Baby Cafe isn’t just a latte party

MUCH has been written in recent weeks about the fate of Northampton’s Baby Cafe. Some of the reaction to the protest at cuts to the group’s funding has been bewilderingly unpleasant and misinformed.

I never used the baby cafe myself, despite breastfeeding all my children. By the time the group formed I think I’d already had at least two children. Thankfully I had a brilliant no-nonsense midwife and managed to master the technique and also get through the draining, often miserable and lonely first year as a mother.

Despite what some observers seem to think, the Baby Cafe isn’t some middle-class meeting place for wealthy stay-at-home mums to knock back premium lattes courtesy of the NHS.

It’s a support group, a haven, a place for often bewildered and embarrassed new mums to go and get good, honest advice from fellow mums, who have been there, seen it, done it and know just how demoralised and isolated you can get in the early months of parenthood.

It’s not even open as frequently as it should be, due to funding. And the protesters certainly aren’t sitting on their post-natal backsides waiting for taxpayer handouts – they already have several fundraising efforts on the go to try to keep it going.

While there seem to be some who think that all women who breastfeed think nothing of flopping out a boob for all and sundry to see while they’re eating their lunch, the truth is that most of us don’t. Discretion comes with practice and honest advice.

This isn’t about politics. Babies need feeding, and no one should judge anyone for the method they choose to do it, be it breast or bottle. The cafe probably does more to ward off post-natal depression and loneliness than anyone realises. That’s the real value of this service to the NHS, the babies, and all those taxpayers who think, wrongly, they are somehow being ripped off.

 

Another of our weekly chats: Watch “His and Hers: Love and pipes” vlog on YouTube

Our son communicates in drawings

SOMETIMES being a parent can be baffling. Our four are constantly throwing us curved balls.

The older two talk in riddles, and when they do deign to speak to us they seem to miss off the beginning and end of every sentence.

Three-year-old Bonnie has decided that every mealtime is mucking-about time. She knows perfectly well how to sit at a table and use a knife and fork. But lately she’s given up all table manners, eats with her fingers, keeps her mouth open when chewing and gets up and down from the table several times. And she shouts “tomato sauce” at everyone regardless of what’s on her plate.

Little Bill has taken to drawing everything and writing notes. Not unusual for an eight year old, you might think, but as well as lovely messages like ‘I love you Mum’ left on my side table, or portraits of everyone stuck to bedroom doors, if he’s told off or is in a grumpy mood, he writes lists of ‘things he should be happy about’ or draws pictures of himself looking sad. Or captions describing himself ‘mean’.

It’s heartbreaking, and when we ask him about it, he brushes it off as just something he likes to do.

We’ve worried that he’s feeling he’s not getting enough time with us, what with the constant demands of four offspring with differing demands, especially his little sister. As he usually seems pretty content and good at getting himself up and dressed and ready for anything, maybe we’ve not given him as much attention. Something we’re now trying to remedy.

Still, he’s better than the rest of us at art already.

Stubbornly getting into hot water

THERE are varying levels of cleanliness in our house, and without wishing to gender-stereotype, the boys can get rather smelly at times.

However, there’s nothing like sudden unavailability of hot water to make people realise just how whiffy they’ve become – and how reliant we’ve become on the shower.

When our hot water pipes froze over the weekend I wondered whether we’d ever be accepted into polite society again.

One of our sons has worked out that short daily showers before school keep the spots under some control, while another will only shower after sport, and there hasn’t been much of that recently due to the weather. Son three would happily go a week without a wash if he were allowed to.

Daughter will take ages over any type of washing, but is also happy to accept a wet-wipe over the face and hands if time is of the essence. Thankfully, this is one of the few areas of life she’s not too fussy about.

We didn’t realise the hot water had gone until quite late in the day on Saturday because, well, it was the first Saturday in ages we hadn’t had to be anywhere or do anything.

So were all slobbing about in our pajamas until lunchtime, and our basement kitchen taps had been working perfectly.

Our hot water pipes froze during last winter’s snow, but had thawed out after I’d scrambled about on my hands and knees for a few hours under sinks, armed with hot water bottles and a hairdryer.

Not this time. Not so much as a drip.

