More Joe Green

It is now almost official that opera is good for your heart. As long as there are no frightening bits and you don’t have to run to get there on time, I suppose.

Verdi is apparently the best as the phrasing is just right.

I don’t know what kind of art is best for your heart, but I think some of the sheep on this clip might need some medical attention (e.g. a cholesterol check) before too long. Maybe they are GM.

I am not the Stig

I’m just not that driven.

Tomorrow I start my new life as a Stay At Home Mum or, if you prefer, Domestic Manager. Wish me luck. Or, as I thought they said on a song you may have heard on Slumdog Millionaire, ‘Tally Ho!’

More thoughts on resting

This is what happens when you travel with a little one:

You plan and pack. Planning I love. Packing, I am sure,  is something invented by companies wanting to sell you things (for more on that, consider Father’s Day).

You make sure all the right things are in all the right places and can be found quickly/tasted/removed/placed in small sealable bags and aren’t likely to be sharp/metal/cutlery/explosive/the sort of thing that would roll if dropped during take-off. You also make sure that you can honestly say you packed the cases yourself and that no one else could have put anything in them, by making them just too full to be free.

After this you need a holiday, which is good because you may well get one.

If your child is under two you are not allowed to buy them a separate seat on a plane. I don’t mind this too much, and Easyjet recommended taking the middle and aisle seats on flights so we could use the window seat as well if no one wanted to push past two parents and a little wriggler. This is a Good Thing. Easyjet also allow parents on early. This is Sensible and causes Relief . I will not talk about our experiences with an alternate company, except to say that we will be Flyin’Rarely with them in the future, so we will.

When you arrive at check-in you have to queue, which in French is ‘tail’. You tail the person in front and wonder whether they are more likely to be frisked than you are, and usually decide that they are, which is a surprise when the opposite happens. You learn that a crying child sometimes gets you through tails quicker, and that teaching a child to cry on demand is something you must never admit to. It can be achieved by removing toys the child enjoys cuddling, apparently. You suddenly remember that you left the baby nail clippers in the pocket of the changing bag and that someone may mistake you for a terrorist and furtively secrete them into the depths of the other bag where no X-ray dares to look.

After checking in you go to an area where you can use real metal (sharp) cutlery, sprays and glass objects which makes you consider how you might get NVQ level 2 in Terrorism with a portfolio of evidence from the airport alone.

On holiday, having hired a car in French  (until the point where you have to ask ‘Quelle type de petrols avez-vous pour ce voiture ici SVP?’ and they give in and talk perfect English to you), you wish you had jumped the tail so that you do not have to interpret the instructions for putting in a child’s car seat (which really are written in a foreign language) as it has started raining.

The gear stick is on the other side and so are you.

Luckily for everyone in France, so is tout le monde and the wipers work and so does the map, so you are off. Again. This time the child may sleep, but probably not until 10 mins before arrivee.

It is good for all concerned that at this point you are able to STOP and have A Drink, which is a relief after hitting 90 to 100 kph on near-empty roads and thinking perhaps you had missed the rapture. All there seems to have been, apart from the odd tractor and no Citroen 2CVs are fields and fields of goats. No sheep.

It is around now that you are well and truly ready to dispense responsibility for your very loved and very tired child to someone else, preferably the Other Parent. This would be ok if only one of you is thinking this way, but it is naturelle for both parents to be ready to delegate.

Advice # Un: Plan when each parent is to rest and to be responsible, so you have no nasty surprises. There are lots of great things you can do as a little family, as well as sharing responsibility when out and about having meals.

Advice # Deux: Each parent deserves time off, and this must be engineered if it is to actually happen.

Advice # Trois: Form an orderly tail and choose something that works for both of you. If you are going to read the same book, do it in succession.

Advice # Quatre: Plan in couple time too. You need to be agreeable if you are going to be under each others’ pieds a lot of the time.

Advice # Cinq: There is only so much time off dans les vacances. Plan regular time for each of you to rest on your return, as well as couple time. It is good for the whole family.

Resting

I haven’t forgotten about blogging. Far from it. I have been resting, and intend to do a lot more of it, once I get my head round how it is supposed to work. In the meantime I have been working on resting. Not too hard, mind. I’m not fully there yet.

I have found for a very long time that I just don’t have it in me to do nothing. I used to be told at primary school that I had to ‘deep relax’ but I didn’t know what that meant. I just kept going. My thoughts were constant and divergent. I would go on long mental rambles.

