You've Got Your Hands Full

A Few Scoobyisms

2009-10-14T10:38:18+02:00

Him: (while playing MySims) Mummy, what are Sims?

Me: Well, it means 'simulations', which are, er, like, um, pretend things that you can play with as if they are real life.

Him: So, at church, why do we sing 'Oh, happy day, happy day, when you washed MySims away?'

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Him: Mummy, why is the food that comes with prawn crackers called chinese food?

Me: Because it comes from China.

Him: Oh. Is that why it takes so long to come to our door?

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Him: I love you Mummy.

Me: Oh thankyou darling, that's lovely.

Him: Just a little bit though. I love Daddy more.

Me: Oh. Why?

Him: Because you're only a bit funny. Daddy is really reeeally funny!

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Daddy: I love all my boys sooooo much. I especially love.....all of you!

Him: (laughs in a knowing way) But I think really that you love me the best.

Daddy: Why is that?

Him: Because I'm hilaaaaawious!

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Bargain Basement

2009-09-29T22:56:41+02:00

As our family gets bigger, and our energy supplier has decided that ours has been the elected household to supplement the world wide rising gas prices, I’m looking for ways to make money go further. So I have begun trying more of the basic-type ranges from the supermarket. Sometimes these are successful, and some are not. Sliced and grated cheese, garlic bread and big bags of unlabeled apples seem to work fine. My particular favourite is frozen peas. While we do eat a wide range of vegetables, I absolutely love the fact that there isn’t a meal is existence that can’t be bulked up in the green veg department by frozen peas. Spag Bol, a roast dinner, stir fries – you name it, you can add peas to it.

There have been a few disappointments too – the enigmatic bag of ‘citrus fruits’ can sometimes yield many wonderful seasonal varieties of small tangerines that are perfect for lunch boxes, or four large oranges that have to be cut with knives and are therefore not. I do wonder as well if the vague title means that one day we will find ourselves with a mixture of lemons and limes that we have no use for. The ‘frozen chicken pieces’ was another one. I presumed that some of it would be on the bone for variety, but no, all of it was on the bone – and more often than not, bone made up the majority of each piece. By the time I had cooked it to defrost and soften it, pulled all the meaty bits off (there’s a reason people generally don’t buy chicken wings unless they are coated with something that disguises the gristle) and recooked them into whatever meal we were having, I decided that it was benefitting us neither in time nor money, as there was less meat than buying fillets in the first place. So we’re going back to being wasteful 21st century town dwellers in that department and sticking to only buying the boneless white meat bit of the chicken(sorry farmers).

It has led me to being more creative in other departments too. The week before the school term started found me sewing up holes in the boys school jumpers where they had been chewed or – well, whatever else it is that small boys do that produces small holes in the middle of a jumper’s chest. And the trousers that I bought online for Turtle turned out to be massively long but rather than buy more, I have tightened the elasticated waist as snug as they will go, and hemmed the bottoms up, adding the words ‘You’ll grow into them boy.’ I am a dying breed, surely?

One idea that I’m sure will be brilliant, if it ever works out, is getting my hair cut for free. I haven’t had my hair cut for a whole year now, which is definitely a record even for me, so I hit upon the idea of asking the salon I normally go to if they need ~~victims~~ people for their trainees to practice on, and they said yes. Models (I think ‘guinea pigs’ is probably a more apt title) are needed on Wednesday nights for teaching purposes, so I figured it would solve both my hair-cutting issues at once; I don’t have to pay money for it, and they will choose how I have it cut so I don’t have to make a decision on what I want. Perfect. The only trouble is that the appointment has been moved twice now as staff go on holiday or have guest speakers in for training purposes, so I’m not sure if I’ll still be waiting this time next year with twice as many split ends for an available slot to finally come up.

Finally, my piece de resistance, today in the post, I received three brand new pairs of trainers, one each for the older boys, for free. That’s right, for free! One of my online mum friends told me about this website that had a few factory seconds that they were giving away for just the price of the postage. I dubiously looked at it, and was surprised that not only did I actually really like the designs, but their limited stock covered the exact sizes we needed - and they normally sell for over £30 a pair! When they arrived we were even more impressed that they are called ‘Inchworms’ and – get this – they can grow to a whole size bigger! That’s right, should the shoe last through a whole season of small boy abuse, they can be adjusted so they last the next season too! Can you tell I’m excited?!?

You’ll be pleased to know that we won’t always have to live frugally though. In recent discussions with the boys we’ve asked them what sort of job they’d like to be aiming for in the future. After much thought, Turtle has opted for a museum night guard, because ‘It’s really easy to do’, Scooby wants to work at McDonalds (what better way to make someone’s day than serving them food?), and Crash has his sights set on farming, which in this country is a really good stable industry with a promising.....wait. No......

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Home Help

2009-09-28T01:30:21+02:00

We're sat at the table eating our tea when Crash's finely tuned bladder goes into action and needs emptying there and then. It would be easier if this happened every evening five minutes sooner so he went before he sat down, but nothing will tear him away from his book/toys/program a minute before he has to, so he generally waits until we've wrestled him to the table and said grace before he realises he needs to go to the bathroom. It does, however, help that it adds more minutes to his eating time as he eats at the speed of a two-day starved savage beast and then bounces on and off his chair until the others have finished and are ready for pudding, so we let the toilet trips go unchallenged.

However, on this occasion, we have nearly all finished before he reappears and he has to be called down the stairs. When he does come back, he's wearing different trousers.

'Crash, why did you change your clothes?' I ask, as he begins to wolf down his pasta.

'I did sit on the toilet but I missed a bit and it went on my trousers,' he tells me. 'But don't worry Mummy,' he continues in soothing tones, 'I put it in the washinsmurshuphl.'

(The last bit was absorbed in pasta sauce.)

'You put them in the wash basket?' I say, to clarify.

'No, in the washing fan.'

'What's the washing fan?' I ask, looking worredly at Richard.

'The spinner,' Crash says, indicating with his hands. 'To spin it round and round.'

'You mean the washing machine??'

'Yes, the washinsmurshuphl.'

I go up with a heavy heart - I know that a load has just finished in there and now it will have had weed-on trousers out on top of it all. Shall I just rinse it or put the whole thing through the wash again?

Then I see that I do not need to make the decision as Crash has taken the initiative to turn the machine on himself, and the clothes are spinning round in the mysterious 30 degree sports cycle, which I have never found a use for (I tend to stay away from anything with the word 'sports' in the description).

As I turn away, I realise that the cap is off the new bottle of non-bio liquid. The new mega-super-family-bumper-sized concentrated non-bio liquid. And the bottle is now half empty (yes, I know I could see it as half full, but in this instance, it's half empty, alright?).

'Craaaash!' I call, and he runs up the stairs, having finished his combat with the pasta.

'Yes?'

'Where's the wash liquid from in this bottle?'

We both know what the answer is, but I have to hear it on the slim chance that some of it may be redeemable.

'In dere,' he says, pointing, of course, to the soap drawer at the top of the machine.

'Noooooo,' I say.

I open it and the only dribble left is in the conditioner part of the drawer. The rest is empty, having drained into the machine. As I watch, I can see the suds building inside the drum.

I patiently explain to Crash that while I value him trying to help with my household burdens, it would be much better if just stuck to the jobs we had already assigned to him and leave anything that involves machines, fluid and no parental supervision alone. I empty the meagre contents of the conditioner drawer back into the bottle and mourn the loss of about 24 washes' worth of liquid all in one go. I change the cycle on the machine to the longest one I can find, then I sincerely pray to God that my machine will not explode nor overflow and cause any soapy water damage to the rest of the house.

Then I come down and ask Crash to clear the dinner table, which, after his demanding day of performing household chores, is clearly too much to ask, and results in an epic battle which involves the threat of stickers lost and much huffing and puffing on his behalf.

You will be pleased to know that 7kg washing machines can, remarkably, take in 24 times the required amount of liquid soap at once without blowing up or spewing their contents everywhere, but it does take at least four full-length cycles before clothes are in a wearable state and no longer covered in a soapy film which renders them impossible to dry or wear without discomfort.

This tip, along with other useful tidbits of information that I'm bound to discover in the next few months and years will surely have to be published one day into a volume entitled 'Pushing It To The Limits: Things You Never Knew You Or Your Household Appliances Were Capable Of.'

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Breaking News

2009-08-30T11:28:45+02:00

Things that I learnt on Wednesday 6th May 2009 (and the days following)

1. A nineteen month old child tumbling from a dining room chair onto a wooden floor can cause very serious injury to himself.

2. When a child has been crying for longer than ten minutes, it is time for a closer inspection of his injuries.

3. When a child’s arm looks like it has two elbows, that is not a good thing.

4. Good friends, when called upon in a dire emergency, will come round extremely fast.

5. It is not hard to find a paramedic in the West End of Morecambe at any given time, nor in fact, to find two or three paramedic crews just waiting around at the end of a job ready for the next local emergency.

6. Having a broken child gets you a free ride through Morecambe and Lancaster in an ambulance, with flashing lights and a siren and everything.

7. Having a broken child gives you priority through all the other casualties and straight into x-ray.

8. Just falling from a height of one and a half feet can snap a forearm bone in half so that the ends overlap each other at strange angles, and will usually need surgery with pins in order to correct it.

9. Morphine does not have a dulling effect on toddlers – in fact, quite the opposite.

10. When a child can no longer feel pain, he forgets about broken bones and wants to adventure up and down hospital corridors.

11. Old men on stretchers do not like the noises produced by a baby bashing a plastic toy with a rattle over and over again.

