Things I love about my kids, part #852: How they totally ‘get’ me.

Sometimes I feel utterly at odds with the world. Honestly. Like everybody’s in a different mental timezone to me half the time. Whether it’s in-laws being crushingly selfish or friends competing in the World Boring Championships to see who can stay indoors and have the least fun, life can sometimes be frustrating.

I’m not judging these people. Well, not much. Okay, I am judging them. After spending years in the wilderness being a slave to the grind and becoming a dull, grey person as a result, I want to make every moment count.

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Dan’s greatest hits…

Kids get bumps and bruises all the time, but I’ve never seen a child so prone to danger as our youngest. Dan can injure himself in the blink of an eye, in situations that no-one else would expect. If it’s true that only an idiot refuses to learn from his mistakes, our baby is in big trouble indeed.

In his life so far, he’s notched up quite a few bumps and bruises, but the top three so far have been:

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So, how do they train dinosaurs to act?

Picture the scene. I’m sitting in our living room with Jake and we’re talking about our new abortive show, Terra Nova. If you’re not familiar with Terra Nova, it’s a series about a group of people who escape a wasted, polluted Earth to the dawn of the planet where they can found a new civilisation.

Anyway, I recently found out that FOX have cancelled the show, and wanted to break it to Jake that once we hit the season finale, there wouldn’t be any new episodes. Welcome to the eternal disappointment of the sci-fi geek, son. Never trust FOX to keep a good show running, etc.

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How our middle child is overcoming his shyness

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it on this blog, but our eldest son is painfully shy. Well, he was painfully shy. At one point, my wife suspected he had selective mutism, a condition where the child behaves normally at home, but outside the house they barely communicate at all. In front of other adults outside the family, Jake would rarely utter a word.

Lately he seems to be gathering more confidence. I’ve noticed such a change in him in the last twelve months. He’s always buzzing about things in his life – whether it’s his adventures at school, or his time in Cub Scouts, or even things that’ve popped straight out of his (incredibly fertile) imagination. In fact, he’s become an unstoppable chatterbox!

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Adventures in parenting #1: Giving them independence

One of the most difficult things we experience as parents is giving our children new freedoms and encouraging their independence. Especially when it concerns their safety.

After weighing it up, we decided to allow our oldest two to walk part of the way home together. Without us. Yikes!

Now, we don’t live too far from the school. It’s a ten minute walk at best, and a relatively close-knit community where everybody knows each other. We decided that the kids are safe enough up to the first main road they have to cross, so we agreed that they would leave school together two as a week and meet us at this road.

They had their first test run today, and it went really well. Dan and I left the house a few minutes later than normal and met the older two at the arranged place. I was not-so-secretly looking out for sensible behaviour: no racing, pushing, jostling or recklessness that might result in danger. And to be fair, both of them – and the friend they were walking along with – were exceedingly well behaved.

It was easy to see the effects of this little bit of independence. The pair of them met us with big smiles, clearly pleased to have been trusted to walk without parents for once. And speaking as a parent, it wasn’t a huge risk or worry for us, so it worked out for parents and kids alike. Especially for Ray, our eldest, it’s an important factor for her because when she moves on to secondary school, she’ll be bussing it to school in another town. So it’s important for her to get this taste of independence now.

What we the ways you start building your child’s confidence, and how do you feel with each little step on the road to growing up?

Metamorphosis

If you’re a longtime reader of this poorly updated blog, you’ll know that our lives went through some peculiar twists and turns in the last twelve months. 2011 was a turning point in our lives: in fitness, in focus and for the future.

I start with fitness, because Lisa and I both dropped an enormous amount of weight and started exercising. Our wardrobes changed as our waistlines contracted, and our self-confidence grew: partly due to being so successful at the seemingly insurmountable task of losing weight. Imagine you discover the self-discipline to lose 30kg – what else can you achieve when you put your mind to it? Of course we were also much healthier and feeling energised because of our new lifestyles.

The reason I titled this post “Metamorphosis” is because it feels like we’ve changed as a result of all this. The new energy is everywhere. I feel a revitalised love of life that makes me excited about the future again. I think Lisa feels it too.

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Blissful Autumn days out with the children

My wife and I are professional bloggers. It’s a fantastic job in that it allows us to work from home and the infinite flexibility that gives our family. The downside is that we work a lot more than you might imagine.

This becomes more of a problem at the weekends, because of the subject matter of our main blog, that’s when we’re most busy. So the dilemma for us is how do we give the children our attention while getting the work done?

Answer: divide and conquer. My wife stays at home and works on the site while I take the children for day trips and outings.

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Rachel At 10

My daughter – my eldest child – turns 10 years old in a few days.

Of course, she’s precocious beyond her years. Ten going on teenager, really. But I think it’s fun when they’re this age to sit and reflect on their journey. After all, it’s been a decade.

I remember when she was a baby, I’d come home from work in the afternoon and go for a nap with her. I’m sure it started off as me giving her mum a break, but we’d ultimately settle on the bed and she would fall asleep in the crook of my arm. It was a standing arrangement.

Of course all of that was in a different house, fifteen miles away, a decade ago. So much has changed in the meantime. She’s had two brothers. She’s joined classes. She’s made friends.

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Divorcing Mother: When your mother lets you down

What do you do when your mother is a disappointment? It’s not especially something you see covered in blogs or writing. Mothers are supposed to be practically perfect. Hold on, that’s Mary Poppins…

Sadly, I’m at the point where I’ve had to throw my hands up and admit that my mother has been a disappointment. This is not new information. In fact, when I left home for university back in 1995, it was mostly to escape her and the small town mentality that she represented.

