Parenting
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Monday, October 30th, 2006Tomorrow my boy returns to school. He is in equal parts excited and frightened. I’m not sure if we are doing the right thing sending him back, even though he seems to want to go. I feel we should let him try a few more days there; I will soon know if he needs to be taken out of the school.
My youngest son, now a glorious nine and a half months, has reached a whole bunch of milestones and for that I could weep. He says ‘dog’, he is about to crawl, commando style, any minute and he has pulled himself up to a standing position. His two older brothers were early walkers and Ben has supported his weight by pushing up on his legs since the day he was born. It’s like he has said, ‘stuff this whole sitting crap when I can get up and walk.’ I have found a high calorie milk that he will actually drink, even though it is dairy and aggravates his eczema to the point where he could rip the skin off his neck if I would let him. He returns to the hospital in a couple of days and to a nutritionist shortly. The doctor is seeing him weekly because he now needs high monitoring. He faces a barrage of tests but hopefully these will shed some light on why he won’t/can’t eat.
Meanwhile I’m really struggling to keep a sense of perspective about stuff. That’s the sleep-deprivation. I know I am not doing a great parenting job at the moment. I want to be a better, calmer, happier mother to my adorable children. The baby cries too much and I sometimes resent having to hold him when I have stuff to do just so he won’t cry. He has such a temper on him too and I worry that he has developed that from the noise and irritability that often abounds in our house. Likewise he will happily co-sleep but will throw a strop if I put him in the cot. If I have to get up in the night to deal with the older boys I worry that he could fall off the bed so now I face controlled crying or similar which fills me with dread, or creating a ‘family bed’ which I suppose means a mattress on the floor. My middle son is sweet at school, always smiling, shyly happy but develops a little devil personality when he rejoins his big brother. Eldest son was lovely, responsible and fun to be with when I took him and the baby to town this morning but became silliness personified when he rejoined his his little brother and partner in crime. Perhaps with the older two back at school I will have more time to teach the baby to sleep - maybe along side me every morning between 9.30 and 12.00! - and everything else will settle down.
I’m eating cereal for supper and wondering whether I have the energy to stay up and watch Spooks, the BBC’s fine series about the secret service. With Ben nursing night and day my clothes are hanging off me as my weight drops but I just don’t have the energy to cook (or more truthfully there is no time before my date with Rupert Penry-Jones, MI5 agent and licensed to kill). So cereal and secret lust it is.
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My last three weeks in list form
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006These are some of the search terms I have typed into Google recently.
Baby won’t eat and failing to thrive
Can antibiotics suppress a baby’s appetite
Long term consequences of a baby failing to put on weight
Urinary tract infection, micturating urethrocystogram and urinary reflux
Will it hurt when they push a catheter into my baby’s penis
Will I cry when they push a catheter into my baby’s penis and he screams
Bullying in reception class/kindergarten
What legal obligation is there to keep my child safe in school
How to deal with a passive-aggressive head teacher
Could I home-educate without losing my sanity
Local education authority procedure for changing schools
Middle child attention seeking behaviour, middle child syndrome
(reason to have another child if ever there was one - although does that just give me two middle children?)
Child in pain with chickenpox blisters all over head and torso
My baby won’t stop crying, chickenpox prevents eczema treatment
How to amuse two children and a baby recovering from chickenpox
Why are children excluded from school with chickenpox when they have probably already infected everyone and the parents bring those same children over to catch it anyway
Why the hell doesn’t the UK offer the chickenpox vaccine
Chronic sleep deprivation
How much sleep can I do without before I end up comatose or possibly killing someone unintentionally (or possibly intentionally)
Which is worse torture: chronic sleep deprivation or three hideously behaved children
Yes, the last three weeks have been fun.
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Posted in Parenting
How to stop bullying
Thursday, October 12th, 2006On Monday the teacher and the teaching assistant had to forcibly drag my son into the classroom while I watched in disbelief that it had come to this.
I saw the head that morning. I was told that my son’s injuries were due to his ’silly behaviour’. I left with the reassurance that Harry would be watched more closely in the playground where the majority of the incidences have occurred. I also left with the resolve to have nothing further to do with such an uncaring school.
For the last three days I have been considering all the options. I’ve done and thought about nothing else. Worse, I’ve no idea what to do: I’m concerned that I’m so exhausted (the baby slept through for the first time in weeks on Monday night but I was woken at 4.55am, 5.20 and 6am by the other two who had streaming colds) that I can’t think rationally let alone make a decision of this magnitude.
There is every chance that the bullying will stop with the action the school is taking (closer supervision of Harry in the playground) but I don’t know if I can physically get him back into school. He wants to stay at the school (in theory) but he doesn’t want to go to school (in practice). There is the option to return him to his previous pre-school which he seems keen on but it is a backward step and we still have to find another school (or return him to his current school older and more confident) next September. There is another good school relatively near with a place but I’m not sure if he is simply not ready for any school where there is a big, potentially rough, playground. There is a private school further away (longer school run every day) where he would be one of eight in the class as opposed to one of twenty three. All eight in the class are boys which is not ideal. It’s very expensive. There is home education for now or the forseeable future with any or none of these options available for the future. At the back of all this is the worry that moving him might turn out to be unnecessary and that he may settle happily when/if the situation is resolved. I walked the dogs today and I could see the children playing football on the playing field and I like the idea of him being so close by. It’s a really good school. His school friends would live in the village. He and his brothers would be definitely be able to be at the same school together (not a certainty if he goes to a school outside our catchment area). But if we leave him where he is I worry about real, long-term damage to his confidence, self-esteem and willingness to go to any school if the ‘wait and see’ approach fails.
