Good Enough Mum

Miss Dose, the doctor's daughter

In September, Katie will be starting school. The school have a rather well worked out induction period involving visits first with a parent and then without, and the filling out of a booklet about her likes, dislikes, attributes, and abilities, including some questions about basic knowledge such as ability to name shapes, colours, and body parts.

"Katie," I told her, "your new school wants to know if you know any bits of the body. Can you think of any?"

She thought about this carefully.

"Skeleton?" she suggested.

Give her time; by the end of primary school I expect I'll have her up to scratch on the full list of internal organs.

Ah, the warm glow of being viewed with awe and respect

A few weeks ago, Katie's nursery school was doing a theme on 'People Who Help Us', and asked me to come and say a few words to the tots about my chosen profession. Having done this before for both reception classes at Jamie's school and for Katie's other nursery (she's at two - long story) I agreed quite equably, turned up, gave the assembled preschoolers a few minutes of discourse on how my job helps others, and showed them my stethoscope. (More accurately, I showed them the stethoscope I'd borrowed from one of the practices I work for, my own having gone AWOL.)

"Doctors help us," my daughter mused to me later on, "so we need you. Even though you don't know as much as Daddy."

Charming. Reminds me of the time when Barry first went back to work, and was telling Jamie about what was required in becoming an engineer. "You have to pass lots of exams," he explained, "which means you have to answer a lot of questions to see if you know the answers to them. Then you have to go to university and do lots more exams."

"I think," Jamie mused to me later that evening, "I'll be a doctor when I grow up. Because I don't know the answer to very many questions."

Life with my son

Welcome to the March 2012 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting With Special Needs

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how we parent despite and because of challenges thrown our way. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

 

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For the second time, I'm taking part in the Carnival of Natural Parenting despite not considering myself a Natural Parent, in response to a topic that happened to be relevant to my unnatural self as well.  The topic this month is 'Parenting With Special Needs'.

My son Jamie, now aged seven, is autistic.  He's not what you might think of when you think of an autistic child; he doesn't spend his days sitting in corners rocking unresponsively, locked into his own little world.  He's fully verbal, attends a mainstream school, and loves to tell you about his computer games, cooking, and the things he's learning about space and planets at school this term.  But, if you met him, you'd pretty soon notice some unusual things about the way he acts. 

When I say that he loves to tell you about his computer games, that doesn't really cover it; he will talk incessantly about his computer games, and, while I appreciate that this is within the bounds of normal behaviour for a seven-year-old, the way that he does it isn't.  He'll describe the game in obsessive detail without ever giving you any sort of general explanation of what it's about, unable to see the wood for his focus on every tree.  If you try to stop his monologue to do something else it will freak him out.  So will any attempt to stop him when he's fixated on an idea or way of doing something (including an idea that someone else in his life should do something in a particular way).  It's often not obvious in advance when that is - he's not one of those children who need every little detail of the routine always to be the same, but, when he has got it into his head that things should go a particular way, any expectation that he change his plans without warning will cause all hell to break loose.  He doesn't really understand how the way he acts can affect the feelings of others.  He doesn't really get the normal social conventions that other people pick up easily enough to take for granted.  He manages at school only with full-time one-to-one assistance from a teaching assistant and a lot of flexibility on the school's part about how much of the curriculum he actually does. 

Communication can be a problem because, while Jamie superficially seems to have very good verbal skills, but it really isn't the way that he most easily takes things in, and I've had huge problems with getting his attention to ask him or tell him things.  This can be extremely frustrating, all the more so because he seems able to understand perfectly well when he wants to and it's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking he's just being naughty and ignoring me.  But he isn't; he genuinely has a problem processing what he hears, and the fact that he often does manage to deal well with that problem doesn't change the fact that it is a problem.  He's a lot better at it than he used to be, but it will never be the easiest way for him to take things in.

The key, with this, has been to write things down.  Whether it's something as simple as the choices available for lunch (for a good while, I had a standard menu saved on my computer to print out a list of choices from which he could pick) or a more complicated issue that needs a social story to help him understand what he should be doing, writing rather than talking has been a huge help.  It seems appropriate; my husband and I met on a social group on the Internet, and now, twelve years later, here we are communicating with our first-born child in writing.

I've written before about my attempts at trying positive discipline with my children.  Jamie's difficulty in communicating his wishes definitely made this harder at first.  Before I'd ever heard the term 'positive discipline', I'd devoured Faber and Mazlish's 'How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk', with their description of solving discipline problems by presenting the dilemma to the children in an empathetic way ("Oh, no!  You and your sister both want to have the yellow cup!  Looks like you both really want it!  What can we do?") thus inspiring the child to come up with his or her own answers.  I loved the idea and looked forward eagerly to trying it out with my own children as soon as they were old enough (I read it when Jamie was a toddler).  But, for a long time, it was an absolute non-starter for Jamie - he would carry on screaming with no concept whatsoever of the possibility of trying to solve the problem, leaving me wondering unhappily what I was doing wrong.

