Lessons in Sole Parenting

Looking after the kids by yourself is a lot like running a marathon. You sidle apprehensively up to it, not entirely sure you've got the stamina for it. Once you're doing it you just grit your teeth, eyeball the finish line and force yourself to do it through sheer bloody-mindedness. There are times when you're sure you won't make it. It's bone-dissolvingly tiring and as soon as it's over you swear you'll never do it again. You toy with the idea of never even jogging again, even when you're late for the bus. And two days after that you're enormously proud of your achievement and that insane little part of you whispers in your ear..."That wasn't too bad. I could probably do that again..."

This is not at all a criticism, a mere statement of fact, but Charles does not understand what it's like to be left alone with the kids. Since I'm breastfeeding he's never had to watch them both for more than a few hours. He has no idea what it's like to do the parenting thing solo for a whole day, let alone a weekend - no clue how awful you feel when you're on the verge of losing your temper and they say, "You're so mean Mama, I want Daddy". No idea how hurtful it can be to do your best to fill the void left by your partner and still wind up with a child sobbing "I just want Daaadddddyyy" into your shoulder come bed time. And all of that is peppered with, "Daddy would let me do it," "Actually I think I'd like to wait for Daddy to do that" and "Mama, can you make Daddy come back sooner?"

So while Charles is sympathetic, he's not really empathetic and he does tend to go away quite often*. Death metal concerts, football games, business trips, etc and good ol' yours truly gets to watch the kiddies while he's gone.

Despite having looked after them fairly recently while he went on a business trip and again while he completed my brother's buck's night, when the opportunity to go and see the AFL grand final came up I knew that if he managed to get tickets I absolutely had to find a way to get him there. I tried my hardest not to think about having to look after the kids by myself while we found a way to make it happen.

Within a few hours of getting home with them on the Friday night James was running a temperature**. He was cross with everything, lashing out with his little hands and all he wanted to do was sit on Mama and cuddle. Fresh from a day of school and sugared up from a party, all Madam wanted to do was play with her unwilling little brother all the while talking at a million miles an hour and spilling everything that came her way. Tipping them both into bed was challenging, but enabled through the use of Panadol, warm milk and stories. I myself was in bed not long after them.

Saturday was an exercise in martyrdom. James was still sick. Madam had cabin fever. There's absolutely a reason there are usually two parents. Because right around the time you feel sure the only way out is to drown them in the bath you can flick the towel at your partner and mutter "It's your turn." Of one thing I am certain - single parents deserve a bloody medal.

All Saturday it felt like I did nothing except tend to one child or the other in between trying to clean the house. Getting food, arranging drinks, cleaning up spilled drinks, ending the argument over whose drink it was, changing the television, fixing the television, explaining why we don't drink out of toilets, changing nappies, changing clothes, rescuing the dog, rescuing the cat food, rescuing the contents of the garbage bin, rescuing my son from the bathtub, explaining why we need to keep the bathroom door closed, fishing the remote control out of the toilet, explaining why we need to keep the toilet door closed, for the hundreth time, at the top of my lungs.

On Saturday afternoon my Dad landed for dinner and a bed. By this time I was completely frazzled and on the verge of screaming things like, "Why do you need to breathe so loudly anyway???" The situation was instantly improved by a fairly tired Opa antagonising the kids and mimicking them whenever they whinged. This gave me whinging in stereo. It did not improve my mood.

The thing that irks me the most about these little sojourns into the world of single parenting is that you never, ever get credit for managing to get the kids, house and pets (not to mention yourself) through to the other side in one piece. From Dad's point of view you've done your usual job with a bit less help and as far as the kids are concerned you've been a bit more on edge than usual so we'll take Daddy now that he's back, thank you so much. Daddy is the favourite, we've missed him so much and Mama's so mean because she yelled at me about something to do with the toilet door.

Lots of things hold a marriage together and in every marriage one or both of you are sure to think about leaving at least once. Most of the time there's something that makes you stay. For us that something is one simple rule. Whoever leaves the marriage has to take the kids...and the other one gets to keep the house. On weekends like this one I dream of alternatives to this arrangement and I have nasty revenge fantasies about divorce and shared custody. The lure of a week-about custody arrangement is more tempting than a Latin man who can salsa could ever be.

Despite this little rant on the darker aspects of single parenting, I did actually have a pretty good weekend. Sunday was a lot better - we made cupcakes, played and Charles came home early so we could have a late picnic lunch in the park. Having managed to clean the house on Saturday I spent the afternoon gardening and the house wound up in a better state than it's been for many months. I felt almost normal again by the time Sunday ended. I'm pleased with having made it...and swearing I'm never doing it again. At least for now.

