Bubble Boy

J-cub slept until an astonishing 9am this morning, probably helped by no alarms going off to wake us up, and only one nap yesterday (it was a 3 hour nap though, so I'll let him off). I managed to fall asleep around 2am, so actually feel a bit more like normal today.

We only had one nap again today, as he woke up late and so didn't go down until midday, sleeping through lunch and throwing everything out of whack. We've never tried to instigate a routine with him, but he's been pretty good at doing it himself, and I get a bit confused when things go haywire. Still, he's been lovely today, happy and climby and investigatory and shouty and fun.

Our day has been bubbly from start to finish; we played with bubbles this morning, which lead to lots of excited pointing and clapping and made Tilly pounce around with confusion. J-cub's book of choice for the day was a Meg and Mog board book, which has a nice 'Bubble bubble' spell in the middle, to make him giggle and continue our theme. And while he had his nap, we caught up on some telly (which felt so decadent, in the middle of the day), watching 'The Bubble' with David Mitchell which started about 6 weeks ago. We're rubbish at finding time to watch telly. It was very funny, and so nice for us to do something normal like drink a cup of coffee and watch an-almost-quiz-show during daylight.

Don't know about the future, that's anybody's guess

Just a quick one today, as I've done nothing of note other than try and get better, take Jamie to the GP so he can try and get better, and made a stupid mistake with the washing. What was I thinking, putting a brand-new, bright-red fleece rug in with the rest of the laundry?

The insides of J-cub's nappy wraps are now a delightful pink, although thankfully the nappies themselves are still pristine-white. A few of his t-shirts and vests also came out with a hint-of-pink, but I'm sure it'll just add to his charm.

Check out the wrap on the front line, third from the left. Doh.

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Today's Look Up photo comes courtesy of a battle with my camera, which has not been taking photos of the quality which I have come to expect. I've been fiddling with the settings all day, and getting nowhere, so I've switched it back to auto, stopped pretending that I can pass as a photographer, and taken some bog-standard shots.

The cherry blossom in our garden has exploded out of nowhere, it wasn't there 10 days ago, and it's just stunning. I've cunningly planted garlic all round the bottom to prevent the blackfly we are usually plagued with, and touch wood, so far it's working. I love Spring.

Happy Star Wars Day

I've elected to stay home from work today and tomorrow, so as not to pass on my lurgy to any other staff/children, and because when I start coughing, I just can't stop, and I'd rather that didn't happen when I'm tearing round a playground trying to keep within eyesight of a hyperactive 10 year old.

I was gutted when I woke up this morning and realised that my decision meant that a) I wouldn't be there on our first day in a new classroom, and b) I'd miss sharing May the Fourth style Star Wars jokes with the boy I work with (E), who has been obsessed with Star Wars for 5 years now. When I started working with him, he and I did not mesh well. We couldn't find any common ground, he resented me replacing his previous favourite therapist, I was too authoritative and found it hard to let go and be silly with him. Every day that I worked, I'd be met with cries of "No! Not you! You're fired!", and I'd have to carry him to our work area in the throws of a full-blown autistic tantrum, kicking, screaming, biting, and pinching me for the first hour or so until he'd given up trying to get rid of me. Our sessions were always peppered with attacks from toy swords and screwdrivers, threats to cut off my head or drill through my hand. He threw a table at me once.

About six months later, he saw The Phantom Menace for the first time. My husband Jamie is your typical born-in-1977, geeky Star Wars fanatic. I've seen all the films a thousand times since we've been together, and gradually grown to love them as much as he does, although I don't think I'll ever be quite as obsessive about the lore as he is. This education, though, meant that at a time when I drove home from work every day in tears, losing all hope of being able to work with and help a child who hated the very sight of me: all of a sudden, we clicked. He started talking about Star Wars. His verbal skills were very limited at the time, but when he found that I could describe scenes for him, and knew character names, and could differentiate ships for him, and had an arsenal of Star Wars toys, books, and merchandise at home which I could bring him to play with, I became, in behavioural therapy terms, a motivator for him. His eyes would latch onto mine whenever we had a conversation, rather than skittering away to stare at the branches of the tree outside the window over my shoulder. He would run to our work table when I called, rather than me having to pick him up and place him in the chair. His verbal skills started improving at an exponential rate, as he found something that he really, really wanted to talk about. He started greeting me with pleasure, and reading on the sofa after work was finished, I had a warm and cuddly boy cwtched up against me, rather than a child who couldn't bear me to touch him.

