Baby update

The babies have been earning their keep lately, you'll be pleased to hear.

They've been going to school.

Some of them are exemplary students.

And they all have their names on flashcards.

After a hard morning's learning, it's time for a snack and some TV.

Pinterest-worthy?

I needed a storage solution for all the stuffed toys. Mabel has amassed a large number of stuffed toys, because she likes to put families together. This means that one stuffed dog/horse/cheetah is not enough: the more the better, but at least three or four so there can be a mommy, a daddy, a little sister and a big brother. Aw.

So the stuffed toys were growing out of the red box we had them in and proliferating all over the already laden shelves.

On a trip to Ikea I spotted the perfect thing: light, flexible, see-through, inexpensive laundry baskets. We got one for the playroom and one for Mabel's bedroom, but after the one upstairs migrated downstairs several days in a row, I'm putting up with just having both of them down here all the time.

Isn't that great? Don't you think you too should use an Ikea laundry basket as stuffed toy storage?

Because then your children can chuck the stuffed toys all over the room and pretend they're caterpillars turning into butterflies.

(This is curiously reminiscent of the bottom picture here. They're a little bigger now.)

Happy families

Mabel is something of a girly girl, with her pink and her tutus and her babies, but she still likes to stick it to the patriarchy.

Ever since she was first talking - and she talked early and often - she has insisted that her toys are almost always "she"s. I'd take a small plastic kangaroo, or a plush puppy, or whatever the item of the moment was, out of her hands to help her out of her carseat and say "Here, give him to me," and she'd always answer, exasperated, "It's a her!"

Some children mix their pronouns until quite late on, but Mabel was always quite certain that most of her toys were of the female persuasion. It's a convention of our language to use the masculine as a neutral, so I might ask her "What's he doing?" about a clearly genderless rubber frog, perhaps. But Mabel didn't get that particular lingustic memo, and as far as she's concerned, everything defaults to female. More power to her, I say.

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She always plays families with whatever is to hand: given one large and one small dinosaur, one is instantly the mommy and one the little girl. Given four, there will also be a daddy and a brother, or maybe two mommies and a little sister. (If one is actually a pony, that's okay: it was adopted.) A box of crayons is just as likely to be sorted into a bunch of rainbow relatives as to be used for their given purpose. Wrenches, nails, pebbles, leaves, french fries: they've all been turned into family members by my daughter.

The extended crayon family

Dash has a half-size skateboard that we found at the thrift store a while ago. Last week I caught Mabel running across the road with it to reunite it with its mommy, the full-size skateboard at our neighbours' house.

Right now she's outside putting together a family of scooters belonging to all the kids on the street. 

At IKEA, reuniting all the mommies and babies

I promise you she hasn't experienced any deeply sublimated family-separation trauma in her young life - but you'd be forgiven for thinking that she had.

Junior midwifery

Dash is anti-marriage these days. He doesn't mind it for other people, and agrees that men and women should be allowed marry whomever they love, but feels it's not for him. So he won't play marrying with Mabel any more, but she's managed to get around that, thanks to the Mr Rogers episode on d-i-v-o-r-c-e that she saw last week. "Let's play babies," she tells her brother. "We don't have to be married. We can be divorced, except you still live here and we have a baby."

Mabel loves to hear the story of when she was born. Or the story of when Dash was born. She particularly relishes the part about my waters breaking (first sign of labor, both times) and also how everyone I called in the early moments of my first labor had their phones turned off. (True story.)

We have a book called the Usborne Book of Knowledge, but neither of the children are remotely interested in learning about birds, or vehicles, or any of the sections other than the one on the human body. Mabel likes the page about how our bodies fight germs, and how bones fit together, but mostly she likes the two that detail how a baby is made and how a baby grows and is born. Lately she's been drawing babies in circles and telling me, "That's the bag of waters."

Then we have the first-aid book, which is a proper grown-up book that has somehow made its way onto the kids' bookshelf. Mabel likes to leaf through that and ask me what's wrong with all the people, or what might have happened to them if I don't know. There's a picture in there of a birth, just in case as a first-aider you come across some poor woman in the last stages of labor and need to do more than just boil water and find towels. It exhorts you not to pull on the head of the baby as it emerges. Good advice.

Yesterday I was complicit in a game of babies that was going on around me. Every few minutes a baby would be placed up my sweater, and then pulled out with a flourish.

"Oh, I can feel it starting to come down," I'd say.
"Push, push," they'd tell me, delighted.
"I can see the head," crowed Mabel.
"Twist it so it comes out," advised Dr. Dash.
"No, don't twist it," I said, concerned for my child's welfare.
"It's a girl! Congratulations!"
"Yayy! I always wanted a baby sister!"

Five minutes later I was safely delivered of two more babies in quick succession. Easiest pregnancies ever, I have to say.

Ersatz

Sometimes I don't know why we bother with toys. I know it's just another riff on the baby-loves-boxes theme, but this is what I found Mabel playing with this afternoon, after she'd raided the kitchen for implements.

And then I asked her to clean up a mess and she found the cutest little family of sweeping brushes.

Then again, maybe it's because all the babies were napping.