Gavin, Rachel, Matthew and Peter's Diary

We went to Looe again. All the way by train there and back this time – more than 6 hours each way, and hooray for seat reservations. And also for a child who can keep himself entertained at least some of the way by reading. And also for the netbook with headphones and children’s DVDs.

Once we got there, there were no problems at all keeping the children entertained. ‘Beach’ said Peter. ‘Go beach. Play sand. Play water. Dig hole. Build castle. Need Peter’s spade. Need Matthew’s spade. Need bucket. Mummy carry bucket. Daddy carry spade’. And that was about it. We did go on a very bumpy boat trip, and to the Plymouth aquarium and a National Trust house. And we ate a few cream teas, notably at Daisy’s Cafe. (We like the people there even more than before; not only did they remember us from more than two years ago, they also turn out to sell gluten-free rock cakes and pasties).

Peter’s language developed quite a lot during the holiday, I think. Matthew’s negotiating/arguing skills developed even further, in that he learned to enlist Peter on his side: “Let’s watch some more telly. [No, you've already watched enough]. Peter, do you want to watch telly? [Yes. Watch telly]. See – Peter wants to watch telly too! We want some more telly!”

We’re not sure when, or if, Peter will start arguing with Matthew. At the moment he pursues the frankly more productive tactic of giving a minimal answer and carrying on regardless.

Every now and then I decide that my children don’t have enough opportunities to do the creative things children are supposed to enjoy doing, like making models and painting. So on Friday I decided we’d do painting. Part way through setting up the painting I decided that it would make more sense if the children wore minimal clothing while painting. So they painted in their underwear and aprons. This was, on balance, a good move. Peter discovered how to tip the water from the water pot into the paint pots, and back again. Matthew discovered how to make the paint splatter by splatting his brush onto the paper. Both of them quite enjoyed applying paint to paper, lots and lots of paint with plenty of water mixed in. After about ten minutes they were bored. I took the paint-soaked sheets of paper away to dry, on the unlikely off-chance that anyone would want to look at them later. I then suggested a bath. This was popular. I put them both in the bath and hosed them down. This was extremely popular. I left them in the bath while I quickly wiped the wet paint off the floor, walls and furniture. This was even more popular, but as I came back up the stairs I smelled a strange tarry smell. Two small boys were just about visible above a mound of bubbles. The bottle of special medicated coal-tar shampoo was empty. The other bottle of shampoo was half empty. Matthew announced that they were playing polar bears and this was the snow in the Arctic. “Polar bears!” said Peter.

Matthew’s main inspiration to start painting had been the idea that we could “have an art gallery in our house”. So once they were hosed down again, and dried and dressed, I took them to the art gallery in the city centre, to find out what you need in an art gallery. Matthew decided that you should, ideally, have automatic doors. Peter clearly thought that you need a cafe, and those little low barriers set a few feet out from the wall, at just the right height for a toddler to run his hand along them as he races around the exhibits. I think they both concluded that pictures were a nice bonus but not essential.

The following day Matthew said at breakfast time “Mummy, I think we should do just the same thing today as we did yesterday. You know, do painting, have a bath, go to the art gallery…”

Peter is two. He isn’t at all terrible. His second birthday didn’t exactly pass without incident, though. On the day before his birthday he decided to demonstrate how healthy and energetic he is these days by jumping off the sofa, several times. On the several-and-oneth time he hurt his foot. “Hurty foot”. When he still couldn’t walk on it the next morning (that’s his birthday) we decided to take him to A&E. So he spent his birthday morning finding out that his foot wasn’t broken – at least, not so an X-ray machine would notice. We were told that a “toddler fracture”, if such it was – ie a small hairline fracture in a small person’s leg – would heal of its own accord within a week or so. I like this idea that toddlers have their own category of injury.

Anyway, Peter, as a true toddler, is now definitely getting better, and walking quite long distances if he temporarily forgets that his foot is supposed to be hurty. He did his birthday party (balloon-and-bubble-chasing and all) at a rapid crawl/knee-shuffle. And he liked his gluten-free gruffalo cake, and his small cuddly gruffalo (is that a contradiction in terms?), and being sung Happy Birthday to, and having other children to watch.

His new word is “person”. This is an interesting one. If he starts playing with a toy vehicle that doesn’t have a toy driver or passenger, or sees something that could be an accessory in a pretend-game (eg a box that looks like a bed), he stops and demands “person”, i.e. a central character for the game. Toy animals are, of course, perfectly acceptable as “person”. I think faceless objects of about the right size and shape, designated as “pretend person”, would also be acceptable.

Peter has wholeheartedly embraced – at a younger age than Matthew did, I think – the possibility of living in imaginary worlds. He not only takes up Matthew’s games, he embellishes them. A walk by the small and sluggish Meanwood Beck becomes a daring exploration…

Matthew: This is the river Nile. We’re explorers.
Peter: River! Ducks! Throw bread! [No ducks in sight].
Matthew: We’re going to look for pink dolphins. [NB I told him a few days ago about the pink dolphins on the Amazon].
Peter: Whale!
Matthew: Yes, there’s a pink whale. It’s swimming that way.
Peter: Baby whale!
Matthew: A baby pink whale. It’s going to swim all the way to the sea.
Peter: Whale sleep!
Matthew: No, it’s not asleep. it’s going for a swim, look. Let’s go on, let’s go that way and look for monkeys.
Peter [waving]: Bye-bye, whale.

