Jake's new playroom

We're nearly there. After almost two and a half years of wanting a new kitchen, it's almost finished. These things always take longer than you think but, genuinely I now think we're at most, a week away from properly living back in the house and enjoying the new room. Most of the kitchen is fitted and will be completed on Friday when the new boiler is fitted so we can move back in on Saturday and get cleaning and putting away. I think the most important part of the project is at the back of the kitchen (which used to be the bathroom), where it widens out to around 9 feet by 6 feet. This is not a large space but it means that the kitchen can be a place for people to be in without being in the way of whoever is cooking or washing. It's also a place for all Jake's toys and in theory, somewhere he can play with them as well. This basically gives us back a large corner of our lounge so that we can do that room up nicely knowing that it won't be a dumping ground for brightly coloured plastic and wooden toys as well as the rainforest's worth of books.

The builders are part of a firm my father is a partner in and as such, it's all being done at cost price. This means that whilst it's undoubtedly the cheapest way of doing the work, I don't have a fixed price or even an estimate come to think of it. I told them my budget and heads were sort of nodded a few weeks back. I've kept everything on a spreadsheet but my original budget is bound to be broken (as they always are). We can't get cracking on the loft conversion until we know exactly what we've spent and how much we have left. At the moment I have a buffer on the kitchen budget but that buffer is also part of the loft budget. There will be no buffer on the loft budget so that will need to be costed in minute detail.

The next dilemma is that since we started doing the kitchen I got confirmation of the full planning permission to do the loft with a dorma. On a previous post I'd mentioned that the roof was a sensible option to put a single room in for Jake and a new bathroom. The dorma option is now tantalising us into perhaps making the loft into our room. The benefits of this are that we would get the benefit of the new space and would be much more likely to use the new bathroom given that it would be on the same level. It would also give the house a third double bedroom instead of being a house with two doubles and a small single. Lastly, it would mean that the spare bed goes from being in Jake's room into our current bedroom which would give Jake an enormous room for a boy of less than two years old and he could have the train set out, instead of it still being in its original packaging under his cot. Also, it means we don't need to redecorate his current bedroom. The issues with this are however, that I don't know if the dorma would make enough of a difference in size that the new bedroom would be bigger than (or even the same size as) our current bedroom and also, fundamentally, what this would do to the budget. Given that I don't even have a costing for the sensible version which doesn't breach the roof space and the lack of buffer, it could be a step too far.

Anyway, next week phase 1 will be complete and a major headache will be over just in time for the next one to begin!

More photos below

Choking

Is there anything worse? I don't think so, I hope not. It seems most days Jake will put too much bread or something a bit too crunchy in his mouth and starts a little pre-choke. The pre-choke usually clears the offending morsel, however on occasion (roughly twice a week), the choke builds to the point parental intervention is necessary. When this happens I get the same feeling every time. Blind panic. It's probably the same feeling a bomb disposal expert gets when he's just cut the wrong wire and sees the clock ticking down. It literally feels like you're the only person who can help and you must solve the problem within seconds.

During the first week of Jake's life I turned him upside down after he'd choked on a cat hair and that was probably a bit over the top, but when there's food stuck in there, you'll do everything to get to it. The trick is to try to remain calm whilst panicking madly so as not to distress the child. If they see you flap, so will they and that'll use up oxygen quicker.

It truly is the most horrible feeling as it happens in an instant. We had to turn him upside down and whack him on the back again at the weekend and it doesn't get any easier. It leaves you out of breath as the adrenaline kicks in. This probably sounds far too dramatic but it isn't.

If I could, I'd feed him on soup until his 18th birthday.

Renovations

Since November 2007, when we moved into our house we've wanted a bigger kitchen. I love our house and it's definitely the best one we looked at but I'm still amazed the size of the kitchen didn't put me off. We stretched our budget to afford location, Victorian charm and the basement I craved but it wouldn't stretch to a decent sized or specced kitchen.

Honestly, it was all of about 9 feet in length and 5 feet wide with an arch way at one end and a door at the other, further restricting its usefulness. Originally we put in plans for a large extension which would have given us a lounge area and the essential island, but doing that would have been overdeveloping the plot which is on page one of the 'how to lose money doing up your house' manual. So we decided the sensible, if less exciting, option was to make the most of the footprint of our downstairs and do the extension / renovation that the last people got so horribly wrong. I should point out that beyond the doorway at the back of the kitchen was about 25 square feet of dead space which was made up of a walk way and an airing cupboard. O.K, 25 square feet is not much but when you think how little room we had you'll appreciate that every little helps to re-coin a phrase.

So, we've ripped out the old, smashed through the wall at the end, dismantled the airing cupboard 'room', installed stud wall and turned what was the old bathroom into a downstairs cloakroom and a play area for Jake. I say this in the past tense yet technically it's not happened yet. I should say it's what we are doing, not what we have done. Anyway, work is progressing nicely and the room should be ready for the kitchen fitters to start on Monday and we 'should' be back in by the end of next week.

