Dinner table tales

The family that eats together, well, eats together.
And in the shambles that is our little corner of the Baghdad end of Hampton, it can be an eyeopener every night.

For little Miss S, its all about The Food.
Glorious food.
The girl loves it.
And not just the mushed up rice stuff and apple either, we're talking real world nosh.

Yes, the girl has decided that this baby food caper is somewhat beneath her, and that it's about time she was given full voting rights at the evening dinner table.

Case in point...
The family sat down to a slap up feed of home made pizzas (ham off the bone, pineapple, capsicum, mushrooms, tomato paste and mozzarella on a pita bread base) while little Miss S was given mush of the day (rice meal, apple, quinoa - which is actually pronounced "keen-wa"; you learn something new every day).

She ate a bit.

She watched a bit.

She decided that the family homemade pizza looked like more fun than a nappy full of marbles, so demanded in.

She stopped accepting the mush (granted, after downing her bodyweight in the stuff; the girl certainly knows how to put it away), and grizzled towards the pizza.

Dad offered her a crust.

She grabbed the crust.

She gnawed on the crust (as much as you can with no teeth).

She loved the crust.

So much so that when she dropped it, as you do when your motor skills are in their infancy, she let the table (and anyone with aural abilities withing a 50 m radius) well and truly know about it.

Ok, sure, giving a kiddie wheat-product at this early stage is not exactly in any of the kid wrangling books, but, well, she didn't keel over. At least not in anaphylactic shock - just with delight at being one of the family eating what mum and dad and big bro at the dinner table.

She's now gone on to sample the delights of beef casserole (pronounced "cassowary" by her big brother - we're noting this here so we have written proof in the event of an FNQ parks ranger overhearing the boy talking; no officer - we've managed to avoid eating endangered birds in this household thus far), shop bought pizza, chicken, the family staple (pasta) and even corn on the cob (yes... somewhat cruel when you don't have any teeth; still it gave her many minutes of gumming pleasure).

All this eating has, somewhat inevitably, lead to a great deal of growing.

And all that growing means we now have a little girl bending like a banana in her car baby capsule and hence... about to join the ranks of the vehicularly upright. If she's anything like her brother, the first trip will be in a daze as the world rushes by at incredible speed. (Dad still recalls reading the wonderful nineteenth century "scientific research" which stated humans could not live at over 60 mph.)
Either that or, (granted the far cheaper option) she becomes a banana.

While all this has been going on, the boy has decided that he also wants to step up a notch or two, and if at all possible, make his parents redundant.

There, again, was the family sitting round the dinner table, with the lad's lazy good-fer-nuthin parents doing useless things like EATING ("What a pointless activity that is..." thinks the photosynthesis-only boy - though granted his appetite has been a bit better since we started him on tissue salts) when all he wanted his folks to do was read him his new Henry (from Thomas the Tank Engine) book because, as he said, 'he didn't know the words'.

("I think he's trying to rote learn all his books" said mum, "No, seriously, its a bit scary really...")

Dad asked him if, rather than evolve into a parrot boy, he wanted to learn how to read instead. The boy responded; "Yes."

Hence he's been trying to learn his letters and, granted, doing quite well at it too. And much to his credit, its largely self taught too - he can whip "Maisy's ABC" into the video recorder faster than you can spell dyslexia.

That said, he is at the crawling stage of learning to read, and hence tends to get a teensy bit frustrated at times. His way round this? Well he simply demands that a word means what he says it means, and not the other way round. (Possibly handy if writing a dictionary.)

Case in point:
"Mucks Sleepover" said the boy, pointing at the words on the cover of a book with Muck (from Bob the Builder) on the cover.
"Yes," replied mum, "That word says Muck, but that word is just the letters 'BBC'."
"NO! Muck..."said the boy correctly pointing at the word Muck... "Sleepover" pointing at the letters BBC.
This went on for some time.
A true battle of wills.
"Cant win, don't try" opined dad from the peanut gallery, borrowing from his favourite Homer Simpson quote.

That said, the lad is making better progress with his numbers.