(I eventually found Ross Greene's books 'The Explosive Child' and 'Lost At School' to be useful reading here, although they aren't about autistic children; they're about working with children who don't have the normal social skills and do need a lot more prompting through the whole problem-resolving process than the children in the 'How To Talk...' examples.  They didn't teach me anything very new about the process, but the books did help me to realise that it was OK for my son to need quite a bit more guidance through the procedure, and that doing so was helping rather than stifling his development in this area.)

But, as the years have gone by and Jamie has matured further, I've found that problem-solving is starting to work.  It's working more often in the short term, and, little by tiny, tiny bit, he's picking up more of the skills of self-control and conflict resolution that I want him to learn in the long term.  And, as I've learned more about the principles of positive discipline, I've realised that they are, if anything, even more important with my son.  Instead of seeing unwanted behaviour as 'naughty' and something to punish him out of, I've learned to see it as his lack of ability to behave appropriately, and his need for more teaching and guidance.  Or as his response to the stresses that freak him out and that I need to learn to understand.  Often when Jamie acts in a way that seems 'naughty' or inappropriate, it's because some seemingly ordinary part of life is freaking him out in a way it wouldn't freak out another person, or because, for all his verbal ability, he's just not very good at explaining his feelings to us. 

I remember one occasion, a couple of years back, when, in the middle of a screaming fit, he made up a rule that Katie and I weren't allowed in the living room.  I don't remember the exact rule - I think he defined a narrow age range that was permitted in and that would have excluded both me and Katie while including him - but I do remember him screaming it at us, screaming over and over "You are not allowed in the living room!  Get out!"  I was outraged - how dare he try to make up rules about who was or wasn't allowed in a room of the house that we all shared?  And then I suddenly thought about what it must be like to be a little boy with autism who really needed a few minutes on his own, just a bit of space, but who wasn't good at explaining his feelings in words and was feeling too overwhelmed by life right now to phrase his reasonable request in a socially acceptable way.

"Jamie," I asked him, "do you mean that you want to be on your own in the living room for a bit?"

"Yes," he said a bit more calmly.

"Then the way you say it is 'Could you please leave?'"

He repeated the phrase, and I scooped up Katie and left.  Because, after all, once I'd got past the way he was asking to what he was asking, it was a perfectly reasonable request; heaven knows I've needed a few minutes (or hours) on my own for down time in the past.  He simply hadn't known how to ask for it without having a meltdown.  By understanding where he was coming from, I'd been able to help him with the skill he needed.  (And, after that and other similar occasions, he's since then been able to echo the phrase back when it's needed at least some of the time.)

Life with Jamie feels normal to us because it is what's normal to us.  It's just the way our parenting experience has been.  Maybe it would have felt different if we'd had Katie first and were always comparing Jamie to a memory of a neurotypical (the autistic word for 'non-autistic') child of the same age, but, as it is, we pretty much take his differences in our stride and figure out ways to work with them or work round them.  Parenting is about accepting, respecting, and working with your child's strengths and weaknesses.  Parenting Jamie, with his particular and less common strengths and weaknesses, is just the variation of that principle that we have in our lives.

People so often hear 'disability' or 'autism' as dark scary words warning of dire fates, but to me, those words have always been positive.  They're words that open up new worlds of interest to be explored, worlds that hold some of the keys to understanding my son and to understanding more about people anyway.  And they're words of comfort and reassurance; the words that told me - and still tell me, in times of doubt - that Jamie's differences and difficulties aren't due to any failing on my part as his mother, that they're not evidence of anything I should be doing differently or more of or less of.  They're words that have freed me to understand him as he really is.

Being Jamie's mother is often difficult, usually interesting (apart from the whole listening-to-monologues-about-computer-games bit, which is mind-numbingly boring), often challenging, frequently fun, and nearly always exciting and intriguing.  And writing all of that kind of feels like a 'Duh', because, well, isn't that what being anyone's mother is like?  Obviously, if the genetic shuffle had dealt me a neurotypical child for my first as well as my second then my overall parenting experience would have been rather fundamentally different, but I'm glad that wasn't how things ended up; I like having one child of each variety, one with whom I can have a fairly normal parenting experience and one who's stretched my experience and my ways of seeing the world into new and interesting shapes.  Our story isn't a story of tragic struggle or heroically overcoming the odds or finding new meaning in life - none of the traditional themes for Disability Stories.  It's just about my two children - one disabled, one not - and about how grateful I am to have such a funny, interesting, challenging, lovable, wonderful little boy and girl in my life.

