Holiday: It Would Be So Nice...

Top of the list for logistical nightmares must be going on holiday with toddlers. I swear there are military manoeuvres that take less organisation and negotiation skills than mobilising a family of four off this island. The obstacles to overcome include (but are by no means limited to):

1. Heat
To the average singleton, a destination that is warm equates to less of pretty much everything: less clothing, less beauty paraphernalia, less hassle. To a family with young children heat means more. More clothing, more creams and more apparatus as a consequence of heat based activities (read "swimming"). We have parasols, muslins and a variety of hats in the vain hope that one shall be tolerated and save that fresh, translucent skin from almost certain scorching.

2. Lack of NHS
This is not something the average young traveller really thinks about but when you have small children the nearest healthcare provider is at the top of the list of things to research. Gone are the Google searches for "cool things to do in Ecuador" or "nightclubs in Bucharest" and here to stay are "English speaking healthcare providers in Tenerife"... Ho hum.

3. Baby paraphernalia
Travel cots, baby monitors, prams, car seats, bottles, sippy cups, favoured formula, seat adaptors for eating out, nappy cream, travel potties, blankets, calpol... Need I go on?

4. "Essential" toddler items
Also high on the list, but not to be confused with potentially useful and necessary baby items are the "essential" toddler items. Those which they cannot live without. The things that absolutely define their being... Until you leave the house. At this point the plethora of plastic pieces, assemblage of assorted animals and the formation of furry friends will immediately be forgotten about. Left cruelly discarded in the bag in which they traversed miles across land and oceans only to see daylight upon their return to the homestead.

5. In flight entertainment
I defy anyone to have come up with the exact array of accoutrements that will entertain a child of preschool age for the duration of a European flight, never mind a long haul journey. This particularly item of hand luggage will be weighed down with small toys, iPads, headphones, snap cards, magazines, comforters and above all, snacks for bribery purposes. It shall be adorned with a popular swine based character or Disney Princess and shall be a violent neon colour. Expect to carry it.

6. The "last minute contributor"
This mantle falls to my husband who considers himself to be very organised and to the most part I would agree. However, with 5 minutes to go before departure you will find him throwing everything bar the items glued to the building into the bag "just in case" as "you never know"...

Well, I tell you what, I do know. I know we'll be paying for excess baggage. 

Oh look! We'll be trapped on that for 5hours together! Huzzah!

The Forgotten Child....

I am beginning to realise that so far it reads as though I only have one child. Normally, being forgotten about falls to the first born; the initial pancake that is inevitably tossed to one side (or, in this house, bestowed upon the mother). But no, this mantle falls to my second child. The one who needs no medical intervention, who has been gifted with ten fingers and ten toes and whose limbs are symmetrical and equal in each way.

We eventually worked up the courage to "go again". The horror of the genetic investigations and the torment of the first pregnancy and all its uncertainties must have faded enough to allow a seed of optimism and hope to take root.

This time, we were armed. I now had a definitive diagnosis of type 1 diabetes (which was under control), I was on high dose folic acid and I was living the sort of ascetic lifestyle that would have made Gwyneth Paltrow proud. What could go wrong?

Nothing.

Nothing ACTUALLY went wrong but everyone (doctors included) were on such tenter hooks that I was scanned so often I could have picked my unborn baby out of a police line up. Although I suspect most people would be able to pick and unborn baby out of a police line up...

When my diabetes didn't behave as they were expecting I was admitted for "close observation" and spent half of my last trimester under the watchful eye of a suspicious medical team who were trying to decide whether my baby's blood supply was failing or whether I was injecting excess insulin between my toes.

At 37 weeks they called it quits and kick-started labour themselves. Aside from an initial dodgy trace and an epidural which set in just in time for the tea and toast (the universally recognised reward for bringing life into the world) the delivery was as positive an experience as pooping a cannonball can be.

This was my boy. My beautiful boy and I was besotted... 

This Mum Runs...

I run almost every day. This is not a brag or a challenge to others but merely a statement of fact.

