Prevarication

This week I've been letting Mabel nap, since Dash is at camp and it's the first time I've had an hour to myself since the summer break began. It's hard to resist the temptation to bring her upstairs at 12.30 and just see if she falls asleep. She's been waking early, so she does; and then I have a lovely time blogging or baking or sorting things in peace.

But of course, there's a downside. It's called bedtime. Bedtime for the past few nights has gone like this:

Step 1: Get the kids ready for bed. Teeth brushed, stories read.
Step 2: Dash lies down, possibly drawing in his notebook for a while until he falls asleep.
Step 3: Meanwhile, I take Mabel into her room and nurse her down.
Step 4: Down on that side, down on the other side, first side again... and she's hungry. Or thirsty for cold water from the fridge, Mummy. Please, Mummy.
Step 5: I bring her water and/or a frozen waffle. So much for the teeth.
Step 6: All done. I lie down with her again. "This is the last side, Mabel. No more sides after this."
Step 7: Mabel leaps up and makes a break for the door.
Step 8: Mabel gets to come downstairs and play for an extra twenty minutes, so long as she's quiet and leaves me alone to drink my belated cup of coffee.
Step 9: Mabel wants to watch something on my computer. Mabel wants to write her name on my computer. Mabel wants one of those things I'm eating with my coffee. Time for Mabel to go back upstairs.
Step 10: (Optional) Daddy is inveigled into going upstairs and telling Mabel some stories. Daddy is summarily dismissed.
Step 11: I go up one last (I swear, this is it) time.
Step 12: Some time about an hour and a half after her initial bedtime, Mabel finally nurses to sleep.

Hooray! Time to relax. Oh, wait. I had that in the afternoon. Fold some laundry, put away the dishes, and go to bed.

Ashes

Yesterday, I was on fire, domestically speaking. I had felt the urge to do some housework creeping up on me, and yesterday it burst forth in a glorious bevy of industry. While Mabel was at school, I did two loads of laundry, hung one on the line and put one in the dryer, swept the downstairs floors, cleaned the bathrooms (oh so horribly overdue), cleaned the mirrors, and started on some yeast bread. By pre-dinnertime, I was juggling the two loaves of bread, a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and some quite delicious from-scratch pseudo-Indian stuff that would do two nights' worth of grown-up dinners, as well as a corn on the cob in the microwave for Mabel.

So today, I'd probably have been all tapped out anyway, but the fact that then it turned out one ear of corn (is it an ear? a cob?) and a cookie do not a sufficient dinner make for my daughter, so that she was awake half the night gnawing on me, meant that this morning I was pretty much toast. Fried toast. Toast that is also fried, and burnt, and has had the burnt bits scraped off. The sort of toast you should probably just toss and make anew.

Then, in spite of a morning spent jumping on trampolines and playing with other people's toys, followed by a total needle-stuck-on-record meltdown on the way home ("I don't want to take the short cut, I don't waaaant to taaaake the short cut, I don't... I didn't waaaant to taaaake the short cut," etc), Mabel did not nap. So we got up again and made banana pancakes, she ate five, and the afternoon progressed. She had to be shepherded gently through the hazardous waters of four to six pm, and probably didn't eat enough dinner again, but the upside was that she was fast asleep at five minutes past seven.

I'm going to bed early.

Wild child

On afternoons when Mabel has not taken a nap but really should have, you have to watch her like a hawk, because whenever she decides that she's not getting enough attention, or just because she's a menace, bad things can happen.

In no way exhaustive list of things Mabel might do when she hasn't taken a nap:

• Find some beloved piece of Dash's artwork and take a bite out of it.
• Eat some toothpaste - the minty kind that she likes the taste of but isn't allowed use because she can't spit yet.
• Pick flowers out of the neighbours' gardens, the most prominent and pretty ones that will definitely be missed, and then present them to me with a butter-wouldn't-melt declaration that she wanted to give it to me because she loves me.
• Grab Dash's sandwich before he gets to it and take a bite, or just maul it enough to make him demand a new one, thus enraging both him and me.
• Unroll the entire roll of toilet paper.
• Eat some toilet paper.
• Declare that she doesn't like any of her toys and wants to give them all to the thrift store.
• Take all her clothes off and run down the street.
• Bang the TV remote on the floor until the back pops open and the batteries fly out; then stuff the batteries in her mouth and come to show me, if I haven't noticed already, what a bad thing she's doing.
• Demand food; eat none of it.
• Tip an entire tub of cooked pasta that I was about to put in the fridge onto the floor.
• Laugh a little too hysterically at things that aren't all that funny.
• When bedtime finally comes, fall asleep in five minutes flat.

