Katyboo1’s Weblog

I’ve just trodden on the bottom of my jeans going downstairs and ripped them and nearly killed myself in the process.  It was quite traumatic and I decided to calm myself down by writing this and sitting down where I might be safe.  I don’t know whether I’m more upset about the fact that I just nearly plummeted to my death or the fact that I’ve just made a big rip in my really nice Gap jeans that make me feel thin even on a fat day.  It’s a close run thing. 

I am a bit clumsy at the moment which always happens when I’m either tired, hormonal or both.  I cut my finger twice over the weekend, once on a bit of tin foil, which was quite a feat. I didn’t get a look in on the sympathy front because I was too busy trying to console Tallulah over her blisters (which may be fatal, specially if she doesn’t stop moaning about them) and Tilly over her scratch.  The scratch is about a millimetre wide, but you would think it was a dagger blow which had pierced her to the bone the way she carried on about it.  All I have to say on the matter is that if you will take all your clothes off to prance around the garden in the sunshine, it’s not my fault if you slide onto a thistle. Stupid girl.

I seem to have inherited my mother’s sympathy gene when it comes to this kind of mishap.  I spent my whole childhood covered in scabs, spots, bites, stings and various foliage related rashes, not to mention spectacular bruises.  We also had a penchant for gouging each other with compasses at one stage.  Then there were the games of slaps, the agony of chinese burns and the stupid dares where you ended up with half your shin skin wrapped round some large immoveable object.  My mother’s answer was to smother me in germolene and TCP and send me back outside again.  I do remember the whole; ‘Stop crying!’, ‘But it hurts.’, ‘Not as much as it will if you don’t stop crying.’, ‘But Muuuummm, it hurts.’, ‘Right! Come here and I’ll give you something to cry about.’ scenario.  I haven’t quite used this on my kids yet, but there are times when it would be great.  Children these days are so coddled that they don’t know what true pain is (lucky them frankly!).

This morning was much better in the getting dressed for school stakes.  This is because I bought summer uniform supplies over the weekend and they were both desperate to go to school and preen.  Tallulah in particular was ninja fast.  I woke her at five to eight this morning and she was downstairs fully dressed by five past.  I couldn’t quite believe it.  I can’t afford to buy them new school outfits every day, which seems a shame, because breakfast time would be so much more bearable.  Having said that we did have rather a contretemps over the fact that she had to take her socks off again so I could administer a plaster to her wounded blister.  The getting of the socks on again was a nightmare operation which took longer than it took her to get completely dressed only minutes previously.  I really don’t understand it.

I went upstairs to get Oscar up and left the girls to eat their breakfast. I got back downstairs to find Tilly laying into Tallulah about something she had done and threatening to tell me if she didn’t behave. Naturally I could hear every word which meant that Tilly copped it as well.  Still, she sulked so much about it the rest of breakfast was very quiet.  Unfortunately we then had to move on to brushing hair which has become the next topic for tantrums in our house.  Tilly has been losing hair for a few weeks.  At first we thought it might be because we were doing so much swimming in Canada and the chemicals were eating her hair.  What with one thing and another we haven’t been able to get swimming since we got back and her hair is still coming out, so it’s not that.

I left her to her own devices last week hair wise, and she swore to me that it was getting better and that she was brushing her hair diligently.  This morning she ‘brushed’ her hair and came wandering into the kitchen looking like a hedgehog on growth hormone treatment so I grabbed her head and brushed.  I got three large brushfuls of hair from her, and a lot of tears thanks to the fact that she’d let it tangle hideously.  The problem is that her hair was so tangled it’s clear that she’s only been brushing the top and bottom of her hair for the last week, and just ignoring those knotty, complicated bits in the middle and at the back.  So I don’t know if I’ve got a week’s worth of hair loss, in which case it’s not too horrific, or whether this is just twenty four hour’s worth, in which case I need to whisk her to the doctor in a wheelbarrow as fast as my little legs can carry me.

I am now the hair monitor for the next week so that I can see just what’s going on in Tilly’s world of hair.  I don’t know if this is normal, and may be because she is ‘losing her winter coat’, in the manner of shaggy dogs and ferrets everywhere, or if this is abnormal and I should be giving her vitamin shots and worming tablets and reading up about alopecia.  The only good thing is the fact that she has so much hair, and it is so thick that you can’t tell that she’s lost any at all.  I’m trying not to worry about it too much in case I lose my hair over it.  I do keep having nasty flashbacks to the last picture of Gail Porter I saw in OK magazine and thinking please God don’t let it be that.  Gail seems to be handling it pretty well, but it can’t be easy, and I could do without the stress myself.  Look how much fuss Tilly made about a millimetre scratch on her leg.  God knows how much anguish we’d go through if all her hair dropped out.  She’s bound to be allergic to bobble hats and good wigs cost a bloody fortune.

