Addiction

My daughter has a Dairylea Dunkers problem.

We went shopping yesterday evening, and she asked for Dairylea Dunkers. No, I said; they're a sometimes treat.

We got to the shops and she asked again. No, I repeated, but it's the long weekend coming up, so maybe we can get some then.

We got to the till.

"Daddy, Dairylea Dunkers." I admire the alliteration, but no.

I went to put the trolley away and she began to howl. I got her outside and it really kicked off.

"DAIRYLEA DUNKERS!"

"No, Arya. Not today. Maybe at the weekend."

"Not at the weekend! Now!"

"No, and at this rate, not at the weekend."

"DAIRYLEA DUNKERS!"

And then she took off her coat and flung it on the ground. I picked up the coat and picked up her and headed home.

"No! No! Put me down! DAIRYLEA DUNKERS! Put me down!"

Eventually I put her down, because I don't like restraining her, but then she ran off back towards the shop, stopped after a bit and pointed at the Co-op. I tried to get to her and she ran on ahead, so I had to negotiate the fine balance between catching up to her and not causing her to bolt into the road. Eventually I hefted her onto my shoulder and hoiked her back down the road to the flat, with her screaming bloody murder.

"I don't want to go home! Put me down! Get off me! DAIRYLEA DUNKERS!"

Honestly, if I never hear that name again...

I got her home and opened the door, put her down and she tried to bolt. Took me the better part of a minute to manoeuevre her and the bags and her coat and her umbrella far enough in to shut and lock the door. Then she sat against the door, kicking and crying and screaming: "Dairylea Dunkers!"

Hanna tried to talk to her, and eventually we went to the sitting room and Hanna told her she could come and talk when she was ready. As Arya began - after about another five minutes - to edge around the kitchen door into the hall, we put on some My Little Pony to act as a lure. Slowly she moved into the living room, occasionally responding to our approaches by muttering "dairylea dunkers."

Finally, she looked up and, bright as you like, said: "I found the ball for my elephant, Daddy, but it went under the sofa."

And that was that.

And another thing...

Presenting the choccy biccy banana sandwich.

This landmark in snacking is made from a gluten-free Nairns chocolate chip biscuit break and slices of banana, and represents one of Arya's first independent culinary experiment.

I in no way guided, nor encouraged this experiment. This was all her. I'm so proud.

Going to Pot

Pinned

This weekend, Hanna was mostly baking. It was a truly impressive effort, but Arya disapproves of the industrialisation represented by the new mixer, largely because Arya likes to mix herself, and if at all possible to throw icing sugar over the table, herself, Daddy... Next weekend is Hanna's birthday and Mother's Day and I have a cunning plan to rope Andrew in so that we can make up two loads of cake batter with the mixer and one with Arya at the same time, thus producing the necessary ungodly quantities of cake for a huge stack of cakiness for Hanna, which we can then decorate with a) piping bags and b) gay abandon.

Anyway, other than that, what did we do?

Well, Arya successfully dragged me away from cooking for the Kafkaesque nightmare of doubletalk and evasion that is 'going to the toilet', and having thus pushed Mummy into making dinner, tried to drag her attention back by occupying my chest as if it were Wall Street.

On Saturday we went to Tumble Tots and it was 'Keep Fit, Eat Fit' day, so the counting discs were standing in for veggie pizzas. I was planning shopping and asked Hanna what we should do for dinner. Hanna asked Arya and... well, that was something of a foregone conclusion. Only then Arya saw a picture of some Bolognese in her 'Eat Fit' brochure and wanted Bolognese (which we had actually had the night before.)

"Not Pizza?"

Duplo

"No, Pizza."
"Not Bolognese?"
"No, Bolognese."
"How about... pizza with Bolognese sauce?"
"Yes!"

Genius!

So we went shopping, which got exciting, as it took quite a long time and Arya was getting hungry. She was also drawn as ever to the Frozen tat, and got upset when she was denied, but honestly that's what Grandma Scott is for. We may be considering an Elsa dress for her birthday, but we'll have to see how she goes. She does tend to shoot herself in the foot with these things:

"Elsa dress please?"
"They don't have it in your size, sweetie, but maybe we can order one for your birthday."

