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Main Page Site Index Getting Pregnant Pregnancy Parenting Pregnancy and Parenting Journals Fertility Nutrition Pregnant Moms Morning Sickness Women's Health Child Health	Hi There Normality Have you got a normal child? If so, congratulations, and maybe you could drop me a line and tell me what it feels like. If, as I suspect, you don't, join the club. I read somewhere once (can't look it up, haven't unpacked the books yet) that if X quality was 'normal', 95% of toddlers didn't do it. It leads you to wonder if statistical methods have ever been used to measure 'normality'. (This reminds me of a comment in the Melbourne Age newspaper last year when class sizes in primary schools were published - someone was quoted as saying that the government had a responsibility to ensure that every school had a class size below the average. I would suggest that the government failed, miserably, in their responsibility to teach this person some mathematics). You will have read of our little skirmish with my father in the last article, the one in which he cruelly suggested that Angus had ADHD and required immediate treatment. This from a man who almost certainly suffers from undiagnosed OCD and is as mad as a snake, to use a colorful Australian phrase. Angus was having a bad day at the time, exacerbated by the train of trying to fit in to an alien environment dominated by a strange man with OCD. Numerous friends have hastened to assure me that Angus is merely a lively three-year-old, and most days I believe that. Unfortunately today he has behaved like a grossly unpleasant two-year-old. It's not been a good day. You know those days? When he has a tantrum on the way to school with Tamsin because you aren't taking him to kindergarten (it would have been a twenty-four hour wait for him). When he wants to wear a polar fleece coat all day despite the searing summer heat. When he has a quiet, secretive pooh (in the toilet, good boy), attempts to wipe his bottom himself, and then climbs naked into his sister's bed and spreads her pink play slime all over the bedclothes. When he throws another tantrum when we're picking her up from school and has to be carried home (fortunately not very far). When he's still running around two hours after his bedtime, irritating Tamsin and leading me to fantasies of garroting. Of course it would be easy to think that my father had something there, after all. And then I add up all the things going against Angus today. It is very hot and humid. I've had a headache and felt unpleasant all day, so it would be reasonable to assume that he doesn't feel wonderful, either. He's been sneezing and coughing and may be coming down with something. And he's recently started kindergarten. He loves it but the change wreaked havoc with Tamsin's behavior too, for several weeks, and in general he has actually been very well behaved recently. So altogether I think it is very important that we look for reasons when we complain about our children. How often have you spent the day yelling at your toddler and then found them covered in a rash at bedtime? Or snapped at your school age child all evening because they are being grumpy and unco-operative, and then discover at story-time that someone bullied them at school today? On the other hand it is obviously easy to make excuses for your children. I knew someone in England who blamed her two year old's habit of biting on the fact that she had been born with the aid of one of those vacuum suction cap devices. I always felt that if intervention at birth caused bad behavior, Tamsin should have been the perfect child because she emerged from the world relatively easily. Needless to say, she wasn't the perfect child! I knew someone else in England who had a stolid, immaculately behaved child who was far too grown-up for her own good. She always did as she was told. Their house was immaculate, and I think it was less because the mother tidied up obsessively, than because the child didn't make a mess. (My house was always, and still is, full of crumbs, strewn blocks, and dog-eared books in drifts over the floors of all the rooms). I was thrilled when this child actually had a tantrum one day - a real kicking, screaming, fighting tantrum. I thought that maybe she did have some chance of personality, after all. Angus still hasn't gone to bed. Neither has Vern, his big teddy, so that's hardly surprising. I can't get into Angus's bedroom despite having tidied it up two days ago. Given today, I'm not too sure that I want to! Unless it's to tie him to the bed! Despite all this, and the thumping headache that is now blurring my vision of this screen, I don't think I’d swap them for normal children. I think normal children are a bit like 2.4 children - who wants them? Judy Edmonds was born in England, grew up in Australia and is married to Graham Peters, a fifth-generation Australian. From 1990-1999 they lived in England - it was meant to be a two year working holiday but it took on a life of its own. They returned to Australia in May 1999, and are enjoying readjusting. Judy worked as an academic librarian until the birth of Tamsin in 1993, and since then has been a full-time mother to her and to Angus, born 1996. She is now embarking on a new career as a freelance journalist. Her writing can be found all over the Internet now, and she is the owner/editor of an Australian parenting EZine, Chloe & Jack.