Where ...

It has been a while between updates and I am slowly coming to terms with a whole lot of stuff that is happening at the moment. But, Chet continues to delight. He has lately become the boy who cried 'where?' - at every opportunity. I ask him if he wants some toast, and his response is 'where?' I ask him if he wants to put on his boots and he shouts 'where?', pretty much any question I might ask him could be guaranteed a response of 'where?' He still loves The Beatles and has a Beatles towel that we have to fix round his neck with a peg so he can run around and be 'super Chet'. Here is a photo of him enjoying dry wheatbix that he helped himself to while I was in the shower.

I have been reading a lot - my usual way to make sense of life. The other day I came across the following, which neatly sums up the way I am feeling.

"Whatever a family's tragedy, children demand to be cared for, fed, and played with. This is, I think, one of the great blessings they bring to our lives. Mourning must be filtered through the lens of their all-consuming needs, and their infinite capacity for joy." Death gets a time-out by Ayelet Waldman.

Sharing ...

We have all been learning some lessons about sharing. Neither the K-man nor I are known for our ability to share but parenthood has forced us to re-evaluate somewhat. The K-man remarked the other day that he had never shared as much food as he had shared with Chet and indeed it is impossible to eat anything in Chet's presence without him demanding "mine, mine" with greater and greater insistence, until we give him a piece of whatever it is - cake, toast, banana, gluten-free cereal. And of course, how can we teach him how to share if we do not do so ourselves? Here we are sharing the couch and some granny blankets - one of which actually was my grandmother's.

Even the cat has been getting a lesson in sharing. Whenever she has the temerity to play with any of Chet's toys - she has a habit of flicking them under the couch - he rushes up and grabs them, again shouting "mine, mine". Poor Minx, she invariably gives up and jumps high up on the couch, out of harm's way.

I have been thinking that this insistence of ownership is the curse of the only child but the more I talk to other parents the more I think it is a developmental stage. I guess it could also have something to do with spending time in daycare where none of the toys belong to anyone and everyone gets acquainted with the concept of sharing on a daily basis. Let's just hope we can get past this stage and all learn to share with grace - even the cat!

Last week ...

was a bit of a shocker in some ways. I had pleurisy, albeit a mild case, and Chet was cutting some of his final 4 molars. I had two trips to two different Doctors, one for me and one for Chet, as well as an ECG to make sure my heart wasn't causing any problems (it wasn't). I had two days off work and watched the entire 4th season of The Wire which is fantastic television although watching episodes back to back like that meant that I had the characters in my head for the whole week.

I also had a receptionist imply that I was a bad mother because I was allowing Chet to move some decorative rocks from a pot plant in the waiting room. I mean really. He was moving them from the pot plant to a display stand and back again, very quietly, not causing any damage to the plant or anything else. I would have put them all back when we left but apparently this was not good enough for the receptionist who came around the desk and stood over Chet and grabbed all the rocks and put them back herself. I said that he wasn't causing any harm and that I would deal with it and she told me that I was the mother and shouldn't let him do it in the first place. I was really angry and told her "don't tell me how to mother" but all in all it was a very unsatisfactory encounter. I was a bit shocked that she wasn't charmed by Chet - in the past year and a half I have taken Chet with me to countless appointments and he has done worse things than move rocks around. Every time the receptionists have responded to him with encouragement and interest - one even made him a toy out of a specimen jar and some paper-clips - so I was quite taken aback to suddenly have this negative reaction. Especially considering that he could have been unplugging her computer, pulling patient files from the compactus, playing with the telephone, sticking his fingers in the printer and generally being an inquisitive toddler. The receptionist also said that there were toys for him to play with however earlier she had forcefully put the lid on the toy box making them inaccessible and subtly indicating that she didn't want him playing with them. What's a boy to do?

But, we also saw a chicken crossing the road in Dulwich Hill which cheered me up no end. Not sure where she was going, or whether she made it to the other side as she was being chased by someone, presumably her owner, but I was amused to see something slightly incongruous whilst playing with Chet in the park.

Barking mad

Chet and I went to Parramatta Park on Friday to meet up with the Sydney baby wearers. It was a beautiful warm winters day of the kind that Sydney does so well. But, for some reason, some faceless, no doubt male, bureaucrat, had decided that the play area in the park should be covered in bark. I had cleverly dressed Chet in a cream striped shirt. I put him down on the ground and he took off with his speedy commando crawl and spent the entire time covered in bark and dirt and I wasted a lot of time trying to get it off him and me. Here is a picture taken by the lovely Lara Nettle.

The bark made me realise why the park at the end of our street is so popular. It is quite small, at the end of a dead end street and bordered by the old goods line in Dulwich Hill. The play area was renovated a few years ago - before that it was a bit piss weak world - and it has one of the best swings for babies - a bucket all in one swing that holds them in securely. Here is Chet in the swing minus a shoe. The play area in the park is covered in an astro turf sort of material (I don't know the correct name for it) and Chet can crawl around on it quite safely and cleanly. In the afternoons a steady stream of prams and tricycles trickles down our street heading for the park. I go down there most afternoons just to get out of the house and to get Chet out as well. All we need now is for someone to start some sort of summer wine club down there - I think more than a few mothers and fathers would be down there like a shot sipping a cheeky glass of rose or some such watching their kids play and enjoying the surrounds. I suppose alcohol and child wrangling is not something to be encouraged - perhaps I will be the only one down there with a bottle in a brown paper bag taking a few surreptitious swigs?

The Slap

My concentration seems to have improved and I have finally managed to do some reading. In the past couple of weeks have read both The Slap and Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas. It was interesting to read his first and latest novels in this way and to compare the differences between them. Loaded was a Ulysses-esque day and night in the life of a young gay-ish Greek boy from Melbourne. It was an angry, uncompromising drug fueled sex romp through the homes and streets and clubs of early 90s inner city Melbourne. I liked it and am not sure why I didn't read it when it first came out. I could certainly relate to a lot of it, although my early 90s experience was in Brisbane. The Slap on the other hand was more assured, more adult, not so angry but equally uncompromising in its' own way. The sex and drugs are both still there and I was pleased to see the teenage characters going to parties and the Big Day Out and getting wasted just as the young and the not so young are wont to do.

The premise was interesting - the accounts of the lives of eight people who were present at a bbq where an angry man slaps a badly behaved 3 year old child who is not his own. The ruminations on marriage and family and parenting really spoke to me and certainly as a new parent it provided a lot to think about. Some critics have mentioned that the characters are not terribly likeable but I think that misses the point and that most of us wouldn't come across as terribly likeable if all of our inner thoughts were revealed in the way that Tsiolkas reveals the thoughts of these characters. I thought it was pretty true to life. I liked the structure although I wanted to read more about Gary, the alcoholic father of Hugo, the boy who was slapped. And, for a sleep deprived mama it was a pretty easy quick read. I bought it on Thursday and finished it on Saturday night, happy to return to my old habit of gorging on a book, reading it at every spare moment until it is finished. And I heard on the news yesterday that Tsiolkas won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Slap - well deserved I reckon.