Toddler Co-Napping, Night Time Screaming, and Stupid Sleep Advice

Like many people, I was a better parent before I had children. It’s been a humbling, annoying, rewarding process to not be such a know-it-all and to allow other people to get in the way of my perfectly researched plan for their day.

The area in which I’ve had the biggest mental change in the past three-and-a-bit years has been sleep.

I always knew sleep was going to be a big deal in our house. I. Like. Sleep. Really a lot. I sleep a lot and I am not a nice person without it. This, I declared before my first child was born, is the hill I am willing to die on.

In many ways it still is. My children can refuse to have a bath or decide not to eat anything all day or lie on the floor screaming and I will be happier about it than if they are not quietly in their cot/bed when I want them to be. Not sleeping is OK. ME not sleeping is the end of the world.

When Awdry was born, I had diligently read all the safe sleep advice and thoroughly internalised the fact that if he ever slept while touching a sleeping adult he would certainly die. OK, I said, I’ll put him down drowsy but awake and watch as he self-soothes to dreamland so I will never create any of those sleep problems that Other Parents create for themselves.

HA HA HA.

So we co-slept, because I figured the odds were about equal that he’d die in his sleep or that he’d die because I fell asleep on my feet while holding him at the top of the stairs.

Then co-sleeping started meaning no sleeping as he kicked me in the ribs and I ever so gently shuffled my aching arm away from his head and we both woke up crying. That was around four months old. I think. My memory of that time is kinda hazy.

So we put him in the cot. In our room, of course, because everyone knows that if you put a baby under six months old to sleep in a room on their own, they will certainly die. Which means that if you need to do something like cook while they nap, you have to have a cot in the kitchen. Or a hob in the bedroom. …right? It was around this time that I started to think something was up with all this sleep advice. Even in my barely-awake daytime state I started to get this sensation that I was reading all this stuff and nodding along to 2 + 2 = 5 and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

It was also pretty clear to me that only selfish, lazy parents who valued their own sanity over some crying that their baby wouldn’t even remember would ever sleep train. And that parents who cuddled their children to sleep for an hour at age five were also selfish and lazy for not teaching their children to go to sleep alone. And basically every parent on the planet for all time was selfish and lazy, so I’d better be hypervigilant to make sure *I* didn’t become one of those selfish, lazy parents and mess my child up forever.

At some point around this time I started seeing a counsellor.

I clung on desperately until the magical six month mark where if we put him in another room and he died in his sleep, I wouldn’t end up on the front page of the Daily Mail as one of those articles: “I never knew,” says kiddie killer mum who left her baby alone for five hours in the alligator cage at the zoo. “No one ever told me it might be dangerous.”

And we sleep trained. Yep. Put him alone in his room in the dark and left him to cry himself to sleep while I cried myself to not-sleep on the floor outside his bedroom door. Except it wasn’t full on CIO because I was still doing night feeds, and if he woke up at nearly-morning-but-oh-no-I-just-can’t-even-yet o’clock, I took him into bed with me. So I failed at sleep training too.

Then around nine or ten months I slowly slowly reduced the time spent on night feeds until we were on like one feed of two minutes. I didn’t go in one night, he didn’t wake up for it the next night.

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I’m pregnant with #3 now, and I wish I could go back in time to give my then-self a cuddle, a nap, and some hard-won advice.

Not only is there not one set of sleep advice that works for all babies, there is not one set of sleep advice that works for all parents. And my latest revelation: there is not one set of sleep advice that will work for you and your family for all time.

Geronima had a similar sleep trajectory to Awdry: co-sleep until four months, then get kicked out into the cot with as much petting to sleep as I can handle for another month or two, then bedtime CIO, then gradually wean off night feeds around nine or ten months. Except she LOVED the sling and had all her naps in it for over four months, then went right into cot naps once she was napping at the same time every day and both parents were getting backache.

Except this time I was happy about it.

I didn’t feel like I was ruining her psychologically forever, or like I was creating massive problems for myself to solve later. I still believe that consistency is important, but not ABSOLUTE CONSISTENCY IN ALL MATTERS FOR ALL ETERNITY. More like, “Hey, give it a week of trying it this way and see if there’s any improvement.” I embrace the fact that I as a parent am going to have different sleep priorities at different times.

And that’s how I find myself co-napping with Awdry, who is three, and also punishing him for screaming at nighttime by taking ALL his toys and books away – and thinking that that’s some gold star consistent parenting right there.

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He started waking up multiple times a night screaming, “I don’t want to be ALOOOOOOOONE!” If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past three years, it’s that I can either be a loving and available parent during the day or at night. Not both. Personally, I think daytime is the better choice for everyone.

We tried “filling up his pot” during the day – making more of an effort to pay attention to him, giving him a longer bedtime to tank him up… And believe me, we tried yelling at him. We know well the tones of his various screams and he has this special one that sounds like an air raid siren for when he’s not scared or hurt or anything like that, he just wants us to pay attention to him. During the day we send (or, uh, carry) him to his room for it and tell him he can come out when he’s ready to ask for what he wants using words. That’s worked reasonably well, and we generally have the fortitude to be firm about it and he generally switches it off once he realises we’re really not coming and he’d better just shut up and converse nicely.

So one night, we parents found ourselves both standing in his room at midnight with Geronima also screaming because he’d woken her up. “If you scream one more time,” said I, “we will put all your toys and books away and then you really will be alone.” I kinda wish I had said something a bit more productive than that last bit, but that’s the truth. So he looked me right in the eye, took a deep breath, and screamed.

We packed all his toys and books away and shut them in the cupboards in our bedroom. He cried. We even took away his special bunny. He cried a lot. I wavered. “If you stay in bed quietly and don’t scream until we have helped Geronima back to sleep, you can have Bunny back.” He cried, but without purposefully screaming. He got Bunny back.