* As far as I'm concerned.

** I may not have mentioned this but whenever Charles goes away for some reason one, or all, of us gets sick.

Customer Service WIN

Recently I have discovered a fantastic new restaurant - Zambrero. This place serves up the most amazingly fresh, tasty and HEALTHY Mexican I've ever eaten at a reasonable price and I quickly decided it would become our fall back for nights when we're not up to cooking. So on Monday night we headed down for some tasty Mexican and as we're waiting in line I felt James stiffen in my arms. When I turned to look at him he was holding a red little hand out and blinking in shock. The tears and squeals started immediately. For a second I had no idea what he'd done but it quickly became obvious that he'd reached out and grabbed the sandwich press which, when opened, came up above the glass partition.

As he started to cry I whacked his hand onto the cold bottle of Vitamin Water I was holding and he calmed down almost immediately. I kept his hand on the bottle and he seemed happy enough, so I assumed that the burn wasn't that bad and that the cool bottle had fixed things. But by the time we got home the tears had started again, and escalated, and when I finally prized his hand open under the cool water of the tap I could see blisters forming on his fingers. Unfortunately he was getting more and more distressed and we quickly made the decision to take him to the hospital.

By the time I got him there he was hysterical, his small body stiff with pain and his breath ragged and catchy in between the screaming and the huge gulps of air he was trying to choke down. My happy little guy was clearly in a world of hurt and I was slowly unraveling.

No matter how disconnected and sociopathic you are, your kids will be your Achilles heel. I am sure it's some sort of biological instinct thing because there's no way it's rational. My son has a minor but nasty burn to his hand but in my head he needs skin grafts and months of rehabilitation. He's going to be scarred for life. He might lose his hand. Naturally, it's all my fault. I cry while I hold him and the nurses attended to his rapidly-swelling hand. Mentally I flay myself alive for not realising he could reach something so dangerously hot, for failing to see how badly he'd burned himself...basically for being a bad, inattentive Mum who has allowed her son to be maimed.

Somewhere in all of this the nurse and I manage to force medicine down his throat and, about half an hour later he begins to calm right down...20 minutes after that and he's giggling woozily and laying back in my arms, clearly stoned five ways from Sunday. This is PainStop Night - a codeine concoction that has somehow been approved for littlies. His fingers and palm are swollen and blistered but he no longer seems bothered by it and he's clearly on his way to dreamland.

By the time I get home we've been at the hospital for two hours. Mentally, I'm wrecked. I'm also furious with myself and that stupid sandwich press. In a frame of mind we're going to call "something less than reasonable" I fire off an email to Zambrero's head office relating the whole thing to them. Here's a copy;

"Tonight my husband and I brought our family to your Belconnen store for some tasty Zambrero goodness. As we waited in line my 14-month-old baby son started screaming and I realised that he'd reached over and grabbed your (obviously very hot) sandwich press and burned himself badly. I've just spent the last two hours in emergency with a baby with badly burned fingers. He has blisters all over his fingers and the palm of his hand. I briefly flirted with the idea of sending you a photo but decided that that would be incredibly mean and totally counter-productive. Now the whole reason he was in my arms was to help him stay out of trouble. At first I spent a lot of time mentally whipping myself over what happened (and believe me I still am) and then I thought, why on earth would you have something so hot within easy reach of ANYONE without a glass panel to protect it or a sign to warn people?

I will give you a call to follow up from this email but, basically, I would really appreciate it if you would address this so no one else winds up burning themselves. I can't begin to tell you how horrible it is to nurse a screaming baby and be completely unable to relieve his pain. I would love to know that this will never happen to anyone else. Thank you for your time."

I think I got the balance between "totally psychotic mother bear" and "can we not fix this" just right. I am not proud of this email but in my defence I was very tired and very upset. I was not eloquent or polite, I'll grant you.

Anyways, in my head I brace myself for the "we're not liable" brush-off that I am 100% convinced will be framed in an email along the lines of "you really should have been more careful because your son is your responsibility, not ours".

I am pleased and ashamed to admit that I was horribly wrong. By the next morning the CEO of Zambrero had written to me in person. Here is his email;

"Good evening rebecca,

This is stuart cook, the ceo of the zambrero group. I will fix this immediately and please email me your address and I will send you a letter of apology and if you would be okay to call me so I can find out the full extent of the situation and make sure nothing like this happens again.

