I’m beginning to wonder whether Benign Neglect, a recent post from It’s Not All Mary Poppins, should be required reading for all parents or parents-to-be.

It’s certainly a very therapeutic read for all of us who have felt guilty, at one time another, for not playing with our children enough or for not giving them experiences of the right kind of play. Or more recently (in my case) realising with shame that my youngest son was almost two years old before he’d even seen any PlayDoh, let alone had one-on-one Mummy coaching sessions on how to roll it out and cut interesting little shapes with plastic novelty-shape cutters.

I really wish that someone had told me all this with the first child. Somebody should have sat me down when Akra Jr was a baby and said:

Small children need a lot more hands-on care. There is no denying this. But they don’t need your attention over their every waking breath. They just don’t. As a parent, you have the right to expect that your child entertain themselves some of the time. You have the right to a quiet cup of coffee. If you can’t achieve that just yet, you can make it a reasonable goal. You have the right to read or talk on the phone (or blog!!) while they play. You have the right to say, “Mommy finds that game boring, hon.” You have the right to do all this without guilt, and you can achieve it by introducing to the children a little Benign Neglect.

I believe that many of us come into the Stay-at-Home arena with the same expectations as the work place. I know I did – desperately trying to instill some order into an unordered world. Made myself goals and lofty “perfect mother” expectations in lieu of performance appraisals, had planned activities, felt guilty if some days I was too exhausted to do anything and just somehow muddled through with the help of a few too many children’s DVDs. It took me three years (and a second child) to realise that this was not only unrealistic and impractical, but also completely undesirable.

I don’t want to create children completely reliant on me for their entertainment and happiness, who are lost if one day I’m just not up to it.

I don’t want to treat playing with my children as a chore, part of the “job” – I want to have actual fun with them (which might have to involve some negotiation of activities on my part).

I refuse to feel guilty because I don’t enjoy playing “power rangers” or doing intricate arty projects with them.

I don’t want to hinder their imaginations – I want them to be able to come up with their own ideas and be able to create their own little worlds.

I don’t want to dread the summer holidays and have to create lists of activities for every day they’re off school/nursery.

So, these summer holidays, I’m going to be practising rather more Benign Neglect. What about you?

While pregnant with my first child, I used to see mothers carrying their offspring in one arm, propelling an empty pushchair with the other and I’d think they were completely insane.

Fast forward five and a bit years, and picture me: carrying Li’l Bhaji in one arm, holding Akra Jr’s hand with the other and sort of propelling the empty pushchair with my stomach. What’s changed… ?

… now I know they were completely insane.

Stumbled across an interesting (if a little old) article online from the New Scientist: 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense which highlights thirteen scientific mysteries.

The one that interested me most was number 4, which describes a study by pharmacologist Madeleine Ennis, a homeopathic sceptic whose goal was to prove that the popular complementary medicine was flawed.

For myself, I’ve found homeopathy very effective – beyond the explanations of the placebo effect (when I’ve picked the wrong remedy it hasn’t worked, yet within an hour of taking the correct remedy have experienced substantial improvement in symptoms), but even if it was placebo I’m not convinced I’d totally care, as long as it actually worked.

Yet, there is that dilemma: how can something so dilute that it probably no longer contains a single molecule of anything other than water be of any benefit medicinally? I’ve heard several theories (including resorting to sub-atomic physics) attempting to explain it, but the honest answer is probably “we don’t know”.

Going back to the pharmacology study, Ennis came up with some intriguing results:

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

[...]

“We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

So it does seem that homeopathy might be more scientific than some might have us believe…

In the past 48 hours, Li’l Bhaji has:

• set the house alarm off at 6.30am. This he achieved by wandering downstairs into the living room which triggered the infra-red sensor. He screamed loudly because he has NO idea why walking into a room has caused this god awful noise. Akra Jr screamed loudly because he’s just been woken up by what he’s convinced is a fire alarm and we’re all going to be burnt alive. You have NEVER seen Akra leap out of bed and down the stairs so fast in the early hours of a Thursday morning – trust me on this. I don’t think we’re very popular in our neighbourhood anymore.
• put all the foam letters (bath toy) into the toilet
• stood on Akra Jr’s window sill and posted coins out onto the extension roof. This one I really don’t want to think too hard about how he achieved it, as it still completely freaks me out.

Oh boy, are we in trouble.

So, understandably given Li’l Bhaji is an early waker and the rest of us are all dead to the world until there’s at least a 07 at the front of the time, it’s really rather complicated matters. Time to work out a way to imprison him – time to retrieve the stairgates.

However, putting the stairgate at the top of the stairs wouldn’t totally solve the problem. It may stop the hate mail from the neighbours but still leaves free reign to the bathroom and Akra Jr’s room (why can’t he just make a beeline for OUR room like his brother did at the same age, eh?!). So, we’ll put the stairgate across his room door – simple.

Or not.

You see, Li’l Bhaji likes to sleep in darkness. He has blackout blinds, he has the door closed and all is well with the world. On the flip side, Akra Jr sleeps with his door open and the landing light on. Try and shut his door, even with a night light, and all hell breaks loose. When the stairgate is fitted to the doorframe, the door can no longer be closed.

Okay. We’ll train Li’l Bhaji to like sleeping in the light – better that than he flood the house by sticking toilet paper in the sink and running the tap or something. Akra dutifully puts up the stairgate – job done. The boys go to bed – I hear a door slam and sobbing. With fear in my heart, I go upstairs to find out what all the fuss is about. Akra wearily informs me that Akra Jr is jealous and wants a stairgate in his doorway too.