Running has been my go to exercise ever since I was an awkward teenager trying to battle the weight gain that the new found freedom to choose my own lunch had inflicted, but it was always a battle to get myself out the front door and meet the 'three times a week' target that I had imposed upon myself.

However, since having my second child, running has ceased to be a chore and has morphed into something of a love affair. It enables me to take time out of my hectic and all-consuming life (which I love) as a working mother and centre myself. It allows me to reflect on everything that has happened, everything that is currently being endured and everything great that is still to come. It enables me to breathe which is ironic because often I physically cannot. .

I was recently asked by a friend to give my reasons for running in a three word story for the purposes of Instagram and it was something I had never really dwelled upon before but on reflection I think I narrowed it down to the most important three reasons:

1. For me
Since being diagnosed as a type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetic I have struggled with the lack of control that I have over my own health and all the problems that the future may present for both myself and my family. Running has given me both an outlet for my anxious energy and a way to increase my body's sensitivity to insulin thereby reducing the likelihood of damaging high blood sugars. What is not to like?

2. For him
My husband is a natural runner and could easily leave me behind in a competitive race but we regularly book the babysitter and take a few hours to plan the future while we plod our way through a scenic few miles. So many life decisions have been made in our running shoes.

3. For them
Apart from keeping me fit and energised I think that having my children see me being committed to doing something that is hard; something that I am not the best at but something that I love and makes me feel better is good. My daughter can often be found telling her nursery friends to run around more as her "Mummy loves it and it is sooooo good for you!" I sometimes think it is a shame she doesn't recognise that attribute in vegetables, but i'll take it.  

The Ultimate Running Partner (and the toddler) 

The Road Less Travelled...

My daughter is 3 and a half years old. As anyone who has been or who is currently delighting in being the parent of a toddler that ‘half’ is very important and should never be forgotten. Now I will admit that my 3-and-a-half year old is rather on the small side and works hard to mount the 2^nd centile on the world recognised growth chart following a rather cruel start in life, but in every other respect she is holding her own. She will count to twenty, hold conversations with adults where they genuinely feel engaged, remember conversations you had six months ago, hop on either foot and reel off all the colours and numbers in Spanish (which is awkward as my Spanish is limited to “una cerveza por favor" and still can be caught pronouncing “chorizo” as cho-ree-sio.) As it stands, I am one proud mother.

But here is the thing: when trying to dress herself the other day the “label to the back/label to the side” conundrum had her stumped and her reaction was to say that she is “rubbish at everything”. On more probing, it came to light that her nursery friends had commented that she wasn’t very good at running races. This is something I suspect may be true and could be due to the fact that she is not the tallest or could be because the vast majority of her friends are at least a year older and whilst I am sure the children meant nothing by it (other than the speaking the brutal truth that children are so often prone to do) this negative comment has seeped into her entire self belief, leaving her feeling defeated and inept.

This is the one thing I never wanted for my children. I am a slave to my insecurities. They have led to make questionable decisions as a burgeoning adult, chased me out of the medical profession and plague me on a daily basis should I be relied upon for anything (and by anything I literally mean anything from a deliverable at work to making a cup of tea for someone else.) This is the one thing I did not want my children to inherit (well that and the diabetes). Like a feral dog I am constantly sniffing out the next way to secure external validation and prove (albeit briefly) that I am an satisfactory human being who errs on the side of competence.

This has led to numerous post graduate professional qualifications, psychological evaluations and daily checks with my long suffering spouse that I am not a bad wife/mother/friend/daughter/person and yet I still am no further forward.

How can I save them from this blighted existence? How do you instil confidence in your children when you cannot monitor every comment that will be uttered about them or how they will interpret them? How do you show them just how incredible they are and why they should love being themselves? How do you stop them being you?

All anyone wants for their children is for them to be happy but how do you navigate that path when you fell off the precipice yourself?

#ablogginggoodtime

Schooled

Since our oldest child turned three we have been somewhat preoccupied with the thought of schooling and how best to go about it. When I say preoccupied, there are times when it has consumed my thoughts upon waking and drifting to sleep.

I have an almighty fear of getting it wrong and ruining my children forever. Which I am sure with the gift of hindsight will be laughable but it doesn’t feel very amusing right now.

