Three years in shoes

"They grow so fast," they told me, with wistful looks in eye. "Goody," thought I, wishing myself ever further from the broken nights, sore nipples and sundry other joys of babyhood... and feeling guilty for wishing their lives away, but wishing it all the same.

I do have the odd moment of nostalgia, before sanity kicks in. I can remember when her foot was the same length as my little finger, yet now I am the proud mother of a 3-year-old. I really can't get away with calling her ToddlerGirl anymore. The Girl's not really been a toddler for ages, but just lately I look at her and I see how much she's changed. My desktop wallpaper is a picture of her with BabyBoy (who I should probably call ToddlerBoy now, really) from six months back, and even there I can still see something of the baby about her.

But I look at this assortment of shoes, each one a milestone in it's own little way, and I realise two things. Firstly, they're right: they do grow fast. And secondly, I need to sort out the shoe cupboard more often...

On teething

My neck is not a teether
My ear is not one either
Do you mind if I enquire
How I've raised a half-vampire?

It is hard to keep calm
With teethmarks in your arm
But I'm sure that adoption
Isn't really an option.

And you might want to kiss her
But you just bit your sister.
Please don't do it again.
(Take deep breath, count to ten.)

Oh, how can such tiny teeth
Cause disproportionate grief?
I wish teething would end,
My poor, sore gummy friend.

Help! I'm covered in Petit Filous

Help! I'm covered in Petit Filous!
It's all over me and it's all over you.
It's gone on the cat and on Daddy's shoes,
Why did I give you that spoon to use?
You're only 10 months and you've got to learn how,
But I don't think it's sweat dripping down Mummy's brow.

I've cleaned this floor twice now, and that's just today,
But what you want food for aint eating, it's play,
And Mummy is mean if she takes it away.
Tell me now, please, is there some other way?
I wail on my knees while I'm scrubbing the floor,
"Surely this is not what my life's work's meant for!"

And sometimes I wonder would it really be rude
To have our all mealtimes entirely nude?
It'd save on my washing, it might be a laugh
And time-saving to stick naked you in the bath.
But I'm saying 'oh bother' instead of a curse,
And thinking that chocolate just might have been worse.

Three meals a day, seven days in a week.
I know each one's special, each one is unique -
But how many, pray tell me, just how many more,
Til he learns how to eat and I'm freed from this chore!

(Based on his sister, another 18 months... sigh.)

We don't do matching socks in this house

It's reached the stage where people expect our kids to have permanently mis-matched socks. Clean socks, always. Matching? No. The above is a triumph, as both socks came from the same pack. That's about as close as it gets.

I did hear a rumour that the wearing of odd socks is one of the warning signs social services looks for, but I've been assured that's just a myth. (And if anything, parental wearing of flares should be judged more harshly.)

Tiny socks. Before you have kids, they look all cute and small. After kids, they're just a pain in the ass. (It would be unkind to say the same about the kids themselves. And mostly untrue, chicken pox tetchiness notwithstanding.)

My sofa is insatiable

What's my son's favourite toy? Could it be any of the carefully selected age-appropriate toys, such as the push-along fire engine (which is quite popular and in my view rather marvellous - doesn't need batteries, comes with a fireman and firelady, and is made in Britain!)? No, it's not even one of his sister's toys either. It's the remote controls.

I don't know what it is about remote controls, but my daughter was the same. We went out and bought a 'baby mobile phone' for her, which I figured was roughly equivalent, nay, even better than the real thing. It had rubbery buttons, was roughly rectangular, and bits lit up and made noises when you pressed the buttons! (So many things in my life post-kids light up and make noises. It's a bit like living in the Blackpool Illuminations.)

Of course, she would have no truck with it if there was a real remote control to hand, and nor will Baby Boy. A boring old remote control, that doesn't do much, unless you press the right button which makes Mummy go "Aaargh! No! I need that back now please!" as the TV comes on/goes off/gets very loud/opens up a menu I have never seen before or will again.

