Sunday 27 February 2011

PGCE - by Theo

"Phew! Doing the Madrid run is always a work out," muttered one of the Easyjet hostesses, having just hauled another over-stuffed, overweight suitcase into the overhead locker. Having got cover for my last two classes I'd breezed through Barajas airport with my minimal luggage, in quiet contrast to the majority of the young, 20-something Spaniards with whom I was sharing the flight to Bristol. While they were jabbering away excitedly - including through the safety announcements, which earned them a few death-stares from the staff - I was focused more on likely questions I might get in my PGCE interview the next day, the reason for my whistle-stop visit back to Bristol while Kate had the "single parent experience" for 36 hours.

Friday found me nervously hanging around the lobby of the Bristol University School of Education in Berkeley Square. I'd spent the night at my sister's, just around the corner in Priory Road, but had slept terribly. My sister and her husband were, annoyingly, on holiday that weekend in Norway and seemed to have taken their alarm clock with them. Forced to rely on my ancient English mobile held together by several layers of sellotape, my paranoid dreams woke me up 6 times during the night, frantic that I'd overslept and had missed the interview. Obviously I didn't.

Usually they don't do interviews on a Friday, but given my circumstances they'd made an exception. As a result there was only one other interviewee (also a Berry) whereas usually there would be six at a time. I guess this was to our benefit as part of the interview was a general conversation, discussing questions between us. Easier to manage the conversation and stand out when there are only two of you! In fact the interviewer seemed to be quite interested in what we had to say, even deviating from the script to ask our opinions about contemporary (educational) events. We also had to collaborate on a feedback task, which was fine, and furthermore there was a written assessment (something I hadn't done for about 7 years!) and a brief one-to-one interview.

All in all I left feeling pretty positive, which was great as it meant I could actually relax and enjoy myself that evening, with wine, good company and delicious homemade food round at Sam and Stu's. No too late a night of course, for while I had to get up early to make my flight back, Stu was off to Uganda on an even earlier flight - 4am!

When applying for a PGCE you do so through a website called GTTR - the teaching equivalent of UCAS if you will. So when the following Tuesday I received a notification that something had changed on my application status I logged in slightly nervously to check. "Unconditional offer". Just two words; I clicked accept. All in all a bit of an anticlimax I thought, after all the effort! Not quite willing to trust in two words on an unassuming website I emailed the department on a pretext (sending them my A level certificates which my parents had been searching for) just to check before I announced it to the world at large. Or, rather, Facebook.

So, there we go. Next September I'll be a student again, and, in all likelihood, rather poor: if I had done the PGCE this year I would have a got a £6,000 bursary. Next year, those studying to be English teachers won't. Bum!

As I type it's a beautiful, warm, if slightly windy day here in Madrid, as it has been for the past week. The blossom is out, and the park (Los Molinos) down the road smells beautiful. Food is fairly cheap, my work is fun, people are friendly, I get to spend lots of time with Kate and Rosie, and, most of all, we'll miss the friends we've made here when we head off. Next year is going to be tough - I've seen my reading list! - but in the end, I reckon it will be more than worth it.

Saturday 26 February 2011

Safety Skills By Kate

You can't start 'em too young when it comes to encouraging your offspring to pick up skills that will help keep them safe. Although safety is an alien concept to most small children - until they're at least school age, the kamikaze tendency is quite pronounced - a few habits promoting self-preservation are always helpful, if only to lessen the rate of grey hairs sprouting on parents' heads.

Granted, Stop, Look, Listen; Don't Eat Random Wild Mushrooms and Stranger Danger are a little way off yet, but I felt it was at least worth teaching Rosie The Perfect Dismount, even at her tender age of thirteen months old.

I was inspired by a friend who said she's never bothered with stairgates because she taught her babies how to go down stairs backwards from the moment they could crawl.

Although our flat doesn't have any stairs, it does have a selection of beds and settees that Rosie has been known to frolic on at various times. So after a few unfortunate nose-diving incidents, Theo and I made a concerted effort to teach Rosie the useful backwards dismount technique.

As you can see from the clip below, I think she's got it.

Next, how to safely re-wire a plug.

Saturday 19 February 2011

Hothousing By Kate

You can't start too early when it comes to grooming your child to be a future genius. Playing Mozart to the developing foetus in utero is a good first step, apparently. Then you can dive into the Baby Einstein series and supposedly fire up their right-brain neurons with a carefully selected series of sounds and images. You can encourage your child to play with educational toys and do things like start reading to them from an early age, even if they can't quite understand why you keep preventing them from eating the book.

