The Gallery: Discovery

I'll confess. I am a Gallery virgin. Oh I've been lurking for a while now, but have just not managed to get my act together to actually post a pic. But today I thought I'd have a go. If you don't know what the Gallery is all about, see it here at Tara Cain's Sticky Fingers blog.

The theme for this week is: Your favourite photo

Hard one. I have many. I considered pictures of my children, husband, family, holidays and lost loved ones but finally settled on this series of pictures which I'm calling: Discovery

I very recently posted one of these pictures and a story that went along with it, so I am going to cheat a bit and suggest you read this post for the full story.

But to add: these pictures represent a discovery. A discovery of what an amazing place the ocean is. A discovery of how beautiful the world is. A discovery of what I am personally able to achieve. And a re-discovery of me.

Winter coats in carseats - safety alert!

When I had my first son, I remember that the midwives wouldn't let me take him home until they could see that he was strapped into his carseat. As it was winter, it was freezing so we bundled him up in his ultra-cute all-in-one puffy snowsuit and away we went.

I remember sitting next to him on the backseat watching him breathe, terrified that something might happen to him (I think it took me about 6 months to return to the front seat of the car).

Little did I know though that while I thought my baby was strapped in safe and snuggly warm, I was actually potentially putting him in danger. Here's why:

When you put your baby into a carseat wearing a thick coat or snow suit, you tend to tighten the straps as tight as you can to the coat, not the child. But in an accident, coats can compress (just sit on a puffy coat and see how much it squishes down to get the idea). If the coat compresses, the straps will be too loose which means your baby could get flung from their seat (which has happened in the US - hence the reason Americans seem to know about this but us Brits don't).

The reason I know about this is because a client of mine - www.morrck.com - has spent the last year researching it. We spoke to experts who specialise in car seat safety testing and they said that the fault didn't lie with the coats, but with the parents who don't tighten the straps enough. Apparently, 60 - 80% of all car seats are used incorrectly, with harness tension being the single biggest failing.

But how tight is tight enough? As parents we all know what it's like when you try and strap a child into a car seat in a thick coat and pull it super tight. The whinging starts immediately about being uncomfortable and hot. So you may be tempted to loosen the straps....

Morrck suggests that you do The Two Finger Test to figure out if a coat is too thick - like this:

1. Put the coat on the child.

2. Strap the child into the car seat and tighten to ensure a snug fit.
3. Remove the child from the car seat – without loosening the straps.
4. Take the coat off the child.
5. Strap the child back into the seat – but don’t adjust the straps.
6. Do the Two finger test. If you can fit more than two fingers underneath the harness at the child’s shoulder bone, the harness tension needs to be tightened or avoid using the coat in the car seat.


And if you want proof as to how much of a difference coats make to the harness tension, watch this video

 
Obviously this begs the question: how do I keep my child warm on cold winter days? There are a bunch of ways, from placing a blanket over your child to letting them wear a thin fleece. 
 
Morrck also has an innovative product called the Baby Hoodie that lets you strap your baby in to the car seat in their indoor clothes and you then simply wrap the hoodie around them. It doesn't affect harness tension, is easy to open if the child gets hot, is easy to get to the emergency release button and has been tested in a crash test lab for safety (and passed with flying colours). In the interest of transparency, I repeat, Morrck is a client of mine so I would say their product is great, but if you want to see what other people say about it, click here
 
This is the hoodie in action below
 

 
You can find our more information on this issue by clicking here - there's also a second video that shows you how to use a hoodie. So please help spread the word about this relatively unknown safety issue - whether it's at toddler groups, NCT classes, the school gate, Twitter, Facebook or blog posts - particularly as it's getting colder and those coats are going to start coming out!

Why search a country when there's a whole sodding world

Since my last post about moving house, I feel as though I've been on a funfair ride that keeps going faster and faster, and just as it slows down and I feel as though I'm getting my bearings, it speeds up again and I lose all sense of direction. In fact I'm starting to feel a little sick.

The problem is that I really don't know where I want to live (despite thinking I'd found my spiritual home). I know that it's probably not where we currently live. But finding a place that ticks all our boxes is proving a little difficult. And I'm not talking the perfect house. I'm talking the perfect village or town.

Where is there somewhere that offers me the feel of small, friendly place where you're not just a face in the crowd, but equally has enough va-va-va-voom? With people like us (or PLUs as we've come to call them). That has big enough house sizes and gardens with access to the sea and sailing but isn't so exhorbitant that you have to live on beans and toast in your deluxe kitchen? That has fantastic schools and is commutable to London and not too far from airports or friends or or or...