Later I harnessed that by studying a bit of philosophy and finding I’d already covered a reasonable amount myself. Odd. I had a lot of trouble sleeping. No – going to sleep. Even now, it doesn’t take much to give me a few hours of thinking to do at night, and I know this is unlikely to improve.

The theme of resting has been coming back to me in various forms over recent weeks and months. I do not want to rest my mind, but my body has been fighting for a break. My emotions too, have been drained by events outside my influence. I have been learning a little about BEING rather than DOING.

Here are some of my conclusions:

1. You never rest fully after becoming a parent, unless you are away from the child (or children) for long enough and are one of the rare people who do not feel guilty about this.

2. There is a difference between Activity and Attitude. You can rest your attitudes (especially negative ones and striving to impress or do well) even when you cannot afford to rest your activity. Which means that responsibility is inevitable, but your reaction to it is your choice.

3. Rest is best when it is a rhythm. Weekly. Monthly. Annually. Built in to the diary, with rest always around the corner. Opportunity to DO of course. But also, critically, opportunity to just BE. Taking that risk to be alone with yourself and God and to listen. It may be something you want to hear. If you are willing to be led, it may be important even if it turns out to be something you don’t think you want to hear.

4. Rest is affected by things outside your control, but you can micro-manage certain aspects of life, such as a few minutes reading something or having a conversation or cup of tea and revel in that, despite everything else.

5. You can be a donkey or an ox about it (Matthew 11:30).

6. Count your blessings. No – seriously. Think about your family, your friendships, your home, your community, your environment, the places you are able to visit, the encouragement you can be to others. Think about the things you enjoy happening, such as good food and drink, laughter, your favourite entertainment, great memories. Engineer some more of these things at a pace that works. Go on – have a barbecue and a few people round who like to laugh!

Twits revisited

Once when my husband and I were staying in a hotel we overheard a little boy ask, ‘mummy, how do sausages grow that big?’ and we were struck with images of baby chipolatas and great big frankfurters.

Well, now it seems worms are the new sausage. I am not making this up, although I am not sure whether the BBC are telling the whole truth. In Croatia, a country my younger brother happens to be in at this very moment, a diet of worms is apparently more ecological than theological.

Seriously. There is even a video. Remind you of anything?

If Toddlers read the news…

Our top story today -

Oh my goodness, it seems I cannot get my cardigan on properly - however will we all cope? The sleeves are in all the wrong places and the number of buttons needs checking rigorously by experts in the field. The governor of California has declared it a state of emergency. I think we all need a little lie down to vent our feelings and recover.

In other news -

A dog was seen walking along, and he says ‘woof’, which when pronounced correctly, may sound more like ‘oof’. There has been speculation on this. Over to our zoological correspondant for more on this:

Yes, we have reports coming in of a number of animals, not just doggies, which have been seen not only walking along, but also sniffing. Investigators are looking into this, but we must state at this time that nothing has yet been confirmed. Back to you in the studio.

Out top story again today – cardigans – is it possible to wear them properly now that we are in recession? How has the credit crunch affected your knitwear? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at toddlernews and we’ll read your story on Wardrobe Wars later in the show.

Now for the weather -

It seems that the sun has been going to bed late recently, despite reports on CBeebies and other channels indicating otherwise in the bedtime hour. We would like to apologise for this and for the ensuing trouble caused to our parents. We would also like to thank our sponsors, Vitamin D Easy-Sun-Block for sponsoring the weather report and will now take as long as we can to mention them and the amazing benefits of going outside while being completely covered up so that you forget the weather report and think that the time was entirely taken up with an advert but in any case you didn’t really want to know the weather until the morning. Vitamin D Easy-Sun-Block: Because going outside should be child’s play.

Learnings

I did much learning this weekend, as I went back to college. Here is a brief summary.

On Thursday I learnt that it is perfectly reasonable to take a perfectly reasonable child on a plane and that there is no song you cannot sing while waiting in a queue.

On Friday I learnt that you can become your own tourist attraction in Prague if you are tall and carry a baby on your back (this made a curious Japanese party incredibly happy and I still don’t understand why).

On Saturday I learnt that you don’t eat the whole snail.

Yesterday I learnt that I would not like to drive a funicular train, but I wouldn’t mind being a tour guide.

Today I learnt that however complicated and delayed your journey is, it is irrelevant as long as you get home.