MrsB

It’s been a weekend of mixed emotions. I have stayed away from newspapers and actually hidden them so that the kids don’t see the headlines. I am not ready to explain.

If I still lived in the States I know I’d have to explain, and generally I don’t shy away from deep and meaningful conversations with my kids (more with the 7-yr old than the 4-yr old) but living in London now I am hiding this story from them… I don’t know whether this is the right thing to do or not, but it’s what I’m doing…

Other than that, we’ve had some fun moments this weekend but also a whole LOT of moaning and tantrums :| I don’t know if other parents feel the same, but when my kids have tantrums that just last on an on and on and morph into moaning that goes on and on an on – I totally feel like I’m failing at this parenting thing. [...]

Enough of the exercise stuff, right? It’s finally beginning to look a lot like Christmas! [...]

Just a few photos I took of my ‘baby’ this evening. I’m getting used to his hair – if he doesn’t want to get it cut then let see how it goes until the summer when it’s hot and longish hair probably not very practical.

I love Wednesdays. They are my days off work. My mental health days. My days to go running, my days to cook and to spend time with Oliver who’s in the nursery only from 9:30 to 12:30.

Today was my last Wednesday off until January 2013 – a colleague of mine had an accident last weekend I am now working full-time until Christmas and actually working right up to Christmas having had to cancel my annual leave for the week before as well.

Of course I volunteered to do this since I’m part of a small team and being one member down right before Christmas is not a good thing, so I’m not complaining, BUT it will be a little bit tough on me to do full 5 day weeks.

Today I made sure that I used the day to the max – I walked Oskar to school in the morning and then ran to Richmond park and back, 22.6km in total. Afterwards I had an hour to relax and then it was time for a little birthday celebration for Oliver at his nursery. I took in cupcakes for everyone and got to see the little Montessori ritual that they do for all birthdays – walking around the sun while holding a globe for as many rounds as they’re now old + some songs, etc.

After nursery we came home and danced! Just for the heck of it… [...]

“Scorpio children are strong-willed, passionate, and intense, and the need to feel secure drives them to control themselves and others. A strong, durable emotional connection is one of their primary needs, but, perversely, they may test the durability of that connection, often without realizing they are doing so.

Your Scorpio child may seem by turns affectionate, aloof, devoted, obsessive, loving, and manipulative. Scorpios have such range and depth of feeling that you may sense that your child is expressing only the top layer of her true feelings — and that you could understand him a lot better if only he’d let you in on the secret.”

True. All of it. So totally true. Especially the part about being strong-willed and intense. Oh well, that’s how he rolls so we roll along :)

I’ve written a few random facts about this now 4-year old child of mine. Just because I know I’ll forget them if I don’t write them down. So here we go, in no particular order: [...]

In 2 days my baby turns 4. Thank goodness it’s only 2 days away as I’m sick of hearing “Is it my birthday yet? I want it to be NOW! I want it to be TODAY!” Poor kid, maybe we should have kept his birthday a secret until it actually arrives :)

Compared to his mellow brother*, Oliver’s energetic to the max, always singing or humming loudly, and making HILARIOUS poop jokes or blurting out phrases from books at home and in public (yesterday on the bus he kept almost shouting “Sometimes you’re the winners! Sometimes you’re the loosers!” – from a Dr.Seuss book).

He’s also very much full of WANT! and NEED! and NOW! and RIGHT NOW! and NO! He sticks his fingers into his ears as soon as he senses a command or discipline in my voice. I have to ‘make’ him do things with the nicest voice possible and always raising my voice at the end of every sentence as if it’s a question and not an instruction to do something. Most of the time I remember but if I don’t and say something too seriously, he stops being responsive to me straight away. It can be quite an exhausting game. [...]

During our Cornwall holiday we stayed in a cottage next to a big hotel – we wanted the extra space and the self catering option provided by the cottage, but we also wanted the swimming pool provided by the hotel.

The Headland Hotel in Newquay provided this combination and we loved our living space and the ability to spend a few hours every evening in the swimming pool/sauna/hot tub. [...]

My firstborn child has never been very musical – he could memorise all the itsy-bitsy spiders and humpty dumpties when he was little and enjoyed Monkey Music classes, but he has never sang perfectly in tune.

At the beginning of this school year he said that he’d like to learn the piano at school. My initial thought was – a child who cannot sing in tune will never be able to learn a musical instrument. But then I changed my mind – if he wants to have a go then I should not be the one limiting him based on my views which may or may not be right*. (Besides, I always wanted to play the piano but my mother enrolled me in flute because my sister was doing the piano already. I didn’t stick with the flute.)

So I signed him up. After the first lesson he came home beaming and wanted everyone to hear him play. I was amazed – children are so freaking open minded – when you tell an adult “Now you’re starting to learn the piano” I’m sure that most of them will think “Great idea but piano is SO difficult! And it’s time consuming! And what if I’m never good enough???” Tell a child the same thing and he’ll say “Great! No problem! When do I start??” [...]

Oskar calls them conkers, I call them chestnuts, Oliver calls them peanuts :)

The first two days back at work after a 9-week holiday were a bit disorienting. After I got through a few hundred emails though and answered the question ‘how was your summer?’ 25 times, the rhythm of working life started to feel a little bit familiar again by the end of Tuesday. Coming home in [...]

It’s been a yucky couple of days, but thankfully my mother can sort of move again with the help of painkillers after a bad fall down the stairs :|… and I’ve almost fixed the freaky layout issues I had with the blog… and I haven’t lost my temper too badly at the forever fighting and [...]

I took July and August off from work this year and I’ve been thinking all this time that it’s 8 weeks total but I just checked – it’s 9. That means that I have been at home with the kids for 8 weeks already!!! No wonder I feel like I don’t know who I am [...]

The boys and I had a good morning at the zoo today. Except for the times that they ran after each other kicking each other’s shins. Or for the time that they ran off in the night-time enclosure and I couldn’t find them in the pitch black darkness.

Otherwise, yeah, good times and overpriced ham sandwiches :)

As soon as babies are born, people start commenting on whether they look like the mother or the father (or maybe an uncle or a great-grandfather).

MrB and I both have brown hair and blue eyes and no features that really stand out, but from the beginning everyone has said that Oskar looks like MrB and that Oliver looks like me. They’re probably right, Oskar does seem to have inherited his father’s nose and ears, and he certainly has inherited his ambidextrousness and talent for drawing. …

We had a great sunny morning at a playground in Fulham, but the afternoon was rainy so we stayed inside. Oskar put on his stick-on mustache to complete his Luigi costume and both of the boys draw-played Super Mario for an hour. It’s so nice when they do something together without shouting all the time “Oskar is annoying me!!!” or “Oliver is annoying me!!!”. Here are a couple of videos…