Everything

This morning on the way home from the play park Audrey was up on my shoulders. She pointed exciting things out to me as we walked "Mama, look - red door!" "White van, Mama, big white van!"

She was tired by the time we got close to our house, and my shoulders were aching. She put her "wow red mittens" covered hands on my face, leaned as far forward as she could to look at me, and said "Mama Mama Mama Mama."

"Yes, Audrey?"

"Everything."

It was Ian's 30th birthday yesterday, and we had a lazy family day. Audrey made him a card covered in animal stickers, each one meticulously placed. We went into town and shopped and looked at the "peoples" and the "oooh pretty lights" and the castle rocket on the hill (every castle is a castle rocket right now to Audrey, that's just the way it is).

We went out to have dinner at our favourite little restaurant in Bruntsfield, where the owner/chef/waiter always lets Audrey look in the kitchen and gives her free chocolate ice cream. Also, every single time we're there he offers her a job. She has her own special name for him. She says please and thank you, and always orders the scampi.

Lately Audrey can't get enough jigsaw puzzles. Something clicked for her with them, and now she does them for hours every day. Every piece she picks up she asks out loud "Where fish go? Where apple go? Where tree go?" Or whatever the piece might be. Then she finds the place and puts it in carefully (sometimes forcefully). When it's all done, she brings it proudly to show me.

Toddlerhood is amazing. I wish I could freeze my life right here. We play lots of games and have endless conversations. Audrey has an opinion on everything under the sun.

She's a little charmer, too. She spent some time this morning chatting to the bin men who were taking the recycling away. She loved their "huuuuge white van" and watched the way the rubbish was loaded and ground up for ages. She got so many smiles and hellos from everyone.

This afternoon we're off to the museum to look at dinosaur skeletons and mummies, sculptures and paintings,  clothes and trains and stars, rocks and computers. So much fun!

Ready - GO!

It's bitter cold here in Scotland during the winter, and only anything approaching light for a few hours a day. What light there is comes cloud-filtered and very pale, disturbed by the wind and with a deep, wet chill to it. The ground is marshy, the trees bare, and we are all vitamin D deficient and sluggish.

But the solstice has been and gone now and the days are getting longer again. Spring is my favourite season and I can feel it right around the corner.

Audrey was born in the spring, when the blossom was on the trees. Every year I know my birthday is coming when the daffodils are out, and now we'll know Audrey's birthday is coming when the blossom appears in its little fits and starts.

Because of the cold weather, and because we've been so, so sick, we've not been out as much as usual lately. This is starting to change! And check it out - little lady has been playing with her new wooden motorbike while wearing her new leather jacket, brilliant gifts from honorary aunts Kat and Carrie:

Today we rode the bike to the play park, where Audrey climbed and swung and ran and slid. I think the following picture sums up her personality so perfectly - the black wellies with skull-and-crossbones, the leather jacket, the bright frilly skirt and polka dot tights, the furry purple mittens, and my girl climbing up the climbing frame stairs backwards.

At the park a little girl ran for the swings, pure excitement and joy. It made me think. Every child at the park has her favourite thing to play on. Audrey likes the swing, and will ask to go on it from time to time, but only for a few moments before she gets bored of sitting still and slumps forward, asking "Mama, down!"

Really, it's all about the climbing frame. Little girl wants to be up, on, go, now.

Audrey at 20 months is full of words and movement. She's stubborn and willful, affectionate and determined, passionate and curious. Racing ahead.

Work - Play

Well, our Christmas was certainly interesting! We were sick, tired, worn out and run down. We're still recovering somewhat, especially when it comes to disrupted sleep, but we're getting there.

Today is Ian's first day back at work after a rather extended break, and Audrey and I are trying to distract ourselves from missing him by playing lots of fun games (and doing lots of housework, but nobody wants to hear about the state my house has gotten into over the holidays!).

One of the things I got for Audrey for Christmas is a set of colourful little pompoms (she calls them ponpons) and feathers, for sensory play and crafting. She really loves them, and today we spent some time just investigating the different colours and textures.

We worked a bit on our one-to-one correspondence. Picking up just one pompom at a time is great fine motor practice, working on that pincer grasp. I also got a little metal set of tongs for her to practice picking these up with, but I think she's not quite ready for it yet.

We made a boat and sailed around the hall way. Ignore the ocean of hand puppets and umbrellas!

We practiced "writing".

And we did LOTS of fun bug catching.

We played with colourful pipe cleaners, putting them into a vase (again, great fine motor work) and clipping Christmas pegs to them - Audrey found this part especially challenging but really concentrated and worked at it, and you could see how she felt such a sense of accomplishment when she got it right.

And now the train set beckons, and Audrey has chosen a book about sharks to read. I hope your day is as much fun as ours!

Eve

Since my last post, we've all managed to get very sick indeed with norovirus. Fun! Only, you know, not fun. I've been in hospital with it, and the past couple of days Audrey has been very sick indeed.

We're all resting, and going to be spending this Christmas very quietly indeed. We had intended to be seeing Ian's family, but our little excursion out to Gavia will have to wait until we're not quite so ill.

Still, it's Christmas Eve, there are presents under our tree, and life is beautiful.