The next morning, we started our two part plan.

Part one was that for every night that he doesn’t scream (at bedtime or during the night), he gets to earn something back. The first night it was Gordon, his favourite train. Then the books. Then his wooden train set. I think we have three more nights worth of stuff to earn back and he actually didn’t ask for anything yesterday or today. The first night I heard him wake up and start to scream just as I was going to bed so I popped in and reminded him, and he stopped. I want him to succeed, and it’s gone amazingly well. He is being totally reasonable about it, we are all sleeping better, we are all more pleasant people.

Part two is that we used to make him play by himself after lunch, while Geronima napped and we sat down in blessed silence. Then the novelty wore off and that turned into a screamfest too, and I really really REALLY wanted a nap myself and so *I* also turned into an unreasonable screaming monster. What is really important here, I asked myself, that he specifically play by himself or that I get to have a nap? The latter, obviously.

So after lunch, he and I do one or two “little jobs” and then go to the big bedroom. I lie down and listen to an episode of Fr Mike’s Bible in a Year, then turn some music on. (I find it stops the little whispers.) He sometimes lies down with me, sometimes plays with the puzzles we keep in there, sometimes drives Gordon endlessly round the outside of the bed, occasionally potters off to play somewhere else in the house… whatever. But QUIETLY. I get a lie down, often manage to fall asleep, he doesn’t feel ALOOOOOOOONE.

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I don’t know what the Big Lesson is from this post. Maybe just… chill? And that it’s OK to change your mind. Times change, you change, why would what works change too?

Flexible, Functional Home Binder

I spent a really long time wanting to make a home binder but not really being sure what for. The idea seemed great: all your important documents, from the long-term to day-to-day in one easy, accessible, organised place. But wait, WHAT documents? There are about a billion cute free printables on Pinterest to help you organise your home binder, but I ended up shrugging and thinking that I just didn’t need my GP’s phone number on a piece of paper or to print out a full meal plan every week. Some stuff I don’t need to record (my optician’s phone number?! how often do you call them?!) and some stuff is not a great fit for paper in our house (I keep my to do list on my phone).

So the project smouldered away on my back burner for… I think multiple years? Eventually I just did it, and this is the result.

It’s a ringbinder. It lives on our kitchen counter, leaning against the fridge, with a pen or pencil sitting next to it for instant use.

Almost all the paper in it is just plain lined paper with my handwritten scribbles on it. I keep some empty sheets in the front so I can immediately create another entry.

The dividers are the genius bit which it took me a long time to think of but have solved all of my former home binder angst. I didn’t know how to choose which categories and subcategories to use in my home binder, because what if I need another one one day and have to redo the whole thing, or what if the given ones don’t really fit what I want to use it for, etc etc.

So I thought I’d just file it alphabetically.

There’s not a whole lot in there. Many letters have nothing there at all. I think the most popular letter has three sheets. If I look for something and am convinced it’s under a particular letter (say, B for birthday) and end up flicking through the whole binder to find it (eventually under P for presents) then I just move it to where I thought it would be. Takes a few seconds, doesn’t require rearranging anything else, and if I was that sure it was under B this time, that’s probably where I’ll look first next time.

Let me show you some pages. Some other examples that I haven’t photographed: allergies (friends’ dietary requirements), godchildren (baptismal anniversary and what book we give them as a present each year), Christmas cards (who we want to send a card to), birthdays (list of friends and family’s birthdays each month), funeral plan (mine and my husband’s wishes for our funerals), read alouds (chapter books I have read to Awdry in a simple list by year – just my practice for homeschool record keeping), periods (first day of my last period so I can guess when the next might be). Whatever you want to remember and have at your fingertips for easy access for you and your family can go in your home binder.

But all of these are just jotted down on ordinary lined paper with no special formatting or fuss. If they get so messy as to be unreadable I’ll rewrite them, but it hasn’t been a problem so far! And all of them are just popped in under whatever letter they start with.

That’s all, folks!

Noble Simplicity in Our At-Home Oratory

Another post in my anti-Pinterest series! I joke, I joke. I love Pinterest. But often its ideas for “organising” or “storage” are way more hassle to use day-to-day than just leaving everything in a jumble on the floor.

First we had the toy storage with no lids, no colour coding, no unreadable printable labels.

Then we had the cloth nappy changing station without each limited-edition-print nappy origami’d into a perfect stork before being lined up in colour order.

And today we have the fancy-sounding at-home oratory.

Having a dedicated space as a focal point for family and individual prayer is something I really love having. It’s nice to assign physical dimension to something that we keep telling our kids (and ourselves!) is really important. While on the one hand my heart skips a beat when I see the beautiful painted designs and gorgeous ceiling of Kendra’s at-home chapel… we’re just not that kind of family right now.

Rented house, pregnant me, two toddlers who can’t tell the difference in advance between fun bouncy ball and and bad smashy plate… Yeah, no.

What I really want to do when I post these things is to anti-show-off. Not even humblebrag. To say, “Hey, not everyone is living like an interiors photoshoot but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a pleasant, functional area in your house.” These are photos I’ve deliberately tidied up to take so you can actually see the functionality. I’m pretty sure one of Geronima’s wellies is on top of the pile of cloth nappies right now, and one of the baskets is being used to semi-contain a tower of books in Awdry’s room because we haven’t got round to moving a bookcase up there yet. But this is really what we have in our house, really how we use it, and I really think it works better than whatever we had before.

