Shouldn’t it be Sir Tumble by now?

Posted on 21/03/2011 by

One of the delusions I laboured under as a neophyte father was that we would be able to avoid using the idiot box to keep young Thomas entertained. He would, I thought, gladly spend hours playing with a ball tied to a stick, sit in rapt attention while his father read improving passages from a big book, and then compose naive yet poignant haiku with his letter blocks before wending his way exhausted to bed.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have turned out like that. Soon you realise that, short of high-powered drugs, the only way to get five minutes of peace for pity’s sake is to turn on the telly.

Cbeebies of course, not any of the low-class kid’s telly. We’re not monsters.

And we always try to sit and watch with him, so it’s not just acting as an inert rectangular babysitter. But it does mean that after your hundredth or so sing-along to “Goodbye Sun, Hello Moon” you start to form some pretty intense opinions about the BBC’s tot-telly output.

So starting here are my potted reviews of some of the best, and worst, of Cbeebies.

Numberjacks

Dross, utter dross. I think Numberjacks was some kind of schools programme that was rejected for awfulness, and got shunted onto Cbeebies as filler. The “concept” is that a bunch of sentient numbers live inside a sofa for no adequately explained reason, and solve vaguely maths-related crimes.

Every episode follows this exact same pattern: something weird happens. The numberjacks send out one of their crew (chosen arbitrarily, as they seem to have no distinguishing personalities whatsoever) to investigate. The chosen number works out what’s happening. One of them gets inside a magical machine called, I think, “Brain Gain” and commands the weird thing that’s happening to stop happening. The end.

Every bloody episode. Rubbish.

Grandpa in my Pocket

Jason Mason is a horribly middle-class child from a horribly middle-class family. He has floppy hair and a face that’s going to start letting him down at about 17. His grandpa is an ageing Likely Lad who has for no adequately explained reason a cap that makes him small.

Now, you’d think that a man with this ability would use it for the greater good. Solving crimes or entertaining children or something. No, in every episode Grandpa uses the shrinking cap for the good of one person only: Grandpa.

Each episode something happens that vaguely threatens Grandpa’s cushy number lounging around being waited on hand-and-foot by his horribly middle-class family. He then, despite the protestations of Jason, proceeds to use his shrinking cap to restore the status quo.

By pretending to be a talking doll, causing his hapless victim to run away screaming. Every bloody episode. Rubbish.

In The Night Garden

The people involved in this programme should be rounded up and shot.

Oh yeah, er, the good stuff… um… basically anything with Justin Fletcher in it. Seriously, the man straddles toddler entertainment like colossus.

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One in 35,000

Posted on 08/03/2011 by

Roll a dice. Spin the wheel. So much of life, I’ve come to realise, is pure blind chance. And each chance happening enables another set of chance happenings, and so on.

For example: sometimes people get pregnant.

Sometimes that pregnancy turns out to be twins.

Sometimes one of the twins, for some reason, never gets the spark of life. That twin fades away, so that you may never have known it was there. This sometimes is actually relatively common. It’s only advances with scanning in early pregnancy that have brought it to light.

Sometimes, just sometimes, the twin doesn’t fade away. Despite having no heart to pump blood on it’s own, it keeps on getting blood flow from it’s healthy sibling, who’s tiny heart is pumping for two.

That sometimes is about 1 in 35,000; but it’s a sometimes that’s happened to us. My wife can explain it better than I can.

Tomorrow we go to one of the best places in the country for dealing with this kind of thing. Hopefully tomorrow what just seems like a huge ball of scary and heartbreaking unknowns will seem a bit smaller and more manageable.

There are a lot of different outcomes now, some good some bad. Time to roll the dice again.

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How a toddler’s brain works

Posted on 27/02/2011 by

So, I’m now the father of a toddler. When did that happen?

I didn’t really know what to expect at this stage. Well, obviously, I didn’t really know what to expect at any stage. The baby stage is fairly straightforward: a pink blob that you basically do everything for. Older children I kind of have an understanding of, because I used to be a child, and at the time I hung out with other kids a lot. I can remember all that. But I can’t remember being a toddler, and I’ve never really hung out with toddler, so it’s all a bit of a mystery.

Here’s what I’ve worked out so far about the mind of the toddler (well, the mind of the toddler I’m currently responsible for).

There are two types of situation in the world.

Situation One: things are going totally my way. I am happy.

Situation Two: some small thing isn’t going my way. The world has ended.

There is nothing in-between the above two states.

One word can cover almost everything you’d ever want to say.

The English/Toddler Phrasebook:

English Toddler
I do not want this to happen. No!
I intend to continue doing what you’ve asked me to stop doing. No!
Thank you for spending so much time preparing this delicious meal, but I’m still rather full from that stale bread crust I found under the coffee table earlier. No!
Yes. No! No!