12. Having a hyperactive and noisy child means you will be swiftly removed from the queuing corridor and into the treatment room.

13. Having plaster from the shoulder all the way down to the fingers is not a hindrance to the mobility of a determined enough child; in fact it can act as extra weaponry to wield away interfering parents.

14. Having a broken arm x-rayed and plastered are not pleasant experiences but are in no way as traumatic as having a name tag attached to a healthy arm, which can cause the patient to fly into such a rage that he will actually try and chew it off his own limb.

15. Children’s hospital wards have wonderful cots which can be used as ~~pens~~ safe havens ~~against~~ for poorly toddlers.

16. Spending the night in a hospital, then having nothing to eat or drink for two hours the next morning in sympathy for your pre-op child, along with the trepidation of walking him down to the unfamiliar bowels of the hospital theatre, even for a minor operation, can leave you shaking like a leaf.

17. Watching your child be anaesthetised in your arms is not the same as watching him fall asleep peacefully because his facial muscles collapse, making his eyes roll back in his head and his tongue loll out of the side of his mouth, which is a very nerve racking and unpleasant event.

18. Sometimes doctors can pleasantly surprise you by not doing surgery at all but discovering they can manipulate bones back together manually which means that a two hour ordeal only takes forty-five minutes.

19. Just because a child has had anaesthetic that morning, it does not necessarily mean that he will be drowsy or sleepy at all for the rest of the day.

20. A full length arm pot, a sling and the recent memory of a traumatic fall is not enough to stop a toddler racing up and down the stairs, wrestling with his brothers and climbing onto the table as soon as he gets home from the hospital.

21. Even if you ring up and beg, the orthopaedic department of a hospital will refuse to put other unbroken parts of a child’s body into a cast, even if you think their mobility should be reduced for their own safety.

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How to Waste the Time of a Security Guard, Two Police Officers, Several Teachers and an Agricultural Engineer

2009-06-17T23:06:00+02:00

Tuesday 28th April

Yes, I know I am a long way behind but April was a busy month. And May. And June so far as well. Anyway, some things are worth waiting for, especially if it’s a laugh at my expense.

This day was turning out to be a great day. I had got lots of jobs done and was, which is a rare event, looking as if I was going to get all my to-do jobs done for that day. Before I did the school pick up, I had one more job to do and that was the quick shop. I do a big shop over the internet about twice a month but often nip out to an economy supermarket inbetween to top up on fruit and other bits we needed. Small shops I can handle because there is usually only one make of each food item and therefore dispenses with the need of chosing one brand over another, an activity which always causes me to fluster and go into a mild panic.

I arrived at Aldi at 2:30, which gave me a good 45 minutes to get what I needed and get to school which was only a couple of minutes away. I parked up, got the trolley, wedged Baby in and began the trolley dash. Even when I have plenty of time, I can’t do it leisurely because Aldi shopping trolleys don’t have baby harnesses in them and Baby usually remembers that after about twenty minutes, which means I then have to revert to one-handed shopping while using the other hand to pin him down so he doesn’t heave himself headfirst onto the laminate floor. He doesn’t understand why I haven’t at least let him try this once just to see what will happen, and so he makes a lot of noise which makes people turn round and stare at me as I hold a pack of ham in one hand and a child’s ankle in the other.

On this particular day, I succeeded in making it all the way around the store and to the till before he tried it, and then I gave him the job of throwing the less breakable items
onto the belt, which distracted him for a bit longer.

As I left the shop it was beginning to rain so I ran to the car and put Baby in first so he could stay dry while I put the food into bags and into the car. Then I did what I normally do when I have to return the trolley – I locked the car from the inside so that I could do it without activating the alarm and scaring Baby half to death when he moves. I ran the trolley back, got my pound and was walking back towards the car when I began to get my keys out of my pocket. Except they weren’t there.

Confused, I tried more pockets, finding them all empty. Then my heart began to beat faster as I realised that the only place they could be was in the car itself. I ran back to the car and peered in through the tinted windows and yes, there they were on the floor at Baby’s feet. I must have put them down while I strapped him in instead of putting them back in my pocket.

I began a conversation which went something like this, ‘No, no, no, no, no, nooo, no, no, nooo, no, no, no, NO, no, no, nooo, no, no, no, NO NO NO NO!’ and carried on for a bit longer.

I looked round every inch of the car but there was nothing, no handle, no chink of window, no boot lock, that would grant me the slightest hint of an entrance. Of course, that’s what we pay good money for in our cars – decent security systems – but at that moment I would have given anything to have had my car be a crappy little Escort that could be jimmied open with a coat hanger.

I kept peering through to Baby who was looking at me a bit suspiciously but fairly calmly, obviously clueless as to what I was about to put him through. Feeling the panic rising in me, and realising that my phone was trapped inside with my keys, I had to think of something fast.

I bolted back into the shop to look for a phone and / or someone who would look official and help me know what to do. My eyes were beginning to blur and I didn’t know if I was about to burst into tears, but then I saw a man in a uniform and I ran over to him and told him that I had just locked my keys, phone and eighteen month old in the car. He looked a bit shocked himself and was about to guide me to the shop phone when he said ‘Actually, you know what,’ and gave me his own mobile from his pocket. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you can use this outside.’

We ran back out and I peered back in at Baby, who started laughing as if we were in the middle of a prolonged game of peek-a-boo. At least he was having fun as I began thinking about who I could ring. I tried Richard’s mobile but there was no reply. My friend Catie had a spare house key, and so might be able to find the spare car keys at home for me, but I only knew her home number off by heart, and not her mobile, and evidently she wasn’t in that day. I then realised I needed to let school know what was happening, so I had to ring directory enquiries to get their number (and made a mental note that I must learn that too for future emergencies) and then ring them and explained in a quivering voice about the mess I had just got us all into. The secretary was very nice and told me not to worry, just to keep them up to date with what was going on. I was relieved to have that over with, but then we still weren’t any further to solving the current predicament. (Notice that with that ‘we’ I have now roped in and included the security guard into my misdemeanour and given him equal responsibility to fix it.)

The only other route to go down was the most official one, but we were left with little options so he used his radio and called in the police. There was a team in the area, they said, and could be with us in ten minutes. I started to feel more nervous as I wondered what they would actually do when they got here, and what Richard would say about whatever means they would have to take to get in.

Then suddenly, the guard’s phone rang and it was Richard! I answered it and began blubbing as I told him what I had done and where I was. He had just finished a job in Kendal, which meant he was an hour away, but was ready to set off straight away, and he had the spare car key with him.

The police arrived ten minutes later, looked around the car and confirmed what I was thinking – that there was no way in without causing damage, and it would be risky with a baby in the car as glass might fly towards him. When they heard my husband was on his way they said the best thing to do was wait for him and then the lovely police lady began jumping around the car with me in the rain, peeking into the windows and pulling faces to make Baby laugh.

There’s nothing like an emergency to bring you closer to people. I learnt the family situations of the security guard and the police man, and the name of the police lady's cat. She said that Baby was so cute that she was feeling broody and she might have to blame me if she cancelled her plans to stay child-free for the next three years. The security guard fetched me an umbrella, offered me a brew and kept the store manager updated with my situation. I learnt the different call outs the police had had that day and what a typical week in the life of an Aldi security guard is like (it explained why he was so chirpy – a break from the monotony and fifteen extra cigarette breaks rolled into one was his idea of heaven).

They left when they heard that Richard had come off the motorway and was only ten minutes away (although the lady said it was a good job they were going so she didn’t have to do him for speeding) and I was just getting into a great conversation with the guard about religion when Richard swung up like a knight in shining silver van and bleeped the car open for me.

I could have kissed him with relief but of course I didn’t, because when you’re married to a man who spends his job around the back end of cows all day, you learn some self-control until there has been some sort of showering involved. I opened the door and gave Baby a kiss, thanked the security guard who was finishing his last smoke, and high-tailed the car round to school to get the other abandoned children. And that was the first time in the whole hour-and-twenty-minutes ordeal that Baby began to cry, because he had seen his daddy and was then whisked away again.

When I got to school the boys had had a great time joining in with Year 6 football and Year 3 singing practice and weren’t bothered in the slightest. I got home to find Richard settled in front of the TV because my emergency callout had meant that he had finished his working day early, and Baby was very happy to play with him after a relaxing afternoon in the car giggling at crazy women putting on a entertaining show for him. So the only one traumatised by the whole ordeal was me, as I discovered when I changed into some dry clothes and realised my hands were still shaking.

I also discovered that some kind of miracle had occurred in the middle of it all, unbeknownst to me. When I had originally rung Richard, the reason I hadn’t got through was that he was in a mobile black spot. That particular farm in Kendal had never had mobile signal and so my three or four calls would normally have been pretty futile. However, as he was finishing the main part of that job, his phone beeped to say he had received a message and he was able to pick up my blubbery SOS clearly. Then, still to his bewilderment, he was able to ring me back and have a clear conversation with me, which made him cut the job short and get to me sooner. He even tried to ring me back straight after our conversation to say something else and got the usual blank tone to say there was no signal.

How amazing is that?

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A Typical Day

2009-05-21T22:57:37+02:00

(sheepish look) You'll have to forgive my absense. The irritating thing is, the more material I have to write about my life, the less time I have to actually blog about it, so I have a bit of a backlog of unfinished ones to bring. Here's the first, more to follow when I can find the time...

Monday 6th April

This morning I was awoken at 7.15 by a small boy peering into my face and asking if I could put the Mr Men show on for him. I growled something and rolled off the bed and into my dressing gown. I went downstairs and picked out the program from the TV menu with blurry eyes, and then another child very unwittingly howled at me, ‘I want my milk NOWW!’

