Cave Mother wrote earlier this week about things that make our hearts melt. It was a very sweet post.
Yesterday as we were dancing around the kitchen I got a new one to add to my list.
Scarlett said, " Mummy is my best friend".
Made my day.
Friday, 13 November 2009
Monday, 9 November 2009
Grampy
I have been busy over the weekend dressmaking and sewing some gifts to sell at a local craft market next weekend. Not the easiest thing to do with a curious toddler around, so Scarlett had a day out with Daddy on Saturday and went cycling with Daddy and Grampy yesterday.
Now Grampy falls into the category of 'people to be slightly wary of'. There's no reason for this, it's just a little girl's uncertainty, so to see her head off with him with a big smile on her face was a pretty big deal for me.
It rained for most of the 12 mile trip, so they picnicked under the pine trees and came back chilly and damp but full of beans.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
it all happens so fast
I'm a real sucker for filling out forms, I can't help myself. So when we were given an envelope to take home playgroup today and I opened it to discover Scarlett's enrolment form for when she starts going alone in January, my first instinct was to grab a pen and start filling it in. Name, DOB, emergency contacts...
Upon further investigation I found an A4 booklet for us to fill in with Scarlett called 'All About Me'. Somewhere to record with words or pictures a little bit about herself - family, friends, favourite things to do, food she likes, things that upset her, and important medical information. The invitation to let her personalise the pages with her own drawings, coupled with the chance to add photos and fill in the questions got me very excited. What fun we are going to have.
And then I stopped and thought about it.
It's not long until Christmas and just after that off she'll go. She'll run in excitedly, barely remembering to kiss me goodbye. She'll play and laugh and chat. She'll listen to stories, eat her snack, sing and dance. She'll paint and glue, and make things. For three hours a day, twice a week.
Without me.
And before I know it she'll be at school.
I tucked everything back in the envelope and put it at the bottom of our 'to do' pile. Out of sight, out of mind. There's plenty of time for that later...
Upon further investigation I found an A4 booklet for us to fill in with Scarlett called 'All About Me'. Somewhere to record with words or pictures a little bit about herself - family, friends, favourite things to do, food she likes, things that upset her, and important medical information. The invitation to let her personalise the pages with her own drawings, coupled with the chance to add photos and fill in the questions got me very excited. What fun we are going to have.
And then I stopped and thought about it.
It's not long until Christmas and just after that off she'll go. She'll run in excitedly, barely remembering to kiss me goodbye. She'll play and laugh and chat. She'll listen to stories, eat her snack, sing and dance. She'll paint and glue, and make things. For three hours a day, twice a week.
Without me.
And before I know it she'll be at school.
I tucked everything back in the envelope and put it at the bottom of our 'to do' pile. Out of sight, out of mind. There's plenty of time for that later...
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
daddy time
When Dad's been away at bit it takes Scarlett a while to warm up to him again.
Just like this week. Monday morning he headed off to work early and stayed away overnight. Yesterday he returned home after bedtime. He was off again first thing today, so she didn't see him until he arrived back late afternoon.
His requests for hug and kiss were met with a stern 'No'. She didn't want to sit next to him at teatime.
An hour later I'm listening to squeals of delight as the two of them bounce on the bed, run giggling from room to room. Every once in a while I hear her busy little feet running towards me and her beaming smile appears at the door as if to check I'm listening. There's lots of chatter as they get pyjamas on and theoretically calm down for bedtime.
It's gorgeous!
Funny how the best quiet moments for me are the ones when the house is filled with noise.
Just like this week. Monday morning he headed off to work early and stayed away overnight. Yesterday he returned home after bedtime. He was off again first thing today, so she didn't see him until he arrived back late afternoon.
His requests for hug and kiss were met with a stern 'No'. She didn't want to sit next to him at teatime.
An hour later I'm listening to squeals of delight as the two of them bounce on the bed, run giggling from room to room. Every once in a while I hear her busy little feet running towards me and her beaming smile appears at the door as if to check I'm listening. There's lots of chatter as they get pyjamas on and theoretically calm down for bedtime.
It's gorgeous!
Funny how the best quiet moments for me are the ones when the house is filled with noise.
Thursday, 29 October 2009
I'm her biggest fan, forgive me
There are two things that people say about Scarlett - "That's a lovely smile" and "Doesn't she talk well".
Phew, I imagine these are genuine, complimentary statements with no subtext. It could be a lot worse. "She's full of beans isn't she." (I wish she'd stop climbing all over my furniture), "She knows her own mind" (Spoilt little princess). Then again maybe they would really just like her to be quiet...