Which last, of course, almost makes up for all that may have gone before. Almost.

Nuggets of purest green

It's 11.15 (in the morning) and Mabel is 45 minutes into a nap. This is either a very good thing - nice long nap, but still early enough not to disrupt bedtime dramatically - or a very bad thing - coming down with some horrible lurgy that will afflict Dash and me too, all while B is away sampling the Waffle Houses and home-made paella of Atlanta. I mean, at a Very Important conference.

---------------

The other morning Dash was singing to himself in the bathroom, as sometimes he does, a little ditty of his own creation whose lyrics went, "I am shorter than the Statue of Liberty, I am shorter than the Statue of Liberty..."

---------------

Mabel, over breakfast: I don't like it when I stick my finger into my bellybutton.
Me, reasonably: Well, don't do it then.
Mabel, slyly: But I like it when I stick my finger into your bellybutton.
Me: [Sceptical look, because that's not happening.]
Mabel, with glee: Maybe I could stick my finger in Daddy's bellybutton...

---------------

She's up again, and seems much happier, and in no way feverish or otherwise sick, so here's hoping it will all work out perfectly. Considering Dash is off school for the next nine days, it may be the last nap she takes in a while (it's very hard to get her to sleep when he's awake, and very hard to get him to leave me alone for long enough to do so), so it's probably just as well.

Coincidentally, blogging may be light in the coming week. May the force be with us all.

Progress, maybe

We're travelling tomorrow, but before I go and ruin everyone's (read, Mabel's) new good habits by dragging her across the ocean to a continent five hours ahead, I thought I should document them. For posterity, and because by the time we get back I'll no doubt have more things to say.

Two Fridays ago, there I was moaning to a friend about the terrible night Mabel - and therefore I - had had, when I realised that I was now undeniably one of those annoying people who complains about a situation but never makes a move to change it. Which is fine if it's on my blog - right? Right. - but not fair to people standing in front of me who are too polite to just throttle me for not getting on with it.

Later that morning, Mabel and I had a little conversation.
"Oh, Mabel, when are you ever going to stop having mumeet?" I sighed, and she replied, "When I'm four." She may have said this before, and I never took her up on it because it sounded so far in the future that I was hoping for something a little better, but now suddenly, it sounded like an acheivable goal.
"Okay then," I told her, "we'll stop when you're four. But we'll have to start having a bit less, so that we don't just stop all at once. So from now on, we'll only have mumeet in the morning and at naptime if you take a nap, and at bedtime." And all night, which was implied and understood, if not actually said.

"So now you're just nursing her three times a day and all night, and that's good?" you ask, shaking your head to get the buzzing sound out.

Yes, because she's finally learning that there are other ways to be happy without just grabbing a boob at the merest hint of personal grumpiness. Even though there have been days when she's gone a long time without - from before school all the way to naptime, or even beyond if she didn't nap and we were busy - those were probably the exceptions, and she was pretty used to having a little sumpin' sumpin' before lunch, or after nap, or around 5pm, or just to keep her going till bedtime.

But I made some wonderful discoveries:

• I can say no, and if I keep saying it she will eventually go away and do something else.
• She will accept a cuddle instead of nursing, if I stand firm.
• She's quite willing to take a chocolate chip and a mini marshmallow as a post-nap treat instead of nursing (this is a short-term thing that will be phased out, honest).

Of course, once she figured things out, she realised that it was to her advantage to nap, or at least try to nap, because then she gets a hit in the middle of the day. I'm happy to do this, so long as she naps reasonably early, and to take the resultant fallout of later, more long-drawn-out bedtimes for a while, as it's all in a good cause, and really, who's to look a gift-nap in the mouth? But if she tells me at 3pm that she wants a nap, it's no way Jose and she has to make do with a cuddle on the sofa. And she does.

So. It doesn't solve my night-time problem, and the wearing of the underwear has once again receded into the dim and distant, most of the time, but I think it's a good step forward. When she's used to it, and when we're back from our trip, I'll make some other change, like moving bedtime mumeet to the sofa and letting Daddy do bedtime, on days when she's really tired because she hasn't napped.

