My Momma Told Me There'd Be Days Like This

I think I've been writing this post in my head for about three days now, but I've either been too tired or too busy or both to actually get it started. But there is finally some peace and quiet and I've realised if I keep composing in my head I'll never get this down.

So we've had a couple of bad days here, me and the boys. Nothing awful, nothing to worry about, just...not the most fun I've ever had. Owen has been sick since Monday night and Will since Tuesday, which means less sleep for all of us, and lots of middle of the night comforting. it also means that I'm not at my best the following day and my emotions always seem heightened. I felt close to tears for most of Tuesday. It didn't help that because of their colds, neither of the boys seems all that interested in eating, so I managed to work myself up into a frenzy about their weights and health. But more on that later.

I'm pretty sure they're teething right now too because the level of grumpiness from Owen and William, the level of clingyness is beyond the norm. Today all they had to do was look at each other to start crying furiously, or have me walk away from them to pick up a toy across the room for screaming fits to start. I tried to sit down on the floor and cuddle them both, but would end up breaking up fights over sharing my arms. Soothers have been ripped out of mouths, chubby hands have slapped heads and faces (please note, not my chubby hands! I don't do slapping!), toys have been flung. Its been ugly. And then there's the not eating thing, and the food being flung on the floor and the spinach covered hands rubbing into freshly washed hair. And the crying. The non-stop crying. Yeesh.

I guess we all need days like this to really appreciate our families when they're being good, right? And maybe that's just it. My boys have been so very very good for so long now - we had about two weeks of constant giggling from William and adorable smiles from Owen - that I'm in shock at these little snotty nosed monsters who seem so angry with each other. Where did my cuties go?

Well the good news is that I think I found them this evening at dinner. They ate fairly well, I was pleasantly surprised. And although Owen did manage to smear his dinner into his hair for the upteenth time today (just a little sidenote: I know kids are washable, and most parents would just laugh it off and fling their child into the tub, but - okay, break out the violins now, its sympathy time - with two you can't just fling. If you're on your own you have to do them one at a time and hope the other one doesn't go ballistic whilst he waits in the crib and you have to hope that whilst he's pondering what level of ballistic he should reach, he doesn't smear the entire crib with all the stuff you need to wash off when you've finished with his brother. There's a lot of strategising involved in bathing two on your own), and despite the fact that William threw most of his hummus toast onto the floor for the happy, fatty dog, we calmed down, all of us and went on to have a good play session before the boys went to bed fuss-free. Another first since Monday.

As I mentioned, I've been worrying myself silly about how much they're eating this week and whether they're getting the right number of leafy vegetables and sufficient servings of protein. This all came about because a) I took the boys to the doctor on Tuesday for their one year check up and they weren't as heavy as I thought they were (although healthy - they're "still tall and skinny" said Dr. F.) and b) I've been reading the evil book What To Expect The First Year, which has a section in it called The Best Odds Toddler Diet. This section lists the number of toddler sized portions your child at 12 months should be getting of protein, calcium, green leafy & orange fruit/veg, other fruit/veg, whole grain, high fat foods and iron rich foods. I read this section and promptly panicked. Were they getting four portions of protein a day? Two servings of leafy vegetables? You've got to be kidding me, they won't even look at broccoli and you can forget about carrots! It got to the point where yesterday I started an excel spreadsheet to track how many portions of what they were eating a day. And then, thank heavens, I snapped out of it and realised that I would be in an insane asylum by Saturday if I tried to track everything they were eating and started measuring out portions of this and that. And I also realised that I'm pretty good at getting them to eat a good number of fruits and vegetables and that with the number of rice cakes they eat, there's no way I need to worry about the six to seven portions of whole grain. So I calmed down a bit and decided to just make sure they were eating healthily. Which leads me to baking bread.

Mark's out tonight at a dinner, so once I got the guys in bed, I came downstairs and destressed by baking bread. I've never baked bread before, but I found a recipe in the back of the evil book What To Expect The First Year, for fruited cheese bread that sounds quite good and offers lots of servings of lots of things. I've just taken my loaves out of the oven and they smell delicious. I have to admit that although I don't really like this evil book because I think it makes parents paranoid (as it does with pregnant women in What To Expect When You're Expecting), there are some good child friendly recipes at the back and I thoroughly enjoyed baking this bread.

I'm just hoping it tastes good now. Or at least that it tastes good to Owen and William. If I can offer them something I baked out of love for them, maybe they'll taste the love and feel better. Hmmm, warm bread. Okay, maybe I should just go taste it and see what its like. I'll keep you posted.