When I was a child, she was quite wicked. Nothing I could do was ever good enough. She frequently compared me to a cousin (who ultimately ended up mostly failing at life), and had an endearing habit of beating us with wooden spoons when we got out of line. I distinctly remember wooden spoons actually breaking as the blows rained down on me.

Things changed after I went to university. It wasn’t commonplace in the extended family to go to uni, so it was a matter of pride that I’d got in. But not so much the notion that I’d moved away from home.

And eventually my mother effected an image shift from being bitingly cruel to being this dotty old grandmother figure. If you’d met her after I went to university, you’d have encountered a slightly vacant woman who seemed to thrive on embarrassing her son. And that was fine for many, many years.

The serious bit

Everything changed last year within a couple of months of my father dying. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll be familiar with the story.

Sadly, things quickly turned to crap. In hindsight, if I was able to go back to the graveside and tell myself one thing, it would be “Run. Run like hell.”

I’m not gonna go into the whole mess of a situation that arose. A family member (my sister) began acting out in a big way and caused a whole lot of trouble. I spoke to my mother and other sister about this, and urged them to deal with her behaviour. They didn’t, and she continued to cause problems.

The bottom line is that the person in question was becoming dangerous, and for the protection and safety of my family, we decided that we couldn’t visit my parents’ house in future. I’m not saying this lightly – ‘loose cannon’ doesn’t even begin to describe my sister. I could tell some horror stories, but that’s not the point of this post.

This decision – corroborated by doctors, solicitors and even a bereavement counselor I briefly consulted with – was not taken lightly. But it was met with hostility from my mother, who had slowly reverted to the bitter, sharp tongued woman I knew growing up. She alternated between feeling sorry for herself and being hostile towards me for taking this decision.

I’m painting a very vague picture here, but that’s a deliberate decision on my part. I couldn’t convey in a handful of paragraphs the pain and frustration my mother and sisters caused in the wake of my father’s death. It made an already sad situation needlessly worse.

The letter

So I wrote her a letter. She – and my younger sister – had taken to filling up my answerphone with messages asking us to get in touch. For the last fortnight. But the damage had long since been done.

Tellingly, these were not messages to say “We messed up. Sit down and talk with us and we’ll try and work this out.” They were “Poor us, how did we end up with this awful schism in our family?” And my answer – delivered in glowering mutters to the answering machine – was “Because you did nothing to stop a bad situation becoming worse. You simply pretended it wasn’t happening and then allowed the troublemaker back into your life without dealing with her.

I decided to write a letter. That letter said we can’t be a family anymore. You let us down. You let me down. And somehow you still don’t acknowledge your own part in the events leading up to this. You’ve let someone disrupt your family for 20 years. Someone who actually pushed my wife down stairs when she was pregnant and punched her own sister in front of two toddlers over a remote control.

I won’t expose my children to that ever again. And I can’t forgive my family for allowing those events to unfold and cause the pain that they did. You know what it is? I can’t look my mother in the face again for the betrayal and hurt that she caused. And yet she still perceives herself as a victim of circumstance, which makes me even angrier.

Why I’m writing this post

I’m sorry this post is so frustratingly vague. My reason for writing it is that the vastness of this episode in my life overshadowed everything else.

There have been events in my life that I want to write about, but I needed to get past this. Bloggers out there will understand that I needed to exorcise the demon before I could move on. This was a horrible, stressful, painful time in my life, and it hurt me more than I could ever express in one post. There’s a book’s worth of material in this. One post could never do the last year justice.

So I’m writing this to draw a line under a horrible chapter in my life. It’s over. It might seem harsh and melodramatic to tell your own mother never to call you again, but sadly it’s necessary.

On the plus side, there’s nothing like nastiness and adversity in others to make you realize how much you love your wife and children. They’re really been the most supportive and loving people over the last year, and I’m so glad to have them around me. The next post will be a glowing post about the children, I promise…

Happy Birthday Jakey! (or Seven Years Gone)

I have hazy memories of the day Jake was born. Most of it centers around me, in the afternoon, walking out of the hospital to a nearby KFC to get something to eat. Bizarrely, I can’t remember whether he was born at that point or not, just that the darkening skies chose that point to open. As I returned to the hospital, lightning flashed across the sky above the building, and heavy, warm rain started to descend on me.

I think I was wearing a white shirt, which implies that I’d gone to work that morning. Had I? I can’t recall. It’s shockiing how quickly the details start to get blurry.

It reminded me at the time of that episode of Only Fools and Horses where Del’s first son was born and Rodney was convinced that he was the devil. Especially when they called him Damien.

In the maternity ward, a photographer often comes around to take pictures of the newborns for their parents. In Jake’s first picture he looks like a little tough guy, eyes seemingly squinting up at the lens. Funny, that’s not how he turned out at all – he’s a sweet kid who’s battling what used to be a crippling shyness. He’s smart, funny, affectionate and handsome as hell. He’s absorbed with arts and crafts and every single day last year he returned from school with some paper invention he’d created in his breaktimes.

He’s just gone to bed, but he’s had a great birthday. On his second birthday, Jake actually hid under the dining room table and cried when his cake came out and friends and family sang Happy Birthday. That’s the kind of shyness that’s been typical of him up to now. But he’s becoming more confident, finding ways to make in-roads with new people and not being frozen in fear when he encounters new people.

This year, he was happy to be the center of attention and relished it whenever I bounced downstairs this morning and sang Happy Birthday to him. He even asked Lisa for an encore performance later in the day. And why not, it’s your day Jakey, you’re a wee sweetheart! Happy birthday, son.