In passing this morning Nairn said he wanted to go and visit Good Uncle Barry*. He wouldn’t explain why just that he wanted to go. Pretty soon Erica jumped in that she wanted to go and after a brief discussion with Nairn confirmed that they both wanted to go and to go today. No offence to Good Uncle Barry but it’s the first time they’ve actively wanted to go there which set alarm bells ringing in my head.

After they’d had their breakfast I finally managed to get Nairn explain why he wanted to go. Apparently Bad Uncle Barry+ lives in the same flat in Good Uncle Barry’s hall cupboard.

Seriously. Where do they come up with these things?

* Good Uncle Barry was my best man and used to be my boss many moons ago when I worked for Safeway. He’s good in the sense that he isn’t Bad Uncle Barry.
+ Bad Uncle Barry is a completely different Barry. He is the tattooed crazy artist that teaches our kids to swear on sunny days in the park and encourages them to push old grannies into rivers. He’s even got our kids to start drawing up plans for the invasion of Europe and eventually the overall ruling of the universe. He’s that bad.

Back in March 2008 I wrote this post for another blog I had going at the time.

It’s been something that’s been going on for a long time in my mind. At what point do you shatter your child’s rose tinted view of the world and introduce them to the harsh reality?

Since the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh 2005 when I took my step-son along for the day I’ve been trying to work out just how to get it across to them. You don’t want to sound like a parent from the 70′s trying to get their family to eat all their food by saying, “There is little brown babies in Africa that would love to have a dinner like that.” My wife and I have tried to explain it to our eldest but whilst he seems to understand at the time it goes right out his mind two minutes later when Ben 10 comes on the TV.

photo credit: hdptcar

I was listening to Faithless – Mass Destruction the other day and it got me thinking again. There is a fine line between knowing about the world around us and having the harsh realities forced upon you at an early age. I usually find it difficult explaining to children why I work where I work. Without going into to much detail I’m involved in the administration side of the UK Government’s aid program. This means I usually end up trying to tell the kids about the Millennium Development Goals and whilst they usually take in what I say they almost always without fail ask that one question that all parents fear, “Why?” In this case it’s a perfectly valid question but how on earth do you answer it without cracking the shield that all children should have that lets them play in their own wee world unaffected by the troubles around them. And at what age is it reasonable to actually encourage children to get involved. From a personal view I was involved with CND from a very young age thanks to my Grandfather and several other relatives being very involved with them as well as growing up with Live Aid and Comic Relief but I know many that until very recently didn’t even know about the threat of famine every year around the world and were gobsmacked that the UK sent aid packages to the USA after  Hurricane Katrina.

There are many charities around the world involved with poverty/post conflict relief that are sometimes aimed at children. Comic Relief and Sport Relief in the UK are two of the larger ones with things like Children in Need following closely behind them. Their attitude to showing the kids where the money will go is quite a harsh one and I think it is this particular point that I find the hardest to deal with. On one hand I want my children to be care free and enjoy their childhood but at the same time I want to impress upon them the importance of helping others if you can who are in situations far worse than their own.

How do you deal with this issue?

With the shops ideals being all about helping yourself and the political side of me wanting to ‘make a difference for others’ I came right back to this issue. Should kids be left to be kids for as long as possible or should the reality of the world have an impact on them. Findlay has started watching Newsround on CBBC whenever he can. I love Newsround although I think it’s changed considerably since John Craven presented it all those years ago. They still give a very brief look at things like the current oil spill off the East coast of the USA or various problems in Africa or Asia but, and possibly rightfully so, it still keeps the bloodshed and extreme reality out of their view.

On one hand the kids are playing video games and seeing far more violence in cartoons than I seen as a child and I was an ardent fan of Tom and Jerry or The Roadrunner cartoons. On the other there are now TV channels where the kids will never see any violence at all…ever. Which do you promote? I guess I’m still just in shock at a local kid of maybe five years old threatening to smash my then three year old sons head off a wall and stomp on him like he seen on the TV.