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Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be live and updated by afternoon March 13 with all the carnival links.)

• Parenting A Child With Neutropenia — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama discusses the challenge of parenting a young child who cannot produce enough neutrophils to fight off bacterial infections.
• How I Love My High Need Baby — Shannon at GrowingSlower was shocked to find she is parenting a high-needs baby, but she's surviving thanks to attachment parenting.
• We're a Lot Like You — kaidera at Our Little Acorn talks about how her family is similar to others, even with all their special needs
• The Emotional Components of Bonding with Preemies — Having a premature baby can bring on many unexpected emotions for parents, but working through those emotions can bring about a wonderful bonding experience. Adrienne at Natural Parents Network shares.
• Raising a babe with IUGR: from birth through the toddler years — Rachel at Lautaret Bohemiet shares the story of how her son’s post-birth IUGR diagnosis affected his first days of life and gave her an unexpected tutorial in advocating for their rights as a family.
• When a grandparent has a disability — Shannon at Pineapples & Artichokes shares how she has approached explaining her mother's disability to her young child.
• Taking The Time To Really See Our Children — Sam at Love Parenting writes about her experiences working with children with various disabilities and how it has affected her parenting style.
• Natural Parenting In An Unnatural Environment — Julie at What I Would Tell You gives us a glimpse into how she improvised to be a natural parent against all odds.
• Getting Through the NICU — Laura at Authentic Parenting gives a few pointers on how to deal with your newborn's stay in the NICU.
• Living With Sensory Processing Disorder — Christy at Adventures in Mommyhood talks about the challenges that can come from living with a child who has SPD.
• Our rules for NICU - March Carnival — Hannabert's Mom shares her family's rules for family and friends of a NICU baby.
• Letter from Mineral's Service Dog — Erika at Cinco de Mommy imagines the letter that accompanies her special needs son's Service Dog.
• Blessings in Unexpected Places — That Mama Gretchen welcomes an inspiring guest post from a dear friend who shares about the blessings that come from a child with Down syndrome.
• Tube Feeding with a Blenderized Diet of Whole Foods — Erica at ChildOrganics shares her experiences with using real food when feeding her daughter who was unable to feed herself and needed a feeding tube.
• Abbey and Evan — Amyables at Toddler In Tow writes about watching her preschooler play with her friend who is autistic and deaf, and wonders how she can explain his special needs better.
• How to Minimise the Chance of a {Genetically Prone} Child Being Diagnosed with ADHD — Christine at African Babies Don’t Cry shares her tips on keeping a child who is genetically prone to ADHD from suffering the effects.
• Tough Decisions: Parenting With Special Needs — Brenna at Almost All The Truth shares what has been keeping her up at night worrying, while spending her days discovering just what her options are for her precocious child.
• Life with my son — For Dr. Sarah at Good Enough Mum, life with an autistic child is just another variation on the parenting experience.
• Dear Special Needs Mama — Sylvia at MaMammalia writes a letter of encouragement to herself and other mamas of special needs children.
• His Voice — Laura at WaldenMommy relives the day her son said his first sentence.
• What is 'wrong' with you' The challenge of raising a spirited child — Tara at MUMmedia discusses the challenges of raising a child who is 'more' intense, stubborn, and strong willed than your average child.
• Tips for Parenting a Child With Special Medical Needs — Jorje of Momma Jorje shares her shortlist of tips she's learned in parenting a newborn with special medical needs in a guest post at Becoming Crunchy.
• Parenting the Perfectionist Child — Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children discusses that as parents of gifted children, we are in the unique position to help them develop the positive aspects of their perfectionism.
• Montessori-Inspired Special Needs Support — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now gives a list of websites and blogs with Montessori-inspired special-needs information and activities.
• Accommodating Others' Food Allergies — Ever wonder how to handle another family's food allergies or whether you should just skip the play date altogether? At Code Name: Mama, Dionna's friend Kellie (whose family has a host of allergies) shares how grateful she is when friends welcome them, as well as a list of easy snacks you can consider.
• Only make promises you can keep — Growing up the child of a parent with a chronic illness left a lasting impact on Laura of A Pug in the Kitchen and what she is willing to promise for the future.
• A Mom and Her Son — Jen at Our Muddy Boots was fortunate to work with a wonderful family for several summers, seeing the mother of this autistic son be his advocate, but not in the ways she thought.
• Guest Post from Maya at Musings of A Marfan Mom — Zoie at TouchstoneZ is honored to share a guest post from Maya, who writes about effective tools she has found as a parent of two very special boys.
• You Don't Have to Be a Rock — Rachael at The Variegated Life finds steadiness in allowing herself to cry.
• When Special Needs Looks "Normal" — Amy at Anktangle writes about her experience with mothering a son who has Sensory Processing Disorder. She offers some tips (for strangers, friends, and loved ones) on how to best support a family dealing with this particular neurological challenge.
• Special Needs: Limitation or Liberation? — Melissa of White Noise describes the beauty in children with special needs.
• How I Learned It'll Be Okay — Ashley at Domestic Chaos reflects on what she learned while nannying for a boy with verbal delays.
• Attachment Parenting and Depression — Shannon at The Artful Mama discusses how attachment parenting has helped her get a clearer image of herself as a parent and of her depression.
• On invisible special needs & compassion — Lauren at Hobo Mama points out that even if we can't see a special need, it doesn't mean it's not there.
• Thoughts on Parenting Twins — Kristin at Intrepid Murmurings shares her approach to parenting twins.
• ABCs of Breastfeeding in the NICU — Jona at Breastfeeding Twins offers tips for establishing breastfeeding in the alphabet soup of the NICU.
• Life With Michael - A Mother's Experience of Life With Aspergers Disorder — At Diary of a First Child, Luschka's sister-in-law Nicky shares her experience as mother to a child on the Autism Spectrum. It is filled with a mother's love and devotion to her child as an individual, not a label.
• Raised by a Special Needs Mom — Momma Jorje shares what it was like growing up as the daughter of a mother with a handicap.
• Becoming a Special Needs Mom — Ellen at These Broken Vases shares about becoming the mother of a child with Down syndrome
• She Said It Was "Vital" — Alicia of Lactation Narration (and My Baby Sweets) discusses the conflict she felt when trying to decide whether therapy was necessary for her daughter.