Cue tantrum and removal of offer.

I think birthday will also include more Duplo, as she got well into it on Saturday, including a substantial amount of independent building, rather than the old standard of 'here are two pieces; assemble them for me slave daddy.'

I know that birthday will include DVDs of all the Julia Donaldson adaptations and a copy of The Highway Rat, and as of Sunday also a set of rather lovely Eric Carle punch out and construct animals. Also softplay and taking her friend Marcus to Tumble Tots as a guest.

The chocolate Fu Manchu beard.

Back with this weekend, on Sunday we went on a joint birthday outing/Mother's Day treat sort of thing and visited the Crackpots ceramic cafe to paint things. Arya painted a lovely pink heart-shaped box for Mummy... and then layered it in her trademark random mishmash of colours. I made Hanna a birthday present and she made one for Arya (a teapot/mug and a little mug respectively.) After that we had lunch in a lovely pub in Ely (not cheap at all, but very much needed,) and did some shopping. Then Arya and I stopped into Starbucks while Hanna fetched the car.

All told, it was a pretty long and tiring day, and then Hanna proceeded to ice cakes until bedtime, while I gave Arya a bath. At her insistence, it was a cold bath; not cool, but actually cold. She hated having cold water sloshed on her back and head while getting washed and after she got out she shivered for half an hour while I hugged her tight and worried that I'd enabled her first bout of hypothermia. Once she'd perked up a bit I asked: "So; shall we have a warm bath next time?"

"No! A cold one!"

So weird.

Casting the Runes

Arya casts the runes.

Hanna and Arya came up on the Friday afternoon, and because Hanna needed to do emergency shopping they took me to lunch and then Arya came back to the office with me to do some coloring while I worked.

Yeah, stop laughing.

Of course, what happened was that she got bored after ten minutes, tried to get out onto the landing, and eventually we went up to the roof garden where she tried to cast the runes using the gravel. This is what comes of leaving her moral education in the hands of witches, I tells ya! First it's throwing pebbles, then before you know it she's doing whatever she will yet harming none (which has always struck me as a very genteel and fundamentally British kind of anarchy.)

She didn't eat much at lunch. She preferred to run around Wagamama's like a loon, and when she agreed to sit down in the common room, tried to feed me her food. She made a much better fist of her curry at dinner time, we having given up on cooking on a fundamental level due to extreme weariness.

Spoonstache!

On Friday night we split up for sleeps. I took the monitor into the man-nest (living room sofa) so that Hanna could stretch out and rest her joints. I popped YouTube on and was greeted with a small girl being menaced by supernatural evil. Thanks, Guillermo del Toro; you're a mensch.

When I finally managed to get to sleep I was woken by 'Mummy. Mummy'. I went into Arya's room, fearing the Woman in Black on 'roids, but Arya was just awake and slightly groggy.

"Mummy?" she asked.

"It's okay. It's Daddy."

"Mummy!"

Thankfully she did accept me as an alternative (this would not always be the case through a Mummy-centric weekend) and went back to sleep.

On Saturday we did something new. We took Arya to an introductory session at Tumble Tots baby gymnastic class, which is basically just a lot of guided play on mini-gym equipment to help develop coordination and the all-important ladder skills which will mark her out in later life as someone who can change a lightbulb*. She seemed to enjoy it, so we signed her up for the class.

We spent much of the rest of the afternoon in Ely, going slightly mad. Seriously, I think we were all slightly too tired and events are a bit of a blur. I think Hanna had a nap afterwards, Arya and I watched the new episodes of Sarah and Duck and... Okay, either Friday or Saturday I was introduced to Animal Mechanicals, a series on Netflix which her new bestie Marcus introduced Arya to. I think that was Friday, and on Saturday she watched a lot of Melody on CBeebies with Mummy while I made a paella.

"I call it 'Terror Mountain'."

Animal Mechanicals is a CGI series about a group of mechanical animals who are sent on missions using their oddly arbitrary mecha powers to solve problems. Melody is a mixed live-action and animated series about a partially-sighted girl who interacts imaginatively with the classical music that her mother plays for her. I like to look on this pairing as an argument for the licence fee in microcosm.