As we have covered before, I am not a morning person. Neither is the child in question. He knew exactly what he would get from a request like that, but his internal wisdom had not yet woken up, and neither had my patience. I decided to avoid conflict, and I blanked him. He didn’t take the hint and it took a lot of screaming and a long stint on the naughty step before he would calm down and make a polite request, in which time I had had my cup of tea, the others had all drunk their milk and we had all had breakfast.

On with the school preparations. I had warned them all not to mess around at all because Daddy is away with work and so I am flying solo. I counted them into their clothes and made them all line up ten minutes early with their shoes and bags on and ready. We were about to head out of the door when Crash suddenly wailed something intelligible. I turned round to look, and there was blood dripping off his nose. He had chosen that moment (bored, stood waiting at the door with nothing to do with his hands) to rip a small scab off the front of his nose. From the noise, I made out, ‘I meed a plaster!!’ I ran back to kitchen and got tissue, Savlon and a box of plasters and administered the first aid to him on the street. The tears and the bleeding seemed to stop quite quickly but now I had a son who looked like he had been in a boxing match on the first day back to school. The unruly look was exasperated, I realised as I was seeing them off across the schoolyard, by Turtle wearing his shoes on the wrong feet, and Scooby’s jumper being on back to front. I think I need to add to my checklist in the morning, ‘Item 257: Really, actually, properly LOOK at the children before they leave the house.’ At the moment I tend to be happy with a head and lunchbox count on the way out of the door.

Me and Baby came back to survey the desecration that had occurred in the house during the Easter holidays and work out where to begin. Baby thought that pulling all the shoes out of the cupboard was a good start; my preference was a cup of tea and an itemised list.

I spend all six hours of school time cleaning, reorganising things and ~~recycling~~ carefully preserving all the artwork they had created and dumped in the dining room. Three o’clock came round too fast, so I left what I was doing, picked up Baby and got ready to head out of the door, and then realised that my keys were not where I thought they were. I usually leave them on the sideboard in the dining room, but I had emptied all the contents of the sideboard onto the table while I dusted and reorganised it. The table was now covered with contents I had found scattered around the ground floor while cleaning, and were waiting to be sorted and put away. My heart sank. I put down Baby and very carefully began moving things around the table, trying not to mix up the different piles as I looked underneath them all. Baby helped by trying to dispose of the dusty-cereal-hoops-and-toast-crusts pile. I looked through every item, but no keys. I went back to the sideboard and moved everything on there, but no keys. I tried the floor, down the back of the sideboard, even in the shoes that were under the sideboard, but no keys. It was 3.10, school finished at 3.15 and it took six minutes to get in the car and drive across town, without finding a parking space at the other end. Panic panic panic. I began going up and down the house, into every room I had been in that day, which was all of them, and making bargains with God for what I would do for those keys. I looked to see if Richard had left his spare car keys. No, they must be with him in Ireland too. Darn it, darn it, darn it. Eventually, at twenty-five past three, I looked on the dining room floor, and there they were. On the floor. The floor that I had looked at about seven times, simply behind the table, between a table leg and a chair leg. That’s where they had been the whole time. I was hoping for a really dramatic story to tell at school when I got there late, like ‘Baby stole my keys and threw them in the toilet’, or ‘Baby tried to feed the keys into the video player’, but no, for once he had kept his meddling fingers to himself, and I was just stupid.

On the plus side, there were plenty of parking spaces by the time I got to school.

Next on the agenda was a trip to the supermarket. Don’t look at me like that, I never usually take all the children shopping with me at all, but I had been on a tidying roll at home and didn’t want to disturb it, and it’s probably good for the children’s life education experiences if they get to visit the supermarket once or twice before their thirteenth birthdays. I was prepared and had a list for Turtle to read to the others so they would all have things to focus their avid attentions on instead of creating havoc. We chanted the rules on the way in: ‘Stay next to Mummy; don’t touch anything; repeat’, and skipped straight past the DVDs, computer games and toys and straight to the vegetable aisle. And they were very good! They took it in turns to put the things I gave them into the trolley, they stayed where I could see them, they only asked for thirty or forty things they couldn’t have, and they didn’t smash the trolley into a single other shopper’s ankles. In fact, the only rule breaker was me, who after successfully whizzing them from the canned goods to the cereal without letting them see the crisps, chocolate or biscuit aisles, realised that Baby was no longer holding the shopping list. I do realise that giving the eighteen month old that kind of responsibility was not the best thing to have done, and also that at the end of the shopping trip, most people with a half a brain would manage to remember the two items that were left to get, but I don’t have half a brain left. I have donated large chunks of it to each child, and I am not sure how much of it I have left. Nor am I sure when they are going to start using their designated chunks.

So, because I didn’t want to have to make another trip for a vital item I’d forgotten, and I didn’t want to run past the sweetie aisles again, I said to them, ‘Boys, I need to go back, but I want you to stay. Everybody put their hand on the trolley. Hands on the trolley and don’t let go. Keep your hand on the trolley and stay next to the trolley and don’t move away from the trolley.’ I had run out of different ways to say it, so I said ‘Do you understand?’ and they nodded very solemnly at me.

I left them and sprinted back the route we had come, back to the last point I knew I had seen Baby holding the list (that place where my reason had failed to kick in and say ‘Hey! Baby holding list = not a good idea!’) but there was no sign of it. Darn it. I turned and ran back to the cereal aisle.

Here’s the good bit. The children had, very true to my instructions, not released their hands from trolley, nor had they moved away from the trolley, and were, in fact, still next to the trolley. The only trouble was, that the trolley was no longer in the cereal aisle.

Thankfully, they hadn’t got far, only as far as the bakery section (and nearly in the bakery itself but I got to them in time), which reminded me of the next item, which was bread. A bag of frozen sausages later, and we were at the till. My little helpers unpacked the contents of the trolley for me and found the list, which, again, rather undramatically, was in the most obvious place I should have looked, which was just the trolley itself. I held Baby’s fingers away from the packets of chewing gum and the credit card machine while Crash told everyone else in the queue, very loudly and proudly, ‘That’s ours!’ and held up every item between our ‘Next Customer Please’ signs to show to the other shoppers.

Out of the supermarket, we got home safely and they all helped me to put the food away in the kitchen. I was a bit stumped at the absence of some items, but it all made sense when I searched the bin and found that Baby had helped by lobbing them in there.

At some point, Crash did something. I can’t remember what, but it was worthy of sending him to his room, so up he went. I followed him up and then went into the bathroom, at which point the secret invisible sensor that I cannot find or switch off was alerted – the one that triggers the bladder of every other person in the house. Scooby hurtled himself into the room yelling ‘I meed a wee!’ so I graciously stepped aside and gave him priority, and went into the laundry room to put on a fresh load in there. Nearly hopping myself, I went back once Scooby had finished, only to find that he had decorated the toilet seat and the surrounding area with a generous sprinkling of his fluids. I curse the school for having urinals and teaching them the trick I kept from them for so long – that little boys can pee standing up. I crossed my legs and used a handful of disinfectant wipes to purge the area, and finally it was my turn. But I had forgotten to shut the bathroom door. Three seconds later, Baby walked in, grinned at me, and lobbed the Sky remote control into the bath. As I strained to check that the tub was completely dry, he decided to play a game of open-the-door-shut-the-door-open-the-door-shut-the-door as forcefully as he could, then, sensing my helplessness, toddled into the laundry room next door, which I had also forgotten to shut the door on. As I scrambled to finish my business and get to him, I could hear all number of buttons and dials on the machine being operated as it spun round in mid-cycle.

Finally I wrestled him away, took him back downstairs and began to make tea, counting down the minutes till bedtime. Forty-five minutes later, it was on the table and with the others sat down, I began to search the house for Crash, wondering why on earth I hadn’t heard anything from him for over an hour. I found him in his room, quietly reading books and began praising him for his good behaviour when I suddenly realised that the reason he was here in the first place was because I had put him in here for some misdemeanour and then abandoned him. I couldn’t even remind him why I’d put him there because I couldn’t remember either, so I told him firmly that his five minutes were up and brought him back downstairs.

We ate, we bathed, we brushed teeth, and then encountered a minor hiccup when I went to get pyjamas out of the dresser to discover that there were no handles on the drawers. Obviously, this was my punishment for forgetting about him for so long – Crash had decided to get creative. I quizzed him for a while before he admitted that they were all stuffed in the cavity between the bedroom floor and the bathroom ceiling (which we really need to hole up at some point) and they were returned to their original positions so the children could finish getting ready for bed.

Frazzled and tired, I churned out the shortest story I could find, tucked them all up and was thinking about my precious me-time downstairs with a cup of tea and a chick flick, when Turtle cuddled me round the neck from his bed and said ‘Mummy, I love you. You’re so beautiful.’ My heart melted as I kissed him goodnight and said ‘Ahh, that’s lovely darling, thankyou so much. I love you too and if you dare come down those stairs tonight, there’ll be no TV for the rest of the week. Goodnight sweatheart.’

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Random Fact About Me Number Five

2009-04-19T21:30:56+02:00

Sunday 19th April

5) My goal is to GET ORGANISED. It's been my goal since I was fourteen.

Home organisation is to me what dieting is to fat people. It has taken over my life and become my goal, every new house, every new year, and usually every new week. I constantly create the equivalent of diet plans – which rooms I will do on each different day of the week; or a tick-list of weekly jobs to get done, in order of priority; or a monthly cycled rota so I purge each room once a month; or taking a timer into a room and seeing how much I can get done in twenty minutes. If there’s a method of tidying and cleaning that you can try, I have most probably failed at it.