Revenant

Given that the whole point of struggling through NaBloPoMo was to overcome my writer's block and get me posting more, you'd be forgiven for thinking at this point that it really wasn't worth the trouble, given how scanty my posts have been lately. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened; first there was the scramble to sort out all the Christmas preparations that I should have done weeks earlier combined with trying to get that mammoth post about bedsharing risks written on my other blog, then there was the Great Bedtime Nightmare of the Christmas holidays where the children's always-shaky journey towards bedtime disintegrated completely under the weight of holiday excitement and one, other, or both of them would take until midnight or later to get to sleep every. bloody. night. that holiday, then shortly after I got that improved somewhat Jamie got worms and his sleep went haywire again, then I was trying to actually spend a bit of time with my poor husband after all those shattered evenings, then I'd got out of the habit of blogging, and suddenly here I am two months later with nothing written other than one post about Nativity plays and one about sex workers' rights.  (At least the content makes up in eclecticism for what it lacks in quantity.)

So, what's been happening?  I really do need to get back to posting the snippets more regularly, even if not on a daily basis this time; without that, life with the kids blends into a sort of general fog of thrilled contentment at their general wonderfulness laced with frustration at what little devils they can be when it suits them.  Some specific moments:

When it snowed, a few weeks ago, I showed Jamie the white-blanketed world from the window when he woke up.  "It's really cool that Great Britain decided to do that," he commented.

...........

Katie: "What's sawdust?  Does it come from a sword?"

...........

Jamie (who has been learning about the solar system at school, and also, as luck would have it, has a placemat at home with facts about the different planets on it): "Saturn is really big, and it's got 61 moons!"

Katie (whose placemat shows a map of the world): "Russia's really big also, and it's got THIRTEEN moons!"

............

Me, to Jamie: "I was born in 1970."

Jamie, surprised: "How do you remember that?"

 

'Tis the season

It's been a blur of last-minute on-line orders, frantic scribbling of cards, and vows to do Flylady's 'Cruising Through The Holidays' scheme next year like I should have done (hang on a moment - didn't I make that same vow before?) but I did, finally, get enough Christmas preparations done in time.  And, after that, Christmas itself was wonderful.  Barry's family were staying so I had people to fob the kids off on while I curled up for two blissful days of indulging in books and chocolate.  And, yes, I did emerge for long enough to help with meal preparation, but Barry did the bulk of that, producing a magnificent Christmas feast and some decent recipes for the leftover turkey this week. 

