After two teeth from two offspring last week, two more of six-year old Billy’s teeth have come out in two days.
The tooth fairies got confused and somehow one tooth earned him £3.
I think he’s found a stash of old ones somewhere and is passing them off as his own. . .
Filed under Parenting
Billy loses tooth
THE tooth fairy deserves to get frequent flyer points for the numerous visits to our house. She came twice last weekend.
It’s an expensive time for her (or is it him?), when a child has reached five or six, and their baby teeth start dropping out. The going rate for teeth has traditionally been £1, meaning the tooth fairy will have to shell out £80 for all my children’s milk teeth over the years.
Billy, aged six and 11-months, has got five wobbly teeth at the moment, after the most precarious front top tooth finally became separated from his gob. It’s been hanging on for at least a fortnight. Usually, you can give a very wobbly tooth a quick twist and it will come away easily. Not Billy’s. His seem to become detached only on one side. We had to get the dentist to take one the last wobbler out.
This time the tooth came out in rather dramatic circumstances. A nice day out to Brixworth Country Park was on the cards, but as he went to jump out of the back of our ancient Bongo campervan he fell face-first into the gravel. Ouch.
Forgetting all the first-aid principles of not moving the patient, I scooped him up and sat him back into the van just as his wails hit an ear-splitting volume. He was so concerned about getting plasters on his grazed knees and elbows, he hadn’t realised his mouth was pouring blood. With wet-wipe ‘cold compresses’ being held on his limbs by his concerned brothers, and Fairy Godmother Aunty Nicki distracting a distressed Bonnie, I got a look at his mouth.
“Oh, at least your tooth is out,” said concerned elder brother.
“Yeah, but has he swallowed it?” asked concerned eldest brother. The wailing started again.
The brothers grim were given the task of trying to find the missing tooth among the white tooth-sized gravel where he’d fallen.
Amazingly, sharp-eyed Jed did find it. And thankfully the rest of Billy’s teeth, including the new tooth breaking through, were all intact.
Insult was added to injury when the tooth fairy missed out Billy on her nightly rounds. She was obliged to pay time and a half the following night to meet contractual obligations. (Don’t know about you but the absent-minded tooth fairy has missed teeth in our house on more than one occasion).
Over breakfast the following day, Dougie suddenly announced that he too had lost another tooth overnight, but had decided not to put it under his pillow as he wanted to keep it “and I’d rather have it than a quid.” He’s 11. haven’t all his baby teeth already come out? He showed me where a new molar was growing in its place.
Turns out children’s 20 milk teeth keep falling out until they are around 12. Jed’s just had his last adult teeth break through, just as he’s coming to the end of wearing a brace and his teeth seem to be all in the right place.
With all this palaver about teeth, baby Bonnie wants to get involved. “My teeth out for the fairy?” she asked, as I was getting her ready for bed. I solemnly examined inside her mouth. Her last milk molars at the back are just breaking through. “Not ready yet darling, soon.” (‘soon’ being the unit of time used on Bonnie for everything).
If your child is unfortunate enough to lose a tooth when it’s not wobbly, the old tip of washing it in milk and sticking it back in is actually true.
It needs to be reinserted within 30 minutes, or kept in the milk, and an emergency dentist trip sought immediately. Don’t think it doesn’t matter if a baby tooth comes out too soon, the tooth needs to be there as a ‘spacer’ until the adult teeth are ready to erupt.
Filed under Parenting
WE’RE ending that tricky fourth week of school holidays. The family holiday is over, the playschemes have moved on and video games have been played to their conclusions.
The weather is unpredictable and the inmates are restless and bored. How do we all keep our sanity?
In an effort to get some daily fresh air and much-needed exercise, we’ve started running. . . I know, it sounds bonkers.
But this isn’t running in some hearty, healthy, all-together- Swiss Family Robinson-type way. No, this is 20 minutes up at the Racecourse, either me and one of the boys, or Bloke and one of the boys.
And when I say running, it’s more like they run, and we stumble, half-jog, walk and collapse. Frankly, it’s been a bit embarrassing. The boys skip round our circuit barely breaking sweat. Meanwhile, I’m left hobbling behind, wheezing and purple-faced. After two days my thigh muscles felt they’d become detached from my legs and I couldn’t climb out of bed.
Needless to say, the kids quite like this daily ritual humiliation of their parents and we can’t face being the ones to give up first. Oh God, please make the aching stop soon. . .
Filed under Parenting
WATCHED the documentary Four Sons Vs Four Daughters after being poked about it by various friends.
This followed a weekend where the parents of, er, four sons swapped lives with. . .well, you get the picture.
