went to give it to him, I thought, "I can't do that, he'll just swallow the water and the foam with it!" So then how could I rinse his mouth out? I directed him to take a little water into his mouth and then SPIT IT OUT immediately, and he tried to - he spat way better than he ever has when we've tried to get him to after brushing his teeth, but I think he also swallowed a little. So then I just panicked and held him almost upside down under the flowing kitchen tap at the sink! He didn't want that and kept pushing the arm of the mixer tap away, but I was explaining that he had to have the water in his mouth to rinse the soap out. I don't think I did a very good job.
After I did what I could, I sat him on the dishwasher again and looked in his mouth, and it was pink and clean and looked healthy. I couldn't see any foam, and when I asked him if it was all gone, he said, "Yes!" and seemed all happy again. He DID get disciplined for it, though I wasn't severe with him because I know it was my own fault. I felt so awful, urgh. Neil felt worse when I told him later, because he said he'd got the box out and forgotten to put it back afterwards, and just headed off to work. But I still should have checked.
Anyway. Of course then I looked on the box to see what I should do next, and it's covered with those big bold toxic X warning marks, and it says that if ingested, immediate medical attention should be sought. Urgh! So I phoned the doctor and as soon as one was available, she phoned me back. She told me that based on how much Arthur might have consumed (not much) and how he was acting at the time of our phone call (perfectly fine and noisy and energetic), that he would probably be fine. But she wanted me to phone the Poisons Unit to be absolutely sure. Then she couldn't find a number for that unit which wasn't a "Doctors Only" call line, so she suggested I phone NHS Direct because they have a great list of ingredients of EVERYTHING that might be poisonous, and can advise on what action to take.
So I phoned NHS Direct, and they were fab. A nurse phoned me back and asked me a lot of detailed questions about how Arthur was acting right this minute, and about the dishwasher tablet. She told me it was mildly corrosive, and that with the amount he might have ingested, he might get nausea and vomiting, or burning to the mouth and throat. She said that if he'd taken � of a tablet or the whole thing, he would have had ulcers to his oesophagus and stomach, and terrible pain. I feel dizzy with emotion just thinking about the possibility.
She told me to make sure he got plenty of fluids, and to observe him for chest or stomach pain for the next couple of hours. If he developed any symptoms, I had to take him straight to A&E, but she thought he was absolutely fine and I shouldn't worry. She said milk was better than water, and since he is not a great drinker anyway, I just breastfed him as much as he would take - which he was THRILLED about! That boy may be 2 (nearly 2 and a quarter already!!) but he will still happily breastfeed as constantly as a newborn on a growth spurt if I let him!
Anyway, phhhheeeewwww. He was fine. He didn't even have nausea or vomiting, and I kept looking in his mouth and asking if it hurt him, and he always cheerfully answered, "No, I alright!" and trotted off to play with his cars/trains/books again. I can't believe how careless we have been, considering that we have a child like Arthur around the place. He needs extra care taken on his behalf. I'm just soooo thankful that he only bit a little tiny piece off that tablet and that I got to him fast. Urrrgh.
Next subject!
* It's getting laaaate. I should wrap this up now.
* Arthur is nearly 27 months (in 3 days). That's 2�!!! His year is passing in a flash, I can't believe it. How has the first quarter of Arthur's two-year-old-ness gone already?! This milestone also means we are almost upon another rather special one: Next week (a week tomorrow, to be exact), will be 3 years to the day that Arthur was conceived. So, on that date, I will have been either pregnant, breastfeeding, or pregnant AND breastfeeding for 3 years straight!! How cool is that?! :) Long may it continue, I say! Hehe ;)
* Also next week, I will have an EIGHT-MONTH-OLD baby again! How is this time thing happening?! I need to get Matthew weighed. I haven't done so since he was 6 months old. It just keeps slipping my mind, but I am curious to know what he weighs. I'm still nervous to be told that he isn't gaining like he "should". But I want to know all the same! He is due his last meningitis and pneumococcal jabs as of next week, so maybe I'll try to time that appt (whenever I get around to making it) with a weigh-in?
