On hitting back

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For no particular reason, yesterday was a crap day. Whiny tired kids, whiny tired me, the husband at work all weekend – you know the kind of thing. So pretty much as soon as I could decently put them to bed, I did, and then followed them with a beer and the laptop for a cheering-up dose of Outnumbered, the BBC comedy about a 2-parent, 3-kid family, which never fails to make me feel a bit better about life.

Here’s a clip from the episode I watched last night…

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It’s not one of the funniest bits by any means, but I wanted to share it because it reminds me of one of the ongoing dilemmas we face as parents – what do you tell your children about hitting other kids? It used to be really clear in my mind –  DON’T. And while they are small, that’s fairly easy to maintain. Don’t push other kids around, and if someone does it to you, don’t hit back, just tell a grownup.

It’s not so clear cut for me now. I’m still parroting the ‘don’t hit anyone, ever’, line but particularly with the eldest, should I be encouraging him to stand up for himself more? He’s nearly eight and though I don’t want him to be aggressive to other kids, I do want him to be able to look after himself – and of course as they get older, grassing people up becomes less a route to solving a problem and more to becoming seen as a weakling. It’s not a problem at school, thankfully – where there have been issues between some of the boys the staff seem to be very good at nipping them in the bud. But holiday playscheme is another matter – he is often picked on by one of the older boys there, and there has also been some shoving around. The staff are pretty good but it is never going to be the same controlled environment that it is in school.

Summer holidays are nearly 3 months away but he’s getting anxious about 4 weeks at playscheme already, and I’m getting anxious for him, and about what I should be telling him to do if the picking on gets more physical? He knows not to hit first, but should I be relaxing the line about not hitting back? And what if he does, and it escalates and someone gets really hurt? What are the rest of you telling your kids? I would love to hear about it!

On missing my green-fingered Grandad

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One of my clearest and fondest memories from when I was little was visiting my lovely Nana and Grandad. We were lucky enough to see them pretty much every weekend when we were small, and there were lots of things that I loved about spending time with them – even now, thinking of Saturday mornings brings a smile to my face. We’d all pile into the back of my Dad’s van with his tools, perched precariously on a box of spanners and getting an ever numb-er bum, till someone shouted ‘we’re nearly there! we just passed the tall block of flats!’ And sure enough, once we’d seen the tall block of flats, it would be only another five minutes or so before we twisted and turned through the little roads and arrived at 3, Lilac Close, ran through the alley and into the back gate and into the garden, where my grandad would more than likely be getting on with the day’s garden tasks.

I didn’t take much notice of the garden when I was little. I knew that no matter what the time of year and no matter what the weather, there would be something happening; seeds drying in the sun for next year; potatoes to be forked up; raspberries to be picked; daffs to be tied down. And likewise, no matter what the season, most of the food on our plates came from the garden – either freshly picked, or pickled, preserved, or frozen for the winter. But I never really thought about it – it was just the garden.

I wish now that I’d paid a bit more attention! We have this weird raised bed in our tiny front garden, which is certainly ugly, but is also perfect for a vegetable patch. It’s, oh, probably about 5 foot by 8 foot, so not a bad size. Before the kids came along, I grew herbs mostly; but in the last couple of years I have been trying to grow vegetables, in a vain attempt to keep our food bills down. Last year we probably got about 10 useable carrots, three marrows, quite a lot of runner beans and half a parsnip from it – I’m guessing that I could have bought that lot in bloody Harrods and STILL spent less than I spent on seeds to get started! Still, on the plus side we had lots of fun and the kids enjoyed it – and even just getting three or so meals out of it allowed me to feel all smug and good-lifeish.

Undaunted, we have started again this year – remember that hour of sun a couple of weekends ago? Well, we took full advantage and managed to get carrots, parsnips, courgettes, leeks and onions sown into pots, as well as the bed all forked over and ready for the neighbourhood cats to poo in the seedlings when they are grown. I have been promised some runner bean plants and some tomato plants from someone more green fingered than I, and I have some salad seeds all ready for the windowsill. But you know what I really want? I want my Grandad to be here, giving me directions in his Maesteg accent that he never lost, though he lived all his adult life in Hertfordshire. Telling me all the useful stuff that the books don’t, and sharing all the little secrets he knew. The sad thing is, I know if I had shown the slightest, teeniest interest when I was little, he would have loved to teach me all this. And now I want to know all about it, he is, as he would say, ‘pushing up the daisies’, and has been for many years. Well, Grandad, if you’d just push up a few of our veg too, that’d be just lovely! x

Carrots are in!Springtime jobs

On the Oxotots screwdriver

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I have about a million ‘could do betters’ in my mental Scorecard of Motherhood. But today, I have one less! I have banished the battery blues AT LONG LAST!

I don’t know if anyone else is like me, but I never seem to be on top of keeping batteries in everything that should have batteries. Either I don’t have the batteries in, or I can’t find them, or – more commonly – because I am in the middle of doing something else whenever one or the other child comes to me bearing a sad, battery-less toy. Like trying to get them all out of the door for school/nursery, or cooking for the ungrateful wretches. And even if all the optimum conditions for battery changing are met, I usually fall at the final hurdle – the precision tools required. When I was a kid, you only needed a very sharp nail, or sometimes a 1p piece, to get into battery compartments. Now for some reason – probably to do with Health, Safety and Avoiding Lawsuits, you need a screwdriver. And not a normal screwdriver either – some of the screws on these toys are the size of about half an atom. That’s probably to do with Health, Safety and Avoiding Lawsuits too – seriously, even an ant couldn’t choke on those little suckers.

So I was very excited to receive THIS through the post yesterday from the good folk from Oxotots…it looks like a pen and is about the same size, but it’s actually a miniscrewdriver with four different screwheads – neat, huh?

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Admittedly I am a crap photographer but I think you get the idea – the screwdriverybits are so small as to be almost invisible to my aged squinting eyes, but PERFECT for things like Hexbugs, below.

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I also discovered that the screwdriverybits (it’s a WORD, ok!) are magnetic which saved an awful lot of scrabbling around for lost screws, and probably a fair bit of swearing too – plus gave me the bonus opportunity to explain (badly) to no 1 son the properties of magnets. DOUBLE MOTHERING POINTS  for me then for including a secret educational session – I’m loving this screwdriver more by the minute…

Of course, it didn’t stop there. The call went out and suddenly a collection of toys appeared, all of which now have sparkly new batteries in them – and double bonus – my glasses aren’t held together with sellotape any more either, because this little beauty works for them too! Of course, the down side is that the Husband is threatening to leave home because of all the electronic yodelling, singing, squawking noises that are now unleashed every time someone even looks at a toy. Oh well, can’t win ’em all!

IMG_1279Some of the happy creatures!

AVAILABILITY – The 4-in-1 mini screwdriver (around £7),  along with a bunch of other cool OxoTots baby/toddler stuff, can be found  in John Lewis, Lakeland, House of Fraser, JojoMamanBebe and various other outlets – find your closest here.

DISCLOSURE – The Oxotot 4-in-1 Mini Screwdriver was given to me free of charge.