If I believed in karma (which I don’t) I would say it’s my parents revenge from when I was young and constantly lived in a messy bedroom. Nothing they could say or do would make me tidy it, until it all got on top of me and I would charge at it full pelt for forty eight hours, get it nearly done, run out of energy and time to sort the last few remaining piles, and then gradually they would spread back into the room, seeping into every corner until suddenly one day the carpet had disappeared again.

Now I live in a messy house, with a messy husband and four incredibly messy children. I spend all day every day cleaning and tidying (or planning new ways to clean and tidy) and never have a tidy house.

It’s like running on a treadmill while eating cream cakes.

I love organisation. I crave it. If I can find little pockets of my life when order reigns, I want to stay in them forever. It was why I loved MySims so much. It was neat and orderly and everything stayed where I left it. It’s why I love ironing. That’s right – I LOVE IRONING! You lay the piece of laundry on the board, you smooth over it, you fold it up and voila – a beautiful piece of symmetry where once there was a crumpled mess. The fact that it’s the only household chore you can do while sitting on your backside and watching TV is immaterial.

But I hate doing what needs to be done to get to that place of order. I’ll work really hard on one small corner, and if I don’t get interrupted, leave the room feeling satisfied with myself, only to walk out and drown under the chaos of the other eleven rooms in the house. It’s soul destroying.

I can stand over the boys and help and support them to tidy their bedrooms or the playroom, but by the end of the week, it’s as bad as it was when we started. I can scrub the kitchen and take all day to make it gleam, but after a couple of meals and any DIY job of Richard’s, it’s full of grime and tools and dirty dishes again. It makes me want to cry.

So I binge and I purge. I set myself unattainable goals, I fail to reach them, and then I give up for days on end. I trail the internet looking for systems and ideas and hope that the promise of each new one will fulfill, but I never keep up with the plan. Because it’s been a long day and if I stop to clear the side now, I’ll never get my paperwork done tonight. Because I woke up too late and didn’t have time to empty the dishwasher, so I’ll have to do it later. Because I can’t be bothered to have the Battle of the Playroom tonight, I’ll get them to do it tomorrow. Because I’ll just have a cup of tea and go on Facebook for ten minutes before I get started.

Like waiting until you’re a size ten to organise that class reunion, my dreams are all based in ‘one day’. One day, when I am on top of everything, I will start writing my book. One day, when I am organised, I will do my third year theology correspondence course. One day, when my house is tidy in every nook and cranny, I will invite my grandma round.

Will it ever happen? I really don’t know.

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More Teatime Conversations for the Insane

2009-04-08T12:06:50+02:00

Tuesday 7th April

Turtle: For my first wish, I wish for a house made of sausages!
For my second wish, I wish for a barn full of pork!
For my third wish, I wish for a car made out of bacon!

Scooby: For my first wish, I want a bike made out of bread!
For my second wish, I want a door made out of soup!
For my third wish, I want a chair made out of marshmallows!

Crash: Pour my first wish, I want a gingerbread man house!
Pour my second wish, I want a teddy bear sugar!
Pour my third wish, I want a genie!

His english may be worse, but his strategic planning makes up for it.

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Random Fact About Me Number Four

2009-04-06T00:34:15+02:00

Saturday 4th April

4) I bought MySims for Joel for Christmas and then got slightly addicted to it.

'Tis true and I hang my head in shame. I'm over it now but for a while I was playing it compulsively every lunchtime and just thinking 'One more house, then I'll stop. Oh no, he hasn't got a bed, must build him a bed. Oh, he wants some apple essences to go on the bed, need to go and find a tree, then I'll stop.' Like a crazed person.

This is why I have never in my life tried smoking, drugs or getting drunk. I have such rubbish self-control when it comes to not over-indulging in stuff, that I refuse to start because I know I won't stop. For that reason I've never watched an episode of Lost or 24 either I can't start a really good book unless I know I'm properly ill and will actually be in bed for two days straight.

I did actually let Crash play with MySims too. He had to have his own town though - he wasn't going to interfere with my precious handiwork. I was very glad of that too when one day they were playing on it unsupervised and Scooby came and told me 'Crash moved Violet out of her house and there are no trees.' I came down and did a virtual tour of Crashtown, and indeed, every townperson had been kicked out, every tree had been uprooted and the town hall had been remodelled to resemble something like an art deco garden shed.

I deleted his profile, gave him a new one (with trees and a respectably sized town hall) and then moved him away from the Wii, hid the game from him and made a mental note never to allow him to become Prime Minister.

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Advice on Dechunking Your Laundry

2009-03-27T23:37:13+01:00

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.

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Random Fact About Me Number 3

2009-03-26T13:04:51+01:00

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.

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Random Fact Number 2

2009-03-10T22:48:40+01:00

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.

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25 Random Things About Me: Number One

2009-02-26T23:03:39+01:00

Thursday 26th February

I recently posted a circular thing going round Facebook which simply asked you to put 25 things about yourself (anything at all) then send it to 25 more people and ask them to do the same. I was going to copy and paste the list onto here, but as I started doing that the other day, I realised - 'What am I doing? Here I have twenty five wonderful ready-made blog subjects!'

I'm not sure if they'll stretch to 25 entries - some are very sparse and uninteresting points, but here's the first:

1) I always wanted four children. I consider it an average amount and have huge respect for people with big families, I think they're amazing.

I'm one of four children (two boys, two girls) and I loved being part of my family growing up. My dad is one of six (five boys, one girl) and the family is still pretty close, so whenever we get together as a whole family, there is this sense of being part of something bigger than you - a big, safe, secure network. It's part of the reason I never really wanted to rebel as a teenager. It would have been embarrassing more than anything else - I can imagine my uncles giving me funny looks and saying, 'What on earth do you want to do that for?' It's not that there was any pressure to 'be' something or to attain some high unrealistic goals. There was just a general assumption in the family that there's no point in being an idiot. It's quite a good assumption, really.

So, I view my dad's generation as a big family, and my generation as an average-ish family. So much so that I've always felt a bit sorry for people I know who are only children or just have one sibling. I've always thought it must be a bit dull and how quiet a house must be with only two children in it, and wondered if their parents had fertility problems. Three is okay, that's acceptable, but four is the best number.

Until I moved to Morecambe, I knew very few people with more than four children. It's not really a very middle class thing. But round here, four is definately average. I've met quite a lot of people that have five or six - even as many as eight (usually spread over a couple of marriages and about 20 years between the oldest and youngest child).

So it still takes me by surprise when people refer to me as having 'a brood' or 'millions of children'. I don't see myself as a wondermum - I reserve that for those of the 5/6 category, and only then, those who seem like they are actually enjoying their chidren (because many surprisingly don't).

I do acknowledge that I was in an usual situation in the early days - to have three under-2s is a rare thing - so I really appreciated people stopping me in the supermarket and saying things like 'Oh my goodness, you've got your hand's full!' (that made up about 80% of the first statements said to me by strangers) or 'Wow - how do you cope?' I chose to take those things as compliments because people were saying that I was managing to achieve something most people wouldn't ever have to deal with. It reminded me that it was a big task so it was okay that I sometimes found it very difficult. Some people even said to me, based on a twenty second encounter in the cereal aisle - 'You're doing a wonderful job!' I always said thankyou and wondered how they knew I wasn't secretly a child beater or that the reason the babies were sleeping in the trolley was because I had just sedated them. Anyway, I saw it as a real privilege. Parenting is one of those often overlooked, thankless tasks and there I was getting compliments just for getting myself and the children dressed and being out of the house.

I have to say though that now I don't relish in it quite as much. Anyone can see that a person with lots of tiny chidren must have lots of work on her hand, but now that those three are 7 and 5, it's a very different stage of life. So when people see us sitting having a meal and come over and say 'Oh my goodness, I can't believe it! Look at them! How on earth do you manage?', I look at them sitting calmly eating hamburgers, dripping ketchup onto the napkins in front of them and quietly reading the backs of their Happy Meal boxes, and wonder what these people are seeing that is so dreadful. I generally smile and say 'Oh, it's fine now, it was much more difficult when they were tiny' and hope they go away.

Recently we dared to go into a local fabric shop on a Saturday, so all four boys were with us, and we managed to squeeze them, us and Baby's puchchair into this tiny little shop between all these reams of fabric. As soon as we were all in, the elderly propriatress took a deep breath and said loudly 'Oh my word! Look at them all! How on earth do you cope?' I quickly looked at them all to see what they were doing and they were all standing, just gazing at all the different colours, with their hands in their pockets. Richard made some kind of joke and we began to peruse the shelves. She carried on - 'How do you not shout lots? Oh, I think I'd be shouting all the time!' Again I looked at them, as they were slightly dispersing so they could see more of the shop and talking quietly to each other and wondered exactly what she would like me to shout at them for. I said something about using different tactics at home to save my voice, and she said 'You must have a lot of stairs in your house then!' I counted, and there were still only four children, so assumed maybe she lived in a bungalow.

At the end of our visit, she did comment on how well behaved they had all been, which was nice, but I was inspecting them all closely on the way home wondering whether there was something menacing about their facial expressions or whether their haircuts were too short or if they had 'ASBO' tattooed on their heads, in case I hadn't noticed.

Nope, they were fine. Just right, in fact. That's my number - four - and it's just right

Comments

Medical Trauma

2009-02-18T17:27:12+01:00

Friday 30th January

About once every six months since my child was diagnosed with asthma, I have had a telephone conversation that goes something like this:

Them: Hello, Mmmmmh Mmmmmh Surgery.

