Craftily Creative

A recent study from the University of Illinois suggests that drinking alcohol does in fact make you more creative. This may explain why doing craft activities with my children makes me want to lay down on the kitchen floor and drink gin from the bottle.

I do not have a creative bone in my body. I have friends who are able to take toilet rolls, cereal boxes and tissue paper and construct scale models of the Tower of London. I am able to take the same materials and turn them into life size models of . . . toilet rolls stuck onto cereal boxes. 

I do try. I have a big plastic box full of sparkly pipe cleaners, tissue paper and stickers. Unfortunately, it appears that just buying the stuff is not enough; you then need to work out what to do with it. 

Mr Maker is my freakin' nemesis. I try my best to turn my children away from the TV before he makes an appearance. Both my children worship him, watching his creations with hushed reverence. Unfortunately, as soon as he is finished they look at me with eyes full of eternal hope and (misplaced) parental belief: "Can you help us make that, mummy?"

If, by chance, we happen to have all the resources needed, I reluctantly agree to try. (Any attempts to get out of it by telling them that I'm not very good at making things only prompts the boy to hoist me with my own petard, "You won't get any better if you don't practice, mummy.")

Despite following the instructions meticulously, it never ends up looking as it should. Anyone who saw our dinosaur with legs made of rolled up newspaper would no longer question why they became extinct: the poor creature could only stay upright for about 3 seconds. 

At least my children have obligingly low expectations. Although sometimes there is something more than a little patronising when a four year old tells you that you are "getting very good at cutting out." 

 My other sticking point, if you'll pardon the pun, is Mister Maker's obsession with 'googly eyes'. I'm pretty sure you'll find his brother is the UK distributor for the damn things. How the hell do you get them to stick to anything? Pritt stick (my non-spillable glue of choice) just doesn't cut it. If you use PVA they slide slowly downwards until the imaginary creature is looking out of its imaginary stomach. There is double-sided sticky tape, but if anyone out there has found a way to cut that small enough to fit a googly eye and still be able to peel the back off of the bugger, I will shake that person by the paint-covered hand. (Actually, they do stick to something. I was in the middle of admonishing a Year 8 for their lack of effort in class when the confused looking child said 'Miss, why have you got eyes stuck to your buttons?' It's quite difficult to maintain your authority after that.) 

 Also, what the heck do you do with all these projects after you have made them? I used to get away with filing them in the recycling bin pretty soon after they were made (don't gasp in horror, supermothers, this blog is not for you) but lately they have taken to want to display them for indefinite periods of time. Sometimes I can get away with persuading them that that particular collection of painted pebble monsters would look lovely at Nana's house, but most of the time they are adamant that they want to litter my lounge with them. My latest plan is to implement a genius idea shared by a friend who takes a photo of the current masterpiece and then 'loses'' the original. Now, that's the kind of creativity I can run with. 

 Back to that study from the University of Illinois: the researchers believe that 'intoxication may lower one’s ability to control one’s thoughts, thus freeing the mind for more creativity.' On reading further, however, they note that 'higher doses of alcohol were not tested, nor was the study done with female volunteers.'

 Never let it be said that I would stand in the way of scientific progress. Or that I am unwilling to offer my services to further the advancement of the human race. Anyone else fancy joining me in a bit of research? 

 

                      

Don't invite the children!

I love my children.

I love going to large parties.

I do not love going to large parties with my children.

 

There, I've said it. Going out for the evening with my offspring is not fun.

 

My heart sinks when we get an evening invitation to a party and are told, very kindly, "the children are invited too." It triggers an internal battle between what I feel is expected of me (to bring the children) and what I want to do (leave them at Nana's so that I can actually enjoy myself.) 

 

Sometimes I forget the potential horror of it. "They're a bit older now," I tell husband, "they'll be fine this time." He shakes his head at my naïveté. Unfortunately he is always proved annoyingly correct.

