Tag Archives: children

“Mummy, I want a banana please!”

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It’s 5am and up until a few moments ago, you were submerged in a fitful, tossing and turning kind of sleep. The kind of sleep that fights you from the moment you put your head on the pillow and which you desperately fight back with, in an attempt to achieve some kind of rest. Then,

BAM!

You are pounced on by a bright eyed three year old, who pronounces that, “Mummy, I want a banana please!” and who then proceeds to nose dive beneath the duvet and wriggle around like a caterpillar on LSD, while you pray that you’re still wearing your pyjamas.

After that, the day gradually declines into a lethargic routine, where you try your best to meet your demanding children’s needs, along with dosing yourself with abnormal amounts of coffee – which by the way seems to have a hand in sending you to sleep, rather than kicking you into a bushy tailed state of alertness.

The day draws on and you navigate yourself between teething baby, stunt-girl baby and bored toddler. Your grand plan from the previous day, which involved cooking a delicious, nutritious and healthy evening meal, is sent flying out of the window as you yet again resort to bangers, mash and beans for the toddler and a jar of baby food with a fruit pot for the tiddlers. You completely forget to feed yourself and long suffering other half, so opt for a takeaway when they’re all in bed and spend the next two hours, clock watching – waiting desperately for the Cbeebies bed-time hour to draw to close.

Everything is now quiet. The slow, rhythmic breathing of your three sleeping angels can be heard softly through the baby monitor. The toys have been squirrelled, messily neatly away and you’re sat with a pizza bigger than your ten-month-old, bruiser of a son. As you munch away on the terribly bad for you but oh so delicious grease fest, you get that sinking feeling.

You could have done better today. You could have approached certain situations differently. You could have overcome your overwhelming tiredness somehow and injected some positivity into the day. You could have made that healthy dinner. You could have taken everyone out for a walk and got some fresh air into their tiny lungs. You could have ignored the mess, the dirty dishes, the mountain of laundry and just played – you could have had fun.

You beat yourself up over the could haves and should haves so much, that the pizza in your mouth just doesn’t taste right any more. It’s unsavoury after taste, will follow you to bed and keep you awake during the night, as you run back and forth to the bathroom for a drink of water to satisfy your pizza thirst.

Another fitful, tossing and turning kind of sleep greets you. It’s 5am and your bladder is fit to burst but you just can’t bring yourself to leave that warm, comfy spot in bed for fear that you won’t be able to reclaim it again. Then,

BAM!

You are pounced on by your bright-eyed three year old, who then curls up next to you and whispers in your ear,

“I love you mummy.”

The Manifestations of Grief

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On Christmas morning 2011, our house was full of laughter, excitement and the many other things that you associate with that festive day. We had only just moved in to the property, after years of fighting for a place to call home, the twins were almost three months old and we were all glowing with the space, warmth and joy that recent events had given to us.

That morning, I received a phone call from the other end of the country, informing me that my mother had passed away.

It was a sudden and unexpected shock and something that shook my whole world. As I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by the noise of excited children, the smells of food slowly cooking and received that fateful news, it felt as if time had stood still, while the world sped up around me.

Instantly my thoughts turned to my children. Christmas was their special day and I didn’t want to tarnish that innocent happiness with my tragic news, so I carried on with the day as if nothing had happened.

I could have got through that gruelling twenty-four hours fine on my own, however I had the constant spectre of my mother-in-law, reminding me to “keep it together for the kids”, or to go have “a little cry in private”. I felt heartbroken and stifled by the unwanted attention. The thought that my mother died alone, unaware of her surroundings, with her children not having had the chance to say goodbye and for her to never have been given the opportunity to meet her two beautiful new grandchildren devastated me. After four grandsons, she had always wanted a grand-daughter and I had finally given her one along with yet another grandson.

The Manifestations of Grief

The funeral I didn’t get a chance to make it to.

Looking back on it now, some eight months later, I’ve started to recognise the effect it’s had on me. I never felt as if I had properly grieved for her. There were no floods of tears, no beating at the floor in sheer devastation. I didn’t break down and I didn’t fall in on myself. If anything, I felt a little numb and alarmed at my lack of emotion.

For me, I think grief has manifested itself in the way that I do things and the way in which I behave. Over time, I’ve noticed myself doing things the way that my mum did, saying things that she said, taking pleasure in some every day tasks that she also enjoyed.