So. The oratory. It’s the box room of our “four bedroom” house. I don’t think we could fit a single bed in there and still close the door. Three of us can kneel in a row, but when Geronima kneels too then the kids will have to go in front. We didn’t have anywhere like this in our previous house, and I guess if we’d wanted to create a space like this we would have put a sideboard up in the dining room with a cross and some other bits and bobs on – like Elizabeth Clare’s lovely feast table. One of the nice things about having a permanent space upstairs for me has been zero pressure to switch things up for the liturgical seasons. It being a WHOLE ROOM (technically) makes it seem impressive enough, and mostly guests never see it.

Let me give you the tour. Scroll down for a zoom in. On the left, there’s an Ikea stool. Useful for sitting on, kneeling in front of with a book on it, or playing peekaboo through the sides if you’re 18 months old.

My husband made the radiator cover out of an old door we found in a skip and some varnish. On it sits a large crucifix and two candles in holders. We always light the candles at bedtime prayers and the children love “helping” to blow them out. At the moment there’s a little “vase” (jam jar) with some plant matter in because a bit of pea plant got torn off and it seemed too pretty to waste. I would say 50 weeks out of 52 there is nothing additional there at all.

The windows have some stick-on film. It was a bit distracting seeing the street outside and often the sun would reflect off opposite windows. We took down the curtains that were there (very holy lilac with butterfly print ;P ) immediately because of the candles. We bought a roll of this from Amazon and simply cut it to size and stuck it on. It’s supposed to peel off perfectly cleanly when we move – fingers crossed!

The cupboard used to be our wardrobe but we have built in wardrobes in our room in this house, so popped the wardrobe in here. It’s just storage, really, nothing to do with the oratory – but it wouldn’t fit anywhere else and looks OK in here.

You can’t see the little floating shelf just to the right of the door. That’s where we put breviaries, rosaries, etc – up out of the reach of little hands!

Here’s a closer look at the “altar” stuff:

It’s nice to have a beautifully decorated space to pray in, and to use different resources to reflect the changing liturgical seasons, and to use our senses to remind us of God. But I really do believe in noble simplicity. It gets a bad rap as it’s used as an excuse for tearing down centuries of aesthetic tradition in the church in favour of sweatshop-produced polyester and jeans. Yet I have lots of monasteries pinned* to my “Interiors” board because I find a really profound beauty in the starkness of their little cells and their simple dining halls.

*told you I loved Pinterest!

I love beautiful churches. I hope that one day we will be able to be more bothered about Catholic decoration in our home. But I also know that our little oratory is definitely “enough” right now, and that its very plainness has its advantages. On a good night, it’s just us praying to Jesus on the cross, watching over us. And hey, on a bad night there’s very little to get damaged so I can concentrate on praying/sheep-herding/grappling and pinning as appropriate.

If you’re looking for more noble simplicity in at-home prayer, check out the book A Mother’s Rule of Life. I bought it a year ago and it’s really been growing on me. She talks about just having a special chair in a corner, with a small table or basket beside it to keep whatever you need to pray. I would posit that you don’t even necessarily need a special chair. Just choose one of your standardised domestic containers and gather a few things you might use to pray. If you don’t want to put up a devotional picture or have a crucifix out all the time, you could get one out of the basket and put it back when you’re done. I find candles very helpful so would keep a tealight and a box of matches. Whatever.

It can be hard sometimes to find a balance between it being appropriate to put some effort into our devotional life and improving ourselves as Catholics, and taking on so much that it becomes a burden rather than a joy. The great thing is, you can always change. If you’ve been doing nothing, do one tiny thing and you can add to it later. If you find yourself becoming resentful of everything you’ve been doing, cut back for a while.

You can do it! (However big or small “it” is right now!)

Our Free, Functional Cloth Nappy Changing Station

You guys know by now that we’re not too fancy in our house. Just like for toy storage, Pinterest has some amazing ideas for organising cloth nappies but actually most of the time they’re just overkill. We didn’t manage cloth nappies with our first baby. It was the straw that would have broken this camel’s back. But we’re loving them with our second, who’s currently 16 months and has been in them for a little over a year now. A big difference has been that we moved house in between, and the physical layout of this house is so much better for doing the washing and drying.

So without further ado, I present… our cloth nappy changing station in all its glory.

Starting on the left, you can see five empty Aldi baby wipe boxes, taped together with a huge ring of sellotape round the outside. From the front, they contain: Totsbots all in one cloth nappies, boosters, liners, cloth wipes, misc (wet bags not currently in use and… uh… some other stuff, I guess). We let Geronima take stuff out of them while we’re changing her if it keeps her from just crawling off butt naked across the room.

Then we have the changing mat. Bog standard Ikea one, just on the floor. No need to worry about leaving her unattended if we have to pop out. And the raised end section is towards us so that any in-action wees do not end up on our legs.

The zig zag bag at the front is one of two XL wet bags. It just sits on the floor. Geronima can’t undo it, Awdry knows not to touch it. Neither of them are really interested in it, to be honest. When we wash the nappies, we unzip the wet bag, invert it into the machine and then push the bag in afterwards. Start using the other wet bag, then wash it with the nappies, etc. They do a PHENOMAL job of containing stink. I am pregnant right now and have to practically hang out of an upstairs window every time my husband cooks an egg because the whole house stinks of it even with the kitchen door closed. I have zero problems being in close proximity to that wet bag.

Here’s the bit where the whole setup gets really good: that door behind the changing mat leads to the utility room where the washing machine is, and you can see our drying rack just there on the right. From bum to washing to drying to put away can all happen within a few paces. This is all in a corner of our kitchen, so very easy to get to and very safe for our children. On the other side of the wall on the left is the downstairs loo, so we can tip poo off into the loo within a few paces too – while leaving Geronima on the changing mat and easily knowing if she wanders off.