 

The evening starts ok. We arrive, both children looking picture perfect. We find an area in which to base ourselves (husband already pulling the 'how loud is this music?' face), get ourselves a drink (arguing with children about coke vs orange juice before compromising on lemonade) and try to locate a friendly face in the crowd. 

 

We are then thrust straight into a balloon battle. The boy has a balloon fixation of huge proportions: he spots the balloons as soon as we enter the room and begins a war of attrition on my ears which consists of a repeated "Can I have a balloon now? Can I have a balloon now? Please can I have a balloon? When can I have a balloon?" He has no understanding of the fact that our hosts have placed these balloons decoratively around the room and do not wish a small child to rip them down and run around the room with them like a chimpanzee on acid. 

 

This is just the beginning. I may even have had a small chance of tuning out the balloon mantra if husband didn't then add a second acapella-style chorus about 20 minutes into the party with his own rendition of "How long have we got to stay? When are we going home? Shall I take the kids home and leave you here?" The male members of our clan are not known for being party people. 

 

At least the girl enjoys a dance (I have high hopes for the future where the two of us attend parties alone and leave the other two at home with a balloon each) but that brings a different form of stress in the fear that she will be trampled underfoot by an over-enthusiastic mummy putting double turns into the 'Uptown Girl' line dance. I know how easy this is due to my own experiences over the years clumping small children during the Macarena. 

 

Other people seem to manage quite successfully to attend parties en famille - chatting, laughing, even having a little dance whilst their children are off playing elsewhere. Whilst I admire greatly their relaxed attitude and faith in their offspring, I have a deeply embedded need to have visuals on my children at all times:  presuming that anytime I can't actually see them they are either destroying something, are being pinned down by another child or have escaped onto a busy motorway. 

 

This is a fear often vindicated when I do lose sight of them for more than 5 minutes. If there is a leg-breakingly high stage, they will be attempting to jump from it. If there is a wallet-bustingly expensive piece of DJ equipment they will be tripping over it. And if there is a tottering toddler barely walking who doesn't want a large balloon bounced on his head . . . you get the idea. At least at a large party the music is so loud you can't be heard threatening your children under your breath. 

 

The end of our evening is usually heralded by the over-tired tears of one or both children. Husband leaps on the first teardrop as evidence that we must go home and it is left to me to find our host or hostess and make our apologies. 

 

So, my friends, I would love to come and celebrate your birthday, wedding or anniversary. I will laugh and joke and dance and sing. Just please don't ask me to bring my children. 

Small Child V2.0

Dear God

 Whilst I appreciate that you have been in the business of creating human beings for a long time now, I would like to humbly suggest some modifications should you decide to revise the current version of small child.

 1. Ear functionality - small child V1.0 seems to experience intermittent audio loss, otherwise known as selective hearing. This can vary between acute deafness and the hearing of a superhero i.e. an inability to hear the phrase 'Sit down and eat your dinner" whilst being able to hear the crinkling of a sweet wrapper from three rooms away. (NB Husband V2.0 could also benefit from this bug fix.)

 2. A glitch in brain synapsis which renders an incomprehension of the word 'no'. This incomprehension manifests itself when the small child continues to repeat a question if it is answered with 'no'. As in:

"Can I have sweets before dinner?"

"No."

"Please can I have sweets?"

"No."

"Pleeeeease can I have sweets?"

This can continue through several cycles and often ends with an incessant whining sound and leakage from the eyes.

3. Lapses in memory. This takes two forms: inability to retrieve information (("I don't know where I left your purse after I was playing with it.") and general memory loss (" I forgot that I'm not allowed to help myself with biscuits from the cupboard.") 

4. Shutdown malfunction. I have been reliably informed by several user manuals that you can program your small child to automatically shut down at a set time each evening. My model seems unable to perform this effectively and often requires me to perform the shutdown sequence several times. It also turns itself back on too early or at random times in the night. Also, the younger of my two models sometimes crashes mid-afternoon which makes the evening shutdown even more difficult. 