Me: (taking great care to avoid the phrase 'repeat prescription' as it seems to send them into some kind of wild frenzy) Hello, I need to get another blue asthma inhaler for my son.

Them: (gleefully) Ooo, we don't do repeat prescriptions over the phone!

(pause)

Me: Okay.

(pause)

Me: So, do I need to make an appointment for him or... take him to the hospital or... (trying to think of the other different hoops I have jumped through in the past to get inhalers - it's a new one everytime)

Them: You can just pop into the surgery and fill in a repeat prescription form.

Me: Oh! Really? That's it?

Them: Yes. Can I just take your son's name and date of birth please?

Me: Yes, it's Mmmmmmmmmh and he was born on the mmmmmh of mmmmmh.

Them: Okay. (clicking sound) Oooh. Hang on. When did he last have an asthma review?

Me: (confused about how the information on their computer system works) Um, I don't know. I'll just look it up, I think it was, no, that's this year's calendar so it's not...erm, I know it was in the last term at school.

Them: Well, it says he was down to have an appointment in September but there's no notes on the system from it.

Me: Yes, September. He definately went to it.

Them: But there's no notes on the system.

Me: Right.

(pause)

Me: Sooo...

(pause)

Me: (trying to make helpful suggestions) Then does he need another asthma review before he can get an inhaler?

Them: (laughing at my ludicrous statement) Oh no. Just wait a moment, I'll go and contact a doctor.

(atmospheric music is pumped into my ears)

(long wait)

(my head starts to nod)

Them: Hello?

Me: Wha...?

Them: I can't find a doctor.

Me: (wondering who those people sitting in the twenty different consulting rooms really are) Right.

(long pause)

Me: Soooo......

Them: I'm not sure what to do.

Me: ~~That's very apparent~~ Ok. Shall I ring back later?

Them: No. I think I'll put a note on the system.

(sound of typing)

Me: Ok. Thankyou. But...what do I do?

Them: (stunned at my lack of knowledge about the secret system) You wait till after four o'clock then ring back.

Me: Right. So that would be ringing back later then. Who do I speak to when I ring back?

Them: Well, my name is Mmmmmmmh.

Me: Right. So I'll ask for you?

Them: Oh no, I don't work after 2.00pm.

Me: Wha...? I... (muffled sound of sobbing) So what do I do when I ring back after four o'clock?

Them: (as if speaking to a small child) The doctor will have signed off a repeat prescription form for you. You ring to check it's available, then you wait two working days and come and pick it up.

Me: (weary but victorious) So I can have my son's ~~blood from a stone~~ inhaler at the beginning of next week?

Them: Yes.

Me: Wonderful. Thankyou. I'm going for a lie down now. Goodbye.

It's not that I think all people who work as doctor's receptionists are deliberately awkward - two members of my own family are members of the noble profession. It's just that the ones who work at our local one always seem to think that I understand the system better than they do. Which may be true, but not what you expect when you ring up for help with something.

I think one day I'm going to ring and ask for them to perform a triple heart by-pass operation over the phone and see if it stumps them any less than a simple but life-saving repeat prescription.

Comments

Home Help

2009-01-24T10:25:19+01:00

Friday 23rd January

Im still trying to get used to the idea of only having one child at home while the others are at school. This is an average thing for other people but its strange for me because up till now I've done more 'group' parenting. I know I had one child for a year before being struck with the deadly plague again (also known as pregnancy) but at the time it was more like a hobby than a huge lifestyle change - Turtle just rolled with whatever we did and we had a massive base of people that could babyist him or keep an eye on him while we were running an event or whatever. I even took him to work with me for a while.

Anyway, as soon as the other two entered the scene, en vitro, everything changed and I went from 'person' to 'mummy' and then stopped all normal activity, like shopping, meeting up for lunch, sitting in church - anything that involved going out of the house to somewhere that didn't have plastic balls or bright foam padding. And at home, there were two modes we existed in. One was full volume, everyone running round like insane maniacs, playing or getting dressed or eating, and the other was complete silence, when they were either asleep or watching TV, in which case I had to tiptoe round to get housework done in case I disturbed the delicate balance of calm.

So I'm finding it quite refreshing to experience doing my daily jobs with a child in tow can actually work sometimes. I can go out and into the real world, and fit into most shops now I don't have a double pushchair with a buggy board attached, and as long as I don't stay still for longer than 30 seconds, and keep bribing him with food, Baby is quite placid.

Yesterday I was putting laundry away in the bedrooms, and after using my stern voice several times (which he then started to copy with a vigorous shake of the head and a 'nah!'), I managed to convince Baby to stop pulling things back out of the drawers and put them back in. After a while, he was actually getting things from the clean laundry pile and toddling over to put them away too. I was very impressed, and wonder how I can harness this interest in housework and keep it sustained until he is eighteen.

Of course, it's a bit of a pain having to go to my husband's underwear drawer whenever I want a t-shirt, but I think it was worth it for a bit of help around the house.

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Head Bump Notes

2009-01-17T00:31:28+01:00

Friday 16th January

It's been a full-on week in the accident book department.

On Monday we had the standard 'Your child (Crash) has recieved a bump to the head. Time and place: lunchtime, school yard. Help administered: cool compress applied to the forehead. Please look out for any signs of the following symptoms: nausea, dizziness, eyesight loss, death...' We get that note quite regularly, it's no biggie.

On Tuesday it was similar. 'Your child (Scooby) fell and grazed his knee. Time and place: lunchtime, school yard. Help administered: cool compress applied to the area (yes a wet paper towel does heal everything). Please look out for any signs of the following: continual bleeding, infection in the wound, gangrene, falling limbs...'

On Wednesday, we had a first because it was Baby's turn. I'd left him in a creche while I attended a 'Positive Wellbeing' Course (yes, I will do anything to avoid sitting inside looking at my housework) and I got called through after fifteen minutes to some ashen-faced rookie childcare staff and a sobbing bleeding child. "We don't know how it happened," they said, pointing at the little table. "We think he was just trying to move the chair so he could get to the jigsaw piece." I know exactly what will have happened. After trying all the door handles, cupboards and anything else that looked like an escape route, he will have turned his attention, not towards the oodles of toys that the other children were blissfully playing with all over the room, but to finding what he could clamber on, climb up or experiment with. My bet is that he was standing on top of the chair, trying to straddle it to get to the table, and he fell and put his teeth through his tongue. The poor ladies were distraught that they had allowed my child to be broken on their first watch, but I was very nice and understanding. In fact, I think I gave them more sympathy than I may have done the actual child.

On Thursday we got a step up from the usual note at the end of the day - I got an actual phonecall at eleven o'clock asking me to come into school to pick Scooby up. Apparantly as he was ~~daydreaming~~ trotting around the little yard he was unfortunate enough to run directly into Hope, fall down and bang his head on the floor. Fortunately he didn't scrape his hands or knees at all. Unfortunately this meant he caught the brunt of the impact on his forehead and his nose, which (surprise, surprise) exploded on impact. All of which was exasperated by the fact that Hope, who is easily the largest child in the infant sector, also fell over and rolled on top of him. I bundled his poor sorry little body home and gave him some TLC for the rest of the day.

Then on Friday, just as we thought the injuries couldn't get anymore unexpected, Crash arrived home with the following note in his bag; 'Your child today (wait for it...) bit his own arm. Time and place: 2 o'clock, singing practice. Help administered: cool compress applied to the area. Additional notes: discussed Crash's feelings about the incident back in the classroom.'

What the...? I bet they've heard some excuses to get out of singing practice before but I doubt anyone's ever used that one until now.

Comments

Bleugh. Mornings.

2009-01-08T18:17:49+01:00

Thursday 8th January

I really really can't seem to get up. Because the Christmas holidays were kind of here there and everywhere, we rushed for half of it and lounged around for the other half. We had so many busy days and late nights that the kids keep sleeping till about 8.30am. This was great when we had nothing to get up for, but not so great now. In the last four days, me and Richard have set at least two alarms every day for 7am and have failed to get up until 8. The problem is that the house is so cold, the sky is so dark, and between 6am and 7am every morning several warm bodies come and crawl into our bed, drape over us and fall back to sleep so that by the time the alarms go off, we are all so snuggly warm that we fall back asleep too without realising it. The other problem is that because we did this on Monday and still managed to leave the house forty minutes later and get to school on time, it hasn't really given us the incentive we needed the next day to get up any earlier. And so on, and so on.

Thankfully, I have not made any new year's resolutions this year, so they can't be broken. However, what I have done is to try and develop a new good habit every month so that bit by bit we begin to see some semblence of order in this house without setting ourselves unreachable targets.

So, how does getting up at 8 o'clock every morning fit into this? Well, yeah. It doesn't.

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Less Than Perfect

2009-01-04T23:51:16+01:00

Sunday 4th January

My dad asked me today if I'd stopped blogging because there was nothing happening in my life. After I picked myself up off the floor and wiped away the tears of mirth, I explained that there was plenty happening - that was the whole point. When faced with the decision between blogging, cleaning, Christmas cards, spending time with the children and desperate late night shopping on the internet, blogging seemed to pale into comparison really.

So, for a quick recap, we had a great Christmas. It was mainly sponsored by Star Wars (Turtle), board games (Scooby) and Meccano (Crash). We spent a lot of time going up and down to Preston, where we also spent New Year, and had some friends to stay in between the two festivities. Just when we thought we were all present-ed out, it was Turtle's seventh birthday today. It was also Star Wars themed, from pyjamas to toys to jumpers to bed sheets, making him a mainly excited but partially grumpy boy (owing to only wanting to go home and not wanting to go to church because his toys weren't there). And unfortunately they have to go back to school tomorrow. It's sad, I know, but all good things have to come to an end.