This has been HUGE for the viability of cloth nappies for us. (In our old house, the washing machine was in a concrete outhouse and we had nowhere to dry laundry indoors except on a tiny rack draped over the shower-bath. Don’t ask.) We can actually “just take a minute” after a change to put a wash on, or “quickly grab the wet stuff and start hanging it up”. I know a lot of people think you have to have the changing station in the baby’s room or in a bathroom or whatever. We used to have an additional one upstairs when she needed changing a lot in the night, but that was always disposables so it was a different kit anyway. Nowadays we just have some disposables and a pack of wipes in our bathroom to put one on her at night. All daytime changes happen in the custom, bespoke, dedicated zone you see depicted above in all its glory.

So this is me urging you to think outside the box when you’re organising a changing station (cloth or disposable!) and not to get fancy.

Worrying

I’m pregnant again. We’re sort of pleased. I mean, we are pleased. We’re thrilled to be having another child. Every time I look at the two children we have already my heart feels all bubbly and squeezy about how much I love them and how lucky we are to be having another.

But right now it’s really hard, and I actually haven’t seen our existing children that much lately because I’ve been in bed. Often sleeping, sometimes reading, previously trying not to barf but that’s been better since the GP upgraded my meds. It’s hard to describe what the first trimester is like for me because I actually haven’t ever vomited in pregnancy, so it doesn’t sound that bad. But oh, it is.

My first pregnancy was rough for about two weeks but I had no responsibilities so I could make it through. My second, though, was very bad for at least a month and this one might be worse. My husband has done everything. Everything. Shopping, cooking, cleaning, childcare. I have been unable to do a single thing because any kind of exertion makes me feel faint and nauseous. My job has been to eat what I can when I can and to force myself to drink. I have been trying to keep a diary of just how awful I feel and just how little I have been able to do but I’ve been feeling too bad to do it thoroughly. I need my future self to remember, though. Because this feels like the last time we as a family can go through the first trimester again.

To cap it all off, the other week Awdry had “slapped cheek syndrome”. Parvovirus. We didn’t get it checked out by a doctor but we’re pretty confident that’s what it was. Parvovirus, in case you weren’t sure why I’m bringing it up, causes miscarriages. I’m having a blood test which should clarify my personal exposure and therefore my personal risk, but I must admit that the thought going through my head is that I might have gone through all this first trimester bedridden stuff for nothing. It seems so callous to write it like that: for nothing. But I don’t know how else to put it. And right now I feel like I would be more upset over the “wasted” illness than the dead baby. Sorry, baby, but you have a selfish mum.

The silver lining of me being so ill is that I barely saw Awdry while he was ill – only really on the last day when the body rash came out – so I’m hoping I wasn’t really exposed.

I also had my booking appointment the other day where I was reminded of all the stuff I’m not supposed to do while pregnant. It’s annoying. Not because I have a desperate yearning to down a bottle of vodka while chomping on some pate before I go and do some extreme contact sports. But to me it’s such a good example of the way information is given to women in pregnancy: instruction without agency. The full picture is held back in favour of simple tick boxes. Do do this, don’t do that. You don’t need to know why.

I had to find out for myself that, for example, there is nothing inherently dangerous about the molecules which make up unpasteurised cheese. The danger is listeria. Which, actually, is more common in bagged salad.

I understand that most people don’t want to read an entire thesis on risk during pregnancy and parenthood, but I can think of a few ways to get in the “why” without bogging people down or making it confusing. It’s like SIDS. “If you cosleep, your baby WILL die. They didn’t last night? You got lucky, punk.” Not really accurate, which means parents are not given information which they need to make reasoned decisions.

But still, if I ate unpasteurised cheese and did go on to have a miscarriage or stillbirth, would I ever forgive myself? Would I really be able to go about for the rest of my life reassuring myself that it was a reasonable decision at the time that anyone might have made? Or would I berate myself forever for allowing my greed to kill my baby?

Yet, on the other hand, it’s NOT reasonable to avoid EVERYTHING which might cause the slightest risk to you and your baby. That way madness lies. Truly.

You can’t win.

I feel, at the moment, like that about coronavirus. I worry about how worried I am. Am I worried enough? Too much? How much life is it reasonable to sacrifice to reduce the risk of getting it? Clearly if Awdry’s picking up parvovirus somewhere then we’re not an “infection secure” household but we’re not massive rule breakers either. No one’s leaving our house to work or go to school. We’re not going to large gatherings or meeting friends indoors. We wear masks in the shops and on the Tube.

Only when it’s all over will we know if we were the right amount of worried. And even then, we’ll never know what if. We’re all unvaccinated and as far as we know none of us have had it. Which, frankly, astonishes me when I look at the statistics.

My parents are both vaccinated and are keen to come over and not keen for it to be outdoors. It’s hard to keep having that conversation. They make me feel unreasonable, hysterical, like I’m overreacting. But I just want to stick to the rules. I don’t think you should have to defend that. Over the past year, some of the rules have been nonsense rules. But at least they draw a clear line and I don’t think I would be blamed by others if we followed all the rules and we all got coronavirus and I was left a widow. (Funny how that’s always my nightmare scenario. I guess if I died I’d be OK so I don’t need to worry so much? There’s that selfish mum thing again.)

I find it stressful to calibrate the right amount of stress about any given issue. At least if I follow “the rules” (about either coronavirus or pregnancy) then I’m neither some weirdo worried well freak nor some dangerous maverick.

Anyway, I’m crossing my fingers that the parvovirus test will be clear and I’ll be told I wasn’t exposed. Otherwise I’ve just signed up for extra worry (and extra appointments and scans) until November. Did I mention I’m due then? I’m not looking forward to having a late autumn baby and having to slog through the whole of winter with no sleep and no sunshine.

Still, least we get to pick another name. Awdry and Geronima’s (real) names were such slam dunks for us that we never really went through a “process”. If I had to bet I’d say it will be a girl because I feel so ill but we’ll see.

