Blog goes pop!

I've planned, and discarded, lots of blog posts over the past few months. Thoughts come into my head but by the time they are half formed, or even half written, I've moved on. One of these was a list of things parents of young children do. You know the type of list, the ones that do the social media rounds frequently. Things like Fifty ways you know you were at school in the eighties or If you recognise these logos you were a student in the nineties etc. 

I only got to two things on my list before moving on:

Things parents of young children do

1. Start a parenting blog

2. Give up the parenting blog

The thoughts though, they're like bubbles. And I've written before about how important bubbles are in childhood. They are there one moment, beautifully formed, ready to be caught, and before you know it - pop - they're gone. 

Bubbles are quite a useful metaphor for many things, or so I thought. Last year my then two year old started to ask about death. There were sunflowers in a nearby front garden, dying, and she asked daily about them (daily, ha!, no toddler asks daily. She asked at least hourly, often more), and where they go, and started to use words associated with dying.

I tried to use the bubble metaphor. Bubbles, I told her, have a beautiful, but short life. You don't know when they will pop, but they will, and that's okay it's what bubbles do. They go on a journey, up and down on currents of air, and then their journey is over. 

Yeah I know, I was sleep addled. With literary pretensions, A dangerous combination.

There's a scene in Peppa Pig (which I have also written about before) in which Daddy Pig, asked how they work by Peppa, tries to explain about magic mirrors at the fairground and how concave and convex glass reflect light differently. "Do you mean it's magic?" says Peppa. 

That's what my daughter, quite rightly, did to me, when faced with the whole bubbles going on a journey bollocks. "Do you mean they go pop?"

I did mean that. Except, of course, the ones that go splat, like this post, which is not going anywhere at all really, other than it has been posted, which is more than most of my posts have been this year. 

Which brings me to a third item for my list:

Things parents of young children do

3. Restart the parenting blog

Pop!


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Actually this is the second post of the restart. The first can be found by clicking here.

The magical impenetrable world of brothers

I've just had news of friends' new baby boy, their second. I know I wrote recently about how much I wanted a girl but it is true also that my heart swells when I hear news of a new set of brothers. There is something romantic and wonderful about brothers. They can destroy each other (think Cain and Abel, think David and Ed) but they can be the making of each other too. If I were into quoting Bette Midler I'd say that they were the wind beneath each other's wings. Sod it, I'll say it. When brotherhood works it's as if they are the wind beneath each other's wings. It's why, although I am proud to be a Labour Party supporter, I cannot feel easy about having Ed Milband as leader of the party. Whatever your relationship with your brother is like, however much you think you can do better than them, you do not stand against them for a job. When Ed Miliband uses standing against his brother as an example of having shown courage I think no actually, it's a moral failing that you did so.

When I hear of a second son being born, I think of this line from an incredibly moving article by Simon Stephenson that I read in The Guardian in July, about the death of his brother Dominic in the Asian tsunami:

"To have any brother in this world is to be part of an exclusive club to which no riches, no secret handshake, no guest list can ever gain you admittance."

And it makes me hope that I have two boys in the future. 


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I've not read it yet but here is Simon Stephenson's book, Let Not the Waves of the Sea. 



And here is another very moving book about losing, and searching for, a brother. It's called The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky and is by Ken Dornstein whose brother died in the Lockerbie air disaster. 



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Related post: Am I a SMOG?