Just in case the suspense really does kill somebody, here is the entry I was going to put next (before Christmas stuff got in the way)

Sunday 14th December

We woke up this morning rather rudely to vomit. Crash got into our bed and announced "I feel shick."

There are good reasons why I allow used coffee mugs to linger in our bedroom longer than deemed normal and this was one of them. I caught it all [smug face].

We were then faced with that parental dilemma - do we now quarantine him to save the others (who probably have it in their systems by now anyway) or do we let him roam free and assume it was phlegm based, (as is usually the case in our house)? We waited for the rest of the morning and nothing else unusual presented itself, so we assumed he was okay. In fact he was so okay that he managed some very successful wrestling with his brother, which ended with an unintentional headbutt and Scooby's nose exploding. This fortunately happened just as I was approaching Scooby to wipe his nose so I got hold of him before any blood hit the shirt (successful catch of the day number 2). Unfortunately (and embarrassingly) I was not approaching him with a tissue in hand as one might think, but, due to an empty tissue box and a knack of resourcefully using the mess my children leave on the floor, I was actually about to wipe his nose with a sock. Yes, I collected my son's bloody emissions with his own used sock. And after a while, its pair as well.

Once the bleeding had stopped, we decided Crash was probably okay to go out as he had been bouncing off the walls all day and so we braved it to church. We were right, he was fine. Baby, however, was not. One minute he was toddling around in the main room where we were doing Sunday School with the kids. Then he was pulling faces at the adults having their discussion meeting through a glass door panel. The next thing he was spewing forth all over the door, the carpet and himself. This was not a successful catch - I was in a tidy room with no used recepticles and no verbal warning at all. My friend Catie and I managed to clean up the mess (amazingly the guys in the meeting in the next room hadn't even noticed what had happened and only realised when we actually opened the door to disinfect the crack underneath it) and Baby toddled around semi-naked for the rest of the meeting. His was also a one-time thing and he showed no symptoms before or after that.

No, it doesn't stop there. A couple of our friends had come up from Preston to see our church so afterwards for a change we decided to get an indian take-out. I am no indian connoisseur and so I just ordered one korma for me and another for the kids to share, because I know that it's not spicy - but that's as much as I know. Half way through the meal, Turtle started making agonised noises, gurning and holding his throat. Uh oh.

'What's up?' I said.

'Nuts!' he started wailing. 'I've had nuts! My throat is itchy and my ears hurt!'

I started searching round the table, looking at the naam bread, pittas and everyone else's meals.

'You can't have had nuts, there aren't any here.'

'They're in me! Get them out! Waahh!' (I know he will win an Oscar one day)

'Did anyone get a meal with nuts in?' I asked around.

Blank faces stared back at me and then the bravest of our friends spoke up.

'Erm, you did.'

'What?'

'Korma has almonds in it.'

'WHAT?'

I ran to the kitchen and fetched water and Piriton and got Turtle to drink down as much of it as possible. Then I had to go and make him a weak cup of tea since the first time he had an allergic reastion I ~~lied to him~~ convinced him that having a cup of tea would make him feel better (I was desperate for something to distract him and didn't know what else to do - tea always seems to cure all my problems anyway). He drank the tea and then doubled it all back into his bowl, along with the half-eaten korma. That was the third successful catch of the day, but my victory was somwhat overshadowed by me shrieking at the poor guests; 'Don't look! Shield your eyes so you won't be able to see! Save yourself from the horrific sight!' or something similar. We managed a quick clean up and shunted the other three off to bed, had a polite coffee with our guests (who are currently childless and we think after today, may permanently choose to remain so), said goodbye and then made it back into the house just as Turtle brought up what was left of his guts onto the dining room floor.

So this day was less than perfect. Yes, I did gets lots of cleaning done, but not really the kind that progresses you any further along than you were before. I did spend a lot of time with the children, but none of it was what you might class as 'fun' activities.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And, if you want to know about the gingerbread house, it did progress into house shapes, it was baked to perfection and even constructed, but as soon as any force was applied (as in delicately placing sweets onto it), it crumbled under the pressure and refused ever to stand again. It would have been good - I admit it got further than I, the cynic, would have predicted - but instead we had a large pile of gingerbread pieces on which to ice the sweets and sustain ouselves for the next three weeks.

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Such a Perfect Day

2008-12-18T00:53:05+01:00

Saturday 13th December

This is what I wrote for Saturday, and didn't get around to putting it on here. You'll see why on the next entry.....

Today was a pretty perfect day. To start with, my wonderful husband let me sleep till 10am. And that wasn't all - there was other good stuff too!

I came down and we had bacon sandwiches for brunch. The TV was left on and Saturday Kitchen was showing. A lady came on and started making a gingerbread house and all four boys (that includes Richard, not Baby, he was in bed) sat agog watching the sticky gooey goodness. When the creation was complete, Richard turned to sons one, two and three and said, "Boys, who wants to make a gingerbread house?!"

I spluttered on my cup of tea and tried to give him that look with my eyes, but he didn't catch it. "Let's get dressed and go and buy some sweets!" he carried on.

"What are you doing?" I cried, dispensing with the silent pleading. "Don't you know that we don't do any family activities in this house that require glueing, painting or baking something unless it comes in one packet and takes ten minutes max?"

"Chill," he said. "I'll take full responsibility. Are you going to come with us?"

Well, I wasn't going to miss a show like that, so I agreed. First we went to the Co-Op and got the baking stuff. Then we went to a proper sweet shop and chose different goodies for the roof, walls and chimneys. It was fun, we kept them under control, we even bought some fish from a real fishmongers and looked at blinds for the bathroom on the way.

Then we got back and they went to the kitchen and mixed all the dough together in a fairly peaceful and calm manner, and put it in the fridge to thicken overnight.

I expected the calm to be shot when Richard left at 3.30 to go to a youth event, but it carried on. I put Baby to bed and then raided a couple of drawers the boys hadn't been in for a few months and dragged out some old colouring books. Scooby busied himself with colouring a whole Balamory book orange, Crash found a book with reuseable stickers (and therefore endless experimental possibilities) and Turtle spent his time usefully recalling the names of any Star Wars characters and planets he could think of and listing them all on paper.

I snuck off to the kitchen which hadn't been cleaned for a ~~week~~ little while and got busy too. An hour and a half later, I had gone into every nook and cranny, and they were still playing quietly! Normally when we have a chilled day, it feels pretty wasted because I get nothing done. I don't think I've ever accomplished so much without really trying (okay, I know I need to develop some higher standards).

We had a quick tea and then had a movie night which Richard came back in time for the second half of. I was a bit naughty and actually spent my time on the laptop doing a newsletter for me Christmas cards instead of engaging fully, but, hey - I was getting things done again!

To top it all off, after the boys had gone to bed we watched X Factor and saw the right act win (whoop whoop!). It was a productive, relaxing fun day that had very little shouting. Now why can every day not be like that?

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Happy December!

2008-12-03T23:05:28+01:00

Wednesday 3rd December

IT SNOWED!!!

IN MORECAMBE!!

It's not supposed to snow here - we live a few yards from the sea front and the salt air is supposed to disperse the snow before it hits the house tops. But by some freak of nature, as I was driving the boys to school on Monday morning (early - also a freak of nature), it started to snow and when we got there five minutes later, it had started to stick the ground.

The reception teacher greeted Scooby and Crash with the words "Leave your coats on boys, if this stays any longer, we're cancelling assembly and going out to play!"

What a great way to start the season, which in our house isn't allowed to start until the 1st of December, then I go Christmas nuts. Every afternoon when the boys get home from school, we have been dancing around to Christmas music like lunatics.

We have four advent calendars lined up on the fireplace thanks to my mum. It was obviously Baby's first advent experience and he made me laugh when he watched me open the little door for day one, peel back the foil, and prise the chocolate out to give to him, only for him to take it, put it back in the mould and shut the door again! He did get the point of the game a few minutes later and dribbled a considerable amount of chocolate down his jumper.

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Tis the Season to be Broke

2008-11-28T00:06:32+01:00

Thursday 27th November

There's something about the upcoming festivities that means that money is suddenly tight everywhere. And if it wasn't already, then things are bound to happen that mean that money suddenly begins haemorrhaging out of your account.

Last week my laptop gave up the ghost and died. After a long battle with power leads that seemed incapable of being bent more than twelve times without internally snapping (kind of defeating the idea of a portable and, er, moveable contraption), we had finally bought a new lead instead of repairing the old one again. That was all too much and in some kind of strop or statement to the world, the mother board just keeled over and stopped working. Now, I'm not blaming her. I see her point exactly - in fact, I'm a little jealous myself - but you'd think that something of that value and capacity would last more than a measley two years. Two years! So I am currently undergoing a period of mourning and having to endure sharing (((shudder))) Richard's desktop to communicate with the outside world.

Then, on our lovely shiny nearly-new car with electric thingies all over the place, some idiot reversed it into a stop sign. I mean, it's got reversing sensors for goodness sake! How could I they have not missed it? Some people. Tch.

All of which was topped off by a much less expensive, but still very irritating incident when a chid who will remain ~~lifeless~~ nameless decided, during bath time, that it would be a good idea to take all the clean dry towels off the clean dry towel shelves and dump them in the wet dirty bath water then dump them back out again onto the bathroom floor. At the risk of becoming monotonous - why? WHY? That's more hours of work, wringing and drip-drying, and spinning and tumble drying on things that were already clean. Whyyyy?