Now any normal person might have just called it quits and accepted that the pipes were going to stay frozen for at least 24 hours. A normal person may have just boiled a couple of kettles for a wash. A normal person might have continued to slob out for the day watching the Saints and England rugby matches on TV.

But no, I had to try to beat the pipes. We needed to have showers.

I drove to Argos and spent £40 and probably a lot more electricity on two fan heaters, and by the time the kids had gone to bed – filthy – the house was like a sauna and the pipes were still frozen.

Bloke knows there’s often little point trying to deter me from a determined quest. But he gave me a look. It said: “The kids are in bed. No one is going to have a shower tonight. The pipes will freeze again overnight. Is it time to give up?”

We turned off the heaters, made some hot water bottles and went to bed. I lay awake trying to think up a Plan B. We’d get up early, go to the Mounts swimming baths and have a shower. Like people did when their loos were still outside and baths were copper and placed in front of open fires.

The next morning, early, I woke up to the sound of running water. Hot water. Running. No need for Plan B after all.

By lunchtime everyone was clean and we were all slobbing out watching the rugby. Sometimes I think I worry too much.

 

Are party dresses conditioning girls into impractical clothes for women?

BONNIE has just got to the age when birthday parties are the most exciting thing to EVER happen to a kid, what with all those ball-pits, pass-the-parcels, party dresses and cakes.

Up until the age of three, parties can be a little baffling, but when they reach the grand-old-age of four – as Bonnie will in a week – the socialite is born.

She’s been to two parties in the past two weeks for her best friends Izzy and Alice, which have both led to a dilemma I don’t remember witnessing with the boys: what to wear.

The boys just accepted whatever shirt and trouser or jumper and jean combination I wrestled them into; for Bonnie it seems far more important than that.

She’s been coming home from nursery and putting her summery party dress on just to have tea – and objecting most loudly when sent back up to change.

She seems genuinely conflicted about whether a pretty party frock or Princess dress-up is de-rigueur for a party at someone’s house, or at Wacky Warehouse, or Berzerk.

While I’m trying to coax her into a t-shirt and jeans so she can be more comfortable, she’s wriggling into some multi-layered Rapunzel floor-length ballgown.

I just don’t know where her love of dresses has come from (as you can tell, it ‘ain’t from me). So we’re already compromising: I let her wear her fancy dresses over a pair of leggings and a t-shirt, and wellies if the weather is bad.

At Berzerk last weekend, I bumped into a former colleague and Dad-of-Girls on similar party-marshaling duty. I voiced my concerns about letting her run about the climbing frames and slides in an ankle-length dress, and he laughed. “You’re not used to dealing with girls yet, are you?”

Then he pointed out that just about every girl in the place was dressed in flouncy frocks, with sequined cardies and pretty clasps in their hair. And they were all climbing as high as possible, running as fast as they could, and not caring a jot about having to hitch up their hems to do so.

I guess this is the start of a learned tolerance for impractical clothing that every girl takes into womanhood . . .

Still talking – latest Vlog from our Chron columns

Getting kids to wear coats is snow joke

AT the time of writing (February 6), there’s still about four inches of snow outside but we’re assuming school will be open this week.

Nevertheless it may be the ice rather than snow that throws the proverbial cat amongst the (frozen) pigeons. It’s meant to be bitterly cold this week and parents should be prepared.

It seems ridiculous to say but you do see children turning up at school without warm clothing. I don’t care if your children ‘don’t like wearing coats.’  You’re not their friend; you’re their adult, so insist they wear one. And if they refuse, make them walk the last couple of streets to school instead of getting a lift from door to door.

My elder two seem to think that coats are an optional extra when the temperature hovering around the zero mark, but they get dragged back to stick a coat on over their school uniform. No son, your blazer just won’t cut it. I don’t care what other kids do; you’ll secretly thank me for that coat. And yes, I do tell them that they “won’t feel the benefit” if they wear coats indoors.

The younger two are still, thankfully, at an age where they like a warm coat, hat, scarf and gloves, even if we do get through several every winter (only to find them cluttering up the house come the summer). I think I’ve bought at least four hats for Bonnie since November and even putting gloves on the old-fashioned string-through-the-coat-sleeves doesn’t seem to preserve them for long.

