The Changing Face of Childrens Toys

It’s very easy to overlook those slow changes that occur throughout your life. Then suddenly something happens to throw them into stark relief.

A classic example of this was the TV drama “Life on Mars”, which brought back to life those decades that you had somehow managed to muddle through without constant access to a mobile phone. The days when you left your home and, once out of ear shot, became ‘uncontactable’. And yet we still managed to function. We even managed to meet people! How did we do it? I seriously can't remember and I certainly don't know how I'd manage today.

Another example of this phenomenon was this Christmas and birthday with Marty. 

He’s now two and even though he’d be just as happy with an empty cardboard box we felt obliged to fill said boxes with gifts. When I was two this would have meant a cowboy hat, a little holster, possibly a loud checked top with leather tassels and definitely a very shiny handgun. The kid down the street would then acquire an American Indian outfit and we would happily spend the summer months acting out those genocidal events of yesteryear.

Now I must admit that the idea of giving Marty a fake gun doesn’t sit very well with me these days but I had absolutely no problems with it whatsoever when I was a kid. All the TV shows seemed to be Westerns and it made perfect sense to a kid of my age that you should spend the day pretending to ride around on a horse shooting the indigenous folk - who would then wholly overreact by shooting back.

So I was not expecting Leanne to arrive back from the shops with a six-shooter. However, what I also wasn’t expecting was the tiny shopping trolley, the baby ‘Henry’ vacuum cleaner and the little plastic cooker, complete with pans, and polyethylene fried egg and bacon set!

Seriously! This is what we bought him... Actually, no, this is what my wife bought him! AND no one else blinked an eye! I was standing there a gasp, as everyone else crooned over how cute he looked dragging his little vacuum cleaner around the house, shouting “Oover! Oover! Did it”

I attempted to explain to my wife that these all seemed to be slightly effeminate toys and that maybe a Scaletrics would be a good idea, or failing that a train set , which I could no doubt look after for him until he had ‘come-of-age’. From the look she gave me I might as well have been talking to her in Swahili.

Apparently he loved playing with the house Hoover so – ergo - a toy Hoover was the perfect present. I pointed out to her that he also loved playing with his willy, so how come she hadn’t bought him a plastic one of them? But it was all to no avail.

That said, yes he does seem to enjoy dragging a plastic Hoover around the house and, yes, he loves playing with his plastic ‘Eggy’, he even enjoys pushing his little trolly around the house. I’m just hoping he’ll grow out of it, but apparently that’s a sign of my age.

Amazing things toddlers can't do.

The ancient and venerable art of walking

The amount a child picks up in their first few years is frankly astonishing, but what they completely fail to get the hang of is also pretty amazing.

Bear in mind that when I say ‘amazing’ I’m talking as a fairly uninformed parent. I dare say the experts are wholly unmoved by many of the talents displayed by the under two’s but I, at least, find them astonishing. 

Most of this astonishment probably derives from the fact that until I actually became a parent I didn’t really give kids much thought, to me a baby was just a smaller version of Justin Beiber; I’d heard of them, from what I could gather they were fairly popular, but I had no real interest in them and, to be perfectly honest, I actually found them a little bit irritating. I can’t say my opinion of Justin has changed over the last few years but when it comes to kids I can now see what all the fuss was about.

As a result of this relative indifference, when Marty was born I didn’t have much of a clue what to expect. A quick once over revealed that his initial talents were limited to farting, burping and opening and closing his eyes. So he was already over qualified for a career in politics but was going to have to start climbing a pretty steep learning curve if he ever wished to venture away from Westminster.

Learning to walk and run is probably his most notable achievement to date. As someone who generally took bipedalism for granted I had expected Marty to pick this up pretty quickly but, when you think about it, spending your life balanced on just two feet is really quite an achievement. At the grand old age of two Marty can now race around the house like a demon, yet he will still collide with a door, a wall or the floor at least three times a day. So, whilst you could call it ‘running’ you could also call it ‘a prolonged and inevitable fall’ and still be spot on for accuracy - I fear that it’s no coincidence that he can say the word ‘bruise’.

More startling still, at least to me, is his imagination. I don’t know why but I assumed that abstract thought and rampant imagination would be a long time coming, yet, at the age of about 15 months, he suddenly started racing potato wedges around the plate, whilst murmuring ‘Brum, Brum.’

When he realised how gobsmacked I was by this he then started waving runner beans above his head and screaming ‘Bane!’ – which, in toddler speak, is a plane. I have no idea if this makes him a genius, a normal child, or a potential train spotter but I for one am impressed.

So now we’ve ‘bigged’ him up let’s have a look at what he can’t do and the most amazing one of these is his complete and utter inability to blow his own nose! I mean, come on! How difficult can it be?

