rwrylsin

Had a moment the other day when I suddenly realised Mr4 is growing up, nearly at school, and all too soon his peers will be more of an influence on him than I am.
No, it's too soon! I've been too busy feeding him and doing laundry, I haven't properly indoctrinated him yet!
( Moving on )

6am this morning Bub rocked up in our room with his teddy bear wanting to get into bed with us. Both the bear, and the interest in our bed, are relatively new developments. It’s very hard to deny a toddler clutching his teddy bear anything.

( More Cuteness )

In less cute news, we are all suffering with another child-care cold. Seems to be a relatively mild one at least.

Our toddler has now mastered the concept of attacking - then running back before the opponents riposte can land.
He has picked up the terminology for parry and riposte, but mostly has a very robust offensive attitude to parrying.

Having said that, today he took hold of my foam sword blade and attempted to coach me through the parry and riposte. This is a disturbing development.

Well, we may have answered the age-old question of what happens when you take your child to fencing with you almost every Saturday from the age of... around 7 weeks or there-abouts.



This recent development has been worked on over the last couple of weeks.

We returned home one Saturday and he amused himself for ages picking up a stick, "enguarde, fence" doing footwork down the hall, lunging at a cardboard box with a stick, then "push the button" on a mark on the box before returning up the hall to put his stick down "all done fencing". Put this in infinite loop. I believe he was imitating the fencers turning the box off or changing the weapon settings on the scoring box.

Next week he was dumping the pegs out of the basket and wearing it as a fencing mask, then using a peg as his sword. (Apparently it's a "fencing peg"). Put the mask on, pick up the peg, "Enguarde, ready, fence", a few steps to the glass door which then either got stabbed with the peg, had bub run into it, or both. "Halt", return to starting position, put mask and peg back down. "All done fencing", repeat on infinite loop.

Today at fencing he got hold of dad's foil and wanted to stab the walls with it. So I redirected him to the soft padded wall we use for target practice for the sake of the foil.
He'd been doing rather well with it, so when dad reclaimed the foil I softened the blow by offering to get him his own sword. Bub toddled with me to the weapon bag, I handed over a size 0 foil, stuck a target on the wall for him to aim for... and he was off.

Honestly, this is all imitation and being allowed to play. I'm not some pushy fencing mum giving him lessons, I swear! I'm a little worried he'll burn out and hate fencing before he turns 5 at this rate.
On the other hand, the only thing stopping him from having actual fencing lessons now would seem to be the ability to wear a mask. He's been trying them on, but they're still too big and heavy. (I've told him he can have a lesson and learn to fence with real swords when the size 5 glove and XS mask in the cupboard fit him. It's starting to seem disturbingly close... Until then he's supposed to be on the foam swords, although I'm not sure that's going to stick.)
There are lighter plastic masks, but they're huge and I've yet to find any kid that prefers them to the real thing.

And he seems to be developing a pretty good sense of distance...

You can see a slightly longer video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdOEDmEPEKI&feature=youtu.be

The last 8 weeks have seen him master "On Gud, Are-oo-re-y, Ess!" (Although sometimes it's "Are-oo-re-y, Se, Go!" The confusion is understandable.) He usually holds the sabre correctly, still favours fleche attacks and has developed a good attacking game, but also throws in the odd parry to mix things up.

After weeks of training, it was time for the young fencer to test his skills in competition against his peers. I was shocked to learn that no U18-month competitions were scheduled.
Taking matters into our own hands, we gifted a pair of mini foam sabres to an innocent bystander and were most gratified to see the newcomer immediately take to the sport with enthusiasm. Clearly toddlers have a natural aptitude for swordplay.

The new fencer's mother was very proud, loudly proclaiming "Nooo! I want him to do golf, or tennis, something useful!" and "Argh, a head shot! You've corrupted him into a sabre fencer!"
While I would like to take credit, in truth he was largely self-taught so I opted for a modest "Bwhaha!" in response.

Our weeks are looking busy again.
( It's all Routine )

Bub slept through on Monday night, first time in ages. Unfortunately I didn't get to fully appreciate it, being kept up by a busy brain stressing about stuff. I hate my brain sometimes.

I think I mentioned here before, my original plan back when I was pregnant was that I would be able to use the handy casual occasional child-care place that was just up the road a bit at reasonable prices. Being able to randomly book in for a couple of hours a week or less in advance was pretty much exactly what I needed in order to cover me for coaching work.
Most school work is one-off sessions or up to 4 sessions on one day a week. Usually an hour or 1.5 hours, and a lot of the work I got was filling in for other sick coaches so often short notice. You go at a time that suits the client, they're not changing their whole school timetable just to get a fencing coach in. So basically full time child care is unaffordable, and occasional care that locks me into a particular time and day are no good to me.
However, that place got closed shortly before Bub was born. I was not impressed, especially once I realised all the other places closed by 5pm which was too early to cover after school work.

This year, I had resigned myself to the fact that there simply isn't any casual occasional care that runs late enough to cover after-school activities. Fine, I'd concentrate on doing stuff in school hours that would be covered in the hours of the other places.

But now I see that all the other places have been shut down. Literally, all of them, it's no longer even listed as an option on most council or search websites. No level of government here is willing to fund them, and I can see why it's not an attractive model for private centres.
In a 25km radius I can find only one place still offering casual occasional care, it's in Malvern so the opposite direction to most of my potential work, adding an extra hour of driving to each end of a 1 hour coaching job makes no sense at all.

