Current O & P playlist...

Would go something like this:

Bob the Builder (Can We Fix It?)
You Are My Sunshine (Known by Peggy as Sunshine)
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ("Tinkle")
Baa Baa Black Sheep ("Baa Baa")
The Pirate Song ("Pirate")
The Otis Song (goes like this: Mummy loves Otis, Mumy loves Peggy, Mummy loves Otis Hammond, Mummy loves Peggy, Mummy loves Otis, Mummy loves Peggy Jane Hammond. Mummy loves Otis James Hammond. Mummy loves Girly Whirl Booroo/Booroo Girly/Peggaboo Janey. Mummy loves Otskin James/Otis Milotis.)
I Think I Wanna Marry You (Changed to "I think I wanna marry Boo")
The entire Justine Clarke reportoire, especially The Witches Ball
Theme songs to various ABC Kids programs - Fireman Sam, Lazytown, Gaspard and Lisa

Phew.

Yep, I know, I've been absent.

Life has changed in a few huge ways.

We travelled overseas as a family and made it home alive and happy... Big deal sucess.

We moved house. Currently residing in a cute little three-bedroom brick home. Happy.

And I have a 17 week old foetus growing inside me!

Will be back to backtrack when I can find the time...

My dairy queen...

She loves cheese. Always has. Be it tasty, fetta, or a really pungent parmesan, she'll eat it by the handful. I classify it as a "healthy" snack, but really, it's full of fat and we all know it. Easier to just ignore that though, given how picky Peggy's become lately. I need to believe that cheese in abundance is good for her!

Lately, she's also been into milk. Requests it a few times a day, and can tell the difference between "Mummy's milk" (skim) and "Peggy's milk" (lite white). Ice cream has always been one of her favourite treats, particularly if it is of the "choc-ate" variety.

Peggy does not like fruit.

I purchase, slice and serve all types - mandarins, kiwi fruit (this is one she is anti than most, she'll at least have a lick), apples, pears, grapes... What else is there in June? I a hoping that once summer comes around and berries and magoes are back in rotation, she'll start a new love affair with those. But I've all but given up on the current fruit selection. I know that you are supposed to keep going, keep trying, keep believing that they'll eat the things you want them to, but really, short of holding her nose, I do not seem able to get her to open her mouth when fruit is on offer.

Cheese is just... easier.

Cheese, and dry Weetbix. These are Peggy staples. With milk on the side.

Dummies.

Hmmm. One of the most frequent discussions I've had with other mothers of young babies is the Dummy Chat. Do you give one? At what age do you give it? When do you get rid of it? How do you limit its use? Are there an ill-effects? Do you regret that moment when you first stuffed it in your screeching baby's mouth?

Well, I am a dummy fan and my answer to that last question is HELL NO.

I have documented Otis' love of dummies here. He was into the dummy from Day Dot. The little lips moved with a silent, urgent suck that was a little alarming to me at first. A rogue midwife actually recommended a dummy, and the love affair began. I think Otis was about 18 hours old.

You read in all The Books about dummies being dangerous sleep props that should be banned from about three months of age.

There was no way Otis would unclamp his lips long enough for me to remove it at that age.

There was no way I would have had the courage to bin the one thing other than my nipple that settled my often cranky boy.

I never really had a dummy plan. When he started to babble, I started to withhold the dummy more and more, as I felt it had the potential to inhibit his speech. Glad I did that. By about 18 months Otis was only having his dummy for sleeping, or if he was feeling particularly emotional for whatever reason. Sickness, of course, also equalled dummy.

I had some vague ideas about throwing it away when he was two, but honestly, the dummy was helping me get through each day. By then I had a toddler and a baby, one obsessed with a dummy, the other spitting it out and defying my efforts to plug up her cries. Eventually Peggy got her dummy groove on too, and before I knew it dual dummy love was the order of our house.

There have been many stressful dummy-related moments, being small and wielded by temperamental littlies, they do tend to go missing in the middle of the night. However, there have been many more moments wherein I have praised God for creating dummies and wondered how any mother ever coped without one (actually, one is never enough, a bouquet of dummies per child is what is needed).

Otis has a favourite type, the Nuk ones that come in pastels, and make a very slight squeak when sucked. I introduced these orthodontic ones when he turned one, to try to save him from bucked teeth.

Peggy isn't so choosy. Her attachments are Ted Bear and Wrap. Any dummy will do.

Easter just gone, I got the idea from my sister to use the Easter Bunny as a means of ditching Oti's dummy for good. He was, amazingly, all for it at first. He loved to tell all and sundry about how big a boy he was becoming. He lapped up the lavish praise we bestowed on him - in hindsight, we really laid it too thick.

About a month down the track, Otis fell apart.

I've never seen anything like it.

Not only were we battling with a non-sleeping 18 month old, but now we also had to attend to our 3 year old every hour or so throughout the night. The penny finally dropped after one particularly rotten night when I curled up in his bed and had his hold my ear all night, just so that he could sleep. It wasn't pleasant.

I worked out that he needed something to help him wind down and drift off. If it couldn't be me, perhaps it could be his dummy?

The suggestion alone completely revitalised him. When he took the first few sucks on the brand new lemon-coloured Nuk dummy, his eyes rolled back in his head and he appeared to be getting high.

Since we returned it to him, he's started sleeping all night again and having naps in the afternoon.

He's happy.

And so are we.

Maybe Santa can take the new ones next Christmas?

Wicked witches, guns, floods and earthquakes...