Anyway…less looking in and more looking out. I’ve got work to do

On Friday it was Nairn’s 4th birthday. Somehow he managed to effectively get five days of celebrations and gifts thanks to parties and various members of our family not being able to turn up on his actual birthday which was actually fantastic. It’s possibly the least stressed we’ve been during one of our kids birthdays because of it I think. Anyway one of the presents that he received from us/the kids was a Woody from Toy Story costume which he didn’t like. If there is one thing I can say about the boy it’s that he’s honest. Even if a little ruthless with it. Anyway seeing as all the kid’s love Toy Story Erica decided that this costume was the best thing ever and this morning I came downstairs after looking out her clothes to wear to nursery to find her sitting watching TV wearing this costume.

“I got dressed Daddy.”

I couldn’t not let her wear it hat and all. I just didn’t have the heart.

So it came to pick up time and for once Vonnie wasn’t able to pick them up in the car as she’d been out in the city all afternoon and couldn’t make it back in time. This meant I had to walk the two miles there and the two miles back pushing a pram with my hurt foot as well as carrying Greer in a sling. It sounds worse than it is but it does take time. It’s usually a 60 minute round trip but with the extra child and bags on top of my foot it was closer to 120 minutes before we got home. Around half way home Findlay pointed out that Erica had fell asleep on the bottom seat of the P&T buggy and she was still holding the the cowboy hat in her hands. The next time I checked on her was whilst in the queue to buy pizza for dinner when I realised the hat was gone. Nairn had only had it five days and already it had been lost.

I was furious. How could I have been so stupid. I blamed Findlay for not seeing it fall from the pram. I blamed Greer for being young enough that I could carry her in the sling which completely obstructs the view of the lower pram seat and my feet. I blamed Nairn because he wouldn’t carry the hat for me to keep it safe and most of all I blamed myself for being so stupid as to miss a large brown cowboy hat falling from the pram no matter how hard it would have been to see it. I’d decided that as soon as Vonnie was home she could deal with feeding the children whilst I’d run back to the nursery and retrace our footsteps in the futile hope that no one had picked it up for themselves. I was close to tears with anger at this point and thankfully Vonnie had beaten us home and before we even made it in the front door she had me throwing the kids in the car so that we could quickly get back to nursery.

I jumped out at the entrance to the technology park where the kids nursery is and started jogging along our usual route after checking with the guardhouse. I had it in my head that between the nursery and a path just by the Territorial Army HQ was where it must have happened as I was sure I hadn’t seen the hat any further along our route so it cut down the possible number of spots where it might be. As I went along the route I started to get frantic. Okay so when we’d last been there it was daylight and an hour later it was definitely night time so I was expecting to possibly miss it as in places it was really dark but as I got closer to the TA HQ it became very apparent that the hat wasn’t to be found.

Just as I was about to turn off the path head to where I was meeting Vonnie with the car I had a thought. I’d long travelled past the place where I was last sure she didn’t have the hat but as there was only another 20 yards round a corner before I reached the end of the path I was on anyway I carried on. And there it was. Someone had came along and found it. Not only had the person not taken it for themselves they picked it up and placed it on a wall under a streetlamp so that I’d be able to see it without staring into the shadows that surrounded the place. The relief I felt was unreal. This is why I know I’m tired.

The level of stress and worry that I felt from this was up there with our experiences when Erica wasn’t well as a baby and we didn’t know what was wrong with her. The sudden joy of finding the hat felt exactly the same as the day we found out that Erica was piling on the weight and was no longer going to be a ‘failure to thrive’ baby. I shouldn’t be having these extreme emotions over a lost rubber cowboy hat.

Still… At the end of the day we got the hat back and there will be no tears in the morning. That’s the aim for every day. No tears from anyone in the morning.

The short version:-

I’ve sort of broke my foot.

sergiok @ Flickr

The long version:-

On friday night I stood on one of the kids wooden building blocks. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I basically went straight to bed afterwards but when I woke up the next morning it was a wee bit nippy. As the day wore on it gradually got sorer and sorer and about the only time I wasn’t in pain was when I was lying/sitting down or when I was standing still. Any movement in the food just caused me to wince in pain and hobble about. I thought it was a sprain or bruised tendon or something so I wasn’t that worried by it.

