‘Reasons my Son is Crying’ makes me want to cry a little.

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Jen Watkiss

Everyone loves the Reasons my Son is Crying tumblr.

Everyone, except me.

I am not usually such a curmudgeon about such things. I am the first to admit that kids, especially kids around 2-years-old (like the one in the tumblr seems to be), are hilarious, illogical, pains in the arse.

My favourite episode of Isaac’s hilariously irrational wailing came when he broke a biscuit in half, had a grand meltdown about the fact that it could not be put back together, then the second he got over that, started up again because his tears and snot had so saturated the damn thing it was disintegrating. Ridiculous.

But people, being two is hard. Kids are just developing a sense of the world around them. It is huge, both in scope and in scale, and they don’t understand the rules of how anything works. The touchstones they arbitrarily choose to rely on for security end up being not so reliable. They also doesn’t understand their own emotions, or why they are suddenly full of rage or fear (and so being afraid of their own crazy brains, without the benefit of much self-awareness), compounding the issue.

And instead of helping his kid navigate two-years-old, this dad is stopping to take a picture, so he can put it up for people to laugh at. And that just doesn’t sit right with me.

Part of this comes with our current experiences with Isaac: the most notable parts of his day, the times he wants to tell us about, are the times he was sad.

It’s not that he’s sad particularly often – it’s actually pretty rare. So rare, in fact, that he will manufacture sadness, just so he has something to talk about. Example: he is perfectly fine, but will suddenly throw himself on the floor, wail for a few minutes, then get up again – totally fine – and proudly declare ‘I was sad on the floor, mummy!’

He re-enacts sad events that happened (the time he fell on his face and cut his lip), and picks up on all the frowning or crying characters in his picture books.

It’s pretty obvious that ‘Sad’ is just the emotion he’s most confident in identifying, so he wants to share his understanding. Sortof like when he figured out colours, and everything was ‘Blue!’ (his first colour) for a while.

Still, just like we made an effort to point out all the not-blue things to expand Isaac’s colour repetoire, we’re now talking more about the other emotions. So while it’s ok to be sad, and natural to cry sometimes, it’s also good to be happy, surprised, excited, nervous, etc.

Because how sad is it, to think about being sad all the time? To have all the attention paid to your most troublesome and traumatic moments?

I know, sometimes there are unintentionally hilarious side effects of kids’ experiences figuring out the world, but just like I wouldn’t want someone to focus on my worst moments, when I’m out of my element and flailing, I don’t think it’s particularly funny, or kind, to do that to someone else. No matter how old or young they may be.

Cheeseballs making cheese faces

Two!

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Jen Watkiss

I can’t really believe Isaac’s two today!

It was a little over a year ago we got the news and decided to move to the UK, and he has really taken this crazy year in stride. He’s grown from a barely-mobile baby with cake in his hair, to a real boy – running, yelling, jumping, smashing. “Making lots of noise” and narrating the entire experience.

Isaac, you are insane, brilliant, patience-testing, kind, tenacious, infuriating, empathetic, mischievous, articulate, and so lovey. Happy Birthday kiddo, here’s to seeing what adventure the next trip around the sun brings!

It’s my birthday! I am 2 today! Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh vine.co/v/bXr9nzvKhqJ

— Jen Watkiss (@Jen_Watkiss) March 1, 2013

At the stroke of midnight…

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Jen Watkiss

Someone turned into a pumpkin!

Happy Halloween!

The Friendly Skies – 4 tips for flying RyanAir with a lap infant

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Jen Watkiss

We just got back from a few days visiting friends in Stockholm, which was also our first experience with RyanAir.

Photo by Mikelo on Flickr

We’ve flown other discount carriers before, but RyanAir is often held up as the example of how much discount carriers can nickel-and-dime travellers, and exactly how deep the race to the bottom has gone.

