Writing the Book on Parenting...

Every lunchtime during the working week I walk from my office and go to ASDA.  It's the only place within walking distance; which is both a shame, and an indication of the salubrious setting of my workplace.

One day this week, as I walked from one end of the store to the other, I passed a family: Mum, toddler and Granny.  This is not unusual in this particular ASDA, lots of people seem to think their kids should learn the ways of Smart Price early on.

A little more unusual was the snippet of conversation I heard as I passed them:

Granny: "do we need to get cutlery?"

Mum: [shouting] "she don't need a fork, she'll use her fucking fingers"

Which was nice.

Now, I'm in no position to give parenting advice, nor am I the sort of person who is likely to tell someone else that what they're saying to their child is possibly, maybe, just a tiny bit inappropriate.  But it was, and I didn't think it was a technique Supernanny would have been proud of.

I'm very happy to litter my speech to adults with swearwords, I don't attach any greater significance to them than I do any other word.  But this made me feel sorry for the child.  Maybe it was the first and only time the mum had ever sworn at her, or maybe it was a regular part of their relationship.  I don't know.  But it just seemed so unnecessary.  It was swearing as filler, swearing as punctuation, not swearing for effect or emphasis.  Even if it had been the latter, not in the direction of a toddler surely?

It made me judge the mother too.  I wondered what other things she might think were okay which I might not.  I wondered what the girl would be eating with her fingers; bolognaise perhaps?  A tasty curry?  Perhaps this mum also thought that a bowl of cereal should be eaten without a spoon?

Two days later I heard another mother tell her son "you can't go on the fucking ride, and you're not getting any fucking sweets, now shut up".  That was in ASDA too.  The boy didn't look to be misbehaving, but he did look like he hadn't enjoyed being spoken to like that.  Not an isolated case then.

Am I wrong, or being prudish?  Maybe everyone swears at their kids (and I don't mean the under-the-breath frustration swearing, I mean swearing AT their kids) and it's all part of their growing up experience.

Perhaps when I'm a dad myself I'll understand it, but for now I'll just remain dumbfounded.

False Alarm

Two nights ago, at about 1am, I was woken by the following word from my wife:

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!!"

It took my sleep addled brain a few dozy moments to process that.  Then, assuming that the baby had decided it was time to make an entrance, I did the natural thing.  Panicked.  A thousand thoughts went through my mind.  Well, a couple at least.  They were: "ohmygodshittingshitit'sfinallyhappeningthebaby'scoming" and then: "calm down, calm down, find out what's going on".

My mouth hadn't quite finished booting up yet, so I said something like "nnngggghhhmmmddight?"

Luckily, Mrs L is good at deciphering my incoherent mumblings.

"It's cramp, really bad cramp in my legs".

I asked whether she was sure, because, y'know, I'd imagine cramp in your legs feels pretty similar to contractions.  I blame the fact I was barely awake.  Pretty soon I was back to sleep.  An hour later it happened again.

Since that night, I've been on code red, Defcon 1 (or 5, I forget which way round that works), super-alert-phone-checking mode.  Because it could happen any time now.  I might have to exercise the full accelerative ferocity of the almighty Skoda to get to the hospital at the drop of a hat.  I've started fending off new pieces of work which people try to give me (to be honest, I do that anyway) and trying to wrap up outstanding bits and pieces.  I'm ready for the call, whenever that call may come.

Every single thing we do I find myself thinking "this is probably the last time we'll [insert activity] before the baby arrives".

We're in a period of lasts.  Last restaurant meal.  Last visit to the cinema.  Last game of basketball.  Last trip to the supermarket.

It's harder for Mrs L, having to ferry the baby around within her, but the uncertainty is having an affect on me too.  I'm not sleeping well (and not just because my Mrs L has developed a very impressive talent for snoring in recent weeks) and I feel a bit fuzzy around the edges.  I got all snappy at someone in the office the other day, which is not at all like me.  It's quite stressful, having a baby, and we don't even have ours yet.

So come on baby, get a wriggle on.  We want to meet you, and I want to stop feeling a compulsion to check my phone every thirty seconds.

I Spy - Something Beginning with R

The lovely @jbmumofone takes a mean photo.  Every week she posts a linkythingy on her blog and invites us all to join in a big old game of photographical I Spy.

