Daddy's Birthday Present (Part 1)

Things didn't exactly start well after we left the train. A week or so before our trip we realised that taxis licensed by Durham City were not obliged to provide car seats for their toddler-aged passengers. (Shocking!) Little Miss would have to sit on our laps if we decided to take a taxi. (Gasp!) Being Good Parents, we didn't want to risk our daughter's life for the sake of a five minute taxi trip. (Very Wise!)

So Mrs K got into a taxi with the luggage, leaving the rest of us to walk. The taxi driver gamely tried to describe the way to our hotel. Unfortunately my eyes had glazed over long before he had even said the words 'Walk down the hill and take the first left...' No matter, I thought. I've lived here five years. I know this place. I'll find the hotel. Mrs K waved from the taxi, and then we were alone.

Little Miss did not like this one bit. It was pitiful. Her big round eyes filled with water and she yelled in her most plaintive voice 'MUMMY! GONE!' half a dozen times. The waiting taxi drivers glared at the Bad Daddy in front of them. Bad, Nasty Daddy then tried to reassure Poor Little Miss that we would see her Mummy again soon. 'MUMMY! GONE!' she continued to yell. Bad, Nasty and Evil Daddy then started walking down the hill to the city centre with Poor, Woe-begotten Little Miss wailing from the comfort of her pushchair. Meanwhile the taxi drivers were still sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches. A lucky escape, I think.

Now the damnedest thing about living in a place for any period of time and then coming back to it many years later is that everything looks familiar but all the buildings have somehow switched places. Within five minutes we were standing in an oddly familiar yet unfamiliar high street with no idea where we were going. I asked a couple of locals for directions. No-one I spoke to had any idea where to find the hotel.

And could we find somewhere that could sell us an A-Z? What do you think?

Ten minutes later we lost our Durham taxi cherry. And for some bizarre reason, every single person we met after this time knew exactly where to find our hotel and every single shop we went into sold street maps of Durham.

Spooky.

****************

I loved Durham as a student. I still do. Bill Bryson summed it up best:

Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.

At the risk of sounding like a stooge of the Durham City Tourist Board, I have to agree with our Bill. It is a beautiful, historic place and I would recommend anyone older than Little Miss to make a visit. Better still, you could do a degree there and really get to know the place. The University is pretty good by all accounts. Including mine. Ahem.

(Hopefully that will help my case when the Chancellorship at the University becomes available again. Being nice about the place certainly didn't hurt Bill's chances.)

Now imagine this idyll from Little Miss K's perspective.

1) It's Cold
Compared to sub-tropical Hampshire, Durham is practically in the Arctic Circle. From mid-October to April, you simply have to wear a thick coat, a woolly hat and gloves. Some of the braver locals and students are still running around in short sleeved t-shirts well into November, but us lesser mortals need to wrap up warm.

2) It's Hilly
Durham is very, very hilly. It's not a place you'd want to live if you are only 80cm tall and have only been walking for just over ten months. More pertinently, your hotel is on the side of one of the steepest hills in the city. To go back to the hotel you need to walk up this hill, get a ride on the Daddy Express (a.k.a. the pushchair) or whine and whine until your poor parents are practically in tears and they hail a taxicab. The driver of which will then moan that 'It's not that far, love. Can't you walk?'

3) There's Nothing To Do (Bar The Ducks)
Your historic castles and cathedrals mean nothing to your average toddler. Is there a soft play area in the City Centre? No. Are there any parks with swings and slides? No. Would your parents allow you to play outside in the freezing rain and howling wind if there were? No. Are there any hungry water fowl that need feeding / harassing? Yes. H'mmm. Good thing there are two bakeries close to the river then.

4) You’ll Have To Walk
Your parents thought that they could hire a car with an appropriate car seat for you. They thought wrong. Silly parents.

5) It’s Not Like Home
For five days your loving parents are going to take you away from 99% of your toys, 95% of your books and your comfy bed. You will have to share a room with your parents (or, more acutely, your parents will have to share a room with you...). The television in the hotel room does not, repeat does not, have the CBeebies channel and your parents have 'forgot' your Teletubbies DVDs. So that means no CBeebies, no Teletubbies, no Tweenies and no Josie Jump.

For five whole days.

If Little Miss had known what we had planned we would have had a mutiny on our hands.

Thinking about it, we did have one.

It lasted five whole days.

The Train

11.05 am, 26th October 2006.
Carriage C of the 8.47am train from Basingstoke to Durham.

'Beebies Stickers!'
'Sorry my love, you've used all of them. What about those car stickers?'
'No?'
'Or perhaps the ones with the butterflies on them.'
'No?'
'Why don't we draw a picture?'
'No?'
'Alright. Let's read a book'.