The other thing we've been doing lately is having B go into her the first time she wakes, the time that's a paltry two hours or less since she went to bed in the first place. It's usually around 10pm. The first night we did this, despite having been warned in advance, she cried hysterically, with the heaving and the gulping and the pushing him away and then taking an hour to calm down once I did go in. But we've done it most nights since and now she just grouses at him until he goes away, cries for me, and nurses to sleep pretty quickly. Once, just once*, she fell back to sleep without any further intervention, and I did a happy Snoopy dance. But even without that, since she's accepting his presence more readily, I see progress, even if I'm not sure what exactly the progress is moving towards.

Eventually, it will all fall into place. Won't it? 

*Update: Well, stop the presses, she just did it again! Or he did. I don't care, so long as they can do it without me.

Note to self

For future reference, when your recently-bribed-into-toilet-training three-year-old clutches her crotch while you put on her ice-skates, don't just let her refuse to let you take her to the bathroom. Because the quickly spreading yellow puddle on the ice is a bit of a giveaway when things go wrong.

In fact, backing up a bit, when you know that she really should have taken a nap, even though you're trying to phase out the naps because they lead to neverending bedtimes, don't take her ice-skating in the first place. Because while it may seem cruel to deny her the outing if her brother and her daddy are going, having her fall so solidly asleep on the way home that she takes an unwakeable hour-long nap at 4.30 is probably going to have a worse effect. On your mood when she's still wide awake at 9pm. (Not that we're there yet. Maybe the gods will be kind.)

Revolutions

I introduced Dash to the idea of new year's resolutions today. He liked the concept and immediately announced we should resolve to give more cookies to everyone. Laudable, though maybe not exactly somethijng that will jibe nicely with other people's weight-loss or healthy-eating aspirations.

Ironically, I think deciding to run - jog, whatever - on a regular basis and actually doing it might be the easiest of my resolutions. The other changes I want to make depend more on my children and less on just me; except for those that are good for the kids and make my life harder, like the one about letting them watch less TV.

But then there are the things I want to get the children to do, like getting Dash to eat more foods, and getting Mabel to sleep better. This is trickier, and requires wiles. (You'll note I say nothing about toilet training. She's on her own for that one at the moment.)

Dash and I decided that he's going to try a new food every day, even if it's just a tiny taste that he spits out, or another taste of something he didn't like before. If he doesn't, his regular bedtime game of superheroes won't happen. If he does, he'll get the superhero game and also a star on his chart. After ten stars, he'll get a dollar. So far today he's tried a cracker he didn't like before, and carrots; steamed and plain, and steamed and tossed in butter and salt. He didn't like any of them, but it's a start.

So there's that. The ultimate threat to keep him on track is that if he doesn't make an effort, we'll have to take him to a doctor or a therapist or someone, because I do think he's a lot worse than the average picky eater. I don't see that a therapist would be able to do any more than what we're trying now, but Dash would hate it, so the concept serves its purpose. (I found an SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) checklist yesterday and really, though a few of the many behaviours listed could have applied to him at times in the past, he doesn't send up big red flags for anything, even in the "Oral Defensiveness" section, except this one:

picky eater, often with extreme food preferences; i.e., limited repertoire of foods, picky about brands, resistive to trying new foods or restaurants, and may not eat at other people's houses

Yes, that's my kid. And lots of other kids too, I think.) 

Then there's the sleeping and the Mabel. For the past two nights she's been up till almost 10pm, after protracted nursing-not-to-sleep, leaving alone to yell a bit, sending up Daddy, more nursing, more yelling, finally bringing downstairs because I wanted my coffee, and eventual dropping off. I think this means it's time to nix the nap. Much as I love my hour of peace in the middle of the day, and much as I think she can still use it, I need my sanity and my two hours on the sofa at the end of the day even more. We'll work through the afternoons of crazy until she gets used to it, and when Dash is back at school it should be easy enough to instigate an hour of quiet play (though not in her room, I fear) after lunch.

I reviewed my options, discussed it with friends and spouse, and decided to start with the tactic that's probably least likely to work, but involves the least crying. Because I can't take the crying, and in the middle of the night I know exactly which of us is more likely to back down. We're going to try putting them together tonight, on mattresses, both in Dash's room. For a sleepover. Yay! Sleepover! Mabel said that she won't need me to go to sleep with when she has Dash there. So it must be true.