Waiting at the bus stop with Matthew:
(Me, checking the electronic “tracking” service): It says the bus will come in ten minutes.
A pause.
(Matthew): Mummy, are minutes long or short?
Um… It depends.
(Another pause).
Mummy, are bus minutes long or short?

(At some point later, me): It’s five o’clock already.
(Matthew): Why are the days long in the summer?
Er, it’s because of where the earth is on its way round the sun.
But I can’t feel me going round. It feels like the earth stays still.

Peter now sleeps in a bed. We’re very pleased with the bed we ordered (taking a risk because we hadn’t seen it). The mattress was perfect for bouncing on while on the floor, but rather too fat to put on a toddler’s bed; so Matthew now sleeps high up, and bounces higher up, on the new mattress. Peter, unlike Matthew when he first had a bed, hasn’t developed a tendency to climb out of the bed and sleep on the floor. He hasn’t fallen out of bed yet, either. Actually, he seems only just now to be realising that if he wakes up in a bed he doesn’t have to stay in it until a grown-up arrives to get him up.

Stop there. I don’t really want to remember May 1997, although I can’t help doing so. Too cruel in the current political situation.

But on the home front, things do in fact get better (and as a result it is hard to be gloomy about anything; in part of my head at least, Parliament can go hang). I cannot convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, because I could not have imagined it myself in advance, what it’s like to watch a child who has been ill for a long time, getting better. When he went into hospital, he was hardly walking. A few days ago he climbed the stairs unaided. Yesterday he “bumped” down the stairs on his bottom unaided. Today he ran after Matthew, giggling.

Meanwhile, he’s still fascinated by babies (Hello baby! Baby hat! Baby card’gan! Baby happy…); he plays at going to bed and getting up, a lot, both for himself and with his toys (Bedtime, night-night, sleep, ssshh. Morning! Noisy cockerel, cock-a-doodle-doo. Story! [at which point Mummy has to read a few pages of something, usually The Gruffalo again]); and we have decided to take the hint and have ordered a bed for him. I can’t, on some level, believe that Peter is old enough for a bed. But the evidence is mounting.

Matthew is very interested in apes and monkeys, and in how to make anything and everything (if anyone can give me a four-year-old-friendly explanation of how bees make nectar into honey, I’ll be most grateful).

A week and a bit into gluten-free Peter, and the Peter we know is coming back, gradually. He still looks, and clearly feels, somewhat fragile. He eats quite copiously but very selectively (choosing one or two food items per meal and eating large amounts of just those), and still seems to mistrust bread, cakes and biscuits. We are trying to hasten his recovery by feeding him Strengthening Medicine, like Roo (except that Roo had Extract of Malt, which presumably isn’t coeliac-friendly; Peter has Sanatogen powder). So the new diversion from figuring out how to keep gluten away from Peter is figuring out how to smuggle a flavourless white powder (which unfortunately doesn’t dissolve, so changes the consistency of everything) into his food without him noticing. Perhaps stirring it into the chocolate icing was unnecessary, but it worked.

I started a new blog called good-enough food, so that I don’t have to go on about gluten-free (etc) on this blog.

We eventually emerged from the LGI yesterday, blinking into the spring sunshine, with Peter and a diagnosis: coeliac disease.

This does not mean that Peter is better. In fact, strictly speaking I suppose you could say he’ll never get better, because coeliac disease is incurable. On the other hand, the expectation is that if we eliminate gluten from his diet his symptoms will disappear before too long, and stay disappeared for as long as he stays off the gluten.

Eliminating gluten is pretty easy at the moment, because all he seems to want to eat is potato and baked beans. And cream. Somebody is now going to tell me that this in fact constitutes a perfectly balanced diet.

Apologies to the few people who read the blog and don’t either see facebook updates or receive family emails… but I can’t really be bothered to tell the whole story of how Peter, and hence also I, ended up in the Leeds General Infirmary for three nights so far, undergoing a battery of interesting medical tests in a (so far unsuccessful, but there are various test results outstanding) quest to work out what is wrong with him.

He is (obviously) quite ill, and quite tired, and quite stressed about being in the wrong place, and very strongly opposed to any medical procedure that cannot be undertaken while he is being held by one of his parents. (If a parent is holding him, there’s no problem). But he is still himself.

He says a very polite “bye-bye, later” to everyone, including the people who have held him down on a very large machine that makes scary noises, and/or forced barium-laced milkshakes down his throat. He is very, very interested in the babies on the ward, and attempts to prescribe remedies for their problems: “Baby sad. Baby milk? Baby juice? Baby sleep, sshhh”. He is upset when Daddy goes away, and feels the need to check frequently on Daddy and Matthew’s whereabouts: “Daddy work? Daddy home, sleep? Matthew? Dra-gon-flies [this being the name of Matthew's new nursery group]“.

He is not in a fit state to run or walk around, and he sits a lot. I think I can confidently say that I’ve watched more children’s TV, per day, than ever before in my life (it helps that we didn’t have a TV when I was a child). Peter provides a running commentary, which is helpful for me, because much children’s TV seems to make most sense if you are under three. (Plus he knows, or thinks he knows, the names of some of the more obscure Thomas engines – which all look the same to me). His favourite thing, however, is being pushed round the hospital in his buggy. We pace corridor after corridor and he perks up as he notices now-familiar landmarks: “Hose. Lift. Funny chair. Bed, wheels”.

Unfortunately, as a result of his experiences so far he has started to distrust people in hospital uniform, and tends to scream whenever one of them makes a sudden move. This is understandable.