Trantrums

You pour cornflakes into the breakfast bowl instead of Weetabix. This is enough to set off the first whiney whinge, evolving into crying and accelerating into a full raging temper tantrum. The next half an hour is then spent reasoning, coaxing, diverting, bribing or just ignoring. Anything to put an end to the little red faced person standing before you screaming (oh – and the baby joins in just for good measure).

Our son, bless his little Spiderman socks, is a professional ‘Temper Tantrumist’. Being three, he has got it down to a fine art, having practised hard at it for the past year. I find myself thinking ahead to potential hazards. Have we got the right wellies with us, are the crusts cut off his toast? Ridiculous I know, but faced with a tantrum, I will do whatever it takes to fend them off.

The worst is the public Temper Tantrum. Lying on the floor rigid and screaming at full volume to attract the most attention possible. Most spectators look on either sympathetically or disapprovingly. However, we all suspect they are thinking that we can’t control our child. To our relief we recently saw someone else’s child having a major tantrum in public, to which my husband turned around excitedly and cried out, “Bring it on.”

On one tantrum occasion, someone said, “You need to consult Super Nanny.” Horrified at the thought that I was considered a totally inadequate mother, I took their advice and watched the programme. It featured children (and parents) at their very worst. Our family seemed angelic. However, it did prompt us to introduce ‘The Naughty Step’. You place the child on a step, to reflect on its behaviour for a minute for each year of its life (three minutes for a three year old etc). More often than not, our children promptly got straight off it. I see there are now even mobile naughty mats, which you can use in public places. So you could soon find yourself dodging children parked on little mats in the aisles of supermarkets.

We will continue to ride the wave of temper tantrums, and as for Super Nanny’s advice, I have decided to place myself on the naughty step for 33 minutes of my 33 years and reflect on my behaviour, preferably with a large glass of Chablis in my hand.

Safety versus sanity

I strap my children in and out of car seats on average 55 times a week (excluding weekends). That is around 1,860 times a year. The whole ‘strapping in’ exercise takes around eight minutes, with my ‘behind’ sticking out of the rear car doors, heaving children into their seats, fumbling around trying to locate each clip that fits into the right buckle and adjusting straps to allow for the relevant clothing (avoid the puffa jackets!). I then reappear red-faced, with a slight twinge in the back and ready to screech at the top of my voice across the fields.

Weekends are even worse, when we resort to car seat planning sessions to ensure that we always have the right seats in the right car, for the different trips. Inevitably, the plans change or we are late, so my husband flies into ‘car seat panic mode’ flinging the wretched seats across the driveway in frustration.

Spare a thought too for poor grandparents who kindly agree to help out ferrying children around. Mastering the fastening of the car seat can result in many staying at home and avoiding any trips out in the car whatsoever.

According to the new law, I will be required to use three car seats for another seven years until my daughter either hits 12 years or meets the 135cm height restriction. Each child requires a different kind of seat depending on their age, each with different buckles and fasteners which require studying an instruction manual, which in our case usually finds itself unread in the bin in the box it came in.

Interestingly, taxis are not legally obliged to use car seats for children. I am unsure why they are any safer than parents in people carriers. However, some firms, such as Handy Cabs of Stalbridge, do insist on passengers bringing their own car seats. (They deserve a mention as our five-year-old daughter was sick over the back seat of their taxi last week!)

Obviously we all endorse safety for children, but I am beginning to wonder whether this is part of a secret Government environmental initiative to put parents off using their cars altogether and go by foot instead.

The cake sale

The children skip out of school and thrust a letter into my hand. It asks if parents would, “bake a cake for the Cake Sale.” It is two weeks away, but the pressure is on and I am already starting to panic.