For the Nativity this year, Jamie's school gave a performance of 'The Supersonic Lamb', which, like 'The Hoity-Toity Angel' the previous year, followed the theme of 'Conceited being journeys to stable and, as a result, learns valuable life lesson about importance of not being conceited'.  As Jamie's in Year 2, he got to have a speaking part this year instead of just being part of the chorus, and chose to be one of the three kings.  We did have a minor crisis at one point when he decided, after everyone had learned their parts and it was far too late to change, that he wanted to be an old sheep instead and if he couldn't do that he wasn't going to be in the play at all - when I heard that I was all, good grief, child, even Edward VIII required rather more inducement than that to make him give up on kingship and, by the way, if you feel that way I happen to have this rather nice mess of pottage here which I'm willing to trade for the very reasonable price of only one birthright and would I be right in thinking that you might be interested... but, in fact, when I saw the production I did see where he was coming from on this, as the old sheep actually had really important parts.  (They had a dispenser-of-wisdom role, repeating the play's moral - "It doesn't matter at all whether you're first or last, just as long as you try your very hardest" - at frequent intervals throughout.  The kings had a couple of lines and one song.)  Anyway, after some persuasion all round Jamie reconciled himself to being a king.  And a very fine job of it he made, standing up there in his cloak and crown and joining in the lines and the song with the rest, and I wiped away a happy tear or two as I watched.

Katie's nursery had a short sing-song of children's carols and Christmas songs, which Katie had great fun singing around the house for days beforehand, occasionally with the conventional words but more often with her own misinterpretations and/or cheerfully scatalogical changes of the lyrics mixed in.  At one point, collecting the blocks of the marble run I'd been trying to put away, she told me they were food that we had to take to Away In A Manger's house to make the Baby Jesus lie down.  We were supposed to put her in a Christmas-themed costume, but when Barry found an angel costume in Sainsbury's for her she insisted she wanted the ballerina one instead - I came up with the idea of putting her in that and saying she was the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, but, when I told Katie that plan, she insisted that she was a ballerina.  And, no, not the Sugar Plum Fairy either (my next idea) - a ballerina.  (I did not succeed in explaining to her that the Sugar Plum Fairy is danced by a ballerina.)  So, a ballerina she was - I figured (correctly) that no-one was going to turn her away from the nursery carol concert because her costume was inadequately Christmasy to be allowed in.  Anyway, it was better than Buzz Lightyear, which had been her initial suggestion.

On the day itself, Katie squealed in delight at all the new Duplo she could add to her collection and sneaked Pringles and chocolates throughout the day, and Jamie accepted his new gifts with equanimity and spent the day playing his various electronic games both new and old.  And I enjoyed my time off, dived into my stack of new books, and am feeling quite refreshed and at least somewhat ready to face whatever the new year may bring.

Finito

I heard noises in the hall above as I was finishing my breakfast and thought ah, good, Jamie's woken up before I came to get him and that'll mean one fewer child to roust out of a sound sleep, which will save time.  So I finished my last few bites and went upstairs and discovered that Katie had apparently translocated to the hallway, bedding and all.  She must have woken up and decided to drag her duvet and pillow out into the hallway and make a bed for herself there, and there she was, all snuggled up.  I wish I'd thought to get a photo.

Since I had today off, I'd expected it to be one of my easiest NaBloPoMo days, something to look forward to during all the days on which I struggled mightily to find time; if I could find time for the first twenty-nine, I'd be home free for the thirtieth.  The strike, of course, put a crimp in that - Jamie's school was closed and, as our childminder was rather understandably not keen on having him dumped on her for the day, I had him at home.  Fortunately the nursery, which Katie goes to on Mondays and Wednesdays, was still open, so at least I could get some stuff done while Jamie played on his computer, which was lucky as I'd planned today as the day of the Great Annual Clothes Swap-Over from the outgrown to the new ones, and they're both so obviously outgrowing their old stuff I didn't want to leave it any longer.  So I've been sorting out what can be saved (of Jamie's clothes) or donated (of Katie's) and what should simply be culled, and getting the shop labels off the new ones to put them in the drawers.  I haven't done all of it (still need to finish sorting through Jamie's saved hand-me-downs for age 4 - 5 to decide which ones to save for Katie) but have done the bulk of it, which is a major relief to have out of the way.  I managed to read a couple of old journals from the Journal Backlog Pile as well, so, all in all, it has been a passingly productive day.

And, of course - holy cow - I've also completed NaBloPoMo.  Bloody hell - I actually made it.  Crack open the champagne, start the trumpet fanfares and drum rattles, bring on the dancing horses.  Oh, yes, and remember to hit 'Publish' here so that I don't actually fall at the very last fence.  Aaaaaaand... done.  Goodnight, and wishing one and all a happy December.

Penultimate

"Why can't children say all the words?" Jamie wanted to know.

"What was that, sweetheart?" I was pretty sure I'd heard him, but he was chewing his dinner and I wanted to check.

"Why..." Jamie's brown eyes locked on mine, his face serious with concentration as he tried to figure out how to phrase the idea he was trying to get across.  "Why are there words that children can't say till they're eighteen?"

