The perils of Thomas

Hard not to inhale deeply at today's Mail story about the "little boy trapped in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine". It can't have been only me thinking, 'There but for the grace of God.....' Yet there is one big difference between Louis' Thomas obsession and the boy in the article: I'm trying not to let Louis find out that the Thomas of his many books also moonlights as a television star. Not because I think TV is inherently evil, as the piece goes on to imply, but just because I. Can't. Take. Any. More. Thomas.

Can someone explain what it is about the cheeky tank engine? Personally, I can't imagine a more boring series of books. Especially if you're *lucky* enough to own some of the original stories. Back then, children's authors didn't mince their words so the trains' adventures are described in full technical glory. There are sidings; couplings; buffers; and many, many more trainspotting terms that I don't understand let alone a toddler. Yet he couldn't be more gripped. Night, after night - with plenty of mornings, mid-mornings, pre-lunchtime naps, and mid-afternoons thrown in for good measure - it's Thomas, Thomas, Thomas. Not forgetting the hours spent pushing mini Thomas and pals round his own train tracks.

Bizarrely, I think the obsession was triggered by a cook book. A free one I got sent at work uselessly telling you how to make all sorts of impossibly different character cakes. I brought it home, Louis discovered it, and would spend hours getting me to explain how you make a Thomas cake. But I also blame the person who gave him two Thomas books for his first birthday! (If only the bump in her tummy was male, I could get my own back, but alas!)

(That said, Thomas did - briefly - become cool last night when Louis discovered an interactive Thomas playmat in his friend Yoppy's room that translated every single Thomas train into Japanese. I liked "Hen-ly" and "Haloldy" best. I want it!)

It was interesting, though, that the Mail piece, which was based on a paper published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioural Pediatrics, used evidence of the boy's fixation to rail against television. Louis is (almost) as into Thomas and yet he takes all his stories from an old-fashioned book. I personally think TV can be an excellent teacher - as does Desmond Morris we learnt last week. Plus, I'll never forget one taxi driver crediting the Disney channel for his 12-month-old daughter already being able to count up to ten. And the lessons Louis learns from Charlie and Lola are invaluable. Not to mention the vocab. Perhaps the trick is just not to let him find out that there's such a thing as a Thomas DVD....

Nursery: the hidden upside

Who knew there was an upside to nurseries? Certainly not me when I had to take Louis last Friday morning. It was always going to be tough, my first drop off after nearly a three-week break, and it was. Tearful, he clung, begging to be picked up for "one more cuddle", his plea of desperation for when the going gets really tough. Like at bedtime. It didn't help that his new "key worker" had a day off and there was another new face in the room. Somehow I managed to peel him off and make my escape, his "I want my mummy" refrain ringing in my ears for the rest of the day.

How could I do it? I couldn't stop thinking how wrong it felt for all that a) it's only two days a week, b) it's actually a very nice nursery and I know he's lucky to have a place there, and c) aren't they supposed to teach even toddlers useful skills such as socialising, etc, etc? And yes I'm assured he calms down once I have left, although he does spend the day asking after me. (And Daddy J, I'm sure.)

But then today it struck me. The upside. I don't have to worry that he prefers someone else. Not for us, the scene last week when a friend's toddler was cuddling her childminder when her mum was in the room. Or at playgroup today when one mum had to watch her two year old toddle off after the nanny he shares with another boy. Louis is mine, all mine! And I can stop worrying about the parade of new faces at nursery.

La bella citta

Us urban mums are beset by guilt. There's the guilt that Louis can't scooter down the street because there's too much dog debris; the guilt his trips out involve the tube and the shops rather than his bike and some fields; the guilt that I need to drag him out in his buggy to get anywhere useful; and the guilt that our garden is the size of a postage stamp.

And yet. Day one back in the big smoke after a week luxuriating in the Italian hills with little but baa-ing sheep and partying grasshoppers for company and Louis couldn't be happier. It's not that he didn't enjoy la bella campagna - all that earth was perfect for his diggers - but he was genuinely thrilled to be back in London. What with buses, building sites, trains (including his own personal "toot" from a Bakerloo line driver), and taxis to look at I'm beginning to think city life with a child isn't too bad. It's certainly stimulating: there's always something different coming down the road, even if it is just yet another type of construction vehicle.

