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

Moving in to his own room

Marty's Nursery Mural

When Leanne was 6 months pregnant she suggested that I start the process of transforming the spare room into a nursery for our forthcoming baby. Maths has never been my strong point but even I could figure out that we had at least 3 months to sort this out. We also didn’t know if we were going to be blessed with a boy or a girl, an essential piece of information when it comes to decorating themes. Reluctantly Leanne relented and we decided to wait until the baby had arrived, after all it was only going to take a couple of days, maybe a week at most, to convert the bedroom.

Marty duly arrived and settled into our bedroom. This was fine as he took up little space and we all felt happier sleeping close together. Alas, there was a rather large fly in our otherwise blissful family ointment, a fly that started buzzing annoyingly a few days after Marty moved in. And it was this; whilst Marty was a picture of happiness and delight during the day he cried a little a night, then he cried a little more, then he started to bawl, then scream and then, before you knew it, morning arrived.

I valiantly coped with this by moving to the spare room.

This was of course the ideal opportunity to start decorating the room and moving Marty in, and I would have done this it wasn’t for my wife and what, during my days in I.T., used to be referred to a ‘scope spread’. It turned out that whilst a nursery was good, a new downstairs bathroom and shower would be great... and whilst I’m at it why not insulate and lay a wooden floor in the utility room? And, come to think of it, if I’m laying a wooden floor in that room why not re sand and varnish the floors throughout the house? And wouldn’t it be nice if the conservatory had some radiators.... As if this wasn’t bad enough I’d also told Haynes Publishing that I’d write a manual for them! Oh yes, and I had to go to work!

To cut a long story short, this weekend I finished the mural on his wall - which on reflection was probably a tad ambitious bearing in mind I hadn’t painted in 10 years and had never attempted ‘art’ with vinyl matt emulsion before. With that done it was just a matter of plumping up the pillows in his cot, arranging Tigger and his soft, cuddly, minions on the floor and inviting Marty in to cut the ribbon whilst daddy drank the champagne.

And so yesterday was his first night in his own room! Much to my surprise he seems to have taken to the idea straight away, which would suggest that he was finding us as hard to sleep with as we were finding him. We’ve put in a night light and a small radio, set very quietly to classic FM, and the combination seems to lull him quietly to sleep with little or no bother at all.

So what’s the most surprising thing about all this? Well Marty is still only 21 months old. At one point I thought that he’d have buggered off to university before I’d finished his nursery

Carrying baby

We all need a papoose in life!

One of the most troublesome aspects of young children is their inability to do much in the way of moving. Yes, they might be able to crawl a bit, they may even be able to walk a little but, for the first few years at least, you can’t really go anywhere and expect them to keep up. 

And so we bought a push chair for young Marty, then we bought another, and then another. I questioned my wife as to why we only seemed to have one child yet owned a pram for every day of the week, and the answer turned out to be rather long and tortuous.

Firstly we had a pram that allowed Marty to lie down or sit up as the feeling took him. This wonder pram also came with three huge wheels which allowed us to go ‘off-road’ during the morning walks with the dog. Sadly, it was also just a little too big to fit into the car boot and was a bit of a nightmare to dismantle. So we bought a lighter, smaller, easier to pack away pram for shopping trips and general wanderings around the town.

This was all well and good but then spring arrived and car-boot sale season began. Within weeks we had filled the house with push chairs of every description, which were all apparently ‘bargains’ and offered something unique in the way of perambulation. Sadly, they all failed on one point. My main hobby is collecting wild mushrooms for which wandering woods is pretty much d’rigour and whilst we had a variety of prams that could handle muddy footpaths none of them were truly ‘off-road’. How were we going to go on a family mushroom hunt?

First off we tried one of those baby rucksacks. You know the kind, look just like an ordinary rucksack but instead of filling it with sandwiches and sleeping bags you can stuff a baby inside instead. They looked kind of cute but they put a hell of a strain on the old back. The problem was that Marty could lean back in it and, using the general laws of leverage, double his weight as and when the feeling took him. They were fine for about 10 minutes but any longer was agony.

So we tried a baby sling, or papoose. Our one was basically an enormous long sheet of soft, slightly elasticated, material that you wrapped around you. Initially it took me the best part of half an hour to wrap this thing around me and you could generally bet that within minutes Marty would be swaying round at about knee level whilst hanging on for dear life. 

This was all marvellous for comic effect and photo opportunities but next to useless as a form of transport. Fortunately, once you got the hang of them they proved to be brilliant.

Because they hold the baby very close to your body the weight is much easier to handle, there’re no hard bits to poke and prod you and they keep both you and baby snug and warm, in fact you effectively wander around in a permanent hug, which is all rather nice.

The only downside is that once Marty got taller I couldn’t put him in it in front of me as his head kept hitting my chin. You can arrange them so the kid is wrapped around your back but I needed at least one person to help me get him in and several to help me get him out. I dare say some people can manage it a bit more elegantly but I am not one of these elite few.

