parenting | Mum In The Madhouse

parenting

Teabagging…… I had no idea

34 Comments / mini mads / By

Maxi came running home from the green the other week

“Mummy, Mini has been teabagged”

Now forgive me, but I had no idea what teabagged was, but it didnt sound good. So I dedided to look it up on Wikipedia and safe to say I was gobsmaked and decided that I needed to investigate further.

So I got the boys together and asked them to demonstrate to me what teabagging was (with some trepidation as to what I was going to see). Maxi made Mini kneal on the floor and then ground his pubic area in his face, which thankfully isnt exactly teabagging, I tried very hard to keep a straight face and look suitably offended by what I had just seen.

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Letting go and letting the Children play outside

18 Comments / parenting / By

MadDad had an idyllic and pretty independent childhood. It was very Enid Blyton, well it would be he lived and grew up on a farm and spent most of the summer holidays returning home only to eat and sleep. I grew up with a pretty similar upbringing. We would venture out on our bikes to the nature reserve, the allotment, park or the beach. I loved it and when I was small we were allowed in certian peoples houses and the back alley.
One of our reasons for returning to our native North East was the fact that we wanted to give our boys a taste of the freedom we grew up with. Now before anyone starts with the kiddie fidlers and all that. I am a firm believer that there were such people when I was growing up and I distinctly remember being flashed at the local park, however, I also believe that there are not more of them nowadays, just that we are more aware of the dangers.

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Life

16 Comments / hospital / By

Sometimes life is hard, sometimes I struggle to just see clearly through the fog that is the shroud of my day to day activities. Sometimes when you add in to it pain, recovery and recouperation it is hard to see much past the end of my arm, let alone to the coming weeks and months.
I underwent pretty major surgery on Friday 1 July and anticipated that I would be fine and well and back out of the hospital over the weekend. Oh how wrong was I. I finally was realised the following Friday at 9.30pm after much discussions and some tears on my part as I was missing my family. My surgery was much more complex than originally anticipated and has meant that I am unable to eat solid food for approximately another four weeks and am very much in pain, however, those of you with young children will understand when I say that they have no understanding of concept gentle.

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Bittersweet

45 Comments / family / By

I have been trying to keep myself busy these last few weeks. Trying to avoid the feeling that has been building in my chest, the rising emptiness that has permeated my whole being. I dare not stop, I dare not let this feeling invade for the tears will start to fall and I fear that they may never stop.

Perspective, yes that is what I have needed. It is hard to admit that I am still grieving, that I am scared and that I am so frightened at the moment. That living my life can be so bloody hard. That sometimes the fear paralyses me, that I want to curl up in a little ball and not to go on.

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Is this really what men think about woman?

21 Comments / parenting, Uncategorized / By

If you dress like a slut then you are asking to be raped. Is this really what men think about woman? I know that it is not something I want to even let my boys contenttemplate thinking and have to say I was shocked that in today’s society that any man, let alone a police officer would band things like this about.

If you go into a shop is it acceptable to steal as you are being tempted by all the things on offer? I didn’t think so, so why does the way a woman dress mean that she is asking to be raped? But fundamentally what worried me was that this is what the man obviously thought and felt strongly enough to say even though he was aware that it was something that he shouldn’t be saying in his capacity as a police officer.

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Encouraging reading in boys

15 Comments / parenting / By

I wrote a post about encouraging writing in my boys and wanted to followup with one about encouraging reading. I am an ferociously reader. I adore books and lap them up, no, that is not quite right I adore reading. I love words, their meanings, the way they make me feel, the places they take me too. SO for me it was key that I introduced my boys to books very early on in their lives.

Make books available

We have books everywhere and we make sure that they are within their reach, We have them in the loo, in bedrooms, in the sitting room, we have a bookcase on the landing and one in the conservatory too. When the boys were smaller I made sure that books were in a box at their level and we rotated them. We were offered a free trial of Reading Chest and I have to say Mini loves it. He gets three books delivered and we can post them back when he has read them and we get three more in the post. It is superb if you are looking for books which are pitched at their ability and you do not have a library or in our case there is no reading scheme in Reception, which means Mini doesn’t get any books he can read, just ones that we can read to him.

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Laughing at, not laughing with

21 Comments / mini mads / By

We are going through a learning curve here in the mad house. I try to let my boys have freedom, I believe in letting them play outside and try to encourage them to be independent, but with two boys who are 15 months apart there is a fine line to walk. Mini wants to be out with Maxi and I want to encourage them to look out for each other. In order to help facilities this we have purchased a set of walkie talkies for the boys, which work really well when they remember to take them out! But yesterday things went wrong.

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There is no one way to be a perfect mother

15 Comments / motherhood / By

I didn’t know whether or not to do The Gallery this week. It is something that I pop in and out of when it suits my blog and I have to admit the prompt of mother love had me all of a quiver this week, as I so miss my mum and the mothers love that she provided.

We may not have agreed on everything and over the years we certainly had our ups and down, but I did feel protected in her cape of mothers love. She was there for me when I had my operations and held my hand through countless miscarriages and nightmares about dead babies when the last thing I wanted to do was close my eyes. She was there for me when I spent most of Maxi’s pregnancy in hospital, traveling the 350 miles by bus to come and sit by my side in hospital for the week before he was born, even sleeping there.

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