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Why I love my toddler

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It’s not a secret and I have written about it before, I didn’t have an easy start with my baby. She was refluxy, I had hypothyroidism, not a great combination. I am doing this volunteer course for supporting mothers with difficulties at the moment and I’ve come to realise that I should have had some reassurance back then. I found it so hard, coping with my own emotions and minding an ever crying baby. But this is in the past and I suppose it makes me appreciate even more having a beautifully balanced toddler now.

I’m gonna, randomly and as it comes to mind, make a list of how my toddler melts my heart on a daily basis:

-she uses “Peas(please)” and “Tenk(thank) you” all the time. Especially when she’s after a round of “Yeea, yeea,oooh” on my computer but also when she’s offered a drink, her favourite food or help with dressing up.

-she’s ever so determined to do things herself. Be it either a puzzle, eating her cereal in the morning, putting her jammies on or getting into her car seat, she wants to be able to do it without help.

-she’s so committed to finish what she starts, which is amazing for a toddler. And a beautiful quality which will help her to make way in life!

– she loves tenderly and unconditionally. Her daddy, myself and ALL her friends and relatives. It’s common practice for her to just sit down with me and go through the whole list, asking how everybody is doing. Just out of pure care.

– she’s becoming a chatterbox! She would try now and string everything into sentences.  It doesn’t always come out as a full sentence but it’s wonderful to see her try! Yesterday she was out with daddy and came back to tell me: “Mummy, boys wash daddy’s car! Emma shops, got oranges.”

– she frightens easily and needs reassurance. She is scared of hoovers, bin trucks, cats and the dark. There is an episode in Peppa Pig when Daddy Pig goes in the basement for a few seconds and the screen goes all black. For her, that’s the equivalent of a horror movie and she would run into the kitchen to find me and get a cuddle.

– she’s creative, as creative as a two year old can be! She loves painting, singing, dancing and dressing up!

– she knows how to be happy! She takes pleasure in what we consider small and ordinary things: spending time with both of us, having a chocolate ice-cream, playing with her kitchen, doing a pipi on her potty and getting praise for it!

– she takes pleasure in being friends and sharing her toys and misses her friends’ company when they’re sick or when she hasn’t seen them for a while.

– she forms thoughts that leave us speechless sometimes. The other week she asked about her friends and their baby sisters and then she turned to us and, as a natural flow in the big sister-baby sister conversation, asked us where her baby was!

– she’s a girlie girl and she would sit sometimes and let me put bows in her hair and then go and admire herself in the mirror.

– she’s my gift from above and I am still in reverent awe that she was given to ME to raise into a responsible adult! Wow!

Sunday treat, chocolate ice-cream

Check you out, Peppa Pig!

Ever so committed to finish what she has started

Home is where your heart is…

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Today we decided, spur of the moment, to drive back to our old church in Carrickfergus. I have been missing everybody there and hubby knows it so he actually suggested it.
That it was good to be back is an understatement. Our old church is a small but loving community and it welcomed us back in its midst immediately and unconditionally. It was wonderful to hear the older ladies saying sweet, heartfelt things like: “Welcome home!” and “You’ve been dearly missed!” Mind you, my own grannies died when I was young so these ladies have been the closest thing to the real thing for me. I have been to women’s weekends with them and I have grown to respect and appreciate their sharp sense of humour, honesty, love for God and genuineness.
How did it feel? Well, like home, like we belong there, like we never left. I haven’t experienced this sense of grace very often in my life. Not even when we visit our own families. It’s much more complicated than this actually because everybody seems to have moved on with their life and have little or no interest in making room for us in their hearts. Other things have taken over meanwhile…
So, let me conclude my musings from the other night on waiting by saying this: waiting and going back are not always bad things…Actually, it can be a very uplifting thing when you know that you’re going back to being wanted and loved. Because it’s not actually going backwards, it’s moving forward with your life knowing that your faith in the world has been restored!

Loving friends!

 

Freedom Writers

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I feel like I’ve been shooting my blog in the foot lately because I couldn’t post anything decent and coherent in the last week. But my mind has been occupied by more pressing issues since last Sunday and it’s only started coming back to a more normal state in the last day or so.