5 years later, he still loves Star Wars, although Doctor Who, the Beano, all Wii games, anything to do with space and astronauts all feature heavily too. 5 years of spending 30 to 40 hours a week with the same child mean that I miss him like crazy when I'm not working, in a way which you're absolutely supposed to distance yourself from in this kind of work, but which my stupid empathic nature has entirely prevented me from doing. I was on maternity leave last year, and so it's been 2 years since I've been able to be silly, and giggle, and make the same joke a hundred times in a day. And I'm really sorry that I missed today.

May the Fourth be with you, E.

Bank Holiday comes 6 times a year

I was so looking forward to having an extra day off this week, but we've ended up doing nothing more exciting than a huge Tesco shop. Luckily it wasn't too busy, as presumably other people are more profitably engaged by visiting friends and family, and eating barbecues, and doing DIY. Our next-door neighbour has been doing something to the other side of our fence all weekend, complete with sawing and banging and screwing and nailing, carefully timed to make the most amount of noise while J-cub is napping. I can't see what he's doing, which is driving me slightly crazy. I might have to go out tonight and rig up a series of mirrors and torches to get a good look (not that I'm nosy, but it being OUR fence too, I feel like I should be privy to what's going on).

Our neighbours on the other side have bought a big trampoline with those netting-fency-side things, for their 2.5 year old daughter. Every time I'm outside there are wails of "Daddeeee, Daddeee, lemme out!", then the sounds of velcro being undone, then two seconds later ... "Daddy, I get back in now? Just 3 more bounces? Please?". At around 4pm yesterday, she started calling "Daddy, it's getting a bit dark. I scared. Come out now?". After letting her out and in again about 6 times, pointing out each time that the sun was still high in the sky and it was nowhere near dark, she started crying "Daddy, I can't see you! It's so dark, time for bed!". Bless her.

I managed to get a bit of gardening done yesterday, planting sweet pea seedlings and sowing oregano seeds. I glanced out the back when we got home today to see Tilly asleep in one of the planters, squashing the seedlings and preventing the seeds from even thinking about growing. A quick trip outside with the watering can soon prevented a reoccurrence.

Finally, a quick update on my health. I'm feeling okayish while awake, but still struggling to sleep. I fell asleep well after 3am this morning, but slept for a delicious 8 hours. Thank God for Bank Holidays and husbands who don't mind getting up with the baby. I actually managed to sleep through J-cub waking up at 7, having fun downstairs, coming back up for his nap, having a 2 hour nap, then waking up and going downstairs again. I woke up at 11.45am. It was bliss ;)

Whilst trying to stop coughing long enough to sleep in the early hours of this morning, I whiled away my time reading back through my first few months of blogging, mostly comprising list items. It made me feel even more like I want to start again, so I'm starting to pull a list together. I'm thinking of starting sometime in the next month, so I can finish around my birthday (at the end of August). Well, try to finish. Maybe I'll be more successful this time!

Here's my Look Up photo for the day - J-cub loves the lights and signs hanging from the ceiling in our massive Tesco Extra, and there's often a few birds flying around for added interest. I don't know what had caught his gaze here, but it was very exciting.

Self-pity

I'm currently suffering from a sinus infection, which has caused my asthma to go bananas and my airways to shut down with frightening regularity. I went to the GP on Friday, faced with a Bank Holiday weekend ahead of me and several empty inhalers, and following a night of constant struggling for breath and very little sleep.

The lovely GP gave me some new inhalers, some steroid tablets, antibiotics for my sinuses and a nebuliser to help me calm down and get as much of the good stuff into my lungs as possible. Having pumped myself full of drugs on Friday, I had a much better night, managing to sleep from midnight to 4am, and then 6am til 10am (lovely Jamie got up with J-cub, despite him also having the sinus stuff going on). (The reason for me being up at 4am was because I woke coughing, popped a Strepsil in my mouth, and then took a puff of my inhaler. And swallowed the Strepsil whole. Doh! I had to get up to make sure I wasn't going to die and then I couldn't get back to sleep).

Last night, however, was a repeat of Thursday night, with me not managing to stop coughing long enough to fall asleep until well after dawn broke. I was up again at 9am to take all my meds, and then spent several hours back in bed, trying to make up for my post-5am bedtime.

The consequence of all this (apart from getting to indulge in a lot of self-pity) is that we really haven't done anything all day. It's been a day of trying to encourage J-cub to entertain himself, which thankfully he is very adept at.