Having Two Children Isn’t Twice As Much Work

Geronima is about the only one who hasn’t been in a massive grump for the past week (or more), and I recall now that age one-ish is when Awdry tricked us into thinking another one would be a good idea. However, we had a bit of a summit last night and basically decided that really, we are are grown ups in this family and we should try harder to be a bit nicer to Awdry.

So today has been a better day and I am hoping we have turned a corner. I’m slightly faking it til I’m making it with how delighted I am to burble nonsense as a pretend penguin and not remember how Certain People were refusing to eat their breakfast this morning and then complaining five minutes later that they were hungry, but I’m at least doing better on the faking it part.

Then we went to the playground this morning. We haven’t been out for a few days because I’ve been too tired from dealing with drama to make the effort to tog everyone up (causing more drama in the process), even though I secretly knew it might help. “He doesn’t deserve to go to the playground,” I thought. “Instead we should stay in and all suffer.” Right. Like proving a point has ever been helpful with toddlers.

A young toddler dressed in a dinosaur puddle suit (ROARSOME!) ran over and shouted “Baby!” so I got chatting to his mum. She asked how it was having two, with that air of respect and fear that I well recall in myself so short a time ago.

“Fabulous,” I answered, without a second thought like it was one of those word-association games. What? Fabulous? After I’ve been losing my rag almost daily for a week? But you know, overall, it is. (It helps that it’s the big one causing all the trouble, not his little sister…)

And then she asked isn’t it so much work, how do you do it, I can barely keep up with one, etc etc. All those things I used to ask of other mothers.

It is more work. Obviously. But it’s not twice as much work. It’s not “the experience of having a firstborn” x 2. For starters, Awdry is that much older. He’s nowhere near self-sufficient, but he can sit there and eat his entire lunch by himself. He can walk up and down the stairs by himself. He can fetch his own train from across the room.

But then, you need to think about the kind of work that you do with a small child. There is, at the moment, approximately twice as much physical work (although as I said, Awdry is already ageing out of some of the stuff I used to have to do for him). Twice as many bottoms to wipe. Twice as many bedtime stories to read. Twice as many shoes to put on. For now! Ours are close, but not crazy close (22 months), so we haven’t had two actual babies at the same time.

We can still do a lot of things as a job lot, though. One mealtime. One bathtime. One “OK, time to deal with bodily fluids you sit on the potty I’ll change this nappy” time. They’re too young to share a room, but one day it will be one bedtime too. One playtime. One trip to the park. It’s the same thing, just with an extra person.

But the mental, emotional and social work is really really REALLY not doubled, even at this early age. We spent the incredibly rocky first year of Awdry’s life in figuring out not only what he liked as a baby, but also what we like as parents. Do we like to cosleep or use the Moses basket? Do we like to do baby-led weaning or purees? Do we like putting babies who can sit up into sleepsuits or separates?

All that “what would our optimal baby parenting look like for us” is done. Sure, Geronima was a different baby and liked some things differently, but we already owned the bib we like, the sling we like, the toys we like, the clothes we like, the high chair we like. Zero research or mental exertion required unless something was obviously actively wrong.

The daily routine, too. We flailed around for ages with Awdry trying to work out when the heck we should do all the keeping-child-alive necessities like, I dunno, feeding them. Now Geronima just slots in to whatever Awdry is already doing. We already cook child-appropriate food so she just eats whatever Awdry is eating.

And already, at this so-early stage, they are starting to amuse each other. I don’t need to “practice crawling” with Geronima (like some people instructed me to do with Awdry) because she watches Awdry do it and copies him. They “talk” to each other. They play peekaboo. Already the Sauron-like beam of “what shall I doooooo” is no longer laser-focused on me and is diffusing across a greater number of (let’s be honest, more fun) people.

Soon we will be in the golden years of them just disappearing to play together, rather than trailing round after me with saaaaaaaaaad faces. This I do decree by maternal fiat.

It’s surprised me how little I understood the paradox of parenting until it came true for me. How they can be total turds but also wonderful people. How it can be the biggest slog of your life but also fabulous. I had vaguely read about this but never “got it” until I got two little humans of my own to love and cherish and hate and occasionally yell at.

In the words of Helen Shapiro, tomorrow is another day. Another opportunity to make a herculean effort to occupy the moral high ground in the house. We can do it.

Patience (Or Not) and Parenting

I used to be a patient person, but somewhere on the maternity ward one of the nurses must have snuck my patience out of me and thrown it away by accident in one of those big bins marked ‘non-clinical waste’. You can have the patience of an ox, but if more than your personal allotment is demanded of you on a daily basis then you’re going to get in trouble. You can’t run on empty forever.

It became apparent recently that I was having, ahem, a bit of trouble with Awdry always asking “Why?” Obviously before I had children, I was a cool, relaxed, wonder-loving, learning-oriented, hey-let’s-look-this-up-together kind of mum. Now I am incandescently angry that I have to be quizzed relentlessly about absolutely everything and apparently I can’t even breathe without being interrogated about it. Sometimes I would just like to crush his love of learning and his innate curiosity under my hobnailed boots until they are a fine paste that I could feed to a passing dog.

This morning I totally lost it.

Awdry had been up at half past five thinking it was the morning and SCREAMING in his cot. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and Tired Me is Short Fuse Me. We struggled on until after breakfast, when he started to SCREAM about… I can’t even remember. Geronima, who had just gone down for her nap, woke up. I absolutely flipped out and SCREAMED back at him to SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

My husband came rushing in wondering what on earth was going on. I stormed out of the house, slamming the door, and went for a walk. It’s pretty awkward to sit watching the birds in the park trying desperately not to cry about what an awful mother you are and how much you hate your children and how maybe you should never have been born, let alone them, so I came home. I went to bed. I was too wired to sleep but figured I’d just lie there marinading n my own shame for a bit. I woke up to Geronima crying and thought, “Oh, that must be her waking up from her nap. I’ll go and get her.” Nope. It was her going down for her afternoon nap. I’d slept for over three hours. I was just in time to get a reconciliatory cuddle in with Awdry, but I still feel like Social Services are probably going to come knocking on the door at any moment.