Still, it wouldn’t be my life if there wasn’t some interesting plot arc looming over our lives and leading us further onto the path of weirdness.  My friend Nicki is convinced it is just because she is losing her winter coat.  Unfortunately Nicki has a horse and two dogs, which makes sense, and makes her an expert on animals, but not on nearly nine year old girls who have to be press ganged into eating fruit and vegetables and have an allergy to brushing their hair.  I’d like to believe Nicki, I really would.  In fact I’m going with that until I come up with something better.  My friend Gina had stress induced alopecia for a while, so I’m going to talk to her about it, presuming that she finished her 9k walk on the downs yesterday for charity, and isn’t in fact somewhere above Brighton, dehydrated and with a twisted ankle, sobbing for a St. Bernard.

I finished my Treatise on Leonardo and his painting yesterday.  It’s another one of those ‘I go there so you don’t have to’ books.  Avoid like the very plague unless you’re thinking of whipping up a large fresco of the Battle of Anghiari on the wall of the local church, in which case it may well be the book for you.  I’m now reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, which is much better.  I’m also sneaking off to the loo every half an hour to read a bit more of Rupert Everett’s autobiography.  Very scandalous and full of name dropping moments.  It’s like a literary version of OK magazine but it still has pictures, so I’m enjoying immensely because I’m a salacious little bugger at heart.  In fact I’ve decided that my job title should be ‘voyeur’, not the pervy kind you understand.  I’m middle aged now. I’m passed all that huffing and puffing and getting a broken ankle thanks to some stupid article in a magazine.  No I mean the kind of person who is much better suited to looking at the world than being in it.  If I could just observe my children I’d be a much better mother than when I actually have to step into frame and actually take charge of runny noses and full nappies and blisters.  Unfortunately  I don’t think they really have a salaried position for that kind of job.  Shame.  I’d be a shoo in.

I’m feeling rather proud of myself despite the great hair trauma of 2008.  Oscar and I went from school to the post office and did lots of horrible chores that we (I mean I) had been putting off. Then we went to the library and read the first two pages of lots and lots of books whilst rotating like a whirlwind through the stacks and rearranging the chick lit section, just to give the librarians something to do later on.  Oscar got his baby reader’s pack, which was very cool.  When kids get to be 18 months old the library gives them a little book bag with story books, crayons, note books and book plates in to encourage them to read.  It’s very funky.  Well I thought it was very funky.  Oscar hated it.  He threw the lovely board book about wild animals onto the floor of the carpark outside and read Rupert Everett upside  down all the way home instead!  Nice one.

We went to the Co-op and bought bread and cakes because my mummy is coming for lunch.  We bought some fabulous wrapping paper to wrap Caron’s baby’s present in too.  It’s got jelly beans all over it, and Oscar wanted to eat it.  He kept trying to take it off me and shouting ‘num num!’ very loudly in the hope that this would persuade me to give it to him after all.  It didn’t.  I tried to placate him with some dried apple bits, which he said he liked but then threw into the oncoming traffic as we were crossing the road.  He also refused rice cakes and apple juice because they were rubbish and not half as good as reading Rupert Everett in the end.  I’m sure Rupert would be impressed by his youngest fan.

We had done all our chores by half past ten.  Just in time to get home and watch In the Night Garden, much to Oscar’s deep joy.  He hasn’t seen it for a few days because we spent most of the weekend living in the garden when we weren’t out in hot sweaty shops howling around and being cross with each other.  He is very behind with his viewing, so he was immensely pleased to get the whole living room to himself and Makka Pakka while I put all the groceries away and caught up with a back log of text messages and phone calls from people who’ve been trying to find out if I’m back from Canada yet and can they come round and play.

I’ve been really tired and out of sorts since we got back, but have made the executive decision that the only person who can change that is me, and do I really want to spend the rest of my life roaring at the children and then spending my evenings snivelling about being a bad parent and falling asleep whilst watching repeats of Grand Designs? No, I don’t.  I went to the chemist today and bought a very large bottle of Floradix.  Sometimes when I get like this it’s because my iron levels are low.  I look like a pint of milk and even after weeks in the sun I merely go brown to the point where I look like everyone else in the middle of winter.  It always helps me when I have to go to hospital, because even when I’m not, I always look anaemic.  I am quite often iron deficient though, so I decided Floradix might help.  It should do at thirteen pounds a bottle.  If it doesn’t I shall spend my next thirteen pounds on a bottle of red wine and see how that goes.  I probably won’t care much after that.

So, I decided to take iron, eat more veg and ring all my friends and say that I am ready to play even though I am falling down tired and quite, quite sad.  I thought it might help, and if it doesn’t some of them might bring cake, which most definitely will.