1.  Little Girls

2.  Big Boys

3.  Little Boys

It’s been a Mad Week.  Too much Work, too much Going Out and it’s not even December. I’m phuqqed.  Never mind, chin up, mustn’t grumble, Just Keep Swimming, Smile And Wave.  Son 1 aged 5y 1m was in The Big Bed when we woke up.  Can’t keep him in his own bed.  Can’t get Son 2 aged 2y 2m off my lap when we’re eating, either.   Better parents than me Set Boundaries early and get to sleep and eat without invaders. Oh who cares, they’re cute, they’re soft and fluffy, and they won’t be doing it when they’re 20. So. What did we do today.  Got up, fed children, fed fish, cleaned up, tidied up, hoovered up, put washing on. Pulled apart bags of toys in attic. Some toys are the excess from the September Birthday Fest.. put away to be liberated over the coming year. Some toys are duplicates, things they’ve been given which they already have. In both bags there are boxes and boxes of brand new toys. And guess what. Not a single thing for a Girl.  For today’s party person was a She Child. No I didn’t forget to get a present. It’s been flashing red on the Mummy Dashboard all week.  I just didn’t have time.

In the end I wrapped a book and story CD of Son 1’s which we haven’t used yet. A pity, because it was long stories, which are handy for the School Run.  The party was at The Bird Park, which we love. The weather was foul, storm force winds, drenching rain. A grim, wet, low visibility 40-minute drive.   Son 1’s whole class were in the Play Area, and you could almost hear his heart singing as he tore off his mac, kicked off his shoes and sprinted to join them. Son 2 waddled after him, calling out his baby version of “Son 1! Son 1! Come back!”  “Son 1! Look after Son 2!”  I called.  And he did. Came back, got him, helped him in the toddler area, and spent at least half a minute with him before running off with his friends. They both loved it.  Son 1 played and scrapped, and climbed and balanced, and ran and slid.  Son 2 needed me, and took me on lap after lap of an obstacle course involving steps, slides, ladders, poles, nets and bridges. With pit stops in the ball pool. Son 2 will never let Son 1 pick him up, carry him or play with him physically.  I’d thought it was a Son 2 Thing. Until one of Son 1’s friends decided he wanted to play with Son 2. And Son 2 happily let himself be picked up, carried, pushed down, through and over and spun round.  Smiling and laughing all the time. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep the New Big Boy playing with him. The little beggar.

After lunch and three hours there, I rounded them up with ice creams and party bags and we drove bag. Son 1 slept. Son 2 didn’t.  We picked The Man up from the House and went for a drive, hoping Son 2 would sleep, anticipating he’d raise hell if he didn’t.  Son 1 woke. We dropped The Man and Son 2 in a car park at the far end of Town, so The Man could push him back in the Big Pram to see if he’d snooze. Son 1 and I drove back past a second hand shop, with murals painted on the walls outside. “Pigs and flamingos!” said Son 1, like an oath. “Do they sell pigs and flamingos?” The Man used to live in a flat above the second hand shop when we first started… er.. going out… 22 years ago. ”Maybe not now,  but I think they used to,” I said. At home I lay on the sofa, Son 1 coloured.  The others came back.  Son 2 had refused to get in the Pram, and had walked the mile home.  He lay down on top of me, and tried to push Son 1 off the sofa when he tried to squeeze on too.

1.  Pushing Boundaries

2.  Pushing In

3.  Pushy Mother

A Very Grim Weather Forecast.  Wet. Really, Really, Wet. But clearing up Later On.  We decided our planned Bird Park trip could go ahead, but we would need to leave early. The Man helped us get out.  0930, in our macs just to go from the house to the car, double parked outside.  The house phone rang. The Wednesday Mum.  She forgot. We’re picking up another family and splitting them between us.  OK. We drove round and round looking for the right road.  And found a Post Lady to help. We found the right house.  Wednesday Mum gave us Best Friend to take, so she could take the Mother and two daughters in the other family.  Off we went.   Pouring with rain. The road we needed closed with miles and miles of diversions. And Son 1 aged 4y 10m and Best Friend giggling away as they yelled “Poo Poo Pants!”  and “Wee Wee Head!”  at each other. Son 2 aged 22m sat in his seat yelling “Bart!” (= fart) and laughing his head off.  I will remember not to be disappointed if this is as good as conversation in our 75% male household gets from now on. 