It's too hard. Nowhere feels right. And maybe that's because I don't know anywhere well enough. And when you're trying to start a new life without knowing a thing about the place you're starting it in, it's a bit like Russian roulette. You can take those kind of gambles in your twenties, but when you have two kids and two careers and have to realise that you can't keep uprooting if something isn't right, then it makes it all a little more tricky.

Just to add to the mix, husband has just been away for a week in the US. And it was hard. He's regularly away like this - which is what had led us to think that us living far from London is ok because he can weekly commute and he'll be at home about as much as he is now. Except he won't. Because now he at least has the option to come home if he's in London. If we live too far away, he won't. Do I really want to be a single parent for the foreseeable future?

Can't we find somewhere that ticks all of our life boxes? Am I really unreasonable to expect this? I know Phil and Kirsty are all about 'compromise' but which bit do you compromise on? How do you figure out what is most important until you do it and realise, "oh shit, we made the wrong choice."

And while husband was in the US, he chatted to his boss about our impending move and she said that if moving to the US was something we'd consider, to let her know. Nothing immediate, but there could be.

And this then throws open a whole pandora's box. Finding somewhere in the UK where we can visit (albeit briefly) to investigate on weekends is one thing. To move to a new country and embrace an entirely new lifestyle is quite another. We used to live there, and I LOVED IT. But that was pre-kids. Now I am more fearful. Everything seems harder. You can't just find a swanky one bed flat in the heart of the partying district. You have to find somewhere with good schools and community and blah blah blah.

If we moved to the US, what would happen to my work? What would happen to all I know about being a mother? Everything works differently there.

But, on the other hand, when you look at US properties for sale (and obviously I have looked - me being the house porn slut of the year 2010), everything just looks shinier. Bigger. Better. More well kept. Less dowdy. Did I mention bigger.

Should we be adding the entire US of A to our search criteria on Rightmove?

It's all far too exhausting. I shall now retreat to the drawing room with a small snifter of brandy to recover.  Do let me have your thoughts.

Shaking things up.

So here's the thing. You know how you say: 'I'd love to live by the sea'. Or perhaps you don't. Perhaps you say: 'I'd love to open my own coffe shop or fashion boutique'. Or perhaps you'd rather keep pigs and knit your own lentils instead of sitting on a tube to a job in the City. Or perhaps you're entirely happy with your lot. If so, good for you and you might want to move to another blog.

But I am one of those people who has always wanted to live by the sea. Or actually, by water. A river would be very good. Possibly it's because I grew up right alongside a river and have been searching for home ever since.

Whatever the Freudian reason, it all came to a head over the August bank holiday weekend. We were visiting friends in the Isle of Wight, and we just said: 'What are we waiting for?? We don't love where we live. We don't hate it. It's nice. But it doesn't make our souls sing does it?'  We agreed that it didn't and that living next to a river/sea would give us the outdoorsy, sailingy lifestyle I(and apparently husband) hankers for.

And so, in true male fashion, my husband wasted no time, called estate agents and put our house on the market.

Insert screeching car noise here.


You see, we're perfectly happy here. I have finally made friends, the school is fab, we have the countryside on our doorstep. It's fine.

But it's not the sea.

So having signed a contract with an estate agent to say that 'yes please, we would love to sell our 300 year old thatched character cottage in the biggest recession of all time so that we can be homeless', we spent this weekend looking for a new home.

We went to Devon. In fact we went to Sidmouth, as we had been told by many people that it was lovely. And it is. So utterly beautiful that you want to rip the clothes off your body and run down the beach praising whoever is in charge of beaches. Except (and you can insert that screeching noise again here) that Sidmouth is populated with old people.

I am not ageist. But I do feel slightly intimidated by the fumes coming off the purples rinses. They are lovely. And slow. But lovely. But slow. And old. Did I mention old? Seriously, the stores (described as regency period) stock goods that are genuinely not far off that era. The restaurants serve food last seen in the late 60s and the service is so slow I expect most of their customers die before they eat.

Despite this, we fell in love with Sidmouth. We believe more property will come on the market if you wait long enough. Someone will die soon.