I hope you are not offended with my suggestions to improve your otherwise excellent model; those of us in the field can often experience practical issues which may not have been considered important in the design phase. On that subject, there are a number of modifications which would greatly benefit Mother V2.0: an extra set of hands, larger reserves of patience and the ability to concurrently cook dinner, supervise a craft activity and negotiate a peace treaty to name but a few.

 Otherwise, I am very happy with both of my small child V1.0 although I regret to inform you that I will not be purchasing further copies.

 Yours humbly,

 Mrs A. Mother

 

Going to see Father Christmas

  
In the vast 'To Do' list that needs to be ticked off before the 25th December, taking the kids to see Father Christmas has to be quite a biggie. 

Before I begin, I must explain that I have a major hang up about the name 'Santa' - for me, the man sporting a big white beard in a red costume will always be Father Christmas and, until recently, I have attempted to boycott any imposter with another name. Sadly, the winds of change are against me and Father Christmas is, like the little English red Squirrel, soon to be eradicated from our shores by an American immigrant. For this reason, and also because it is quicker to type, I will use the name Santa for the rest of this blog. 

Last year we went to visit 'Santa in the Woods' at our local country park. We had high hopes due to the fact that I had given up three hours of my time trying to buy the damn tickets online on my 'phone at my in-laws. Plus they had cost us £12 per child. We didn't even want to take the younger one (harsh but true; she was only one, what would she have gotten out of it?)  but you were only allowed one adult per child's ticket purchased and we both wanted to go. £24 later, we were hoping for good things. 

It was nice (whether it was £24 worth of nice is up for debate) and it did last about 45 minutes. We walked through the park as some amateur actors staged a rather contrived pantomime-like story which involved a lost princess and some kind of bad guy. The kids seemed to love it, they got freebies along the way such as bubbles and sweets and everyone seemed pretty happy.

Until we got to the 'meeting Santa' part. Bearing in mind that we had already been wandering around outside for close to an hour, we then had to wait over 50 minutes in the cold whilst they took small groups into a large wooden hut to meet him. We had all been given a number and had to wait, meat-counter-style until our number was called. The part that really got my control freak nature's goat was the fact that the wet weekend of an elf calling out the numbers kept calling out the SAME NUMBERS every time! I was held in check for only so long by the admonitory look my husband was giving me before I had to ask him, "Do you not think they might have actually gone home?"

Then, and I can feel my blood pressure rising just remembering this, we had a situation where there was only one space left on the next sitting and the person with the next number (14) wanted to wait and go in at the same time as their friends (15). I tried, oh I really tried, not to interrupt them but after 7 minutes of listening to Dithery Dobby trying to reconcile this one with his clipboard, I couldn't cope any longer. I broke free from husband's restraining arm and screamed "Why don't we go in now and you can give my ticket (16) to them so that they can go in with their friends?"

Dobby just looked at me pityingly. "We have to go in number order Madam," he said. I wanted to stick my head in the cauldron of tepid mulled wine and leave it there until New Year. 

That year we also went to the classic shopping centre Santa. Quite a long queue but a surprisingly pleasant experience once inside the grotto. A happy little 3D video about the elves making the presents, a short wait to see Santa and a gift - all for free. Admittedly you were not allowed to take photographs and they attempted to fleece you with a snapshot for £8 on the way out. As my eldest child wasn't even looking at the camera and my youngest looked absolutely terrified, this was one expense we were spared. 

I have friends who wouldn't go anywhere else but to the big boys at Christmas: Harrods, Selfridges or Hamleys. However, as tickets for these more high-class Santas seem to sell out faster than a Barbra Streisand/One Direction double bill, you’d need to be a much better organised kind of mummy than this particular slacker. 

This year, quite by chance, we hit the Santa jackpot. We took W and S to RHS Hyde Hall for their children's Christmas festivities, assuming that this would be the usual visit to the excellent Craft Barn to make some Christmas decorations, some lovely cake and coffee for the grown-ups and then home. However, in the Visitor's Centre a Christmas story was advertised and we wandered in for the last sitting of the day.