Bonnie and her snowman as brothers fight behind

But Bonnie recently announced that the navy blue snowsuit she’d been wearing for a couple of winters was a, far too tight and b, FOR BOYS. (Billy’s hand-me-down)

I did look around the shops for several weeks for an age-four snowsuit – not too puffy – but couldn’t find one. You may get lucky on Freecycle for coats, or by checking the charity shops. Kids can grow out of coats in a season and it can be an expensive business.

Then last week I found the perfect all-in-one at Blacks up at Riverside. It was pink, waterproof, not too bulky, and £20.

When the snow came at the weekend, our lot all layered up in warm coats and hats – even the boys, who know from experience the pain of a snowball hitting a cold ear or a being shoved down the neck.

While Bonnie was happy to join in hurling snowballs with her brothers, she soon got bored and devoted herself to making a tiny snowman, or lying on the ground making snow-angels. Meanwhile the boys’ snowball fight descended into all-out warfare, including fortified walls both at the Racecourse and in our tiny back garden, where they trampled my plants and lawn underfoot.

I’d like to tell you that Bloke and I observed maturely from a distance, but it would be a lie. Not only did we race each other inelegantly down hills on toboggans too small for our grown-up bums, but Bloke was at the heart of Sunday’s long-running snowball skirmish. And much to the disgust of our elder boys, we sneaked out to the Racecourse during Saturday’s late-night snowstorm to join other grown-ups building snowmen and running around like kids. OK, so we might not be the après-ski at Val d’Isere types, but at least we can still enjoy a bit of snow closer to home.

Spymonkey’s Oedipussy review, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, February 2012

YOU can hardly move in Northampton at the moment without spotting a poster for the intriguingly-titled Oedipussy, a comedy about, of all things, an incestuous Greek tragedy.

It’s performed by Spymonkey, an accomplished physical theatre group with faces you vaguely recognise but then aren’t sure if you’re mixing them up with others: Petra Massey of Miranda and Hyperdrive fame reminded me of Tracey Ullman circa her Three of a Kind years, while Toby Park has something of the bewildered Mark Heap about him, Stephan Kreiss is a funnier, German version of Stephen Frost from Whose Line is it Anyway while the hilarious Aitor Basauri is a one-off – a deadpan clown whose physicality and expression carried the whole show. So, is it worth the hype? We’d been promised laughs, our audience trooped in to the smell of fresh paint – last minute set change perhaps? And then the four-strong cast told how their last show had received a poor review. This one was going to make up for it.

Switch then to the story of Oedipus – you should swot-up on Wikipedia if your Greek mythology isn’t up to scratch – where a baby is dispatched to die in the hills to avoid the Oracle’s prediction of son-kills-dad-marries-mum coming true.

Mixing a static set with multiple character and costume changes, the troop tell the ancient tale with tongues firmly in cheeks. The performers literally throw themselves into it, with plenty of laughs coming from the fact these are not fresh young teenagers straight out of theatre school. They’ve had to drag themselves to the gym to get themselves in shape and battle the aging process all in the name of slapstick. I fully believed the lines about being on painkillers to make it through the show night after night. If it had been performed by younger actors, it wouldn’t have been as funny.

There were weaker sections. I liked some of the actor’s soliloquies, particularly Toby Park’s heartfelt description of his high-achieving family, but they sometimes unnecessarily interrupted the frantic flow of the narrative. The first half took a good half hour to fully engage the bemused audience, but once the story was in full flow the pace and energy took most of the observers along for the ride.

I was with a group of 19-22 year old students who just didn’t get a lot of the references – PlayAway, Bond films, Wilson, Keppel & Betty’s sand dance and Morrison shelters flew over their heads. But they did laugh at the strange grown-ups running around in nappies. By contrast, a large percentage of the audience were of pensionable age and they were falling about in the aisles.

There is a flash of full-fronted nudity (hence the warnings on the posters and the advice that it’s not for under-14s) but I’m not sure it serves its purpose for a single, albeit funny, joke.

There’s clever and comic use of props and effects – low-fi gory cascading blood, a 70s sci-fi hint to the costumes, Aitor’s show-stealing lepers, silly and sad songs and hilarious Oracle eyes that just reminded me of Cookie Monster from the Muppets.