After Monday I sent him to school without too much difficulty on Tuesday while I tried to make up my mind what to do. He had a reasonable day: he was pulled around by the clothes by two classmates, hurting his hip and being pushed over. He wasn’t hurt and he didn’t cry but he was frightened. A sensitive kid unable to deal with daily ‘rough and tumble’ or insufficient supervision? I don’t know. What if he had been hurt? I thought I’d give it one more day. Instead, Harry decided to come down with chickenpox.
The week after next is half term which would be the best time to move him. So I sit here unable to decide what is best for him and unable to send him to school to see if the situation will improve. When I asked him who his friends were and he replied, ‘I’m not sure who my friends are anymore, mummy’, I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach so tight at the confusion he must be feeling. The right decision is so very important. And I’m not sure what’s going to help me make it.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
Bullying at school
Thursday, October 5th, 2006In all the times I have struggled with parenting, struggled with post-partum depression, struggled to maintain a grip on my sanity amidst one or two or three crying, bad tempered or badly behaved children I have held onto the thought that I alone am responsible for my children’s welfare and happiness and mostly I do a pretty good job. Sometimes this thought has been a burden but mostly I have been grateful to know that these are good times, times when I am able to ensure my children are happy, looked after, protected and prepared for the world ahead of them. ‘Life doesn’t get easier, it just gets different,’ mothers of teenagers would say. I took their words to heart and appreciated the moments when my children were young.
Almost every day for the past four weeks my eldest son, a brave and sweet four year old, has come home with a skinned knee or elbow, a bruise on the head, a bloodied lip - or like today, all three - as a result of being pushed over. Last week he was pushed over by a friend who was first hitting him on the face and then chased him as he ran away and pushed him over. Yesterday he was pushed over by another friend right in front of me as they filed out of school (as I went to pick him up the boy didn’t even say sorry, just made some excuse about Harry tripping over). Today he was pushed over by bigger boys in the playground.
When I picked him up from school today I asked him if he had been picking his lip (a slightly undesirable habit of his) as it was all bloody and broken and he turned at me with a worried expression and said no he hadn’t. This evening I could see it was bruised and it was only when I asked him again he told me what had happened. As he lay down to sleep he said, ‘mummy I can’t lie on this side because my head is hurting’ and when I looked he had a big bruise on his head from the fall.
Until now I have felt angry with the other children who push my boy over, wondering what the hell is wrong with them. Playground antics are one thing, but this is more than that. I’m sure my son is no angel but I could not imagine him deliberately pushing someone over. But if he did, I know he would certainly say sorry if he saw that he had hurt them. I have felt like taking their parents to task but have held my tongue thinking that this would pass. But today I just felt like crying, crying for him because he has been quietly tearful in the mornings when I leave him and now I know why, crying for me because I can’t protect him.
I had already spoken to the teacher and asked her to look out for Harry but this doesn’t seem to have had any effect. I can’t be there to protect him and at four he is too young to be able to protect himself. I expected some jockeying for position among the boys in his year. Boys are an unknown to me and my husband assured me that physical stuff is all part of the boys’ world. But even he is surprised and saddened by this.
This evening my little boy’s eyes filled with tears and he asked if he could go back to preschool where he wouldn’t get hurt anymore. I looked at his bruised, bloodied face and I felt my heart breaking.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
Chickenpox
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006My eldest son started school and my middle son returned to preschool just four weeks ago. For the first two weeks they attended until lunchtime which gave me a couple of hours to sprint into town, buy a few items off a very long shopping list that had been growing over the summer because there was no way I was shopping with three small children in tow unless it was a life or death situation, stop in Starbucks (only to feed the baby in rather more pleasant surroundings than the grotty cubicle in Mothercare) and then drive home praying that there would be no delays to make me look like the worst mother in the world by being late. After exhausting the shopping capabilities of both myself and the town, I then spent the last couple of weeks trying to clear the backlog of cleaning and paperwork that had threatened to take over the house.
As everything settled into a routine I began to look forward to having some time this week to do a bit of work when the baby deigned to nap, to encourage him to eat when he was awake and to see some friends that aren’t exactly what I would call super child friendly (but who might at least coo politely at my incredibly beautiful baby). I looked forward to being able to read a bit, even read a lot, and perhaps even write the odd blog post or two because anything would improve my posting rate these days.
Then my mischievous three year old, William, got chickenpox.
Now he is sitting, itchy and feverish, on the sofa demanding something, anything, to eat that won’t irritate the blisters in his mouth. He has been up hourly through the nights not wanting anything except to see that he is still able to summon me to his bedside. He has been lording it to school in the long-abandoned double stroller, causing me to have a near hernia pushing him and the baby up the steep hill walking home. And I get to go through it all again in two weeks, this time in stereo!
The UK, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, chooses not to offer a chickenpox vaccine and chickenpox is still considered a childhood rite of passage. It spreads like wildfire but we encourage it further by hastily organising pox parties to spread it (we’ve had one today). We (almost) celebrate our children getting ill, knowing that they will have lifelong immunity to the disease, grateful that they will not risk being exposed to it as adults, or worse, when pregnant when the risks are very much greater.
There are few real diseases that our children are not vaccinated against anymore. Side effects of chickenpox can be serious but are rare. With usual middle class angst I’ve been on the lookout for pneumonia and encephalitis along with the bothersome itching but William seems to be surviving it mostly unscathed, except a very large boil-like infected spot invading his leg which will require antibiotics tomorrow. My medicine board will collapse under the weight of another medicine joining the household timetable.
So a few spots disrupting my longed-for free time is pretty insignificant. But, you know, the blogging, the reading. When?
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