Chalk and Cheese

Having arrived and installed ourselves in our hotel in Lyme Regis, all seemed to be going well.

But then... not everything went quite perfectly... except when it did. Our days were a peculiar mixture of ups and downs, highs and lows, chalk and cheese.

Chalk

Initially, we were more than happy with our hotel room, with its proximity to the "games room" that allowed us to sit in peace while LittleBear fell asleep, its distance from the bar and restaurant meaning we were spared the comings and goings of late night revellers, its view of the sea via a quiet courtyard. And then The Other Family arrived. They occupied the two rooms beside ours. They had large dogs who appeared to need to go outside every hour or so. They had a deaf grandfather with whom they attempted to play Who Wants to be a Millionaire? late into the night. They had children who were prone to slamming doors and running up and down corridors. They had a mother who stumbled down the corridor, glass of wine in hand, telling her 7 year-old child that he couldn't go to bed yet, despite it being 10pm. By Saturday morning, BigBear was muttering that he wanted to drive home that day. We spent a particularly grim breakfast, staring at the tablecloth and not speaking.

Cheese

I gently approached the nice people at reception and explained that we were not having the most restful time, what with the noise from The Other Family, and the dogs, and so on. This is not my usual style, since it involved both speaking to another human being and complaining out loud*, but the Bad-tempered Breakfast required desperate measures. And thus we ended up being moved to a different room. A room beside the King Edward Lounge, a residents' lounge that nobody else appeared to want to use. So essentially a private sitting room. We were, alarmingly, above the bar. And yet, after about 9:30 there was merely a murmur from below. More enjoyably, the bar was within baby-monitor range of our new room, and we were able to sit and have a pint of beer together while LittleBear went to sleep. If we hadn't been so utterly shattered after being kept awake by The Other Family, we might have (a) managed to find something to talk to each other about and (b) not given up and gone to bed ourselves at about 9 o'clock.

Our own private sitting room

Chalk

The hotel's "games room", as well as being equipped with full-sized snooker table, table-tennis table, and bar billiards table had an ottoman full of board games. LittleBear was wildly excited to find that there was a Scrabble set, and spent a large portion of time when we were trying to get him to do something else, agitating to know when we could play. And when we came to play... there was no board in the box. And his world began to crumble. Feeling that I needed to spare others from such levels of distress, I took the box to reception to hand it in and let them know it was perhaps less playable than imagined.

Cheese

When confronted with the Disappointing Scrabble Set, the young man at reception said, "Oh, I didn't know the board was missing, but I've got a new one here we hadn't got round to putting in the games room yet. You could take this one." So we christened the new board, and I was trounced at Scrabble by a six-year old again**. 

Chalk

Our first fossil-hunting day dawned bright, clear and sunny, which was a lovely day to be out in. Unfortunately, it was also a continuation in the delightfully mild winter that has resulted in very little in the way of fresh erosion and fossil exposure.

We re-introduced ourselves to the Lovely Fossil Men, C and P, who are friends of a friend, and joined the fossil hunt again. And LittleBear bounced up and down on his toes, arm stretched high, desperate to answer every question. The poor gents had to resort to saying, "Yes, we know you know, but how about some of the other boys and girls? Or grown-ups? Or anyone?" And when it came time to hand out some pre-found ammonites, LittleBear found himself at the back of the queue, as C pointed out, "you have been before, and you do have lots of fossils, so we'd better let the others have some first." My little moppet's bewildered face clearly didn't understand what was going on.

However, LittleBear had obviously touched a soft spot in P's heart, because he lurked behind C, tapped him on the shoulder and muttered to him that he had a special fossil for LittleBear. Which is how my spoilt small boy received a beautiful little pyritized ammonite with a fossilized parasitic worm on its back, and not just a boring old ammonite on its own.

And down the beach we stomped, hunting for fossils, and finding a quite considerable quantity of ammonites, belemnites and crinoid stems. But then... woe and calamity... I found an ichthyosaur vertebra. Surely this is a good thing? You'd think so. But no. The problem was that I found it, thus shattering the internal narrative LittleBear had constructed of his triumphant discovery of a vertebra. And thus we found ourselves, miles along a cold and windswept beach, with a rather poorly, over-tired, small boy, sobbing his heart out at how wrong everything was. P and C were rather concerned, and I had to do my best to assure them that it was nothing to do with their fossil trip. We managed to insert some chocolate-chip cookies into LittleBear, and drag him back to the town to find some lunch before hypothermia and starvation caused any further damage.