By the time Saturday night came along I managed to hobble from the carpark right outside Tesco at Silverburn to Wagamama but I could feel something grinding inside my foot. It wasn’t sore as such but it is the strangest feeling. Imagine two slightly deflated balloons or two blocks of polystyrene rubbing together. That’s the feeling inside my foot. It’s weird. I basically decided that unless it was greatly improved on Sunday morning I was going to head to the hospital to get it checked out. I managed to get Vonnie’s anniversary present before I couldn’t walk anymore which was a bonus but I must have spent about three and a half hours in A&E getting my foot seen to. I felt a bit of a fraud as the boy in front of me came in with a broken ankle and the girl behind me with a broken leg. The fact I could hobble from the exam room to the X-Ray room had me convinced there was nothing wrong. Vonnie turned up not long after I’d been X-Rayed and it turns out I’ve got a stress fracture of my fourth metatarsal or something like that. I’ve to go to see an orthopaedic doctor at 8.30am.

Considering I’m watching the Superbowl at the moment and it’s after midnight already I’m going to be in hell when I wake up.

The postman knows us very well. There isn’t a week goes by where we don’t get a package of some sorts. It’s got to the stage where he knows we’ll be about so holds on to packages for use if he misses us while we’re on the nursery/food/chicken feed run and swings by later to pass them in. Every single package is for Vonnie. The stuff inside might be for the kids but it’s always addressed to Vonnie. Then last week a box arrived addressed to myself…

Turn back time to just over a month ago. I’m sitting at my desk at work trying desperately to do as little as possible whilst still looking busy (for all prospective employers out there…read back through my journal as there is a reason for it ) I stumbled upon a competition being run by the Scottish Book Trust. All you had to do was complete the titles of a few books and give their authors and you could win a few books. Easy. So over lunch I completed my entry and then completely forgot all about it. That was until the other week when I received an email saying I’d won the competition. With it being kids books it was a nice win but my limit of good luck never stretched to more than a few quids worth of prizes.

Now we’ve had a few freebies from them in the past. One of the things they do is to reach out to every child in Scotland and at various times of their give them a bundle of books to help encourage the love of reading. So needless to say with having four kids we’ve seen our fair share of Bookstart books come through the door.

What arrived was a little more than a few free books however.

Rory and his Magic Castle by Andrew Wolffe
Yo-Ho-Ho A-Pirating We’ll Go by Kaye Umansky
Stella to Earth by Simon Puttock
Mungo and the Picture Book Pirates by Timothy Knapman
Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs by Giles Andreae
The Octonauts & the Sea of Shade by Meomi
Chick by Ed Vere
Paddington : King of the Castle by Michael Bond
Love From Louisa by Simon Puttock
Call Me Gorgeous by Giles Milton
I Love Holidays by Anna Walker
Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly by Sue Heap and Nick Sharratt
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

To buy all that in the shops your looking at around £60 and Nairn’s already demanding to have the dinosaur pirates one read to him at night. We already own a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpiller just like every household with children in the UK but I think we’re on to our 5th copy and that is on it’s last legs. My favourite off them all must be Chick though. With us keeping chickens it’s a great wee book for the kids but Nairn was the only one of the younger kids to go through the hatching of our chicks and be able to remember it. If we don’t hatch this year then it will be perfect for the girls to get a better look at how our chickens live.

So needless to say I’m very pleased with the prize and so are the kids. Now all I need to do is buy them another bookshelf to fit their new books on!

So hows things with us other than winning books? We’re getting there. Greer is loaded with the cold and seems to be teething so we’ve been up a fair bit of the last two nights. Vonnie says my eyes look like pinholes which is a nice look. With Nairn we’ve got the whole speech therapy thing going on as well as trying to work out whether it’s in his best interest to go to school a year early or not as well as working out just what school we should be sending to him. Erica’s speech is confusing me. She still has her own wee language almost as her pronunciations aren’t great but in the last few days her fluency has shot through the roof. Findlay? He’s in his own wee work with his laptop these days. If he’s not playing on Club Penguin he’s round at his friends houses.

Today all the kids are at nursery so although I had plans to use that fact to get started on decorating the girls room it’s looking like a quiet day with tea and a sofa to snooze on. This isn’t a bad thing.

The past few days have been hellishly hard work. At the beginning of the week Vonnie went to see the doctor who told her among other things she had a viral ear infection which was causing her headaches and sore throats. On Wednesday night Vonnie had trouble breathing and collapsed meaning she ended up with the paramedics out and a trip to A&E in the back of an ambulance. It turns out she has a really bad case of tonsillitis and has been put on a pile of drugs to get her better.

This morning we woke up and for the first time in about a week Vonnie actually felt positive about the day and was able to get up and not be in that much pain. Our respective parents were popping in to see the kids so we planned a relatively quiet day once we’d tidied the living room up a bit. Then the parents arrived and our son turned from a happy wee boy into this.