I hate feeling so angry with my own children. I’ve been reading this great series on life when all your children are under seven and feeling a little bit better. But I’ve also just been feeling like an Unfit Mother. What does Not Coping look like? I’m sure it feels a lot like having a mirror image tantrum to your two year old. I’m supposed to be the grown up, right?

Part of my problem, which I really am trying to work on, is having some stopping points on the way. I am reeeaaalllllly good at holding it all together… until suddenly I am not and it boils over in a spectacular way. I am trying SO HARD to remember to say, with words, that I am starting to get a bit cross now so would he please just get on with it.

Yet she shall be saved through childbearing; if she continue in faith, and love, and sanctification, with sobriety.
1 Timothy 2.15

I’ve come across this verse a few times recently, and while I kind of hate it, it is slowly starting to dawn on me. Pride is the mother of all sins, right? Well, there’s nothing like a toddler for knocking a few sharp corners off that pride. We know that different people will be saved in different ways. I think I might be a 1 Timothy 2.15 woman. My children have, so far, done more than anything else in my life to make me into a better person. It’s easy to hide from your weaknesses when it’s just you. There are so few consequences for minor sins of sloth or gluttony when no one else can see you. You can kid yourself that you can control everything, that you are in charge of your own life and own salvation.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

You know, I use to be a great mother. Then I had children.

I think we can get through this. I really do. I have no idea how. But we can’t not, right?

Catholic Evangelism for the Chronically Embarrassed

I’m not very good at putting myself out there, and maybe one day I’ll write my “conversion story”, but to be honest a lot of the time I feel vaguely embarrassed about being Catholic. There’s a lot of religion-bashing out there in the world (most of it, in my opinion, not remotely based on the facts of Catholic teaching) and I’m not very good at conflict. I tend to take it very personally and get flustered quickly. So I often keep quiet about my faith in case anyone gives me a hard time about it.

Wow, what an awesome witness to God’s divine truth, amirite?

I was thinking a while back about why *I* became a Catholic. I grew up atheist, dabbled around a bit, but wasn’t actually baptised until I was 27 and married and pregnant. I wish I’d had an awesome, life-changing conversion experience but I just didn’t. It was a slow burner, like most permanent changes in my life. But I got there eventually and I’m not any less Catholic now for having taken the long road.

I eventually converted because of the quiet influence of a number of friends of mine who were Christians. We never actually talked about Christianity. Not really. But I could see them living their lives and going to church and they seemed comfortable in their faith and like it was contributing something meaningful to their lives. Even though I could tell it was hard for them sometimes, they clung onto it through thick and thin and seemed to think (from my atheist’s perspective) that it was worth the effort. That it was a positive thing for them. That it made them happy.

So here is my official, two-step evangelisation plan for people who are chronically embarrassed by their own existence:

1. Look Catholic.

2. Look happy about it.

That’s pretty much it. That is the grand substance of my personal conversion journey. I saw people who looked Christian and they seemed to be happy about it. Of course there was a little bit more to it than that, but that’s the primary reason that I even considered a world outside my atheist family viewpoint and even began to think about the Bible or the church or prayer.

Let’s unpack this just a little.

1. Look Catholic.

If people don’t know you’re Catholic, they won’t know that they know any Catholics. They won’t know that they could ask you about it. They won’t know that there are non-idiots, non-evil people, actual friends to them, who currently believe in God and all that entails.

It doesn’t need to be a big deal. Maybe wear a cross. Maybe mention Mass when chatting about your weekend plans. Pray the rosary on the bus. Whatever. Just don’t obscure your religion.

2. Look happy about it.

Again, there’s no need for this to be some big, artificial, happy clappy quest. But an awareness of how you talk about your faith can be really helpful. For example, do you talk about Mass as some massive burdensome obligation, or is it the highlight of your week? It’s perfectly OK to not be happy about everything all the time (in fact, I think the acknowledgement of sadness is a major point of the Catholic religion) and it is not to say that you have to pretend things that you don’t feel. But Catholicism does actually give us so many wonderful feasts and occasions of celebration and so much beautiful art and music and so on… there’s so much to like!

That’s all, folks.

Well, not totally. Everything you do for your own spiritual life will not only help your soul but will leave you better equipped to give help to anyone else who asks you for it. But that sounds haaaaaaaaard to me right now, so I’m trying to focus on just these two things.

New Decade’s Resolution

I know it’s a little past new year, and even a little past the new decade, but I figured I’d post about my resolution for the next ten years. (Well, til 2030 anyway.)

I keep reading about seasons of life, and how having little children is a season that is very intense when you are in it but will eventually pass. It’s better, I am told, not to fight it but just to embrace that it is what it is. Your life will, of necessity, look a certain way for a while. That way will probably not look like Big Achievements and Super Career Success and Ultimate Professional Fulfilment. I have a huge problem in life generally with focusing on what other people think my potential is, rather than what *I* want to do.

So I made my new year’s resolutions for 2021, and once again I tried to make them things which would improve my life and the life of those closest to me.

1. Stay married.
2. Ensure Awdry and Geronima feel loved and cherished.
3. Finish crocheting my giant blue blanket – either use up all the wool or get to midnight on 31st December 2021 and just cast of wherever I am so we can use it. Just crochet lots.
4. Solve the exercise problem – find something, anything that I will actually stick to. (Right now I am doing this of random bodyweight type stuff plus star jumps.)
5. Write at least one word in my diary every day.
6. Spend 1000 hours outside.