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Table Talk

2008-11-24T11:31:31+01:00

Sunday 23rd November

Breakfast time:

Richard: CRASH! We do not balance the honey on top of the marmalade, it will fall.

Me: SCOOBY! We do not put our tongues in the jam jar, we will spread germs and get sticky faces.

Turtle: PO! We do not wash our pits in the sacred pool of tears.

(They watched Kung Fu Panda twice this weekend)

Lunchtime:

Turtle: Mummy, how many days is it till Christmas?

Me: Erm...thirty-two

Turtle: How many days is it till December?

Me: Erm...seven

Turtle: So how many days is it till my birthday?

Me: Errrrm...forty-one

Scooby: And how many days is it till we are dead?

Me: Er...?

Tea time:

Baby: (scream)

Me: Okay, do you mean you want more? More? Mmmmmmore? Do you want more? Mmmmohhhhhh...?

Baby: (cocks his head on one side like a bird and points at the sandwich like I'm stupid)

Me: Yes, you can have more. Say mmore. Mmmoh. Mmmmohhhhhh.

Baby: (relenting on his silence just to shut me up) Mnah.

Me: Yey! Good boy! Did you hear that boys, Baby said his first word, he said 'more'!

Baby: (lighting up as he realises the whole family is focusing in on him)

Turtle: Hooray!!!

Baby: (misses his cue to start clapping and puts his hands in the air instead)

Everyone: Baby is...soooooo big!

Baby: (hands in the air again)

Everyone: Soooo big!

Baby: (starts clapping)

Everyone: Hooray!!

Baby: (unspoken dawning of the realisation that actually everyone else is merely a puppet in his hands and he could do with the whole family exactly as he wills...)

Comments

Why?

2008-11-19T00:37:00+01:00

Tuesday 18th November

Last night I came home from a friends house and found snow in my laundry room ('room' is an exaggeration - it used to be a toilet cubicle).

'Ahh,' I thought. 'Snow. How lovely. Wait, no...'

Of course it wasn't. I switched the light on, took a deep breath and was gas-fumed by the smell of non-biological detergent. And I don't even buy the power, I get the tabs. Someone had been very busy.

Whoever it was (and my money's on Snotmee), had very thoughtfully used some of the decimated tabs to try and wash something, which turned out to be a school jumper.

Now, I'm all for the children helping with the housework. I have a list of chores up that they do in return for stars, which they exchange for points, which they exchange for prizes - it's less complicated than it sounds - but this definately wasn't on the list. In fact, laundry is the one single household job I actually enjoy doing because you get to fold it and iron it while sitting on your behind and watching television.

What confused me the most was that whoever had done it had left the door open on the washing machine, and there was soapy water sitting inside the drum, and (I discovered when I tried to hoover the floor) more water on the carpet. You see, I have tried many times to open a washing machine mid-cycle, and there is no physical way of doing it. Not even if your washer explodes and dies halfway through a wash with lots of important items still inside it (that happened when I was a student). Not even if you're talking with your husband in the kitchen and you suddenly realise that his hand-held computer is being flung round on spin-cycle along with his work clothes (that happened in our last house). If a washing machine has water in it, there is no way on this green earth it will let you get that door open.

Unless you're a five year old child.

I really think that all those scientists who feel that they have all the basic proponents that will lead to the cure for cancer should bring them to my house, leave them in a high cupboard, sit in another room with a cup of tea, and wait for that five year old to conduct an experiment that will lead to the impossible. I mean, it's got to lead to a way of ~~making me money~~ enriching the world one day. It's cost me enough in make up, liquid soap, washing powder and other smearable products.

Oh, and by the way, I cut my finger today while putting salt on my mashed potato. Now that has to be a record somewhere.

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A Bit of a Pickle

2008-11-14T18:00:16+01:00

Thursday 13th November

About ten days ago, Richard and I were plunged into the middle of our very own mystery. He was making sandwiches and after a bit of rummaging in the fridge, he said 'Where's the pickle?'

I refrained from saracasm, only slightly rolled my eyes and sighed a little bit and said 'Um, is it not there in the fridge?'

He refrained from sarcasm, only slighly rolled his eyes and sighed a litle bit, and said 'Um, no, that's where I've been looking.'

My internal whiner was starting ('Why am I the only one in this house that can ever find anything, why is it always me that has to look, why can people not look more than a few centimetres around the general area where something might be, etc, etc) but my outward me sucked it up because I hate nagging, and went to help him find it.

I found a few interesting things in the fridge, but no pickle. So maybe, I thought, we haven't opened the jar yet and it's still in the cupboard. We looked in all the cupboards, and no pickle. We searched through all the unlikely spaces in the kitchen, and found some more interesting things, but no pickle.

Eventually, we had to give up the Great Pickle Hunt, but we were both pretty baffled. I knew I'd bought some, Richard knew he had opened and used it a couple of days ago, and now it was nowhere to be seen.

Cut to today, we were performing the Mediocre TV Remote Hunt. It's called mediocre because when you do something a couple of times a day, it ceases to be great. It's very difficult to summon up energy for it, it's not interesting or perplexing, it's just dull. We covered the usual - the floor, the mantelpiece, the dining room - so moved on to looking under and inside the furniture. I was stuffing my hands down between the sofa cushions when I felt something cold and hard. I bet you can guess what it was.

Well, you're wrong, because it was a potato.

But yes, next to the potato, was the missing jar of pickle.

I checked again to make sure there wasn't anything else down there - a knob of butter, some grated cheese, or a can of baked beans - but that's all I found. Apparently, that's all you need when you have a potato - a jar of pickle.

We asked the kids and they all unanimously agreed that Snotmee was responsible (he has a lot to answer for, whoever that guy is) and the matter was laid to rest.

Richard felt justified that ~~for once~~ the thing he was looking for genuinely hadn't been there, and I am equipped with the knowledge of a new hiding place should Snotmee return to the house to mess with more of our stuff.

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Fireworks and Headbanging

2008-11-12T01:01:31+01:00

Tuesday 4th November

Tonight we went to a fantastic firework display. It was up the road at Heysham Free Methodist Church (who apparently, according to the local free paper, who wrote a lovely but glaringly incorrect piece about our new church, we are a faction of) and was executed by a semi-professional pyrotechnic, so well-worth seeing. Baby, who was only ten days old last time we went to a firework party, was awed by the sight of so many pretty sparkles, owing to his obession with overhead lights (he likes to switch them on and smile, then off and frown, on and smile, etc, and I'm just hoping it doesn't lead to some uncontrollable form of OCD when he gets older).

In addition to the display, there was hot food, a tuck shop, a drama presentation and crafts, led by a lovely lady who didn't bat an eyelid when Turtle asked if he could use the resources to make a light sabre instead of a rocket, and handed him several sparkly pipe cleaners to entwine together.

The boys filled themselves on burgers and hot chocolate and we caught up with a few old faces. It's always an interesting experience being in the Free Methodist churches, because my family have been involved in them for years, and Richard's dad was a minister at a couple of them, so lots of people know who we are even if we don't know them. I have many a lovely conversation with people whose faces I recognise but whose names are a mystery, who ask me how my grandma/dad/father-in-law/little brother is, and I have to reply in the vaguest of terms because I don't know what their relationship to the aforementioned relative is, and how much detail they really want to hear. I even met a guy who said that the last time he had seen me was when I only had two chidren and was pregnant with my third. I was very tempted to ask him if that meant he was one of the many midwives, student nurses or paediatricians who had entered the room in the twenty-three minutes while I had my legs in stirrups trying not to push and waiting for the mobile scanning unit to confirm whether the second twin had turned to be head down, but I restrained myself instead and told him he must be mistaken.

Anyway, after a very smooth, fun-filled night, something had to go belly-up and at the moment we were about to leave, Richard realised he couldn't find his keys. He had met us in the car park when we arrived because he'd come straight from work, and helped me to get the kids in. So we, and many willing volunteers (who were the last ones left and waiting to close up the church and go home), traced his path from the car to the church, from the church to the field where we had stood watching fireworks, back to the church, around every room in the building, and back again. The boys were very good in the meantime, even Baby who must have been wondering what happened to his bed time. The older three hovered in and out of the entrance, staying in sight, and just at the moment I turned around to tell them not to run on the patio, there was a stumble and a fall and a face hit the paving stones.

I ran to Crash as fast as I could, thinking he had grazed his palms, but no, his hands hadn't even touched the floor. Instead, he'd caught it with his head. As I rolled him over, waiting for him to let out the cry he was sucking air in for, I literally saw the bump, Wiley Cayote-style, raise up from his head and turn greyish-blue. I picked him up and ran back in.
The crowd who were anxiously fretting over the lost keys, were now raised to a new frenzy of mild panic as we walked past people and their eyes widened in horror. The kitchen ladies produced a cold wet tea towel and an ice pack as if by magic and one rushed to get her car to take us to A&E. Everytime I peered back under the ice pack, the bump seemed to have expanded, until half his forehead was pushing out forward and his eye had changed shape a bit. Thankfully, Richard reappeared with the lost keys, and was able to take Crash to casualty in the van, while I took care of the other three, leaving the concerned onlookers free to go home and be contacted a couple of hours later to be told he was given the all clear by the doctor and sent home again.

In fact, when he got home later, he was able to give me a clear description of what the doctor said ('Oh dear, what a big bump!') and of the different toys he played with in the waiting room. His only concern was when I showed him his head in the mirror and he held his finger to the bump and said 'Mummy, I want it bigger and bigger and bigger!' I think he watches too much Tom and Jerry.