RyanAir is known for being exceedingly tight-fisted across the aviation industry. We were chatting with a check-in agent on a different trip about our (heavy) luggage and he dropped into the conversation that “hey, we’re not RyanAir here, our parents are married.”

So to say I was a bit nervous about how we’d fare on this trip was an understatement.

Turns out that if you channel that nervous energy into checking and re-checking the conditions of carriage, and have exactly no expectations about any standard of service, you might just be pleasantly surprised!

There are a few things you need to know about how RyanAir operates that are likely a bit different from some other airlines. These can be especially frustrating for frequent travellers, who are used to their routines and like to arrive as late as possible to spend as little time waiting around as you can (I am totally one of those people). So your first tip is to arrive early. No seriously, I mean it.

RyanAir closes their bag-drop, passport-verification and check-in desks 40 minutes before flight times. They make this fact well-known. But they don’t tell you they also have a skeleton staff checking people in for flights (fewer employees means lower fares!), so if you need to get to the desk before your flight, you should count on an additional 30 minutes (at least) of line-up time. And unless you are an EU citizen, checking no bags, you need to visit one of those desks. We definitely needed the line-up, since Isaac and I had to have our passports verified, and we had to get a luggage tag for our gate-checked stroller (the one and only (and appreciated!) freebie) as well as check-in the travel cot we’d paid for.

And here’s where I give you tip the second about traveling with an infant on RyanAir: check a travel cot. Cabin baggage restrictions are stringent (one piece only, max 55cm x 40cm x 20cm and 10kg). Any personal items (laptop, camera, handbag) must fit inside that one piece. Infants get no cabin baggage allowance, and it’s expensive to purchase checked baggage (£25-£40 per direction).

But! If you are traveling with an infant you can purchase a checked travel cot for £10 each direction, and it can be up to 20kg. We managed to roll Isaac’s fleecy blanket, some jeans and sweaters of our own, and a bunch of diapers up inside the thing while it was all folded down and bagged up to squeeze those few extra items onto the flight.

Photo by bigpresh on Flickr

Boarding is also a special experience.

Like other discount carriers, RyanAir employs a “general admission” process. Queue up, and pick a seat once you’re on board. There is no special treatment for those traveling with babies. If that happens to be you, here’s tip the third: pay for priority boarding. The cost is negligible (usually about £5 per direction), but it puts you up a the front when it comes time to board.

When going with a tiny human, you’ll find the extra cost totally worth it as you can store your cabin baggage nearby and find a block of seats with your party (the last to board generally end up split up over an assortment of single seats). You can pay £20 for reserved seats, but the priority boarding is really totally adequate.

So! You’re on the plane, adjusting to the bright yellow and assortment of public-transit-esque ads, and ready to go! Just make sure that if you have timed your flight so your tiny-human might sleep, you employ the fourth tip: have a setup prepared to block out some noise and sound for your baby.

Another way RyanAir keeps fares low is to plaster the inside of their planes with ads, and bombard you with offers to purchase things (duty free! snacks! drinks! smokeless cigarettes! lottery scratch cards! more snacks!) for the duration of your few hours with them. There is literally an effort to part you with your money every 20 minutes during the cruising time of the flight.

Photo by JayFreshUK on Flickr.

It’s not a hard sell, just a constant barrage of offers. They’re fairly easy to tune out as an adult, but not conducive to sleep for babies who are startled and/or bothered by a constant stream of announcements and carts up and down the aisles. It also means they never turn down the cabin lights while cruising. If your kid depends on some dark and/or quiet, it’s worth getting some earmuffs and/or jury-rigging some sort of tent-ish thing during the flight to try and insulate them a bit.

It also helps for those times a couple cretins and their brood of hellions who like to throw toys at each other over the seats and rile each other up into a vibrating, shrieking frenzy end up sitting a couple rows away. Not that I’d know what that’s like or anything. At least it makes your baby seem extra angelic in comparison.