* We have had a new front door fitted today. Yes, yes, we have NO money. But we had no choice but to get a new door and bung the darn cost on the credit card, tsk. Our wooden front door had swelled and stuff in the rain before Christmas, to the point where I could not physically open the front door. Shutting it was almost impossible too, but I could do that if I had to, jamming my shoulder in the process. It was just crazy. It didn't really improve after Christmas, rain or not. I have been using a strong woollen scarf to wrap around the latch and YANK with all my might every time I need to open the front door. I have to tell Arthur to stand back before I go to do it, as I usually get propelled backwards a fair way by the sheer force of pulling when the door gives and opens up suddenly. Crazy. It's not even like it's an old front door. When we moved here (5+ years ago now), we had an older wooden front door, and that swelled and stuck, and so we bought a new wooden door and I painstakingly treated it with FOUR coats of weather-shield stuff. Our neighbours got the same door and only gave theirs 2 coats. I felt sure that ours would do well and last us nicely against any weather that could come our way. But our house faces into the day's sun, and always gets the brunt of any rain and wind on the front of the house. So it isn't best placed to withstand that, no matter the treatment on the door. That was only a few years ago. It seems this whole side of our little road has the same problem, because you can hear all the doors scraping open and SLAMMING with a shhhh-THUNK when people leave for work in the mornings!
So we figured enough is enough, and ordered a PVC door. We waited 5 weeks and now it has finally arrived and been fitted, and it only took 3 hours! Yay! Now we have a nice-looking (we got mahogony effect on the outside, white on the inside, with some frosted glass in the middle of the door), silently opening/closing, draught free, excellent security, easy-to-use front door, at LAST!!! I am so excited :) Now to pay it off. *sigh* Our windows desperately need replacing too (they're just rotting away) but we can't afford that. The door was desperate so that's why it got done.
* I cleaned the kitchen floor, at LAST!!!! Yay! Well, there's still some gubbins under the table and a bit of dirty laundry in front of the washing machine, but the rest is 100% suitable for a newly crawling baby! Yippee! Now to maintain it, though.
* Here is Arthur this morning (before I cleaned the floor), doing some ironing! He kept asking me for the ironing board (I put it away as it's too easy for a boy to get hurt when it's there to get out and drag around without my supervision) and when I got it for him, he disappeared into the kitchen, dragging it behind him, iron in the other hand! He was quiet for a while, so I went to check on him, and I found him nicely set up in the corner, having selected a clean towel from the pile of stuff that we'd just folded from the tumble dryer, ironing away with glee! :) Here's my happy little helper:
* This bullet point is for random wafflings that are SURE to take me way past the time I should have stopped and gone to bed, but I just have some thoughts that I wanted to waffle out here for a bit. THEN I'll go to bed :)
I was reading an article today about IQ and it got me thinking.... I know my IQ from some extensive testing when I was 6, and again at 13, and then again in my 20s. A LOT of pressure was put on me (much of it without really MEANING to, though, in my family's defense) based on my "numbers", through my whooole time at school, and it was something I found hard to shake after school. I mean, I found it hard to feel like I was achieving anything if I wasn't DOING something obvious with my brain. And if I was doing something obvious with my brain, then I found it hard to feel like I was successful at ANYTHING unless I really got some big wowee results at my obvious thing. I am darn near 100% convinced that this was the source of my big black hole of depression which lasted from age 16 to 21.
Now I am better. I have come out of the depression (thank you God for healing me!), I have had about 54,362 years of therapy in various forms, and I found God, who let me know (in no uncertain terms) that I am precious and valuable to him just BECAUSE he loves me, and that achievements and such don't mean anything to him. What a weight-off that was! I definitely feel happy in myself and I don't hold myself up to high standards like I used to. I don't feel like I'm failing half as much as I used to - in fact I rarely felt like that till I became a mother, but I have learnt that this is a normal way for mothers to feel sometimes! I love myself the way I am. I don't feel pressure to "maximise my potential" any more.
