(no subject)

[ailbhe]

On Friday morning, I think, the Health Visitor came to do what used to be a two-year-old development check. They don't do those any more because they weren't useful; children with developmental issues are in general pretty obvious, and bright children often refuse to play along anyway, so it's much more helpful to ask the parent if they're worried, usually. Anyway, instead of development checks, they now do a Family Health Assessment, where they ask about the whole family. They do one of these antenatally, and one when the child is two years old, so this was Linnea's two-year one and the tadpole's antenatal one.

She asked about all our health - mental and physical - and listened while a little dam burst. Apparently I'm not even nearly a little bit as over the whole birth trauma thing as I like to pretend I am. It was established within, ooh, three minutes that Linnea's developing "normally" (there are two things measured - normal and delayed) and that we are good parents. She asked how I felt about being a parent.

I said I like it, I'm exhausted, but I enjoy it and I'm good at it. I know I'm good at it because Linnea is a good parent to her toys. She's a lovely parent to her toys, actually - she loves them and cuddles them and tells them off gently and walks them and dances with them and puts them to sleep and feeds them lunch and wipes their boppings (bottoms) and all sorts.

It's like a little progress report. When she's nasty to her toys I will know to examine what I've been doing. The Health Visitor thinks this is an entirely reasonable way to go about things, and also that Home Educating is a very sensible thing to do, though she suggests I look into a state nursery to give myself a bit of a rest. I will call the Children's Information Centre sometime soon and see about getting Linnea's name down for somewhere - or two somewheres - in case when she turns three I decide I do need a morning off every week. HV says it's not necessary to send her every day or anything like that.

---

So on Saturday Rob went to London, and I cycled into the Farmer's Market, where I joined the Reading Cycle Campaign, and then to the park with Louis, and then into town where Linnea "acted up" in the rain. Eventually I got her a raincoat and we settled down a bit, and Rob came back from London and met us, and he took her to the Early Learning Centre to play while I sat in a cafe and drank coffee and ate a cookie. Why, can anyone tell me, are cookies in the kind of cafe that has peculiar names for drinks sizes about the size of a normal saucer?

After that we had a minor disaster in Waterstones - Linnea's nappy had become waterlogged and when she did another wee it made a little puddle. I have, however, very speedy elite mothering cleanup skills, so we got it all sorted out in the end.

I ordered a wardrobe for Linnea from John Lewis; found one with half shelves, and the other half two rails, one at child-height so she can dress herself. Then Rob showed up and we went and ordered a dishwasher.

I've been resisting a dishwasher on grounds of ecology and not encouraging laziness for a while. However, a dishwasher can do 12 place settings in 14 litres of water, and I use more than twice that most days. So.

It's a good time to buy these things, as my budget has long included the money to go to Janice's wedding, and the closer the wedding comes, the more I want to just TRY to go, and damn the consequences. I can't go to Janice's wedding even if I want to and I mean it dammit. I am not physically fit to do a seven-hour flight with a toddler; I can't even do a two-hour train journey with any confidence. But it will be easier to believe if I've spent the money on other things.

Rob is going, on Friday. It's going to be very busy while he's away and as soon as he returns we have houseguests (with toddler!!! hurrah!) and then there's the Cancer Research Race For Life and then very shortly after that there's going to be a baby.

Agh! No-one told me it was so soon! Only 12 weeks left, unless I postpone the section!

Comments

[lovingboth]

Have you tried her on some of the tests for older kids in the 'red baby log book'?

I suspect she'd pass most of the ones for three or four year olds.

[ailbhe]

I'm not keen on testing her, really.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Modern dishwashers often save money and energy over handwashing, if you are careful about what model you buy, and use the proper settings. And, as far as not encouraging laziness -- life gives you enough things to do. There's no reason to go around looking for more. Your children can always have enough chores to keep them understanding what work is, and, if there's STILL not enough to do, they can start working on projects to help the whole community.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Your HV sounds nice! Sensible, for a start.