Other than that, it’s hard to argue with jetting across the continent for less than it costs us to take ourselves and our car on a BC Ferries return trip from Vancouver to Nanaimo. Or less than a fancy dinner. It cost us more to park our car at the airport than one of our tickets.

Everyone loves to complain about the horrors of flying discount airlines, but it’s a compromise. And as long as you’re prepared, it’s really not much different than flying with an infant on any other carrier. Be ready to deal with longer lines, comply with the baggage restrictions, and employ a shred of the manners your mama taught you about living in polite society, and both your wanderlust and your wallet will thank you.

Baby, you can drive my car

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Jen Watkiss

First, let’s clear something up – it’s not the wrong side of the road. In fact, some would adamantly state it’s the correct side, and the other 70% of the world is wrong! But it is the other side of the road, and driving on it is the least confusing part of this whole process, if you’d believe it.

For anyone coming from North America, I highly advise getting comfortable driving a manual transmission BEFORE you head to the UK. Because thinking about everything else that’s new, and then trying to change gears without stalling or running into anything, is enough to make one’s brain explode.

So far I haven’t hit anything, but I have stalled. A lot. Though at least the prevalence of manual transmission cars here means drivers generally expect other cars (especially the ones with gigantic “L” stickers on them) to stall somewhat frequently.

The other nice thing about the traffic rules and patterns here is that they’re generally designed to keep traffic moving as much as possible. I have yet to see a stop sign. The rule at unmarked intersections (which are very common) is to “give way” (yield) to traffic on the right, or on the major road, and most major intersections are controlled by roundabouts rather than perpendicular stoplights.

But man, roundabouts? They are nerve-wracking. Especially for someone not particularly confident in their clutching skills. (I was going to say “they’ll be the death of me” – but I’m not confident enough to even joke about that yet.) In my nightmares I see a wee gap in traffic, think I can go, start to move off, and then I stall, and I’ve bunny-hopped into the middle lanes of a roundabout, and I’m blocking traffic and I get plowed-down by a double-decker bus.

Needless to say, the few times I’ve driven without the instructor I’ve planned my routes around lots of left turns and as much roundabout avoidance as I can find. Hopefully after a few more lessons, and some more practice in light traffic I’ll be feeling more confident.

And, somewhat related to driving, the transport of the tiny human in our car has been interesting as well.

Our Canadian car seat is, of course, not approved for use in the UK/EU. I was (and still am, really) convinced this is a total racket; just as US car seats aren’t approved for use in Canada (or elsewhere in the world), and Canadian seats also aren’t approved for use in the US. I can’t believe crash data is so drastically different across continents that the device would implode upon itself in a crash if it somehow realized it wasn’t in its home country.

Better safe than sorry (at least, insurance-wise), so we did replace the car seat. And I have to say, because ISOFIX came in as a standard in the UK only fairly recently, seats here are FAR better designed to be installed with a seatbelt than anything I’ve seen in Canada. No belt-locking clips to fuss with, and multiple guides and tension-points. Our UK seat (the MaxiCosi Tobi) fits far better in our car here than the Canadian one did. In fact, stores and manufacturers here provide a lot of guidance on which seats work best in which cars. It also makes me feel a lot better about putting Isaac in a forward-facing car seat now (In Canada, Isaac’s recommended to remain rear-facing for another 6-8 months).

But I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing so many car seats in the front seats of cars. Even when I was smaller (and out of a booster seat), I remember the rules being very obvious about no carseats or booster seats in the front, and even after that, “the back seat is the safest place for a child.” And this is long before airbags came into the picture. Now, it’s part of the driving theory test in the UK to learn that “before you put your childseat in the front seat, you need to remember to turn off the front passenger airbag.” Seriously?

I’m trying not to be a typical ExPat who attempts to recreate as much of their home-country experience as possible when abroad, but in this case, I’m keeping my kid in the back seat. Especially since the back passenger side of the car is furthest away from the buses I’m convinced are going to hit me in the roundabouts.