And if you're really serious, you can start their musical education virtually from the moment they can sit up unaided. Percussion comes naturally to most infants, but your obvious aim is to progress them onto the violin or some other classical instrument just as soon as humanly possible.

In her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Amy Chua details her approach to hothousing her daughters as musicians with harrowing tales of all-night enforced practice sessions while the reluctant child was virtually tied to the piano stool, crying in protest and and ready to tear up the musical score she was supposed to be learning. It's quite an eye-opener, with namby-pamby notions of the child's natural interests and personal choices having nothing to do with the often painful process towards virtuosity.

With this in mind, Theo and I have bought a glockenspiel for Rosie's first birthday and we continually set it in front of her and encourage her to do some practice. Simple scales and arpeggios to start with, but obviously two handed syncopated rhythms are firmly in our sights. Sometimes we even shut the door of the room while Rosie does her music practice to stop her getting distracted by unnecessary things like her Bunny Boing Boing or favourite floating duck.

As you can see below, our firm approach to Rosie's budding musical talent is already paying off. Next stop, the Paris Conservatoire.

Thursday 17 February 2011

Running Before She Can Walk By Kate

Garish plastic toys that bleep, parp, bark, twitter, sing songs, challenge you to card games and demand a cup of tea while lighting up like a demented fruit machine, are every parent's nightmare. There's nothing so guaranteed to set your teeth on edge and start a migraine than the mechanical voice in one of these toys piping up for the hundredth time that day and shrilly inviting anyone within earshot to play, before launching into some trite nursery rhyme with relentless mechanical cheer.

As it happens, Rosie is even more dubious about such toys than we are. She tends to regard their unnerving noises and flashing lights with deep suspicion and will give them a wide berth if set down anywhere near her with the power on.

So rather pleasingly for us terribly-middle-class-don't-you-know parents, she's far more inclined to enjoy simpler more "traditional" toys like stacking cups and cube nests or soft versions of skittles and hoopla.

In fact, our Christmas present to her wasn't a shop-bought toy at all. It was a collection of odds and ends we found around the house, including jar lids, plastic tubs, tins, pegs and spoons. She plays with them all the time and endlessly discovers new ways of clashing them together, putting them inside each other or rolling and spinning them on the floor. This type of idea has a fancy name: it is called heuristic play and is a cracking scheme if you're a bit of a cheapskate.

The latest classic toy to get the Rosie seal of approval is the push-along truck she got for her birthday. Now she's getting more confident at standing up, the ability to not only walk but jog up and down our corridor is irresistible and she's very proud of herself indeed. So much so, she keeps stopping and giving herself a round of applause, then looking expectantly at us in the hope we'll follow suit. Which we dutifully do, of course.

Here she is in action.

Sunday 13 February 2011

The curse of maternal insomnia By Kate

You're used to your baby waking you up at various times in the night. It's not exactly fun, but it's one of those aspects of parenthood that most people have to live with at some point or another. The real bummer is when your baby is sleeping like a small log and you're wide awake, wishing someone could rock you back to sleep, offer you a pacifier or stroke your head until you manage to get settled again.

Yep, maternal insomnia sucks. It's definitely worse than being kept awake by a fractious child. It's also surprisingly common, especially when you consider how exhausted and sleep-deprived many mothers of small children are.

Ironically, the insomnia usually hits hardest when the baby is sleeping better. You wake up for no particular reason, then something inside you tells you there's no point in sliding back into unconsciousness because you're bound to be woken by your offspring in a minute. Then another minute passes. Then an hour. Then another hour. And so it goes on.

Inevitably, just as you are on the point of dropping off again, that's the cue for the baby to start wailing. It's as if they know.

Well, I've had enough of it. The maternal insomnia, that is. So I'm doing something about it.

I tried a short course of hypnotherapy and although that helped a bit, it didn't solve the problem.

So now I'm following a self-help book which uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to get the insomnia put to bed. I'm in Week Four and after keeping a sleep diary; working on correcting my thinking about sleeplessness; and practicing relaxation techniques, I'm now at the tough part.

For this bit, you have to decide on a daily getting up time, work out what your average amount of sleep was over the last ten days, then go to bed no earlier than that number of hours prior to the morning alarm call. Does that make sense? In my case, I've been getting just over five and three-quarters of an hour of sleep per night, so subtracting that from 07.15, you get 01.30.