Last year Bub was coming with me to primary schools and it mostly worked pretty well, but by the end of last term he was no longer willing to just sit in the pram and doze or watch the whole session, and now that he's crawling he wouldn't be happy in there for 5 minutes. I can put him in the sling, but I don't think he'll let me get away with that for a whole hour either.
David sometimes worked from home and kept an eye on him while I was out, but again, now that he's mobile and getting into things David can't just plonk him in a clear spot and get on with his work. Bub is only content to play quietly in the playpen for about 10 minutes or so, then he wants out. Bub wrangling is definitely a full-time occupation at this stage.

Paying a baby-sitter would cost too much relative to what I'd be earning (pretty much all of it). I can probably pull in a few relatives and favours to cover some commitments in January but I can't have that as a business plan.

After much late night wrangling, I've had to admit defeat. My coaching activities are going to be limited to what I can do at the club, so I'd better concentrate on getting paid for that.

This irritates me enormously. Mostly just because I thought it was going to be possible to be mostly looking after Bub and earn some extra income doing something relatively enjoyable where demand exceeds supply, and now that's been taken away.

Days flit by so fast, I don't know where they go. The question of why I'm not getting much done is usually accompanied by one of the cats arriving to demand a cuddle, but I have timed this for their afternoon nap time ;)

The new school year has started, and I'm teaching fencing to a couple of after-school care groups. Had the first class on Tuesday, which was complete chaos really. They're primary schools, a mix of prep to grade 6, and were a bit over-excited at the whole start of year, first sports class, sword fighting combination. After making a bit of an effort I ended up just letting them chase and whack each other with the foam sabres to maybe get it out of their system.
From next week I'll have one on Tuesdays and one on Wednesdays, and those will run pretty much right up to my confinement. I'm sort of banking on first babies tending not to arrive early, and assuming 2 hours a week, only carrying foam sabres, should be do-able.
Paid maternity leave has been approved by Centrelink.

At the antenatal class on Monday there was some discussion about work arrangements, some people planning to work right up to the last minute, others already having stopped for a while. Apparently some of them are bored and don't know what to do with their time, but I don't seem to be having that problem.

The sewer works in our yard are done and we have our yard back. I'm not entirely convinced they put the top soil back on top, there's rather a lot of clay and rocks there, but otherwise the area has never looked so potentially useful. They've mostly flattened out and cleared the area I've been meaning to clear and flatten, and done some significant pruning that has opened the area right up. I think a couple of inoffensive shrubs have been crushed, but they might bounce back once we get stuff off them.
Other bonus is that the Ivy and Trad on the other side of the fence has gone. Hopefully removed entirely, but at least for now we won't have as much trouble with incursions.
I'd like to one day keep a few chooks down there, although that's probably a couple of years in the future. Apparently the previous owners did so. In the mean time, might see if we can convince some kidney weed to colonise the area.

Nesting-acquisition is pretty much done now. Next step is to get the nursery painted and sort out the storage. We were given some boxes of small-sized baby clothes, and it's deceptive how many little outfits fit into a small box (and then don't fit into an apparently large drawer). I think Bub has more clothes than I do now.

We're having our last pre-baby social fling on Feb 25th, a baby shower segueing into games night. David's in charge of all that since I'm busy wandering around vaguely and trying to remember to do the bare minimum necessary to keep the fencing club going and the dishes washed.

Fencing club doing well so far, 15 members signed up, at least 5 more to chase for money. Need to do more for the junior class though which is off to a very slow start, and convince a couple of people to take the coaching course.
My replacement coach has now announced that she is also pregnant. A trimester behind me, but as I don't know how long it will take me to start reappearing at training sessions, I need more coaches!

Life has been busy, and we've just survived a busy weekend largely dominated by committee meetings.

Finally managed to get my fencing club committee together on Saturday, which resulted in an unusually long planning meeting. Still nothing firm yet, but we have general direction for next year and plans to survive my absence. Spent a fair bit of it trying to make sure people understood the fundamental reality of clubs - things only happen if someone does them, and money out is constrained by money in.

Sunday we emergency-hosted the Discworld committee, which was unusually small in attendance and probably as a result of that actually made some progress on deciding timelines. With luck we might even be able to accept memberships before Xmas.

Now I'm working to catch up on the outstanding tasks waiting in e-mail, then the end of the year will be in sight. I'm behind in e-mail, but hope to catch up soon.

Took delivery of plastic sabres Sunday morning (a delivery in a Sunday? I'm amazed and delighted). Will probably be good and stick to the lesson plans which require me to wait until the week after next to corrupt my junior fencers with sabre fencing.

Sunday morning also saw me toddle up the road to a "Childeren's Market" with people selling their second-hand baby and kids stuff. Managed to pick up the important remaining things I need for the hospital stay and immediately afterward, nice and cheap.

Yesterday David took a day off work so he could come with me for the 20 week ultrasound scan, and we learned the gender. However, although my first impulse was to shout it on Twitter apparently David wants to keep it quiet. It's not a big secret, you can ask if you're really curious, we're just not publicising it.
I'm not sure how long it will be until I slip up. Avoiding pronouns does encourage one to think creatively about how to word things though.

And now I have no further excuse to avoid thinking about names. Naming is scary.