Object etiquette

My boy's so polite at times - he'll say "bye bye" to folk in shops, wave to people who smile at him and is beginning to get the idea that adding "peese" (aka please) gets him more things.

I gave him a bath tonight and after he had got his fill of picking up the bubbles and blowing them all over the bath, tiles, himself and daddy, it was time to come out. So I pull the plug and lift him out of the water only t be smothered by 2 metres worth of towel (you gotta go overboard - it's the only way to sail). Just before we headed out the bathroom, he does his "IH" noise that means he sees something he wants, so I turn back and he's pointing to the bubblebath stuff I use (smells like raspberry... even though I don't like eating raspberrys). You know what he wanted?

"bye bye bubbles!"

He was waving to the bubble bath!!!

Dinosaurs invade

My boy's right into dinosaurs right now, well, he calls them sawrs but I know what he means. I was into sawrs when I was a kid too. He has this DVD "We're Back! A Dinosaur Story" which is pretty good, not too long and lots of dinosaurs in it, anyway, he loves it to bits and just wants to watch it all the time (that or In the Night Garden on CBeebies).

After we'd watched it (and I can now play the parts in it) we went through to his room to play with his duplo bricks. Being the creative beast I am, I decided it would be cool to build a dinosaur from duplo (rather than the big cars, big faces or big house that you can generally only build from duplo). So daddy set about building a T-rex out of Duplo whilst the boy passed him pieces and tried to sneak the odd block onto the construction.

I must admit, I was fair chuffed with it! The boy smiled and then went back to his other toy, which was a bit disappointing.

Eventually he got up to play with daddy's masterpiece and I sobbed as he did what he does best - destroy things...

Millions of years of killer instinct and it comes undone from a little boy with a soft football :(

Softplay Chronicles

Last week I took the boy to a new softplay centre. For thos eof you who don't know what one is and if that's you then slap yourself for me, a softplay centre is somewhere that has a climbing frame with slides and ball pits and it's all padded so kids can't hurt themselves - they're great fun! Anyway, I thought we'd try a different one and see good it was.

It was busy as hell, that's what it was. Schools are on holiday and there were all these women there with their kids. I probably shoulda had a field day with all the mums there since the ratio of girls-to-guys was about 30-1 but knowing who's a single parent and who isn't seems out of my league, plus I was there to play with the boy, not chat up women :)

He was so, so excited and could barely wait whilst daddy paid a hefty amount for him to get in (but I was testing the place out so it was okay). There were no free seats anywhere so I found a bit of wall, claimed it as daddy Gurn's and put our stuff there. The boy was desperate to get in so I lifted him into the place and went off to take my shoes off. Of course, his enthusiasm was replaced with a little bit of nerves so he hovered at the edge shouting on me all the time.

Once I was in there with him he was loving it.. until someone came across and told his daddy to get off the frame because "adults aren't allowed on it". I hate that :( I wanna play with him on it and what if he gets stuck up on the top?? Stupid rules :p

Good fun and he threw a big tantrum when we had to leave but I don't think we'll be back, it's quite pricey.

Super praise robot

I took my boy swimming at the weekend there which must be the first time in many, many months - he always seems to come down with something when I wanna take him. Anyway, we had a ball and decided to come out and get dried and dressed. He's all dressed after a wee bit of frantic drying and trying to make sure all of MY clothes don't fall onto the wet floor when a mother and two kids walk into the family cubicle next to me.

I can hear her start getting her kids ready and she must have a wee one too (toddler age, probably a bit older than my boy) and everything he does is followed with a serious case of exuberance from mother along the lines of..

"OH WOW! Look at you, you managed to take your shoe off!!!"
"That's SUPERB! Look at how well you managed to sit down!"

That sorta over-the-top praise that some folk do.

Well, I was getting myself dressed listening to all of this when I noticed the little kid's feet under the partition.. then I noticed lots of liquid splashing down by his feet.. then I realised that he had decided to pee there and then.

"Oh, well.. that's not so good is it?"

says mummy.

The annoying thing? She didn't do anything about the pee on the floor!