It actually took him the best part of 18 months to learn to blow! He was trying from the age of about 8 months but not a lot was happening. Even by 18 months he couldn’t have blown the skin off a rice pudding if his very life had depended upon it. By his second birthday he had finally summoned enough wind to blow out his birthday candles but he hasn’t even begun to speculate upon the merest possibility of nose-blowing and all it entails.

I still can’t understand what on earth he finds so difficult about something so mundane but apparently he’s not alone, in fact all children take an age to learn to blow and even longer to learn to apply the art to their nose. I had always assumed that walking the streets with green slime running down your face was just something kids did for effect but it turns out that they have little choice in the matter as wiping their nose also seems to take an age to fathom.

I came across another surprise recently; apparently babies can’t jump! They start going through all the motions of jumping at a very early age but they generally remain stubbornly affixed to terra firma until they approach their second birthday. The reason this was such a surprise to me is that Marty has been leaping into the air for as long as he’s been able to walk, in fact it’s hard to keep him on the ground. 

There, I knew he was a genius!

Mortality

The way we were

One of the more disconcerting aspects of parenthood is a sudden sense of mortality. Being 48 when my first child was born hasn’t helped this feeling but I think I’d have suffered from it regardless because the main causes seem to be a sudden interest in the future and the general paranoia of being a parent.

I have lived the vast majority of my life from day to day; I have rarely planned for the weekend, barely ever planned for a holiday and always assumed that those people who said the best bit about a holiday was the planning and the getting there were spending a fortnight in Skegness.

All of a sudden this changes. Two years ago we had this largely immobile little bundle of joy and before you know it he’s racing around the house and has become a slightly larger bundle of joy and snot – he has a cold at the moment. Every day he changes and every day his future looms into my head; what will it be like taking him to school? When can we go on our first fossil collecting hunt? What will they be calling ‘O’ levels by the time he gets around to them? When will he enter his first Olympics and what will he win? What position will he play for Liverpool FC?

And at the end of all these future plans is the sudden internal exclamation “I’ll be how old??? Bloody Hell!”

On the bright side, at least I don’t have to fear for my son. I do of course but that’s just normal parental paranoia. No, the reality is that in this day and age - and living here in the West - the chances of my son not making it to his 21^st birthday is reassuringly remote.

Of course this is a recent event. You often hear people say “No one should have to suffer the death of a child” completely forgetting that that used to be the norm, and still is in many areas of the world. Victorians didn’t have huge families for the hell of it, they had huge families because only a few of those children would make it into adult hood. In the Middle Ages the average life expectancy was 35, this wasn’t because adults died early. No, the average adult lived till about 70, not much different from today, but the chances of a child making it to 10 was remote and the chances of them then getting through to 20 wasn’t a whole lot better.

Bizarrely enough, the fact that our children are now astonishingly safe from death and disease doesn’t seem to have filtered through to most parents, who still seem to regard their children as fatal accidents just waiting to happen. Sadly, I am a member of this paranoid fraternity. Given a chance I would happily wrap the house in bubble wrap - although, on further reflection, it might be easier to leave the house and apply the bubble wrap to Marty. I still can’t watch him walk down the stairs, although this has much to do with Marty playing to the audience and stopping half way down for an impromptu bounce if he thinks anyone is watching him.

I just hope I don’t turn into one of those parents who can’t let their children out of their sight for a moment. The sort who believes the world is full of child molesting perverts who can only be thwarted by denying their child the right to play.

I guess it’s a tough call though, not made any easier by a self righteous media who take great delight in scaring the pants out of the general population, and parents in particular. 

The Terrible Two's

Light blue touch paper and step well back.

“The terrible two’s” is a bit of a misnomer but, to be fair, the more accurate “The Terrible 18 months until God knows when” is nowhere near as catchy.

Sadly, whilst Marty might have been a little slow learning to crawl and walk, he was right there on the button when it came to the terrible two’s. I don’t know how he learnt it but as he turned 18 months he suddenly realised a wonderful truth: “If I cry, they will come!”, followed by “If I cry really hard I may even get my own way.. well maybe not but it’s worth trying anyway.” By all accounts they can keep this up for quite a number of years in fact, if the House of Commons is anything to go by, some can keep it up well into their dotage.

Apparently this has nothing to do with your child suddenly deciding to become a truculent little bugger because he or she thinks it will wind you up - although it’s hard not to come to that conclusion sometimes - but everything to do with their brain developing to a stage where an idea of ‘self’ emerges. Until that stage a baby couldn’t readily discern between themselves and their surroundings; they ask their arm to move and it moves, they ask their parents to move and they move, they ask the sky to move and the clouds pass by. As a result they assume they are all the same; they are at one with the world and the world is at one with them. Alas, this illusion only persists if you resort to class A drugs, for the rest of us you have to give up on this conclusion and come to an idea of ‘self’.