Get the dishwasher. Get someone else to plumb it in (I'm not maligning Rob here, OldBloke did ours and he's usually good at stuff but he didn't do it right...) and then let it do the hard work. It won't encourage laziness unless you start viewing it as an extra cupboard and never putting anything away away!

[ailbhe]

Plumbing it in - now there's a tale. I asked the John Lewis spotty salesboy if they had a plumbing service to go along with the delivery service. He said yes. But no - what they have is a "connecting to existing dishwasher plumbing" service. It took over ten minutes to determine this though. Grr. So we have to book plumbers in seperately.

(Rob doesn't do the plumbing - he'd never so much as plumbed in a washign machine to existing pipes before I met him. Plumbing would be my job if I didn't, you know, live with a toddler, argh).

[k425.livejournal.com]

A Stern Look for making assumptions! Except that half of me thought "A can't do it at this stage of a pregnancy" because of fitting into spaces.

[ailbhe]

I think I'm pretty small now.

[k425.livejournal.com]

You probably are. I forget that most women don't gain 3+ stone and put it everywhere when pregnant... In addition, you're pretty limber - you can get in and out of the trike. I couldn't get out of the car on our drive by 6 months and had to wait till OldBloke got it into the garage. Normally it's my job to get out and open the garage but the slope was too much to fight against!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Our dishwasher was a wedding present from my grandmother who washed dishes for five children over twenty years so I figured she knew what she was talking about when she said it was the best thing anyone could start married life with. ;-) (She had eccentric ideas about presents when I was young but the dishwasher and the car really were excellent gifts in our circumstances.)

Definitely not a laziness encourager in my experience, and I am notoriously lazy about washing up.

[ailbhe]

I was mainly afraid of them because Rob grew up with a Housework Fairy, and I'd hate to raise children with that debility.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's easily avoided: smallclanger is currently in charge of loading and removing saucepans (and only saucepans, we have a tiled kitchen floor so he's not yet allowed to carry crockery across it) and will work his way up to loading and unloading most items fairly soon I suspect. But then, he also actively enjoys washing up at present so we save his (mostly non-dishwasher-friendly) stuff for a sink session every day or two.

[ailbhe]

Yeah, it's becoming obvious that I'm not going to have that issue - I let Linnea help even though it takes twice as long, and that's absolutely automatic to me.

[barakta]

The last thing my mother could be described as is a 'housework fairy'. I didn't know houses could be tidy/clean without monster effort and constant 'wiping wiping wiping' neuroses like my Godmothers till I got my own house... We had a dishwasher from when I was 5 which my mum purchased using allowence money which they got for me for a few years (about 3 years after they NEEDED it for disabled child expenses).

My mum still isn't tidy, but at least she doesn't have to wash up - she hates it. We (children) did other housework, and were usually responsible for emptying and filling the dishwasher whenever it needed doing. One of my mum's friends has 6 children + hangers on - I remember watching all their children finish their meal; collect up their plates, cutlery, drinking cups and trot over to the dishwasher and put them in the correct places. It really worked and meant the table could be cleared almost instantaneously and not just by all the parents.

I like the sound of the wardrobe too, I find this idea that small children can't dress themselves to be very strange. I only needed help dressing for a long time because my hands didn't work and were usually encased in plaster. I remember being appalled that one of my cousins couldn't even lay his own clothes out, nevermind dress himself aged 9! Apparently my aunt justified it by saying "he's too slow on his own, and he makes bad clothes choices" *shudder*.

[ailbhe]

My mother is also not a housework fairy, but she was good at letting us know that keeping our home clean and tidy was as much our responsibility as hers.

Not that it WAS clean and tidy, but none of us ever died of typhoid.

"he's too slow on his own, and he makes bad clothes choices"

I can't imagine why.

[barakta]

/me grins at shared responsibility.

Children learn by example as well as being allowed to make their own mistakes. Fear of failure and constant intervention for anything other than safety doesn't help anyone - parent or child.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Heh. I figure Agent Weasel's clothing choices are her problem. (I do give the occasional bit of guidance re colour combinations but that's it, really.)