Both families were reasonably well-off, and had lovely kids: very stereotypical sporty boys and ballet-dancing, girly girls.
The only really interesting outcome was seeing the ‘background parent’ (the mum of the boys and the dad of the girls) realising how left-out they had become.
This was nothing to do with the kids. It was entirely to do with the Dad of the Boys being sporty and the Mum of the Girls being girly. If the genders had been more mixed, I’m not sure the families would have been any different; it was clear the Boy Dad and the Girl Mum were the dominant forces in their homes regardless.
People often seem to assume that having gender-biased offspring means you are different compared to those with a mixture of boys and girls.
And that if you, like us, end up with a girl after lots of boys, or a son after lots of daughters, you must have felt somehow lacking beforehand. It doesn’t feel that way to me.
I had a lump in my throat when the program showed how the parents felt when their children were born. It simply didn’t matter that they had girl after girl or boy after boy. And honestly, it was the same for us. In fact, it was more of a shock when Bonnie wasn’t a boy.
Our boys aren’t always wrestling or shooting toy guns, although they do always want to spend any spare moment kicking a ball around.
While we do spend a large amount of our time ferrying them to football, rugby or cricket, they do also help out with the cooking – often without being asked or cajoled. Some of them do drama. Some of them sometimes like drawing and dancing.
No pink in sight
She may only be two, but so far, Bonnie is no different. I If there’s a ball being kicked about, she wants to join in. If there’s tickling, play-fighting or playdough monster-making going on, she’s elbowing her way into the action.
But she also likes pushing dolls around in a pram. She’ll run to get the dustpan and brush if anything gets spilled. She has demanded that her tiny toenails get painted with varnish like Mummy’s so she can “have lady toes.” She can make a sulk last hours.
Is that because she’ girly or just because she’s joining in with her surroundings? Am I indulging her in a way I wouldn’t have with the boys?
It’s inevitable that our children will be influenced by what’s closest to home. I’ve never been very girly, but then I had no sisters, two brothers, and was brought up in a boys boarding school. Might I have been less sporty and more interested in shopping (ugh!) and make-up (boring) if my brothers been sisters and the school had been for girls? I’m not sure. . .
Bonnie is showing tom-boy tendencies – getting filthy at the allotment, insisting on wearing her brother’s ‘soldier’ coat, refusing to have her hair brushed and trying to pick up insects – but I’m sure there are plenty of girls without male siblings who are just the same.
She’s also recently become obsessed with those crappy plastic Disney shoes that little girls clip-clop around in. She’s actually tried to steal them from other children. Still, she walks better in heels than I do.
Our kids will develop their own likes and dislikes, influenced by their families and their friends. (Hopefully not too much by television and the media, where aspirations seem limited to being either footballers or their wives).
It’s up to us as parents to allow them to try as broad a range of experiences as we can, and get away from gender stereotypes altogether.
Meanwhile, part of me is quite enjoying having my make-up ‘applied’ by my grinning daughter.
I hope her technique improves though, I need all the help I can get.
THIS week is appointment week. Not the most exciting thing but good to get out of the way. We’ve got the dentist, the opticians (to collect Billy’s third pair of frames in less than a year) a health-visitor check-up, a pre-op visit for ear grommets (shudders*) and a visit from the nice lady who makes me look blonder than I really am.
I am resolved to get school uniform sorted earlier than usual. I’d also like to paint the house, mend the shed, do some paperwork, stick a mountain of toys and clothes on eBay, clear the allotment, fit in a visit to my parents ‘oop north’ and sort out a mound of other ‘day-job’ work which still needs doing despite the presence of four children in my ‘office.’
Who am I kidding. . ?
Filed under Parenting
Mystery plant?
I NEED your help solving a mystery. What on earth is this plant? I know it looks like a courgette flower, but it’s very small, about 14 inches and the leaves and stems are literally covered in quite vicious white thorns.
It was sent to me by a reader, Mr Tapp. I’m not the greatest of plant identifiers but had started to recognise more and more plants and flowers, if not the exact variety, then at least the family. But I’m stumped, and asking other gardeners for help!
I had better luck with another query: Lindsey’s tree. It’s a great big spreading thing at a house she’s only been in a couple of years and this year it has beautiful, huge white flowers all over it, which turn brown and fall off, leaving an unusual spiked ‘cone’.
magnolia grandiflora
It’s a magnolia grandiflora, and I only recognised it as I saw one at Cliveden gardens which covered an entire stately home wall! These magnolias flower in summer rather than spring, and the flowers come alongside the leaves, rather than before. They are evergreen too, which makes them ideal for a sunny wall where you can train them by trimming each year’s growth back to a healthy bud. plant. If yours has become a large tree, with the flowers out of sight above the canopy, then start to hard prune back a third of the tree this year and so on until it’s a manageable size. They can grow to 15 metres by ten wide if you don’t prune. You can see this year’s growth as it will still be green and slightly bendy. It may sulk for a season or two after hard pruning, but should recover.