BUT, having said all that.... Something must still be lurking away, because I get this feeling when the subject of achievements, and academia, and IQ, and such things come up. I FEEL like I haven't thought once about whether I'm intelligent or not in YEARS. But perhaps I'm just sneaky under the surface, even behind my own back? I do find myself idly wondering about whether my constant state of sleep-deprivation and intermittant pregnancy brain has completely altered how well my brain works. Seriously! I feel SO dull and soup-like in my head all the time. Sometimes I can't do the simplest of things with my brain, and my brain is even now feeling too dense to think of an example to write here (though there are LOTS). When I was six, I had a genius IQ. By 13, I was basically resisting any sort of learning that came my way and generally being thoroughly stupid at school - playing the teachers up, doing no work or homework, getting 39 detentions that year, smoking with the "daringly bad" gang behind the school bike sheds, etc. My teachers put me in low ability groups and said I wasn't capable of doing the more challenging work, and my parents were so IRATE that they had me re-tested in London to prove to my teachers that I should be in the top groups. *sigh* My IQ had dropped by more points that the people who tested me had ever seen in such a short expanse of time, hahaha! Except not hahaha, because then I was a Huge Failure and we had to discover what had gone wrong and why (which we never found out anyway). Urgh.
Since I never got re-tested after that, I continued to presume that my brain was permanently altered and that I was still a Huge Failure and ever-more would be so. Hence the depression, I think. I think I was depressed in childhood for a long time, but it got really bad from about 16. Anyway. Even after I felt happier and found God and so on, the question of whether my marbles were gone forever still nagged at me, so eventually, feeling rather foolish and embarrassed, I applied to Mensa, sat the test, and found my IQ back to where it had been, and even a few little bonus points higher! The perfect end to all my worrying, along with the "newly charged with self-worth" me! But sometimes I wonder. I did NOT join Mensa because, what's the point? Not to be disrespectful to anyone who IS a member of Mensa, I just mean that for me, there was no actual REASON for me to join. I felt like God would not have me do that. But at times I sooooo wanted to, just to have that "badge" to wear to satisfy the watchers who waited to see if I would do anything with my "potential".
These days, the very term "genius IQ" just makes me want to lie on the floor laughing and kicking my legs until my ribs ache, because I FEEL SO THICK these days!! Although, I obviously do not mean genius like.... um.... (see, soupy brain!).... uhh.... those clever people who everybody knows about from the history books - CLEARLY I am not clever like that. It's just a number, a figure to indicate "potential", and I did NOT use mine. I found difficult maths easy-pips at school. Big deal, in the grand scheme of things, right? It should not even matter the number, but I do find myself wondering if my IQ is like HALF of what it used to be, haha! These days if you ask me to multiply a two-digit number by another two-digit number, I will likely say, "Oh crap!" and then mumble incoherently and count on my fingers for ages till I finally admit I can't figure it out. So I am sure my head is now full of fluff. Is that possible? And if it is, will it ever recover? But even if that is so, it doesn't MATTER. But, nag nag nag in the back of my mind.... Maybe I'll never shake that thing about my sense of worth being attached to a number that gives a vague idea of what I should be able to do with my brain. Since I have never made use of that, I always feel like I fell short of what I should have been doing. Not like a pressure to BE a certain person or DO a certain job, but just.... where's the achieved-potential from a so-called "genius IQ" when you never finished any education except the compulsory school that your parents and teachers dragged you through as you fought hair, tooth, and nail against them; when you have no career or aspirations to one, and you "simply" stay at home and raise children all the year long? It's what I WANT to do, in fact, it's what I have ALWAYS wanted to do, and nothing else. I can do it because it's up to me what I do, and this is my chosen thing. Which I do happily, and well - most of the time. But sometimes that sneaky feeling creeps up on me, and it makes my shoulders feel heavy. As though I have wasted something special that was given to me, and that somebody, somewhere must be mightily disappointed in me because of it.
I'm not sure how to get past that. Or maybe I should accept that I probably never will, and just put it to rest and get on with my life? I hope I don't come across as..... something not nice - egotistical? In this entry. I feel squeamish about this subject. I will start a new one.
* Arthur rides his elephant! :)
* Arthur also does this to his elephant during the "mad moments" that he has, sometimes! The strange child...