Oh, and the location of Richard's keys? Well, it would be far too embarrassing for him if I told you that after a twenty minute search, he suddenly remembered that when he had helped me get the children out of the car, he had swapped his jacket, so I won't say a word.

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What Not to Cook

2008-11-08T17:15:41+01:00

Monday 27th October

How to make Stewed Mother

You will need:

Dried-up Horlicks
Golden syrup
Filter coffee
Vitamin pills (yes, my heart stopped at the sight of those too)
Strawberry Nesquik
Chicken Cup-a-soup

Crackers
Chocolate sauce

Strawberry sauce
Four individual sachets of sugar
A potato peeler (NOTE: not a knife, because everybody knows Mum goes ballistic at the sight of you using a knife. So a potato peeler is sooo much better...)

Stir it together until it looks like this:

Then make sure you track through as much of it as possible so the mixture can be evenly distributed throughout the house:

(Thankfully the recipe ends here - I caught them before they worked out how to turn the oven on, or before they ate any of it. Although in hindsight, maybe that was a bad thing - maybe it would have cured them from ever stepping foot in the kitchen again...)

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Happy Birthday Baby

2008-11-06T11:19:28+01:00

Saturday 25th October

What's going on?

He needed a little help from his brothers

And of course, he preferred the boxes to the gifts

The favourite present - a helium-filled Elmo

Wheels courtesy of Grannie and Grandad

It took a little damage control to keep him off the candle, but he did like the cake too.

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Just Showing Off Really

2008-11-05T00:25:31+01:00

Friday October 10th

I have outdone myself and have managed a feat any parent would be proud of. I have made myself seem some sort of earth mother.

Today, after weeks of build up and anticipation, was Disney day at school. Lessons were done around Disney-fied topics, the canteen food was all cartoon themed, and everyone, teachers included, had to dress up as Disney characters. And because ~~I wanted to prove that even though I have continually lost letters, forgotten non-uniform days and repeatedly needed to be reminded of important events, I am not the worst mother ever~~ Turtle had asked, I decided we could make our own costumes. That’s right, even though we have at our disposal in our dressing box enough pre-made items to make a Lion King, a Woody, and a Mr Incredible, I decided to go with his request and attempt to make a Wall-E from scratch. I asked Scooby who he wanted to be and he said Goofy.

‘Are you sure? Don’t you want to be something cool like Buzz Lightyear or Lightening McQueen?’

‘No, I want to be Goofy because ee’s funny and he dances like dis (mini demonstration) and says “Gawrsh!”’

‘Okay…’

And for Crash, I pretty much made the decision myself as he is prone to change his mind every couple of hours and chose a character from his favourite film – Monsters Inc.

So I spent Thursday trawling through Morecambe’s indoor market, trying to find thick elastic, superglue, fluffy blue material and plastic teeth, and I was pretty successful too (even if I did have to buy two fluffy blue dog toys so I could rip them apart and use their pelt as shoe covers).

Then I spent most of Thursday night, through to the wee hours of Friday, putting it all together. I have to admit that compared to the other kids in their official Disney Princess and Pirates of the Caribbean costumes, they did look a bit shabby. But you know what? I’m so glad I did it. When I showed them the pieces I had for their costumes last night, they were so excited. Turtle by himself took the initiative to colour the cardboard box we were using for Wall-E, and the other two joined in, crayoning the sides and the wheels. They loved it, and before they went to bed, we laid out all the things on the floor in the lounge. Then in the morning, hey presto! There were three ready-made costumes and I’ve never seen them get ready for school faster so they could get them on. It was a bit like Christmas (and anything Christmas-like makes me feel very happy ).

And, not that I want to brag or anything, you know, but AHEM they did get honourable mention in assembly in front of the rest of the school. I don’t think any other bigger families had been ~~crazy~~ brave enough to try and make their own.

So here are the finished results:

Sully, Wall-E and Goofy (although if you didn't know that before I told you, I obviously haven't done a very good job!)

I could probably work out how to rotate this, but I'm tired and I can't be bothered.

Please notice the fine workmanship of the two-fingered gloves and the fact that the staples on the elastic held out till only 20 minutes before I went to pick him up.

My Goofy boy. Again with the non-rotation - sorry.

Thankfully we already had this hat - I just had to make and attach the ears.

He wore a pair of my shoes over his own shoes to get the slopey walk. I told him he should take the top shoes off for play time so he wouldn't fall over, but he assured me he could and would run in them and proceeded to lollop around the house to show me how.

My favourite blue jumper with purple spots added made a good body for Crash's costume. Halloween is a good time to get pointy plastic teeth.

Part of the decimated fluffy dogs, wrapped around a headband with silvery points (conveniently stuffed with the dogs' innards - don't share any of this with the children, will you?)

I ran out of ~~carcass~~ fluff to cover the whole shoes.

The whole happy crew. I made them, and their costumes too.

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Another Kitchen Casualty

2008-10-06T22:41:12+02:00

Monday 6th October

I’ve just cut myself on the World’s Sharpest Knife (I’m not exaggerating - that’s the actual brand name). I was in the kitchen, so therefore I was damaging myself. Last time I was in casualty, it was because of a tin of beans. I’m not going to the A&E department this time though. I’ve come up with a cunning plan instead. You see, as soon as I did it, I grabbed my finger and held it together. Squeezed it as tight as I could. Then I remembered what a wuss I am when it comes to blood loss, so I ran to the couch and lay down before I could get dizzy. Aha. Eventually, I got up, and still holding the cut together, got the plasters from the medicine box and, still without looking at the cut or allowing it to open, I’ve managed to wrap two plasters over it. One along the length of the cut, the other one widthways very tightly around to stop the blood from coming out. See? If there’s no blood and I can’t see it anymore, then it’s okay, yes? Presumably the pain will disappear after a few hours too.

The reason I was in the kitchen is because I was Cleaning. That’s different to your average cleaning – wiping, hoovering, sweeping – because I do that everyday, about sixteen times an hour. No, this was Cleaning. I am on a mission, since the little darlings started school, to reach the areas of this house that have never before been reached. We have lived here for a year and a week now, and there are still corners that have never been touched with a cloth, drawers that were dumped in a room one day when Richard came home with them and have never been given a purpose (other than hiding junk), and general stuff that has never found a home and just sits in a pile waiting for someone to take pity on it. This week is the turn of the kitchen (well, actually, it was the kitchen’s turn two weeks ago but I was still drowning under the paperwork in the study, and then we were all ill the week after that). So, purely because it was last on the list of priorities and has been ever since we’ve lived here, I started with the bay window where the sink lives. It has been hiding under a grotty net curtain, and smeared with nicotine from the previous owners, plaster from having all the walls redone, and paint from the hasty job that was done a few days before we moved in. Now, I know I’ll have to sort it all out again when we repaint it and finally get around to tiling it, but I figured a year is long enough to wait, and it has bugged me every day since we moved in, so I’m going for the feel good factor. And, to my smug satisfaction, I have got it clean. I have brushed, scraped, soaped and buffed it and now it is all sparkly. I have washed the net curtain and discovered it is actually white, not yellowy-brown. I have even cleaned the sink and managed to get off the tin can marks I thought may be permanent, and the flecks of paint and grout that somebody keeps leaving there after they ‘clean up’ after a job. I am so proud.

So, while on a roll, I thought I’d sort some of the stuff that had built up from the previous week while we were all on our death beds. And I started with the baby milk containers, which are made of cardboard except for the plastic tops. Now, these are an ingeneous idea, because they are like round cardboard boxes but in the lid, they have a clip to keep your scoop safe (so you don’t have to drop it in the powder to keep it in the box), and a little corner bit that you can level your scoop of milk off with. Sooo clever. But, the down side is, you need to get the plastic bit off the top so you can recycle the bottom. And it don’t just pull off, you have to kind of hacksaw away at it. Hence – the injury with the aforementioned World’s Sharpest Knife.

Ow.

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Birthday Boys

2008-09-17T23:51:04+02:00

Tuesday 16th September

Today two of my babies were five.

It’s so weird to think what life was like this time five years ago. I was (at the beginning of the day), absolutely huge, aching, hormonal, drained and worn out from eight months of being sick, and absolutely terrified at the thought of having two babies to look after. At the end of the day, I was very sore, more exhausted from the long, all-day labour, dizzy from lack of blood, and absolutely terrified at the thought of having two babies to look after. And, later, even more terrified when they had to take one away for tests because he was showing symptoms of an infection (he turned out to be fine).

Then I was thinking about this time four years ago. In a huge turn of events, we had just started bible college, so the boys were going to nursery half the week and I was rediscovering the old personality I had – you know, the one who is not just ‘mum’. I’m soooo glad we did that – I love my boys very much, but somehow I seem to love them a little bit more when I’ve had a bit of a break from them. It made those toddler years absolutely brill instead of claustrophobic.

Then, this time last year was almost as turbulent as five years ago – I was pregnant again (and therefore exhausted, aching, hormonal, etc), and still waiting for our house to be ready. I was commuting the boys from Preston to Morecambe every day for school and preschool, and using the hours inbetween for sanding or painting or sleeping in my car.

So, today was a day for celebration what I thought how far we’d come. Looking back is sometimes a good thing.

Crash opening his presents:

Scooby, who is obsessed with board games and loves Scooby Doo, was obviously over the moon with this:

After school, my sister, sister-in-law, and two nieces came over and we played pass the parcel and had a birthday tea.

And Richard brought home the cake:

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