The storyteller was fantastic. He held around 35 children of many different ages, and their parents, absolutely enthralled as he told them the story of how Santa Claus came to be. Then, and even I was genuinely surprised, the man of the season came knocking on the door.

And what a Santa he was. From his fluffy white eyebrows to his shiny black boots, he was every inch the real Saint Nicholas. He walked like Father Christmas, he talked like Father Christmas; to everyone in that room, even my humbug husband, he WAS Father Christmas.

He spoke to the children about Christmas traditions in the past, when children would be given an orange and a homemade toy. He asked them questions to find out what they knew: praising those that knew their history and rephrasing the more random responses (such as W's suggestion that they might have made lightsabers) so that they never felt silly. He then told them how he had been asked once what had been the greatest gift he had ever given. His inspired answer? The gift of imagination.

Afterwards he invited the children to come and speak to him. He said that there was no rush, he would stay until he had spoken to every child, and he was true to his word. He took the time to speak to every one of them for as long as they wished to about anything they wanted to say. Admittedly, this meant a long time waiting in a queue that never seemed to go down but, amazingly, no-one seemed to mind. I'm not sure if it was because we were in the warm, because we had just listened to a wonderful story or because we were all, adults and children alike, a little in awe of this wonderful man, but I didn't hear one word of complaint. I watched as child after child told him everything they wished for this Christmas. I overheard him giving them fatherly advice. To one boy who said he was struggling to learn to play the piano he said, "All that matters is that you get a little bit better every day." And that was it. No cheap plastic toy, no video screens, no allotted time slots. It was old school, it was low-tech, it was wonderful. 

When we got to the front, W became uncharacteristically shy. Santa Claus took his hand and asked him what he liked to play. Before long, they were having a lovely conversation about Star Wars and W told us afterwards that he must be the real Father Christmas because he "knew about everything". As we left, he shook our boy's hand and said, "Always stay away from the Dark Side, William." 

All in all, it was the perfect beginning to our Christmas festivities. For me, this was everything a trip to see Father Christmas should be about. The only tiny fly in the ointment was that he was in fact called Santa. But, hey, you can't have everything can y'all? 

 

 

Long Car Journeys

I have idyllic, probably rose-tinted, memories of long car journeys to Cornwall as a child. Being carried from my bed, half asleep, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Snuggled under a blanket in the back seat with my younger sister, eating car sweets, playing eye spy, singing along to my dad’s Beatles tapes and dozing off again, before waking up six hours later parked up at a Cornish beach. My husband has similar memories of holiday trips to Wales and recreating these journeys was something we looked forward to with our own children, starting our own little piece of family history.

The only problem is, this time we have to be the parents.

Firstly, it’s the packing up of the car and, however much you share domestic arrangements with your other half, for some reason it is always the mum’s job to pack for a holiday. Packing for yourself is one thing (I pride myself on having the capsule wardrobe thing down to a colour-coded art), but packing for your children when holidaying in the UK means trying to cover every possible eventuality.  Clothes for sunshine, rain, mud, heat, cold, snow, beach, playground, walking, going out to a nice restaurant (pause for ridiculing laughter) or possible alien invasion must be included. Then you have to decide which books and toys they are going to take. Do you risk their current favourites knowing this will make them happy but jeopardising your future happiness should they be lost? Do you allow them to take everything that they want to or try and restrict them to just a couple of items? After all, as ‘the mum’ it will be your job to try to sneak Thomas the Tank Engine and his 17 friends into an already packed car whilst your husband swears and mutters something about ‘it’s a one week holiday, we’re not bloody moving house’. Holidaying in the UK seems to turn men into their fathers, too.

