Because I always stick my neck out, I get my head chopped off quite often. I am fair but strict … possibly a little too strict … but I also believe in empowerment through giving all the tools to grow. This includes the ability to speak using proper vocabulary, the ability to argue his case raher than letting him get his own way, and the ability to use numbers logically. There are those who believe that enabling my child in this way is not allowing him to be a child. But I already catch glimpses of the incredible man my little boy is going to be and, as a result, I find it difficult to get my levels of mothering right. When I look at my toddler and see a gorgeous man, I find it tricky treating him like a child.
Archive for April, 2009
M-Power
Thursday, April 30th, 2009Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009I still have a problem with his sleeping. It’s as though he sleeps more now to make up for my keeping him awake when he was a baby—I followed Gina Ford but I didn’t take into account that her entire formula was based on keeping baby awake for certain hours during the day so baby would sleep at night. I had a baby that would happily sleep all day and then go on and sleep all night too. And I would phone TLC (baby clinic) in tears and ask what I could do to make my baby stay awake—in retrospect, I’m not sure how I escaped being committed.
He now sleeps during the day, goes to bed at night at a decent hour … but wakes me up reaaaaally early. Teaching him his numbers early on has paid off though—when he started wandering through to our room to climb into bed with us close to 5 a.m., I put a digital clock in his room and told him he was not allowed to come through until 6. The first few mornings he came through at 5.06, 5.26, 5.46, 5.16 … until he figured out (with some gentle, hair-pulling persuasion) that the 6 had to be on the left, not the right. We now have a perfect alarm clock… pre-set until it reaches the teenage years.
What happened to the village?
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009I have a friend who believes in this concept – amazingly, just the one. There are those who get really uptight if you so much as reprimand their kids for such indiscretions as smacking, kicking or even biting your own precious offspring. And then there are those who believe that bringing up baby all on your own is a lark and if not for the input from all around, your child would not be quite as balanced as one would wish. Perhaps all the breeding for more and more kids has a lot to do with parents trying to create their own mini-village … who knows. I certainly don’t have a clue what it’s all about and I could spend this lifetime and the next trying to figure it out.
Like any crisis that happens en mass, people tend not to individualise in order to better contain it. This seems to be what happens with parenthood – it happens to everyone who has a child so parents are grouped together into one collective and a rule of generalisation is applied to everyone in the collective. But, behind the scenes, there are people screaming in pain at the stress of it. Broken marriages, non-existent sex lives, grey hair and emotionally screwed up children.
It is not easier being part of the collective … ‘the collective’ is not the same as ‘the village’.
Dreaming again
Sunday, April 26th, 2009I had a dream last night. It involved India … which a lot of my dreams do at the moment. To put this in context, I have always lived in tiny homes and, although content, I would have recurring dreams about discovering one day that there was a secret basement or attic or just a whole lot of extra room. Now that I have a bigger home, I no longer have this dream. Now that I have a child and a dog, I have the freedom dreams – the ones that involve international travel to exotic destinations … the ones I wouldn’t know how to travel in with a child in tow because I only really know backpacker travel to these destinations and doubt I would even enjoy it any other way.
Anyway, about the dream. I was in India (obviously) and there was a cricket game due to start on the weekend after me and husband (note, no child) were due to leave. I was talking to my husband about the possibility of staying on and couldn’t he negotiate it with his boss (I had grown up in this dream and there was employment involved). He sat there looking at me but every time he tried to speak, all he could do was snore. Of course, I woke up moments later to a loudly snoring husband, a child who had climbed into our bed and a dog crying to be let out for the fourth time because he had eaten something dodgy out of the compost heap again.
Freedom? What’s that?
Have baby, will travel
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009It’s no wonder I didn’t win the blog awards 2009. I am lazy, my content is scant and inconsistent … and I have a child who, when he was a baby, made other mothers sick with envy. Most of my friends never read my blog … most of my friends don’t even know I have a blog! When I sent them all the link to vote for the finals and received less than a 5% response, my husband told me it is because they were all in shock reading it for the first time … probably because they all found something in there that related to them in some way.
I suppose I sound a little self-righteous at times but I never promised I wouldn’t tell the truth at all times, regardless of who got miffed in the process. If it’s not out there, it’s not real. And now it really is out there and more people will be directed to my blog as a result of being asked to write the following article by the company that put the whole Blog Awards thing together in the first place.
So I maintain my promise to be truthful and I add the promise to get the hell up to date with my blog posts. Better late than forever … which it won’t be as time is running out for a baby blog now that I can no longer claim to have one of those … but rather a very well established parasite who is most definitely growing on me in a big way.