Oedipussy is a dazzling show, performed by highly-competent actors who have fully honed their craft. Having reviewed dozens of shows over the years, I was relieved that nothing irritated or bored me about it. I laughed solidly throughout, but could also see others around me just not getting the joke.

It’s undoubtedly bold and bizarre, as is Spymonkey’s way, and you can imagine it going down a storm at Edinburgh’s Fringe. But it’s starting its run in Northampton’s traditional Victorian Royal Theatre, and once you get your head around that, you can sit back and enjoy another piece of innovative theatre Made in Northampton.

Oedipussy runs in Northampton until February 18.

Book your tickets now, go on, via www.royalandderngate.co.uk or on 01604 624811.

His & Hers: Zombies and the Fishmarket

Reblogged from The Steve Scoles Experience:

HILARY and I discuss this week’s columns we have written in the Northampton Chronicle & Echo. Here are my columns and these are hers. His & Hers: Zombies and the Fishmarket, posted with vodpod

Kids’ TV is dead. Long live kids’ TV

YOU can usually tell someone’s age by asking them what their favourite children’s TV programme was when they were little.

Rentaghost

The surreal delights of the Clangers, Mr Benn, Rainbow, Rentaghost and The Wombles would label you as a child of the 70s, while Dangermouse, Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would shift you into the 80s.

If Thunderbirds, the Sooty show and Andy Pandy in black and white trigger misty eyed reminiscences, it’s safe to say you are older than me.

Our own children, now ranging from ages 14 to 3, were blessed – and some would say cursed – by the invention of multi-channel TV in the 1990s.

Our eldest two boys were the original Cbeebies generation; the first to enjoy Teletubbies when it was causing a national kerfuffle, and Bob the Builder when he was still made of clay and flirting with Wendy (Sunflower Valley and CGI ruined it).

And while Billy had Balamory and Bonnie enjoyed the strange delights of In the Night Garden and Waybuloo, it seems some fear decent programming for children may become a thing of the past.

Russell T Davies, the man credited for rescuing Dr Who from TV purgatory and restoring it to prime-time family viewing, is warning that children’s programmes are on life-support.

In an interview with the Observer, Davies said: “I am passionate about children’s television, but it is, as ever, an endangered species, under threat.

“The most shocking thing I have seen is that, apparently unnoticed, five years ago ITV dropped children’s programmes. There is now the complete absence of children’s programmes made by ITV on CITV.”

When we were growing up there was always a snobbery about ITV, which I’m not sure has diminished much in 40 years.

While I always did prefer Magpie over the goody-two-shoes Blue Peter, and liked Press Gang more than Grange Hill, I can’t say I’d automatically associate ITV with great children’s shows.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that the undoubtedly talented Mr Davies is working on another children’s TV show for the BBC – Aliens Vs Wizards – about a teenage wizard and his scientist friend trying to stop aliens who intend to destroy the earth. And while his ability to spin a good script is undeniable, he did also write for Chucklevision.

Certainly as budgets get hit, children’s TV isn’t going to get as much dosh thrown at it as perhaps it deserves. It’s probably cheaper to import some overdubbed cartoons, or Disney-style tosh about overconfident teens than it is to make a decent home-grown programme.  Deadly 60, the hugely popular and intentionally hilarious wildlife show, must cost a fortune, as its bonkers presenter Steve Backshall travels the world looking for creatures that can kill you.

But I agree with RTD about TV networks not seeing the bigger picture with children’s productions, and that by categorising a show as ‘just for kids’ is failing to recognise both the writing talent and the potential cash-cow. After all, he made a lot of money for the Beeb from Dr Who and its Sarah Jane spin-offs.

Now I’d like to see Horrible Histories, the very best thing on TV, moved to prime-time BBC at, ooh, 7pm every night? Even its repeats would be far more intelligent and entertaining than what is currently offered in that slot.

Until the BBC complies with my demands, you can go to the CBBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/cbbc/episode/b011qlwb/Horrible_Histories_Series_3_Episode_2/ and catch up with Series 3 of Horrible Histories. You don’t need to have the kids around. Put your headphones in and enjoy. It’s more educational and humorous than any half hour you’d spend on Facebook.