The thing is she has a lovely little voice. Her pronunciation is exact, precise, as if her brain has been fine-tuning everything she hears. It feels deliberate, in the same way that a neat and tidy person would carefully place an item 'just so'. The latest thing is for her to ask me to repeat a new word or phrase until she's got it. "Mummy say it", and I can almost see her thinking about how to copy what I've said. Her delight at discovering new words is such a pleasure to me, the Oxford English Dictionary is on my list of top ten books, I love words.
I was trying to keep a kind of list of her vocabulary...last attempted back in the spring, but gave up pretty early on, it was so difficult to keep up. I know our ability to speak, to communicate our feelings and thoughts and ideas, starts in these early years but watching it happen is truly amazing. From single words to two, from strings of words to sentences - all this has come so fast.
It's something I want to capture somehow, keep forever, like a lock of her baby hair, her first pair of shoes. I have photos of almost every day, certainly a picture of every week of her life so far. I have a collection of cute baby clothes I can't part with. She has numerous toys which will become ornaments when she no longer plays with them. But already my memory of the detail of this incredible, burgeoning, blossoming, great life changing development is fading. Is secretly recording her a silly idea?
Her fluency means she is understood by almost everyone, almost all the time; able to express herself seemingly effortlessly. I am sure this is why our lives are relatively tantrum-free. Don't get me wrong, it's not that she doesn't show frustration or rage, it's just that when she does she tends to chant a word over and over (and over and over) rather than throw herself about. Equally maddening, less embarrassing.
When she looks at books by herself, or as she has just started to do 'read' them to someone else, sometimes the story is almost word for word what she has heard us tell over and over. Sometimes it's an approximation of the story, other times a brand new tale she's made up herself.
When we lie in bed at night, settling down to sleep we often talk about the day that's been. Our conversation will always follow the same pattern. I start by saying 'That was a lovely day wasn't it'. From then on, depending on how tired she is, I'll get a little story: where we went, who we saw, something funny or unexpected that happened.
A playleader recently commented that Scarlett's speech is exceptional. I think all toddlers' speech is exceptional, I find it just awe-inspiring that a gurgling baby learns to talk in such a short space of time. Not so long ago our babies were crying to tell us they were hungry, tired, too hot, too cold, and in the blink of an eye the room has filled with the happy chatter of our children.
Phew, I imagine these are genuine, complimentary statements with no subtext. It could be a lot worse. "She's full of beans isn't she." (I wish she'd stop climbing all over my furniture), "She knows her own mind" (Spoilt little princess). Then again maybe they would really just like her to be quiet...
The thing is she has a lovely little voice. Her pronunciation is exact, precise, as if her brain has been fine-tuning everything she hears. It feels deliberate, in the same way that a neat and tidy person would carefully place an item 'just so'. The latest thing is for her to ask me to repeat a new word or phrase until she's got it. "Mummy say it", and I can almost see her thinking about how to copy what I've said. Her delight at discovering new words is such a pleasure to me, the Oxford English Dictionary is on my list of top ten books, I love words.
I was trying to keep a kind of list of her vocabulary...last attempted back in the spring, but gave up pretty early on, it was so difficult to keep up. I know our ability to speak, to communicate our feelings and thoughts and ideas, starts in these early years but watching it happen is truly amazing. From single words to two, from strings of words to sentences - all this has come so fast.
It's something I want to capture somehow, keep forever, like a lock of her baby hair, her first pair of shoes. I have photos of almost every day, certainly a picture of every week of her life so far. I have a collection of cute baby clothes I can't part with. She has numerous toys which will become ornaments when she no longer plays with them. But already my memory of the detail of this incredible, burgeoning, blossoming, great life changing development is fading. Is secretly recording her a silly idea?
Her fluency means she is understood by almost everyone, almost all the time; able to express herself seemingly effortlessly. I am sure this is why our lives are relatively tantrum-free. Don't get me wrong, it's not that she doesn't show frustration or rage, it's just that when she does she tends to chant a word over and over (and over and over) rather than throw herself about. Equally maddening, less embarrassing.
When she looks at books by herself, or as she has just started to do 'read' them to someone else, sometimes the story is almost word for word what she has heard us tell over and over. Sometimes it's an approximation of the story, other times a brand new tale she's made up herself.
When we lie in bed at night, settling down to sleep we often talk about the day that's been. Our conversation will always follow the same pattern. I start by saying 'That was a lovely day wasn't it'. From then on, depending on how tired she is, I'll get a little story: where we went, who we saw, something funny or unexpected that happened.
A playleader recently commented that Scarlett's speech is exceptional. I think all toddlers' speech is exceptional, I find it just awe-inspiring that a gurgling baby learns to talk in such a short space of time. Not so long ago our babies were crying to tell us they were hungry, tired, too hot, too cold, and in the blink of an eye the room has filled with the happy chatter of our children.