You may see I've created an entirely new category for this type of post, called Best Intentions. So you needn't point out that I'm always promising to do things that don't pan out. I'm painfully aware of that. But here I am again, writing from the point of view of unalloyed optimism, as we've yet to try which means we've also yet to fail. There's probably only a tiny chance it will help, but heck, here goes nothing. Again.

Hoppity

Isn't it great when your three-year-old, who was demonstrably tired all morning, if the unwarranted hitting littler kids and yelling "I don't like [poor innocent 20-month-old who just happened to get in her way]!" and repeatedly climbing in and out of the shopping trolley at the supermarket checkout* are anything to go by, then turns out not to take a nap? Well, yes, it's great at 7pm when she finally goes down for the night and you get to enjoy a rare early night of peace and perhaps some red wine (or perhaps a lot of red wine), but right now, it's not so great, no.

*My children wind up, not down, when tired. So if they can't stand still and are bouncing off the walls, that means they're exhausted. (Unless it's Dash, in which case it may also mean he is trying very hard to ignore the call of nature yelling at him from his bladder region.)

Wiggles

I was just composing a lament to lost naptime, an ode to naptimes past, when it struck twelve-thirty and there was Mabel looking for mumeet. So we went upstairs, and lo, she is asleep. Hooray for naptime.

I will pay later on, of course, when it will take an hour and a half to get her to sleep tonight, but for the moment the respite is welcome.

I think we're just at that stage, where she needs a nap half the time, maybe less, and when it happens it's vital, but it messes up bedtime no end. So we need a new bedtime routine for the days when she doesn't nap, in order to get her to sleep earlier than 8pm, which was fine in the olden times but not no more. The trouble is that it's difficult to get her to sleep before her brother, unless she's really so fried that she has a total breakdown and I cart her off to bed on the spot.

The old routine started at 7.00 for both of them: pyjamas, game of superheroes, upstairs for teeth and stories in Monkey's bed with Daddy, after which I would be summoned to spirit Mabel away to her downy rest. The new routine goes straight from pyjamas to stories on the sofa with Daddy, and then I take Mabel upstairs for teeth and bed while Monkey gets a reprieve and a more leisurely game of superheroes and whatever else he needs downstairs.

This worked pretty well on Saturday, when it was implemented. Monkey decided that if we were having stories downstairs, we should just go ahead and sleep downstairs too, so he carted his duvet and pillow down to the sofa and every one got cosy. Nobody did sleep downstairs, mind you.

 Hm. Looks like pyjamas hadn't quite happened for Monkey at this point.

Earlier today, looking at a two-inch-high plastic horsie, of whom Mabel is particularly fond:

- Mabel, why does this horsie have no ears? Did you bite them off?
- No.
- Oh. So where have they gone?
- Well, they were wiggling all over the house, and then we went to the zoo, and they just wiggled off.
- I see.

Not lupus

Mabel has decided she's not taking a nap, and my feeble attempts to leave her in her room for quiet time worked about as well as you might predict, so now she's doing something with Duplo and monologuing about Thor. (She and Monkey have been watching The Avengers cartoon series, which is only partly completely unsuitable television for an almost-three-year-old, and she knows all her superheroes better than I do. Anyway, I like that she knows about Thor because I can pretend it's mythology rather than superhero-ology.)

She didn't really go to school today because I decided to take her to the doctor instead, and between the traffic and the waiting room, we finally squeaked into the playground with 15 minutes of the morning left. We went to the doctor because she'd had an odd red rash on her hands last week that was itchy at night, and which Dr Google told me might be eczema. I got some cream and it seemed to be improving, but other, different, rashy bits were popping up on her torso. So, just to be on the safe side, we went.

I'm glad we did, because, just to be on the safe side, she's now on half a teaspoon of amoxycillin three times a day for the next 21 days, to make sure she doesn't have Lyme disease. One of the rashy patches (these are tiny patches, just blips really) is suspiciously circular in shape, and when I said that I'd pulled a tick out of her leg several weeks ago - not where the rash is at all - the doctor said it's much easier to just treat than wait and see. I don't think she's showing any other symptoms, though I suppose if she's extra tired that might explain her reaction to school last week, but I'd much rather be on the safe side with this one.

