FUD: Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt

End of year summary December 31, 2006

The year has certainly flown by. Ethan will be four years old next month. Amy was 18 months old yesterday. Mike and I have both somehow turned thirty. If you add all our ages together we’re all set to retire and move to Florida.

I considered breaking this down to a month-by-month review of the year but so much goes on that everything is a huge blur of activity, birthdays, random screaming children, destruction of nice things (which is why we can’t have ‘em) and a newfound appreciation for rarely-found peace and quiet.

So this is pretty much what has happened this year:

Amy grew. She is starting to talk a lot more now, still in single-word bursts, but she is a wee bundle of energy and never stops moving or babbling or hugging us. She reacts to new things with an enthusiastic “Wow!” and never fails to give her opinion on a topic, whether with a yes, no, or raspberry.

Ethan grew. He passed the magic one-metre mark back near the start of the year and every now and then I get a brief insight into how he will look as an older kid, a teenager, a young man. He has a thirst for learning: writing, spelling, numbers, experimenting, socialising with others. He has gained an obsession with superheroes and a memory like an elephant. He asks us the hard questions now and Mike and I have to go into a huddle to work out just how to answer him. Or I have to resort to the old standard, “Ask your father.”
I grew. I’ve made a decision on how I plan to spend the next, oh, thirty-odd years in terms of a vocation, and since I’ve made that same decision with a variety of outcomes in the past, this is my last chance at completing my education. My last academic gasp. Teaching will hopefully be the fun, challenging and rewarding (and all those other cliches) career I am looking for.

The future is hazy. Travel? Settle down? Stick with the known and familiar or bugger off again and find more adventures? We’ll see. For now, 2007 is pretty much mapped out for us. It should be a great year.

Bad mother story? Let me top it! December 1, 2006

Yeah, so the other day I posted a couple of horrific parenting tales involving my children and physical injury. Then I thought, ha, no one can do anything worse!

Then I let my kid knock another kid out cold. Beat that, suckahs!

We went to a thing where there was morning tea, neighbours, other kids, including Ethan’s friend Hannah. The two of them along with half a dozen other kids were running riot, and I’d already told Ethan off twice for running around a bunch of elderly ladies — he’d stop for a bit, then when I looked away he’d take off running again. I gave up since no one else seemed too concerned.

Then I was chatting to someone else and we all jumped at a tremendous BANG! behind us. Ethan and Hannah had collided head-on. I and Hannah’s mother rushed to the scene, where our respective offspring were laid out on the wooden floor, both screaming. I gathered Ethan up and checked for blood — none — and realised that Hannah’s screaming had stopped. Her mother picked her up and she was limp and silent, obviously unconscious. They didn’t stop to talk about it but rushed out the door to the medical clinic.

Fortunately it turned out they only had a 24-hour concussion watch — waking Hannah every half-hour to make sure she could be roused. But yes. I can see now my genetic predisposition to clumsiness has not, sadly, skipped a generation.