My mobile is XXXX. Please feel free to call me anytime tonight or tomorrow.

My deepest apologies,

Stuart Cook
Chief Executive Officer
Zambrero Group "

What a class act! Stuart's not lowering himself to my level. We have a genuine apology, a promise to fix it and all of it probably legally the equivalent of admission of guilt. If Stuart's lawyer saw this he would have had a fit and then tasered Stuart for even contemplating sending it. This was followed up by a phone call later in the day to check on James, reassure me that all Zambrero stores had been checked and perspex ordered to be installed in every store that had the same issue so that it would never, ever happen to anyone ever again. Charles went back to Zambrero tonight and, true to his word, Stuart has fixed the issue in less than 48 hours. Can you believe that businessmen like this still exist???

I am humbled and awed by this man's ethical, human approach to what was an enormously traumatic experience for us. The term "litigation" has been bandied around by people who have heard about this and I'm 100% sure that it crossed Stuart's mind the instant he saw my email. He could have taken a very different approach. He could have told me it was my fault for not being more careful and refused to address the problem. He could have...but he didn't.

When it comes down to it, we would probably have an excellent case for compensation if we decided to sue Zambrero. But the reality is that this was a genuine accident. I have no doubt that they had no idea that someone could be hurt the way James got hurt. Once he touched that sandwich press the damage was already done. No amount of money would have taken his pain away. No amount of money would have stopped the nightmares I had all night or made me feel better while I sat nursing him in the hospital.

But knowing that the same thing will never happen to anyone else does make me feel a lot better. Knowing that when I buy my next burrito my money will be going to an ethical business that cares about its customers makes me feel better. Learning that there are still people and businesses out there that value people more than the almighty dollar has been invaluable. Stuart has won us as customers for life. A big thank you to him and Zambrero for their concern and their efforts.

A little photo of the poor little hand the following day... blisters on his palm, all four fingers and his thumb. Poor little guy...

What are you so angry about?

Today as I was driving home I hit a bit of a traffic snarl. I continued in my lane at the same pace as everyone else and then we had to merge and form one lane together. I thought I'd just driven quite normally but somehow a lady in the other lane took offence at the fact that I'd managed to get ahead of her and continued to try and pass me even after the lanes had come together, snarling at me in the mirror and revving her engine aggressively.

Given that we were practically at a stand-still I couldn't really understand why she would care. It's not like she could zoom off as soon as she was past me...she'd still be crawling along...albeit one car further forward. The whole thing wasn't really that important to me though so I hit the brakes, turned to look her in the eye with my totally confused look and gestured that she should pass me. The look I was trying to convey was, "Either you don't know how to merge or this is loads more important to you than it is to me, so go right ahead before you have an aneurysm." And as soon as I did that she lost all trace of her aggression and inched past me, blushing furiously and refusing to make further eye contact.

Before I met Charles, when I was in a pretty unfulfilling relationship that made me miserable, I was an angry driver too. And my anger spilled over into other areas of my life - not just the driving. Even after that relationship died and I'd met Charles my anger and frustration continued well past the time when it should have vanished. I clearly remember the day I stopped being a self-obsessed, angry little cow and decided to leave the rage behind.

My anger had boiled over (again) and poor Charles was wearing it (again) and I remember him looking at me in total bewilderment and pain and saying, "Why are you so angry? Just tell me what I've done to make you so angry and I'll fix it."

He may as well have slapped me across the face. My anger had nothing to do with him and everything to do with how disappointing my previous relationship had been and how much I resented the person I'd become as a result. But until that moment I'd never realised how much useless anger I had inside and how destructive it was to the new life I was trying to build. In that moment I saw that one day this wonderful man, who seemed to be everything I'd always wanted in a partner, would wake up and realise that my anger had nothing to do with him and he would walk away from me. I would lose my chance at a good relationship with a good man because I was unable to let go of my rage.

It sounds really easy, doesn't it? Realise what you're doing wrong and just stop doing it. But it wasn't an overnight fix. First of all, I'm not a person who can drop things easily. Secondly, since my rage was tied quite strongly to the fact that I'd become someone I didn't like, living a life I hated, I had to work to be a person I liked with a life I enjoyed. It took a lot of hard work and a long time to let it all go. There were a lot of things to work on and a lot of things to fix. The obvious outcome is that I didn't lose Charles. We married, had two beautiful children and we're still together now.*

That would be reward enough, but there have been unexpected benefits to letting go of the rage. I find myself smiling at strangers, singing more often. I don't take things so personally any more and these days I'm a lot better at recognising when other people's negativity is a result of something internal rather than something I said or did. I have more energy to be there for other people and I definitely like the fact that I don't lose my temper at my kids. Life, on the whole, is a much sunnier place and most days I am quite generally and amazingly happy.

