Mummy I need to go!!

My life sometimes resembles an episode of the cartoon my son loves so much, “Nina needs to go.” In it,  little Nina decides she needs to go at the most inopportune moments, when a toilet is far from accessible, much to the dismay of her long-suffering parents.

Yesterday afternoon, my son had a scholarship presentation event to attend at schoo,l and like the responsible mum that I am, I took time off work, arrived at the school really early to freshen him up, make sure he uses the toilet and change his shirt (I knew it would be unpresentable by that time of the day).

He was a bit nervous about going onto the stage but he obediently followed the long line of scholars into the auditorium. Once all the teachers, parents and scholars were seated, the ceremony was underway with three sets of presentations  for the all-rounder, music and finally academic scholarships respectively with a musical interlude between each set.

During the second set of presentations, I was sitting in my very good seat in the second row, armed with my camera when I noticed my son stand up with very pained expression on his face. He looked at me and shouted,

“Mummy I need to go, I can’t hold it any longer!” (All eyes turned towards the offending mother, ME!!)

Assessing the situation very quickly and knowing how prone he is to expressing his disapproval very strongly, I jumped out of my seat, and made my way down the row, pushing past a line of  reluctantly shifting knees and feet. By the time I got to him, I could almost see the tears that were going to stream down his face and I imagined the rim of the puddle on the new red carpet of the auditorium.

In my mad panic and embarrassment, I grabbed his hand and ran up the stairs to the black curtain that I imagined would magically reveal a toilet. I tugged at the curtains and my son did a few tugs of his own but alas the black curtain revealed a stark white wall. I looked around in blind panic and then the kind man who was supervising the sound for the event in his little black room advised me,  very slowly and loudly in a tone reserved for the very feeble,

“Go…. DOWN… the…. stairs… and… out the door that you CAME in and you will find the toilets on the right hand side!

What a clever man, why didn’t I think of that?!?

Knowing where I was going now, I proceeded to the exit of the auditorium and raced him to the toilet to where he insisted on washing his hands twice saying , “Mummy, I haven’t washed them properly yet,” (yes, yes, yes you are supposed to wash both sides of your hand but today, RIGHT NOW could you just be very very very quick). After he had dried them properly and I fought the urge to pick him up and run back to the auditorium before he missed his name being called out, we ran back,, to find with relief that the second musical interlude was in progress. The academic scholarships hadn’t been called yet!! Thank the Lord!!

I pushed past the row of people again, my legs bumping 12 sets of  knees as I apologised profusely for the inconvenience.

The final set of presentations started just then and I had just enough time to ready my camera before my son walked across the stage to receive his certificate.

A very very proud mum took picture after picture trying to capture that precious slice of his life  and make it eternal!!

 

 

 

How did she get pregnant?

Weekly Writing Challenge: Papa Says Get Economical

For this week’s challenge, I chose the first two paragraphs of a wordy post I wrote  (I’m not proud). I cut-down, polished and shined just like Papa ordered.

Before

If like me, the term, ‘digital dependency’ is  new to you,  you’d be even more surprised to learn that there are children being treated in digital detox centers for this modern addiction. Now the relationship between violent games and aggression has been well documented and is almost common knowledge, but four-year olds needing therapy for electronic addiction?  That is deeply disturbing. How I stumbled upon all of this, is a personal story, which I will share with you here.

I have a four-year old son whose recent and very sudden bad behaviour puzzled my husband and I.  I am not in any way suggesting that prior to this, his behaviour was faultless, but I had that universal something-doesn’t- feel-right mummy moment. My son is a regular, active, rebellious and headstrong four-year old. There are negotiations all day to get things done, like brushing teeth, getting ready for school in the morning, going to bed etc. He is also a very fussy eater so meal times are an ordeal in our house.

After

Did you know that there are children as young as four in digital detox centres?

The relationship between violent games and aggression is well-known. However, digital dependency among pre-schoolers is a disturbing modern phenomenon. My son is a regular, headstrong four-year old, but lately, he’s been having tantrums on a daily basis. The culprit: his iPad. This is how I know….

What do you think? Is that better? 

What my father taught me

With all the posts about fathers today, I’ve decided to contribute to the thread…

My father and I have never been particularly close, I’ve always found it easier to talk to my mother and I’ve never even said the words, ‘I love you’ to him. Only in texts or cards, but not to him in person. It always seemed too bold a phrase. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, I’m not so sure.