Our family has been on a roller coaster of emotions, motions and locomotions since August and things haven’t settled yet. It looks like we can’t move forward yet although, as I have said in a previous post, this would have been hubby’s preferred option. So we’re staying in Northern Ireland for a while(sigh of relief from my side!). But waiting has its bad connotations, hasn’t it? It is more often than not associated with missing out on something bigger and better. A hindrance rather than a necessary step in the natural order of things towards a pre-established goal.

Waiting room symptoms? Impatience, inability or unwillingness to enjoy the present moment. Irritability at one’s misfortune. Fatalism and indecision. Here’s where we’ve both been this week.

Tonight we watched “Freedom Writers” together. Second time watching it but we were as in awe of it now as we were the first time. As I said after watching “The Vow” a few weeks ago, the human soul has the ability to distinguish Hollywood polish from substance and boy, you get loads of it in these two movies!!

Then, boom, came my moment: what if my waiting is not just for waiting and moaning? This time was given to us for a reason and because I can’t see it yet the next best thing is to make it up!! So I will have to assume this waiting time is for living and enjoying! I was given another year in a great place, with people who are kind, genuine and full of humour! Well, I can think of a few places on this earth I’d rather not be and Northern Ireland is definitely not one of them! Here is to another great year here!

Making ourselves comfortable here for another wee while.

Happy Mother’s Day, mama!

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I miss being in Romania for special days like the 8th of March, Mother’s Day.
I have been singing this song to my mum every single year on Mother’s Day since I was 5 and she’s still touched when I do.
The song says: Mummy, I have brought you my love because I couldn’t think of anything better to bring. And it expresses so well what I feel…
I miss just being there with my mum and doing normal things like having a coffee in her tiny, untidy but full of her presence kitchen. Love talking to her about everything and nothing in particular. Love waking up to the smell of fresh bread. Or staying up till late to have fresh from the oven cozonac(traditional Romanian cake) and sarmale(stuffed vine leaves).
Miss the carelessness of my childhood. Thank you, for making it as special as you could,mama!

The worst boy in the world

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Last week was a week of excitement and exhilarating feelings. A break from reality we all need sometimes. But it wasn’t a break completely sheltered from reality. Every morning the hotels we stayed in dully provided us with the daily newspaper, either the Irish News or the Irish Times. Of course, when you travel with a toddler you can’t really have a proper read, you just scan the titles. Just to keep yourself up to date with what is going on around you and in the world.

Well, on Wednesday morning this title caught my eye, a story of horrendous neglect and abuse in a family with five children, aged between two and nine. I managed to read it through actually as it was succinct and cold, a mere rendering of appalling facts. Children left hungry, improperly dressed and NEVER toilet trained, not even one of them…It took my mind a while to get around the physical facts in order to begin to assess the psychological damage those things alone would have inflicted on those children. Of course, it didn’t stop there, there was also sexual abuse and everything else you can imagine going on…

But what shocked me to the core was the statement the eldest boy made when taken into care: “I am the worst boy in the world.” It made my mother heart weep and moan at the indescribable loss this boy had suffered; not only the physical beatings, the lack of food, the fear he must have lived with forever but above all, the deprivation of dignity, of self-worth and value at the hands of those who were supposed to offer them to him and more freely!

The parents unsurprisingly went to jail on various accounts. The mother got 18 months only because she had had a history of abuse and crass neglect herself.

As a mum who believes I am here to provide the best upbringing possible for my little girl, I would tend to say:” I would have never let this happen to my children. I would have got up and fled. I would have started over on my own.” OR WOULD I? Would I have the courage to turn my back to life as I knew it, have the clear head to see reality for what it is and take the decisive step? Would I step into the daunting, blank unknown??

I am sorry for those kids and for their mum who didn’t know and couldn’t do better by them. I am sorry they were robbed of everything they were in God’s plan and purpose in such a horrific manner. I’m no fool and it’s been a while I stopped believing in fairy tales and happy endings. All I can hope for them is that they will be given a chance, a real chance, wherever they are, to pick up the pieces and start rebuilding their lives.Walk down the path of recovery and win all the battles that lie ahead…

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