Friday May 9th – Cake Fur Breh Fus

I’m going out very soon.  A friend of mine has a new job and is taking me out for tea and buns to pick my brains.  I’m quite nervous about this.  I haven’t worked properly now in over two years and I don’t know if I’ve got any brains left worth picking.  Still, if he’s offering free cake it might be worth at least giving it a go.  I’m hoping the soothing application of sugar molecules will calm my fevered nodules and allow me to produce some fantastic words of wisdom.  From this side of the cake experience it seems unlikely to be honest, but you just never know.

The mornings are rather fraught this week and today has been the pinnacle.  I’m so glad it’s Saturday tomorrow, and maybe, just maybe I might get a lie in.  At least I won’t be faced with the spectacle of Tallulah roaring her eyes out because it’s Friday or whatever other random excuse she has created for bursting into tears before breakfast, even if I do have to get up early.  Every morning this week she has snivelled her way to the breakfast table in various states of undress, with toothpaste dripping from random untoothy parts of her, and with twigs in her hair.  This morning she started crying before she had even attempted to put any clothes on because she has lost her bear.  What she was doing looking for her bear when she was supposed to be getting ready for school remains unclear, but it was a tragedy of epic proportions.  Needless to say, after random shouting the bear was left lost and I went downstairs to prepare breakfast and let her get on with things. 

After twenty minutes she came roaring downstairs complaining that she couldn’t possibly put her pinafore on (she was too short, it was a holy day of obligation, I don’t bloody know).  By this time she had only managed to put on a t-shirt.  I sent her back upstairs to put on the rest of her clothes first.  Fifteen minutes after that she sashayed down with her pants back to front and odd socks on, still roaring and still clutching her pinafore dress.  She has been able to dress herself since she was three, which is the most frustrating thing about it.  She just likes the drama.  Unfortunately what I like in the morning is Zen like silence and three cups of coffee.  Our needs just don’t intersect at any level.

While all this hoo ha was unfolding I was dealing with Oscar.  He didn’t want to get up this morning at all, and while I was getting him dressed his fondest wish was actually to play with a toy cash register.  He then hit himself sharply on the head with it whilst trying to open the drawer while I was trying to put his shorts on.  Mayhem ensued, only assuaged by the promise of breakfast or breh fus as he calls it.  We went downstairs, him still clutching the cash register (I decided it was easier to give in than have a screaming match while I wrenched it out of his hot little grasp).  Yesterday morning at breh fus, I offered him all his usual morning delights, pineapple (nyeoooohhh), banana (neyoooohh), shreddies (nyeooh, nyeoooh, yeurch) and toast (Nah!).  I gave up and said, ‘Well! What do you want?’ little expecting to get a coherent reply.  He looked at me, cocked his head on one side like a bird and announced very clearly, as if talking to a subhuman life form: ‘CAKE fur BREH FUS.’  At which point I was speechless, incredibly impressed, and so not going to give in to his demand, no matter how well he had phrased it.  After this we had a battle of wills for ten minutes while he sang a sad and keening little number which involved the random application of the words ‘cake’, ‘breh fus’ and ‘ta’ and I refused.  He begrudgingly accepted pineapple, but was not impressed.  He kept spearing it on his fork, looking at it mournfully and saying: ‘Cake? Neyoooooh’ in a tragic voice before eating it anyway.

This morning it was the turn of ‘Bikkits fur breh fus’, which met with the same maternal resistance.  Eventually he settled on yogurt followed by shreddies.  He only had the shreddies because he was so impressed by Tallulah’s incessant tantrumings that he wanted the same as ‘Tulah’ as he calls her, in the hope presumably that her tenacity and doggedness would rub off on him through the application of shreddies.  In the end he didn’t really want them to eat, due to them not being biscuits so he carefully spooned them out of his bowl and placed them on his head.  He then did a kind of arms thrown open gesture with his spoon still clutched in his podgy fist and shouted: ‘Shreddies! Head! DA DA!’ with enormous pride.  I threatened the first child to laugh with imminent death, scraped the shreddies from his cranium and then went and laughed in the downstairs toilet before coming back to do more random shouting.

After Tallulah had  changed her socks, rearranged her pants and had to put her shoes on twice because she’d put them on the wrong feet, we managed to get out the door.  I was exhausted.  A shadow of my former self.  Then the teacher cornered me at school for a word.  This worried me.  I finally thought Tallulah’s Waterloo had arrived.  She has been so good at school for so long that  I just knew it couldn’t last and I’d be hauled before the beak because she had strung some  child from a tree and whipped her with a brace of skipping ropes.  Amazingly, given the tenor of the week’s proceedings it wasn’t anything like that.  Apparently she has been so very, very good this week that she’s going to get a special award at the merit assembly this afternoon for her diligence and general all round shininess, and would I like to come?  After having to have a sit down, a glass of water and a thump on the back I recovered long enough to say hoorah! and staggered off home to ring my mother and tell her the good news.  Maybe her behaviour is proportional if you see what I mean? The worse she behaves at home, the better she is at home.  Presumably on this basis, the week she strings her sister up and flays her alive, she will be awarded the Freedom of Glenfield and get to live in the Headteacher’s office.  It’s a thought, not a particularly comforting one, but a thought nonetheless.

My children never cease to amaze me.  I was talking about this with my mum today and she said that I was to remember that she and my gran had advised me never to volunteer, and that if I’d only listened to them I’d be in a convent about now, reading books in the peace and quiet.  I said that knowing my luck they’d have put me in charge of the bees and I’d be forever extricating bees from my vestments and getting hot and sweaty from herding them about everywhere.  I’d be rubbish at learning the bee dance.  I’d probably also develop some terrible cough from all that smoke they use. She had to agree that this kind of ill luck dogs my steps and that I was probably better off with the kids after all.  How sad.  Sad but true.

Cool things.  Jason went to play poker last night and won £1300! That’s just amazing.  He staggered in in the early hours of the morning and woke me up to announce that we wouldn’t have to go into hideous debt to pay for the decking in the garden after all.  It was quite exciting, but I wasn’t compus mentis enough to whoop, dance around in my pyjamas and throw poker chips in the air with glee.  I believe I muttered, ‘That’s nice’, and went back to sleep.  I was slightly more enthusiastic this morning when he went to work, although as he only got three hours sleep, it was his turn to say ‘hmmm’ unenthusiastically as he zombied out the door.

Also finished reading the book by Maria Savva.  Not my cup of tea I’m afraid. I don’t think she’s going to be sending me any more.  Although fair play to the woman for actually finishing a book.  I’ve been writing one on and off for fifteen years and haven’t got past the first chapter yet.  I also finished the book ‘on painting’.  I am doomed, doomed.  There was forty pages with diagrams on perspective and geometry and I didn’t understand a word.  I was reading it.  It was going in o.k. but when it got to the translation part of my brain it just went: ‘blah, blah, blah, painting, blah, blah, blah, triangles etc…’ Still it’s finished now.  I’m onto Leonardo’s book on painting (it’s probably unfinished), and a book that my friend Caron lent me six months ago and I’ve just found and thought ‘crap! I really must get that back to her.’  It’s all ticking along.

So, that’s it.  I await my cake with eager anticipation…