He’s excitable. He’s noisey. He won’t do a damn thing he’s told. And that’s before he even gets anywhere near the sweets. Even when he’s not fighting for his grandparents attention he is loud without an off switch. He talks to himself or when he’s alone he’ll just whitter random noises but there certainly isn’t an off switch. He becomes that hard work that Vonnie was completely and utterly shattered by the time our parents left to go home and it’s been a constant battle with him for the rest of the evening.

His speech therapy assessment went really well. Apparently problem cases are flagged if they have something like more than three percent of their normal chat being effected by stutters, stammers or repetition. I think Nairn comes in at just over two percent so they don’t see it as a major problem but he’s to go back in five months for a check. He’s got so many things going on that check of boxes for autism, ADHD and dyslexia that I don’t know if it’s just my parental desire for there to be nothing wrong that makes me think it’s just a kid thing. From getting my own ‘diagnosis’ with regards to dyslexia last year I know that if any of them do turn out to be a problem for him none of them are severe enough to really cause him much bother but it would allow us to target those problems to help him and ourselves.

I guess time will tell.

It’s bad when you single out just one of your kids for any sort of praise without giving something to the others as well. The thing is that Greer is such a fantastically good natured baby that it’s impossible not to. Every day we’re grateful for having her. I said at the time that she completes the family and she does.

She wakes in the morning with a smile on her face. She’ll laugh and giggle to herself all day. She always has a smile for everyone and unless she’s completely beat will almost never cry never mind scream the house down. She eats whatever we give her and loves her brothers and sister.

We’re heading for a big fall. We already know the middle two are going to be a handful when they hit their teenage years but we just know that there’s no way our luck can continue all through Greer’s childhood. She’s going to be one evil teenager!

Today started so well. We had prepared the veg for tonight’s dinner last night and Vonnie managed to get everything thrown together and into the slow cooker with ease this morning. It wasn’t until I started loading the tumble dryer that things started going wrong. I’m not pointing any elbows but someone took all the metal BBQ skewers and put them on top of the tumble dryer in such a way that one of them was sticking over the side and pointing right at me as I bent down. I don’t know how but I managed to just miss my eye by about a centimetre and I’m now the proud owner of a inch long scrape that looked quite nasty at the time. This combined with a few other things meant that I was late for work.

Lunchtime came around and off I went to the pet shop to buy a new filter for the fish tank. Literally 20 seconds after I left my desk to start the long walk down the office to the main stair well one of my colleagues shouted after me whilst holding the phone. It was a bit unusual as normally if it’s work related they’d take a message and if it’s Vonnie she’d just ring my mobile phone. I started walking back when she said that it was my wife and my daughter had been in an accident. I remember starting to run but not actually running. I picked up the phone and found my wife almost in tears on the other end trying to explain that Erica had fell in a coffee shop and had hurt her head. An ambulance had been called, there was blood everywhere and could I get money from my mum, she works in the same office, and get a taxi straight to Accident and Emergency at the Southern General where I would meet up with them.

I remember someone asking if everything was OK but I have no idea if I answered them as I’d turned around to my boss and basically said that Erica had really hurt herself and that I was getting a taxi to A&E, I had no idea how serious it was but that it sounded bad and that I’d let him know what was going on as soon as I did but that I wouldn’t be back in today. I ran across to the local hospital to use their cash machine and was standing waiting on the taxi when Vonnie phoned with an update. Apparently the bleeding had stopped but the ambulance still hadn’t appeared and just in case I passed by the shopping centre they were in before it did turn up I was to call as I was passing. It turned out we went nowhere near there however.