"You mean like on the telly last night?" A word in a speech shown on the news had been bleeped out, and Jamie had wanted to know why; I explained to him that there were some words that children weren't allowed to say until they were eighteen, and so they wouldn't put them on the telly in case children heard. "Well, there are some words that people think are not very nice, that might offend people - that means upset them - and it's harder for children to know when the times are that you shouldn't say those words, or to remember when not to say them, so it's better for children just not to say them at all until they're old enough to know more about when they can say them and when they can't."

Jamie seemed to accept that.  I'm sure we'll have further interesting conversations on the subject over the next few years.

.....................................................................

Katie continues to approach life with unabated enthusiasm.  This evening, running up and down the hall before her bath, found a red-painted shell lying around.  I can't even remember where we got it from - it's one of those little trinkets that you collect like fluff on the journey through life.  Katie reacted to it with a passion on the level of that girl from Twilight going on about that boring vampire hero Whatsisname.  "I love my shell so much!  I'm going to take it to my nursery and show my teacher!  I'm going to take it to Christine's and nursery and everywhere I go!  And if I go somewhere else I will take it with me there!  Because I love it so much!!"  Who knows - she may even remember its existence by tomorrow.

Later on, we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of Katie's many favourites.

"In the light of the moon," I started out, "a little egg..."

Katie flopped onto the open pages, curled up into a ball.

"Are you being a little egg?" I inquired.

"A little egg on the moon!" she told me.

We moved on to the caterpillar, which Katie illustrated with a wiggly finger that she poked into each of the holes in turn and which, on the last page, duly hatched out into a butterfly made with linked hands flapping.  (She used to flap her arms when we got to that page - the caterpillar/butterfly hand is a new development these past couple of days.)  Then the caterpillar/butterfly was still hungry, so he had to keep on eating his way through the different items in the book while I took Jamie to use the toilet and get into his pyjamas, and then go for a crawl around the room (the caterpillar, not Jamie).  Eric Carle seems a positive amateur by comparison.

Evening routines

Pushing against the clock, always pushing uphill.

As soon as the first child has finished pudding, I whisk them off upstairs and start them on the bedtime routine while waiting for the second child.  If it's Jamie, I can usually persuade him to get undressed and put his clothes in the laundry basket quite quickly and then get him into the bathroom to use the toilet, have me brush his teeth (must teach him how to do it for himself, must get round to doing that, but somehow every morning and every evening it's too much of a scramble, never enough time to teach anything), get him into the bath and have me wash him.  If it's Katie, it takes rather longer to distract her from wanting to run up and down the upstairs hall/do flumps on the beanbag/defeat Bowser in order to get her clothes off her and get her into the bathroom, whereupon she insists on taking up long-term residence on the toilet.  She's going to grow up to be one of those people who take the Sunday Times in there and sit there for half an hour reading the whole thing.  Then we have some negotiation around getting her teeth brushed and then I get her into the bath and wash her while she tries to play pouring games and whisking the water with the eggbeater (which she used to call an eggdbeater but can now pronounce properly).  Katie gets her hair washed every day; Jamie gets his washed Tuesdays and Saturdays, and rinsed off on the other days when I shower him off, and he's also a bit simpler to wash because I can use the same soap all over him instead of negotiating eczematous areas with medicated lotion.

As you can imagine, I prefer it when I can get Katie upstairs first and at least get Jamie ready for bed while she's sitting on the toilet - the time works out better that way - but she's also the one who usually takes longer over her dinner and pudding, so it's usually Jamie first.  At least that means he can use the toilet and get it done without having to compete with Katie.  But they'll compete for my attention while Katie sits on the toilet and Jamie in the bath.  Apparently the bathroom contains an invisible remote on-switch for Super Mario monologues, because Jamie will invariably start up during the getting-ready-for-bed process with 'Let me tell you about the different worlds in Super Mario 64...' or something similar, and keep going on and on and on and on and on.  Katie will promptly start screaming about something random, which is partly because she's learned perfectly well that once Jamie gets started she isn't going to get a chance to get a word in edgeways any time soon and partly because she just plain doesn't like the idea of anyone who isn't her getting my attention.  Both of them start screaming at each other and I have to calm them down somehow, make a joke out of it, or try to discuss things.  Or just get out of the bathroom for two minutes and leave them to it while I get a bit of space.

When Katie's washed, I try to get her to stand up so that I can lift her out easily - we have a game where she pretends to be a seed and I water her with the blue measuring cup and get her to grow into a plant while chanting "It's growing, it's growing... it's biiiig" (her script).  She likes the game when I can get her started on it, but all the other fun things to do in the bath are too much of a distraction and it can be quite difficult to get her to do it.  If I really can't, I just lift her out.  Jamie has usually got out himself by now and gone into the bedroom to wrap himself up in the towel I hang on the end of his bed and climb up onto his bunk, often with a continued Mario-themed monologue drifting back towards us.