Next item for debate, do you take food? Whilst we know that they do have supermarkets all over the UK, there is always the temptation to take ‘something for breakfast tomorrow’ or ‘a few essentials to start us off’ – five bags of shopping later and I have nowhere to put my feet when I get into the car. Snacks for the journey are a must. I spend at least 60% of the journey throwing sweets and crisps over my head in the hope that some of them hit the laps of the children behind.

One of the biggest differences for our children are the advent of car seats: an absolute necessity for car safety, but not half as much fun as making a duvet tent on the back seat and eating Smarties by torchlight. On the upside , we don’t have to deal with two children kicking seven bells out of each other under a blanket whilst we shout, “Don’t make me come back there!”

There have been many scientific advances in the last thirty years which make a long car journey easier on parents. Wet wipes, for example, are a huge advance on my mum’s damp flannel in a polythene bag which was as rough as sandpaper and smelt of sick. I also have no idea how parents coped on long journeys before the invention of the in-car DVD player or iPad. I’ve tried to play eye-spy with my children in a nostalgic nod to my car journeys of the ‘70s, but quite frankly it doesn’t cut it when compared with Angry Birds on the iPad or Peppa Pig on DVD. These devices are no longer a luxury item for a long car journey with kids. Put it this way, I don’t know any parents who have made the mistake of forgetting the in-car charger twice.

The fact that there is more traffic on the road now than there was then can also add to the stress of the journey. Encountering a traffic jam is never a pleasant experience but when you have two over-tired, sugar-fuelled children in the back seat, hitting traffic opens up a whole new world of pain. Also, this is usually the cue for the phrase that strikes panic into the heart of any travelling parent: “Mummy, I need the toilet.”

After cajoling, distracting and begging the full-bladdered child in question for as long as it takes to get to a service station, it can be quite annoying when you do get there and suddenly the urgency seems to have subsided as the supposedly ‘desperate’ child takes their time, wandering past the games machines, having a look in the shop window, maybe even climbing onto the massage chair. Other users of the coffee lounge look at me askance as I scream, “Do you need to poo or not?”

The part that really makes me realise that I am now the mum is the very last leg of the journey. Whilst husband and I generally share the driving on a long car journey, as we approach our destination there is an unwritten rule, for the sake of our marriage, that husband drives and I navigate. This is because I need more warning to turn right than, “This right! This right! This right!  . . . . Oh, you’ve missed it.” Once, after a particularly horrendous Sat Nav re-routing, we found ourselves at 2am down a boggy track in Yorkshire, in torrential rain, having to reverse the car for about two miles. Even husband said it was the moment he wished his dad was there to do it instead.

When, with relief, you realise you have actually found your holiday destination, it dawns on you that the end is not yet in sight. Looking back at your sleeping children, you realise that,  as the parents, it is up to you to locate the hidden key, work out how to open the door, make up the beds and carry your, hopefully still sleeping, children into bed. Then you have to go back outside and unpack the car, work out how to use the heating controls and check that you haven’t forgotten the toilet paper, before you can finally make yourself a cup of tea and collapse onto the sofa.

Because that’s what it means to be the parents on a holiday journey; you are the ones with whom the buck stops. It is as this sinks in, that I find myself awash with nostalgia for 1978, a sleeping bag on the back seat of a Ford Cortina and a wet flannel in a polythene bag.

Thanks Mum and Dad x

 

Hosting a Sunday Lunch

Next time I invite friends for Sunday lunch, I am going to ask my children to do the following.

When you see me opening and closing the oven door, whilst trying to select a flattering yet casual outfit and simultaneously throwing any stray toys/shoes/dirty plates into the cupboard under the stairs, I would like you to:

1.       Find a food or drink that stains and spill it down yourself. Timing is key for this one, you must wait until you’ve just been changed into your ‘nice’ clothes. You may well be still in your pyjamas ten minutes before the guests arrive, but don’t be tempted to do the spilling too early.

 

2.       Tip a whole box of craft materials onto the floor of the kitchen, preferably the really small shiny stuff that it is impossible to vacuum or sweep up and must be picked up, individually, with fingertips.