The worst part of all is that the distress is due to a very middle-class quandary (which I do realise I am extremely fortunate to even be able to consider) for I am trying to decide between state and private schooling.

You see, my husband was private schooled and I, state. Academically we are probably on par but where he is filled with an innate confidence and comfort in who he is, I am racked with insecurity and would gratefully morph into (any) another human being altogether. I see he and his friends and they just seem more at ease with who they are and their lot in life. For some reason, I put this, at least in part, down to schooling. I do realise that I am probably entirely mistaken, however, it is the one thing I can do something about. I want my children to have the confidence (not arrogance) to enjoy their lives to the fullest. So while there is certainly nothing I can do about the genetic make-up that I have passed down, what I can do is obsess on schools; private schools, state schools, grammar schools, mixed schools and everything in between.

What I would like to make very clear is that I don’t think private schooling makes you a better individual and I do see that in some cases it can do quite the opposite. I do believe that the quality of the teaching staff is identical but the class sizes and resources they enjoy are not and if we can afford it then surely we should lavish those bouquets of pencils upon them! But I then realise that we are merely on the cusp of being able to afford it and would I be short changing them elsewhere? Would they end up enduring school at the bottom of the social heap like a Cinderella who has been discovered half way through the first dance?  

With jobs that can be easily moved, we regularly play the “Right Move” game where we pick an area and look up the available schools in the area ( I should point out that this can involve plonking our baby on the map and seeing where he crawls). Although currently Scotland based, England (as well as the weather) has the attractive offer of grammar schools as while we do not struggle to meet the mortgage repayments, we would certainly be stretching ourselves by enrolling two children in private school but then is anything more important that your children’s education? And again, I come full circle.

That’s it. I’m home schooling

The "Right Move Game" Toddler Style

The Pregnancy: My Imperfectly Perfect Baby

So, to cut a long story short we did actually have a baby...

It was a miscarriage that never was but a threat that loitered menacingly for the duration of the pregnancy. My lovely, green "low risk" sticker was obliterated by an angry, red "high risk" stamp as further complications ensued: gestational diabetes, gestational thrombocytopaenia (no platelets and therefore an inability to clot) and "measuring small for dates".

At nineteen weeks we had our anomaly scan. This was booked early as, although undiscussed, there was a palpable expectation from the medical team that an abnormality would be discovered. Our previous conversations held in the scan department cloaked us in pessimism and the phrases uttered a mere two months ago rang clear:

"There is no fluid..."

"We usually find that this is not compatible with a viable pregnancy..."

"... normally due to a chromosomal abnormality..." 

And sure enough they found an anomaly.

Our baby had a "unilateral talipes". What this actually means is that one of their feet had developed in such a way that it turned in on its self. Historically the affliction had the rather attractive name of “club foot”. The good news was that it was entirely treatable to the point that the vast majority of those born with it actually go unnoticed. They can expect their feet to be different sizes, their calf muscles to be a little under developed on the affected side and they may need to rethink any aspirations to be a professional footballer or ballet dancer but they will run; they will jump; they will play. It takes five solid years of a parental commitment to physiotherapy but it is fixable.

It wasn't the abnormality that they found which caused the concern but the increasing possibility that there would be something more fundamentally wrong with our baby. Any sort of structural anomaly increases the likelihood that there is some underlying chromosomal irregularity but there was no way to know for sure. This was a worry that we would just need to live with and we did.

When she came she was beautiful, there was no denying that. She was tiny, which was fine, as she cried and fed without any fuss but when they passed her on to my tummy I saw it straight away. It didn’t fill me with dread or panic me to the core. She was here. She was never meant to make it this far and she did. There was little that could take away from that. She was my miracle. The miscarriage that never was. A proper human. With nine fingers and ten toes.

They tell me, with the aid of hindsight, that the attempted miscarriage was probably due to the membranes popping in early pregnancy but she had put her arm through the whole and sealed that cocoon up good and tight (my little dutch girl!). The tight seal around her arm restricted the blood flow and prevented it from developing properly leaving her with a slightly smaller right hand and only four functioning fingers. The lack of fluid meant that her legs and feet did not have the freedom of movement to develop correctly which led to her left sided talipes but there were no other abnormalities to find. She was imperfectly perfect.