On to what I think of as Phase 2 of getting ready for bed.  Jamie needs to have his night-time nappy on (and I get him to go to the toilet one last time beforehand - the nappies are no longer enough for the night and I'll be in his room changing him a couple of hours later before I get to bed myself, in hopes of keeping him from leaking through before morning) and then get into his pyjamas.  Katie needs to have her hair brushed and her pyjamas and night-time cream put on her and she wants three stories, so, since Jamie will usually entertain himself with a book or continued Mario monologues, he's unfortunately the one who gets short shrift at this point.  (I'd be happy for him to come and join in the stories, but he just isn't that interested.)  I go back and forth between children, trying to get the bits done that need to be done and avoid either of them being left alone for long enough to decide to start getting a game out or inventing something exciting to play.

Lights out time. There's a 'so near and yet so far' feeling now.  If it's a day when I wasn't working in the afternoon, there's a good chance I'll be sort of kind of vaguely close to on schedule for when they should get to bed.  If I was working in the afternoon, there won't be a hope - I always overrun, Barry has to collect the children, and by the time he's finished work and driven to pick them up and got them home and got dinner cooked and the children have eaten it and been through the above, it's going to be later than it should be and that's all there is to it.  By then, it's damage limitation, trying to get them to bed as soon as I can, knowing I'm facing the double whammy of losing my evening time and having a struggle to get them woken up in the morning when they haven't had enough sleep.  If they could just settle down quickly now, it would help, but they don't want to - Katie is bouncing around and wanting me to watch her hang on the side of the top bunk and then slide down and in to drop onto her own bunk.  Jamie may well be on his bunk and ready to settle, but, if he's wandered off and found something he wants to play with, I've got practically no chance of redirecting him.  Sometimes it's quicker just to send him to the study down the hall to play while I at least get Katie into bed.  But usually, by this stage, both of them are in bed, with Katie insisting that she's not ready for me to put the lights out and me telling her unsympathetically that she can hurry up and get ready then.  I count down from five before putting the lights out, but somehow that never seems to work out as planned - instead of the countdown being the warning it's somehow become part of the ritual, and she insists she has to be ready (whatever that means - some arrangement of stuffed animals, herself snuggled under the duvet, and random variations that she comes up with on the spur of the moment) before I can start counting.  OK, enough.  Five, four, three, two, one, zero.  Too bad, Katie, you had plenty of warning and you could have done whatever it takes to get ready more quickly.

I settle down on the ground next to Katie's bunk for a tiny little sleep with her, as she always describes it.  (I used to lie on the bunk next to her, but then came the evening I staggered through from the bathroom with Katie in my arms and sat down heavily on the side of the bunk and it cracked under our combined weights landing on it so abruptly - Barry managed to screw the wood back together, but he's forbidden me to put weight on it in future.)  It's usually just a matter of waiting now, waiting to make sure they do settle down.  They've mostly grown out of the stage of setting each other off into an escalating spiral of overexcitement the way they used to.  Mostly.  I can't ever quite exclude the possibility that one or other of them will decide to kick off.  For two years, I had the cot in our room as backup to put Katie in if she did get too noisy, but by now Barry and I are more than ready to reclaim our room as our own space, and as Katie approached four I felt she was getting too old for a cot anyway - so I've deliberately avoided that fallback for the past couple of months.  There's always the spare room - I'm not wild about using that option, but I have put Katie in bed there a couple of times until she settled and it's worked out OK.  That's what I had to do tonight.

But mostly by this stage it's just waiting them out, waiting for them to settle.  Past a certain point it's OK - tiredness takes over, they can't summon up the energy to start kicking up a fuss or to get out of bed - but it's never very clear when that point's been passed on any given evening, so I just wait and hope.  Katie's the wrigglier one, but usually also the quicker one to fall asleep, younger and more tired out by the day.  Jamie will usually be quite happy to stay in bed and read or just lie there, turning his hand-held light back and forth in slow hypnotic rhythms that he stares at, but in recent days he's been prone to getting out of bed wanting to know how long it's been since he went to bed and insisting he's not tired - an unwelcome development, I do hope it's just the effect of the bad cold he had last week keeping him awake.

Settled enough that I think I can leave them.  I sit on the floor outside their room, ostensibly waiting to be sure neither of them gets up but actually snatching a bit of time to sit and read before having to summon up the energy to face the rest of the evening's jobs - I'm drained.  If I'm feeling virtuous, I might tackle some of the eternal journal backlog - more usually, it's whatever piece of fiction is handy.