The Bird Park. Soft Play, on a hideously wet day in the summer holidays.  Every table full.  Wet macs, jackets and kagoules over the back of every chair.  Son 1 and Best Friend ran off, I plopped Son 2 in the baby area and found a table. I put our macs and bags on it, went to play with Son 1 and still had to fend off an older woman who snuck on the one seat I hadn’t baggsed.   The others took a while coming.  Son 1 and I had a good play. He stood on top of the jets, all his fine, long, blond hair blown vertically upwards. With his tee shirt full of air and a great delighted smile on his face.  We played with the balls, we climbed, we went down slides.  Son 1 was a pain. He spent the morning playing  a Fierce Game.  Growling and roaring at everyone. Eventually he fell out with Best Friend.  He roared, Best Friend lashed out. He cried.  So all three of us went to play on the Big Uns equipment together.  

And then we all went outside.  In our macs, the rain drumming down, no-one else out. Son 1 dropped his Knobbly Bobbly ice lolly.  I gave him 85p and told him to go back in and buy another one. He managed.  Amazing what motivation can do.  We saw owls, and otters. Son 2 just said “Fish.”  “Fish.” “Fish,” as we wound our way down to the farm area. He studied the fish - great fat koi - for as long as we’d let him.  We looked at the rabbits and the guinea pigs. Outside we fed rabbits and sheep with goat food. Son 1 was letting big sheep lap the pellets off his hands; Son 2 was still just a bit scared. There was a Daddy, Mummy and Baby donkey. Son 1 and I wondered if The Man would let us have a baby donkey.  Son 2 hung on the wire sides of the hen houses.  At penguin feeding time the other Wednesday MOther took her two boys back in. Not us. Son 1 sat on the side of the penguin pool trying to get picked to feed them. Son 2 cried with tiredness and pressed his face in to mine.  When it came to choosing the children, Son 1 didn’t get a look in. “Just get down,” I said, giving him a nudge over. Inside the penguin pen, he turned to me. “Did they say it’s all right?”  ”Yes it’s all right,” I said. “Did they say so?”  How well that child knows me. The keeper passed him and told him to come along, olonking a bucket of fish down beside him.  Son 1 and his new friends hurled them into the pool.   Next to Son 2 and me, two children behind the wall stood with their hands up.  We went round the pool to watch Son 1.  “Pin Gin” said Son 2.

1.  Foresight

2.  Hindsight

3.  Second Sight

I told Son 1 aged 4y 6m that, to mark the end of the holidays, we could have a Big Trip this weekend.  He chose the Fun Park, and he chose today.  Nanna, who on Sunday didn’t take Communion because she didn’t think could make it from the pew at the back of The Church, said she’d be fine with the huge amount of walking.  If we took the Big Pram for her to use as a zimmer frame.   I did a mega packed lunch, including coffee for me.  First, I don’t like the food or the cafe… and second I am trying to cut back. It took FOREVER.  Cost-benefit analysis.  Saved £20. But two bored boys allbut unravelled the carpets and peeled off the wallpaper.  Son 1 has a very sore and red left eye.  Worrying, as the Old Friend we saw on Tuesday was just over an evil bout of conjunctivitis. 

At the Fun Park, Son 2 aged 19m thought he’d entered Paradise.  Ponies and piglets.  “Dig! Dig! Dig!” at the climb-on diggers in the sandpit. Lambs and rabbits and chickens and goats.  Son 1 was insistent on going down to the Haunted House.  Soft Play in the dark.  Nanna sat outside while we played.  The Ball Pool, knee-high and low-lit, was being dragged by two men in Fun Park uniforms. Sort of dive, body plough, surface.  “Are you looking for someone?” I asked.  “A mobile phone,” one said. “Can’t you ring it?” “We don’t get signals here.”  We left them to go and play Scooby Do on the stairs in the dark.  

