New Mummy Blog: Same Word, Different Meaning
Sometimes it feels as though I have had to learn another language to navigate my way through life with two small children.
There are all these words and phrases that I thought I knew the meaning of; but it turns out I was using them in the wrong way all along.
Holidays
Silly me. I thought holidays were lovely, relaxing things - amazing food, late nights, cocktails by the pool.
In actual fact, they’re exhausting and intense periods of time where we try to shoehorn the children’s routine into a different bedroom in a different country in a different time zone.
Days are spent preventing the kids from drowning in the pool, slapping on the sun cream, trying to win the nap time battle in 30 degree heat. Evenings are spent at the kids’ mini disco in the company of a giant Peppa Pig. And the whole thing is bookended by fraught and stressful journeys in small, confined spaces with a hundred or so strangers.
At least one of us gets to laze about on holiday [Copyright: Yahoo/Claire sparks]
Me time
A spa day? Oh yes, I remember those. But heck, I’d settle for an uninterrupted hour in the bath these days.
Me time is such an alien concept; both my kids cry when I leave the room and I can’t even go to the loo without one or both of them demanding to come too.
Nap time
How I laugh in the face of the memories of my university days, when a power nap (or rather, a blissfully lazy and long mid afternoon snooze) between lectures and the night out we had planned. Probably the third or fourth night out of the week. I don’t even have that many nights out a YEAR now.
Nap time nowadays means spending the best part of an hour gearing the kids up for a post lunch sleep, only to then spend the following hour trying to cram in as much housework as is humanly possible before they wake up. Not the same. Not the same at all.
Happy hour
Something that used to happen on those uni nights out, this now translates as the giddy hour after the kids are in bed when we crack open the wine.
Spelling
I thought this was something we did at school that’s now been superseded by predictive text and spell check.
Turns out it is in fact the only way you can communicate with another adult when you have a bat-eared toddler in the room. And my, it’s laborious.
Bloody
A handy adjective I’d use all to freely to describe my displeasure. Most commonly used when driving.
And still do, as it turns out, when trying to navigate out of a tight spot in a hospital car park in my husband’s tank of a car. The problem was that the aforementioned bat-eared child was in the back. She obviously enjoyed the way I said the word as she mimicked it with relish all the way home.
Then repeated it in front of my mother in law, shouted it in fact, at her toy pony as she tossed it on the floor in disgust for some toddler-only-knows reason. At which point, its meaning became ‘bleeding’, or so I so desperately tried to convince all three of us. “What’s that, darling? Your My Little Pony is bleeding? Has she hurt herself?” Uh huh.
The toddler’s driving is better than mine [Copyright: Yahoo/Claire Sparks]
Silence
It used to be golden. Rare and enjoyed. These days I meet it with panic. If the kids are too quiet, they are definitely up to something.
Late
Something I used to never be. Ever. I hate tardiness.
Now it’s something I am, regularly. Constantly. It seems no matter how much time I allow, the toddler still fills it and demands more. I get up 20 minutes early? She takes an extra 20 minutes to try on every single pair of shoes, twice, declare they’re all “too squashy” then settle on the very first pair she’d put on and taken off again. While I silently count to five… and breathe.