Finally, finally, they're asleep.  I manage to make myself get moving, which takes even longer.  Still the lunches and drinks to get ready for tomorrow, the kitchen counters and dining room table to wipe down, laundry to be put in the washing machine/dryer/hung on the clothes horses.  A few minutes for myself, time borrowed from my sleep time, knowing the price I'll end up paying in tiredness is probably going to be higher than I want.  Browsing the Internet, putting off the final effort to get up and finish the evening.  Shower.  Bed. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll start earlier, finish earlier, find some extra depth of organisation.  Always more days.

Sundries

Katie's actual birthday was on Friday - again, we didn't do anything much to mark the day after having had the big present-giving occasion the previous weekend, but she did get one present on the day (a Peppa Pig top from our childminder, who had previously given Jamie a Transformer's T-shirt for his), and cards from the childminder and from Jamie, as I hadn't been organised enough to get him to write in his card for her in time for last week's festivities.  Actually, I wasn't really organised enough to get him to do it for this week - I just took advantage of the fact that he had as usual finished dinner before her to haul him into my study (an extension of the dining room) and thrust the card and a pencil in front of him as unobtrusively as possible.  Katie was pleased with the card, anyway - a picture of a dinosaur holding up a large number 4. 

"Look!  He's etten a bit of the 4!" she squealed in delight.  So he had - I hadn't actually noticed, but the designer had drawn a large bite mark in the top of the 4, which was a rather cute touch.  Katie certainly appreciated it.  "It must be made of cheese!"

She chose her birthday cake the next day at Sainsbury's - a giant chocolate hedgehog, though we didn't bother with any candles this time around in the general Saturday evening kerfuffle of getting the children fed and upstairs to bed - and we also gave each child one last present on the Saturday morning, the new Cars 2 DVD for Katie and the Wii Super Mario Galaxy game for Jamie.  And that's that over for another year.  I really must get round to doing something about Christmas.  Present lists, please, family members of mine!

The walk that Barry's workplace had planned for today was, unfortunately, cancelled at the last minute due to general lack of interest, so we went for a stroll in a local scenic village instead, where the kids had a great time climbing on the stone constructions in the village centre.  Jamie decided to have a climbing competition but wasn't very clear on what the rules should be, so the two of them ended up running round the central stone steps a few times instead.  Katie was most proud of herself for managing to climb up on the other stone marker.  "Would you like to see me climb up there?" she wanted to know (I'd been with Jamie on the central stone construction while Barry was with Katie).

"I saw you from over here," I explained.

"Would you like to see me do it closer up?" Katie suggested, clearly not about to take no for an answer.  So I watched her climb up several more times, and we had a lovely time walking through the village and enjoying the end of autumn.  Now we're all back home in the warmth, with Jamie busy playing Super Mario Galaxy and Katie snuggled up with Barry on his armchair playing games on his phone and looking at pictures on his computer.

Bigger

I now have children of seven and four.

Back when Katie was a baby, I used to daydream wistfully of the days when my children would have reached interesting fun ages like - say - six and three.  I looked forward to that so much.  I would be able to have proper conversations with them!  Hear their ideas about things!  Do interesting stuff with them!  Oh, I had one child who'd reached that sort of age, and that was good, and I was thrilled to have my second child, my family complete - but, still, I looked forward to having a six and a three-year-old as some sort of distant Mecca.

So, I gritted my teeth and hung on in there through the night feeds and the insane toddler stage and the toilet training, plus all the good bits (and there were lots of those along the way, don't get me wrong - they just somehow seemed to be mere floating bits of debris to grab at in an overwhelming torrent of exhaustion and frustration and boredom), and the years went by.  And I made it.  I got to the point where I had a six-year-old and a three-year-old.  Throughout the year, every so often, I would stop for a moment to think to myself in awe - this is it.  This is the future I longed for, dreamed of, during those exhausting days and broken nights.  I'm actually here. 

And you know what?  It didn't disappoint.  Oh, parts of it weren't exactly what I'd expected - I hadn't anticipated quite so many monologues on Super Mario, or so much time sitting on bathroom floors while my daughter used the toilet (I hadn't realised that some children insist on company in the bathroom even after they're technically quite able to manage for themselves).  But I do indeed now have two children who can hold conversations with me or with each other, who go to school or nursery respectively and come home having done interesting stuff totally independent of me, who have thoughts and opinions and disagreements and are not afraid to voice them (volubly).  Two fascinating little minds unfolding as I watch.  Six and three was a really, really good year.

And now we're on to the next stage.  Seven and four was the kind of Nirvana I didn't even dare to have more than fleeting dreams of - children that old?  Seriously, did I dare believe that was ever going to happen?  No freakin' way!  It was just too good a life to dare to picture, mired in struggling with a baby and a three-year-old.  And now I'm there.  My son is seven, my daughter - as of today - is four.  The year's adventures lie in wait.