But then after seeing THE PROPERTY TO TOP ALL PROPERTIES EVER we were told that it has shared gardens and the owner was a complete knob who hated children and really we would hate living there (got to love honest estate agents). So we bid farewell to the views but thanked the agent for her tip to go see a village called... Situation X.... because I don't want to reveal it on blogland.

And we went there. And I found my spiritual home. It is so lovely. And everyone was just like us with kids like ours and it's commutable and involves sailing and has good schools and well just everything.

So now, having panicked about putting our house on the market in haste not knowing where we might move too, I now just want to sell and start our new lives next to a river, a spit from the sea living the dream life I've always wanted.

I feel all jumbly inside. This is all so sudden, yet not. Stay tuned .. I might have bought a luxury liner before the next blog post and have moved to Bali.

One year on

Date: 13 September 2009
Place: Hull, UK
What: The start of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race

Exactly one year ago today I set sail from Hull en route to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via La Rochelle, France. Anyone who followed my More to Life than Laundry blog will know the huge amount of effort involved in getting to this point. A mum to then 3 and 5 year old sons, a business to run, a normal busy life to take care of. But I wanted to get off the hamster wheel of life for a little while and do something for me.

And so after months and months of very hard work organising, fund raising and training, I was finally ready to set sail. What followed was a six week experience that had been billed as life-changing. A year on, my question is, was it?

On paper, my life is exactly the same. I have two (slightly older) boys, my business, a busy life and house to run. I have the same frustrations that were always there (the laundry pile never gets any smaller). But something has changed. And it's very hard to define. 

What's changed is me. It's a very subtle thing that probably isn't visible to the outside world. But I'll try to explain...

I feel empowered. Not in that in your face women's lib kinda way. But in a quiet, understated, gently simmering warm feeling of knowing that I can do whatever I set my mind to.

I feel free. The constraints of motherhood, adulthood and responsibility can feel suffocating, stifling with the question of 'Is this it?' loitering in the dark corners of your mind. I'm free of that now. Because I know that there's a horizon out there that is blue and golden and it's perfectly possible to go explore it.

I live life. I used to berate myself for not having a global business empire or greater business achievements. I've made peace with that now and set myself a new objective. To have fun, to enjoy life, to cut myself some slack. And I've spent most of this year doing exactly that.

I feel peaceful. Obviously not all the time as my last post highlights, but when times get tough, I go to my mental sanctuary. A place I discovered in the middle of the Atlantic. It tastes of salt. It smells of clean sea and fresh air. It sounds like rushing water. It feels like a warm breeze tangling hair tendrils that whip against a sun-cleansed face. It looks like a never-ending blue canvas that arches around me in all directions. It is bliss.

So yes, it has been life-changing. Not in the 'I'm changing career and taking up adventure sports' way, but in the ways that count. Best of all, I did it, and nothing can ever take that away.

When you don't like your child

I love my children, dearly. When I watch them sleeping in their beds, hair mussed up, chests rising and falling, they look like little angels and I can't believe how lucky I am.

Yet most days, particularly most mornings, I don't like one of my children. That's a terrible thing to say. But it's the truth.

My eldest child has been difficult from the day he was born. A baby who didn't stop crying and wouldn't sleep. A toddler who had tantrums worthy of oscars. A pre-schooler who wouldn't join in and would cling incessantly. A school starter who would cry everyday at school drop off, run out of school and throw monstrous tantrums. He's never managed to control his emotions - happy or upset. All of these stages I have found incredibly hard work and sometimes downright bewildering, but I have learned and accepted that he is a sensitive child who takes a while to adapt to things. I've tried to provide the right balance of firmness with understanding and love.

But now he's six and a half. And we're in a whole new world. I take heart talking to other parents that their children are similarly behaved, but what I find most upsetting is how I feel about him.

His moods are relentless. He screams, yells, throws things about, is aggressive, rude, hits, kicks, spits, breaks things and is bone bloody idol. He will do nothing to help himself - unless there is something in it for him. He takes responsibility for nothing. He won't share. Yet he demands that things are shared with him. He never seems to learn from any discipline or punishment or consequence or reward. He refuses to listen if you try to have a reasonable conversation with him, simply covering his ears saying: Blah blah blah. We go through the exact same things over and over and over. He believes the world is out to get him. Mostly he seems unhappy and very, very angry.

I know that as a parent it is my job to help him work through this. To teach him social niceties and how to behave. To help him find out how he fits into the world and how to make the most of his abilities. To help him be happy. But parents are human. And even though I love him, I am finding it particularly hard to like him. And this makes it so much harder to remain the calm, loving, firm parent I want to be.