Apparently a boat.

On Sunday we were woken up by Arya calling for me (yay!) and we went swimming. Arya was clingy as anything; Hanna maintains that this is because I am anxious, but I don't think I am, and besides, I was bricking it when I took her to the playground in the afternoon (after breakfast) and she wanted to scramble over the big kid climbing frames, and that didn't stop her.

She also rode the horsie while singing 'Row Your Boat', which was adorable, if slightly confusing.

After the park, it was pretty much time to say goodbye, and Hanna took Arya off back to Martelsham for the week. Next weekend I have Arya all to myself, although we will actually be staying with my Mum and Dad.

* I may have some scars from being told I wasn't qualified to climb a ladder in the professional setting.

The Deconstruction of Food

Note the emergence of the ponytail, which
also results in awesome 80s morning hair.

Dinner: deconstructed

Cooking is the art of taking disparate ingredients and combining them into a single, perfect whole, and of serving a combination of said wholes which compliment each other in taste and texture.

Cooking for children is an exercise in frustration and futility, accompanied by plaintive cries of: "But you like peas.*"

Arya is currently going through a phrase where she likes her food to be separate. Rice is rice and eggs are eggs, and never the twain shall meet, for the miscegenation of ingredients is shameful, and should it happen - say in some sort of casserole or curry - then the parts may only be eaten if they are rigorously sorted. Pea and ham omelette? Well, yes please, but let's pick out the peas and the ham to eat separately, and then maybe we can eat the scrambled egg that's left over. Rice from the casserole? I think not; it'll never come clean.

Heston Bloomenthal would no doubt make - if you will - a meal of this. Maybe I should write and suggest that his next book be about the deconstruction of dinner: Casseroles consisting of panfried chicken and onion, roasted vegetables and plain rice served in a colour-wheel arrangement; eggs, ham and peas set out like an edible tricolore flag. Perhaps I should just write to Jack Monroe and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall to let them know that they have some great recipes, but wouldn't they be better if nothing was mixed together?

And another thing...

Of course, it would all have been easier this weekend if Arya hadn't been ill - again; yay for nursery! It's so good for her socialisation** - but she was.

On Friday night she refused the cot, so I slept in with her so Hanna could get some shuteye. At about 1.30 she woke up and demanded space (quite literally there were two in the bed and the little one said roll over.) I gave her some medicine (she was running a high fever all weekend, controlled with meticulously monitored doses of ibuprofen and calpol, which she mostly took very neatly but was clearly hacked off with by this morning) and after another hour she woke up again and was all "what they hell are you doing on the floor, daddy? I want cuddles. And Babby. And Rah***. don't you know I'm not well?"

Rah.

We also got to play the blanket game. This is where she lies on the bed and lie next to her and cuddle her and she says 'blanket', so I pull the duvet over her. Then she kicks it off and says 'blanket'. She gets hella upset if I don't pull the duvet up, even though she hates being covered.

On Saturday, Arya woke up in a major grump. We gave her more medicine and some breakfast and she transformed into a total angel. Sadly she didn't nap (she did go to sleep, but woke when I tried to move her to the cot, a theme of the weekend) and so we spent pretty much the entire afternoon watching Sarah & Duck. I swear, I fell asleep twice watching the episode 'The Big Sleepover'.

Because she is wise, Hanna suggested that if I were going to keep Arya with me on Saturday night (she once again refused to sleep in the cot after deconstructing her paprika chicken and rice, usually a solid favourite, and refusing either to brush her teeth or get ready for a bath) then perhaps we should sleep in the big bed rather than me teetering on the outside edge of the single while she irresistibly occupies the middle. Hanna brought her through and she instantly lay sideways across the king-size mattress. Once again, her temperament was improved once her fever was down a bit and she cuddled up rather adorably next to daddy for the night.

