Im going to join in for fun - Ive read some great ones so I know I wont win, but heck, lifes not just about winning (says she who hates to lose LOL)!

See the rules.

I first heard about Minti on Steve Wright in the Afternoon (BBC Radio 2) as I was driving about to get Soph to sleep as a little baby and curious to see the house my friends were trying to buy. SW had a "website of the day" and recommended Minti as "Wikipedia for Parents". At the time I was at a low ebb, having lost some friends who couldnt handle my daughters behaviour, feeling a failure as a mum, and pretty isolated. I arrived on Minti and immediately met up with some mums with children who's behaviour was just like my DD1s. Finally I wasnt alone. I'd read about them, but now I had knowledgeable friends who knew what it was like to be judged for your childs born character.

I also discovered I could add comments to others advice, which reminded me of things Id encountered early on in my parenting-journey, giving value to everything I had been through. The thing about parenting is that the moment you have the latest problem sussed, the child changes and you feel like a beginner all over again. Very demoralising! The only way I can cope is to go with the flow, and so I hadnt realised how much Id learned, until I came to Minti!

It's really boosted my confidence being on Minti. Ive made some good friends. It is, as DH acknowledges (soomewhat grudgingly) just about my only "me" time. It is available at what ever hour I happen to have long enough to switch on a computer!

When I have an anxiety about something to do with parenting, i am learning not to worry. It is simply a case of posting something on Minti, and weighing the variety of responses, often prayerfully, getting differing perspectives on whatever I was focussing on. So Minti is for me an answer to prayer!

 

I've been "meme" tagged by llmunchkin and lightbee!

Here are the rules for this tag.

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

6 random things about me

1. My first date with my now-DH was to the Muppets Christmas Carol! We looked around and I really do believe we were the only ones who hadnt found a young child to bring with them! Well, DH was still a teenager (I was 23) so perhaps I had after all LOL!
2. I've had various nicknames in my time. At school I was called "Grinner" as I was too shy to talk to anyone, so I would just grin at them if they talked to me. My dad has called me variously "The Perennial Student" (I was in college til 25 by which stage I'd got 4 post-school qualifications) and "The single Handed Gardener" (I have a dodgy back, two dodgy knees and RSI in one wrist).
3. My favourite plants to grow are Fuchsias, while my favourite cut flowers are Freesias. WHen DH wanted to propose to me to me he went into the Florists and announced that he didnt know whether he was supposed to buy a bunch of Fuchsias or Freesias. Fortunately the Florist advised him that as Fuchsias dont come as cut flowers, he probably needed to buy Freesias, so he got it right!
4. I organised my own engagement party, but was almost the only person who didnt realise it WAS my engagement party (I thought it was a New Years Day family get together) until just before it began!
5. We have a tank-full of fish as pets, and I have named them all - Mr Whippy (a Cat Fish), Ainsley (Harriet died - both Gouramis), Mr Foxy (Flying Fox), the two Ottos (cant tell them apart), Rosy & Jim (Rosy Barbs), various Tetras I havent named as I cant tell them apart (Neons, Blues, Greens, Glowlights) and the Danios (some Zebras and Peals). I could sit and watch them for hours. Happily, DH looks after them so I only have to feed them when he is away.
6. I'm really into family history. My dad had already researched the family on his and mum's side by the time I got into it, so I got into DHs instead, using the internet, while I was expecting DD2. One day while I was looking into MILs family tree I realised she and my dad were 4th cousins - small world!

OK, who to tag next? kseers, rogerchristineday, julielf, mcm, dramamom, and cookclan.

Right, now I've got to tell them!

Just a quick question for my visitors - I may put on Q&A eventually!

Emma has what we call "excited hands". I cant think of the right term. It's not really a nervous twitch, more of an involuntary movement done when she's excited. It emerged when she was about 1 I think, and it was welcome, in part coz it helped me see when she was excited about something and partly coz her older cousin had excited hands when little but we all missed it when he outgrew it. So I decided not to mention it, but just to comment "the cat is exciting, isnt it" or when she was older "what's so exciting then?" etc.