Silence. Ladies and gentlemen, we may have a winner.

'How about 'Baa Moo, What Will We Do'?'
'No?'
'Elmer?'
'No?'
'I know, 'Aaaaaargghhh, Spider'.'

Silence. Finally. We've found something she wants to do.

'It's really lonely being a spider. I want to be a family pet. This family's pet...'
'DOWN!'

Little Miss wrestles herself free and makes a break for the carriage exit, with her Daddy in close pursuit.

How did we find ourselves in this predicament?

My birthday was almost two months ago. After struggling to find me something for several weeks, Mrs Koinuchan had a brilliant idea. We should go on a little nostalgia trip back to Durham. I was a lowly post-graduate student at Durham University when we met, and she thought that seeing all our old haunts would be a pleasant and fun thing to do. We could pretend that we were still young and carefree (albeit with a two year old in tow). We could have delicious pub grub in the Court Inn, walk along the river, feed the ducks and be like we were Back In The Day.

Getting to Durham posed a problem. Should we fly? This would involve getting to Heathrow (train? taxi?), getting though check-in, boarding a plane, flying to Newcastle, catching a train down to Durham and then catching a taxi to our hotel. This might be feasible when you are a young, energetic student; it is utterly daunting when you are on a journey with the most reluctant traveller ever to grace this planet.

If taking the plane is not a possibility, why not drive? It is 281 miles between our house in Basingstoke and our hotel in Durham. Assuming that our average journey speed would be about 55 miles an hour (allowing for traffic) that means that I would have to listen to Josie Jump asking us to 'jump a little higher' approximately eighty-four times door to door. I'd rather gnaw my left leg off.

National Express? See above, minus the in car entertainment and with considerably less leg room. My right leg would be a goner too.

Since teleportation is an appealing but scientifically impossible option, this left The Train. It didn't seem such a bad idea. Little Miss would have plenty of room to wander around and we would be able to book a seat with a table, allowing her to play with her stickers and do some drawing. She even seemed excited by the idea when we were waiting on platform 4 of Basingstoke railway station.

The true nature of our situation only became apparent one and half hours into the six hour journey. This was when Little Miss realised that we had a limited number of stickers and apparently none of her favourite picture books. (This preferred reading list changes hour to hour and will never include anything that you might have brought). This was compounded by the problem of finding her something to eat from the cornucopia of culinary delights available in the buffet car. Difficult enough when you are a hungry, unfussy adult; damn near impossible when you are a picky toddler.

By the time we got to Leeds, we had reached crisis point. The train was running half an hour late. Little Miss was supposed to have started her afternoon nap two hours ago. She had eaten the fruit bars, bread sticks and apples we had brought for her. Our sandwiches were deemed inedible due to their minimal cheese content. Polly (her rag doll) had been consigned to Daddy's rucksack. The grandmotherly type that Little Miss K had charmed three hours ago was now looking murderously at her and her parents. It was time for drastic action...

It's a little known fact outside of parenting circles, but mummies have mystical and wonderful super powers. For example, a mother can calm their screaming child to sleep just by holding them close to their breast. I've tried it, but I always end up with a mild case of tinnitus and an angrier and more miserable child than when I started. Mrs K can achieve the impossible within three minutes flat.

Mrs K did her thing and Little Miss fell asleep. The silence was wonderful. No, more than that. It was beyond superlatives. The half-deafened denizens of the carriage went back to their sudoku and crosswords. I slept; Mrs K read.

As we pulled into Durham, Little Miss' eyes popped open and she started to grin.

'Bye bye, train. All done!' she giggled. And she scuttled off after her mother.

Jane

Driving has just become that little bit less stressful because we have a new toy for the car. It might just save our marriage too.

Let me explain. The Koinuchans generally get on very well with each other. We have fun and enjoy each other's company. As soon as we step into a car together everything changes. I'm usually the designated driver. Mrs K map reads. Little Miss K heckles from the back, demanding Josie Jump. I try to drive as carefully as I can. Mrs K frets that a) I am not driving carefully enough, b) there are too many dangerous drivers about and c) I am not listening closely enough to her directions. Little Miss K continues heckling.

Then we get lost. I'm stressed because I don't know where we're going. Mrs K is stressed because she doesn't know where we are mostly because I wasn't listening to her closely enough. Little Miss continues heckling. At this point I usually ask Mrs K if she would like to drive. She refuses, knowing that with my dreadful sense of direction we'd get even more lost and we'd stay that way. She knows that with my map directions the burnt wreckage of our car would be discovered six months later in some obscure corner of the Hampshire countryside. So we continue bickering until the road sign for the B36713 looms over the horizon and we realise that we were twenty miles off course. ...And at that precise moment, Little Miss decides to fill her nappy.