So for a while we were a bit buggered and me and the dog had to wander the woods alone. Then Leanne found a neat little thing on Ebay – an online car boot sale. It was a rucksack that you could put your child in but it was also a push chair! This sounded brilliant! We could heave Marty around on my back when we were hacking our way through the undergrowth and then push him along once we reached a footpath.

What we actually got was a “Mothercare Back Pack Carrier and Stroller”. Sadly they don’t seem to do them now but you can still find them on-line. Of course the problem with things that attempt two functions is that they tend to not be much good at either but I think this has managed quite well, although it’s a much better as a rucksack than it is as a pram - the wheels are too small, the whole thing tends to be a little too low to the ground and you tend to get a muddy bum if you convert a few times during wet weather.

On the plus side it’s very easy to convert from one to the other, possibly because when it’s a rucksack it looks as if you’re carrying a push chair on your back and when it’s a push chair it looks as if you’re wheeling along a rucksack.

Death Wish

incognito

It’s an astonishing fact that there are now about seven billion people inhabiting this planet. That’s seven thousand million of us! And what’s the most amazing thing about this – other than that there are an awful lot of people having an awful lot of sex? Well, it’s that every single, solitary, one of those seven billion people had, from the age of next to nothing until at least 4, an uncontrollable urge to try to kill themselves! How on earth did we reach seven billion when every single kid on the planet seems to have been born with a death wish? 

Take young Marty as an example. In the early days, when an inability to move much tended to cramp his style, he would contentedly dice with death with mundane acts such as choking on his own vomit or trying to eat his pillow. However, once he’d learnt to move, a world of opportunities for an early demise where his to grab... or suck, or poke, or eat.

Put him in a room filled with soft, cuddly, perfectly safe toys and he would, within minutes, be throwing Tigger and his sidekicks aside and making a bee-line for the electrical socket in the corner of the room where, if left to his own devices, he would spend the morning trying to get the cover off so he could electrocute himself in spectacular fashion.

From the very moment he learnt to walk it became clear that his sole aim was to go as fast as he possibly could. This achieved, stage two was to go as fast as he possibly could into wholly immovable objects. Not a week has gone by where he has not been sporting at least one enormous bruise.

We recently returned from our summer holiday – We went to Wales so treat the word ‘summer’ in its loosest possible sense. On the very first day Marty managed to almost knock himself out by running head long into the dining table, a collision that resulted in him sporting an enormous black eye for the whole of the holiday.

Not content with concussion he diligently went to work on the gas fire – which, despite being a ‘family’ caravan home, didn’t actually have a fire guard. We spent hours building elaborate barricades around the fire and Marty spent hours trying to thwart our defences. On the last day of our stay, whilst his parents were busy packing everything into the car, he finally broke through and achieved his holiday goal – he got burnt!

As I write I can hear the battle going on between him and his mum; she wants to cook dinner, he wants to climb into the oven! I tell you now, if we all followed young Marty’s guide to health and safety there should be no more than about 20 of us on this planet... and 9 of those would be in hospital at any one time.

Going Gooey

I always expected Marty to change - after all, a complete failure to grow-up and develop would have condemned the poor boy to a career in politics. What has been a surprise though have been the changes in me.

Of course you’re told by everyone who’s ever had a kid that “You'll change” but they usually mean the trivial things like looking as if you've had a good eight hours sleep, or possessing the ability to leave your home in under an hour, or popping out to the pub for a beer, or basically doing anything on an impulse. I’ll grant you that at 4 in the morning ‘sleep’ doesn’t feel like a trivial matter but, when you think about it, feeling knackered is hardly the stuff of philosophers and poets.

No, what I’ve noticed are things like going “Ah!” when I hold up my boys tiny little coat, or suddenly finding myself smiling in that vacant parental fashion when I see other young children. In other words, I have gone surprisingly - and slightly worryingly - gooey.

I hadn’t really realised this until I was actually putting some of Marty’s clothes into his draw and finding that I couldn’t even get my hand down the leg of a pair of his trousers to turn them right-side out. I knew he was vertically challenged but I hadn’t realised just how astonishingly small he was. It was at that point that I actually heard myself saying “Arh! He’s soo cute!”... I was shocked I can tell you!

Then I thought about it. Over the last year or so I’ve found myself feeling tearful listening to things on the news that involved small children and getting positively lachrymous at the sort of films I used to scoff at.

Before Marty arrived I’d always regarded small children with supreme indifference or, if that wasn’t possible, then with extreme reluctance. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them it was just that, at best, I couldn’t see much point in them and at worse they were rather annoying, irrational and noisy little things that I just didn’t understand. These days I seem to find all little kids delightful. I dare say I’ll discover some exceptions to this new rule but so far all kids suddenly seem to be cute.

I suspect part of this new found gooeyness is because Marty is at a perfect age; he’s learning to talk but hasn’t learnt to answer back, he knows how to cry but has yet to learn the full on tantrum. Even his walk is part locomotion and part comedy routine, in other words he’s just plain gorgeous at the moment.

I have a horrible feeling that this will all change in the coming months – he’s already using the cry to get an awful lot of what he wants and, if he’s anything like his dad, he’ll soon have an answer for absolutely bloody everything... so I may soon be looking at all children with a feeling of dread before the years out.