What I AM sure of is that he has taught me many things:

• strive to be the best always; mediocrity is not a word in his dictionary
• no goal is too difficult to achieve
• there is no harm in dreaming
• trials and tribulations build your character like nothing else
• you can do a lot with a little

I know that I inherited his sense of adventure and restlessness; without which I wouldn’t have travelled the world and become a serial expat. I also love that he is the most generous person I know. He is generous to a fault; he would take the shirt off his back to help someone in need.

Happy Father’s Day Daddy!

Hanging on a strand

Cradling you on my lap.

I feel your warm breath on me.

My favourite smell.

These days are slipping away.

Your legs stretch far beyond what my lap can contain.

Your weight pulls my arms down.

I regret that I didn’t enjoy you more.

I worried too much about dirty dishes and scattered toys.

Soon I won’t be able to hold you like this.

You want to be a man like your daddy

but I want to hold onto this sweet moment forever.

I will let go in time.

I will have to.

Now I hold on to you

as you hang on a strand,

balancing on the edge of dependence.

Attachment

(Photo-credit: Andrew Prescod, Flickr)

I was reading a glossy magazine (something I don’t do very often) while waiting to get my eyebrows threaded (painful experience) at the beauty salon last week and I learnt something new. To be more precise, I learnt a new term for a  particular parenting approach. It was a revelatory moment for me because I had in fact used this style of parenting without knowing it. My son is four now so it’s been a while since he was a baby, but the article brought back a flood of memories.

The article was about a young celebrity mother who was sharing her bed with her baby daughter and feeding her on demand . This was decribed as, ‘the attachment method’, and the various benefits of this were divulged sprinkled with lots of glamourous photographs of the celebrity mum looking nothing like a woman who has just given birth. She lay in her plush bedroom cradling her new-born as if she had just stepped out of a five star beauty salon; perfect make-up, manicured nails, and not a line of worry or exhaustion visible on her face. I looked nothing like that when I gave birth.

I walked around in a zombie-like state for months after my son was born as a result of post-natal depression and a very difficult birth. I cried most of the time and only left our flat when I had to take my son for his weekly weigh-ins. I had one of those baby carriers and my son was attached to me all day and all night.  I did the housework, ate,  slept and went to the toilet with his body against mine. The midwives, health workers and family frowned in disapproval when I told them this.

My husband moved into the spare room while I perfected a breastfeeding posture which allowed my son to have milk whenever he pleased. He only had to part his lips and the milk would flow into his tiny mouth. The sense of attachment was so strong that for those occasions when I had to remove the baby carrier, I felt the absence of him so strongly like there was only half of me left.

So the moral of this tale is that for a long time I was made to feel bad for an approach that seemed so natural to me, an approach which is now being praised and glorified among celebrities.

Questions I can’t answer

Now that my son is four, he bombards me daily with questions. Here are three of my favourites…

The other morning while supervising him as he brushed his teeth he asked me,

‘Mummy how do snakes brush their teeth?’

On another occasion he asked,

‘How big are giraffe beds?’

This is one he asked really loudly in the hospital waiting room,

‘Mummy, why does that lady have a beard?’

These questions remind me of his innocence and I get to see the world from his eyes.

Help! My four year old might be digitally dependent!

If like me, the term, ‘digital dependency’ is  new to you,  you’d be even more surprised to learn that there are children being treated in digital detox centers for this modern addiction. Now the relationship between violent games and aggression has been well documented and is almost common knowledge, but four year olds needing therapy for electronic addiction?  That is deeply disturbing. How I stumbled upon all of this, is a personal story, which I will share with you here.

I have a four year old son whose recent and very sudden bad behaviour puzzled my husband and I.  I am not in any way suggesting that prior to this, his behaviour was faultless, but I had that univeral something-doesn’t- feel-right mummy moment. My son is a regular, active, rebellious and headstrong four year old. There are negotiations all day to get things done, like brushing teeth, getting ready for school in the morning, going to bed etc. He is also a very fussy eater so meal times are an ordeal in our house.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed that he has been extra crabby and generally screaming when he dosen’t get his way. My first thought was that he was feeling unwell. He did have dark circles around his little brown eyes. No it couldn’t be that, because there were none of the usual tell-tale symptoms of an ensuing sickness; no sign of a fever, lack of energy or runny nose. It had to be something else.

He was unusually angry especially in the afternoons. My second thought was that he might be tired from school and the extra-curricular activities he does. He has recently started playing mini-football and I attributed it to too much exertion for his slight frame.

