You've Got Your Hands Full

Friday 27th March

Occasionally one will find oneself with a child who develops a temporary food intolerance, particularly to dairy products.

By this I mean you feed them and they return it to you threefold.

If you have a child with a longstanding habit of doing this, you are actually in a better equipped position because you never let them drink their milk without standing guard, holding a catching vessel, ready for the first heave of fluid. One can become quite adept at catching a moving flow. We know because we had one of these such children.

However, if you have grown unused to such habits because the necessity has long since passed, but you are of the ilk that continues to produce more children, you may find that nature lands you with a tricky one. One that usually holds their dairy but occasionally decides to have a stomach bug, or an excess of phlegm, or just a mischevious twinkle in his eye. This type of child will wait till long after their drink or meal, until they seem to be out of the danger zone and are wandering or resting unsupervised, and then choose to upheave their stomach contents.

Having such a child presently and having been caught off-guard three times in the last 48 hours (that doesn't include the one that I did manage to catch), I thought I would share my words of wisdom on how to clean up after the event.

Firstly, it is useful to have a husband or other trained animal professional present who will take the sticky wriggly, now excuberant and uncooperative child to a seperate place to be washed. If this is not possible, try to cordon off the affected area while you clean the child yourself, and come back later.

Note: repeatedly shrieking and pointing to the disaster zone and giving warning of its existence is an ineffective method of cordoning, and will most likely draw more children towards it rather than driving them away.

Secondly, baby wipes are your friends. After using kitchen roll to remove larger clumps (and this is where mucus does come in handy, because it does stick them all together) from floors, mattresses or furniture, baby wipes clean pretty much everything. I mean obviously disinfectants, fabric sprays and carpet shampoos are all useful and necessary for deep cleaning, and for getting rid of the germs and the smell, but when it comes to getting it off here and now, when you are supposed to pick the other children up at 3.15 and it is now 3 o'clock, and you just need to get the stuff off everything before people come home and walk through it or sit on it, nothing else beats those baby wipes. Yes, that was me on Thursday.

Thirdly, do not put any affected fabrics straight into the wash. Most mothers discover early on that using a washing machine is not guaranteed to remove chunks and will either leave them intact or, more likely, spread them into smaller particles that smear and stick to the fabric, never to be freed again. In fact, someone near and dear to my heart once found an entire poo in her drum after emptying it of laundry, and had no idea how it got there. Amateur.

Instead, use the following tactics:

A ) Showering the item(s) - good for getting the chunks straight off and into the drain, ready for the machine. However, this is not good for duvets or any other large items, as the target matter just seems to spray off one area and straight onto another, causing you to lift the item higher and higher until eventually you find yourself entwined with it and face to face with the only spot you managed to miss. Even after you think you've got it all down the drain, you will - I repeat - you will inevitably walk downstairs and realise you've managed to get some on your slippers.

B ) Using the ever faithful baby wipes and picking up the chunks clump by clump and putting them straight in the bin. Suitable for larger laundry items, but not for those who are weak stomached or those who like to keep their dignity. Having lost mine a long time ago, my only issue with this one is that it takes a long time.

C ) Flushing the item. That right folks, your trusty lav can be multi-functional. That flow is great for pulling those chunks straight down and away from your eyesight - after all, that's what it is designed for. Extreme caution is to be used when using this method however. Flushing an item too large may clog your system and bring the water (and the matter you were trying to dispose of) back up towards you. A tight grip is to be maintained on smaller items at all times, otherwise you may as well have saved the water and just used the bin. And finally, always, always make sure that you have removed the child before flushing any items of their clothing.

Thursday 26th March

3) The worst thing I ever did was give a letter to a girl as we were leaving primary school forever. I told her not to open it until she got home. It was all about how much I didn't like her!

As this story indicates, I am not the best at confrontation. Rather than tell this girl what I thought of her at the actual moments she committed her crimes against me (which included such things as getting everyone else to play a different game in the playground when I wanted to play Dogtanian, and swearing blind that she had dropped some Jason Donovan posters off at my house for me when she hadn't), I realised there were only a few months left to go until I would never see her again and so I stored up all this information so I could use it as my ultimate revenge. That's right folks, I put it in a strongly worded letter. What a shocker.

I can't remember the exact wording of the letter and, having never seen her again since, have no idea what long-lasting effects it had on her. Maybe she suffered for the rest of her life without sustaining lasting friendships because she learnt never to trust anyone. Maybe she learnt the error of her evil ways and from then on let other people choose how to spend their breaktime, and only promised posters to people if she know she was going to deliver them. Or maybe she read it and thought 'Phht. What a loser,' and threw it in the bin.

I'll probably never know but what I do know is that she had the ultimate revenge. Because what I didn't realise at the time was that from September next year, my high school bus route would take me past her beautiful white gabled house every single day. That's right folks, every day during term time. Each time I saw it, I would get a nasty feeling in the bottom of my stomach and think about what I had done. For seven years. She may have only lived there for another year or so and then moved to another country for all I know, because I never saw her there outside the house. (Of course, equally she could have been sat inside it the whole time, in her darkened bedroom scared to go out inside humanity turned on her again, drinking bottles of White Lightening to forget the pain.) But I do wish I hadn't done it. Or at least done it to her face so I could have seen her reaction. Then I could have looked at that white gabled house every day without a trace of guilt.