As for my aggressive friend in traffic today, one look at her told me everything I needed to know. She needed that "win" because she isn't winning in other areas of her life. It was written all over her haggard face, tired old car and in the faces of her terrified children in the backseat. And when I gave her the "win" she was looking for, it was not the rewarding triumph she'd anticipated because the truth is that her anger was never about me and the fact that I merged in front of her.

Next time you find your internal gasket heating up to the boiling point over something petty ask yourself what you're really angry about. Is life going the way you want it to? Is this really worth getting steamed about? What are you so angry about? And if you come across an aggressive driver who clearly needs to "win", let them have it. Chances are their life is miserable and you've already "won" in the grand scheme of things.

* While I haven't quite left my temper behind, I have toned it down dramatically. Charles calls me his "flash-in-the-pan-Kitty" because I am furiously angry for two minutes and then I can't be bothered being mad anymore. He wears his very patient "fisherman in the eye of the squall" look while that two minutes ticks past and only then will he attempt to talk sense to me.

Extreme Parenting

Normally I don't comment too much on other people's parenting style lest they look in my direction and point out my own failings. But today in the chemist I saw something so unusual that I had to share it with you. A woman was herding her two children down the aisle barking, "No TOUCHING! Hands on heads!"

And bugger me if these kids weren't walking along like hostages with their hands on their heads eyeballing the shiny stuff with longing. Now I want to know - has this been her approach to shopping with children in tow from day one? Or did they commit a crime so appalling that by mutual agreement she didn't strangle them in return for their agreement to stroll the shops forevermore with their hands on their heads? Either way I don't think we'll see this one on Supernanny anytime soon.

Lessons from the Garden

Gardening has many lessons. Some are very deep. Some are amazingly superficial. As a person that is constantly doing two things at once, watching TV while I sew, listening to music while I clean, I love the pure focus and quiet of gardening. No noise here but the thoughts in my head. Today was the first serious day of gardening for me in our new house since we moved in. You've got to live in a place for a while before you know what you want to do to it. Now that we've been here for a while we have a better idea of what needs to happen and today our garden went from maintenance mode to active growth.

As I worked I thought about some of the lessons I've learned from gardening. In no particular order;

1.) Bark chips are evil. I do not know if any other country has ever embraced bark chips to the extent that Australians have. During the 80s and 90s they made it into 90% of the gardens in Canberra and 100% of the playgrounds. Just as we realised how awful they look and started to give them away someone had the bright idea of dyeing them interesting colours and people went nuts for them all over again.

When I bought the house my aunt took one look at the red dyed bark chip mulch and sighed, "Oh no, not the quick fix." I knew what she meant. Bark chips are meant to be an organic mulch that breaks down. And they will - three generations after you put them down. In the meantime they will look great for the first four months and then they'll gradually become diluted by debris and redistribution of topsoil. And just as you think they're gone for good you will attempt to plant your spade and again be foiled by a solid hunk of timber. Today I am reminded of how much I hate bark chips as I try to remove them from my garden.

2.) If you plant anything with thorns there will be at least one moment when you really regret it.

3.) Weeds that look pretty are still weeds and will annoy me until I get rid of them.

4.) A post-hole digger is a must-have. 20 minutes of cursing while you remove loads of dirt that could be measured in spoonfuls with a spade or two minutes with a post-hole digger. The choice is yours.

5.) I am not a patient gardener. Some gardeners, like my mother-in-law are like garden fairies. They are happiest when they're in their garden and every time they step outside something gets nurtured. A prune here, a pot adjusted there and a bucket of water for you. Their gardens are constantly changing and always amazing. I remember seeing an interview on Gardening Australia once with a man who loved tropical gardens so much that he worked for years to achieve the look in his Melbourne home and had "created a sub-tropical microclimate in the process". My first thought was not "oh how pretty" it was "why on earth would you bother?"

I like having a nice garden but I want to sit in the shade and admire it more than I want to nurture it. I do not experiment with plants, I go with the hardiest I can find. They get fertiliser and mulch and for one year they get watered. Then they're on their own. I have better things to do than encourage a fuchsia to be frost-tolerant.