Then two days ago my eyes fell upon the iPad in the living room. There it was, standing upright, all smug in the bright red rubbery childproof cover we had only recently bought for it.  It was in that moment that I noted my son had been using the iPad more than he has ever done since we bought it. Somewhere in my brain’s neural pathways, a connection was made. That was it. It had to be. It was the only thing that had changed since his behaviour had worsened!

My son had even started visiting the app store and coming to me and my husband to insert the password when it blocked his attempted purchases. Of course, we didn’t buy the apps he chose without montitoring whether they were appropriate for his age. For some reason his new interest in the iPad is insatiable. Maybe it’s because he understands more now that he is four. He is accumulating a selection of apps, some educational which teach numbers, letters and phonics in innovative ways and others which are accompanied by loud music and one game in particular which involves squishing unsuspecting insects as they walk across the screen. The bigger the insect and the messier the squish, the more points awarded. I know you are thinking we are terrible parents, but I don’t know how it made its way into his app collection but it’s there.

Everytime my son uses the iPad and it’s time to put it away and have a bath or eat dinner, he has a tremendous tantrum. He refuses to relinquish it. With all of this in the forefront of my mind, I went to the place we all go for information nowadays; the internet. There, I came across articles about the new digitally dependent preschool generation. According to the extensive research carried out by experts in the field such as Dr Craig Andersen from the department of psychology at Iowa State University, even the games without the bloody gore, the ones with cute cartoonish characters displaying covert violent behaviour are harmful for children. There is a direct link between these games and aggressive behaviour including tantrums and acting out. Thoughts of my son squishing the innocent bugs plagued my mind. What had I done and what would he become when he was older?

I am not one to believe all the scare-mongering you read in the papers about foods we eat and other aspects of modern lifestyles, but what I do know is that my son’s behaviour has deteriorated since he started using the iPad more. Even after his sessions, he seems restless, dissatisfied and unhappy.  Now we can’t afford to pay the astronomical digital detox fees; tens of thousands for a month long programme, so the gameplan in our house is to restrict his use immediately. After school and lunch, my son is allowed to use the iPad but I give him 30 minutes a day and I set a timer which beeps loudly to signal the end of his session.

We have already seen a reduction in the tantrums and it is not such a struggle to take the iPad away. We are hoping that with the timer, we can gently steer him away from all the electronic entertainment with its loud music and overstimulation to more physical activities. Not easy in this desert climate but it has to be done!

Confessions of a Working Mother

When my son was born, I was fortunate enough to take a whole year of maternity leave thanks to the generous maternity allowance in the UK. When it was time to go back to work, I admit that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him with strangers. After visiting local nurseries and feeling unimpressed by the level of care, I decided that I wouldn’t go back to work. It just didn’t feel right. I know that many women have no choice but to leave their children, and of course there are good nurseries but it was something I wasn’t able to do. We could afford to live on my husband’s salary, so the decision was made for me to stay home until my son was a little more independent and could at least articulate his feelings.

The two years at home were not as blissful as I first imagined. It was in fact a lot harder to be at home, I craved adult conversation and felt isolated and worn out. Although I know that my son benefitted in so many ways; emotional and otherwise from my time at home, I was more than ready to go back to work at the end of my two year sojourn. I started jobhunting and was offered a teaching position. Taking the job would mean moving the whole family to the Middle East. Thanks to my adventurous and supportive husband who encouraged me to accept the offer, we packed up our lives in London, exchanging our parenting roles and leaving behind the dampness for the scorching heat of the desert.

We had mixed feelings about the big move ranging from excitement to fear. My husband would be staying at home for the first time in his long working career and I would be working full-time.  Naturally, the transition was very difficult at first, my son lost his appetite, my husband was finding it difficult to adjust to his new role as house husband and I felt guilty all the time.

This guilt has never gone away. I have now realised that this guilt burden is part of being a working mother. I feel guilty when I come home feeling so tired that I have no energy to play with my son. The last thing I want to hear on those days is the dreaded refrain,

‘Mummy please play with me.’

I  feel guilty that I look forward to the time of day when he is fast asleep in his bed. I also feel guilty when I lose my temper in the morning rush to get ready for work and school. There are days when it’s a struggle to get the teeth brushing, porridge eating and lunch making done without tantrums and yelling. I arrive at work worn out and yes you guessed it reader guilty! There are times when I can’t take the morning or afternoon off for school events and my husband attends without me. There are even harder times when he is ill and I have to go in to work choking back tears because I know that he needs his mummy at home. Guilt, endless guilt!

