Saturday 23rd February – The Name of the Game

Today the children have been honing their skills in one of their favourite games.  It’s called; ‘Let’s Give Mummy No Peace At All.’  The rules are, anything goes as long as you stick to the principle that mummy must not be allowed more than five minutes to do any one thing at any given time of the day or night.  It’s better if mummy is actively trying to multi task and is already clearly quite stressed.  It is at times like these that asking questions such as: ‘What do oranges taste like?’ is a sure fire winner, and guaranteed to tip mummy over into the world of the ragingly insane.  It’s also good to ask questions which don’t really require an answer, but which are guaranteed to provide instant high blood pressure such as: ‘Mama! I’ve lost some beads from my necklace.  It broke, and Oscar was helping me find them.  Do you think he should be breathing in that snuffly way?’

The children remain endlessly amused by it, and Oscar seems to have been born with the advanced level skills hardwired into his brain, despite the fact that he can’t eat a yoghurt without flicking it to the four winds.  I don’t know if it’s a gift or because he’s a boy, or because he’s been intensively coached by the girls.  I thank my lucky stars that I stopped at three.  Once you get to six or higher every child must surely be the devil incarnate?  It is true to say that after nearly nine years of parenting that I’m finding such jolly japes as these are wearing a little thin. 

To be fair to them, some days they are very good, but today hasn’t been one of them.  They seem to have an animal like sixth sense for those days where I have an extraordinary amount of things to do, and react rather as if I’ve just announced that I’m going to lock them in the cupboard under the stairs for eternity and feed them on thin slivers of bread and water by poking it through the keyhole.  Even with Jason at home and helping me out it was still a gargantuan effort not to run screaming from them after several hours of persecution.  You can tell it’s been a bad one because Jason kept patting my hand sympathetically and saying: ‘I don’t know how you do it.’  Normally he offers at least half a dozen times a week to swap my job for his.  Not today Josephine.

It’s not so much the kids’ physical presence I object to as the fact that my brain seems to be slowing down, and I will just have a thought half formulated when one of them bursts in and starts bleating at me, at which point the thought disappears into thin air never to be seen again.  I might suggest to them that they take lessons in the subtle art of the ninja.  Yes, they’d still be a deadly force to be reckoned with, but they would also be quiet, and it would help me no end when I wander into the kitchen clutching a shoe for the fourteenth time in a day thinking: ‘Now. I’m sure there was a very good reason for me to be here with this…’

I had critical cleaning to do today, due to a wealth of visitors last week that produced considerable extra wear and tear on the house, and a further influx of visitors over the next few days.  I decided to get the kids to help me.  They usually quite like a bit of light dusting and making smeary streaks on the windows in the name of cleaning them.  I feel that I am equipping them for a useful life when I finally tell them never to darken my doorstep, and they feel that they are being ‘helpful’.    Naturally it takes fourteen times longer to clean anything, and I have to sneak back when they’re in bed and redo key corners, but normally we rub along quite nicely. 

Unfortunately today wasn’t ‘normal’.  I emptied the contents of the bathroom bin into a carrier bag along with a freshly minted nappy from the bowels of Oscar, tied the top and asked Tilly to take it outside to the bin and dump it.  She was gone so long I came downstairs to check that she hadn’t been kidnapped by a rogue bin man with a penchant for small, smelly girls.  She was just re-entering the house with the carrier bag, empty.  She had undone it, emptied the contents and was just moseying along to the kitchen to put it back in the carrier bag drawer.

I halted her in her tracks, explained that she should have just put the whole lot in the bin, but not to worry.  I asked her to put the dirty carrier bag into the kitchen bin.  I followed her into the kitchen.  She walked straight past the dustbin and put the carrier bag into the sink, whereupon she rinsed it under the tap.  I asked her what she was doing and she told me that she was washing it so that it could be recycled!  I pointed out that it had been full of pooh and nappies and that although her sentiment was admirable I just wanted her to stop wafting about with a shitty carrier bag and put it in the bloody bin.  She got quite upset at the fact that a) I had shouted, and b) I didn’t have green credentials.  I then pointed out that I had been recycling the carrier bag as a bin liner and nappy sack in the first place and that scraping pooh off it to use it again was a step towards saving the planet that I was just not ready to take yet.  She went off in a huff at this point, and the day continued in this vein until bed time when I crawled into bed weeping with joy.

Jason’s sister came to visit us for the weekend.  The kids, of course, thought that this meant she would be standing on the doorstep at 7.00 a.m., bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to play.  She is 28, single, and lives in Cardiff.  She has the great good fortune to be able to please herself, and not the slightest desire to get up at the crack of dawn to drive to our house and spend the entire day being manhandled by three small but adoring children. 

She finally turned up at half past three in the afternoon, after a lie in, a leisurely breakfast and a trip to the gym.  By this time the children were bald with stress and climbing around on the ceiling to try and escape me after I’d finally cracked after the nine hundredth time of being asked if Aunty Lisa was here yet.  I had tried the sarcasm route: ‘Yes she is.  She’s just shrunk to the size of a pin head and is having a swim in that egg cup over there.’ I had tried the flat out denial; the ‘why don’t you stand by the window and look for her’ routine, and the just ignore them gig.  Nothing worked, which was why I was reduced to bellowing and flailing.

When she finally did get here we were knee deep in making cheesecake.  I was desperate for sugar and thought it might provide a suitable and non destructive distraction from waiting.  Tallulah was hitting a lot of digestive biscuits with a rolling pin and sending everyone else blind with flying crumbs.  Tilly was trying to gently fold icing sugar into cream cheese and creating a fine mist of sugar which settled on our shoulders like sticky dandruff, and Oscar was wriggling about in his high chair, mad to get out and join in and refusing to be pacified by a lump of digestive which had flown into his path.  It was hell, and Lisa looked like she wanted to turn tail and go back the way she’d come.

Luckily, Lisa is in an active phase, so I sent them all to have a wash and banished them into the garden to play on the trampolene with Aunty Lisa.  She was thrilled, they were thrilled and by the time I had constructed cheesecake out of the remains of our ingredients and hosed down the kitchen I was fairly pleased myself.  I was even more pleased when Jason sashayed downstairs after half an hour on his new exercise bike and announced that he was getting a Chinese takeaway because it wouldn’t do for him to get fit all at once.  This meant that I didn’t have to batter my brains out thinking about what to cook for one cholesterol heavy man, one woman on a diet who is also a vegetarian, three grumpy children and me.  By this time I had gone off food altogether, and it took me so long to reconstruct the cheesecake that it wasn’t going to be ready to eat for hours, so I surrendered to the lure of prawn crackers myself.  Thank god for monosodium glutamate.