Parents that hurt, with a busy 11 month old!

It has been a while since I have blogged. Part of having the immune form of arthritis as opposed to the older persons type is you never know what mischief is going to happen whilst you sleep at night. It can be any thing from attacking joints to choosing to muck about with my kidneys. At the moment both is happening to me, what is not yet on the waiting list to be removed,will be at some stage. No idea what to do about the kidney, time for Mr Cranberry juice to make his cameo appearance of the year along with anti biotics.

All that aside life has to go on, as any parent knows, you can not afford to be ill when you have children!

As Christopher, our 11 month old son, has grown up some things have become easier but other things become a nightmare. Be warned parents to be, never think it will be easier when your child can sit up, crawl, it isn't so enjoy the peace of a first born baby  because by 5 months things get a little more crazy.

As ill parents, we know we are going to have to enforce a lot more rules on our child than perhaps well parents would need to. We are already having to use stern voices during nappy change time, we are happy nearly all the time so when we use stern sounds he knows we mean business and calms down a bit. If we didn't use this method we would have a child stronger and more flexible than us, rolling off the changing matt, kicking his legs into our joints and there would be general exhaustion in us so we then could not give him nice times as our limited energy would be spent on just the daily maintenance of a child.

This is very like my son! From Hasslefreeclipart.com

Feeding time was getting difficult.We could not have him catapulting food around the room as is his want, as a Psychologist I know there is a need for children to learn about texture of food and play with it a bit but we want him to eat too, plus my assistant dog is getting huge because she is getting all his thrown food to hoover up! We struggled to pull the spoon off him, my hands have not grown any bigger than his hands and my husbands hands don't flex, so this is a major battle. We have to use our voices. We have to be tough and equally distracting. We try to make feeding fun by pretending the spoon is a car, we sing songs and if he still grabs the spoon we say "no" with a big glare on our faces. It makes him upset but he has started to get the message and leaves the  spoon alone. Our other tactic is to have finger food on his tray such as bits of toast ,which he controls, and in between him stuffing the bread in his mouth we can sly in some of the good stuff. It seems to work at 11 months, he may cotton on to all these methods soon!

He adores reading time. He seems to be enjoying "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr Seuss, this seems a bit of an older child book to me but I think babies enjoy rhythm.



He loves songs, he will watch any thing with music in it so he currently watches retro Christmas music videos.His father has recently purchased a Ukulele, so my husband plays and son listens and tries to clap along.

 "Baby Einstein" DVDs are a godsend to any creaky parents, it keeps your little darling transfixed for a good half hour whilst you sit down and have a cup of tea and painkillers.

My husband is an artist so hence why we like this particular dvd!The DVDs are available all over and I am sure competitively priced since thanks to some idiots who threatened court action as the dvds were not making their children smarter, come on people, get some common sense, its tv watching not doing a cryptic crossword! Makes for a blooming good half hour rest though for any parent.

Finally it is the season to be jolly. Our tree will go up soon, we have Chris tingle Church service coming up which I love and I have hand made a lovely Christmas stocking advent calender so when he is older every sock will be filled with a different Christmas related gentle activity, right down to making those gaudy paper chains children love!

The best thing to combat pain is to ignore it, fill your mind with your child, how lucky to have a child and throw yourself into Christmassy feel, fun and online shopping! Tests have proven that you can fool your brain into thinking you are well or in less pain if you stop dwelling on the pain. So off I go to stick Christmas carols on and get wrapping some presents.

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