Oh my stars, my boy is 4.

Some days I look at him and wonder where the hell the time has gone. [warning: TINY jaundiced baby if you follow that link]

Some days I look at him and wonder how he’s not yet 13 because he certainly ACTS like a teenager sometimes. And oh the days can be LONG.

But he’s a bright spark, a ball of energy, SO observant, always listening even if he pretends he doesn’t hear us.

As we are away, we taped this interview in advance. On a sick day we had together. Here’s what the boy has to say for himself.

Oliver at 4

He’s being thrown a party on his actual birthday (today!) by his paternal grandmother, which will include 2 lovely second cousins, while we are in England He’s also getting a birthday party when we come home at an indoor playground. He’s very lucky. So are we.

The holiday card photo we should have sent out

The photo we did send out, where they totally aren't looking at the camera

We are off, for (hopefully) greener pastures (oh crap), to see family and old friends, to watch wonderful Christmas telly (2 Doctor Who specials, the last with scrummy David Tennant! Eastenders! All kinds of looking-back-on-the-year-that-was  comedy specials!), to (hopefully) drink some Sainsburys’ Asti, to eat some proper fish and chips (haddock, please), to shop (Monsoon! Marks and Spencers! Next! Orla Kiely – maybe?!), to go on adventures as yet unknown.

Wait, what the hell?  Was that just an optimistic post about our trip to England? Could it be – could it be that I am actually being POSITIVE and looking forward to it?  Clearly I have lost my mind in some sort of holiday (or rum & eggnog) induced madness.  And I have somehow forgotten all about taking two small children on an airplane for 7 hours each way, plus that lovely extra cushion of airport time, oh at least 4 hours.

NO.  I am not even going to start.  I’m being all merry happy.

Not sure if I will post while we are away.  Will be on twitter if you follow me on there.  Will have my shiny lovely new iPod touch with me, always on the lookout for that elusive wi-fi signal.

Merry Happy to you, too.  However you celebrate.

[Inspired by a post at Magpie Musing - great idea, just what I needed.]

Since my, um, rant last week, I haven’t felt like I’ve had the time to come on here and blog.

Have had a sort of refreshing week of not being online very much and also beginning to stop listening to some of those messages that make me question myself even more than I already do on my own.

We had Christmas with my parents last weekend. My house is now overstocked with new toys & books; the boys are fighting over them; some are already broken.

My family was, as usual, incredibly generous with their gift giving. And I am so happy to not still be shopping for major gifts!

We are 6 days away from a 7 hour plane journey plus airport time with my two little kids – one of my own personal hells.

We are so lucky to be able to spend the holidays in England.

My parents and grandparents are flying to Barbados tomorrow to bask in the warm sun, swim in the ocean and eat all the flying fish that I should be eating.

We are going to England.  We are going to see people we love and places we adore full of history and have adventures of who knows what kind yet.

My desire to enter the Toronto real estate market will potentially lead to divorce and/or my own mental health hospitalization.

We are so lucky to be able to consider entering the Toronto real estate market. Lucky in general to have a solid roof over our heads.

Work is rather boring right now – the holidays grind everything to a standstill and being bored at work makes me CRAZY.

I have a job. A good job.

I can’t get the damn wireless router we got at home to work no matter how hard I try. And my Blackberry Messenger on my phone is completely borked.

I just got an iPod touch and a Bose sound dock for my big Christmas gift. They are beautiful and awesome.

**

I swear to god, I could keep writing this for days. Maybe I should do this once a week!  Keep my whining in balance, eh?

I usually love following the conversation(s) on twitter, I love reading parenting blogs, I love engaging in this ‘community’, whatever that may be, however you define that. But sometimes – oh sometimes, it just drags me down.  And makes me want to stab a fork in my eye. Or, truly, what it really does? Makes me fundamentally question myself and whether or not I am good enough.

This week I learned of yet another thing I am doing wrong. I am putting my children in their car seats without warming the car up first, and with them bundled up in their warm winter coats or snowsuits.  I get what the article is saying, why the safety concern – but I don’t think it’s practical AT ALL.  There are reasons I don’t warm the car up first (it’s sitting in the garage and I won’t leave my kids in the house by themselves to go and turn it on, for starters).  And I can not put them in their car seats without their coats if I need to quickly drop them off at daycare when I get there – and what happens when I open the door to the car to get them out? A rush of cold air as we scramble to get dressed in the parking lot?  Just another thing to feel guilty about, eh?

Because you wanna know what else I do or have done TOTALLY wrong or TOTALLY right, according to people I follow on twitter/the ‘experts’/the media/everyone and their aunt depending on what day of the week it is?

• I co-slept in the past
• I don’t co-sleep now
• My kids don’t generally wake up in the night unless they are sick
• I breastfed (but not full time for 5 or 10 years, barely AT ALL comparatively)
• I formula fed
• I used a sling sometimes (but not always)
• I used the wrong kind of sling (according to some people)
• I used (and still use) a stroller
• I used (and still use, for another few months) dummies/soothers/pacifiers
• I used a few cloth diapers
• I have used a lot of disposable diapers
• I didn’t potty train until Oliver was over the age of three
• I potty trained my kid when I thought he was ready
• I let my kids watch tv, probably 1.5 hours a day total
• I use that tv as a babysitter in the morning while I am getting ready for work
• I use it for wind-down time at night before books and bed
• We vaccinate
• I go to work
• I have my kids in daycare and don’t see them between 8am and 6pm most weekdays
• Sometimes, I yell
• Sometimes, I use time outs
• Sometimes, I use tickles and silly distractions
• I don’t make my kids clear their plates
• I encourage my children to run laps around the family room to expel their energy
• My kids don’t eat organic food
• My kids eat a lot of home cooked meals
• Sometimes, my kids eat fast food
• We have plastic toys in this house — quite a lot of them, actually
• I think it’s time for me to shut up and stop listing this stuff.