This, simply, Would Not Do.

Our saviour arrived after a particularly miserable journey when Mrs K got lost on the way back from a play date. I was at work, but by the sound of things my wife had made a couple of unexpected detours down untarmacked bridleways. At this point, we decided that enough was enough and we bought a TomTom GPS.

Car journeys have never been the same since. At the start of the journey we enter the postcode of our destination, press the 'Done' button and we simply follow the instructions. No stress. No bickering. No interruptions to Josie Jump. I've almost come to regard Jane, the Tom Tom's female voice, as a close personal friend. When Jane's in charge nothing can go wrong.

Last weekend, the three of us plus Nonna and Yaya went out to have a pub lunch. I pulled out of our drive. Jane told me to 'Turn Right'. Little Miss then told me to 'Turn Right' with precisely the same intonation. Jane then told me to 'Turn Left'. Little Miss concurred. Jane then told me to take the first exit on the roundabout. Little Miss started yelling 'TURN LEFT! TURN LEFT!' as if her life depended on it. And she was right. So I turned left.

An idea popped into my head. You can customise the sound samples on the Tom Tom to your own - or anyone else's - voice. Wouldn't it be fun to get Little Miss K to give directions? Just imagine, you're driving along then a little squeaky voice announces 'Laa Laa, Po, painting bwed stick' and you'd know that up ahead is roundabout and you need to take the third exit.

Other images materialised in my deluded brain. Me and Mrs K arguing whether than 'bwed stick' meant the second or third exit. Little Miss K heckling her own voice and giving us misleading directions. The nightmare of taking colleagues to an important customer meeting, being forced to rely on the TomTom, and then being two hours late and having to explain why. The TomTom having an 'unfortunate accident' and trying to use our rudimentary map reading skills again.

Jane, we love you. Please, never leave us!

The Casserole

The time? 5.30pm
The place? Castle Koinuchan
The occasion? Daddy has just arrived home from work.

...And Little Miss K is hungry.

For the past week or so Little Miss' Nonna and Yaya - her maternal grandmother and great grandmother respectively - have been staying with us. My wife's family are, without exception, good cooks. As you can imagine, getting home and finding something delicious waiting for dinner has made even the most mediocre of work days bearable.

Nonna and Yaya had spent the afternoon cooking, so the kitchen counter was laden with plastic boxes full of home made tomato sauce and minestrone. And tonight's meal is one of my favourites - beef and veggie casserole. Little Miss loved this dish when she first started eating solids. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to introduce her to new and exciting food concepts such as 'carrots', 'green beans' and 'broccoli', dinner now means 'pasta'. If not 'pasta', then dinner must mean 'meat with mashed potato and veg' or perhaps 'rice with carefully disguised meat and veg in it' on a good day. Frustratingly casseroles are simply not on her culinary radar despite plenty of persistence from us.

Whether dinner can be ever be made ready in time for Little Miss is a moot point. She can go from 'I'm not hungry - why are you messing around in the kitchen instead of playing with me?' to 'I want a bread stick!' to 'You better get my dinner on the table now, or there will be trouble!' in the space of just two minutes. We know that she has reached the last stage when she starts trying to climb into her high chair wailing 'CHAAAIIIIIR!' in an insistent and frankly distressing manner.

As soon as I manage to get her bib on and her hands washed, her Mamma comes over with her meal. 'PASTA!' Little Miss exclaims excitedly with an enormous relieved grin. She looks at her dinner. 'NO PASTA!' she wails. 'YOGURT! NOW!'

We really have to do something about her manners.

'No, my love,' I patiently explain. 'This is a yummy stew that Nonna has made for you.' Her little face goes red, then develops an expression of utter contempt. 'OK, Pasta,' she calmly but firmly states. 'Try it, you'll like it,' I counter. 'Here, have a spoon.' Little Miss picks up her spoon and starts to prod her casserole with an air of fatalism. Her parents join her with their meals. In the meantime Nonna starts filling the kettle. Little Miss will get her casserole by fair means or foul.

Five minutes and half a dozen molecules of casserole later, Little Miss puts down her spoon and yells 'All done! OK, yogurt! Cheese! PLUM!'. 'No, try some more,' I reply. Little Miss looks avariciously at my plate. 'MMMMMM! CARROTS!' she announces, conveniently forgetting that there are carrots in front of her already. Then she notices my cabbage. 'WANT LETTUCE!' she adds. I put a little of each from my plate onto hers in the vain hope that she might prefer Daddy Carrots to Little Miss K Carrots. More half hearted veggie prodding ensues.