There are moments when his lovely nature shines through and when it does, I want to grab onto it and hold a mirror up to him and say: 'See, this is what you can be. It's gorgeous and lovely and wonderful!' But it's like holding water in your hands and it slips away all to fast.

I desperately want him to be happy. I want him to know I love him. But mostly I want to like him more often. I fear that the more he behaves in this way, the harder it will be for me to separate him from his actions. That I will start to resent him and in turn he will resent me, and our relationship remains one of me-against-him and him-against-me for a lifetime.

I am fairly certain that my own parents felt the same way about me, as by all accounts I was a particularly vile child. So perhaps it's simply karma that I should have the same experience. Retribution so to speak. But perhaps it's because I know how I felt as a child that I want to help my own son so much. I wished with all my heart that I didn't behave like I did as a child. I remember sulking and fighting with my siblings and wishing that I wasn't, but some how being unable to stop myself. I am almost certain that my son feels the same way. But how do you help a child out of that cycle? Particularly when his behaviour is so maddening that you're hard pressed to remain civil much less find a solution.

Perhaps I am wrong to even write this post. A grossly inappropriate thing to admit. But I just so badly want to like my son. I can't believe I am the only parent who feels like this. And perhaps by just writing it, it's the cathartic release I need to be able to put my feelings behind me and move forward to help my son.  Here's hoping so anyway.

Wot I mostly did on my summer holidays

And so the summer holidays end. And with it, the start of glorious weather. How ironic. It has been an exhausting, but lovely 5 weeks. If I were feeling less shattered, I'd attempt to write something clever or moving or poetic. But as it is, I can barely keep my eyes open. So instead, here's my first-day-of-school-summer-holiday-recap. Sit quietly in the front row, put your hand up and you'll get your turn to tell us about yours next:

• Fantastic break up day party involving parents getting far too drunk but it certainly set the tone for the rest of the holiday
• Three days of actual work, while the children had a ball with their childminder.
• Two weeks in Greece. I could write a lot about this. But suffice to say that week 1 saw our children in kids clubs from 9am to 5pm daily (despite us offering to take them out repeatedly - they declined as they were having too much fun) and then video club from 7pm - 11pm. So really utter bliss during which I suntanned, swam and sailed (and drank unhealthy amounts of Greek wine and Mythos beer). The highlight had to be sailing in dinghy races daily, something I haven't done since I was a teenager, and I won! In fact I kicked butt. It felt marvellous. I was absolutely hyped when I came off the water and just wanted to head straight back out for more.

See exhibit A of sailing action:

• Week 2 involved us going on a flotilla around Greek islands in the Ionian Sea. It was fantastic but very stressful at times, like when you're trying to moor up next to a £2million yacht and not knowing what you're doing and trying not to bash it and trying not to shout at your husband to hurry up with the fenders all while saying to the children: "No, we can't play Uno right now". But besides the mooring/anchoring up, it was marvellous. Lots of swimming off the back of the boat in the sea, eating and drinking too much and general swanning about. Bliss. See below

• Back home for a day of recovery before 3 days of work and then a fab day out with fellow mummy bloggers Pantswithnames and Nappyvalleygirl.  It was lovely to meet people that I've got to know virtually and with 6 little boys between us, there was plenty of charging about for the kids.
• Then a day of doing a Treasure Trail in Hungerford with old friends, followed by a day at home and a fab pizza evening out with friends and kids playing in country fields.
• Then off to the Peak District for three days of camping in torrential rain. Oh what fun it was. I can't bring myself to write more about this other than it involved mud and lots of it.
• Back for one day of work, before heading over to the Isle of Wight for a final summer soiree for four days, drinking too much, laughing a lot and exploring the Island with the view to possibly moving there.
• We've since had two days at home, during which I've attempted to catch up on work and failed, played with friends and gone for long walks in the countryside.

And now on the eve of back to school day, I feel in dire need of a holiday to recover from it all. Actually, what I need is to get back to work before my brain turns to mush. And I should really start to night, but I won't. I shall savour the silence of the evening knowing that tomorrow morning will see my littlest boy head off to big school for the first time, while I sob into my breakfast tea.

This is why I have been absent from the blogosphere. This is why I have been absent on the work front. This is what summer is meant to be all about. Hope yours was just as lovely.