* We're making some big decisions at the moment. Moving, jobs, our little ones' futures, etc. At the moment, we have pretttty much decided that we will not be enrolling Arthur in a pre-school playgroup. This makes him different from EVERY other child in our area. It seems that all children go to playgroup from about the age of 2. Most playgroups in our area don't take children till the age of 2�, but they all have long waiting lists and you are supposed to get shopping for the ideal playgroup and get your child registered somewhere around the age of 18 months, or asap after that age. I have been dragging my feet, but I have finally decided (and talked with Neil, who agrees) that I don't WANT to send Arthur to playgroup. He's only TWO. There are other ways for him to socialise, if that's what it's about. He doesn't need to be weaned off me before nursery age. When I was little, no child around here spent any time away from their mothers until nursery school (which was full of crying children as a result, those first few days and weeks of a new term!) at age 3. Before age 3, there were mother-and-toddler groups. Society has changed soooo much in the past 30 years. I'm not saying it's a BAD change, but it's a change that doesn't feel right for my family, right now. In the OLD old days, babies were still absolute babies until age 3 at least. I mean, they still rode in a pram and everything, and were called "baby"! How times have changed.
Anyway. My purpose isn't to baby Arthur, but to keep him close to me for now. He is still breastfeeding. Neil's biggest concern about him going to playgroup was actually that if he hurts himself he always wants some Mummy milk, and he hates the thought that if he hurt himself at playgroup he wouldn't be able to have Mummy milk to make it better, and in fact he wouldn't even be able to SEE us, let alone get comforted by us. It just feels to us like our little one is too young for that kind of separation yet. Arthur is gregarious and confident. He's a very sociable little boy. He would probably adjust well to going to playgroup, and enjoy it. We are not out to deprive him of essential new things that he'd enjoy, but we just feel that he wouldn't be missing out on anything by staying home with us. As he is getting older, we want to make sure that he gets more opportunities to socialise with other kids his age, because we don't want him to be lonely, or to miss out on fun with other kids when he would really enjoy such things. But so long as we pay attention to that, I think it will be fine for Arthur to be here at home while other kids his age are at playgroup.
If you think about it, homeschooled children are at home all the time throughout their childhoods, not with other kids in a mainstream school. I haven't come across any sad or lonely or wistful homeschooled children yet on my searches. Most of them do better academically than their school-attending peers, are happy and well-adjusted, possess excellent social skills with adults and children of all ages, and ALL say that they love being homeschooled. Most have several siblings to share their time with though, and Arthur only has lil Matthew so far.
Anyway. I'm not saying we're homeschooling. That's not what I mean. But I'd be lying if I said we weren't thinking about it sort-of-maybe-seriously, for the future perhaps. I am not sure if I'd want to homeschool just two children. I think if I did homeschool my kids, I would want to have a BUNCH of children for them to have the maximum benefit of the setting. It's the kids in big families who seem to benefit the most from learning at home. I hardly hear of it in England, but I checked and it's officially a rising phenomenon - if it can even be called a phenomenon yet. It's rising, anyway, whatever it is. There are currently about 150,000 families where a parent is teaching their children at home, full-time, in the UK. I was surprised that there were that many! Mostly you hear of it in the States. There's a lot of debate about it, but since I am sort-of-maybe-seriously thinking about it, I have looked into some actual research that seems to lean pretty strongly in favour of homeschooling as far as the kids are concerned. Interesting....
Anyway. These ponderings are usually kept for my new "nobody bash me!" diary, hehe! But if they become relevant to things that are actually happening in my life, then I will start to share them. If I make a firm decision then I will share it here, because I like to share everything here. So far, no pre-school playgroup for Arthur. Which I feel absolutely joyfully relieved about, actually :) We are sure enough so that if someone asks us, "Have you registered him for a playgroup yet?!" as they keep on doing, we will now cheerfully say to them, "No, and we're not going to!" Hooray! :)
* Swimming. I wanted to write about swimming for the boys (thoughts on this), and how it clashes with going to church (which we aren't doing much at the moment anyway), but OH MY GOODNESS I just noticed the time (1.42am) and realised that I have let myself waffle just as much as always. *sigh* So I must go to bed RIGHT NOW. And that is that.
Except, oh! Boys being cute through the kitchen door again :)
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