Smart Smartie

Asher and I went to Wizzy World again today, to meet some Mothers' Group friends we haven't seen for a while. Last time we went was really quiet and Asher and Audrey pottered around by themselves most of the time. At one point they had been quiet for a while and when I found them Asher was managing to sneak Smarties out of the lolly machine by the (small) handful. I'm not quite sure how he managed it but he seemed to be flicking the 'release' handle with persistence and a certain gentleness. He was getting so many out that he had a crowd of three or four kids around him enjoying the bounty. To stop Asher eating nothing but Smarties for the day I spoilt the fun by telling the staff who promptly taped up the offending part of the lolly machine.

When we went today it wasn't long before he had disappeared over to the lolly machine again. The middle hopper, which held the Smarties last time, was empty but Asher there were Smarties in another hopper. Asher twiddled and flicked enough to get a few of the lollies out, but since they weren't scattered all over the floor being gathered up by eager children I didn't really worry. I convinced him to come play somewhere else for a while, but periodically he would wander back for another Smartie or two periodically. Now wonder he thinks it's the most fun place in the world!

In the interests of not letting this blog die of neglect...

...I'm just going to mention how much I hate school holidays! I always thought that school holidays only affected parents of school aged children (except for the decrease in traffic and lack of obnoxious high schoolers on public transport int he afternoons) but the affects seem to be much more far reaching than that. Most of the playgroups seem to shut down during school holidays, so the normal pattern of our week is interrupted. The zoo, the indoor playcentres and other fun places to take little kids are really busy and unpleasant because Asher and his little friends practically get trampled by the 'big kids' who are on holidays from their preschools and kindergartens.

We still go to the park or for a coffee in the early mornings (we often leave home at the same time as Sanjay to minimise the opportunity for tantrums) and we still meet up with the baby club gang on Thursdays but we miss our favourite Tuesday afternoon TAFE playgroup.

At least this holiday is only two weeks, and hopefully Clare will come and hang out with us a bit while she doesn't have classes. I wonder what other parents of toddlers think of school holidays? What are the favourite distractions for really little kids that don't involve extra crowds?

Toddlerdom development update

Asher is learning and growing every day, and it still amazes me. His walking, in the space of a week, has gone from a few tentative steps most days to suddenly wanting to walk everywhere. Almost whenever he wants to go somewhere no he takes off walking and then after 1 or 5 steps he either reaches his goal or falls to the floor and crawls. My friend K said her daughter A used to do the opposite - stand looking at her objective and calculating whether it would be easier and faster to walk or crawl.

His language development has also come along in the last two weeks. He understands quite a lot of what we say. He finds my nose when requested, can generally point to his ball or his truck (and in fact the other day at the park I wanted to pack up and started muttering "where's your green ball Asher" and he pointed it out to me). He has a sign for "more" which he uses whenever he's hungry (he thinks it means "Food! Now!") and requests various songs by using their actions. He's also just taken to using the imperial point and saying "dat!" and I try to name the things he points at for him. I think he's really thrilled about being able to communicate with us.

He's also obsessed by technology - particularly the phone (which he calls 'Gah!' - I thinks it's from me walking into the room saying "Gah! He's got my phone again"). He holds the phone up to his ear and makes a word that liberally interpreted could be understood as hello. He will also feel around on the table above his head to find the computer mouse and the other day he pushed his little chair over to the table to get at both my phone and the mouse. It was so cute I had to photograph it:


Now he's awake, so I have to turn the moniter off before Sanjay gets him out of bed (he's pretty much transitioned to one sleep per day) but despite how relentless his little demands are, I just love him!

so..... tired.....

Ok, so I've decided that I'm not that keen on this Sanjay-less existance! I've been managing ok, but today I'm just exhausted and vague (I went out today and forgot to wear shoes!) so I'll keep this short.

Today, being Thursday we had baby club and V very kindly offered up her lovely home and a stack of canvasses for 'art-jam' for the babies. There was some limited finger painting, plenty of foot prints and a fair amount of mess but it was all terrific fun. I hope Sanjay doesn't read this because it will be giving away what his birthday present is - I think I'm pretty safe!

Ok, it's 9pm and I'm going to creep off to bed pretty soon - I'm really ready for Sanjay to come home now!

Mothering as work

I was feeling a bit flat about the day as I got dressed this morning. I don't have anything scheduled so it's just going to be me and the boy and that can get really really intense and it often doesn't bring out the best in me. I was mentally going through what needs to be done in the next two weeks and realized my New Parents' Group (aka mother's group, aka baby club) is one of the rocks around which the rest of my life eddies and flows. I do everything in my power to ensure I don't miss Thursday baby club, which is really weird, because generally I dread social situations like that. I don't like all the mothers in my group yet I'm scared of not fitting in and being liked by the group, I'm bothered about the reputation mother's groups have for being focused on most boring minutiae of childrearing and for sly competitiveness over which baby is hitting developmental milestones or has the most expensive toys and equipment not to mention the depressing (to me) suburban middle class-ness of the concept of organized social groups that aren't self-selected.

So why, despite all indications to the contrary, do I love my Thursdays? The potential for unpleasantness is very real but when it comes down to it these women are my colleagues in this job of mothering. Just like colleagues in any other workplace I have made some friends and work to remain on good terms with everyone. The talk as we sip our coffees has the same tone as workplace gossip and I mean that in the most positive way possible. We talk shop about feeding and sleeping, we learn different ways of doing things from each other, we compare notes about the fathers (there are no single parents in the group) and our domestic situations and we commiserate with each other over difficult inlaws and having to go back to paid work.

The baby is waking up, so I'll leave my discussion of how this ties into the book I'm currently reading until another time, but I guess that this confirms that I'm not cut out to work full-time from home or work on my own.


I have consciously talked about mothers in this post rather than parents. In part it's because I don't know any IRL Stay At Home Dads at this point and also because I think that although SAHDs would experience some of the isolation there is a whole other bag of familial and social expectations, identity and body issues that SAHDs would not need to confront in their role (although there is a bunch of other crap they would have to face).