Philadelphus, or Mock Orange
The next picture is philadelphus, or mock orange, emailed by “Mrs Toodles.” She said: “It looks quite dull most of the year at the back of our garden but this July it was totally covered with lots of white flowers with a strong scent.” Philadephus also need hard pruning too and flowered particularly well this year after the snowy winter.
cosmos
This “big daisy flowers with fluffy foliage” sent by Jane and James is annual cosmos. Usually sown indoors in spring and transplanted into place in May/June. There are perennial types, like the delicious chocolate cosmos.
One of the most frustrating things for the beginner gardener is not knowing what you’re actually growing. You may have inherited plants when you move house, or have lost labels or seed packets. The best thing is to get a good book, like Hessayon’s New Flower Expert, and just go through the garden comparing pictures with the real thing. Online gardening forums are great too, if you can take a snap and upload it.
It’s not been a great year for the new gardener, thanks to the drought, so don’t beat yourself up if things haven’t gone as well as you’d hoped, even the most experienced gardeners have had some disappointments this summer. It’s not you, it’s the weather!
Filed under Gardening
GOING through the holiday snaps stored on various cameras I noticed a theme: Dougie is playing with his mobile phone in almost every photograph.
This was to be expected. Giving an 11-year old his first mobile phone and then not letting him fiddle with it for the next month is like giving a puppy a chew toy he can’t bite.
If, like us, you are taking the plunge and getting your pre-teen a phone as secondary school and new independence looms, then don’t leave it until September. Get it now and they’ve got the rest of the holiday for the novelty to wear off.
There’s legitimate research that says children shouldn’t be holding mobiles to their ears as their brains are still growing, and they are more susceptible to the radiation emitted.
There’s also fears of them being more open to mugging, bullying and generally spending too much of their time and our money. We parents can argue that we grew up fine without mobiles, but we also grew up with smoke-filled homes and no seat belts in our cars.
We need to accept that times have changed, and mobile phones are both a noisy, expensive curse and an utterly brilliant way of keeping tabs on our children.
Trust me: that phone isn’t really for him, it’s for us.
Festival not as exciting as my phone
Last year we went through the whole hand-wringing over mobiles with our eldest son before he went to secondary school.
Back then, a whole 12 months ago, it was easy to buy a bog-standard, no-one-would-want-to-nick-it model, which Jed bored of quite quickly and only uses to write illegible texts to his friends on. I pay £10 a month for credit on a pay-and-go basis– no negotiation – after advice not to sign a kid up to a contract. Getting a free texts/limited calls sim card is advisable, as they won’t spend much time talking on it.
However, phones have come a long way in a very short time. They are far more sophisticated, and even getting a cheap one meant touch-screens, android technology and social networking built in. It’s a job to even work out how to actually make a phone call on the blinkin’ thing.
Much to the annoyance of Bloke and I, Doug’s bargain phone is better than our contract ones. And no, we are not going to join the herd and hand over any money to Apple. Iphones are so last year.
Dougie is a techno fiend. Within minutes of its first battery charge he’d entered all his mates’ numbers, sent us all texts, downloaded a game, set his ringtone and transferred all his music files. I fear the novelty may never wear off.
I’ve already wrenched it from his sticky mitts, usually when he’s engrossed and ignoring everything around him, like walking into the road. I need to stem his addiction now before he gets it confiscated during his first week of school.
After all, it’s no good to me as a tracking device if it’s in a teacher’s drawer. . .
Filed under Parenting
ladybird larvae eat blackfly
RETURNING from a week away showed just how little my garden and allotment need me: they hardly looked any different.
Yes, lots of the marigolds needed deadheading and the courgettes had turned into marrows, but generally, all had carried on perfectly well without my interference. Marrows are a vegetable I have learned to love since I started gardening. Slice lengthways, scoop out seeds, fill with browned mince and rice, sprinkle with cheese, bake in the oven. Delicious.
I’d like to claim it was planned. But in reality I had resigned myself to dead veg and droopy dahlias. The rain may have helped but on visiting the allotment this week I found out how little impact the heavy showers have had. The ground is bone dry and solid beneath the top half inch of damp dust.
Nonetheless, I needed to dig.