Tom is the master of the double negative. He’s also quite handy with the triple negative, and the never-ending repeated while running away screaming negative.

Spoons are for wimps

The following items are finger food:

  • Fish fingers
  • Carrots
  • Baked beans
  • Scrambled eggs
  • Yoghurt

…and basically anything else you can get your mitts on.

Needless to say, despite all that, we’re having a whale of a time. Finding out about how the world works, from a toddler’s point of view, makes you realise that happiness is forgetting about the rules for a while. Baked bean, anyone?

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Movement

Posted on 24/02/2011 by

This blog has been in limbo for a while because, well, our lives have been in limbo for a while. Things have been happening, Tom has grown from a baby to a crazed toddler, with more energy than I can ever remember having. I’ve become a governor at the place where I work, which is a nice feather in my cap. And a thousand other day-to-day things have been ticking over.

But in the big journey of life I’ve felt like I’ve been kept in a holding pattern. This is mainly due to the situation we found ourselves in of letting out two properties and renting ourselves. Jane and I both own 1-bedroom places which we were unable to sell due to the bottom falling out of the market three years ago, so we ended up renting out so that we could afford to rent a place big enough to take the three of us.

We thought, perhaps naively, that eventually we’d save a bit of money and eventually be able to afford to stop letting out our properties and sell them. But the trouble with juggling 3 properties is that there’s always something going wrong with at least one of them. We were exposed to expenses from all directions.

So, at the start of the year, I realised that enough was enough. The only way we were ever going to have our own house was to grasp the nettle and put our houses back on the market again. This meant risking losing both tenants and losing the income that was paying our own rent. But we decided it was now or never. If the worst came to the worst, we’d end up having to live in one of the properties we owned, squeezing a 3-person family into a one-bedroom flat.

The last time I put my house on the market I got no interest whatsoever. Hardly anyone even viewed it. I wasn’t expecting much more now.

Within a week of me putting my house on the market, amazingly, we’d found a buyer. We’re not at the stage of exchanging contracts yet, but things are really looking good.

Today we put in an offer on a brand new house being built in an ideal spot for us, and it was accepted within the afternoon.

Things are really starting to move quickly. It makes me wonder why everything seemed so hard before. It also makes me wonder if everything is too good to be true. I’ve not stopped worrying just yet.

But, really, things need to move a bit quickly, because in September this person turns up…

Scan of our new baby

That scan was from Tuesday. The house offer was on Monday and we paid our deposit today… so yeah, busy week!

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The Day We Caught the Train

Posted on 10/08/2010 by

After a trip to sell my car, we found ourselves at a bit of a loose end in Peterborough yesterday. I vaguely remembered visiting a nice park in the Nene valley, and after a bit of satnav-wrangling we managed to track it down.

What I’d forgotten was the park has a mini train line running from one end of a lake to the other. So Tom got to have his first ever train ride. And I got to fill up on some pure Dad Mojo.

Here’s a little video I made entirely with my iPhone.

When Tom watched it for the first time, he went “choo chooooo”. It was about then my Dad Mojo gauge went “pop”.

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Research

Posted on 26/07/2010 by

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The Bum-B-Kleen

Posted on 19/07/2010 by

After dealing with another non-localised lower-torso baby poo explosion, I have designed this. Funding please.

Posted in Daddyblogging, Imagery, Japery | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Tick-tocks and Mah-mahs

Posted on 18/07/2010 by

Tom has a New Thing.

We took him to see his grandmother today. While I was carrying him into her kitchen, he looked over my shoulder and waved his head from side to side, going “ttich, ttitch”.

I followed his line of sight and found he was looking at a clock on the kitchen wall. He’s always been fascinated by clocks, particularly the one in his other grandma’s front room. She always holds him up to it to let him see it chime, and makes a “tick tock” sound while waving her head from side to side. Sometimes Tom vaguely mimicked this, but I always assumed he was just copying his grandma. But, amazingly (to me) that’s now embedded in his little synapses: when you see a clock you wobble your head and go “tick tock”.

What’s even more amazing (to me) is that the clock in one grandma’s front room is nothing like the one in his other grandma’s kitchen. The kitchen one is shaped like a fat bird, with large out-of-shape numbers and spindly legs. The other one is an austere wall clock with a plain white face and roman numerals. In the family tree of clockness, they’re occupying opposite corners, and don’t really talk much other than at weddings and funerals.

In Toms head though, they’ve been successfully grouped and classified as “things you go ‘tick tock’ at”.