Then they will start the loft conversion. All in all, four weeks of disruption is not much to bear given the end result but a month of living between parents and out of a car (especially when you only have one car between you) seems to last a lot longer than say, a month spent on a beach in the Seychelles. We're lucky that our parents have the space and the inclination to put us up and grateful, but home is home all the same and we can wait to get back to clean up the mess.

Until now I always rubbished claims that babies and toddlers were expensive. We get £80odd a month from the government and that more than covers Jake's food and nappies but it's only now when I'm building a bigger kitchen so we can house his toys and then building him a room in our roof, that I realise how bloody expensive he is!

Here's some of what we're up to.

Dadda!

So, after just 18 months, my boy looked up at me and said,

"Dadda"

That was last Sunday morning as we were in bed and Clare was opening her Mother's day cards. The irony of it all!

I've been waiting patiently. Clare's mum has been repeating dadadadadadadadada for the last year or so. He's been saying mamamammamamama for ages so to finally hear him say it was awesome, if long overdue.

He went for his hearing test last week and aced it. They were also happy with his speech development and told us to keep a list on the fridge of the sounds he's making and what we think they might correspond to. Sure enough those words are starting to make sense. Narna is banana, rack-or is tractor and dadda is daddy. So he can talk and his speech is developing nicely. Ever since he sailed through the second operation, this bit is really the only thing we need to worry about regarding the cleft between now and when he goes to school and we monitor possible bullying and then when he's 8 or 9 for the last operation. So it's good he's on the right road.

Separately, I had some nice comments from a lady in Australia who'd found the blog after having had her unborn son's cleft lip diagnosed at her twenty week scan. Whether you're in Oz, Guildford or outer Mongolia you'll immediately go to the web when something like this happens to suck up as much information as possible. It also proves Google works! The longevity of this tome combined with how blogs and search engines work mean that typing in anything from '20 week scan', 'cleft lip and palate blog' or 'probable cleft palate' will usually display What Now?! somewhere near the top. I'm really glad that someone who was searching found something they could take from all of this. It sounds a bit wanky that, and if we hadn't been through all of this, then I'd take the p*ss out of anyone who said such a thing but I do remember the afternoon of our scan vividly. All we wanted was information, before and after photos, and it was all consuming; but for all the medical sites and reports available there wasn't (or at least not when we first had a look around) a personal account of the experience from start to finish. I think we'd have got something from that and I'm pleased to have been able to help in some way.

I've mentioned a couple of times the friend of a friend who emailed me photos of his boy at 18 months after both successful operations. Those were a great help and whilst I didn't know the chap, his empathy was worth so much more than the sympathy we got in spades from all the people we did know.

It's funny how whoever you are, whatever you do, life just circles on. I'm sure the guys who just read this will be passing their experiences on to others in the same situation they're in right now in 18 months' time.

All better

Good news to report that the boy is much better and back to bouncing around the place like he was before. Just a week long blip which seemed like a lot longer. Problem is now that his sleeping isn't great. And when his sleep isn't great, ours isn't either. We had a week of 4 hours' kip a night. Shushing sessions, gallons of Calpol, crossed fingers and 4am arguments. I believe, in the heat of it all, I said I was moving out the night before last.

I find myself constantly worried about going through all that again. We're at the stage where thoughts of number 2 arise. We're not 'trying' (I really hate that expression) but at some point, we will have to consider the timing of it all. I've written on here before that I think you'd always feel guilty about stopping at one child, yet you'd never feel the necessity to add a third to a brood of two; I said to a friend of mine recently that you could always have an 'accident' pregnancy 5 or 6 years after the second and he said that would be just as bad as having an only child. I've never thought of it like that, but there's 11 years between him and his brother and as far as he's concerned he felt like an only child. Maybe he isn't lumbered by some of the behavioural traits that some only children develop, mainly because he's not an only child, but he felt he missed out somehow. There was always this elder brother, but he couldn't relate to him, couldn't bond like he did with his parents. There was always too much of a gap to bridge and at every new stage of each of their lives, the other was at a different one. So, while they're not strangers, they're certainly not mates and it's no one's fault, just bad timing.

And that's the point isn't it; it's about how it affects the child, not our selfish 2.4 children, 4x4, black Labrador, suburban ideal. So, the gap needs to be enough but not too much. I also think that there's a sense of the sooner it starts, the sooner it'll be over. I.E the hell of sleep deprivation. I'm sure it's not just me but I really do think that's head and shoulders the single worst thing about parenthood. I certainly feel that I've got it in me to do it once more but then, unless I have the money for a live in night nanny, I'm done. So, I totally get why people stop at two but also wouldn't judge anyone who stopped at one. I do think you'd regret it in the long term when the memory of sleep deprivation fades.

Hopefully as his appetite gets fully back on track he'll add the extra hour and half to his sleep pattern which is currently missing and that makes all the difference to mum and dad's sanity!