Old Before His Time

Oscar's talking is coming on in leaps and bounds, and he now uses full sentences which often sound like they should be coming from the lips of a 1940's public schoolboy (I have absolutely no idea how this happened). At his birthday party he was in full swing, telling everyone 'how lovely' it was to see them, and praising them on their choice of attire, which to me seems a bit quirky for a two-year old (but very sweet nevertheless). He hangs on every word that the grown ups around him are saying and repeats it back to them at a later date. He stood up after having his nappy changed last night, rubbed his back gingerly and said 'oooooh I'm sooooo stiff today'. It's probably a good thing that we have lots of visits from his little mates and he sees other children at playgroup, or we would be caring for someone with the body of a toddler and the brain of a slightly confused pensioner.

Play Away

Oscar now attends the village playgroup and is really enjoying it. We're getting some lovely artwork for our fridge, and I get to spend three whole hours up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand twice weekly. I feel incredibly fortunate that we have such a good facility in our little village. I love walking Oscar up to playgroup in the mornings along the wobbly church path (he likes to have a horsey ride on my shoulders), hang his little coat on his peg and see him dash off and have fun with the other children. He runs up to me after the sessions with a big grin on his face, invariably covered in mud, paint, playdoh and flour, and tells me all about his adventures. For the first time he is doing things without me in tow, which I guess is the first small step on the wobbly path to independence.

And for my next trick...

I think someone has slipped Oscar a Haynes Manual on How to Be a Two-Year-Old at some point when I wasn't looking. I suppose it shouldn't really come as much of a surprise to me that Oscar, being a toddler, is going to display pretty standard toddler behaviour. He is developing a repertoire of mind-blowingly frustrating, yet at times hilarious, quirks which require full-on attention, patience and physical strength to deal with, to name but a few:
1) He pushes things up his nose. Peas, raisins, bits of crayon, and if his own nasal cavities are full up, he tries to put things up mine instead. Oscar tells me very enthusiastically that he has a pea up his nose, as if I'll be pleased that he's found some handy extra storage space. Sometimes he tells me he has something up his nose when he hasn't, or that he hasn't when he has, which results in me having to peer up his nostrils with a torch looking for a vague hint of bright green.
2) He has tantrums. I think the fact that I've given birth to a child that is prone to epic tantrums is something that shouldn't have come as much of a shock. When I asked my mum to tell me what age I was when I stopped having tantrums, she said that she's still waiting patiently. Oscar has perfected the art of becoming almost impossible to pick up, get near to, or reason with during one of his little episodes. Carrying a screaming mini-McEnroe under my arm through Tesco's like a roll of carpet is having a rather negative impact on the state of my spine, as my osteopath will verify.
3) He doesn't like getting dressed. Oscar is currently of the opinion that it is perfectly sensible to go the park in November dressed in nothing but a nappy, one sock and a sunhat. Why is it that he can be so keen on one sock and hate the other one so much? Of course when it's time to get him undressed again then he's inseperable from all the clothes that he objected to hours earlier. He loves his new slippers though, because they have lights in them that flash when he stomps his feet. Is this the only way forward? Will I have to buy him singing trousers next?
4) He likes toddler food. Fishfingers, ketchup, and for special treats fishfingers and ketchup stuffed down the back of the sofa, scooped out, licked clean of fluff and stuffed up his nose.
5) He has more energy than a pack of cheetahs who have eaten a whole box of Chupa Chups. More experienced mums have advised me to enroll him in some classes to burn off some of his excess adrenaline. Does anyone offer baby base jumping in West Sussex?
6) He loves making a mess. If Oscar's clothes stay clean and dry for more than an hour we're having a very good day. When we've finished a crafts session on the kitchen table, it looks like Attilla The Hun has popped round for a spot of paintballing, and when his toddler chums come round, they detonate a massive toy bomb in our living room.
7) He says funny things. Oscar's talking really warrants a blog entry of its own, which I will probably get round to writing in about 2012. Needless to say he does an awful lot of it.
8) He has absolutely no grasp of the concept of having a nice quiet sit down.