In the end she was the one who called them her "excited hands" and mimicked herself (though it is distinctly different to the real thing). She kind of rubs her hands very quickly together for about 2 seconds and gets a tense excited face. If she's really excited, like she was when waiting to trampoline on Monday night, she can go though 20+ repetitions. To be honest, I thought peer pressure at Preschool would put an end to it, but here she is one term into school, and still doing it.

So, casual as possible, I asked her last night if anyone ever said anything unkind about it and she said yes sometimes, and I asked her how that made her feel, and she replied a bit sad. So (guessing) I said she really had two choices, to either ignore what people said, or to try sitting on her hands when she felt excited, so no-one could see them. She didnt reply.

I think Im probably more worried about this than she is, though it's hard to be sure!

Does anyone have any experience of this? Am I right to just act like it's normal? Should I try to advise her more how to stop? Should I speak to the teacher? No one seems to guess what it means - every now and then someone will ask me "is she cold?"

Thanks!

This is mostly a note to myself as I want to write Advice on this one day! I was reading Izzy's Advice on Katie's Flat Head and suddenly remembered Emma's head when she was born.

Due to Emma's head not being in the right position when she was about to come into the world, she arrived with a cephalhaematoma on the side of her head which wanted to be born first! Cephalhaematomas are usually seen in newborns when they have been ventoused into this world. It is a haemorage of blood between the skin and the membrane which is immediately next to the skull. See a good cross section picture on Wikipedia if you want to see what I mean. Emma's was rather like a large wobbly blood blister covering half the top of her head! After the initial "yuck" reaction I rather forgot about it, except when people used to assume she'd been delivered with ventouse and tell me their borth story leading up to their child's cephalhaematoma. The midwives reassured us that in a month of so the blood would all have been reabsorbed into her body and no-one would be able to see any sign that she'd had one. Other parents said much the same thing. While in hospital, Emma had jaundice, which may well have been related to her haematoma. Well, the weeks passed and the cephalhaematoma grandually reduced in size. One day it was gone, but.... now a bony lump the size of my little finger was visible in it's place. Off I went to the Health Visitor (Nurse) to find out what this was. She had no idea and referred me to the GP. This was a bit worrying.... I then saw a lovely Doctor, who also had no idea what it was, and suggested that maybe two of the skull plates had overlapped. She was very keen to reassure me but I was pretty rattled. She referred me to the Paediatrician at the hospital, and so we waited for the appointment to come through. After a few weeks we turned up to see the paediatrician. It turned out we'd been given THAT appointment for something else, but he was good enough to deal with both issues in the one visit. He said Emma had a classic case of Calcified Haematoma. If it was so classic, how come the other health professionals hasnt even mentioned it?! Anyway, with our permission he rooted around and found his camera, but it was out of film. He said he would love some pictures of Emma's head for teaching purposes, so we sent him in some pictures later that day. The calcified haematoma he explained was just that component of the blood being reabsorbed rather slower than the others. He said that in a couple of months it would be gone too. And he was right, pretty much. Her head is still not symetrical, being squarer at the back on one side than the other. She took an age to grow any real hair, so it was noticeable for a few years, and I heard one comment at the swimming pool when she was little about her head, but fortunately she is a girl and does not need or want to have a short style (and hopefully wont ever decide to shave it all off!). For a few weeks I was fighting back the worry of "what ifs" about what could be going wrong with our DDs head to make it "grow" wrongly. I so wish that the health professionals had been able to tell me at the outset what it was, rather than having to put her on the waiting list to see the specialist. So that is why I wanted to Blog and later publish this as Advice, so that someone esle can have their mind put at rest much sooner.

Hopefully from the below pictures taken over her first year you can see the progression as her Cephalhaematoma is replaced by the calicified haematoma and then she is just left with an asymetrical head.

This snap made us think of the line from Oliver Twist! She was overheating at an older relative's house just after Chrismas, hence the rosy cheeks and the vest. That determined thin-lipped look on her face is becoming more common - think Im gonna see a lot of it in the Terrible Twos and the Trying Threes!

I was walking Emma home from school and caught myself being vague in my instructions to her . She wanted to run ahead of me, I assumed to hide, so I said "don't go too far ahead"! I then proceeded to worry about how far ahead she would think WASNT too far. Fortunately she hid in the usual places, so all was fine. But it got me thinking! I remember some time ago Izzy saying that she found her son responded best when she gave him instructions with a short explanation of why. I had found Emma exactly the same, whereas other children seemed to do as they were told (sort of) without the reasons being given to them at that age. Perhaps it's the personality type. However, I dont think Im the same type of personality type as Em at all, and yet I always like to know why when given an instruction! I've had that a bit since Em started school - her head teacher writes Newsletters home almost as a set of instructions, all without explanation. I see red regularly!

Anyway, all that turned my mind to SMART, which I was taught in a management module at college. For the uninitiated, it stands for

• Specific,
• Measureable,
• Achieveable,
• Realistic, &
• Time-related.

When I'd said to Emma "Dont go too far ahead", I certainly wasnt Specific. I'd relied upon common sense, which lets face it, 5 year olds dont have much of. How can they? They have so little experience to remember.  It's such a memory-dependant thing, as I'm finding out with my mum (who has dementia). What I'd meant was "dont go so far ahead you can see or hear me if you need my help".

Measurable - I usually say "dont go out of sight" or "dont go further than the next lamp post".

Achieveable - I suppose in this instance I was trusting her to go ahead as I knew she'd done it sensibly before, but without giving her instructions as to how to achieve the "not too far" I had asked her to guess at how to achieve it, setting her up for failure.

The moment the fear set in I knew I hadnt been Realistic - my little daydreamer could easily get carried away and run too far ahead.

So although I knew that the activity was achieveable and realistic, in that she'd done it before, I also knew that by not giving her proper instructions, I was risking that she would guess and get it dangerously wrong. I know that my 5 year old daughter still needs lots of guidance if she's going to get it right. 

Time-related - well, I suppose I could have told her to only run ahead for the count of 20, or to come back in 2 minutes if I hadnt found her hiding place.

Anyway, I hope that by sharing these ramblings, I will at least have cemented these lessons in my own brain, and perhaps given others food for thought. I always feel that in giving Emma reasons, appropriate to her age of course, that I am treating her with some respect and also teaching her to think a bit. Because there ARE reasons for life's rules, both as children and as adults. I know my SIL has turned to her mum on plenty of occasions since becoming a mum herself and said "NOW I know why you used to do/say that to us - I had NO idea why then!" IMO, so much better to obey rules because you agree with them than out of blind duty.

Tomorrow Emma starts her 2nd term at school. All being well I shall be able to concentrate on Sophie's sleep. I very much suspect that she's following her sister's lead and beginning to outgrow naps. From about 15 months I found it increasingly difficult to get Em to nap. From 9 months until then she had finally got into a routine where she would hop onto my lap after lunch and have a leisurely 1 hour feed followed by a 1+ hour nap. If I needed some time out I could just feed her again when she stirred and get up to 4 hours on the sofa, which I had to do when migraines struck. Forget the loo or snacks, drinks etc tho! I always made sure I had the telly zapper and my mobile phone! But from about 15 months, after the disturbance of Christmas, she would finish the feed and jump up and go off to play. It started occasionally but increasingly over the next month. By 16 months I could only get her to nap by loading her into the car and heading for the old Roman Road outside town, which was the nearest straight National Speed Limit road near us. Apart fromt he cost to the environment, fuel and wear & tear to the car, there was however a cost in her behaviour. Without a sleep she was grumpy but fell asleep fast at bedtime. With a sleep I got a 1 hour break but had to cope with a foul tempered toddler who took an hour extra to fall asleep at night. At 17 months I decided to settle for the grumpy version. Well, Soph has now gone two consecutive days without her nap, and definitely skipped some over Chrismas. Are we going the same way? I found out later that DH and his two sisters dropped their naps at 14 months - some things should be told to new mums BEFORE they become relevant! None of my friends babies gave up their naps for at least another year, so I hadnt even considered it was possible. Oh well, older and wiser this time!