The upshot of this is that finding the remote control at any given moment is always a bit of a treasure hunt. To complicate matters, there's one remote control for the PVR, one for the DVD player, and one that makes the TV come on (and can make a DVD play, but only if it doesn't have a menu you need to navigate). So not only do you need to keep track of where one roving remote has been deposited by Baby Boy, you have to keep track of three. Or else witness me howling with frustration as I try to do my DVD workout without the DVD remote, thereby trapping me in an eternal loop of Intro > Medical recommendations. So near and yet so far, never able to move the menu selector down to 'Workouts'. It's a trial almost worthy of Greek tragedy.

Which is the situation I found myself in the other day. Daddy had the kids, it was a rare moment in which I had the house to myself. And could I find the remote contol I needed? Of course not.

I spent 30 frustrated minutes going through the living room trying to find the damn thing before giving up in a fit of pique.

Husband comes home and lends a hand with the hunt. Now I'd already looked in the sofa, shoving fingers down the sides and giving them a good wiggle to try and make contact with anything remote-control-ish, but it wasn't. And while there was a fair quantity of gubbins skulking in there, I didn't have time to clean it out. Boy should I have done.

Husband industriously retrieves the pile of clothes that had managed to migrate under the side panels and down the back of the sofa:



That's half a washload on its own.

Whilst taking joint-responsibility for not keeping on top of the situation - out of sight, out of mind - how has the sofa managed to absorb that many items of clothing?! Personally, I'd like to blame poor sofa design, as the side panels are wide enough for things to wedge themselves down, but not wide enough for you to stick your hand down to retrieve said stuff without leaving most of the skin off the back of your knuckles down there too.

Baby Boy is no longer allowed to play with the remotes. And the remote control I needed wasn't down there in the end. It was sitting on the other sofa, in plain sight. Where I'd looked three times already. Whoops.

Public safety trouser announcement

"So, what do you think?" I ask the health visitor anxiously. She peers into my baby's mouth with a frown and the in-drawn breath that usually precedes an expensive quote from the garage...

Rewind 48 hours to the Sunday - these things always happen on a weekend, don't they?

Having shed 3 stone of babyweight, I was delighted to discover a whole new wardrobe... in my old wardrobe. Clothes I hadn't been able to squeeze into for many months have been touchingly reunited with my more-svelte self. Including a pair of flares, or to give them their name in full, "super-flares". In my defence, they are the only pair of flares I've ever owned, bought on a whim. And worn on a whim, on the day in question.

Now, you know those surveys, that the likes of RoSPA put out every year or so? The ones listing bizarre causes of accidents? And you read these pieces and you think, what moron injures themself with a pair of trousers? I mean, how do you do that, exactly? Read on, dear reader, read on...

So it's Sunday afternoon, I'm chatting to husband mine about some rubbish too inconsequential to recall, while the kids play on the floor. My baby-radar is on, and I clock Baby Boy crawling towards me. I assume he'll do his usual thing of stop, look up and grin at me, or perhaps pull himself up on my trousers and give me his best puppy-dog 'play with me!' eyes. He does this a lot.

Today however I am wearing flares, rather than my usual jeans. Today he's decided to lean on me, rather than get a good handful of trouser. Today, he sits up, launches forward, and glides smoothly between my legs - through deceptive denim curtains that decline to support his weight - to land smack on his face. The sound of impact is sickening. The blood more so.

Baby's screaming, I'm freaking out, husband is trying to work out where the blood is coming from as Baby Boy is smearing it all over his face. It turns out the blood is coming from his mouth. His two tiny teeth have gone through his upper lip, and somehow seem to have impacted on the stub of a tooth that had started peeping through just a day or two before.

I can't see that tooth any more. There's just a bloody pit. A premonition of photo-shopping a front tooth back into school photos flashes through my head. By this point, a few minutes later, Baby Boy seems to have got over the shock. He's happily trying to catch my nose as I'm peering into his mouth, in paroxyms of guilt at having not foreseen this foolish flare disaster.

Whatever damage is done, it's not put him off his food, and he seems content enough in himself, so the call is made not make the dreaded trip to the out of hours doctors. Which brings us back to the baby clinic health visitor...

"Hmm, yes, he's taken a nasty knock. The tooth's still there, but with the swelling it's hard to tell if it's chipped. We'll just have to wait and see."

Wait and see. How I hate those words.

Parents - beware your trousers! They don't tell you that in the parenting books...