Yet despite of (and probably partly because of) the above, I feel privileged and delighted to be able to spend each day with such an animated, smart, funny and loving little boy. I may be fit to drop by the end of each day, but I'm so very very lucky to be able to join in all the fun and games.

Moving swiftly on

As readers of Neil's blog will know, we've been pretty busy moving house and acclimatising to life away from the noise and bustle of London. I won't go into all the details here, but we feel we've definitely made the right move and it's very exciting to think we're now living in the house that, all being well, Oscar will spend the rest of his childhood in. And when he's sixteen and starts resenting us for making him live somewhere this quiet, we'll just pack him off to Brighton, which is twenty or so minutes down the road, to top up his urban grittiness. I'm living proof that parents are hard-wired to worry needlessly, as I'm now fretting that living somewhere this nice won't prepare him for the real world.

Oscar is, like every other toddler, completely self-obsessed and absorbed into his own little world of discovery. It's strange that a little person with so little ability to empathise with my feelings can make me feel so happy and make me laugh so much.

In a moment of sentimentality earlier today, I gave Oscar a big hug and whispered in his ear that mummy and daddy loved him so very much and would always love him, no matter what. He looked me straight in the eyes, slapped me on the cheeks in the style of Eric Morecambe, and said "more biscuits".

Brutal Honesty

Now that Oscar has begun to talk, I guess I should brace myself for a few embarrassing situations as he innocently points out observations that are usually tactfully avoided in adult conversation. He's showing early signs already but thankfully only at the expense of close family members. Oscar was fascinated by an ebony statue of a rather curvaceous naked tribeswoman at a friend's house last week. He toddled up to her, poked her in the belly and shouted 'DADDY!' very enthusiastically. My mum, according to Oscar, has a famous celebrity doppelganger. Oscar found a picture of the person concerned in the Radio Times and was most insistent that it must be her, jumping up and down and shouting 'Nana Nana Nana!'. I'm sure mum would have been very chuffed to be likened to Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. What a shame it was a photo of Bill Oddie.

Bad Hair Day

It must be great to be a toddler because almost every day you can get stupidly excited about a new 'first' (first ride on a tricycle, first time patting a horse, first drawing, first picnic, first trip to A&E department, etc.). I took Oscar for his first hair cut yesterday, and quite frankly after that experience, Neil can take him next time.
It was a spur of the moment decision; I was passing our local barber's shop and Oscar was beginning to show early signs of a mullet, so I took the plunge. The poor woman who carried out the cutting was having to resort to 'extreme hairdressing' - Oscar was thrashing about and screaming like I'd taken him to see Sweeney Todd. I have no idea how she managed to fashion his unruly mop into a neat style while he performed more head banging than the front row of an Iron Maiden concert, but miraculously she managed it, and Oscar left with the same number of ears as he had when he arrived.

A Different Beast

Oscar has just started to get interested in watching children's TV, and we switch the Idiot's Lantern on for 20 minutes or so first thing in the morning while he has his beaker of milk (which means N and I get a bit of time to remember which planet we live on before the day kicks in).
Whichever wonderful person at the BBC dreamt up CeeBeebies should be awarded the Nobel Prize - in my current position its usefulness ranks right up there with the wheel and the light bulb. I'm not suggesting kids should be left in front of the box all day long, but the odd fix of Teletubbies or Tweenies is pretty harmless as far as I'm concerned. It all seems so safe and cuddly, with its wholesome presenters and carefully planned out educational messages, and no chance of some unscrupulous advertiser slipping in a product placement for Turkey Twizzlers. Oscar sits on my knee at the crack of dawn each morning and bounces along to the theme tune of Balamory, and I must admit I've started to look forward to finding out 'what's the story' each day. I think N has developed quite a crush on Josie Jump. We really must get out more.
Watching new children's TV has made me realise just how far things have moved on since I was a nipper. When were insects replaced with 'mini beasts'? Did they go through some kind of Saatchi-style rebranding exercise when I wasn't looking? 'Take Hart' appears to have metamorphosed (excuse the pun) into a show that tells you how to take photos on your mobile phone, download them onto your laptop using Bluetooth and edit them in Photoshop. Poor Tony only had a gallery, and even that was really just his wall. The best bit of Kid's TV progress as far as I'm concerned has got to be that no child has ever got to sit through Metal Mickey ever again.