You know what? I am already hard enough on myself.  I am so hard on myself.  I don’t need this extra scrutiny from you.

You don’t judge? Yes you do.  Rebecca from Playground Confidential recently said it VERY WELL.  You judge.  You tell me how I should have done it differently, even if you don’t say it explicitly.

Even when it shouldn’t matter to you.  Because nothing I have done, when it comes down to it, has fundamentally affected the safety and well being of my kid. Or your kid. Or people in general.

It’s 2009. It’s almost 2010! We are parents. We have choices. So many choices!! Give us the information that we need and let us make our own choices – for the health and well being of our kids, and for our own sanity.  That’s what I make my decisions based on:

1. Are my kids okay?
2. Is this making me crazy?
3. The end.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could put that judgment and that effort into things we should all be caring about?  Bigger picture, macro scale problems.  Situations where kids really are not safe.   This is first world crap we are talking about here.

I did a quick Google check to see how many other people had entitled a blog post the same as this one. Thankfully, not too many. But there was this one from a month ago, with a perfect image, that also said much of what I wanted to say:

***

I wrote this the other night, feeling frustrated. And then I thought I didn’t even want to post it. And then I thought, what the hell, I have nothing else to say. I guess I was angry. But mostly, as always, I am just not a confident person.  I am very self-critical so even if I feel fine about a decision that I have previously made, if you later question it, I immediately question myself – instead of defending my position. In most cases.

I’m not the only person who is lead to question their decisions when others preach about parenting.  We’re not all as confident as you.  And sometimes — maybe almost ALWAYS, there’s more than one right answer to a situation.

It would be the perfect time to write a post, if only there was something particularly interesting to say — I have a cup of warm coffee, I’m home alone, except for one napping boy.  The boy you wouldn’t think would be napping, the almost 4-year-old Oliver.

Yesterday something felled him enough that the doctor gave us Tamiflu.  Which lies unopened, because really that was a bit of a “every sickness right now MUST be H1N1″ sort of diagnosis.

Yesterday morning, he was a bit feverish, vomited once, and said his ear hurt.  Dr. Mummy declared it to be an ear infection.  We gave him something to bring down the fever, he cheered up and went to his Sunday morning sports class just like normal.  We took him to the real doctor after it was over.  They wanted him to provide a urine sample, so he kept drinking more and more water.  And he got more and more feverish and ill-looking.  By the time we made it into the pharmacy and I’m arguing about the Tamiflu prescription, he’s vomiting all over the pharmacy floor.  Jeebus.

He slept on the couch most of the afternoon.  There continued to be much vomiting and no keeping food down.

By late afternoon, I was starting to feel miserable myself — just in my head though, nothing in the tummy.

He ended up improving as the evening went on, and I ended up falling asleep on the chair holding him a few times, while beginning to suffer a rather awful light-sensitive headache.

We both went to bed.  I think both our fevers broke in the night.

I’m fine except for a nasty sore throat.  He’s fine except I forced him to drink some Gatorade powder with electrolytes that I mixed for him in a water bottle, and he threw it all up again.  Pretty sure that was due to the drink rather than his short-lived sickness.  I couldn’t send him to school until I knew he was keeping stuff down, though.

And the fact that he’s sleeping now?  Yeah, he needed some more recovery time.

So I don’t know what terrible plague crossed our threshold.  Is it the dreaded swine, and we built up enough immunity to it that we got a very mild 24 hour case with only some of the symptoms each?  Is it just a tummy bug for him and something else for me?  Is it seasonal flu?  Whatever.  Glad it’s almost over.

PS – because of this, because I couldn’t deal last night and probably not today either, I extended the giveaway for the HE washing machine cleaner over on the review blog

They got flashlights from Daddy, and I wandered around the house turning all the lights off.  They invented Flashlight Tag (I didn’t tell them I used to play it, they think they thought of it).  Oliver decided they were going to go camping in the dark and they went in his bedroom and Oliver crawled under the blanket on his bed and made a tent out of it and Callum got scared and wanted to go to where the lights were still on.   The coolest thing was they did most of this without any parental involvement (well except for me taking weird pictures in the dark and DAMN IT I MUST LEARN TO USE THIS CAMERA PROPERLY).

They are playing together and imagining together and tonight they kicked me out of the room and told me not to come in. And I was happy.

(Don’t worry, they were safe).

These boys, they adore each other now. I mean, they still fight over toys and who gets in the bath first and who got the biggest portion of dinner, but they are so happy to see each other first thing in the morning it makes me happy.  When they are apart, they are asking about the other sibling constantly, and not just because they might be jealous of what they are doing (e.g. if one is out with Daddy, etc.).

The other day, sitting beside each other in a shopping cart, they spent most of the time in the grocery store kissing each other on the lips.

THIS is what makes the pain of having them 22 months apart worth it.  Those dark and desperate days.  They are so close, in age and in friendship.  I hope they will always be this close.

I think, I kind of hope, that my last giveaway for a while is over at the other site (it’s a HE front loading washing machine cleaner, if yours stinks like mine does. I’m sure yours doesn’t because you are a perfect housekeeper. I am a housekeeping failure on all fronts).

Because they’ve been great to do, the reviews; I’ve been happy with the products (in the case of my new pillow, I am in LOVE). But really, giveaways are kind of exhausting.

Oh poor me. Snicker.