I struggle in life with consistency. I adore the rush of starting a new project and the satisfaction of finishing it. Coupled with the guilt of feeling like I need to be Doing Things for my life to be worthwhile, this leads to a lot of started projects and a lot of bin bags of disappointment after the initial excitement has worn off.

So my resolution for the next ten years of having little children and knowing that probably have plenty of life left, is:

STOP ACHIEVING

Not that I’ve massively achieved so much already, but that was the most succinct way I could think of to phrase the fact that my plans for the next ten years are to not “achieve” anything. No career. No writing one of the zillion books I fantasise about. Nothing but staying home, bringing up my kids.

Maybe other stuff will happen, and I won’t fight it if it does (I’m currently 15k words into a detective novel! but I might just give up if it gets boring) but the goal is to NOT achieve anything. No goals. No deadlines. And my new year’s resolutions are all about consistency in the small, daily things and NOT ticking anything off a list.

So far, it feels good. Every time I’ve got wound up about how I should be doing this or that or the other or how do other people manage to do this or that or the other, I just say to myself:

STOP ACHIEVING

…and remind myself that in this season of life, I’ve pressed pause on the big picture. On the legacy. On my potential. It’ll all still be there when I’m forty. I won’t, despite what my teenage self might have thought, be basically dead. For now, I’ll just… not.

How We Enjoy Going To Church With Our Small Children

I auditioned a number of titles for this post, all vaguely in the vein of: How Our Children Behave So Perfectly In Church All The Time, I Am Awesome, You Suck, Ner Ner Ner.

But none of them quite hit the spot.

We have a two-and-three-quarter-year-old toddler, Awdry, and a ten-month-old baby, Geronima. Sometimes going to church with them is an unbearable slog and we arrive home, collapse onto the sofa, and lie in a groaning semi-coma for the rest of the day to recover. Not often, though. Most of the time it’s a generally pleasant experience where we get to share the wonders of Mass with our little ones and hopefully set them on the path to holiness. Tiring, to be sure, but well worth it.

And — I’m embarrassed to type this out, but every week someone tells us how beautifully behaved our children are. (Often, I’ll admit, the same person. But it still counts. She’s just THAT impressed.)

So… how do we do it?

Believe that keeping your children in Mass is the most important thing

I hate Sunday schools that happen during Mass SO FREAKING MUCH. What is the logic there? I’m going to get someone to take my child away from Mass, away from Jesus, away from the real thing that’s going on. They’re going to do some cutesy crafts. At some random point I am going to decide it’s time for them to come and to something weird and confusing where they have no idea what’s going on. And they’re just supposed to magically ‘get it’ and not prefer hanging out with their friends making glitter glue tattoos on their forearms.

At no point did Jesus say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me but only when they’re over the age of nine” or whatever.

Children belong in Mass. Period.

Yes, it can be hard. Yes, people might try to persuade you otherwise. Yes, it might cramp your own worshipping style.

Don’t care. Keep. Them. In. Mass. If they never know anything different, they’ll never expect anything different.

And you will need a lot of sheer bloody mindedness to slog through those Sundays when actually your children are not perfectly behaved. One time, Awdry headbutted me so hard I thought I was having a nosebleed. I was heavily pregnant with Geronima and at church alone for some reason, and I took him to the toilets and shouted at him and had a little cry. Then we went back to Mass. Because that’s where we belong.

Don’t expect more in church than you expect elsewhere

Elizabeth Clare has written a great post called The Undeniable Laws of Mass Behaviour which I will try to avoid duplicating too much here. But with any behaviour you expect in church, be it sitting down or being quiet or joining in with the responses…

I know grace is real and the eucharist is amazing and so on, but it’s not like storybook witchcraft magic. You don’t shout “Gratia Plena” and suddenly your terrible two year old puts their hands together and raises their eyes to heaven and praises God for the beauty of his liturgy.

If your child can’t or won’t be quiet at home, they won’t be in church. Ditto sitting still. Listening to you. Not touching your phone. Paying attention to other people. Respecting property. Existing without toys.

You need to practice these things at home, not just for an hour a week on a Sunday morning. They will make your children more pleasant to be around generally. If you need help with this, then Kendra can tell you how to always mean what you say.

Teach them to whisper

Our enjoyment of Mass went up tenfold when Awdry learned to whisper. I knew that being silent was a big ask but being quiet – making the same utterances but at a much lower volume – would be achievable much earlier. This should be one of the first things on your to do list once they can speak.

Whispering is fun! It’s a game! Just keep whispering to them and one day they’ll whisper back. Then you know they can do it and you just have to keep on reminding them.

Choose your priorities

I have a hierarchy of goals when we take our children to Mass:
1. Don’t disturb others
2. Actually get some praying done myself
3. Have them pay attention and get something out of it too

It’s not an absolute thing – sometimes they can be paying a lot of attention and still disturbing others! But when I’m trying to decide whether a behaviour is acceptable or not, I first ask if it will disturb others. Screaming, running around, kicking the pew – that kind of thing. All of that is right out.

Then I ask whether it will impede my own prayer. Awdry likes to swap places in the pew during Mass. He does it very carefully and quietly so I’m sure no one else even notices but it drives me NUTS. So unless I really can’t be bothered any more, that’s not allowed either. You pick your place and stay there.

It would be nice if they also got some spiritual uplift from Mass. At the moment we don’t require anything of Awdry in this regard, but he likes to copy us and is currently practicing standing, sitting and kneeling. Often at random moments contrary to whatever everyone else is doing. But he’s not disturbing me or anyone else so that’s OK. We’re trying to teach him the responses but I think he’s too shy to say anything out loud when it’s actually happening.

