#76

A new one this morning:
“Daddy I’m going to teach you an Aladdin song. First I will sing it and then you sing it with me.” When it gets to duet time, we are in a very busy part of the walk with many people around, so I sing very half-heartedly-self-conscious. “Daddy you aren’t even trying! Why won’t you sing with me!!!???”.

She loves to sing. This is going to keep happening, isn’t it?

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#77

I remember one of my university lecturers telling a story about watching Stewart Little on Film 4 with his 3yr old daughter and falling asleep.

He said he woke up much later to the scene with the helicopter from Night of The Living Dead (?) and his daughter looked at him and said, “Mouse?”

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#78

*Stuart Little! Call yourself a fan?

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#79

I’m not sure I did…

#80

Yes! Embrace it. I bloody love seeing parents being silly with their kids in public.

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#81

I’ll tell you what’s mildly stressful, public toilets.

I can’t take her into the ladies, so we have to go into the gents and hope no one’s using the urinals. Then I have to squeeze with her into the cubicle to use her seat thing, then when she’s finished, if she’s done a shit, somehow find room to lie her down on the mat and wipe her. In some places it’s almost physically impossible, especially when she’s demanding to do stuff like flush the bog while instinctively touching every disgusting surface in there (then sticking her hands in her mouth).

When a place has a proper baby changing toilet or disabled loos with space, it goes up so massively in my estimation.

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#82

Massive fan of large shops, venues etc that have disproportionately teenytiny cramped and entirely unsuitable toilet facilities.

And by ‘massive fan of’, I mean ‘consumed with hate and disdain for’.

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#83

absolutely does my head in.

#84

Quite often we end up in my local Costa when we pop out to a café (because, as an aside, another stressful thing is when you ask them if they want a treat, and they say they want a gingerbread man, which seems like such an innocuous request, but can you find anywhere that sells them where you can eat in? Can you fuck? But our local Costa does, and it’s a novelty one with holes to put your fingers through to make them walk, and in those little moments of joy I can forgive being in a chain coffee shop).

Anyway, Costa is good in some respects in that it has a reasonable sized toilet. So you go to the toilet but it’s locked. With a code. That’s on the bottom of the receipt. That you turned down, because, no, there’s quite enough scraps of paper in the world thank you very much. And in the meantime, while you’re trying to find out what the code is, your little one is getting more and more desperate by the second.

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#85

recently; an hour long text message conversation that began ‘what the hell should I do?!’ when one of my eldest’s mates was freaking the fuck out after having taken 2 MDA pills. We got through that one OK though - aside from the ‘not-telling mum’ part but that was whole different headache

as for the little one, the most stressful thing is when she constantly interrupts the bedtime story to ask what words mean - but she knows what most of them mean and just wants to show off that she knows them in two languages.

Another kind of adjacently stressful aspect of parenting that’s current in our house is that we have a neighbour with a little one the same age as ours and the parents are two of the loveliest people you could ever meet but their kid is a devious, manipulative, aggressive monster and constantly destroys or blows apart other kids’ games and gaslights them all the time. Not much I can do about that really though

#86

Argh it’s so hard. My wee boy always wants to go into the gents and of course I can’t take him there. The sooner we have unisex toilets everywhere with BIG decent cubicals the better.

For bum wiping, I adopted the 'child facing me, bending over as if to rest their head on my knees while I bend over their back and attack the crack from above. I know little girls have a front-to-back wiping requirement that boys don’t so much, but I think that set-up could still work for you? It maximises tight spaces and you can really see their bum properly to make sure you’ve cleaned it properly too. Jesus. words I thought I’d never type. :joy::rofl:

BTW I forgot to share a potty training discovery. Our lad has been potty trained for ages now but for a long time was still insisting on his toilet insert being used which meant carting this thing around with us if we went out-

insert
insert.jpg625×833 92.2 KB

UNtil we came across this which is amazing and portable- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Foldable-Gimars-Portable-Training-Silicone/dp/B07FMT1YY5/ref=pd_rhf_ee_s_rp_c_0_1/259-8214523-7841940?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B07FMT1YY5&pd_rd_r=e285bb62-3848-43a8-8e61-6679f47c048a&pd_rd_w=QSWng&pd_rd_wg=9HiJm&pf_rd_p=20241d84-56c8-4232-b0f8-eef034466a58&pf_rd_r=CH1GT39PFQ9TKZS0YERN&psc=1&refRID=CH1GT39PFQ9TKZS0YERN

He actually used this for a few weeks and then didn’t want to use it as too babyish. so it was perfect combo of convenient and also weaning off the bigseat-tool.

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#87

Just a brief message to say: fuck mainland Europe* and its lack of free public toilet facilities. It cost the best part of 3 Euros on most cities for a family of four to go for wees. Even the McD’s (everyone’s favourite unofficial toilet facility) in Koln charged 50 cents a piss.

* or at least, its major cities.

#88

We have that foldable one in pink!

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#89

oh

that first one was maybe a bit of a more than mild for those whose kids aren’t into the teens yet

apologies

#90

Yeah, this post was inspired by just being in Amsterdam / Brussels for a couple of days, and not finding any decent toilets.

Part of that might be our insistence on going to bars and breweries though which don’t really cater to kids… :man_shrugging:

#91

It’s very cool that your eldest could come to you about it. I would much prefer mine do that than panic or make a stupid decision because they don’t want to get in trouble.

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#92

Swearing.

My eldest is three and has recently started parroting the odd swear. I don’t particularly give a fuck if he swears or not, but I HATE the idea of him being told off or just judged by other people for swearing when he doesn’t even know that he’s doing something wrong. So, no swearing it is.

Except that means no swearing for me, which is very fucking difficult cos I have a mouth like a fucking toilet.

The younger one poured an entire bowl of porridge on his own head this morning, and observing this the 3 year old made eye contact with me and went “fuckin ell what a mess”. I felt so much shame. The other day we were at a place with animals and he got bored and said “let’s go and look at the fuckin pigs”

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#93

a brilliant paragraph, loved every word

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#94

This has done me :smiley:

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#95

cheers yeah. Quite a positive sign but then I’ve always been pretty open with her about my own experiences and this country is one where drugs are zero tolerance so she didn’t really have any other competence to turn to.

She was in quite a panic though, she thought her friend was ODing but she was just hitting a heavy comedown after a marathon debut flight of 12 hours with the sky gods :slight_smile: