In which Ivy takes etiquette lessons from a first-grade rugby league player, Ted has the plague and I am healed by Craft.

It's been a rough old week. Teddy was hit with a perfect storm of illness- ear infection, chronic diarrhea and four insistent teeth. He spent a lot of time like this.


Meanwhile, Ivy has been pitched in a battle of wills with me over who actually runs the show. (She does. Don't say anything.) The naughty shelf has been looking a lot like this.



Life for a three-year-old is tough. I feel for her - I can see how frustrating it is to operate in what must seem like a set of arbitrary rules. Her capacity to process strong emotion is low, and as she gets bigger, stronger, smarter, she wants to try all these new things. I am like this bitchy bouncer who tells her she's wearing the wrong shoes and stops her from entering the VIP playroom where all the fun stuff is happening. (Matches! Taps! Plastic explosives!) Her fuse: short. Dramatic instinct: high. Emotional time bomb: ticking. Yesterday, although she's fully toilet trained, she did a poo in the hall 'just to see what it looked like.'

In general, I'm having a down week on the parenting front. The relentlessness of it all is getting to me. Mama's-got-the-blues... it's the oldest song in history. I read this great book after Ivy was born, called The Post-Baby Conversation. I've lost or lent it away since (if you love it, set it free...) but it's a great new-parent read, and the authors premise has stuck with me: that becoming a full-time, stay-at-home mum is a JOB, and you must think of it like that.

It helps me. All gigs have their bad days. Their crappy seasons. At least I'm not faced with annoying, flirtatious IT guys and bureaucratic HR chicks on 'forms committees.' And MEETINGS. The problem with modern motherhood is that it's too easy to buy into the myths - mainly that it is utterly fulfilling all of the time; and you can (and should) excel at all aspects of it.
Well, it's not. And I don't.

Not this week, anyway.

So after a couple of days of feeling exhausted, seeing nothing but an endless loop of laundry, antibiotics, apple peels and naughty furniture in my future, I turned to the healing powers of Craft.

I picked up these two bar stools at council clean-up a few months ago.

They were uggers mc-buggers, but very useful for the constant kitchen performances that run liken a thread through my days. (Mums, I know you know that show.) I pulled out the fabric box, found some scrappers, and had a good time inventing how to cover them.



The top sleeve is velcro'd underneath, and the seat cover is sewn with a ring of elastic to pull it tight. The sewing is so rough, but the act itself, and the transfer of my headspace to somewhere a little more creative, has worked.

I feel just a little more able to cope this weekend. And a little alone time is on the cards too, I feel. Ted is recovering,. or should I say, Ted is rockin his best lady-killer pose, and Ivy - oh, I love her, she kills me - won't be three forever. Obsessed with skulls, with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and - having watched an episiode of Curb Your Enthusiasm - now telling me 'Won't it be funny when a dog bites Dad on the penis.'

Once you decide not to put your head in the oven, all you can do is laugh.

No baths tonight, kiddies. Doctors orders.

Clean kids are a health hazard! Hooray. I've always hated that anti-bacterial wipe lifestyle. Makes me think of women who use vaginal deodorant and men that wax...anything.

Via Sach, homebirth advocate and musical hipster.

Higel brings sexy back (to the library.)

This week I returned to Story Time, hoping to improve my reputation. While I sat, feigning interest and thinking about coffee, my friend arrived. Let's call him 'Higel'. He's been present for the Troubles before. Come to think about it, he's probably the ringleader.

While I tried to behave as requested in the pamphlet 'Appropriate Behaviour for Parents and Children in the Library (otherwise known as 'Four Sticks Up My Bum and Counting'), Higel made it impossible by telling me a story that made me dribble from my nose.

Recently Higel, for reasons I chose not to enquire upon, borrowed the new edition of The Joy Of Sex. (His review - bring back the hairy people.) When he returned it, slotted modestly amongst a selection of less liberating literature, he wandered away to browse, and then noticed the librarians gathering around the returns chute.

Sure enough, they had the Joy out, and soon a flock (a shelf? a fine?) of librarians were tittering, pointing and flipping through the mighty tome. (Surely searching for the hairy people.) The group session lasted for a while, and got everybody so het up that they re-shelved the book without stamping it.

Over the next weeks, Higel's fines began to rack up.

In the end, he had to have a little chat with the librarian at the centre of the saucy huddle, tell her what he had witnessed and request that they stamp the book, take the fines off his card, and if possible, put back the hairy people.

While Higel told me this story, his girlfriend 'Histie', just returned from a shopping trip, pulled a fancy new bra out of her bag to show us.

I'm not so scared to return next week - I 'm pretty sure that Higel and Histie have surpassed my pedestrian brand of bad behaviour in terms of the tea-room gossip. What's a bit of parental neglect when faced with Mr Curious and his lady wife's kernickers?

Sweet pencil-wraps.

Check out these beautiful handmade pencil wraps for creative little fingers - a lovely Christmas present perhaps? Bianca is giving one away if you visit her blog in the next few days.

A happy mummy-moment.

Some weeks as a parent can leave me feeling leached of life-force, mentally foetally-positioned, cursing Supernanny and rocking back and forth, muttering 'IUD, diaphragm, IUD, diaphram, pill....'

But then there are other weeks.

The ones where I feel like things might be on track.

This has been one of those weeks.

Ivy has made the transistion into a big bed, enrolled in the most beautiful pre-school after a long, thoughtful time of planning, and her sleep-time dummy has been sent, wrapped and beribboned, to the fairy babies.

We went on a walk to the letterbox after we wrapped the dummy and wrote the fairy babies a nice letter wishing them well. Ivy clutched her package all the way and kept up her usual running commentary on life. (Current favourite resonse to my every statement: 'But that doesn't make any sense.' )

At the postbox I felt overcome with a surge of emotion. I picked Ivy up and wrapped her in a hug. 'I'm so proud of you, Ivy, 'I said, a bit teary. 'You're such a wonderful 3-year old, and you're getting so grown up. Now you're in a big bed, you'vre going to go to a beautiful litle school soon, and you're even giving your dummy to the fairy babies. What a great girl you're turning into.'

Ivy doesn't always tune into the same emotional frequency as me. But today, with a wide, proud smile, she hugged me back, and I knew she'd really registered. It felt like a layer of love settled on her, like all the work of mothering had coalesced into a moment. It felt like the enthusiastic love I shower on her, even if I get other stuff wrong, is helping her to feel proud and strong somewhere deep inside, and building reserves for whatever her future brings.

And that, my buddies, is a good feeling.