Geronima is her own thing. For me, I think that when they’re under one year old it’s 100% our responsibility to keep them quiet. We’re entering what I think is the worst bit with her, when they really want to do stuff in a way that they don’t when they’re tiny, but they don’t know what they’re not allowed to do and can’t really control themselves and pass the time in other ways. I think it starts getting better around 18 months, and by two Awdry was pretty great.

So she holds the back of the pew and dances, she gets passed between us, she eats rice cakes… whatever. Very rarely do we take her out because it’s mostly just the odd shriek of delight and this weird growl she has going on. I don’t think it’s that bothersome.

Pack your bag the night before

OK, now we get serious. You WILL be bringing a bag to church and you MUST pack it the night before. This bag will have the same stuff every week packed in the same places so you both know where everything is and don’t have to rummage or have whispered conversations during the consecration about where the muslin is so you can wipe the sick off your shoulder.

This is our packing list. We take two bags: a rucksack with general stuff and a canvas tote bag with potty stuff.

RUCKSACK
[Lunch tupperware (in main compartment)]
[Small bowl (in main compartment)]
[Three forks (in foil bit)]
One A emergency nappy (in back inner pocket)
Sandwich bag (in back inner pocket)
Wipes (in back inner pocket)
Spare trousers and top for G (in back inner pocket)
Spare trousers and socks for A (in front lower inner pocket)
Chapter book (front top inner pocket)
Two cloth nappies (in main compartment of zig zag bag)
Three cloth wipes (in main compartment of zig zag bag)
Changing mat (in secondary compartment of zig zag bag)
Zig zag bag (in main compartment)
Water bottle (in main compartment)
Church cakes for both (in main compartment)
Muslin (outer pocket)
Purse, phone and face mask and heartburn pills (other outer pocket)
Three snack bars (other outer pocket)
Alms (loose in someone’s pocket)

POTTY BAG
Potty seat
Privacy towel
Plastic wee bags
Spare trousers
Spare socks

We also, every Saturday evening, check the travel news and the weather forecast.

Does this seem crazy? I don’t know. But this is what we do and it’s made the whole experience so much more enjoyable for us. We never forget anything because we have a list that we pack from and we know it’s done so Sunday mornings are less rushed.

Make lunch the night before

We go to a church in central London so we get home an hour after our usual lunchtime, in the middle of what is usually naptime. We have a small snack on the train home and then eat immediately upon arriving home. And I mean immediately. Lunch is pre-made and cold and if we could get it together enough to lay the table before we left in the morning we would. We usually have a cold pasta salad and it’s pretty much the same every week to minimise effort and drama.

Don’t bring toys (it’s not worth it)

We oh-so-briefly brought Awdry’s Rabbit with us to church. It was very quickly a pain in the neck and we stopped taking him. He did not keep him quiet, he just diverted his noise and attention to Rabbit instead of Mass and was just as disturbing to others. At some point you are going to have to take the toys away or give up on your children’s liturgical education completely. Obviously you don’t want to do the latter, so just do the former before they even realise it could be a thing.

We allow our children to fiddle quietly and non-destructively with any reasonable item that is present in church. Like flipping through the hymn book or looking at the service sheet (in pre-plague times). I sometimes do that as an adult so I think it’s reasonable for them to do it too. But nothing noisy and nothing irrelevant.

Leave EARLY

Our Mass starts at 10.30am. We aim to get there between 10am and 10.15am. We need enough time for everyone to go to the loo and for Awdry to finish his snack before church starts. Oh, and also for people to need poos just as we’re walking out the door, for the train to break down, for one of us to break down… the usual. 10.29am would be a borderline irresponsible time for us to arrive.

Sit at the front

Because you have got there so early, you can sit at the front. That’s right. You. Your kids. Your massive bag of stuff. All your coats. Right on the front pew.

Why would you sit at the back? Why? Is your church a mile long so it would take you four frantic sprinting minutes to get to the back if you had to take your child out? Is 6 seconds vs 10 seconds really worth it to spend an hour every Sunday staring at the back of people’s heads? Because if you can’t see what’s going on, your children sure can’t.

Sit at the front so your children can actually see. If you don’t believe me, get down to your children’s level next time you go to church and see what they see and tell it’s transcendentally interesting. Your children will behave better if they can see. You will have less noise and less fidgeting if they have something to occupy them like actually watching Mass.

Get to know people

Say hi! Our church is nice and sociable and in non-plague times has coffee after Mass. We used to bring a packed lunch and eat in the hall while all the fancy solo adults sipped their hot beverages and we dodged flying banana. Alas this is currently not possible, but Awdry knows the people we usually see at church and looks forward to it. So do we!

Not only is it nice to get to know people but they’re also much less likely to be tutting at the occasional flip-out if they know who you are. They’ll give you the benefit of the doubt rather than asking why you don’t take that little brat out.

Don’t schedule anything else for Sundays

Honestly, I can’t imagine trying to cram anything else into Sundays. And why would I? I really believe that you should not have other regular commitments on Sundays (I’m thinking football practice, orchestra, tutoring…) because that’s not an appropriate use of the Lord’s Day.

I’m really not super-strict about stuff I do and don’t do on Sundays, but personally I find that extra scheduled stuff really ruins the mood of a Sunday. If I’m watching the clock on Mass trying to calculate if it ends at X time we can spend Y minutes chatting afterwards but really have to go at Z o’clock so we get back in time to do ABC before DEF….

No thank you.

I’m sure this will become harder as the children get older but right now we just say NO to other stuff on Sundays. We come home, eat lunch, get the little ones upstairs for their nap and have our weekly coffee and just relax with our books.

You can do it

I’ve written a lot about the nitty gritty of getting to Mass (and staying in there!) but it really all comes back to making Mass a priority and believing that it’s important for your children to be there. If you really commit to that, you’ll find a way to make it happen.