Da-da digivolve to..

This morning my son upgraded me from "da-da" to "da-day" :)

I've got that all-warm and fuzzy feeling that you can only get when you have children

Scared shitless pt3

It was suggested that we keep him in the hospital overnight and we both reluctantly agreed. We were given a room which had a cot, a single bed and a chair but the boy wouldn't sleep on his own in the cot and so slept on his mother on the bed whilst Dad took the uncomfortable chair.

Thankfully the boy managed to get some sleep and the extra ibuprofen they'd given him was starting to work and his temperature was dropping. It was awkward being with his mother for this length of time given our history but my son's always more important and past history is something I've always wanted to shelf - it's not forgotten or forgiven but it's not at the forefront of my mind. Both mother and son managed to get some sleep with the latter getting the most. I on the other hand, sleep lightly normally (so I can hear ninjas coming) and with the ward randomly bursting into life with someone's kid crying or screaming, I was lucky to get an hour and a half at most.

The day came eventually and I was beaten down - so, so, so tired but the worry was still keeping me going. He woke up and was a bit groggy but after a few hours of waiting for the doctor to do her rounds, he was back to his happy, little self :D He was mucking about on my shoulders a lot and even had some food which was a first for two days.

When the doc did come round, she and the consultant concluded that it wasn't a reaction to the mmr but he'd probably picked a bug up from his brother's dad (timberwolf was dying of a stomach flu or something). To be honest, we both knew at the start that that was a likely cause but we were taking no chances especially when he had just had his MMR.

So I took him home and I was beaten and shattered. My family came up to look after him for me and I went for a nap but it wasn't long or very good. Still, it all worked out in the end even if I had to go through hell to get there :p

Scared shitless pt2

I had the boy Saturday night and whilst he seemed like his usual, happy self, there was still a slight bit of worry in the back of my mind especially since we had been at the hospital that morning. Anyway, bedtime came and I put him down without any complaint. I would keep checking on him and then started noticing that he was getting hotter so I stripped him down to his nappy and left him asleep.

At 10PM he awoke crying and I rushed through to him to find he was burning up and shivering. God this made me panic a bit but had to change his nappy so it was "focus Dad, focus!" With that job done I found he just wouldn't leave my arms and just wanted to hug me but he was so bloody hot. He'd had some medicine (ibuprofen and calpol) so I didn't know what else to do or what was wrong with him.

I ended up phoning the NHS 24 helpline where the call handler had issues with me. Because my son is resident with his mother, my address didn't prove squat.

Her: 'So what's his address normally?'
Gurn: 'Oh.. I can't actually remember?'
Her: 'Right, do you know his mother's phone number?'
Gurn: 'Not off the top of my head, it's in my phonebook on the phone I speaking to you on so I can't get to it.'
Her: 'It's just I need some way of proving identities'

I felt like shouting "HE'S GOT THE SAME BLOODY SURNAME AS ME AND HE'S BURNING UP ON MY FUCKING LAP SO I THINK THAT FUCKING PROVES HE'S ACTUALLY MY SON AND NOT SOME RANDOM CHILD I'VE KIDNAPPED!!".. but I didn't (I was getting angry at this point)

Her: 'Okay, do you know who his GP is?'
Gurn: 'I have no idea.'
Her: 'What about the name of the GP pratcice he goes to?'
Gurn: 'He used to go to the one in ZZZZZ but he's moved since then and I've not been told.'
Her: 'Eh.. hold on.. does he have a middle name?'
Gurn: 'Two'

And with that I was finally taken seriously

So the nurse I was eventually put through was very nice and asked me to bring him into the hospital at 00:40. I met his mother there and we waited in the foyer for the doc. There were a few other toddlers there, all of which looked REALLY sick so that did nothing to alleviate my fears.

Finally we saw the doctor and she gave him a thorough examination. Her conculsion? Might be related to the MMR or it might be a viral infection, OR it might be a VERY nasty viral infection that could fuck up his kidneys. She made us take him straight up to the Sick Children's hospital and I remember worrying that little bit more.

