watch tHe skies

Ben is now coming up to 18months old and to date we have kept him away from TV. However now we would be grateful if he would watch something for, say 10 minutes just to give us a break. Perhaps just long enough to get a cup of tea.

This morning as I was having my breakfast, I turned over to BBC2 to find Bob the Builder, and seeing as a couple of Bob’s construction vehicles look a bit like tractors, Ben was rapt and stood, pointing and laughing as Bob built a drive-in cinema.

However it did bother me greatly that Bob was using illegal scaffolding practices. The handrail was only a single bar and there was no kickplate to prevent tools being knocked over the side where they could cause serious injury… RIDDORs are just waiting to happen.

And it’s this kind of slackmanship that keeps me from letting Ben watch television. What kind of parent would allow their child to grow up learning unsafe construction practices? I mean who knows what bad habits he can learn from Fireman Sam, let alone the haphazard driving demonstrated in Roary?

In all honesty I am very annoyed and disappointed in the BBC in this respect. I would write a letter of complaint but I hear that Postman Pat is on strike…!

I was reading an interesting article yesterday about baby talk. That is some of the theories around how you talk to your children and how that affects them. There’s a lot of views on whether people’s “inner voice” in adulthood is very much moulded by the way parents talk to them as children.

Now I make a point of only giving positive encouragement to little Ben. Right from when he was wee, to the strapping 16month old now who seems to understand everything we say to him. And going back to when he first started to react to me, giving some feedback, I would be encouraging, tell him how clever and funny he was and how much Mummy and Daddy love him.

And its interesting because it would get a reaction, it would, despite me knowing better, seem as if he understood the words even from a few months old, and would react accordingly.

And then it dawned on me. Something that babies are really, really good at, is watching and listening. He was responding to something, but it clearly wasn’t the words I was saying.

He was watching me and listening to me. He was reacting to how the things I was saying were affecting me. Because everything we say and do affects everyone in the system. And at a time where Ben didn’t know what words meant, he was able to detect all of the subtle unconscious signals my body was sending out to let him know that these were good messages, messages of encouragement and happiness and love.

And I think we all have that skill to greater or lesser extent even as adults, that empathic ability to pick up on the unspoken emotions of people. And of course we can affect them. Affirmations aren’t things we say to ourselves only, the words we use to others not only affects them, but us too.

So I wonder how different your next interaction could be if you tell them how great it is to see them, heck if they ignore the words they’ll still be affected by how you feel…!

I feel all warm now, come on it’s time for a group hug…..

It’s a great time to have a curious 15 month old boy. It’s sunny and the garden is trimmed and safe for him to run around and discover fauna and flora. Ben’s intrigue knows no bounds as he digs and climbs and pulls and pushes his way around the garden, rapidly expanding his perception of the world.

Recently I taught him to “hi five”, it’s a great little social skill and it lets people interact with him in a safe way (he likes to pull glasses off noses and poke eyes because he doesn’t know that he shouldn’t). It didn’t take long, half an hour here and there over a couple of days and now he comes up to me and wants me to hi five him which is very cool.

He’s learning stuff all of the time and yet at the same time he doesn’t know that he can’t do a whole bunch of stuff; jumping being an interesting one. After all I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t jump, and yet Ben looks at me puzzled when I leap in to the air to demonstrate. He doesn’t yet have the information to even let him comprehend what I’m doing sufficiently for him to understand that it’s a skill he doesn’t have and can learn.

So the communication line is dead. We don’t have enough in common for him to understand what I’m trying to teach him. Despite of his voracious appetite for learning.

And it makes me wonder, when someone I talk to just doesn’t “get” what I’m trying to tell them, is it simply because we don’t have enough in common for them to understand? I wonder if finding out more about what they do know well, and using that knowledge to get my point across will save lots of time and frustration in getting to where I want them to go?

So our little Ben is now at an age where he has the ability to terrorise all around him and demolish everything in sight. Left to his own devices, he finds entertainment in dropping stuff, pulling things off walls and slamming doors on to fingers, cups, plates, grapes and assorted footstuffs.

The house is looking a bit worse for wear and the only way to counter it is to play with him.

So much so that when I get home and take over, feed him his tea, bathe him and put him to bed, Jen is completely shattered. This means that the house is getting a little untidy.

So we’ve decided to employ the services of a cleaner to come in and do the fundamentals, the stuff that you can’t do with a 14 month old tearing around, stuff that involves cleaning materials.