Monday, 26 October 2009
days like these
I'd willingly forego hot summer days in July and August if we were guaranteed warm, sunshiny days in September and October.
Days like today when we've been outdoors most of the time, sitting on logs, kicking leaves, mushroom hunting, jumpers on, orange and gold all around us.
Thursday, 22 October 2009
joy juice
Before Scarlett was born I didn't have much contact with, or knowledge of, babies and children.
Whilst I was pregnant I knew all I needed to know about my developing unborn baby, avidly following week by week and month by month charts and chapters in books and on the internet, excitedly reading about which parts of her were growing, what she'd look like at each stage, how I might be feeling. I always had plenty of questions at my antenatal check-ups and I talked a lot to friends and my mum and sister, gleaning all the information I could.
And as for the birth itself, my brain was positively bursting with information and I knew exactly how I hoped it would go!
But what to do with the baby once she arrived, or how babies and children work...I was definitely lacking. The first thing I did when all my visitors left the hospital and I was alone with my newborn was ring for the nurse and say, "Everyone's gone, I don't know what to do now".
And I genuinely didn't. Scarlett was still swaddled in the blankets she'd been wrapped in immediately after delivery, all I'd done was hold her, adore her, gaze at her, watch her feed and adore her a little bit more.
Since then I've made child development my pet subject. I now rarely have time to read fiction; all of the books on the bedside table are about kids and parenting. I still don't claim to know that much, but I do know a good book when I see one.
It doesn't have a very inspired title, but this is a really accessible book about child development. It's full of information about the development of the brain, and the chemistry of happiness and stress, and being published by DK it contains lots of side bars, chapters summaries, bullet points, stand-out quotations and photos making it really easy to read.
There are chapters on crying, separation, sleep, behaving badly, discipline, love and looking after yourself. Everything is based on scientific study and makes great reading for any parent to be. If I'd read it before Scarlett was born I could have buried once and for all some of those doubts that have niggled away at us over the months. It's not a book that tells you what to do, so much as one that explains what's going on in the brain when a child experiences joy, love, positive responses - a flood of opioids and oxytocin making them feel great, or what happens when they are left to cry, deprived of close emotional contact with a parent, or not helped with their 'big' emotions like fear anxiety or rage - namely high levels of stress hormones making them feel terrible.
With the scientific back-up that this book offers I would never have worried that we were 'spoiling' our daughter. The thought that our approach to parenting is filling her with 'joy juice' is plenty to quieten those doubts.
Whilst I was pregnant I knew all I needed to know about my developing unborn baby, avidly following week by week and month by month charts and chapters in books and on the internet, excitedly reading about which parts of her were growing, what she'd look like at each stage, how I might be feeling. I always had plenty of questions at my antenatal check-ups and I talked a lot to friends and my mum and sister, gleaning all the information I could.
And as for the birth itself, my brain was positively bursting with information and I knew exactly how I hoped it would go!
But what to do with the baby once she arrived, or how babies and children work...I was definitely lacking. The first thing I did when all my visitors left the hospital and I was alone with my newborn was ring for the nurse and say, "Everyone's gone, I don't know what to do now".
And I genuinely didn't. Scarlett was still swaddled in the blankets she'd been wrapped in immediately after delivery, all I'd done was hold her, adore her, gaze at her, watch her feed and adore her a little bit more.
Since then I've made child development my pet subject. I now rarely have time to read fiction; all of the books on the bedside table are about kids and parenting. I still don't claim to know that much, but I do know a good book when I see one.
It doesn't have a very inspired title, but this is a really accessible book about child development. It's full of information about the development of the brain, and the chemistry of happiness and stress, and being published by DK it contains lots of side bars, chapters summaries, bullet points, stand-out quotations and photos making it really easy to read.
There are chapters on crying, separation, sleep, behaving badly, discipline, love and looking after yourself. Everything is based on scientific study and makes great reading for any parent to be. If I'd read it before Scarlett was born I could have buried once and for all some of those doubts that have niggled away at us over the months. It's not a book that tells you what to do, so much as one that explains what's going on in the brain when a child experiences joy, love, positive responses - a flood of opioids and oxytocin making them feel great, or what happens when they are left to cry, deprived of close emotional contact with a parent, or not helped with their 'big' emotions like fear anxiety or rage - namely high levels of stress hormones making them feel terrible.
With the scientific back-up that this book offers I would never have worried that we were 'spoiling' our daughter. The thought that our approach to parenting is filling her with 'joy juice' is plenty to quieten those doubts.
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