I have accepted that the guilt will always be there because our modern society judges women harshly and demands  superheroes who bake perfect cakes, have splendid careers, spotless homes and angelic children. I have none of the above. But I do have a happy four year old who has an incredible bond with his stay-at- home- dad. So much so that sometimes he calls out for his daddy rather than his mummy. That he is happy and has two active parents in his life is a blessing and happiness in itself, guilty or not.

Dinosaurs and Cotton Candy

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My son’s dinosaur hunting hat

Last week my son came home from school with a dinosaur hunting hat and an invitation to a birthday party. The theme of the party was Jurassic park. There would be a dinosaur egg hunting competition (hence the need for the hat). My son was thrilled, he adores dinosaurs and as little as he is,  knows his triceratops from his tyrannosaurus. We have dinosaurs lurking in all the rooms of our house.

On the back of the invitation, there was a map showing directions to a palace. Yes, you read right, A PALACE.

The birthday boy was a VILP;  a very important little person and in the same school as my son. We live in a small city with few schools so this is a likely situation.

In the run up to the party our home was filled with excitement and commotion,  our conversations were about palaces, birthdays and dinosaurs. ‘What would we buy as a gift, he probably already had every toy there is to have?’

‘Mummy will there be REAL dinosaurs?’

‘And dinosaur bones?

‘Dinosaur bones are called fossils sweetie,’

‘What’s a palace, daddy?’

The afternoon of the party finally arrived, much to my son’s relief. Each day is as long as a lifetime for a little boy waiting to go on a dinosaur hunt.

We arrived at the palace in good time. There were a few families there already and the party organisers were hurriedly putting the finishing touches to Jurassic park in the luscious palace gardens. I looked around self-consciously half expecting to see celebrities and paparazzi milling around. No, only a few mums supervising their children on the bouncy castle in the middle of the park.

‘Where are the REAL dinosaurs mummy?’ asked my son, clearly disappointed by the dinosaur models and the dinosaur fossils made of  sponge.

I prepared myself mentally for a colossal tantrum, but thankfully he was quickly distracted by the popcorn and candyfloss machines that were being carried out of the catering truck.

‘CandyFloss!”

‘Is this Funcity mummy?’ he asked much later, his hands and mouth sticky from all the candyfloss he was gulping down. Yes, it was a kind of funcity, Disneyland even.  It reminded me of the magical lands in the Enid Blyton books I devoured as a child. There were bouncy castles, clowns, dinosaur photo booths, amusement rides, activity centres, balloons of every size and shape and chameleons in cages. Yes chameleons! They were the closest to REAL dinosaurs we got that day.

‘There’s not enough space in the cage for the baby dinosaur,’ my son observed sadly as he watched the chameleons desperately trying to push their way out of the wire cages.

‘They’re not dinosaurs, they are lizards that change colour,’ responded the chameleon keeper. And with that, my son was no longer concerned about the lack of space. He returned to his search for the REAL dinosaurs.

Then,.. enter the professional dancers and a Gangnum style dance ensued which the children took part in.  After the dance session, the children were escorted to the candy area. Adults and children alike were encouraged to indulge in their deepest sugar fantasies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much candy in one place, other than maybe a Candylicious store! It was a sugar lovers veritable heaven! There were dino eggs, chocolate rocks, twizzlers and  sour cola pops, jelly beans and sweets I don’t know the names of.  Had we landed in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory?

There was my son arm deep in a tall glass jar full of liqourice twirls, his lips caked with sugar grains, his tongue stained green  and his eyes wide with delight (It took us about two hours to settle him that night as a result of  all the sugar consumption).

Two and a half hours after we arrived, the palace servers started bringing out trays laden with more food and that really was our cue to leave. We thanked our hosts and  left the part with dinosaurs toys; both the soft and hard variety, dinosaur cupcakes and bags of candy precariously balanced in our hands.

When we arrived home my son finally felt safe enough to release his afternoon-long frustration ( a lethal combination of too much sugar,excitement, exhaustion and of course the lack of REAL dinosaurs) and had a full blown tantrum.

‘But mummy there were no REAL dinosaurs!’ he cried. Thankfully, he was pacified by a warm bath and lots of cuddles.

Just as an aside here, the word for a REAL dinosaur is of Greek origin and means ‘terrible lizard’; ‘deinos’ meaning terrible and ‘sauros’ lizard (www.digonsite.com).

Our little ‘deinos’ only slept at 9.30pm, two hours after his usual bedtime. My real worry now is that because he hasn’t been to many birthday parties, he might expect all of them to be that extravagant!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)