I’ve also started to change how I look at life. I’ve looked at what held her back from achieving a happier existence, identified them in myself and have slowly begun to change them, in an effort to learn from her mistakes.

It was her Birthday on the 1st of August and my partner asked me if I was going to wear black. This struck me as an odd thing to do. A Birthday is a celebration and I don’t think mum would have wanted me to remember her at her darkest times. She would want me to celebrate her colourful and vivacious existence and to tell my children all about her. Black just would not do.

I think grief hits people in different ways but for me, it’s helped me to keep alive the images of when my mother burned the brightest and I couldn’t ask for anything more wonderful.

OldiesbutGoodies 1 The Manifestations of Grief

New or Used – My Purchasing Dilema

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4448797256 7944d04370 m New or Used My Purchasing Dilema

Recycling is good for the planet (Photo credit: stuant63)

As I begin to write this post, I am sat on a second-hand armchair, which is perched on a second-hand carpet, typing on a second-hand laptop and drinking out of a second-hand coffee mug. In fact, almost everything in this room – and indeed this house – has been previously loved/played with/used/worn by somebody else, at some point in its lifespan.

You see, I’m not a huge fan of buying things new if I don’t have to. While I love slipping my feet into a brand new pair of shoes, or ripping the tags off a brand new pair of pyjamas (I have an unhealthy obsession for buying PJs O.K. don’t ask!), I also know that financially it really isn’t feasible for me to be kitting the house and family out, in brand new shiny things. Raising children is expensive! More-so when you have three of them, under the age of three and of both genders! Therefore, it has always been my mission almost, to try and find what we all need either pre-loved, or at a discount price.

My problem is I’m starting to doubt my reasoning behind doing this. I tell myself that I’m doing it to save money, so that I can pay the bills, stock the cupboards and fridge and keep the family ticking over nicely. Then I make the fatal mistake of comparing myself to others and self doubt hits me, like a wet flip-flop to the face.

I see children, the same age as my own, running around wearing designer clothes that look like they’ve hardly been worn, their presentation absolutely immaculate and their toys looking like they’ve cost more than my entire wardrobe! Then I look at my own three: my 9 month old daughter who has just learned to crawl, can’t keep clean for more than a minute and is always rolling around in a pile of her elder brothers toys, of which whose cleanliness is questionable. My 9 month old son can’t quite crawl yet, so enjoys sitting on the floor with a pile of cushions around him – much like the commander of his own fleet of space ships – adorned in his elder brothers cast off clothes because really, he is growing so fast I see little point in buying him new stuff! Then there’s my 2 year old who is  3 next month, going on 30 with mud smeared all over his face from trying to herd the ants in the back garden, his toys in a heap in the corner of the living room because I can’t face organising them yet again and his clothes a combination of hand-me-downs and Tesco’s finest.

I get that parents take pride in theirs and their children’s appearance – as a mother or father it’s almost a given that we like to see our little ones looking presentable, if only for the five minutes before they eat that packet of chocolate buttons, but I think that sometimes it is taken out of context and is more of a showcase – a way of showing off what you have.

People have commented in the past, that they couldn’t possibly put their children in ‘second-hand’ clothes and I think Why? Will our children actually care if their possessions are state-of-the-art and their clothes – careful creations of the worlds most popular fashion designers? My twins would just carry on with their usual rolling around and my eldest would probably just look quizzically at me if I asked him and then ask for a biscuit and some ‘monkey juice’, (the cartons have monkeys on).

I don’t want my children to grow up, expecting that they will get new things whenever they want them. I’m not a complete Scruge – I do indulge them when I think they deserve it, but I certainly won’t nuke our finances into orbit in order to do so.I hope that by doing what I do, I am teaching them the value of money and the importance of saving and working for the things that they desire, instead of them growing into adulthood and expecting the rest of the World to fall into their way of thinking.  So much of adult life is targeted towards purchasing goods that really, we don’t need and probably won’t use once we’ve satisfied the urge – much like the huge pile of pyjamas I’ve accumulated. Do we really need to inflict this consumer rivalry onto our children at such a young age?

What stance do you take on this in your house? Do you buy new without a thought, or do you go down the second-hand route? Maybe you do a bit of both? I’d love to hear from all of you!

Admitting You Need Help.

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I’ll let you into a secret about myself. I don’t like leaving the house. I don’t even like popping to the corner shop for milk. It’s like a deep rooted fear and I get anxious at the thought of just stepping out of my front door. It’s completely irrational. I tell myself this on a daily basis. There is no rational reason for you to fear slipping your shoes on and nipping to the shop, but more often than not, even with that knowledge, I still can’t do it.