Cheese

Our second day of fossil hunting followed hot on the heels of the Bad-tempered Breakfast, and was an expedition undertaken only by LittleBear and me, while BigBear went to explore the cliff path. And LittleBear, his expectations suitably adjusted downwards, had a lovely non-tearful time, finding all the normal fossils. He bounced up to both P and C when we encountered them on the beach to tell them what he'd found. He was utterly untroubled by the absence of complete plesiosaurs, and quite delighted with everything he found. He did demand that I stop looking for belemnites as it was "not fair" that I'd found more than him. In fact, at one point he removed one from my hand and threw it back into the shingle, to even things up, but I allowed that to glide past, for the sake of an enjoyable few hours with my moppet.

We raced back along the damp sand, leaping over little streams and giggling together, to reconvene with BigBear at the sea wall. And then we all had a little pause while LittleBear "dammed" a rock pool and declared proudly that he'd completely stopped the flow of water from one side to the other.

Our collection of easily-portable fossils

Chalk

LittleBear, being (I hope) a rather typical small boy, has a distinct reluctance to do what we want to do on rather too many occasions. Often, to my frustration, the thing that we're suggesting is something I know he'll enjoy. Which is how I ended up having to cajole and drag my small boy a matter of a few hundred metres ("but it's miles Mummy") to a museum full of awesome fossils. Because what LittleBear really wanted to do was play Top Trumps in our hotel room, and not have to any of those terrible holiday activities his parents were suggesting.

Cheese

As well as finding, as predicted, all the awesome fossils, we also discovered that there was a cool craft activity going on in the museum. Because Dippy is on tour from the Natural History Museum, they had a 3D-printed copy of his skull, and a artist/educator who was getting children to join in making a model of Dippy's skeleton with glue, and black tissue paper, and toilet rolls and straws, and all the other good Blue Peter-style stuff. And the three of us settled in with the friendly artist man and had a lovely half hour of gluing and sticking and generally having a nice time.

Making a miniature Dippy

Extra Cheese 

As I believe I alluded to when describing the songs LittleBear was making up, Squidy came on holiday with us. Some of you may not remember quite how big Squidy is. He needed to wear a seatbelt to be safe while travelling...

Squidy's coming on holiday.

 But he did like being tucked up in bed

And yes, LittleBear did manage to fit into that bed with his squid. And a penguin. And a stingray. And a hammerhead shark.

But most of all, Squidy enjoyed pretending to be Meryl Streep, sitting at a table used in the filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman, where Meryl sat.

The French Lieutenant's Squid

* As some of you may have noticed, I am awesome at complaining in private, or in writing, but doing so in person is not my thing at all.

** The six-year old in question does receive a certain amount of help from his doting mother, but is developing into a keen Scrabble-player.

Road Trip to Lyme Regis (redux)

Last summer, LittleBear and I set out on a road trip to the Jurassic Coast. We went without BigBear, and (mostly) had a marvelous time. There were less than marvelous points, such as car-sickness, and attempting to share a bed with my son, but it was largely splendid. And while staying in Lyme Regis, we went on a guided fossil-hunting walk, which was an excellent way of taking the pressure off me to be good at finding fossils. However... the two delightful men running the fossil-hunt cheerfully told my son that the best time to find fossils is actually in winter, when the rougher seas, and worse weather, cause more erosion and more mudslides, revealing more fossils. Not to mention that there are fewer people visiting, so fewer people finding all the lovely fossils.

Which is why we're now in Lyme Regis in February.

I had intended to repeat last year's efforts and write a daily blog of the trip, but we're already on day three of the road trip, and I've only just found the energy to do so. The last two days we were staying with GrannyBear, which was a great relief. As I have recently mentioned, I've been a bit under the weather, and LittleBear has had The Eternal Cough. My patience has been wearing more than a trifle thin, such that I reached a new nadir of parenting shortly after midnight on Tuesday....

BigBear was still at home, and not due to join us for another day. LittleBear had gone to bed coughing. I had gone to bed at 10:15 and fallen asleep in around 17 seconds. An hour later, LittleBear's coughing started. So I trotted over to his room and rubbed his back and soothed him. Then at midnight a small figure appeared beside my bed to inform me that it was midnight and that he couldn't sleep because of his cough. So I invited him to join me, as it seemed the simplest solution. Then I remembered how much I hate sharing a bed with LittleBear. And then he needed his bedside light. Then his GroClock. Then his cuddlies. After I'd been back and forth several times, and found the cough medicine, I was even shorter on patience than I usually am in the wee small hours. Which is how I came to say, "If I'm horrible to you all day tomorrow, it will be your own fault for keeping me awake!"

Like I said - a parenting nadir.

I more or less redeemed myself by cuddling my moppet, and stroking his hair and soothing his worries about not sleeping, and about coughing, and soon we both drifted off to sleep. To my surprise, neither of us woke up again until shortly after 7 o'clock. Then my LittleBear read his book beside me in bed before trotting round to GrannyBear's room to check if she was awake and climbing into bed with her for a cuddle and a chat. The next thing I knew it was 9:30 and I stumbled, bleary-eyed, downstairs to find LittleBear and GrannyBear playing Scrabble together. I cannot begin to put into words how grateful, relieved and lucky I felt in having such an understanding mother, and such a biddable small boy, that they allowed me the extra sleep that I needed and happily got on with their day together.