This week the letter of the alphabet she is interested in is R.  Beloved of Bristolians, it seemed this was an appropriate letter for me to make my I Spy debut.  Without further prattling, here is my photo:

What do you see?

Clickify on this here badge and find yourself in a world of other R based pictorial joy:

Troll

No, not her.

There’s something which has been pissing me off for a while now.  I’ve been biting my tongue on it, because it’s not really important in the grand scheme of things.  But yesterday’s Samantha Brick debacle brought it back to the forefront of my mind.

I’m not going to start harping on about how beautiful, or not, or whatever, Samantha Brick is.  You’ve already read all about that.  You read all about it on the Daily Mail’s website.  You read all about it on Twitter.  You may well have read the follow up article which is apparently actually in the Mail’s printed publication today, as well as online.

I’ve read all the above.  I was as swept up and fished in as everyone else.  But when I read the second instalment of the Samantha Brick saga this morning one paragraph leapt out at me:

 - Samantha Brick, Daily Mail

“Until this week I never really understood the term 'Trolling' — used to describe when anonymous people viciously attack others on the internet. Now I do!”

No.  You don’t.

Because that’s NOT WHAT TROLLING IS.  That’s what the media, who obviously couldn’t be bothered to research it properly, have decided it is.  And have decided to start spouting off about all the time.

Trolling is the posting of deliberately inflammatory content online, with the express intention of provoking a reaction.  (Paraphrased from Wikipedia, because I CAN* be bothered to research)

It is not Samantha Brick who spent all day yesterday being trolled (though what was happening to her was indicative of the ugly, pack mentality of the internet.  To actually think it’s okay to send her hate mail directly doesn’t seem okay to me.  She didn’t have to read what was on Twitter, or being blogged, or even on the comments about her own article, but actually emailing her?  That’s a bit nasty.)

It was us being trolled.  That’s right.  You just got “pwned” by the Daily Mail.  We all did. 

Someone posted on Twitter yesterday that the Daily Mail had won the internet.  They were right.  Mail Online is already the most viewed newspaper website in the WORLD.  Now they’re being clever enough to use the internet against itself.  It’s like some sort of postmodern mindfuck.  If the Mail is now trolling us, who will troll the Mail?

No-one.  Because the rest of the media is using its power to convince us that what I would probably term “cyber bullying” is actually trolling.

So here’s my intention for the future: I will not click on links that are to the Daily Mail Online.  I will try not to react to articles elsewhere which are blatantly planted to gain a reaction.  I will do my best not to feed the trolls.

And if you see that I have slipped, you’re more than welcome to tell me I’ve been a right old Sammy (in a thick cockney accent, preferably).

Disclaimer: I know I’m feeding the troll just by posting this.  The irony has not passed me by.

*Can’t.  I know Wikipedia doesn’t count as a valid source for anything.  It is right though.

Toys

We had some friends over at the weekend, to drink tea and eat cake in celebration of Mrs L's birthday.  The tea was nice, and so was the cake, but the star attraction was the nine month old not-quite-toddler son of one couple.

From the moment he arrived to the moment he left he was the focus of everyone's attention.  Rightly so, because he's a fab little man, smiley and engaging, with a definite cheeky edge.

I learnt something in that hour of toddler time: to a toddler, EVERYTHING is a toy.  Specifically, the things which were not designed to be toys.  Even more specifically, the most expensive things in the room which were not designed to be toys.  To take it one step further, he was fascinated by the TV.  He also quite liked the laptop, but we hid that.  There's nowhere in our house that you could hide a reasonable sized flat screen TV, not if you ever wanted to watch it.

Not a toy.

Little man's mum was alert to this, and had him under close surveillance at all times.  A fact I am grateful for.  She also managed to prevent him from eating my car keys, which was nice too.  For him and me.

A toy.

So how do they know?  It's not unique to this baby, I've see other ones drawn like a magnet to iron when they're placed within sight of some expensive item.  I don't think we did anything to highlight the value of any specific items to him ("hello baby, listen carefully, these are the ten most expensive things in the room, please feel free to destroy them as you see fit") and we certainly didn't make the mistake of refusing him access to the TV.  Innate ability?  Some kind of genetic affinity with the magpie?  I don't know.