I’m trying something out with my strawberries, which have been in a couple of years and have become very clumpy this summer. Usually you can root the runners from established strawberry plants, which are like little clusters of leaves on a long stem which you can push into the soil and then sever from the parent once rooted to get a brand new plant.
My fruit beds have become very overcrowded and messy, so I thought I’d try splitting the big clumps instead. They lent themselves to the reduction well, as there were many plantlets that could be easily separated by gentle pulling, keeping a good amount of root and soil on each. From eight plants I now have 28!
Strawberry plants don’t last forever, and it may be that these have exhausted themselves, but by replanting and watering in well now, it should allow them to establish before winter and hopefully we’ll have better yields of berries next June.
The crops are coming well, and this week we’ve been eating potatoes, shallots, garlic, onions, carrots, beetroot, runner and French beans, courgettes, cucumbers, spring onions, tomatoes, raspberries and blackcurrants, all home-grown.
I made some fairy cakes and mixed in some of the blackcurrant jam that we made and the cakes looked normal on the outside but were purple in the middle.
The beans are still managing to crop despite my blackfly infestation. I don’t spray, and the wildlife is now helping out instead.
The ladybird larvae are more numerous than I’ve ever seen, as you can see in the photo taken on my mobile phone. There are around eight and an adult on one small section. They eat huge amounts of aphids, and are your greatest garden ally. It’s hard to believe those bizarre-looking bugs turn into our beloved round ladybirds.
ladybird larvae (copyright H Scott)
PS: I’m on a mission this week as, by coincidence, several people have asked me to identify mystery plants in their gardens. I’ll update next week, so in the meantime, if you have any photos you want to email to me of plants you aren’t sure about, I’ll happily add them to the list.
courgette glut
Filed under Gardening
The only way to endure camping
YOU’VE waited all year for this moment and now it’s here, you’re not quite enjoying it yet.
Yes, holiday season is here and anyone with children is frantically writing lists, buying up first aid kits and worrying about passports.
That’s before the little darlings have even got to being sick in the car/train/ferry or needing a wee just after you’ve left the service station.
Holidaying with kids is hard work. But with a few simple tips your break might just end up being the relaxing family break you need.
Filed under Parenting
I’D love to show you a photo of the first ever tomato to make it to full redness at the allotment, but Baby Bonnie picked it and took a bite before I got to her.
Rather disconcertingly, she then spat it out and handed it to me. And she LOVES tomatoes.
A little worried, I tried it, and couldn’t find anything wrong. Perhaps it tasted too much of tomato. There are loads more just changing colour on my solitary bush tomato, and it just proves that despite previously killing toms at the allotment, they can actually grow there, with even having to be netted.
Apart from the tomatoes, It was lovely to visit the allotment last week, because on my previous visit I was concerned the season was over for me, bar the shouting.
Suddenly everything is ready to eat, despite what certainly feels like the driest summer in years.
A gap of three days since my last potter and the courgettes have turned from tiny half-finger-long veg-lets into marrows. Lots of them.
The kids were digging carrots that were the longest we’ve ever managed in our solid clay soil. Yet more beetroot, spring onions, potatoes, raspberries, far too many beans (they still came through) and onions. The sweetcorn is coming along nicely, and I have a pumpkin plant starting to fruit. At home, there are more tomatoes and the first of a promising-looking mini-cucumber crop.
Now the problem is keeping it going when we go away on our holidays. My attendance is somewhat random at the best of times. How will the plot, and home garden, survive?
In recent years it hasn’t been a problem: it rains.
Usually the problem is coming home to find the weeds have taken over. This year, we desperately NEED rain. And this is coming from someone who is going camping!
What I’d really like is for it to rain heavily every night, just over Northampton, while we’re away. But more realistically, I’ll water and water as much as possible and cover the planting holes of the courgettes and tomatoes with muck and straw to try and hold in moisture while we’re away. Alternatively, you may be able to persuade a friend or relative to water every other day, or fit a drip irrigation scheme with a timer on the tap. I’m too disorganised to have done either.
It was also a pleasure to visit the allotment with all the kids. Our eldest doesn’t have to come after school by virtue of being on the other side of town. It was nice to see how chuffed he was to find the seeds he’d sown in a raised bed back in May had turned into carrots, beetroot, spring onions, coriander and dwarf sunflowers.
He’s also a good forager (scrumping is banned). He came back with blackberries, plums and gooseberries, all growing along the hedgerows (I made him show me).
Foraging is a neglected art. There’s plenty of fruit growing along hedges, footpaths and on derelict land, as long as you’re sure you aren’t trespassing and you know what you’re picking!
Filed under Gardening
Hilary Scott Writes 