6.) It is not a good idea to pretend to be something you're not. Charles is a planner. I am a do-er. Occasionally Charles will have a go at being a do-er. His vegetable garden is a stellar example. He confidently prepared a bed for Winter vegetables, shunning my advice as he went about confidently fertilising to a depth of two feet, watering every second day and arranging his veggies in a haphazard fashion. With absolutely no need to store anything below ground the Winter veggies leapt for the sky. Two months later we had an alien landscape of flowering broccoli bushes, weird beetroot shrubs attached to radish-sized beetroots and six foot high parsnips with a sort of thick hair below ground that clearly wouldn't survive peeling let alone roasting.

While me pretending to be a planner does not produce such amazingly real and blatant proof that people should stick with what they're good at, I'm the first to admit that it's just not a good idea. Our gardens have always been the best example of Charles planning and me doing. I throw out suggestions, Charles yays or nays them while drawing up a plan and then I go and do it. It works every..single...time...but there's still a moment where I think my idea is so solid that there's no way it can go wrong...

7.) Gardening is about who we were; When we lived on a farm we were broke and resorted to interesting money-making ventures. Some successful. Some not so much. One year my father bought about three thousand bare-root strawberry plants with the idea that we could sell the fruit. So as a family we carefully planted them out in rows and mulched them. Unfortunately weeds and a dry summer meant they were quite stunted and the possibility of harvesting anything shrank by the day. After I overheard my Dad lamenting the waste of money we couldn't afford to a neighbour I took it upon myself to go down every day after school to weed those wretched things and try and turn the situation around. Dad in turn used the ride-on mower to cart water from our dam and lo and behold they took off and started fruiting. They were doing really, really well and promised a bumper crop until one horrible night when we caught our bloody cows eating them.

I don't even remember the moment now but Dad claims I sat and cried in the strawberries at three in the morning, threatening death and dismemberment to those cursed bovines. I do, however, remember all the time I spent trying to get those strawberries to grow so we could sell them. And I remember how much it hurt to have nothing to show for all that time I spent. My garden will always have strawberries because my family love them. But every time I plant them out I think of my Dad, how much we struggled and how much I wanted those strawberries to be a success.

8.) Gardening reveals a lot about who we are; While we're talking about him - my Dad is a clog wog. And like all wogs, he likes growing his own produce. I clearly remember him saying to me once, "Why would you have a vine when you can have a vine that grows fruit?" It was probably a throw-away line for him but for me it was one of those seeds that takes root and grows in your brain. And now, whenever I go to plant something, I always ask myself whether I could have something similar that would give me fruit, herbs or veg as well as look pretty. And this is why all of my gardens include fruits, veg and herbs.

My mother was quite the gardener too - although her focus was less on produce and more on pretty. She loved hardenbergias - a naturally occurring groundcover in the Australian bush that has masses of purple flowers. At some point after she died nurseries cottoned on to the fact that hardenbergias are not only pretty but practically unkillable and so they trained them into an upwards fashion, rebadged them as "happy wanderers" and sold them for stupid amounts of money. I don't care. I will love them forever because they remind me of her and I will always have one in my garden. I will just stubbornly refuse to call it a happy wanderer.

9.) Gardens are about family and love; For the rest of my life every garden I plant will have a plum tree for Charles, tomatoes for Charlotte and figs for all of us. Vines will grow tangled around the entertaining space - a mix of banksia rose, potato vine, climbing rose and jasmine. Rosemary and mint will grow in abundance for cooking. Fruit trees will give lemons for setting jam, plums for Pa's plum sauce and loquats because they're something from my mother and aunt's childhood that make me smile. Strawberries will serve as groundcover and the fruit will never make it through the door and into the house because my husband and children will scramble over each other to eat them. And I'll love every minute of it.

The power of the thumb

After a whole week of meeting her chores and completing each challenge -including the giving up of the thumb - Madam has finally earned her Moxie Doll. The same night that she achieves her goal I check on her before I go to bed and find the sneaky little digit firmly wedged in its home.

Tonight as I get her ready for bed I tap her thumb.

"You have to stop sucking this baby."

Her eyes narrow.

"Do you want another Moxie Doll or not?"*

"Hmmm. I think one Moxie Doll will be enough."

"Well that's not the only reason you need to stop sucking it. If you go to big school next year and you suck your thumb then the other children might laugh at you."

She shrugs indifferently.

"Well that will be their problem."

"You don't mind if they laugh at you?"