Not a moment too soon, Nonna announces that Little Miss K's pasta is ready. She whips her granddaughter's plate away, blasts the remaining food in a liquidiser, then adds the puree to the freshly cooked pasta, sprinkles parmesan cheese on top and returns Little Miss' plate to her. Little Miss greets this new development with great enthusiasm. 'PASTA! Mmmmm OK, Pasta!'.

She eats everything. All of her casserole, plus the 60g of pasta her Nonna had cooked for her. She then burps once with great gusto.

We really, really need to do something about her table manners.

Nudie Rudie

This is likely to get a bit fluffy in places. You have been warned.

While Mrs Koinuchan was expecting we read lots of books about child rearing. We were hoping that they might prove useful once our sproglette had made her grand appearance. On the whole, they haven't. For some reason the most important lesson - do what works for you, not what some self appointed childcare guru suggests - wasn't covered in any of them. Probably a bit of a downer on their book sales I guess. Anyway, one they all agreed upon was that a good bedtime routine was vital at the end of the day. In summary: get your little darling used to a certain way of doing things and they will willingly go to bed.

Hey, it works for us. In her routine, she’s not allowed to watch television after 6pm. Dancing to Josie Jump with her Daddy, on the other hand, is mandatory. By 7.30pm Little Miss knows that her 'Bah Time' is imminent. All her Mamma needs to do is say 'Bathtime!' and she will scuttle up the stairs without a single word of complaint. She knows that her Daddy is ready and waiting with her bath run, her towel and changing mat ready and a clean vest, nappy and pyjamas waiting for afterwards. And afterwards, her Mamma will clean her teeth and give her a bottle of Happy Cow milk.

Bathtime is a little bit of bittersweet Daddy/Little Miss K quality time. On a good day, we get Nudie Rudie - her playful and rather under clothed secret identity. For some reason, seeing my toddler daughter on a nudie rampage is incredibly funny; effectively a curly haired, giggly tummy on matchstick legs. And judging by her reaction to her reflection in our bedroom mirror, she must think it is pretty hilarious too. When she is in the bath we sing about winding bobbins, play tickle with her Moo wash mitten and squirt each other with her bath toys. Dressing her is still akin to trying to get a wet suit on an espresso fuelled octopus, but I do get a huge heartfelt cuddle and a sloppy kiss afterwards. On a bad day, she just continuously yells The Dreaded Almighty 'OUT!' and her bottle simply can't come quickly enough.

To say that Little Miss K has had a mixed relationship with water is an understatement. When she was roughly seven months old, she had a course of lessons at a local swimming pool. Since her Mamma had been a pesciolino (little fish) and had learnt how to swim at an early age, it seemed a fun thing to do. Ermmm... No. Remember Little Miss' reaction to nurses? It turns out that large expanses of water aren't her thing either. The instructor didn't help. If you ever want to hear a lead-footed rendition of 'Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush' with all the joie de vivre of a mummified stoat I know precisely where to send you.

'What about the seaside?' I hear you cry. 'All kids love the seaside...' Sadly, the one time that Little Miss has been to the seaside was less than a qualified success. Little Miss' Nonna lives in Palermo, Sicily. Amongst other things, this region of Italy is famous for its beautiful seaside - it has warm sunshine, clear water, lots of fish and a distinct lack of Kiss Me Quick hats and Little & Large variety shows. An ideal, gentle introduction to joys of the seaside you might think... We have photographic evidence of a ten month old Little Miss K before and after her first experience with the briny. The before picture shows a curious proto-toddler with her Mamma looking at the water, little feet dangling six inches above the gently lapping waves. The after picture shows the same child with her legs folded up under her bottom, yelling at her Mamma. Luckily Little Miss cheered up when she tried her first chocolate ice cream later that afternoon.

Bath times (getting back to my original topic) used to be stressful too. They were a necessary activity, but not one to be savoured. At one point we considered using a sheep dip, but there weren't any readily available on eBay. Anyway, we realised something important the evening after the seaside trauma. To wit: Little Miss wants to do things her way or not at all. Put Little Miss in her bath on her back and she will yell at you. Allow her to sit on her haunches, just like she does when she is playing, she will happily sit in the bath long enough to make washing her almost pleasant.

In other words let her think she has got her own way, even if she hasn't. This little nugget has been more useful to us than anything written by, say, Gina Ford or Tracy Hogg.

There. I've just saved you a few quid.