I try to explain that the stairgate is to shut Li’l Bhaji in so that he’s safe, and that Akra Jr is a big boy and doesn’t need one, yadda yadda yadda, but to be honest I don’t try very hard. It’s past their bedtime, I’m past fighting… we put one up in Akra Jr’s doorway as well. Neighbouring cells.

I just don’t want to know what mischief Li’l Bhaji is planning to do to HIS room in the morning. *sigh*.

… you get minifigged!

Many thanks to Kaptain Kobold for immortalising me in Lego.

I especially like the fact I’m chasing snails to photograph – very timely, considering (although I’m depicted chasing garden snails, not the aquatic variety).

The original photo can be found in his Flickr Photostream.

I have two new additions to my Biorb – they’re Bumblebee Nerite Snails and, despite an awful lot of aquarium owners trying to get rid of snails that have sneakily snuck into the tank, these two were intentionally bought from the The Snail Shop (don’t worry – nerite snails’ breeding habits are rather complicated, so I won’t be overrun with baby snails in the very near future… I hope).

I’ve named them Bill and Ted. Akra Jr thinks the names are hilarious, but doesn’t get the actual reference, fortunately. Then again, you’re never too young to learn to play the air guitar and say “excellent!”

The snails are already demonstrating unique personalities. When Ted was added to the tank, he set off (quite speedily for a snail) to explore his new home and took in several laps of the bowl, grazing on unsightly algae along the way (“Oi, Ted! You missed a bit…”). In contrast, Bill sat on his pebble for a bit, moved a centimetre, fell off… had to be put back on his “foot”, eventually got back on his pebble and explored it and its neighbour lazily, pooing a lot along the way in a very creative large spiral pattern that stuck to his shell.

Who knew that snail watching could be so much fun?

Do you think it might be a bit excessive to buy a new large fish tank just so I can buy the 8 Apple Snail Rainbow Pack?

About a year and a half ago, I linked to an article which exclaimed that Toddlers Don’t Toddle Enough – the usual doom and gloom report of children’s inactive lifestyles linked to soaring obesity rates.

At the time, I expressed a smidgeon of cynicism, given that I’d never met a sedentary toddler in my life and if anyone had one, I was quite prepared to swap, just for a little while.

Now, a new study has discovered that kid’s activity levels are completely unaffected by their environment. Surprisingly, it’s an individually set daily constant in all children aged between 5 and 10, regardless of socio-economic status, the amount of physical education provided by the school, or after school activities.

Those children who had spent a lot of time at school running around, were understandably rather knackered when they got home and were more sedentary. On the flip side, those who had little chance to be active in the day, burned off their excess energy in the evenings – fairly common sense, you would have thought.

My first response is that of relief that the Internet can still be relied upon to find conflicting studies that conveniently match your personal world view when required. But I am also inclined to wonder, given that they can no longer blame parents or schools for the lack of physical activity in our children – how are they going to pin the blame for rising childhood obesity on us next?

One by one, the little oases of calm in the day are gradually being eroded. Yes, there are rumours that The Great Lunchtime Nap is on the way out.

I knew it had to happen eventually – after all, by the time Li’l Bhaji gets to school, I knew the chances of him needing a 2 hour sleep in the middle of the day were fairly slim. I’d just hoped I might cling on to it until, say… age four and a half or thereabouts.

Okay, so that was a little optimistic of me, seeing as how his brother started to give up his lunchtime nap at around the age of two and a bit as well, dipping his toes back into the waters of the short daytime sleep just as he started at nursery the following September, but never again allowing his Mummy that middle of the day downtime where all the chores got done.

And therein lies the rub – just how am I going to get everything done in the day now?

Li’l Bhaji is still at the age where I get twitchy if I haven’t heard from him in more than 30 seconds, or it goes a bit quiet in the next room. I’m currently resorting to those great parenting standbys of Cbeebies and simple computer games on Kneebouncers just to get this blog post written, but I can’t see it being very effective for long. Li’l Bhaji is quick to realise that he’s lost my attention and suddenly want to borrow my hand to draw around, for example. Never mind what all the interruptions is doing to my flow of thought. Any more serious (i.e. paid) writing is now going to have to be relegated to the evening, when I’m at my least creative or mentally alert – and that’s only if I succeed in getting him to stay in bed and not repeatedly pop out to see what the rest of the household is doing while he’s supposed to be sleeping.

Of course, it’s a natural stage. I have to accept that my baby is growing up and that a lunchtime nap is silly when he’s just not tired anymore.

The problem is… his Mummy is still tired.

My Wheel of the Year photos for July are now up on Flickr.

We’re past the half way mark now, so those of us who are still persevering are on the downhill run and starting to see some great results. It’s fantastic to see all the changes (seemingly imperceptible at first) gradually gaining momentum throughout the year.

On the flip side, though, I’m finding it a struggle to keep going. The project takes up so much of my day on the first of every month. There’s several of my photos that haven’t really changed, or don’t interest any more and it’s a chore to trudge out with camera in tow and take the SAME photograph AGAIN this month. Seeing the changes in the Oak Tree or at the Pond are rewarding, but are they rewarding enough? I just hope the end results in December are worth all the aggravation.

Next time I come up with a great idea for a photo project – remind me to design it so it’s all over in a day, please?