It’s all a very steep learning curve for me, this parenthood thing. One minute I think I’m doing ok, and the next minute I’m yelling at my son at the top of my voice and realise how awful I sound and how unproductive it is. It must be so much easier for two parents so that one knows the other can take over at some stage.
Anyway, Jaycee Junior has taken to saying, ‘I’m hungry,’ quite a lot, to the point that it made me think he wasn’t actually really hungry. He has four weetbix for breakfast just about every morning and when he doesn’t devour four weetbix, he will have some toast and porridge. He was getting in a habit of saying ‘I’m hungry’ about ten minutes after breakfast so I’d let him eat an apple. I’m surprised it took me so long to cotton on that the I’m hungry thing was just an attention grabber. He is a good eater so I just thought he was going through a growth spurt. We went away for the weekend and my friend said that his ‘I’m hungry’ was just an attention grabber and what a good way of doing it. It got to the stage over the weekend that he would say I’m hungry and I’d just say ‘Oh are you?’ then he’d go off and do something and forget about it. I think he now knows that I’m on to his ‘I’m hungry’ and I wonder what he will come up with next. So to remember for the next thing, which I hope is not ‘I need to do a poo’ as that cannot be ignored either, not to get sucked in to the attention grabbing thing.
Oh, and a warning about supermarket trolleys. We went grocery shopping last night and while we were at the checkout waiting for the Austrian students to go through and the checkout woman to give him a list of must see places, I had started to unpack the trolley and Jaycee Junior was running amok behind me, then I heard this almighty bang. I turned around and Jaycee Junior was on the floor with the trolley on top of him. Of course as a responsible parent I would not have let him do this to have fun but these things happen so quickly that it was unpreventable. I gave him a hug as he screamed the place down and he only had a small graze on his leg where the trolley landed on top of him. I used to be really paranoid about going shopping and my son yelling the place down but it’s amazing how quickly one can adapt.
