The Cerebral Mum

I’ve been shite lately. Obviously. I don’t even want to look at the date of my last post. I haven’t been reading my friends blogs. I haven’t even been reading my emails much. I think there are a gazillion people online that I haven’t thanked for various things. And a few offline as well. At some stage, things just got “all too much” and I left my computer off, zealously, and buried my head in sand (aka Sci-Fi DVDs). And when you feel like everything things all too much and so ignore them, it actually makes you feel worse.

So here I am, back again and feeling somewhat miserable and stressed, but I’ll probably feel better by the time I finish this post. There are so many things I have to do right now. I can’t even begin to enumerate them. I know people say to break it down into small parts, and to write lists and tick them off so you feel like you’re getting somewhere, but when the task of writing such a list is overwhelming, I think you’re pretty much screwed.

So I’m starting my baby steps - again - here. And apologising to all those people who deserve much attention and haven’t been getting it from me. I can’t promise you’ll be getting it any time soon, but now at least you know that I am thinking about you.

Sometimes, I am the life of the party. And sometimes I am a very antisocial creature. My real life friends are mostly aware of that, and don’t worry when they don’t hear from me for months on end. That’s just me. I think internet relationships are more tenuous. They don’t, for me at least, have the strength of years. So I feel more guilty when I don’t “water” those friendships. Which, again, makes me want to bury my head in the sand.

I’ve been slack at taking photos too, so I have no picture of “Monday’s Child” (I don’t want to cheat and use an old one) but I can promise that he is still as gorgeous as ever. And we started toilet training a couple of weeks ago.

Caspar will be 18 months in 2 days, which is apparently on the early side for toilet training these days, especially for boys. (Yes, I scanned a couple of pieces of the child rearing literature before ignoring it and Skyping my mother.) He’d been showing signs of readiness for a while, and I had a potty on hand but decided that trying to get him to use the potty when he was interested in the toilet was a stupid idea. So I looked around for a toilet seat for him. I didn’t think that would be so hard.

I just wanted one of those seat and step combined folding things. I thought they were pretty standard. But no, I couldn’t find one anywhere. Just seats and separate steps which were too low. And ridiculously high tech things which convert into Lear jets or some such and had a similar price point. After a couple of weeks searching for simplicity, I gave up and just bought a padded seat because he didn’t want to wait any longer, and holding him over the bowl was not fun for my back.

(I also shopped around for some plain undies - without crazy patterns or “licensed” characters. I loathe “licensed” characters on everything. It was worth the extra pennies not to have to look at them 10 times a day.)

Of course, the standard seat didn’t fit on our toilet, so out came the hacksaw to remove some excess plastic and we were off.

One other issue is that Cas still doesn’t speak so has no way of telling me that he needs to go so I’ve had to be a little vigilant about keeping an eye on when he’s fidgeting. Kelley from Magneto Bold Too and Leechbabe from Stuff With Thing (I think - it was a while ago) both gave me a couple of handsigns I could use so I taught him one of those as a way to say “toilet”. He learned that pretty much instantaneously. Of course, learning it and using it are two different things.

Overall, it’s been a simple change. To be honest, throwing a couple of pairs of undies in the washing machine is easier than laundering nappies. And he gets it. There have been a few accidents, obviously, but also a few days accident free. We’ve even gone out a couple of times without a nappy. And he’s actually really great at weeing on the loo. He doesn’t even need rewards. He’s happy just to get a piece of toilet paper when he’s done and to wave bye-bye. The pooing, though? Not so much.

In the couple of weeks, we’ve only had half a poo in the loo. But he’ll get there. Toilet training is not as bad as I thought. Maybe because I decided not to stress about that, at least. It helps to have a Mum that says it takes longer than they say it does, and to not be a sucker for the Potty-Train-Your-Toddler-In-A-Day Brigade. If he’s fully toilet trained in six months, that’s good enough for me. Although, after seeing how well he’s doing, I doubt that it will take that long.

So there you go. I wrote a blog post. That’s one thing I can cross off my gargantuan non-existent list. And I feel a bit better.

Although still a crappy person for not, figuratively, returning my friends’ calls.

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