The taxi turned up only for the driver to not have a clue where A&E was at the Southern General, it’s quite a big hospital and I got lost in it’s grounds when Nairn was being induced so I couldn’t blame him, but we headed off down through the town rather than along the motorway. Eventually the ambulance turned up and they patched her up and started taking her to Yorkhill which is the sick kids hospital in Glasgow so another phone call later I had redirected the taxi and actually turned up before the ambulance arrived. That’s not bad going. I still didn’t really know how bad Erica was at that point so I actually thought the change of destination was something the ambulance crew decided upon because of her condition rather than it’s what they do as standard when its a young child within the catchment area. Running into A&E and heading straight for the reception desk not knowing where your child is isn’t something I want to repeat any time soon. Especially when they had no knowledge of her and it was only after some searching by the desk clerk that we found out that she was still in the ambulance on her way. If they treat young children with head wounds as a priority, which they do apparently, how did I manage to travel from East Kilbride after waiting on a taxi, take a few wrong turns as we tried to get off the Clydeside Expressway and up to the hospital and still get there 10 minutes before the vehicle that even without it’s blues and two’s going other cars make way for. I ended up standing outside the receiving doors waiting for any and every ambulance coming in just in case it was them. At one point i started to convince myself that I’d picked Vonnie up wrong and that they were actually going to the Southern General but that soon passed.

Pretty soon after all this doubt their ambulance drew up and I got a nod from the driver with a thumb pointed in the back so I knew this was the right one. The rear doors opened and Erica’s face lit up when she seen me. Just beforehand they had been having trouble keeping her awake but when Vonnie started trying to get a photo to send to me Erica started shouting ‘CHEESE’ and smiling.

Once we got her inside I finally got the full story about what had happened as the triage nurse went through the story. Erica had been jumping on a chair as kids do all the time but this time she tripped and fell towards the table. She had put her hands out to stop herself but she missed and her forehead took the full force of the impact on the corner of the table. My sister-in-law, Stephanie, picked her up and noone thought anything of it other than it might be a bad bruise the next day. Then Vonnie seen the dent in her forehead and realised she could see bone. Then it started filling with blood and wouldn’t stop. Vonnie panicked as any mother would and a bystander phoned an ambulance for them all the while Stephanie was trying to stop Vonnie from seeing just how bad it was. Once the ambulance turned up she helped take the kids to her mothers and as she left the coffee shop a waiter at a neighbouring restaurant asked her if she needed any first aid help or a bandage. She hadn’t realised that one side of her tee-shirt was drenched in Erica’s blood.

Anyway back at the hospital Erica had started to perk up a little and the doctor we seen went through the options with us for repairing the wound. We could have the temporary paper stitches the paramedic had put on redone, we could have it glued shut or we could have traditional staple/stiches put in. In actual fact the doctor was reluctant to do anything as the paramedic had done such a good job, he didn;t like using glue on faces and to redo the stiches in anyway would probably just cause more harm and stress to Erica. He went through the points to be aware of with head injuries in young kids and sent us on our way safe in the knowledge that if Erica was to regress and get worse all we have to do is get her straight back down there and they’d see her straight away.

It was on the taxi to go get the other kids that she fell asleep but since she woke up she’s been the life and soul of the party. She went to bed early though and I’m just about to go check on her to make sure she’s doing OK. It does mean we are having to put Nairn into nursery for the next few days to help her wound heal up and that she probably won’t be going to Beth’s birthday party now but it’s a small price to pay for something that could have been a lot worse.

Vonnie’s take on today can be found here.

You know those moments when your kids do something and all you can do is stay stuck to your seat and think, “oh god no…please don’t do that” well my son is the master at that.

Yesterday we spent our morning at the church in Carmunnock at christening of my wife’s friends child. We sat through the first hymn and the ceremony before I took the kids across the road to the ‘creche’ so that the rest of the service could go by without to many interruptions. The kids loved it but as we had left in such a hurry we had left everyone’s jackets and toys sitting on the pew which meant Vonnie was going to have some trouble lifting it all out whilst holding onto Greer as well. With this in mind I brought Nairn and Erica back over to the church a little early so that we would be on hand to carry everything but when we got there we found Vonnie feeding Greer whilst talking to the photographer outside.

We got talking about camera equipment and how amazing the Canon 5D mkII was with it’s ability to shoot video as well as stills. It was just about now that Nairn had a twinkle in his eye and decided that no he wasn’t going to listen when I told him he couldn’t run around the back of the church into the graveyard. With the service still going on I was reluctant to shout after him but he turned with a cheeky smile and promptly started climbing up the gravestones and onto the crypts. He’s three years old and apart from goodies killing baddies in some of his older brothers games that’s about all he knows about death. He didn’t understand why I was getting angry at his attempts to scale the largest gravestone in the cemetery.

The look of horror on Vonnie’s face when I told her what he was doing was only beaten by the sheer joy in Nairn’s smile and the laughter on the photographers face.