He's all about the sense of touch at the moment, he loves to follow up his pointing with a careful one-fingered touch of whatever he's looking at, which might extend into a full-palmed touch and even a grab-and-hug-to-his-cheek if the item is particularly lovely. When my mum came to stay last week, she brought a large square of gorgeous red fleece for me to make nappy liners out of. I only needed a small strip off one end for that, so the rest of it was left as a lovely soft floor mat. J-cub loves fleece more than anything - when we put fleece mats on the floor he spends his time alternating between gently touching it, doing downward dog, and having a full face-down rest so as much of his skin as possible is touching the mat.

We arranged the mat on the floor and set up stations of toys around the edge, and he delighted us by crawling around, selecting the toys he wanted, then taking them one by one to the centre of the mat to sit and play with them. Cups featured heavily, as did his 1st birthday balloons which are still going strong.

I took tons of photos, and many fulfil my 'Look Up' brief, so I've stored some away for days when I forget. I love this photo, it captures him perfectly: sitting with his ankles crossed, holding cups, wide-eyed and incredulous.

Look Up

I'm feeling the need for a bit of a blogging project. I'm really starting to miss my list, and have been thinking about starting a new list, or a new hundred-days project, but making it more achievable and a little less full of pressure.

Tammy at The Heartful Blogger has started a hundred-days list, and she has inspired me to seriously think about what I need to get done, and to pull a list together. I've also been doing some items from my original list, and I'll get round to blogging about them soon. I'm still undecided as to whether I should start a new list to cross them off from, or whether to cross them off the original list. Any thoughts? Not that it matters really, but I do feel like I've drawn a line under my original project and it would be nice to start something new (and achievable).

In the meantime, I'm going to try and blog every day in the month of May, and have signed up to National Blog Posting Month to give me impetus to keep going. The theme for May is 'Look Up'. I initially misread it and thought it was just 'Up', which I found more interesting. So I might be playing with it a bit.

For now though, J-cub is playing along nicely. He has learnt to point, and is fascinated with light fittings. In our spare room, we have a nasty whirly ceiling fan, which was in place when we moved in and is far too complicated to attempt replacing, even though the actual light part of it is crap and we barely use the fan itself. J-cub loves it though, and got very excited when we turned it on for him today.

Real Nappy Week 2010

I'm a bit late with this post, as there are only two days left of Real Nappy Week. Still, that's two days left for you to act and get yourselves some freebies and discounts. Lots of online cloth retailers are offering 10-20% discounts using the code RNW10, and there are competitions galore to win everything from single wraps to full birth-to-potty packs worth upwards of £250.

We're so happy with our decision to go cloth, it's been about a month now and he's in cloth at all times except for over night. Nursery are happy with them, and though it means packing and taking an extra bag every day, the extra effort is worth it. I very nearly didn't bother asking them, as they already think I'm enough of a weirdo as it is, but I happened to overhear another mum telling the staff that her daughter only had disposables that day as she was in a rush, so I was brave and asked them to change.

Our only problem is that we don't have quite enough nappies, we bought 14, and had a couple of freebies. All except one of the freebies don't fit him well, so we have 15 nappies in regular circulation. With drying time, that really means that we need to be washing half way through every other day, otherwise we run out. I've tried Freecycle, I've tried netmums, and ebay, and usednappies.co.uk, and the Cloth Nappy Tree, but there seem to be no freebies to be had, and good quality secondhand nappies can go for almost as much as brand new ones. As I want to use these nappies for any subsequent children, I'd rather have new so they last longer. And so I thought Real Nappy Week would be an ideal time to find some bargains to add about 5 nappies to our stash.

Whilst dredging round all the myriad of online retailers, trying to find the biggest discount/best offers, I also entered some 'Freebies not Discounts' competitions run by TotsBots. I logged onto facebook a couple of evenings ago to see a post saying "BETH WOODS come on down!!!! Send me your address and I'll send you you 5 pack of easyfits..... :-DDD"!

I've never won anything in my life, and I was so excited, especially as the prize is exactly what we needed. I have a moral compass which stops me from entering competitions where the prize is something I don't need (like a total set of nappies - I already have an almost-complete-set so would feel guilty taking a prize away from someone who would really appreciate it) or don't want (like a holiday to Ibiza or somewhere equally hot and clubby). I can't wait to receive my nappies now, so we can try them out and see how they compare to the MEOS. We already have a TotsBots wrap (see picture, above) which I love, although I need to get better at remembering to close the aplix fastening before I put it in the washing machine.

Anyway - that's all from me, I just wanted to share my excitement and encourage you to go out there and get saving/winning if your stash is in need of any supplementation. Feel free to add any further bargainous discounts you've found in the comments section.