NOJOMO 3 – Chronicles of a naughty toddler pt 2

 When we got up in the morning, Cassie was still whinging and a bit wary. I’m not as comfortable in my granny’s house as in some other places, I’ve never for example gone through her cupboards by myself or helped myself to a drink from the fridge without asking before. Some of these niceties have to be ignored when you have a small child though, especially when everybody else in your party doesn’t get up till after 8.30am. I even felt a little awkward taking Cassie into the living room to play, because when I stayed over when I was younger, I was supposed to stay in my bed and read a book until my granny got up. 

So when Cassie inevitably woke up at 6.30am, I had to get her a cup of milk and try to hold her off till breakfast by giving her a banana from the fruit bowl (I always presume that when in doubt, the fruit bowl is fair game because you aren’t hunting in cupboards). I had to forget my manners and rifle through cupboards looking for food when at 8am, no-one had got up and Cassie was starting to loudly insist that it was breakfast time and where was her ready break? 

She ended up eating two brioche for breakfast because I couldn’t find any bread or cereal. 

By the time my dad woke up and came into the kitchen, Cassie had already eaten, I’d got her washed and dressed and myself washed. Usually at my grannys, everyone sits at the table at the conservatory and has breakfast and sits for what seems like ages with a cup of tea. I don’t drink tea and I’m more of a get up, get ready and clean as soon as possible kind of person, but you follow other peoples routines. However, Cassie really couldn’t be expected to sit at the table when she’d already eaten and there was nothing to do. 

My Granny wanted to go to the car boot sale at her local church, which I was quite happy to do. I gave Cassie 50p to buy herself something. I ended up buying her a Tellytubbies DVD, 3 dressing up dresses and some plastic figurines. Cassie proved herself to be a born haggler, as I was asking the stall holder how much the tellytubbies dvd was, Cassie was rummaging through a box of toys at our feet. Just as I asked him, she bobbed back up clutching the most enormous giant plastic toy horse. "Excuse me man, I have the horsey too please?" she said. He laughed and said "You drive a hard deal, I’ll throw the horse in if you buy the dvd" so we got both for 50p! I asked Cassie for her 50p and she told me seriously "I losted it mummy" so I had to get my purse out. As we left the church, Cassie put her hand in her pocket and with a flourish produced the 50p. "This is for my money box mummy" she beamed. 

My granny also bought Cassie some Disney Princess Megablocks figurines and a Boo from Monsters Inc doll, which was really nice of her. Boo has been a big hit and Cassie has been carrying her everywhere. 

After that, my granny said she wanted to go into Ballymena to go shopping. My dad was quite annoyed about it because he wanted to go to Carrickfergus or Larne so he could take Cassie to the play park because as he said, it wasn’t fair just to drag Cassie round car boot sales and shops. Bearing in mind, we hadn’t brought the buggy so she was walking everywhere and it’s a bit stressful walking a toddler down a busy high street because people just don’t notice them and constantly barge past them or bang their bags off them. Cassie also wasn’t entirely herself, she was still being funny with people. 

Where did my granny decided to take us? The world most cluttered and eclectic department store. In particular, the seasonal department. There were ornaments everywhere – even on the floor. The walkway was only just about wide enough for an average sized adult. I didn’t trust myself walking round there, let alone Cassie. Cassie has a thing about penguins at the moment after watching Mr Poppers Penguins and at her eye level everywhere were ceramic and stone penguins. I admitted defeat about a quarter of the way into the department and made my excuses and took Cassie up to the top floor in the lift to change her nappy. 

Cassie doesn’t like baby change rooms. She really doesn’t like public toilets because she’s scared of the handryers. When I took her into the baby change, she was already so out of sorts and anxious that I had to lead her round the room to show her that there were absolutely no hand dryers. Just as I’d got her onto the changing table and she’d eased up a little and was chatting happily, a hand dryer went off in the toilets next door. The hand dryer was obviously on the adjoining wall because the entire wall was vibrating next to Cassie. Cassie went into hysterics.