Audrey is asleep in bed upstairs. I so hope little lady is feeling better tomorrow. She can open her presents and we can hug and stay in our pyjamas all day and play.

Feeling all the love right now. My amazing friends, my family, my daughter. Happy Christmas everyone! I promise a proper post soon, when we've all recovered a little.

Intentional

Audrey's sleep has been really disturbed lately. She's never been one to sleep all the way through the night, with a few brief exceptions when she was a baby, and that's always been fine by us. We so strongly disagree with the concept of "controlled crying" or "cry it out" - we take the longer, harder route of safety, respect, attachment; we practice gentle parenting. This means Audrey doesn't sleep for twelve hours straight like a good little automaton. It means she acts appropriately for her age and developmental level and wakes up several times a night needing a feed, comfort, her mama. It means she calls out to us if she has a bad dream, and in the morning she wakes me up with warm little hands on my face: "Mama! Wake." If I had a problem with this I would be seriously asking myself why I had a baby - this is what they do, you can't just pick and choose which parts of it you want and which you don't.

Audrey knows we'll always be there. Always. If she needs us, she only has to let us know and we're there. This safety, this lack of abandonment, is one of the single biggest things I can give her at this age when it comes to her psychological development. I need to remember that when I'm trying to wrap presents at midnight and hear her call my name through the baby monitor.

Independence is prized so highly in even very young children. I always wonder why. Obviously I think it's good to encourage children to try things they are ready for - both physically and emotionally ready - but it is simply not developmentally appropriate for a toddler to be independent of their parents to a very great extent at all. She needs us. She needs me to hold her hand when she's feeling shy, and not tease her for it or make it a big deal, or invalidate her feelings - "Oh, you're not shy!" Sometimes Audrey flings herself at people, makes friends with the kind of wild abandon I wish I could have when meeting new people. Sometimes she hangs back and wants to do her own thing instead. I have to work harder to make that Fine By Me.

It's also funny to me that, for all that "independence" is prized when it is something the parent wants - the child to sleep for 12 hours without waking, the child to learn to use the toilet as early as possible, the child to be okay with hanging out with strangers at nursery, the child to play by themselves/with other children and not need us there to engage with them - it is actively curtailed when it is inconvenient. What a mixed message! We are entering with Audrey what is known as the "terrible twos", the age where she is asserting her autonomy, her individuality, her no. It is really tough, but I want to be a parent who has a LOT of respect for that. I want to give her a lot of space to find out the shape of herself. And I want to teach her, through this respect, that she has a right to control over her own life and body.

As I've said so many times, I want nothing to do with "obedience". If I can't communicate why Audrey needs to do something, maybe I should have a think about what that means. Is it a NEED after all, or a want on my part? How can I model respect for people's boundaries, communication, team work, compromise? Why do I keep enforcing MY priorities on other people?

I'm trying to be a better person. I'm trying to get things right. I'm trying to look at my own behaviour first, before I censure hers. And you know what? She is trying. She is trying big time. In a funny way, she gets so much more of this right than I do, and I am constantly learning from her. Parenthood is immensely humbling like that.

Yesterday I had people coming round here to the house at 4pm for shelter related stuff, and we were cutting it fine to be back on time. My work mobile charger was broken, so I didn't have it with me and couldn't call them to rearrange. Audrey wanted to play - oh how she wanted to play outside on the crunchy, frosty grass in the park we were walking by to get to the bus stop. There were little hills to run down, and she wanted to be there so fiercely. She could not have understood less about getting home for boring work things. We couldn't stop. She cried and cried, melting to the floor, struggling to run to the park. I so got it. I so empathised. I didn't want to go home either, I didn't want responsibilities. I wanted to run down a hill and feel the grass crunching under my feet.

Empathising is easy. Communicating that to her is tough. Letting her cry and be sad and not feel pressured to pretend she's not really hacked off just so it doesn't embarrass me - that's tough. I don't want to say "it's okay" when it's clearly NOT okay by Audrey. I say "it's okay to feel really bad" and "you wanted to play, you feel sad and angry" and "I'm sorry we can't stop today, I wish we could too". I try to simply explain what's going on and keep checking that she's following what I'm saying - "We have to get the bus. Can you point to the bus?" I provide lots of opportunities for distraction, but try not to force them.

I try so hard not to let it provoke an emotional response. It is really, really hard. I can feel my brain wanting to go there, to make it all about me and how I'm having a rough time and I'm tired and hey, kid, don't you know I have work to do? Don't you care about how *I* feel?? I can feel myself wanting to shout her down, show her I can make a loud noise too, tell her to shut up, tell her she's cried enough. Ouch. Ugly feelings. It's tough to even write it down like this, but I want to be honest.

Most of the time I can look at my little girl and realise hey, I'm the parent here. I'm the adult. The only way she's going to learn to regulate her emotions and her responses is by my example - I can't bully her into feeling better, I can only try to be a calm, accepting centre for her. I can make this about empathy, or I can make it about how I'm bigger and she needs to do what I say and shut the hell up. It's an obvious choice when you think about it, right?

Lots of hugs. Lots of letting go of the small stuff. Lots of remembering just how many people would love to have these problems, lots of remembering that one day I will miss this so strongly that I would give anything for one minute of it back. Even the 1am still-not-sleeping minutes.