The doctor said the rash on Mabel's hands is something else, possibly hives, and told me to give her Benadryl for that.

I've also decided I have arthritis in my thumb. Getting old is terrible. Monkey needs to hurry up and make his anti-ageing machine.

A walk with Mabel

Okay. You need to go to sleep. You keep running away when I try to nurse you down in your room, so it's the Ergo for you, Missy. Into the stroller, Monkey, you'll have to come too, because I can't leave you behind.

[Five minutes later, the wrong one is asleep. I curse (inwardly, natch). Mabel is still chattering blithely.]

- What that, Mummy? What that noise? What that, Mummy? You say something, Mummy? What you say? What you saying?
- Nothing, Mabel. I didn't say anything.
- What that, Mummy?

[I strain to hear whatever it is she's talking about. She hears all the little background noises that my ears are so used to just cancelling out, so I really have to think about it.]

- I think it's a drill.
- Man? Man with a drill? What man doing, Mummy?
- Making holes. Go to sleep, Mabel.
- I can't see man. Man making holes? With a drill? There's a doggy. Look, Mummy, see the doggy? Doggy say woof woof. You sing the song about the doggy in the window woof woof woof? You sing the song, Mummy?
- No, Mabel. No more songs. Go to sleep.

[I wonder how I can bludgeon her into silence. Luckily, she's on my back so the logistics are too awkward. I slog along.]

- ...The maid was in the garden, counting out her money... You sing the song for me, Mummy? You sing the blackbirds baked in a pie? 'Winkle 'winkle 'ittle how I wonder what you like a diamond in the 'ky... Can I sing a song for you, Mummy? I sing ABCDEFGLMNOP, Mummy?
- I'm not talking to you any more, Mabel. It's nap time. Put your head down and go to sleep.
- What you say, Mummy? You not talking to me any more?
- No. [arggh]
- You not talking? I go to sleep? I run away so we have to go for a walk?

[She puts her head down. A few seconds of silence. We pass the women with the dogs and one of them says "Hi." I try to look polite and manage to muster a grimace, instead of taking out a shiv and silently stabbing her, repeatedly, for what's about to happen. Head comes up.]

- What that, Mummy? Those doggies? That the doggy behind the fence? Say woof woof woof?
- [Seethe]

Mabel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad morning

(With apologies to Judith Viorst)

Mabel woke up on Friday in a grump.

She couldn't find her baby. The new one with the pacifier and the eyes that open and shut. Mummy looked in all the usual places, but baby wasn't there.

Mabel took her big brother to school and went to Gymborama. But she didn't feel like running and jumping and climbing with all the other little kids. She felt like having a nap, but it wasn't nap time.

Mabel went home and felt grumpy. Mummy still couldn't find Mabel's baby. Neither could the people in the shop they had been in on Thursday.

Mummy decided to get the big green potty chair from the box in the basement. Mabel was excited about the big green potty chair in the basement. They brought it up to the bathroom together. But then the big green potty chair did not operate the way Mabel thought it should. She wanted it to go on top of the toilet, but Mummy said she couldn't make it work that way. Mabel was Disappointed. She made her Disappointment Known.

Mummy was in a rush trying to pack things for their night away before they had to get Mabel's big brother from school. Mabel wanted a nap, but it still wasn't nap time.

Mabel put on her backpack, ready to get in the car. She went upstairs with Mummy, and then started to follow Mummy down again. Mummy was trying to remember everything they needed.

Bump bump bumpity bump went Mabel. She had fallen down the stairs!
Ouch, thought Mabel.
Oh no! thought Mummy. Mummy felt Very Bad.

Mabel cried a lot, and nursed to make herself feel better. It still wasn't nap time, but Mabel fell asleep for about a minute.

By which she somehow reset her entire body clock and no longer needed a nap. Hooray!

*******

Thus began a terrible cycle of no nap followed by early bedtime leading to very early mornings leading to no or very early naps, yada yada, out of which we have not yet emerged. However, Baby was found by Monkey the next day, stuffed in the top step of the stepstool. We do not know who put her there.

The End.

Using words, resting eyes

Last night I uploaded a post I'd written a while ago and not posted for some reason, about Miss's expanding vocabulary. In the three weeks or so since then, it's amazing how many more words she has - I actually asked her to "use your words" to tell me what she needed today. (It didn't work, of course.) Unlike her brother, who would never repeat a word just for the sake of it, she's a little parrot, quite happy to attempt anything. The other night there was a clamour for more Blues Clues from Child One, and suddenly Child Two came running over to me hooting "Boo coo, boo coo."