Lunch, a bit of a run round, some sliding with Son 2, and then it started to rain.  We played inside again, in a toddler area - ride on tractors, and  in another Ball Pool, where I played a game with both Son 1 and Son 2, lifting them up and letting them fall (slightly.)  And then upside down.  Son 2’s Ball Pool confidence grew and grew, until he was relaxed lying on top without moving while he waited his turn. And then there was a little castle which ran the length of one wall.  Son 2 was fabulously independent.  Climbing in, taking himself up and down steps, out-of-sight along walkways, vanishing until just a little red and white striped sock appeared, and then another, as he lowered himself down steps at the end.    Then back to the Haunted House and the Ball Pool there.  Son 2 sat, happy, letting himself sink till only his face was visible. Wiggling. “Dear little soul,” I thought. “He’s so good at these now.”  He leaned back and stuck up a little baby foot.  A bare baby foot.  No sign of the little red and white striped socks.   The wiggling had clearly been Son 2 removing them under the surface.  This time it was me dragging the Ball Pool. And it’s not easy.  By the time I found the socks, Son 1 had taken his off. They were exhausted when we finally left.  We got back in time though for the Pharmacist at Tesco.  Son 1 has a stye, not conjunctivitis.  We have ointment. And a proclaimation: “You’re not putting that stuff in my eye!”

1.  Sleeping In My Bed

2.  Banana Cake

3.  The Play Den

Midnight.  A stir in the air which means Son 1 aged 4y 4m is heading upstairs.  Son 2 aged 16m started roaring.  I sat up.  Son 1 crawled into bed behind me.  I waited to see if Son 2 would settle, but he wanted someone to come, and he was doing his shouting-so-angrily-you-can-hear-his-throat-strain thing. “Did you wake Son 2 up?” I asked Son 1. “No.” “Did you peek in his room at all?” “I didn’t go in his room.”  Son 2 was using everything he had, heels upwards, in his yelling.  I went downstairs to him.  The quilt of the bed in his room was turned back.  Son 1 had obviously got in the bed, snugged across unsuccessfully looking for a parent, padded away upstairs… and set his brother off.  By 0130 Son 2 was back in a deep sleep.  I plopped him in the cot, and went next door to sleep in Son 1’s bed.  I was freezing and needed an extra blanket.  Ah.  Son 1’s broken nights have coincided with this cold snap.  We are indeed Terrible Parents.

In the morning I told Son 1 that someone had, indeed, been into Son 2’s bedroom in the night and woken him up.  Son 1 laughed.  “It was me.”  Son 2 wanted food.  I took him downstairs while I made drinks and snacks.  He stood on dining chairs propped up by the worktops.  Direct line of sight to  the tub containing banana cake made by Wonder Nanny on Friday.  “Aahhh,” points Son 2.  I don’t think it’s possible to deflect Son 2 from a food mission once he’s got an idea in his head.  He ate two pieces.  And another piece for breakfast.

Son 1 had an invitation to a joint Nursery party at a Tourist Attraction 30 miles away.  The day was planned.  Son 2’s sleep.  Lunch. In the car and off we go.  Son 2, bunged up with banana cake,  wouldn’t eat an atom of lunch.     We walked into the Tourist Attraction. “You know Mummy, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” said Son 1, taking in the slides, the soft play, and the Big Uns’ playstuff.   Half the size of the Bird Park play area, with four times as many children.   He sat on the sides, swinging his legs, and trying to get me to ask his Nursery friends to play with him.   He got there in the end.  Son 2 loved it.  Ball pool, play with the air jets.  Slides.  Climbing over the Big Uns’ playstuff. 90 minutes of heaving Son 2 up and down, round and along… sometimes checking on Son 1, sometimes playing with him, and it was time for Party Tea.  I tried to get Son 2 to eat a ham sandwich.  He settled for a chocolate doughnut.  At last I could go and get a cappacino.  The coffee machine was out of order.  Twenty minutes later, an announcement.  The loos were also out of order.  Tea over, more play, and then we rounded up our balloons and headed home, listening to Peter Pan and (one of us) munching cake and eating lollipops all the way.