The nice thing was that he wasn't actually interested in mauling the screen itself, it was the faux-carbon fibre weave on the stand he liked; running his tiny nails over the texture over and over again, making the sort of scratching noise usually reserved for sound effects in bad horror films.  I suppose that's it really, it wasn't some unfathomable addiction to the pricey he was displaying, but an entirely fathomable desire to do something interesting.  Nothing else in the room made that noise, or had that feeling.  Maybe he'd never heard that noise before in his short life.  He was exploring the world, the world where almost everything is still new to him, and that's a lovely thing to watch in someone else's child, so I'm really looking forward to watching it in my own.

Uncomfortable

It's been a while coming.  Nearly thirty-nine weeks in fact.  She's done well, but now she's just about done.  It's just too much.  Too much weight.  Too much volume.  Too much circumference.  The bump is finally defeating my wife.  Wobbling around like some 50s b-movie monster attached to the front of her, the bump has begun to take its toll.

I've been amazed through this whole nine month process that there hasn't been more in the way of aches and pains.  The books all say a woman should expect to start hurting far earlier than one week prior to the due date, and I'm sure most do.  Mrs L has been toughing it out though, that or extremely lucky.

But not any more.

Every movement is accompanied with a breathless sigh.  A trip to the shops is akin to a major expedition to some hitherto undiscovered corner of the globe.  Even resting is no longer a rest, rendered unpleasant by the sheer size of that baby oven.

No combination of pillows, cushions, duvets and assorted other ephemera yields the comfort my wife so desperately craves.  Her anatomy is at the mercy of the baby, stomach squished up inside her so that she's never hungry, her hips, knees and ankles working under conditions that have their union rep threatening strike action, her feet swelling into caricatures of their normal selves.

Yet through all of this, there is hardly anything by way of complaint (there's certainly a lot less whinging than would be happening if I was carrying all that around).  Not once have the words "I just want this baby out of me" passed her lips.

She's bloody amazing, and I, in turn, am bloody amazed.

Names

I heard a story recently about names.  Part of me hopes it isn't true.  It went like this: a couple has three children.  The oldest is called Coco, the middle child Princess.  When the third child is born they register him with the name Dikenwe.  The registrar is a little surprised, so asks the parents how they decided on it:

"We named all our children after perfumes we like, Coco by Chanel, Princess by Vera Wang and now Dikenwe, you know, because we couldn't call him DKNY"

Oh dear.  What a terrible abuse of power.  Thankfully, he'll only have to live with it until he's sixteen, when he can change it via Deed Poll.  Or maybe he'll love it, it's certainly different.

But even without the benefit of having a parent who is clearly mental, many people end up with names they're not keen on.  We're keen to avoid that, which is why we've been having the name conversation now for nearly twenty weeks.  Because we want to like the name we give our baby.  We also want our baby to like his name, once he's old enough to have an opinion on it.

Meet my son, his name is Sexy.

It's difficult though, isn't it?  Without realising it, I've been going through my life marking names up with little tags: John is too common.  Luke, Leo and Liam would all be alliterative with the surname.  Isaac is already taken by a close member of family.  I was bullied at school by someone called Jason, and someone else called Antony.  Colin sounds too old.  Matthew is too biblical.

Mrs L has a separate list of names which she wouldn't want to bestow on the boy, some of which I quite liked.

We want something a bit different.  But not too different.  Something with no negative connotations from people we've known, or people from history (not too many Adolfs around these days, wonder why?)

The conversation isn't over.  Won't be over until the day we register the baby.  But we do have a short list now.  Eventually we realised there aren't going to be many names we can say, without any reservation, that we're 100% happy with, so we went for the closest we could get.  There are five names on the list, I'm not going to write them here, but I will write our concerns:

Options one, two and three: they're nice, safe, popular names.  But that's the problem, they're a bit dull.
Option four: is shared with a current politician, whose policies we don't like.  We'd like to avoid the inevitable "is he named after...?" questions.
Option five: is of French origin.  Neither of us is remotely French.  We're a bit worried that it might be a touch silly.

When the little guy does make an appearance though, I'm sure all our concerns will melt away.  We're not going to love the boy because of his name, but because of what he is.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a son by whatever name will be amazing.