"No. Laughing is fun. If they want to laugh at me then they're having fun. We laugh at each other all the time at school because we're so little and we do silly things. And laughing at each other is funny."

Back to the drawing board.

* A second Moxie Doll has been promised if she can stop sucking her thumb permanently.

Poxy Dolls

Charlotte is not a child who covets very much. She's not really a toy kid. She doesn't beg for the things her friends have. We can ask her to put down the toy she's playing with in Kmart because we're leaving and she'll do it without a tantrum. Occasionally, though, something will catch her eye or take her fancy and then she applies every ounce of will she has to procuring it.

Initially when she came running in to where I was doing the dishes screaming hysterically I thought she'd fallen off the bed and hurt herself. But I quickly established (lack of tears) that it was excitement.

"MamamamamamaIreallywantamockydollcanihaveonecanicanicani???"

"A what?"

"Amockydollmamaamockydoll!"

At this point I gave up trying to decipher what she was saying and went in search of the Foxtel remote instead (thank you Foxtel IQ for your live pause and rewind function.) Sure enough here's the ad for MOXIE dolls. Looks like a Bratz but comes with hair styling stuff including - wait for the hook that snagged my daughter - hair colouring wands.

By this point Charlotte is completely hysterical, bouncing wildly and almost teary with longing and excitement. I explain to her that Moxie dolls look like they cost a lot of money and that she might need to wait for her birthday. She seems to accept this and so I consider the matter to be at a close. Later in the week, when I come back from doing the shopping, it's brought home to me that the Poxy dolls are more than a fleeting interest. Madam has a total meltdown when I come home without one. To her - "Mama's out shopping" meant "for a Moxie doll for you".

Through the tears I tell her that if she wants a Moxie doll before her birthday she will have to earn one. Instantly the flood is halted and her eyes narrow.

"Earn one?" she asks carefully. I can almost hear the whizzing of her mind behind her eyes as she calculates just what she would do to own one of these things.

"Mmm. Mama will make up a chore list and if you can do all your chores for a week then you can have a Moxie doll."

"What's a chore?"

"It's jobs."

The eyes narrow to slits.

"What sort of jobs?"

Here I flounder because I was mainly winging it and I really expected her to lose interest as soon as I mentioned having to work for something. But I can see that mentally she's in the zone. Charlotte, with the right motivation (and possibly a double shot of espresso), could probably trade the world's way out of the global economic crisis in under 24 hours. I quickly scrabble for some suitable goals - a careful balance between making my life easier and some moral goals designed to enrich her health and mental wellbeing.

"Well. We might have things like you have to do your teeth every morning and every night."

"I already do my teeth every night!"

"Yes but you need to do them every morning too."

She considers this and then nods shrewdly.
"Okay Mama, what else?"

Careful to make her chore list reasonable but mindful that the poxy doll will probably cost me a bit, I list five things for her to do every day for a whole week. They are;

1.) Clean teeth in the morning.

2.) Clean teeth at night.

3.) Keep her room clean.

4.) Keep the family rooms clear of her things (shoes on the shoe shelf, toys away at night, etc)

5.) Put her dirty dishes away after she's finished eating and drinking.

I ask her if she thinks that sounds okay.

"Okay," she says solemnly, "But I think we should say no thumb sucking too."

Now I am completely blow away. This is huge. Charlotte discovered the built-in soother when she was six weeks old and the passion has never waned. At four she sucks it any chance she gets*. Under the covers. In front of the TV. In the car on the way to almost anywhere. We've tried talking, threatening, cajoling, begging, bargaining, bribing and pleading. And now she's offering it up in return for a Moxie doll.

The chore chart is duly drawn up, the stickers bought and Madam throws herself into it with surprising passion. We've obviously hit on the rewards system at the right time because she draws our attention to every completed chore she does.

"Look Mama, I ate my breakfast and my plate's in the sink!"

"Look Mama, I haven't sucked my thumb once!"

I can't help but feel that there is a let-down ahead when Madam actually achieves her goal. I think we all remember those childhood moments when the Skeletor/My Little Pony/ Rainbow Brite Action Sprite we'd sold our soul to our parents for was nowhere near as cool as the ad had initially promised. I'm also dreading the effect of the hair colouring wands on Charlotte's hair, clothes, bedclothes and the house in general (not sure how the dog will look with sage sparkle wing-tip ears).

But for now I'm letting her enjoy the thrill of earning her stickers, working her way towards her Moxie doll and I'm quietly praying that a week is long enough to break her out of the habit of sucking her thumb.

* When she thinks we aren't looking.