The above summary is a beautiful thing to be able to write as it now feels like it has always been that way but the certainty I felt when I cradled her for the first time wavered in those first few weeks. You see, we weren’t told those reassuring explanations to begin with. They had to rule out some pretty nasty things first. We needed genetic testing and this couldn’t happen for another six weeks.

It takes its toll on a marriage that: genetic testing. You think you have found the one; your companion into old age. You agree on the fundamentals and you like most of the things about them (let’s not lie, there is always something). You have been through some pretty tough times together and come out stronger at the other end, but then there is a possibility that you do not match in the most important of ways. There is a possibility that in bringing a child into the world you cannot give it the simplest of things: health. It takes a while to navigate your way around that.

I am not sure we enjoyed her until we knew for certain. I am not saying we wouldn’t have enjoyed her if it had worked out differently but there is something to be said for knowing. Once you know for sure you start to cope. You readjust your expectations and move on.

Looking at her now I sometimes forget how amazing she truly is. She is a bright, chatty, happy three year old who runs, jumps and skips. She draws, uses cutlery and picks things up using both hands almost interchangeably. She has the most amazing team of plastic surgeons who have recreated her hand to make it function like a normal hand (apparently opposable thumbs can be built from other fingers) and if you didn’t know, it would definitely take you a while to notice.

I do sometimes feel sad that she might not enjoy a good manicure or may prefer not to draw attention to her hands by wearing the jewellery that most women enjoy. I do worry about bullying and people saying cruel things or shying away from her touch because her hand doesn’t look like it should. But mostly I feel proud. I feel proud that she was strong enough to get here. I feel proud that she is as amazing as she is turning out to be. I feel proud that even though she may not feel it at times, she is a fighter. I am one proud mother.

Toddler Rejection: The Threenager...

"Mummy, I don't like the way you talk to me. I want Daddy!"

"Mummy, I wish I had a Mummy like your Mummy."

"Mummy, you are so mean. You are not my best friend anymore! You are mean!" (sung to an indiscriminate nursery rhyme tune)

"I don't love you anymore."

As I write these phrases down I realise that this is a right of passage. A lesser known milestone. There's smiling, cooing, clapping, crawling, walking, talking and then wounding. I had been warned that this would happen from a variety of sources on a multitude of occasions. I just don't think I believed it. I could not fathom that my beautiful, kind, empathic girl would turn into a surly monster who channels all of her inner angst in my direction as the "primary care giver" (read "sitting duck".)

The thing is, I know that it shouldn't bother me.

I am aware that there are people all over the postcode, country and world who are receiving exactly the same treatment from their offspring on a tri-daily basis merely for deigning to parent. A toddler lacks a filter and will communicate every feeling exactly as it is felt. I know this.

I wanted to believe that my disappointment in this turn of events was because my daughter was different. I wanted to believe that she was intrinsically angelic in nature; advanced in her years for her unfaltering empathy and incapable of thinking, never mind uttering, such hurtful remarks.

The truth is, it's me. I am the one who cannot take rejection in any form. I am the one who is analysing the words of a three year old. I am the one who, upon hearing the criticism, critiques my parenting abilities and finds them coming up short.

She is three. She is mad because I won't let her dress up as Elsa for the twelfth day in a row. She is livid because I used the wrong colour of plate at tea time. She is enraged because I have been the one to greet her when she wakes in the morning. She is incensed because I won't let her waterboard her little brother in the bath. She is the perfect toddler in that she is acting just as a toddler should.

She has no concept of me being a good, bad or mediocre parent. To her, I am the one who is always there. I am the one who is writing the ever expanding rule book which she cannot comprehend and which causes her limitless frustration. I am also the one who is comforting her when she is sick, reassuring here when she is uncertain and re-enacting each and every Disney princess storyline with her upon demand. I am her constant and the one upon whom she depends.

That is just a little bit harder to articulate when you are three...