He's certainly got zero to nine down pat, and now moving on to numbers 11 through 99, which can make walking down the street somewhat slow as he stops to read every letterbox.

This has all come about because, enigma-like, he's cracked the adult code for numbers. Or so he thinks.

Any dual digit number is "{number}-tee {second number}".
Which is all fine and dandy for 42, 95, 61, 79 etc., etc.
But 33 is "three-tee three", 18 is "one-tee eight" (though of late he has learnt that that isn't quite right, so sometimes its become "eight-tee one", which at least sounds right, if still wrong), and 26 is two-tee six.

Ten out of ten for effort and application though.
Or rather one-tee zero.

But back to the dinner table.

There we were once again, and once again the conversation was getting a bit dull for Master M, so he took it upon himself to entertain the family with a story.
"It was a beautiful summers day on Sodor..." he started.
...which sounded vaguely familiar.
He kept going... and going...
"...'Burst My Boilers!' Thomas said"
and going...
"...was to fix the Lords summer house..."
and going.

Now to anyone without a two to four year old, this may have sounded like the ramblings of a mad child, however mum and dad stopped eating and sat, agasp, in awe.

In all, the lad recited approximately the first five minutes of the "Hero of the Rails" Thomas the Tank engine movie... line for line, with changes in tone and inflection for about half a dozen different characters.
Seriously.
Five Minutes.

Finally he stopped.
"Well..." said dad, "Bugger me."
The boy smiled.
The family applauded (...the boy, not dad's indiscretion).

You wouldn't be without a dinner table for quids.



.

Long time between drinks

Yup. It's been a while between blogs.
(We blame society.)

And when you're only 6 months old, you can crank up a fistful of firsts in only a few weeks, so stettle in - we've a bit of ground to cover.

The latest set of firsts have included (but been far from limited to), her first plane ride (to Sydney and back - thank Ford for "earplanes" and hence no 1000 decibel screaming kiddie landing), the first crawl (13 Feb 2010), first tooth (9 March), first 10+ hour sleep though without even a faint whine (14 March) and, of course, her first six months of life (17 February).

The crawling (in so far as the traditional baby commando shuffle can be called a crawl; she'd be a star if/when required to slither below barbed wire under enemy fire) has been an unmitigated success. If only so she can access her current favourite food (newspaper); the first crawl coming after the temptation of a juicy copy of the local 'Leader' rag became all too great, so she took matters into her own hands and tootled off across the room to fetch it.

Her talents for mobility have since extended to chasing (via amazingly rapid commando crawls) her significantly bigger brother all round the house - that said, our house is smaller than some Rosebud foreshore tents - trying to steal his favourite Thomas trains, leading to our first case of parent enforced child separation before the lad instigated punitive actions against his aggressor.

There's also been no stopping the lass in the combined crawling and eating department - her balanced diet, as alluded to above, consisting of both tabloid and broadsheet.

(Never let it be said this family doesn't like to devour the Saturday Age on the weekend - literally. Come Monday there was semi digested newsprint strewn from welcome mat to compost bin until Mum decided that a solely printers ink diet didn't appear in any of the standard kidwrangling texts and hence should be curtailed.)

In fact it must be noted that Miss S is an avid eater in general; and not just of the (r)Age sub-ed's finest work. She can devour a jar of Heinz Organic's in minutes and watch out anyone who gets between her and a slice of banana; they will lose fingers. In fact, at times she appears to eat more than her big brother, who goes through extended periods digesting so little we've decided he must surely be generating his sole energy source through photosynthesis. We figure it's an evolutionary sidestep, if not advancement.

It must also be noted that all this food the girl devours has been gummed, not bitten, down.

The first tooth has indeed been a strange one. At the same age, and much to mums breastfeeding peril, Master M had a mouthful of choppers. Not so the lass. When finally one tooth did start to drop down from her top gum, it took one tiny sliver look at the world.... then disappeared!

Tru dinks.

Straight back to being gummy. (Not that mum's boobs are complaining...) Ok, you can feel a little tooth under there waiting to rear its head again, but it appears in no hurry.

