Toothbrushes and other objects

My daughter went to sleep just now in the pushchair, clutching a tub of rice pudding and a teaspoon. Two nights ago, she fell asleep in our bed with a bottle of calpol in one hand, and a plastic medicine spoon in the other, and now she won’t go anywhere without her toothbrush, and if she can get away with it, her sister’s too. Why this need to have something to hold in her hands? Paediatricians and psychologists talk about a child’s need for a “transitional object” – usually something soft and cuddly, like a bear or blanket, from which the child receives comfort and companionship as they are learning to become more independent from their parents. It’s an almost exclusively Western phenomenon, a fact attributed to our habit of pushing our children towards independence early, keeping them at arm’s length in cots and pushchairs, and having them sleep in separate rooms from a very early age. In other cultures, where children are carried in slings, and sleep in a shared bed with their parents and siblings, such objects are not common.

All this makes sense, and I remember quite clearly when my older daughter started to become very much attached to her favourite bunny, the now much-loved and rather scruffy looking “Floppy”: it was when she was 3 and a half, and I moved her into her own bed because I was pregnant again and fed up of being kicked by a long-legged child turning through 90 degrees every night. She occasionally favours another soft toy, of which she has many, but basically Floppy is her constant companion; he/she comes in the car with us, sits on the sofa to watch TV with us, and even sits at the kitchen table sometimes to eat a pretend supper with us.

Her younger sister, now 21 months old, will occasionally give a soft toy a perfunctory kiss or cuddle, but she’s not really interested in them. Useful things, however, like medicine spoons, toothbrushes or pots of rice pudding, she can become utterly fixated on, to the point where removing them will cause a major tantrum. Is this behaviour coming from the same root as the need for a transitional object? Is she doing this now because she is becoming more independent anyway? She is still firmly attached to me in many ways (we are still co-sleeping and she is still breastfeeding), but she is becoming more bold in her exploration of the world, and more aware of how things affect her. She has become terrified of dogs, and when a loud aeroplane roars overhead she will cling to me, saying she is scared. Perhaps these inanimate objects allow her to feel a small amount of control over the world in which she is finding her place. Maybe I’d better stock up on a couple of spare toothbrushes in case she loses this one.

Library Lion

Appropriately enough, we borrowed this book from the library recently, and liked it so much that we bought our own copy.

Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen with illustrations by Kevin Hawkes, is a simple tale about a lion who goes into a library. I love the way that sort of thing can happen in a book, and no one wastes time asking where the lion came from, or why he's gone into a library. He's just there. He sniffs the card index; he rubs his head against the new book collection; he goes to sleep on the bean-bags in the story corner.

No one knows what to do because there are no rules about lions in the library. There is a theme running through the book about rules, and whether one should break them or not. As it happens, the lion hasn't broken any rules, so there is no reason to ask him to leave. And so he stays. He stays for the whole of story time, but when it's over, he becomes upset and roars in frustration. A new rule is created: "No roaring in the library." But the librarian, the charmingly named Miss Merriweather, states that a quiet lion would be welcome to come back the next day.

The lion becomes quite a fixture, and Miss Merriweather comes to rely on his help, though her assistant Mr McBee is very resentful. Eventually, of course, there is a crisis, and the lion is forced to break the rule...

I won't be spoiling much (it is a children's picture book after all) if I let you know that it all ends happily. It appeals on many levels, not least because in a past life I worked as a librarian for several years, and there were many days when I would have dearly loved a lion like this to keep me company! There is something rather wonderful about the character of Miss Merriweather and her gentle insistence on the importance of rules, and her equally gentle admission that occasionally there is good reason to break them. The illustrations are beautiful, and the characters are portrayed with subtlety.

My 5 year old loves it, with its combination of the unexpected (a lion in the library! "Don't lions eat people?" she asked) with more recognisable details ("No running!"). We will be reading this one a lot, I think.

Pumpkin

Today I had to throw away last week's pumpkin, so this is in its honour. I'm not a fan of the modern Halloween traditions in general - I've always hated horror films, don't see any pleasure in dressing up as any kind of weird or violent creature, and feel rather threatened by the "trick" part of trick or treating - but I have to admit there's something rather wonderful about the glow of a pumpkin.

As a child I remember one year when my mother either left it too late to buy a decent pumpkin, or was trying to economise, and we ended up trying to carve turnips instead. They were very hard, and smelled terrible when the candle caught the turnip flesh on the inside. Naturally I was anxious to avoid repeating this experience, so when my 5 year-old came home from school full of excitement about the idea of a Halloween pumpkin (she's never expressed an interest before), I bought one several days early in order to make sure we had a lovely plump looking specimen. Poppet drew the face and I carved it.

  

Like many modern celebrations, the "new traditions" have obscured the old. My googling tells me that Halloween probably has its origins in the Celtic festival Samhain. Then during the Roman occupation of Britain they attempted to replace Samhain with two of their own festivals: Pomona, celebrating the harvest (the symbol of the goddess Pomona was an apple, so perhaps this is a tenuous link to the tradition of apple-bobbing?), and Feralia, a celebration of the dead. By the 800s, Christianity had taken hold and 1 November was designated as All Hallows Day, probably in an attempt to create a church-sanctioned way of celebrating the dead. 31 October then began to be referred to as All Hallows Eve, which eventually led to its current name.

There seems little consensus about exactly when or why people began carving pumpkin lanterns; google throws up a number of possible stories, most commonly the Jack o'Lantern v. the devil story, and I was amused to find that the original lanterns probably were in fact made of turnips, until Irish immigrants to America discovered pumpkins, which are much easier to carve. It seems an innocent enough pleasure - it's a chance to light a candle, really, and that's always a hit in our household!