Due to the fever we did not go swimming on Sunday, but her appetite for fluid was back with a vengeance. She napped beautifully, brushed her teeth and had a lovely bath. She then took ninety minutes to go down to sleep (first we had to settle with Babby and Rah, then Babby had to be undressed****, then Arya wanted more milk*****.) After forty-five minutes she woke up in tears and demanded Mummy, and only Mummy, because Daddy had promised Mummy would come and get her and take her to bed (this being the plan) and she'd woken up in the same place she fell asleep alone.)

I spent the night on the day bed so as to be in some sort of state for work. when I took Hanna her tea in the morning, Arya was peacefully asleep. Hanna gave me a plaintive look and said: "This is the first time she's been like this all night." I'll believe her, though thousands might not.

* A child's taste in food is not hardwired, but governed by a bizarre alchemy of whim and weather, but it is the very devil for parents to get their heads around this.

** Designated support worker Krupke, we're down on our knees, 'Cos no-one wants a baby with a social disease...

*** Iago the dragon appears to have been renamed Rah.

**** Arya has some sort of objection to clothes on toys, although it's less awkward than my ersatsz niece who just objected to clothes on her.

***** She didn't drink it, but it was fearfully important that she have it.

Fruit and Balloons

This has been a weekend of fruit and balloons.

This apple was 'appropriated' from the Co-op
by the tried and tested means of licking it until
Daddy had to pay for it.

Arya loves her fruit; she genuinely does. She's always liked satsumas and other small orangey citrus fruits (although actual oranges she seems to find a terrible disappointment,) has loved bananas since they stopped making her sick, and now is into her apples as well.

She's less into cinema. We went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2 on Saturday morning, and once she'd finished her popcorn and raisins and poured CapriSun on Daddy's crotch, she was pretty much done with it. We went downstairs and played a game where she ran around the arcade in the karaoke and bowling place and I tried to catch her and make her put her shoes on. It was hilarious; y'know, if you were her and except for the bits with the shoes because shoes are evil.

"Do you come here often?"

She's at an odd stage for interacting with things. She fixates on odd things; last week she clung to her toothbrush until the milk appeared at bedtime, and she will pick up a pair of tights or PJ trousers and hug then for hours, but kick up a storm if you try to put them on her. Shoes she is particularly against at the moment, apparently because she feels she should be putting them on for herself and only over her toes.

All in all she's very independent and very bold. It can be hard keeping hold of her, so on roads and in crowded places she has to go in the pushchair which, much of the time, she hates. It's heartbreaking to fight her into the chair, especially as 'No, Daddy! No!' is now an established part of her vocabulary, but the alternative is letting her run around in car parks, so it's a no brainer.

All your fruit are belong to us!

Arya was full of beans this weekend; literally as well as figuratively. We had some trouble with food, although that could come down to 'doesn't like pumpkin' as we had chicken and pumpkin risotto on Friday and an amazingly gloopy potato and pumpkin soup on Sunday.

Mind you, that doesn't explain the roast fish and veg that she's nommed before.

Anyway, beans are a good fallback to make sure that she eats something (fibre, protein, vitamins) and we also had a Frankie and Benny's breakfast after the half-movie and run around because she was taken with their balloons. She was of course then desperately aggrieved to be put back in the pushchair and howled all the way to the Co-op by the station, where we bought much needed fruit (we were down to two satsumas and one banana, which unbeknownst to me, Mummy had already eaten.)

Happiness is a warm orange.

She immediately wanted to be allowed to hold the fruit, and was upset when I took it away to pay for. I then offered to peel a banana for her, but no; she didn't want a peeled banana to eat, she just wanted to hold all of the bananas and all of the satsumas.

Still, it made her chipper as anything as we walked quickly to the station. There we had to get past the wankers who had decided that because the barriers were open it was totally okay to go the wrong way though the 'wide access for pushchairs and such' gate, in spite of the Dad and baby coming the other way. As a result of this, we missed our train by seconds and had to wait an hour for the next one. Fortunately, Arya soon went to sleep, although she woke up when we got home and I tried to extract her from her fruit pile.

Everyone loves balloons, right?

She was also given a balloon in McDonald's on Sunday. This one floated, and hilarity ensued as she swiftly realised that a) it floated and b) releasing the string would lead to Mummy and Daddy grabbing for it in an amusing way (at least until Mummy 'lost' her grip and let it float away out of sight.)