Thoughts of the nice chocolate cake on display at the local Farm Shop spring to mind. No one will ever know if I destroy the packaging and pretend it is mine. But guilt sets in and my mother says, “As a mother, it is about time you learnt how to bake a cake.” Turning to cooking guru, Mary Berry, I discover a fail-safe recipe. The dreaded deadline arrives. Apron on, children parked in front of a DVD and an assortment of cooking utensils lined up alongside double the ingredients, to allow for disasters. I meticulously follow the recipe and wait nervously, peering into the oven while it cooks. It comes out a little miserable with a sunken middle but it will look fine once the icing is on.

At teatime, my daughter spots the cake and says in amazement, “Did you make that?” They then ask to try a piece which is probably a good idea, given it is a first. Which means that night, I am under even more pressure to repeat the whole exercise again. By 10pm, the finished product is carefully wrapped in foil ready to take to school the next day. Nightmares set in about who in the village will buy it and be exposed to my inept baking. The next day, I guiltily slap a sticker on the top of the cake saying, “Made by a 3-year-old” and ask my mother to drop it in at the school. My strategy is to lie low for the next few days and avoid eye contact with other parents. Later that week, as I am picking up my daughter from school, a voice shouts across the playground, “We bought your cake. It was delicious.” Grabbing the childrens’ hands, I skip to the car and breathe a huge sigh of relief. The mother of three has finally conquered her fear of cake baking.

Nits

At first we put the scratching down to shampoo left in the hair. Friends did mention ‘nits’ to me, to which my reponse was confidently, “No way. None of my family have ever had nits.” However, on closer examination of all our little heads, to my horror I discovered that they were alive with 3mm black beasts. Due to my total denial, the little mites had spent many weeks settling in and they were going nowhere in a hurry.

My approach was to treat this as a ‘Major Household Incident.’ I was prepared to do whatever it took to ensure that every last nit was eradicated from heads, hairbrushes, pillows .. and the dog. Everyone queued up to be doused with strong hair treatment that left a distinct odour lingering in our house for several days. Friends that visited promptly left. Weeks were spent combing hair with ‘industrial’ nit combs, obsessively attempting to extract the enemy and their mass of little white eggs. Even now the children only have to raise their hand in the direction of their head and I whip out the comb to ensure we remain ‘nit-free’.

They do say that once you have experienced nits, you will go to extreme lengths to ensure they never return. A friend who has four children at primary school said that she was spending a staggering £60 per month on nit treatments. “There were persistent non-treaters at school and eventually I threatened to keep my children at home.”

To my relief, a new programme has been introduced to some schools called, ‘National Bug Busting Day’. The children take home a Bug Buster kit on set days throughout the year, which includes nit combs and guidelines to encourage parents to check for lice. However, in the absence of this scheme at your school, you can always wash your children’s hair in coke which apparently loosens eggs, spray the hair with tea tree oil and water before leaving the house or persuade them to keep their small heads away from other small heads in the classroom.

Party panic

We have just recovered from ‘The Birthdays’. Two of our children were born on the same day four years apart so the poor little mites have to share their special day together. I think most of you will sympathise with me when it comes to organising The Birthday Party, particularly when we are dealing with a grown-up, pink and glittery girl and an active baby boy who crawls in mud and is quite partial to eating the odd woodlouse.

To get some help, I ‘googled’ “childrens’ parties” and discovered some terrifying facts. One report revealed that UK parents spend more than £1.25 billion a year on childrens’ birthday parties and an average of £18 per head. Apparently, the fifth birthday is the biggest with many parents spending more than £500 on it. Extraordinarily, more than half of parents say they worry more about what other parents think than about what their children want. So, according to this research, if our two children shared a party and invited around 30 children between them, we could be digging into our pockets for a staggering £792!

Advice offered by experts also says to never ask a child what sort of party it wants, avoid organising a party during the afternoon as children are too tired, offer carrot and cucumber sticks rather than crisps, sweeten the cake with apple juice, not sugar, and absolutely never ever have balloons as they may burst and traumatise children for life.