We got there and were told they'd do some tests on him to rule out some things but they'd need a urine sample first. "oh, right" I thought as if, yeah, I can make my son pee on command? I even took him to the toilet and let him watch his dad pee as sometimes that's made him start peeing.. and laughing but that's nothing to do with anything you're thinking about :p It didn't work and just served to make him cry more (he was still burning). They took his temp and it was over 39 degrees which caused them some concern. Thankfully he took a drink and pee'd.. whilst sitting on his mother :)

Next came the blood test and I swear I have never been more scared in all of my life.

Never

He'd had cream on the back of his hands to numb them so he wouldn't feel the needle. He'd had this on his hands for the better part of an hour and when the two nurses came round to take some blood, they couldn't find a vein. They saw one on his arm and asked if they could use that instead and that they could take it now or we could do the cream thing again (would be another hour with his arm in an awkward position and lots of crying) so we said to just take the blood now.

One nurse held the needle
One nurse held his arm to make the vein more prominent (this caused my son to start screaming the place down)
His mother held his arms still so he wouldn't writhe about
Daddy kept talking to him since he was face that way.

Daddy had the worst of all jobs :(

I had to watch his face shiver in fear and pain as the needle went in and he just kept screaming "DA DA DA DA DA DA" over and over begging me to take the pain away from him. I'm never going to forget that moment because I couldn't do the one thing I'd promised him the very first time I held him - to protect him. Here I was, watching him try to get to me but unable to do anything because I knew they needed his blood.

I was almost in tears.

It was over in a minute or so but he took a good 10 minutes to calm down. After that came the snot test which required them to put tubes right up his nose to collect snot. I had to walk out because I couldn't take another reaction like the blood one. I took the opportunity to go to the lobby to phone my sister to let her know how he was but I could hear him screaming from there and I had to head back to him. It was all over when I arrived.

So with all the tests over they started coming back with results and all of them were negative.. thank god. But we still didn't know why he was running a fever.

Scared shitless pt1

It's Saturday morning, just gone 6AM and I'm sleeping off my alcohol-filled birthday nightout when my phones goes off with a txt from the ex. She's worried about my son's temperature saying it's too hot and she's waiting to hear back from the doc. I lug myself out of bed and go take a piss then I sit down to try and get brain working enough to send a reply. I don't even get to start when she phones me saying she's been told to bring him into the hospital.

Oh shit!

So with a renewed panic I got myself a shower and then got ready (minus the breakfast). She picked me up since I was still wasn't completely sober and therefore unable to drive and we headed to the hospital with sleeping boy in tow. He seemed happy to see me when he woke up but his temperature was normal by the time we arrived. Still, the doc checked him out and said he couldn't see anything wrong with him. We both noted however that he wasn't walking properly and was staggering with a few steps but he advised us to just keep our eye on him.

Now I know what you're thinking - paranoid parents but here's why we were both worrying. 3 days prior he'd had his MMR innoculation which has been fairly controversial in this country. It vaccinates against Measles, Mumps and Reubella and they used to give an injection for each but now they have this all-in-one thing. The controversy has come about due to some side-effects but the government's official stance was that it was advisable to get it. His staggering seemed to disappear later on so all seemed fine.

Big Foot

Popped out to the local shopping centre to visit Clarks shoe shop so I could get the boy's feet measured (his mother had asked me since I was on holiday). As usual, the wee yin drew smiles from all the women around and I'm convinced that if I'd left him alone for 20 seconds, he'd have been abducted by one of them. Anyway, the last time I bought him shoes, he was a 4.5 F in both feet (this is bordering on bra sizes methinks), this time the young lassie told me he was now a 5 F in the left foot and still a 4.5 in the right. The worry is.. what happens if he keeps growing JUST in the one foot??? ;)

But at £30 for a pair of shows I can barely get my fingers into? How the hell do they justify that, especially when he'll only be in them for a few months? £30 would be the upper limit for buying shoes for MYSELF so the amount of material they must save when making smaller shoes must equate to cheaper prices.. surely?

Nope, just another proof that the toddler industry is a money-grabbing whore :)