Category: musings

“Mummy, can I take my shoes off?”
“Yes.”
“Mummy, can I pretend my shoes are aeroplanes?”
“Yes sweetheart.”

– Huff and Mummy

Puff was reading Psalm 2 to me this morning. It’s one of those psalms where the LORD speaks a bit.

He did a different voice (a bit more bass-heavy) for those parts.

Love it.

The last two nights I’ve been up with one or other of the kids at 2:45am. That’s a tough time of night. I want to just get the kid back to sleep as soon as possible, but these are the moments that I’ll look back on when the kids are bigger, and wish I had made the most of them.

Huff cried out at 2:45 and wanted to be cuddled. It took quite a few cuddles – I’d ask her if she was ready to go back to sleep, she’d say “not yet, not yet” in increasingly tired tones, and then finally agree to lay back down, be tucked in again, and go to sleep. As much as I wanted to go back to sleep, it’s hard to argue with her when she wants cuddles.

Puff, the next night, came into my room at 2:45 and said – in a fairly loud voice – he couldn’t get the theme song for a particular game out of his head, and could I put him back to bed. I sent him to the bathroom, he blinded me by turning on the bathroom light, and then I carried him (his idea) back to bed, tucked him in, and helped him go back to sleep.

I think I made the most of it, but there’s no way to be sure.

Huff’s new expression if she’s unhappy with something is “I no like it be happened”. She’s constructing bigger and bigger sentences, but her grammar is developing separately.

Reading a bible story about Moses and the burning bush to Puff and Huff tonight, Huff was saying “baa”. I realised there were sheep in the illustration, pointed them out, and kept reading.

Then, she started pointing to Moses and saying “God”. This kept going for a few pages – it’s hard to explain the incorporeal to a 2 year old. Puff, veteran of many more stories, doesn’t have that issue.

Now we play the waiting game.

A sidebar: Huff is starting to know the names of the various kids we pray for. Also, her favourite story is “monkey book”: a touch and feel book called Little chick’s holiday which has a monkey character on the first interior page.

Brief discussion with Puff this morning about Old MacDonald and his farm.

Puff: “Old MacDonald had a farm with a monkey and a cat and Spots” (the dog). This happens to be the different toy animals that Puff sleeps with which is, I think, where the idea came from.
Dad: “I don’t think monkeys usually belong on a farm, I think they live in the jungle”.
Puff: “Old MacDonald could have a jungle, with a monkey and a cat and Spots”

So we sang the song together about Old MacDonald having a jungle. I love the way he sees the world.

Looking back over the camera, I noticed that I left out two little events from last week: sitting down to watch the DVD of Cars (he lasted about 10 minutes before getting bored and wanting to do something else).

Also, meeting a chicken. Which was made all the more perfect when he said “Chicken… and chips?”

As part of the night routine, Dad generally reads Puff a few small books, and then a bible story. Dad and Puff then pray together, and then he goes into his sleeping bag, and into his cot to sleep.

Last night, for the first time, he said “wanna read the book”, and read “Shhh Tigger”, and a couple of books later read “Dizzy Days” to Dad. It made me realise just how short a time I’ll be reading to him, and to make the most of it.

[ Steve Fogg ]

Part “stuff white people like”, and part unusual take on the car commercial genre, I couldn’t help but share this one. Helps to understand the strange transition from non-parent to parent.

So, we’ve checked out of the hospital, and head down to the car. Instead of going straight home, we seize the momentum, and stop off at Grind, down in Cronulla.

An excursion out with a baby – even a short one – is a bit more of a logistical exercise. For days – puff’s whole life – he’s been living in a plastic cot, in a trolley that has everything he needs either in it, or on call.

Suddenly, once we leave the hospital, we’re on our own, in a very real sense. There are no more midwives to respond to the push of a button, no immediate changes of clothes if he needs them, no convenient place to bathe him. Just us, and the rest of the world.

The biggest challenge so far is settling him: sometimes after a feed, he’s relaxed and easily goes to sleep, but at other times, he’s grizzly, and complains about – well, who knows what. We work through the new parent checklist: dirty nappy? wind? too hot? not wrapped tightly enough? but sometimes, it’s none of the above, and we just have to wait until he’ll go to sleep.

This is easy enough with two parents at home, but looks like it will be a lot trickier when I go back to work. Time will tell, though.