The trouble is, now we have someone coming in to the house to clean, Jenny worries that the house will look untidy and so has me tearing around cleaning the house in preparation for the cleaner. The result - I’m financially poorer for the cleaner AND doing more cleaning and tidying than I did before. Catch 22 I’m afraid. I did suggest an alternative (Swedish au pair or similar) however this was both unacceptable to my wife for obvious reasons, and in the long run, probably a bad investment… i’d never get a word in.

Well we are shortly off to the Farm for Ben’s 1st birthday, which is today. Scary to think that he is already 1 year old and nearly walking.

So I just wanted to wish him Happy Birthday and now we are off to stroke pigs!

Well this last week has been pretty exhausting hence the lack of posts. Saturday night saw Ben pick up a stomach bug, turning our house in to a 3 dimensional vomit target for 4 days. Poor Jen has been at home nursing him back to health, whilst I’ve helped in between the office, meetings in Edingburgh and Milton Keynes.

So it’s been non-stop all week as he’s not slept very well and at one point it looked like he might have to go in to hospital because he was so dehydrated. Fortunately the pair of us taking shifts feeding him water through a syringe for 3 days, night and day, kept him at home and now he’s looking much better, but quite thin because he’s not eaten solids for nearly a week.

This is the most poorly he’s been since we got him, and I was surprised by just how distressing it was to see him so ill. I think I might buy him an oxygen tent and keep him indoors until he’s 18 so he doesn’t get ill again…

Since we came back from Holiday, Ben has been suffering from a cold. Well actually he suffered for a week, during which time Jen and I seemed untouched by the virus, which was fortunate as the little man was very poorly, struggling to breathe through his nose, which constantly ran, coughing, not sleeping well, generally grumpy. After a week or so he recovered and seemed pretty bright.

However unknown to Jen and I, the cold had incubated and mutated within baby to become a giant nasty monster of a cold, which Jen then caught, and passed to me. Now Ben seems to have recaught the mutant virus and the whole house is infected with fits of sneezing, coughing, lack of sleep and all round grumpiness.

My concern is how we break this vicious circle of illness before it mutates in to a living breathing monster that rampages through our village, destroying newsagents and chipshops and anything else that crosses its path. Perhaps there is no hope. Or perhaps it will wither and die and we can get back to our normal lives and not each have to carry around a box of tissues with us everywhere we go.

On the plus side, Ben is now crawling like a good’un and climbing up furniture. Adding a third dimension to his world seems to have taken it’s toll though, he is forever bumping in to stuff, pulling stuff on top of himself and falling over. Still, it’s funny to watch.

Our previously cute, happy and lighthearted 8 month old has this week been taken away by the fairies and replaced with a grisly, whining, dribbly little monster as his baby teeth erupt from his gums like that scene in Superman where his fortress emerges from the snow and ice.

Except Kal-El’s fortress of solitude finished emerging in a few seconds, whereas Ben’s incisors seem to move but a millimetre each day, yet the pain seems to last the entire time. The result is our poor little fella is miserable all day, and we feel guilty for giving him calpol in a BA Baracus “I ain’t getting on no plane, fool” stylee.

And this is only the first tooth. Does it get easier or can we expect such bedlam for each and every tooth that appears??

As much as it is comforting to hear Ben snoozing in his cot when we go to bed, the comfort we gain is being gradually eroded by the distinct lack of sleep that we are getting as a result of his early morning operatics.

He is definitely teething, and this is causing him to sleep less than he was previously. Unfortunately an early feed only settles him, it doesn’t put him back to sleep. Instead, he likes to sing for an hour or so before dozing off. Whilst the Zombie look I have been sporting recently can amuse work colleagues occasionally, constantly battling the urge to slip in to slumber in meetings makes for a rather stressful working day.

And so Ben is being relocated in to his room from tonight. I am sure that many people move their babies out much earlier than 5 months however it would seem that the time is right for us if we are going to get anywhere near a decent night’s sleep!

Baby Ben has made a few discoveries this week. The funniest one is that he is very good at blowing raspberries. This was amusing on friday night as we were getting to sleep - we would be just dropping off when he would let rip and then giggle to himself.

Unfortunately this was quickly accompanied by him discovering his ability to shout. Very loudly I must say. To the point where we gave up watching TV because the telly simply couldn’t compete with his deafening gibber.

This became less funny at 2am this morning when he decided that sleep was out, and raspberries and shouting were in. As a result I suspect that work today is going to move very slowly indeed.

Poke me if I start snoring….