[pauamma]

If you don't mind my asking, is your userpic an X-ray of one of your hands?

[barakta]

Nah, I nicked it off the Interweb. I was born without thumbs, so this icon is a sign of my thumb envy.

One of these days I'll get round to acquiring one of my freakier xray images and use that.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

When I moved back to .ca, I decided that since I was buying all new, ultra-energy efficient appliances, that I was allowed either a dishwasher or a tumble dryer, but not both. I wanted a dishwasher much, much more than a tumble dryer, despite the fact that it's only possible to hang laundry outside on the washing line for half the year here. Being (at the time) a single person living alone, however, I bought a 'half-sized' dishwasher. It uses 2/3 the water & energy of a full sized one. Now that there are two of us, we use it for tea cups, plates, and cutlery, mostly and run it about twice a week. baronscartop does the rest of the washing up by hand.

Much as it would be absolutely lovely to have you at my wedding, I'd really rather you didn't take any chances at all with your health. Really. *hug*

[ailbhe]

A dishwasher uses energy and resources that would be used anyway - water, heat, etc. A tumbledryer just accelerates something that will almost always happen even if you just do nothing for a long time.

I do feel a lot better now that the money for my plane fare has been spent. It's now *not* realistically possible for me to risk my health. Um, hate to ask - will there be a video? Or just ten thousand photos?

[ai731.livejournal.com]

We're not specifically arranging for a video, though with the video capabilities of most digital cameras/mobile phones/PDAs/wrist watches these days, some video may happen. Since Steve did such a fantastic job of the photos for your wedding, I've asked him to do ours as well. Unfortunately he hasn't had a chance to reply to my email yet, so I don't actually know if he will be doing it or if we'll end up with just whatever pictures people took on the day...

[ailbhe]

I might ask Rob to video the vows, if that's ok with you?

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Almost certainly, since I know Rob will be polite about it. Let me check with Himself, though. Rob might want to plan to video the whole ceremony, so as not to accidentally miss the vows, as we'd be very surprised if the entire thing takes much longer than 10 minutes.

[ailbhe]

We'll have to see how much the little camera can hold :)

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

A dishwasher uses energy and resources that would be used anyway - water, heat, etc. A tumbledryer just accelerates something that will almost always happen even if you just do nothing for a long time.

I can live without the dishwasher - it's just wasteful not to have one.
I remember not having a tumbledryer. Clothes were always an issue. Space to dry them was always an issue. I seemed to be able to dry one single washing mahcine load, it would take a full week and they would be wrinkled and smelly. Energy to lift all those clothes up and lift my arms to bring them down again was another issue for me. Mould due to condensation from drying clothes was a nightmare every winter. And the clothes often stank. I couldn't wash often and I would be falling over wet clothes all winter long. I hated it.
Chris and I finally put out for a rented tumbledryer and wow! The difference! Clean clothes in less than a day. Always having dry socks! Fantastic! So, I wouldn't go back. It's one of those luxuries where I thank the gods for being able to have it, every time I think about it. Giving it up would hurt, a lot.

[rmc28]

I keep failing to convince Keith we should get a dishwasher, though his objection is only partly environmental grounds and is partly to do with the risk of him having a fridge back agains the wall of his room keeping him awake. Though perhaps we could cut back to just one fridge rather than two, and then put the dishwasher in the obvious space currently occupied by a fridge.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

I miss the dishwasher.
I use at least four litres of water every time I do the washing up, and I wash up every time I have a cup of tea.

All that water has to be heated and a lot of it gets wasted.

The dishwasher used to be used one every day or two days. So much less harmful, and probably less yuk in the environment too, since it's easy to go eco-friendly when you're not having to scrub yourself.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

We conserve energy by using the same teacup all day for multiple cups of tea, sometimes even for two days running, before washing it. Or perhaps we're just lazy slobs ;)

[ailbhe]

Two days? You're *builders*.

[flybabydizzy.livejournal.com]

buy more teaspoons