Maybe all those parents who claim they're moving out to the countryside for the sake of their kids actually have themselves in mind. Or am I just speaking as someone with a pre-school age child?

The Imperial Digger Museum

You know when people tell you not to worry about something until it happens? Well, sometimes they're right. (Only sometimes, mind.) Last week's destination was a trip to the Imperial War Museum (triggered by collective parental guilt about our lack of knowledge about the Battle of Britain after a visit to Louis' great-grandpa). I figured we'd able to do a quick crash course, while Louis amused himself looking at an aeroplane or two and wandering through the trenches. What I hadn't figured was what I'd tell him the museum was all about. After all, war is a tough concept for anyone to grasp, let alone a two year old.

But as it turned out, I needn't have fretted. Louis took one look at the giant caterpillar tracks on the tanks dotted throughout the ground floor and said: "Diggers!" After that, it was just a question of dragging him away from them long enough to find the Second World War exhibit. Which we did, but only after walking through the replica trenches at least six times. (Again, concerns that he might be scared by the dark, like a fellow toddler who was inconsolable after her parents tried to take her in, were pointless; he adored them, mainly because we had to walk on the "train track" because of all the mud....) Only Louis would watch a black-and-white film of the Blitzkrieg through France twice over because he was waiting for the German Panzer digger brigade to reappear.

The only disappointment was that you can't actually climb into any of the diggers, sorry, tanks, although you can walk through the nose of one of the bomber planes and explore a submarine. And that he didn't give us quite long enough to atone for years of ignorance about the finer points of the Battle of Britain. So instead, I wrote a comment piece about it for the Indy on Sunday, which you can read here if you'd like. And no doubt we'll back at the Imperial War Museum soon enough, if only on another "digger" hunt.

Having it all

So, it's official. As a working mum I can give myself a pat on the back for making the right decision and not staying with Louis 24/7 because he'll turn out the same either way. Or I could if I had a hand free. Because as a working mum, as everyone knows, "hands" and "free" aren't exactly sentiments that go together. Which is why any sane person grabs every bit of help that they can, whether it's the odd extra hour of childcare courtesy of some very kind grandparents or the ultimate luxury of a fortnightly cleaner (doesn't ask what the house looks like on day 13).

Or at least they do, if they're anyone but Emma Thompson. The actor and mother-of-two decreed this week (ironically via a publicity interview for her latest Nanny McPhee film) that working and mummying don't mix - unless you have a household full of staff to do the dirty work for you. Which was a timely dig at all those supermum celebrities who neglect to mention their back up when they preach about the effortless joys of being a mother (naming no names, Gisele-breastfeeding-should-be-law-for-six-months-Bundchen or Angelina Jolie). Weighing into the debate about how people's working lives just aren't working for a lot of women, Thompson claimed she never wanted to "delegate the running" of her house to others so that she could forge ahead with her career.

I applaud her sentiment but I'm heartily sick of the likes of her trying to pretend that their lives remotely resemble the wider populace. And I don't believe for a minute that she cleans her own toilet. Or mops her kitchen floor. And I resent her implication that she does. (I also resent the fact that I, like millions of other people, try somehow and see parallels between my own life and the rich and famous, but that's hardly her fault.)

It would have been more useful if Thompson had made more of the fact that she hadn't had her biological child until she was 41 to point out the ludicrousness of the situation that means any ambitious women out there feel they have to prove themselves in the workplace before allowing themselves the chance to have a family. Now that we'll all be working well past our dotage, isn't it time that someone pointed out it makes vastly more sense for women to have children in their 20s and then hit the world of work in their mid-30s, when, let's face it, they'll still have a good 40 years toil minimum ahead of them.

Perhaps that way we could move on from the debate about whether working mums are or aren't the devil's spawn. And women really could have it all.