Still, all this gumminess doesn't stop her grabbing a fistful of steamed carrot and mashing and masticating it into easily digestible bits; just takes her a little longer.

And in fact, combined with her new found passion for crawling, has embarrassingly led to another A4 dropped into the "dont tell the council nurse" file...

A parent (name deleted to protect the female) had been feeding the lass (or rather, letting the lass feed to herself) steamed sticks of steamed carrort, stalks of broccoli and the odd bean or three, resulting the inevitably detritus spread far and wide on the floor beneath the high chair. (Dad has taken to laying newspaper on the floor below- no, not as dessert, thanks for asking.)

Lunch over, said parent started doing the dishes/answering the phone etc, and popped little Miss S on the floor at their feet to play. Sure enough, it wasn't long before the lass grew a little sick of current surroundings and was orf.

No worries...
Until said anonymous parent realised she hadnt heard much "talking" for while.

So they looked. And there the girl was...
...beneath the dinner table, happily eating the food scraps she'd dropped off the high chair.

Oh well... saves buying a dog and it did indeed clean the floor; maybe we should rent her out to Dysons for evaluation.

Finally, the big first for little Miss S (and for mum and dad and Master M too): a true sleep through - no grizzles - from her 7:30pm laydown to a some vaguely decent hour (in this case 6:15am). Not that 6:15am on a Sunday is civil in anyones language...

The whole sleeping caper reached a head when Master M was emphatically denying that his sisters frequent nighttime cries and wakeups were not effecting him in the slightest, while at the same time his eyes were hanging out of his head and he'd developed an attention span measured in microseconds.

Not to mention that mum and dad were going insane(er).

Hence reactive parenting went proactive, and in was called a sleep angel; i.e., a nice lady with some ties to a horse-piddle and a knack for getting kids to sleep and parents to sanity.

In her words, Miss S was having a bit too much of the good life; all late nights, boobs and getting (milk) drunk whenever she dam well felt like it.

Hence it was onto the 12 steps of Mammaries Anonymous.
The first step is admission.

"My name is little Miss S, and I've been a nightime boobaholic for 6 months".

Going cold turkey overnight wasn't easy, and mum and dad staggered through the daylight hours for a few days like the terminally undead, but it soon came.
Only 3 wake ups.
Then only two.
Then one. (Then one. Then one. Then one.)
Till finally...
Only self-settled grizzles.
Ahhh.... sleep.

On the boy front we've discovered he has a memory like a steel trap; don't dare get one word wrong in any book he has read more than once, even if you think you haven't read all of it before.
Case in point: "Daddy - no, no, no, no.... its Jerry Smith"
Dad: "No, Phil Jacobs"."Daddy... no, no, no; Jerry Smith..."
Dad: "Phil Jacobs".
"Daddy... no, no, no..."
It went on like this for eons; arguing over who was listed on the inside front cover of the Thomas books as a co-illustrator with Robin Davies.

Seriously.

Then Dad opened the next book.
And what did it say:
Illustrations by Robin Davies and Jerry Smith
Oh, you gotta be kidding.

We've also moved forward rapidly with the potty training, and now have a boy who, if he puts his mind to it (if!), is able to spend a full day in the Reg Grundies with no accidents, and make it through many a night barely putting a drip into his pull-up.

However, there is one downside/learning experience we've encountered that we didn't imagine but in retrospect can almost understand. Almost.
{The squeamish should look away now; its been nice talking to you. Promise the next blog wont take so long to write.}

The boy took himself to the toilet (not potty), hoisted himself up on the ladder and kiddie seat attachment and did a great big poo.
Well done.
Then there was silence.
Followeed by a Homer Simpson-like howl from mum: "NNNNNoooooooo!!!"

Prologue:
Post poop, boy had hopped off the seat, turned round, and retrieved something from the toilet.

"Its a pea." he said proudly.
And so it was.
Partially digested.

He lifted it towards his lips....

"Its for eating!"

Mum: "NNNNnnoooooooo!"

{Told you to look away.}

Ok, to ease your mind/tummy; he didnt actually eat it.

.