Thankfully, I am not aware of any parent who really minds what others think about their party. Most just want to get through the day and keep their sanity intact. The parties we go to are fun, sweet-filled, traditional parties with an abundance of balloons. In our case though, we plan to spend the next eleven months persuading our daughter to celebrate her sixth birthday with a few close friends in a local coffee shop. Meanwhile, perhaps we could plead with a local farmer to take our son on a tractor ride - a truly memorable birthday treat for any two-year-old boy.

Going to Granny's

It begins with, “Mum, would you mind having the children for half-term? We thought it would be really nice for you and Dad to spend some quality time with them.” Before you know it, the car pulls up in front of your house bursting with the grandchildren, their luggage and the ‘granddog’, that no one had remembered to mention! Out pile three small children with very runny noses along with travel cot, steriliser, stairgate, highchair, ride-on tractor, pushchair, doll’s pushchair, bicycles, three car seats and an assortment of carrier bags stuffed to the brim with wipes, rice cakes and nappies. You are instantly handed a detailed routine for the baby and talked through a list of instructions. “No fried food, no marmite (too salty), no juice (too sweet), no nuts (possible allergies) and limited television.”

The parents finally leave, with the grandchildren totally unphased. You return to the kitchen to find the list has thankfully been chewed to shreds by the ‘granddog’. For the next five days you barely have time to listen to The Archers or watch your favorite television programme and certainly have not read a newspaper. You struggle to answer the phone and, when you do, you cannot hear who is on the other end anyway. Your civilised evenings, chatting together over a carefully-prepared supper and a nice bottle of red are replaced with leftover cheesy pasta, Petit Filous and an extra large gin and tonic. You have both nodded off on the sofa in the middle of The Bill.

However exhausting they are, not many grandparents would change it for the world. Grandpa has a team of helpers in the garden and on trips to the rubbish dump, and Granny has a kitchen full of chefs who have crammed tins full of peppermint creams and cookies. They have eaten the odd fish finger, nut, lightly spread marmite soldiers and watched a few DVDs, but all in moderation. They are well-exercised, happy, allergy-free and their teeth are intact (just). Typically, the minute their parents pull up in the car, all three grandchildren promptly dissolve into floods of tears.

Trial by lunch box

The chaotic daily breakfast routine is in full swing. One child is doing her last minute school reading out loud in between mouthfuls of cornflakes. While the other has decided that he will now only eat fruit for breakfast. He says, “Sports candy is all that Sportacus (off CBeebies’ Lazy Town) eats.” Meanwhile, the baby is busy tossing marmite soliders to the dog lying under the high chair. They are totally oblivious to their mother barking, “Eat up. Put your coats on. Have you brushed your teeth?” Finally, once everyone is ready, strapped into the array of car seats, a small voice says, “Mummy, where’s my lunch box?” The deranged mother then tears back to the kitchen to frantically rummage through the larder, spread pieces of Hovis Best of Both, cut off crusts and slice cheese.

A friend tells me there is an art to the preparation of a lunch box. “You have to be well-organised and put a menu planner together at the start of the week. I cook a few good wholesome dishes in advance which they have cold in their lunch box each day,” she says. However, such military-style planning may be too much for some.

According to recent research, one in five parents in the UK include ciabatta and focaccia in lunches while three per cent include sushi and smoked salmon. Most parents I know in Dorset would not go to this extreme, but some do trawl supermarket aisles searching for novel healthy snacks. Whether it be yoghurt covered cranberries, organic fruit sticks or even olives, there is pressure to steer clear from the vast array of crisps and chocolate biscuits that most children long for. Every afternoon, we are told about the contents of other childrens’ lunchboxes. “Sarah had Smarties and James had Monster Munch today.” Eventually, we decide that Friday’s lunch box can contain a few treats - funnily enough it comes back looking as if it has been licked clean.

Perhaps we do need to get more organised and plan ahead, so our mornings are less fraught. But I will not be replacing sandwiches with sushi.