Then again, my face-to-face confrontations with people don't generally go well either. When I was at university, the only way to get there from home was to catch a bus that went once every two hours to and from town. It was the 182, the only bus ever to drive through the forgotten village of Woodplumpton, and you couldn't miss it because there wasn't another one that even came close. So I was waiting one cold wintery night at five past five for the comforting lights of the 182 when a bus approached, labelled as the 180. I panicked for a moment, knowing that I was there at the right time, but that this was the wrong number, which ended up at the same destination but went via a different route, and so rather than getting it wrong, I failed to stick my arm out and the bus went past without me. I ran to the timetable on the side of the shelter and looked at all the numbers and times and realise that I had been right - the 180 shouldn't have come for another hour and I had indeed missed the wrongly labelled bus. A few phonecalls and lots of waiting later, and my dad had to come out and pick me up and take me home.

The next night, as I was waiting at 5.05, the same thing happened - the bus came but it was labelled 180. I stuck my hand out, got onto the bus and asked the driver if it did go through Woodplumpton.

'Yes,' was his miserable response.

'Oh, the number's wrong on the front then,' I said helpfully. 'It should say the 182. The 180 goes a different way.'

He turned to me with evil dripping from his eyes (as I remember it later in my nightmares) and growled, 'Thankyou for telling my how to do my job, now go and SIT DOWN!'

I was so shocked that I ran to the back of the bus and meekly plonked myself on a seat, and had to wipe tears away from my eyes all the way home.

Why I couldn't have looked him back in the eye and said 'Actually I missed the bus last night because it had the wrong number on, you miserable beggar', I don't know. Or why it mattered to me that some guy I didn't know was having a bad day and took it out on me. I think when you've spent your whole life trying to please people and always try and say and do the right things at the right times, you take it pretty hard when someone doesn't like you.

(I have to say I'm not as bad as that now. I only mull things over for maybe a few weeks afterwards now, rather than years.)

So, how wierd is it that when you become a parent, confrontation is what you have to do every single day, almost constantly? Telling people what to do, challenging unacceptable behaviour, pointing out the negative as well as rewarding the positive? It's no wonder parents lose sense of themselves. In just a few years I went from a girl who never argued with anyone (except my brothers, but they don't count, they're just brothers) to this woman who feels like she shouts all day. It's no wonder having toddlers is an exhausting time.

I think if I'd have encountered that bus driver now, and I'd had a pretty bad day myself, he'd have been in for a bit of a shock, and I'm not talking about a strongly worded letter this time, either. I may just have got him out of his seat and onto the bus steps to sit for forty-seven minutes (I'm guestimating) until he was ready to apologise. And he wouldn't have got any pudding either.

Tuesday 10th March

2) I hate wrists, I can't touch them or look at them.

Weird, I know, but this has been the way since I was about twelve. I am super-squeamish and hate the sight of blood and anything gaping open where it shouldn't be gaping open, and wrists are just horrible veiny reminders of all that blood pumping round your body and fragile damagable skin....gah. I'm shuddering and tasting blood even as I think about it. I'm definately not one for gore - I hide behind my hands when I watch action movies until the fight scenes are over.

So I am very very grateful that so far none of my children have ever presented me with a real blood-filled emergency.

I know you're all screaming now - 'What are you doing writing this on your blog? Stop tempting fate, woman!' Well, I don't believe in fate, so there. But I do believe in being thankful and I am. The worst I have encountered is when Turtle was about a year old and stood himself in a large toy bin in the back room of church, then knocked it over with himself still inside and whacked the back of his head on a huge sharp hinge on the door. The cut was small but fairly deep and had managed to slice through a small chunk of his hair so that I had to actually pull the severed hair back out of the cut. But it stopped bleeding after a few minutes and wasn't even worth a trip to the hospital. That's it - that's the worst.

I'm not saying that we don't regularly have injuries of course. Not a week goes by without a head bump, a nosebleed (I don't mind those because you can't see the source of the blood), a split lip or a black eye (for the best example of this, see 'Scooby Doozy', August 08). And we've had a few trips to the A&E too, but they never coincided with the bloody bits, as they were mainly related to asthma attacks, more head bumps, and a phase that Crash went through of 'pulled-elbow syndrome'. It's a real thing where a child's elbow can have a weakness and sometimes kind of dislocates itself out of place. This tends to happen more when the child is being rather uncooperative and is being firmly walked with a vice-like hand grip to or from nursery whilst having a tantrum, or holding onto railings and being pulled off pursuaded to let go. Thankfully the doctors every time were very understanding and appeased our guilt each time, and from then on we remembered to pursuade him using his left arm instead.

My grandma had five boys and one girl, lived on a farm and has many more horror stories to tell, varying from broken limbs from climbing trees, to broken noses in a bus crash, to nearly losing a two-year old in a slurry pit. Top of the list was when her youngest came to her aged seventeen, holding his fingers which he had nearly sliced off with a circular saw, and she had to go back to the workshop to find his thumb.

I'm going off to throw up now.