I can't even start to list all her words, but thinking about just food words, there's waffle, peas, cheese, bread, drink, juice (not that she gets it), sandwich, broccoli, bagel, apple, strawberry, blueberry, cookie ... okay, so sometimes you need the context to know she's saying it, but I'm still impressed.

We're all a bit at sixes and sevens these days as far as sleep goes. I'd love to blame it on the missing hour, but it's more to do with nap transitions - Miss from two naps to one, and Monkey to giving up his naps altogether. So some days she drops off for a quick catnap before we pick him up from school, and then naps late or (argh) not at all; some days he naps and goes to bed late, others he skips the nap and goes to bed early.

All I can do is offer the opportunity - which for us means going for a walk around 1pm with him in the stroller and her in the Ergo - and if they take it they get the nap and if not, they don't. But there's no consistency, so it's hard to plan anything: an afternoon playdate or even a trip to the post office might be sabotaged by someone who didn't nap, is unexpectedly napping, or can't be taken out in a car for fear they'll fall asleep. Yesterday Monkey had no nap, so he went to sleep at 7pm - which meant he was awake at 5 this morning, which has led to a nice early nap this afternoon, which I hope will bring us to a reasonable bedtime and a reasonable waking tomorrow, but who knows.

Monkey never actually admits to napping. The most you'll get him to say is that he rested his eyes. Here he is resting his eyes in the stroller one day last summer.

Idle hands

This weather is terrible. There's still snow on the ground, so even when it's something approaching warm, we can't go to a playground. And on days like today, with the the windchill taking it well below freezing, I don't want to venture out at all once we've been to school and back (twice, in today's case). Which makes for one bored, restless, frustrated kid all afternoon.

The nap problem is part of it, since Monkey's not-napping more frequently right now, so that I'm afraid if we go out in the car after 3pm, he'll fall asleep on the way home. And he's (we're / I'm) terrible at quiet time. How do you make them stay in their room and play quietly? How do you even make a kid play quietly?

Short of dire consequences, which I'm bad at due to lack of imagination and follow-through, I'm really unable to keep him in a different room. I did once say I'd throw Little Spider-Man in the bin if he didn't keep his seatbelt on, and that worked quite well, but it's not something I can use on a regular basis. Threatening no dinner is just pointless for my non-eater, and "witholding side" just sounds like a direct route to therapy. (For me now, him later.) I could lock him in his room by putting the child-safety baffle thingy on the doorknob, but that reduces him to hysterics straight away, and also endangers every other thing in his room. I can imagine that leaving him in his bedroom for an hour of quiet time would result in the contents of the drawers (all his and Miss's clothes) and the closet (all the towels, some clothes to grow into) and the bookshelf being thrown with force all over the room. And leaving him there until he picked them up again is just a non-starter. He's not that kid. Or I'm not that parent.

I try to engage him in some colouring or puzzles when Miss is napping and he's not, but he doesn't care. He'll just watch tv until he's going out of his mind with boredom, and then whine at me. He doesn't want to make things with Lego, he won't play with cars, he's only interested in badgering me to make a machine that will turn him into Spider-Man, usually by gluing a pile of random things together in a totally impractical, not to say impossible, way. Or variations on that theme.



[This is a typical machine. You can see how well glueing all this together - or stapling, or taping, or attaching by any other means - would work.]

Clearly, I'm doing this All Rong. I need to be more proactive in planning playdates for afternoons, but it's hard when I don't know from day to day whether he'll be napping. Also, some of our regular playdates are out of the loop right now due to their own crazy nap schedules, or working moms, or having moved back to Brazil (for instance).

Gentle reader, if you're out there and have your own Monkey, how do you enforce quiet time?

Lover

I go to bed with my new lover. We lie forehead to forehead, whispering sweet nothings to each other. I gaze into his eyes, and he into mine, mirroring adoration, wondering how there could be a time when I didn't know him.

Then it all goes wrong. There are shouts and harsh sounds, kicks and scrapes and pinches. He won't lie still and just fall asleep beside me. I don't want to be with him any more, I just want to close my eyes and slide into oblivion.

Thus it is when one is mother to a three-month old who doesn't like to take his naps.