Valentine's Day thus passed in a medley of games and food, with me in a considerably better mood than I'd managed for some time (and I apologised to my LittleBear for my poor behaviour in the night...) And finally, after many train-based-delays, BigBear arrived and we were ready to start the major part of our road trip the next morning.

This time, we were not travelling on a Bank Holiday, and I had not allowed LittleBear to over-fill himself with soft fruit, so we managed to arrive without a hint of vomit. LittleBear was (again) underwhelmed by Stonehenge, and (again) delighted with the place names. We were thrilled to rediscover West Camel, and to find its compatriot Queen Camel. In fact, we then spent several miles being regaled with a long list of potential camel-based place names. And then an even longer list of random-words-with-camel-appended, before parental patience wore thin and we called a halt to the recitation. LittleBear then returned to another current favourite - making up his own songs. Songs with catchy lyrics such as:

There's a mince pie in the sky

or

Blu-tack is small and round and furry like bolognese

or

Squidy's going on holiday
Squidy's going on holiday
Squidy's going on holiday
Oo! Sign to Lyme Regis!

Because, yes, we have brought a cuddly giant squid on holiday with us. I am more than a little bit relieved that our room is near the back of the hotel, and accessible via a door from the carpark and I was not forced to march down Broad Street and through the hotel carrying a giant, scarlet, cuddly squid.

So far, LittleBear has declared this to be the best hotel he's ever stayed in. Which he says about every hotel we ever stay in, but let's not quibble. It has a swimming pool and jacuzzi that LittleBear and I have made use of already, despite my having left my swimming costume at home. Because it's the kind of hotel where they expect you to be gormless and therefore have a stash of swimming costumes of various sizes to buy at reception.

So far, it's shaping up to be the best place I've stayed with LittleBear, if for no other reason than I am currently writing this while sat on a sofa, with a large glass of wine in front of me, in a properly lit room, safe in the knowledge that LittleBear is tucked up in bed about 6 metres away from me, and I have a baby monitor by my side so I know he's OK. This is a significant improvement on sitting hunched in a corner of a pitch black room, trying to type quietly.

And tomorrow we start hunting for fossils again.

Under the weather and over-reacting

Over the past couple of weeks, I've looked at my computer, or even got as far as looking at this blog, and then a wave of weariness and ennui has swept across me and I haven't written anything. I keep having "things" I want to write about, I keep writing "things" in my head. In fact, I keep ranting in my head about lots of different "things". But then, I just don't quite have the energy. And I go over what I've been thinking about and realise that it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup.

And now, the lack of sleep caused by LittleBear's night-time coughing, and nightmares, has caught up with me. And the vague feeling of being a bit under the weather has evolved into a full-blown cold. I now have a fever, and a headache, and my neck hurts, and I'm very bad-tempered. And I realise that perhaps some of the "things" that I've been ranting about in my head are not really worth ranting about. So it's probably a good thing that I didn't.

So instead of writing about all the things that have been getting me worked up, I'm going to try and take a step back. I'm not going to write to the school about The Thing that's really bugging me - I'm going to sit back and wait till I'm calm and see if I still think it's a problem; I won't be trying to "fix" things for my LittleBear that probably aren't really bothering him, but that I'm fretting about; I am going to stop pushing back against the colleague who is determined to undermine me and do the opposite of what I've planned - I've put everything in writing and passed it on to the MD; I'm going to stop contorting myself in the hope that people will like me and just be; I'm going to stop focussing on the hows and whys and whats of other people's behaviour - I cannot control what other people do, but I can try to always speak and act with integrity and honesty. If I don't receive the same in return, that is not a judgement on me.

Meanwhile the positives, rather than just the ambitions:

It's half-term, and I'm going fossil-hunting in Lyme Regis with both my bears in a few days time. (I'm not completely convinced how much fun BigBear and I are going to have in the cold and the wet, staring at rocks, but I think we'll enjoy LittleBear having fun.)

Yesterday I finally went to see my osteopath, after giving up on my GP, and he diagnosed a problem with my L3-L4 facet joint, and now for the first time in a year I don't have a line of pain and numbness running down my right leg. An absence of pain and discomfort is a wonderful way to improve my temper.

LittleBear has a party this afternoon, and it's a drop-off! In truth I may stay with him, and help my friend out with a village hall full of small monsters, but the idea that LittleBear is now a Big Enough Bear to go to parties and be left there is pretty damn exciting. Or it might reduce me to tears that my baby is growing up and doesn't need me. One or the other.