I do worry about her love of messing with the
oven controls (or any turny thing; I
accidentally boil-washed a bunch of clothes
after she left; hopefully no harm was done.)

After McDonald's and a very rich honey and almond hot chocolate in Starbucks (she had a baby hot chocolate and just ate the cream off the top) we bought her some new clothes and went swimming, where she had fun on the floating mat and then dancing with her reflection in a mirrored pedestal, which was like the most adorable thing ever.

She was also much better at being bathed this weekend, actually sitting to play with her whistling dolphins instead of standing and bending precariously to reach them. She even lay on her tummy and practiced swimming a little. Then she fought me like a demon when I tried to put her nappy on afterwards.

So, it's been swings and roundabouts again this weekend, but fortunately at any time I feel frustrated either with her or with my own ability as a parent I have the rampaging toddler and his screaming, shouting, swearing parents upstairs to reassure me that I am the bomb at parenting. Um... yay?

The Curse of Ipswich Station

This weekend I again spent the Friday night in Ipswich and brought Arya back on the train. For added funsies, en route I missed a train and, having time to muse, called 111 and described some symptoms I had noticed. Two hours later I was in Ipswich hospital being diagnosed with hand, foot and mouth disease!

After consulting with Hannah and Andrew, I went on to spend the night at the bungalow, and the following afternoon took Arya home by train. We got to the station with her still asleep this time, but then the damned tannoy woke her up by yelling down right in front of the lift. Given that this is the one spot that parents with pushchairs have to pass, putting the speaker there feels like a pretty shit thing to do.

She wandered a lot, but fortunately was less
fixated on hitting the emergency alarm than
the last time.

Still, she was much happier this time, at least until I made her go back into the pushchair. She pottered about, and was only really troubled after she realised that the doors had buttons and stood right up to them trying to reach and press them. She was not happy to be taken away from them.

It was a mixed evening, as she was dead tired and therefore grumpy, but we had dinner, watched the usual Pajanimals and she went off pretty quickly.

On the food front, Arya still doesn't like porridge, whatever yummy things I put in it. Okay, she might go for maple syrup, but that's far too sweet and far too expensive. She can feed that habit from her GF cereal.

On Sunday we went into town before swimming, partly to let her nap and partly to buy a stuffed Toothless from Build-a-Bear Workshop. The one of these thwarted the other somewhat; having previously been in either very early on a Sunday or in the week, the noise in BaB took me aback, and woke Arya, who at least had fun pressing the buttons for the various sounds (girl loves buttons; ain't no doubt.)

She went down alright on Sunday, allowing Hannah and I to catch up on Downton Abbey, but then woke and became upset. When she wouldn't settle, I took her through to Hannah (I was sleeping on the sofa due to lurgy,) thinking it was by now quite late. It was actually about half-one, which I realised only after Arya was snuggled in next to mummy.

Friday Night Bonding

Friday night was a father/daughter bonding experience. I picked Arya up from Andrew at the station and we walked home, where I cooked while Arya made it clear that leaving her in a high chair so I could prepare food for her without stabbing, scalding or searing her with hot oil was an act of cruel abandonment.

After dinner we settled on the expanded sofa to watch some Muppets and sing songs together (well, I sing most of the songs, but she's starting to clap and make sounds) and eventually she drifted off to sleep.

She also said 'Dadalu', which is close enough to 'Daddy Luke' for me.

In addition to the Muppets, she seems to be getting into Alphablocks, possibly because we enjoy it as well.

On Saturday we had a family day out, and another on Sunday to the cinema in Bury. For future cinema trips, we're looking to plan a day including lunch, or perhaps work a Cambridge visit into her swimming days, because it's too far to haul out and back for one film, and we were very hungry by the end of two.

This is her at the Littleport Steakhouse on Saturday. don't be fooled by the salad; she's just polished off several chips, half a buffalo wing and a piece of kangaroo steak (although her part of Hannah's rump steak ended up on the floor).

And this, from a week ago, is Arya falling down the side of the bed.

And Arya's rapturous response to the treasures of the British Museum.