Of course there is a lot to be said for a sense of self but it does first insist on you giving up control of a lot of things. Marty is slowly learning this with planes; it doesn’t matter how much he screams and cries, planes only show up in the skies above Lincolnshire as and when they want to. Things are proving less straightforward with his parents.

The problem is that he’s being forced to give up on the idea of being able to control everything in life and as a result he’s really fighting to control something. The latest incarnation of this frustration is his refusal to walk anywhere if you are holding on to his reins.

If I’m in the right mood, i.e. it’s not 4am, I find these little temper tantrums quite amusing, although Marty is still only dallying with tantrums in that he is yet to throw himself to the floor of the local supermarket and scream and shout whilst pounding the floor with his arms and legs. I dare say this will happen in the next week or so and I’ll have to smile that dangerous smile at the passing shoppers as they give that look that says “Can’t you control your kid?” To which the answer is of course is “Yes. So one more word and I’ll let him loose on you!”

Of course there are many upsides to this stage in your child’s life in that both of you are going to improve your negotiating skills enormously, which is really what it’s all about; Marty wants total control, I’m happy to give him some - This article at safekids.co.uk covers it all quite nicely.

On a slightly different point I read a while back that at the age of two a child finally becomes more intelligent than a dog. I have a few issues with this statement but the biggest one is that the author cannot ever have met my dog – we have moss growing in the garden that could run intellectual rings around our dog, and trust me, it’s not even smart moss!

The three ages of childhood

What?

I have come to the conclusion that there are three ages of childhood and that Marty is firmly in the first epoch, the age of “What?”

For the last 6 months our breakfast routine has gone pretty much like this:

Comfortably sat in his highchair, Marty surveys the morning’s breakfast arrangements. He now picks up his spoon, waves it under my nose and asks, “what?”

“It’s a spoon.” 

He digests this for a few seconds then dips it into his porridge. “What?”

“Porridge” 

He looks at me as if he’s not sure I can be entirely trusted and then, as if to test me, points at his milk. “What?”

“It’s milk!”

Patently unconvinced that I know what I’m talking about – and who can blame him for that -  he now turns to his mother and repeats the entire exercise. This completed, he takes a few moments to ponder all this new and fascinating information. Then he sits back, pokes his porridge, sips his milk, examines his spoon... and it all starts again.

I’ve got to admit that in terms of wild excitement it’s right up there with drying paint but for some reason Marty himself finds it all totally fascinating.

It’s as if he’s thinking “But I’ve asked 15 times now and they STILL say it’s a spoon! A Spoon! Who would have thought? Wow!”

This routine continues for pretty much the entire day with breaks only for pooing and sleeping and the occasional wild stabbing at the sky and the cry of “Bane! Bane!” – which, in case you were wondering, is an aluminium cylinder with wings that is frequently found traversing the skies of the East Midlands.

I mentioned to a mate that I found all this “What, what, what?” a tad tedious and he pointed out that this stage will soon develop into the second golden age of childhood, the infamous age of “Why?”

By all accounts the age of “Why?” can last for years and years and leave a parent yearning for the halcyon days of “What?” or even for those far distant days of yore when it was just mummy, daddy and a bottle of wine.

I must admit that I'm actually looking forward to Marty asking “why?” all the time and I’m determined to at least attempt accurate and reasoned replies. Ok, in reality these good intentions will probably not even make it through the first weekend and I’ll no doubt be buying earplugs en masse before the month is out, but for at least a short time Marty will gain some erratic, and no doubt erroneous, wisdom.

I have been told that after four or five years the age of “why” gives way to a period of relative peace, until the teens arrive and the final age of childhood begins; the age of ‘Whatever!”

Strictly speaking this epoch is not just about ‘whatever’. The word ‘Urr!’ ,for example, is a popular means of expression, as is the age old cry of “I hate youuuuu!”

I can see why it all happens like this though. The age of ‘what?’ helps the child develop his language skills, the age of ‘why?’ helps develop their mind and the age of ‘whatever’ helps fray the bonds of parental love to such an extent that your child packing his bags and leaving the family home for good is now less of a nightmare and more a cause for wild celebration.

Parenthood: The things they never told you!

As a new parent there are many things you may run out of from time to time - sleep, nappies and patience, to name but a few - but the one thing I can guarantee that you’ll never run short of is advice.

From the moment you declare to the world that a baby is on the way – and when to tell people that is often the first bit of advice you’ll get – everyone and his mate will be queuing up to offer words of wisdom.

Of course this isn’t a bad thing. Yes, 90% of the advice can be filed away under the heading “Statements of the bleeding obvious”, much can be politely ignored and some is just downright batty but in the mix are some true gems that make you feel grateful for having a close family and fine friends.

One thing I’ve noticed though is just how much of this advice seems to be geared towards making parenthood convenient. A classic example is:

“Oh don’t sleep with your baby! They’ll want you to always sleep with them!”

Of course they will, after all it’s very comforting to all concerned and is what we’d all be doing if we were living a more natural life. After all, this idea of everyone sleeping in separate rooms is astonishingly recent and, whilst having your own space is all very nice, the first thing most of us do when we leave home is to hunt down someone willing to share a bed with us.

Attachment Parenting is the ‘new thing’ to help address this slightly perverse view of baby rearing and, like most new ideas, is just taking us back to how we used to behave before work, 60’s pseudo science and Victorian morality arrived to fuck things up.

I can’t say we’ve fully embraced attachment parenting. Not because I don’t agree with it but because I’m not sure my back would be up to the job... although the fact that it seems to have more than a hint of the bobble hat brigade about it is also a bit off putting – why is it that so many people with good ideas feel the need to spoil it all by wearing daft head gear and drinking Yak’s milk?

Anyway, this blog wasn’t supposed to be about the advice you get, it was supposed to cover the advice that doesn’t rear its head above the carry cot.

So far I have come across two very important points that I wish I’d known about before Marty arrived.

The first is floorboards! Do yours creak? If so, sort them out before baby arrives, especially those in the proposed nursery. I singularly failed to do this and I very much regret that fact. Ours creak like crazy things and as a result getting Marty to sleep and then getting out of the bedroom afterwards is like a scene out of an Indiana Jones film. If the floor creaks he’s going to wake up again so I have to mark my start position, take 4 paces to the left, 3 steps forward, two to the right.... I have yet to be chased out of the room by an enormous boulder but I have also yet to get out of the room first time without Marty waking up.

Another thing that no one mentioned was glasses. Do you wear them? Did you invest in gloriously expensive ones? Oh dear!

Here is a simple test to see if your glasses are suitable for parenthood. Pick them up in both hands by the bits that go over your ears. Now, whilst holding on tight, stretch your arms out wide. Now throw the glasses on the floor and giggle in delight. Now pick them up in your fist and hurl them across the room whilst shouting ‘Daggies!’. Repeat until the guy in the opticians notices what you’re doing.

I only need glasses for reading so I have taken to buying a box of them every few months from Poundland. In our house they have the life expectancy of an asthmatic Mayfly but they are wondrously cheap and provide Marty with some exercise.

Words

In conference

By all accounts words didn’t come easy to F.R. David. Sadly, this didn’t stop him writing one of the most annoying pop songs of the ‘80’s, a song which pops into my head every time someone mentions ‘words’... which at the moment is surprisingly often as words are currently dominating Marty’s life!

The rate at which his vocabulary is growing is frankly astonishing. Every day he seems to add at least three or four more words to his repertoire. I’ll grant you that they’re not the largest of words - ‘repertoire’ doesn’t feature for a starters - but these days virtually everything you say around him comes back seconds later at a higher pitch.

Of course his enunciation still leaves something to be desired and it does take a degree of imagination to translate his words - which is often helped by the fact that he’s stabbing a finger at whatever he’s talking about. The biggest barrier to translation is that he still struggles with certain letters of the alphabet, mainly the letter ‘P’. So we have ‘Tigger’, his little pink mate ‘Tiglet’ and their bear buddy who, according to Marty, is called ‘Mmmn’. Meanwhile, the word ‘Bear’ can be either a soft fruit or an animal that defecates in dense foliage – allegedly – and the sky above Lincolnshire is full of ‘banes’.

The oddest of all though is his word for Snowman, which is something along the lines of ‘Bow-bar”. Go figure!

As you might have gathered I’m rather proud of all this so it was with some dread that we all went to a kiddies birthday party attended by, amongst others, his nemesis. This is a lovely little girl who is about 5 months younger than Marty and is light years ahead of him; when he could barely sit up she was crawling, when Marty had learnt to crawl, she was walking, when Marty was walking, she was doing hand stands in the corner of the room....

So I entered the party fully expecting Marty to be running around the room, stabbing at the wallpaper and screaming ‘Tiglet’ whilst this young lady sat down at her high chair, turned to her mother and said “Mother dearest, could you possibly pass me some cutlery, I have an urge to dissect this pomegranate.”

But not a bit of it! If anything Marty has a better vocab! I was well impressed.

There is a downside to all this though, words after all have power. Marty should by now be fast asleep but as I write I can hear a tiny, mournful voice echoing from his room, “Tigger? w'are you? Daggy? w'are you?” The temptation to race into his room and cuddle him is almost overwhelming, but I suspect the clever little bugger knows that J