As if to prove the point today, Tom also added Mah-mahs to his repertoire of classified objects. Mah-mahs are the big birds you get in ponds and feed bread too. They’re called Mah-mahs because that’s the sound they make. You might think they go “quack quack”, but if you listen as Tom has, you’ll realise they really go “mah mah”.

We took him to a duck pond today, and Tom started mimicking the sound they made as the ducks rushed to see us. It was difficult to tell if he was just making the sound because he was hearing it. So, when we got him home I showed him some pictures of ducks, and sure enough, they were Mah-mahs.

And the pictures of clocks were “tick tocks”, together with the essential wobbly head.

This probably sounds like an over-enthusiastic dad marvelling at some tiny thing that every single baby does. In a way, I suppose it is. This isn’t Tom even speaking really, in that he’s not repeating “proper” words or sentences.

But he is moving towards speech, inside his bonce are now cells that can abstractly link “a thing that looks like a clock” with a combination of noise and action.

I am an over-enthusiastic dad marvelling at each new little thing. But if that’s not marvellous, then I don’t know what is.

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New Season Blues

Posted on 15/07/2010 by

I’ve suddenly realised what Britain feels like now, under this new “austerity” government.

You know when you’re watching a good TV series and it builds up lots of interesting threads, and it’s slow-moving but you’re kind of happy to wait because you can see the way things are generally going and you’re looking forward to seeing how things play out?

Then suddenly they kill off a character you liked, and what you thought was going to be a great ongoing sub-plot is completely ignored, and they go against some hard-and-fast rule they set in an earlier episode, and the whole thing just turns into a huge disappointment?

That’s what Britain feels like now. It’s a new season, they’ve got new writers in, and it’s all turned into a horrible disappointment.

I’m not saying I was particularly happy with how the last season was going, but I thought that after the big Credit Crunch episode near the end we were in for a stunning comeback in the season finale. But no, the finale was a let down, and the new season has started badly.

You know that fancy 2-meg broadband-for-all plot we were building up? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. The Arts, Science and Welfare characters you enjoyed? They’re being sidelined for a while. All those other things we made you think were going to happen aren’t now. We’re “going a different direction” with it.

Huh, maybe things will pick up in the next season. At the moment I’m hoping the whole thing gets cancelled and they start showing re-runs.

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Stuff

Posted on 08/07/2010 by

The, er, slight pause in blogging has been mainly brought about by moving house. We were without broadband for a week (due to some stunning ineptitude by British Telecom) and even when we were back online the thought of blogging whilst surrounded by endless packing boxes didn’t appeal.

Jane and I both had our own places for quite a few years before we married, and inevitably we both collected a lot of Stuff to fill those places. When Tom was coming along and it came to finally finding a place big enough for all three of us, we snapped up a pretty huge bungalow some way out of town. That place was big enough for both houseloads of Stuff, so we kind of put off the exercise of properly combining our Stuffs and throwing away the Stuff we didn’t need.

We lived there for over a year, it’s the first house that Tom knew (although he’ll never remember it), and it was a great place for him to squiggle about in. But this was an old building with no wall insulation. Also, it was a long way out of town in a village with no facilities whatsoever, we had to run two cars and with only one salary coming in (and Tom demanding luxuries like food and clothing) it was getting hard to live within our means.

So we upped sticks a few weeks ago and moved to a nearly-new house closer to town. I’m now able to bike or walk to work, and we’ll be paying less for most bills. Things should be lot cheaper.

But, this house, like most new properties, is a lot smaller than our ginormous bungalow. We’ve finally had to do some serious Stuff Rationalisation.

To say it’s been stressful would be an understatement. I spent a whole week off working lugging boxes between bungalow and house, and to recycling stations and charity shops. Topping it off with a week-long cold and sinus infection didn’t help.

It’s getting there now, we’ve managed to fit most Stuff in, and there’s only one room in the house now that looks like a storage depot.

I don’t want to move again for a LONG time.

Which is a bit of a bugger because we’re going to have to move again sometime soon.

A bit more background: when Jane and I moved in together we put Jane’s place on the market. Right at the start of the house market crash. Needless to say, it didn’t sell.

And neither did mine, but neither of our places were big enough to bring up a small baby in. So in slight desperation we rented out both our properties and rented the bungalow with the income.

Now we’re renting this new place, and we still have two properties rented out. It’s a bit precarious, and we’re both desperate to have our own home, and end our magnolia-painted rental existence.

Which means biting the bullet and trying the house sale market again. Which means potentially losing the tenants in those houses if then move out before we sell. Which means losing the income we’re getting from renting them out. Which means not having enough money to rent ourselves.

I’m more than a little worried about the whole thing. But we can’t live like this forever.

There are always options, and when we DO sell our places we’ll be in a great position for finally buying a family home. It’s just the getting there that will be tricky.

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