There are times when I’ve accomplished (to me), the impossible and walked that five minute shuffle round the corner, and when I get back home, I feel good that I did it. Most of the time though, it’s a constant battle of “I know I really should be going and getting some fresh air, taking the children for a walk, giving them new experiences and good memories.” and then, “But I really don’t want to go, I should put a load of laundry on/make the beds/tidy the rooms, what if, what if, what if…”

This started way back before having children was even on my agenda. It only really set in properly however, after my first child. He needed a lot of care and attention during his first year, as he couldn’t swallow or feed the way normal babies could. He was fed through a tube that went straight into his stomach, and he also had a colostomy bag (to collect his poop as opposed to…well..the obvious), so I was limited on how much time I had for getting us out and about. My fatal flaw was that this continued after his corrective surgery. I had been so used to staying in the (then) flat, that it became my comfort zone.

Almost two years later and our twins came along – again making it impossible at times, to get out of the house with three children, which leads me to the position I am in now. My eldest is nearing three years old, the twins are turning nine months and there really are no reasons any more for me to put the inevitable off.

Admitting You Need Help.

When me and my siblings were younger, our mother had a similar problem. The things we should have done as children, the memories we should have had, are simply not there, because our mother never had the strength or the support to ask for the help that she needed, and it wasn’t until we all left home that she began to find her feet again in the world. Sadly it was short lived and we lost her to the dreaded C word last Christmas day, which is why I’ve come to the decision that enough is enough.

I’ve spent a huge chunk of my life trying to deal with things, rightly or wrongly, in my own way and I’m also very good at pretending to other people that I’m OK, when really the depressed, anxious, self deprecating me is screaming that no, no I’m not OK. So I called the GP this morning and made myself an appointment.

I’m not expecting miracles. I know it’s going to take a whole new way of thinking and looking at things, to get me back onto the right track. I’ve taken the first step however. I’ve admitted to myself that yes, I do need help. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s my late mother’s birthday next week, that is prompting me to get my life in order. As much as I loved her, I don’t want my own children to remember me that way. I want them to be able to have those experiences that I missed out on, but more importantly, have me there with them to share in the enjoyment.

I’d be interested in hearing from others who have gone through or are going through something similar. What is it like on the other side?

New Quest Chain.

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So welcome to my first post. I’m an unashamed newbie to the whole blogging theme, but thought it would be an interesting hobby between nappy changes. I’m also a mum to 8 month old twins, and a nearly three year old, so with that little bit of experience behind my belt, I thought it might be worth sharing the love a little.

To get things going here’s a post from a private blog I never had the courage to make public:

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I thought that raising my eldest child for the first year was challenging, mostly due to him being diagnosed with a congenital birth defect and spending most of his first year in this world, in and out of hospital for surgery and check-ups.

Now I have twins and this is so much more difficult. I’m no fool – I knew that raising twins along with a toddler would be hard, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the mental, physical and emotional turmoil that comes with that lovely bundle of babies.

The hardest thing is time. There isn’t enough of it! Every moment of the day is consumed in an instant and before I know it, I’m waking up to start the whole process all over again (if I indeed actually got to sleep the previous night). It is a relentless grind sometimes, and though I love my children so much, I can’t help but look back at the days when I had no responsibilities and the freedom to do what I pleased, when I pleased.

I think perhaps that is the lesson to be learned when becoming a parent. You have to learn to make the most of each minute you are given – even if that minute is to down a mug of cold coffee, or dash to the loo for a much needed toilet break and I’ve found that this also applies to my relationship. When all of the children are asleep for the night, it’s important for us to use what little time we may have remaining that day, to spend some time with each other, and to engage in some sort of conversation that doesn’t have a child’s voice piping in every few seconds.

Most of all though, I loathe the overwhelming guilt and worry I often feel. Guilt that I don’t get out enough with them when daddy is at work, guilt at that chocolate biscuit I just used to bargain with my toddler, in order to get his nappy changed, worry that I don’t do enough, or don’t play enough, don’t give them the right kind of stimulation, or don’t constantly keep them looking clean and neat. I think it is something that most parents feel when raising their children – unless of course you are super confident, in which case I am not worthy! Please share your secrets!

I guess the main thing is that they’re happy and if they are, then I suppose I am. It would be nice though to get out with my other half, minus three children once in a while.

S.C.