Oh Crumbs...

Oscar REALLY likes biscuits. Despite our efforts to get him to eat little bits of chopped up fruit and vegetables for snacks, he would far rather gorge himself on the little animal shaped biccies that live in our bread bin. These delicacies are made by the organic baby food manufacturers, and contain concentrated grape juice instead of sugar (which I suspect in nutritional terms doesn't make a blind bit of difference, but makes us parents feel less guilty). They're only teeny, just big enough for a toddler's fist funnily enough, yet they seem to have 'spreading ability' which Dulux could only aspire too. When mauled by Oscar for a minute or so, they transform into a sticky vomit-like gloop which gets stuck on everything. My entire life is currently covered in biscuit (which I believe is Parenting Stage 3, following Stage 1 - baby sick and Stage 2 - baby drool). I have found biscuit gloop stuck to my face, in nappies, underneath the car seat, in picture books, on the TV screen and in the lining of my coat. Oscar's face is permanently encrusted with the stuff, and nothing short of an industrial sand blaster will remove it (now there's an idea...). I was pushing Oscar round the high street this week and I could see childless people looking down their noses at 'crusty child in buggy'. I imagined them making mental notes to ensure their future offspring would always be kept immaculately clean. I wish them good luck with the brocolli florets, because quite frankly they'll need it.
Yeah, I know. I should just bin the biscuits and only offer 100% healthy snacks. I just need to decide whether I prefer my life to be covered in carrot or mange tout next.

Toddling along

I appear to be the mother of a fully fledged toddler. Oscar is walking! It began between Christmas and New Year with him taking the odd 'buzz lightyear' step (more like falling with style), and he has now moved on to staggering around the house like a drunken sailor, looking very pleased with himself indeed. Neil and I took him to be fitted for his first pair of shoes yesterday, which was a big event in the W-D calendar (he is size three-and-a-half 'F', for anyone interested - presumably the 'F' stands for 'Flipping expensive'...?)
It is not just the walking that earmarks the beginning of Oscar's toddler era. There are signs and clues everywhere. We appear to have a living room full of plastic beeping things (last year's blog entries that state that Oscar is content with playing with simple toys now seem cringeingly naieve). More food goes onto our kitchen floor than into Oscar's mouth, and he now scrapes his once eagerly devoured vegetables off his tongue as if they were sulphuric acid. He is permanently covered in a crusty layer of food, snot and household detritus (and screams blue murder if I try to get anywhere near him with a damp flannel). Despite abundance of beeping things, his best games ever are trying to empty the kitchen bin onto the floor, taking the tops off milk cartons, making the cereal dust in the bottom of the Shreddies box 'snow' over his head, squashing grapes into the sofa and sticking his fingers up his nose and offering the contents to Mummy. I have the world's worst 'poker face' and my poorly concealed sniggers just egg him on, but oh it's all so much fun! Although I could live with less baby snot.

One Year On and Counting...

Christmas is here again, and Oscar has just celebrated his first birthday with the obligatory presents, cards, balloons and a large slab of chocolate cake. My little boy is growing up fast, which leaves me feeling excited for the fun we will have next year, but just a little bit sad that my baby isn't going to be a baby much longer. We're slowly weaning him from breastmilk to cow's milk from a beaker, which I also have mixed feelings about. Cuddling up with Oscar while he has his milk before bed is my favourite time of day - we have a cosy bolthole in the corner of his room where we listen to music and escape from the world for half an hour - and both often end up drifting in and out of sleep. But Oscar's second year should see a change in the routine: bedtime stories, milk in a cup and letting Daddy share the bolthole now and then.
Instead of sleeping through Christmas dinner under a napkin as he did last year, I expect Oscar will share our festive food and hold court over the table from his highchair. Let's hope the crackers aren't too scary.