Oh, and if you wake in the night, or can't get to sleep when you first lie down, you have to get up again after fifteen minutes of lying awake in bed. You can only go back to bed when you are feeling genuinely sleepy again.

For someone who's fallen asleep no later than 22.00 for the best part of a year, that's a bit scary. But it kind of makes sense. Instead of lying unprofitably doing nothing except feeling narked about being awake, I might as well do something vaguely productive. Like write a blog, for example.

One point to make is I have to make allowances for Rosie. On average, she's awake for just over an hour a night. She also tends to wake earlier than my preferred getting up time - often between 06.00 and 06.30. So I've factored both those things into my calculations, leaving me with a going-to-bed time of 23.15.

Apparently, if after a week you score a 90 per cent snooze rate for your designated kip window (not the official term), you can then lengthen the in bed time by 15 mins and see how you do for another week. Etc.

The aim is to get you to "sleep through". Well, I'm all for that. I'm just aware that the chances of nighttime derailment by Rosie are very high, given that she's never "slept through" in her life thus far.

But if I can at least maximise my sleep around Rosie's nocturnal habits, that at least would be progress for me. As for Rosie's sleep, I'm hardening my resolve to do something radical to get her "sleeping through" the night as well. Just not yet.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

The Politics of Parenting By Kate

When it comes to parenting, I regard myself as a pick'n'mix progressive. I like the label mainly because it alliterates, but also because it does sum up my approach in a pithy sort of way.

Books, as I mentioned in my previous post, are well worth consulting when planning one's parenting campaign. But as soon as you start choosing your titles and taking their advice to heart, you are in effect making a political decision.

Parenting methodologies are as polarised as any political situation you care to mention. And you nail your colours to the mast even in pregnancy.

Sheila Kitzinger and Janet Balaskas advocate a move away from over-medicalised labouring and towards drug and intervention-free births carried out in any position other than the classic lying prone. Possibly a headstand isn't deemed suitable either.

Once the baby is born, you have the routiners in one corner: Gina Ford and Tracey Hogg et al. Then you have the pro-co-sleeping/baby-wearing/breastfeeding/let the baby decide etc. gang in the other (Dr William Sears, Deborah Wisdom, Kate Evans etc.).

For sleep problems, there are the control crying advocates (Marc Weissbluth, Richard Ferber) and opposite them, Elizabeth Pantley, who would probably rather eat her own arm than leave a baby to cry.

Once the child reaches toddlerdom and above, you have the naughty step/reward chart type method espoused by Supernanny (Jo Frost); or you have the "Don't order your kids about, consider their feelings" approaches favoured by Lawrence J Cohen, Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlich; there's the no punishments or praise philosophy as outlined by Alfie Kohn; or Dr Christopher Green's attention/distraction/time-out techniques.

It's all rather confusing and has the potential to make the already bewildered and out-of-their-depth new parent flounder even further. Not to mention the extra guilt of failing to do what the books suggest to add to the existing load of guilt carried by virtually any mother you care to talk to.

My advice on making a sensible selection? Read the reviews online (or wherever), find out what other people thought of the books and then decide which is likely to suit your own personal style best. Read with an open mind, use the bits you think will do the job and disregard the rest.

For what it's worth, here are the books I've liked best so far:

Janet Balaskas:
New Active Birth
-OK, I had a C-section, but the yoga exercises were really worth doing and I felt very positive as my due date approached thanks to her book.
Naomi Stadlen: What Mothers Do (Especially When It Looks Like Nothing)
-THE essential book for preparing yourself emotionally for motherhood (and indeed fatherhood. Theo thinks it should be given out to all expectant couples by the NHS.)
Robin Barker: Baby Love
-Non-prescriptive, down-to-earth and often wryly humorous guide to a baby's first year.
Elizabeth Pantley: The No Cry Sleep Solution
-Lots of good ideas on helping improve baby sleep difficulties.
Dr Christopher Green: Toddler Taming
-Funny and reassuring advice on dealing with the pecadilloes of the 1-4 age-group.
Lawrence J Cohen: Playful Parenting
-Fun ways to connect emotionally with your offspring and light-heartedly smooth the rough-edges of your relationship.
Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlich: How To Talk So Your Kids Will Listen
-Fostering heartfelt and effective communication with your sometimes reluctant progeny.

It's still early days - after all, Rosie's only just turned one - but pick'n'mix progressive is the way I want to go.