After I calmed her down, I tried to call both my dad and Siobhan who weren’t answering their phones. We tried going through the stationary department, which was where they were going next, but Cassie managed to knock stuff off a table by banging her arm against it (literally, this department store was like a badly organised storeroom). Cassie said sorry and burst into tears. While I desperately kept trying to ring my dad and Siobhan, we rode up and down in the lift twice because it was the only place I could trust myself to keep Cassie from breaking stuff – and Cassie likes lifts. After twenty minutes, which felt like forever, I realised Cassie and I were going to have to brave the seasonal department again. To get to the seasonal department, you had to go down from steps from the entrance, which was surprisingly narrow. 

I got Cassie to the bottom of the stairs and as she looked round, something obviously clicked that hadn’t before. She looked round, beamed and shouted really loudly and excitedly "Mummy! It’s Christmas!" 

Then she looked thoughtful and piped up. "Santa Claus! Santa Claus coming mummy at Christmas! I want to see Santa Claus in his house! Where Santa Claus mummy?" 

I bent down and said "Santa Claus isn’t here today Cassie, maybe another day". 

"But I see Santa Claus! Santa Claus here at Christmas!" 

"No Cassie, not today". 

Without warning she flung her backpack, which skidded across the floor and hit a pile of snowman ornaments, which luckily didn’t break. Then she flung herself on the floor in front of the stairs, kicking and pounding the ground, shouting at the top of her voice. "IT CHRISTMAS! I WANT TO SEE SANTA CLAUS!!!!" She was blocking EVERYONE and a little crowd gathered. Luckily everyone was good natured and just laughed at my horrid little child screaming her head off about Santa Claus in the seasonal department of a department store. A nice man got Cassie’s backpack for me and

another lady helped me gather our stuff up and bundle a resistant Cassie onto my shoulders so I could hurry her out of the store. 

I was so unbelievably mortifed. 

We eventually found my dad and Siobhan, after all that my Granny Ede had decided to go off and do errands on her own. There was nothing to do in Ballymena but go round shops. Cassie was not in a good mood at all. We went into a shopping centre and she started whinging to go on a roundabout. She was hungry at 12pm when she normally has lunch, but my dad and Siobhan keep Southern hours and don’t usually have lunch until 1.30pm and were really dragging their heels about going somewhere for lunch. Cassie started getting upset that her lunch wasn’t coming at it’s usual time. I was embarrassed but really, it isn’t all that hard to understand that most children don’t cope well with change and they certainly don’t cope well with empty stomachs. This is what I find hard, that when you are in company they expect children to fall in with what the adults want – when I kind of think that within reason, you should feed a child when they are hungry and let them sleep when they need to. 

I noticed that Siobhan was being polite but that she was getting increasingly more irritated and was finding it harder and harder to smile through gritted teeth. That made me feel more awful because I don’t want my child’s behaviour to stop people from having a good time. In all honesty, Cassie NEVER behaves this badly, so I was a bit thrown and didn’t know the appropriate way to deal with her sometimes. I knew her behaviour looked really really naughty, but I didn’t think she was doing it out of badness, she just seemed very upset and confused and I was torn because I knew nobody was really considering her feelings or her needs at all. 

We went to a cafe, though my dad and Siobhan wanted to go to Subway but I knew Cassie wouldn’t eat it and the mood she was in, I wanted her to get a good meal down her and avoid a food-related meltdown again later on. I asked for the cafe to make Cassie sausage, scrambled egg and toast for lunch, even though it wasn’t on the childrens menu but they didn’t mind. Cassie perked up as soon as she saw her favourite meal for lunch and happily chatted away and was singing and colouring with crayons. I think  she could have stayed at the cafe all day, she loves going out for lunch. Lunch was really nice – I had scrambled egg on soda bread. My dad and Siobhan had soup and fried wraps. 