Next year Poppet wants to dress up and go trick or treating; this gives me nearly 12 months to work out what I'm going to do about it, and canvass neighbours with older children. What's your take on it?

Barefoot Books, Oxford

When Barefoot Books opened its north Oxford branch a couple of years ago, there was a ripple of interest around the parental circles – a genuinely baby friendly café/bookshop is a real find – and it soon became popular with the buggy-pushing trendy mothers in the area. Since I aspire to be trendy, and have a bit of a thing about books (and cake), I thought I’d feel at home there.

The ground floor is designed in three sections which flow front to back: first a bookshop, then a café, with plenty of high chairs, space for pushchairs, and a low table supplied with paper and crayons for toddlers to test their new teeth on, and beyond that there is a story “tent” – a carpeted area with benches around the walls and heaps of cushions, a throne for the story-teller, and drapes hanging from the ceiling to look like a colourful nomadic tent. Outside the front doors is a small area with more café style tables, which has recently been fenced off from the pavement, to prevent free-range children escaping.

It’s colourful, bordering on garish, it’s welcoming, and the books are an interesting mixture of modern and traditional stories from all around the world. Barefoot Books has an impressive reputation so far, and an ethos it would be hard to argue with. The founders say they want to give children nourishing “soul food” in the form of art and story. It's a way of life for Nancy Traversy, Owner, co-founder and CEO of BB) who says:

Living Barefoot for me is creating beautiful, magical and authentic stories and art and bringing these to a grassroots, global community of people who care about how our next generation of children is raised.   

So far, so good. But I have to confess I don’t like the Oxford studio (as they call it) as wholeheartedly as I want to. More bluntly, if it weren't for the baby-friendly nature of the place, I wouldn't go again. My main bugbear is the enormous TV screen on the wall of the café area, which is permanently on, showing the DVDs that tie in with many of Barefoot Books’ titles. At best it’s distracting, at worst downright intrusive. The words scroll along the bottom of the screen with a little bouncy ball to tell you which one to sing along with, karaoke style. I accept that DVDs are a significant part of their marketing strategy for their books (this makes me uneasy in itself, but that's another matter), but if I’ve gone to a bookshop/café, the chances are I haven’t gone there in order to watch TV. It makes me feel really cross just being near the bloody thing. When it's really busy, they turn the volume down slightly, but today, with the café surprisingly quiet, it was loud enough to make conversation difficult, and no-one was watching it at all. They even left it playing while a shop assistant led a story session in the tent area just beyond the café. She did her best, but it was difficult to concentrate on her with tinny singing coming from the TV the whole time.

I've also been disappointed by the café itself. It is styled in keeping with the rest - bright colourful crockery and a family friendly space, but having been there three times, I’ve had bad food twice: first, in the very expensive fresh fruit platter, a pear so unripe as to be crunchy and inedible; and more recently, carrot cake that was both stale and strangely bitter. The café is a big selling point here, so why these basic errors? It’s pricey too, even by north Oxford standards (and that's saying something). Oh, and did I mention there’s a whacking great TV on the wall? Maybe it’s to distract you from your food…

That said, they do run an impressive-looking series of events, both in the story-telling area downstairs, and a larger studio area upstairs, and they have definitely fulfilled a need in providing such a child-friendly place for parents to hang out, especially now the fabulous Summertown Wine Café has sadly closed down (sob!). Doubtless I will go there again, despite these bugbears, but maybe next time I'll smuggle in my own food, and pluck up the courage to ask them to turn off the screen.

A Necklace of Raindrops (2)

Many of you will have enjoyed the works of Joan Aiken in your youth, and perhaps saw my earlier blog post about her story A Necklace of Raindrops. That blog was seen by a Twitter friend of mine, the lovely Kate, who blogged about it in her turn, and then did something even more wonderful. She took the idea of the raindrops, found some glass teardrop beads that were just perfect, and commissioned me to make a new version:

Now I've found a supplier who can get me more of these beautiful beads, so I can create more of this lovely design. I've also made some matching earrings. What do you think?

Tonight, I think I shall read A Necklace of Raindrops to my Poppet again, who at five years old is ready to be utterly bewitched by such magic. I imagine she'll want a necklace of her own after that!

Do you have a favourite children's story? Has it ever inspired you to create something as an adult?

Cumbria (for National Poetry Day)

It's National Poetry Day today, so here's one I wrote earlier...

Cumbria

Cumbria travels with me,
a two-inch ragged oval on the atlas
penned in by the blue motorway.

Larger scale, I can contour the kitchen wall,

Exploring hidden valleys with coffee in my hand.

Each mountain conjures a postcard:
Fairfield - where sudden snow lit up the air;
Wetherlam - where muddy sheep stole sandwiches;
Coniston - where a thunder-storm tore the sky and day apart;
Mardale Head - where we climbed
    away from cars and cares
    and lay map-flat on the grass
    listening to the skylarks
    and heather humming bees
just off the pink dotted Right of Way.

Fiona Lewis

You can find out more about National Poetry Day 2012 from the official website, and from the Poetry Society, who also have an events page.

Perspective

Yesterday morning I heard BabyGirl saying "Climb. High." This is a child who is fearless, and at 20 months is regularly found balancing ("look no hands!") at the top of the slide, or on the kitchen table, or on the back of the sofa, so a part of me was suddenly very afraid. I abandoned all hope of a nice long shower, turned off the water and hurriedly grabbed a towel...

This is where she was:

She continued to climb on and off the book for several minutes, before inviting me to do it too, and holding my hand to keep me steady. I wonder what we'll climb next!