In an ideal world my little ones would only know sunshine and rainbows and cuddles and flowers and joy, joy, joy. But we currently live in a world that is stunned by one catastrophic natural disaster after another. The news is overflowing with increasingly graphic, apocalyptic-movie-like images of raging fires, quake-split roads, churches turned to rubble, muddy, disease-filled excess water and people waving toilet paper out of windows seeking rescue. There is something a bit sick about the way this stuff is shown on TV, the way Channel 7 goes into natural disaster programming mode and show unfiltered pictures of other people's pain for hours at a time.

When I wasa little girl TV coverage was obviously less immediate and therefore more censored, and I don't recall ever seeing the type of horror that has entered our living rooms of late. I can't help but wonder what it is doing to my kids...

I had a little panic the other day when Otis, in pretend mode, "killed" Peggy over and over with his "water pistol" (he only calls it a water pistol because I told him that guns, real and/or imagined, are banned from our home), and then, that same day, "shot" me when I asked him to do something he didn't wish to do. I sent him to his room and told him that all his good vs evil movies - the best kind, in his little drama-seeking mind - were being put away under lock and key. Snow White, his current favourite, plus The Neverending Story, The Little Mermaid... There is a real undercurrent of aggression in these films that I was/am starting to be concerned about. I guess I want him to stay that sunshine and lollipops boy who just cuddles and smiles all day long.

And then, today, I see him playing with his Little People... The plane is on top of the car which is teetering on top of a fire engine... "It's a flood, Mum! And an earthquake, look! They are all drowning and dying!!!" Cue huge smile of delight and mischief.

I can censor fiction, but I don't know how I can contain what is fact.

Chatterbox...

She never stops. Here's a little list, for Peggy to look back on with wonder one day. I don't mean to brag, truly I don't. But she's so full of life, and full of words:

Mummy
Daddy
Otis
Brother
Wee wee
Nappy
Dummy
Mine
My
Peggy
Baby
Doggy
Bird
Bear
Doll
Happy
Hair
Toes
Shoes
Nanny
Poppy
Isla
Indi (Didi)
Lan
Gwammy
Piggy
Book
Block (for ice block)
Yummy
Car
Bob (as in the Builder)
Fish
Bike
Side (outside)
Door
Cot
Wrap
Toast
Brekky
Duck
Cow
Bart
Jord
Yuck
Poo
Yeah
No
Hello
Bye
Bag
Boat
Apple
Bikky

And one beautiful, heart-warming phrase...

I LOVE YOU. (Sounds more like "I lup mmm")

16 months of age and already a great conversationalist.

The reluctant 3 year old.

Otis is now 3 years old. And I'm not sure that he's too happy about it. He tells me numerous times each day that he is "still a little boy, not a big boy yet", and that he doesn't want to be a dad yet. I try to reassure him that adulthood and all of its trappings are many, many years away. But still he reminds me, over and over again he defines himself as something closer to baby than he actually is.

It's all connected to the dummy. We had grand plans for getting rid of it in a very final and dramatic fashion upon his third birthday, but of course we left for our annual camping trip the day after and the idea of battling through tent sleeping sans dummy was intolerable to me. So I postponed the challenge of dummy eradication to an unspecified time in the next few weeks. He knows the dummy is on its way out and he'll do whatever he can to prolong his affair with it.

He currently only has his dummy for going to sleep. So his new thing is to tell me he's tired at random moments throughout the day, just so that he can lay on his bed and suck away with a gleeful expression on his face. Of course sleep is nowhere in sight...

With ageing, comes independance. In some areas Otis is determined to manage on his own - he loves to "read" aloud now, the story a mixture of rememberings and his own interpretation of the illustrations. And he is really thriving as a toilet-trained, pooing-in-potty person. He likes to flush and turn on the tap and use the soap all by himself.

But then he also likes to be fed, to be dressed, and for me to play game after game with him, day after day. I am working on this. No more feeding him... It was only ever dessert, we had a ritual of all sitting on the couch together after dinner, Phil and I feeding the babies their messy, sticky concoctions as quickly and cleanly as possible. But I've stopped that. And I don't dress him anymore either... Sometimes I have to instruct him as to why he has the wedgie from hell though! But he's learning. And growing. And soon that dummy will be history...

One more funny anecdote. He's worked out how babies escape the confines of their moummy's tummies. The tummy apparently breaks open like an egg, and the baby hatches. A doctor then glues the tummy back together, waiting for "the glue to dry" before sending the mummy home. Hence my stretch marks... Evidence of repairs I guess.

Chitter chatter...

Otis says to me yesterday, whilst flipping through the pages of a book in complete silence, “Mum, I am not reading this book, I am listening to it, just like you.”
Current favourite activity is reading magazines, he loves all the ones aimed at little/pre-teen boys, like Mania, Krash and DMag. He cuddles both one of these (usually the latest, I pick them up for him on Sundays after his swimming lesson as a bribe, I know, evil, dastardly parenting technique, but I figure keeping him alive in the water trumps the badness of bribery) and his cuddly Santa.

Peggy says “Mummy” in the sweetest, most clearly enunciated way, it is such a delight to hear. Also says:

Dad/Daddy
Ammy (Grammy)
Braa (Brother)/Ati (Oti)
Bird
Popow (Popov, used for all dogs or other animals she doesn’t know the correct name for)
Yum
Hello (said upwards of 60 times a day, to anyone who walks past her or as soon as she hears me answer the phone, or in response to a character on a TV show, even though she doesn’t like TV, won’t sit still for a minute to even try to engage with it. She pronounces this “Hewwo”. It is said in a very short, abrupt way. )
Bye
Ta
Booboo (Boob… Even though weaned for nearly 2 weeks now… This girl will not forget!)

Current fave activity is to try on other people’s shoes, which she is surprisingly adept at, as well as their clothes, which she has a bit more trouble with. When she can’t manage these things immediately and with ease she screams and throws herself on to the floor in a most dramatic fashion.