Siobhan was still a bit cold (I don’t think Cassie’s aversion to her helped at all) but my dad was starting to feel a little bad for Cassie I think because he started saying that it wasn’t fair to drag Cassie round shopping centres and he’d make sure we got her to a play park or something afterwards. We met up with my granny and went back to the car – and Cassie fell asleep, so she didn’t get to go to the play park after all. We got back to the house and Cassie happily played with her toys for a while when I sat and gossiped with my granny but at about 4.30pm she started saying she wanted her tea (she usually has it about 5-5.30pm) and I went in and asked my dad and Siobhan when tea was going to be and they said 6.30pm. Bearing in mind that they know Cassie goes to bed at 7.30pm. I knew Cassie wouldn’t last that long and I asked them whether we could possibly have it a little earlier and they said no, give her a banana to hold her off! 

Luckily, my granny overheard and offered Cassie a little platter of cheese, crackers, apple and grapes which Cassie ate gratefully, saying thank you to my granny and utterly charming her by saying "Thank you Granny Ede, crackers make my tummy better". This is the thing, my granny was the stranger but Cassie was nice to her (though still wouldn’t climb onto her lap) but my dad and Siobhan were who she was really weird with. 

Cassie played nicely with her toys until tea, which ended up being 6.45pm. At this point, Cassie kept pointing outside and saying "It’s night time mummy!" and asking to go in the bath. Cassie clearly did not think it was dinner time anymore. When the food was put out, it was chicken, potato wedges, rice and salad. Cassie ate all her chicken and refused to eat anything else. Siobhan kept pointing out that Cassie hadn’t eaten anything else and kept telling her to eat and Cassie was stubbornly shaking her head and saying she didn’t want it. Cassie usually sits nicely and talks to everyone and admittedly, does start doing daft toddler things like talking to her spoon and making it dance or pretending to read the labels on the sauce bottle nearest her once she’s been sat a while, which we generally ignore rather than make a fuss of because she stops it once she realises she’s getting no attention and you pick your battles – a toddler is not going to sit quietly and neatly for half an hour, to me the fact she’s sat at the table the whole time and being sociable is the battle won. But tonight, probably because it was bordering onto her bedtime and she’d already eaten, she was not sitting at the table. She kept getting down off the chair and trying to wander off into the bathroom to start her own bath. I was not getting the chance to eat at all, I was constantly popping her back onto her chair. I ended up putting her on the naughty spot but really, I think our expectations of Cassie were too high. She’s only 26 months old and as far as she’s concerned, when it’s dark she has her bath and goes to bed. And part of the problem was that the minute that she started playing at the table, Siobhan was glaring at her and making comments so I think she felt uncomfortable as well. 

She enjoyed her bath and was in a good mood, until I put her to bed. She burst into tears and told me she didn’t like it here, she wanted to go home and sleep in her sheep bed and see Tybalt (our cat). She said she was sad and scared and she didn’t like Granny Ede’s house. She said she wanted me to stay and cuddle her, but my dad appeared at the door and I felt I had to leave her. This time she went to sleep after 45 minutes and this time I kept going in and resettling her and giving her a quick cuddle, but I felt like such a mean parent because she’d clearly told me that she was unhappy and there wasn’t much I could do about it. 

After Cassie was asleep, I enjoyed myself for the first time of the holiday so far by sitting with my Granny all evening doing family tree stuff. My granny is very interesting and she’s a really big talker, she can talk for hours. My favourite bit was when Siobhan went to bed and my dad seemed more like the dad I remembered. He said to me that he felt bad for Cassie, this wasn’t really a good holiday for her at all, that the next day we were going to my Uncle Johns and hopefully Uncle John would do something Cassie orientated with us. Then after a bit my dad went to bed and I stayed up a bit longer with my granny Ede, sitting in the conservatory chatting with our hot chocolates and teapots of tea.