 

3.       Decide that you both want to play with the same toy and fight over it relentlessly. (Remember that this one is even more effective if the toy in question is a baby toy that you’ve just found behind the sofa and that neither of you has shown any interest in for the previous 12 months.)

 

4.       When you tire of this, find a toy that has a million tiny pieces (jigsaw puzzles work well here, or any kind of play set which includes tiny figures) find that one piece is missing and cry/whinge until someone helps you to find it.

 

When the guests arrive:

1.       Don’t share any of your toys with the visiting children, particularly if the visiting child is asking you very nicely, with impeccable manners and offers to share their own toys in exchange.

 

2.       Refuse to eat any dinner, demanding chicken nuggets or similar.

 

3.       During dinner repeat “Why can’t we watch a DVD while we have dinner like we usually do?” ad infinitum.

 

When they follow these instructions to the letter, I will be able to smile proudly, in the knowledge that I am an Alpha Mother whose children obey my every command. No longer will I be crying into the washing up that no-one listens to a word I say.

If, on the other hand, they revert to type and do the exact opposite from my requests, I will be able to relax and have a lovely afternoon as my guests look on in envy at my perfect children.

Either way, I win.

Sleep

“To sleep: perchance to dream”                Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1

“To sleep: chance would be a fine bloody thing.”              Emma Robinson 2003

 Most nights in the Robinson household are a game of musical beds. We all start off in the right beds but, by the morning, there is no telling who will be where.

Take last night. Husband and I went to bed about 10:30. At around 2:30am W appeared beside the bed, I lifted the quilt and he climbed in. Roughly an hour later, S cried out and I went and got in bed with her. 6:00am, husband got out of bed and went to work. I got back into my bed with W for an hour until our alarm buzzed at 7.00am and we all got up.

Sometimes, we move around on nocturnal autopilot, to the extent that you can’t actually remember what went on under cover of darkness. A couple of weeks ago I went to bed with my husband and woke up with my son. When I asked husband in the morning where he had spent the night, he looked at me blankly trying to remember. Five years ago, that may have been grounds for divorce.

Sleep is a very contentious issue and a subject, like religion and politics, which is best left undiscussed amongst friends. Many of my friends have very strong opinions on how, where and when children should sleep and would take a very dim view of my haphazard attitude. What can I say? I freely admit that I am too weak for controlled crying, too selfish for full on co-sleeping and too damn disorganised for a regimental bedtime routine. Actually, that’s a lie. I rarely admit to anything.

For these sins, I will be consigned to a broken night’s sleep for many years to come. I have read a wealth of books on the subject of children and sleep: searching for the magic formula which will mean my children will sleep all night, in their own beds, but I will not have to listen to them cry. Reluctantly, I am realising that such a formula does not exist. Well-meaning friends have told me that they will sleep better once they are walking, have all their teeth, have started school. For my little insomniacs, however, none of these lifestyle changes seem to make any difference whatsoever.

I am very fortunate to have a wonderful mother who often has my children for a sleepover so that I can catch up on a few sleep cycles. This reduces my zombie-like demeanour to something approaching normality. I start to be able to function normally, even managing to answer difficult questions such as ‘Do you take sugar in your tea?’ within 20-30 seconds.

Perhaps there is a subconscious reason that I have never managed to fully resolve their nocturnal shenanigans. As, despite the fact that I would dearly love a few night’s uninterrupted sleep, when I wake up in the morning with my son’s arms linked around my neck, or my daughter’s fingers twisted into my hair, I know that they won’t be climbing into bed with me forever and I cherish the moment. As they grow, the time they will want to spend cuddling with their mummy will decline. One day I will wish for these days to return, sleepless nights and all. Sometimes I hold the moment, breathe in their still baby-like smell and squeeze them tight in an effort to commit this feeling to my emotional memory bank.

Then I pack them an overnight bag for Nana’s house.