Katyboo1’s Weblog

This is my Saturday night blog.  I’m probably not going to post it until Sunday morning and then I can pretend that I am a novel about Angry Young Men by Alan Sillitoe (look it up).  But, given my insane amounts of blogging at the moment it is hard to tell what I will do.  I may have blogged another novel’s worth by the morning and still be going strong.

It’s not that things are any more interesting than usual.  Maybe it’s that I’m more interested than usual.  The kids are also making me laugh quite a lot and as I don’t do photos (see previous blog about my prowess with a camera) I do verbal snapshots instead, which means I wander round with a notebook a lot taking cryptic notes about the stupid stuff they do and say.  The problem is that my notes are so cryptic that if I don’t write them up fairly promptly I have no idea what it was that made me nearly die with laughter and valuable ammunition is lost for the time they get boy and girlfriends and I produce all this as evidence before demanding genetic testing and insanity clauses in the pre nup.

So.  I posted earlier about their collecting and disco dancing with pants on their head.  Shortly after that we decided to go out and meet my friend Saj at Borders.  Saj is a serial dumper in our friendship.  She frequently promises to come round and then invariably gets side tracked and doesn’t.  It has been six months and about fifteen promises since we last saw her.  As she was definitely within geographical range today, having a pathological need to shop at the shopping centre near our house we decided it was too good an opportunity to miss and went to capture her and bring her to our king.  To be fair to her, I never go to see her.  This is partly because she lives in Loughborough and I have a pathological hatred of Loughborough based on the fact that it is mostly full of physical education students running around in purple tracksuits and looking healthy.  It is also because she lives a student type life style in a shared house and I have three small children in tow.  The two lifestyles are not really compatible and never the twain shall meet.

Saj shops more than me.  Saj’s hobby is shopping.  Last time she came to my house she was three hours late because she was canoodling with a personal shopper in Monsoon.  She is unable to resist the siren’s call to go to the shops as often as possible.  Saj shops more than a personal shopper.  This is frequently why Saj fails to come and see us.  She is too busy maxing out her credit card.  To be fair to her she is also young, free and single and has a social life that put mine to shame even when I was young free and single myself.  She is often too partied out to come and see us too.  And who can blame her? Who wants to be surrounded by three hyperactive midgets all clamouring for attention when their head is pounding to the rhythm of the previous night’s pumping bass tunes and their handbag is full of sick? Not me, and I’m related to them.

Anyway, she was at Fosse Park shopping today, so we knew we could creep up on her.  We met her in Borders for cake and coffee.  Saj doesn’t usually shop at Borders so it was virgin territory for her, but due to the cake and children who threw themselves at her, squeaking with delight she liked it, although she was quite perturbed that Jason bought a book, particularly because it was 1984.  Saj had to read it for GCSE English and apparently it made her sick with boredom and frightened the pants off her.  Not a winning combination then really.  Still, she should have been glad that we didn’t buy it for her.  And Tilly did a picture of some Jimmy Choos for her, so all was not lost. 

Saj’s fatal weakness in the grand scheme of shopping is the sub category of shoes.  She has been known to offer workshops to men on the subject of how to judge women and relationships by the qualities of the shoes of both parties involved.  It is a serious subject.  She loves shoes, shoes, clothes and makeup, but mainly shoes.  She’s also been known to walk a mile over hot coals for a handbag, but only if it will match her shoes.  She doesn’t envy me any of my pairs of shoes, although she doesn’t know that my mum bought me a pair of Gina shoes the other day, so she might now.  She does envy me my Ghost handbag though.  Unfortunately my Gina shoes don’t go with my Ghost handbag.  I still love my handbag best.  It is the nicest handbag in the world and luckily for me it is so big I could fit a child in it, or enough things so that I can keep a fractious child amused for several days.

When Saj went to America for four months before Oscar was born I had to babysit a hamper full of shoes that she couldn’t be parted from so that nobody would steal them away while she was gone.  She also brought the girls two carrier bags full of killer heels for their dressing up box and deposited several more hampers with other kind people with shoe shaped spare rooms.  It is a serious addiction.  She favours Choos.  I prefer Manolos and Louboutins.  I don’t have either.  Saj does have Choos and killer Armani heels which look like weaponry.  She goes out dancing in these things.  Much kudos to her.  My dancing days involved Doc Martens or Mary Janes.  A lot, lot easier to dance in than four inch spikes.  Just the thought makes me want to cry.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was not the delights of our visit with her, because it was indeed delightful and I did promise her that I would write about her in the blog, hence the preamble.  What I really wanted to write about was what happened with the children both before and after we met up with her.

Before we met her we had to get out the door, and with three kids it’s no easy matter. The shoe cupboard has become a midden and is full of things that nobody wants to wear any more, or which the kids have grown out of, but which we haven’t gotten round to throwing away yet.  It also seems to contain three kites, two water pistols and a broken umbrella which I’m still puzzling over.  The forage through the shoe cupboard takes twenty minutes and a miner’s lamp and that’s before they have to have a wee, find their coats, argue over who is sitting next to who and then realise they need another wee because they’ve spent so long doing all the other things. 

Now, we have to keep all the bathroom doors firmly shut at the moment because Oscar has taken to turning on all the bath taps and dropping various crucial items down the toilet.  Ironically one of his favourite things to drop down the toilet is the wooden toilet from Tallulah’s dolls house.  It’s all very quantum. 

So, Tilly was rummaging in the shoe cupboard while Jason directed her with a torch and an ordnance survey map, I was doing something complicated in the study and keeping half an eye on Oscar, and Tallulah was in the toilet having her wee.  Tallulah came out of the toilet and unbeknownst to me, forgot to shut the door.  I turned to find my purse and Oscar toddled into the toilet and grabbed the first thing he could see which happened to be the toilet brush.  He then appeared round the study door, waving the toilet brush triumphantly and looking extraordinarily happy with himself.  He shouted ‘Teef! Clean!’ and shoved the dripping end of the toilet brush into his mouth before I could a) scream or b) run towards him.  He did not look very impressed with himself after he had lowered the brush, nor when I wrenched it out of his hot little grip.  Tallulah didn’t look very impressed with herself when she got a firm reprimand for not shutting the door, and I was not very impressed with myself for not having Zola Budd’s sprinting abilities.

My one consolation is that the toilet brush is much larger than his mouth and I am hoping that very little of it managed to wend its way into his gaping maw.  As it is I have been forcibly giving him lots of liquids ever since and praying a lot.  I really, really don’t want to spend the next few days trying to explain to the hospital how I let my child get dengue fever from the toilet brush.  As it is I nearly had to take him this evening because he tried to sit in his favourite bucket while he was having a shower and got his little fat bottom wedged in it.  Luckily he fell over because he was top heavy and that shunted it off his bum with a small pop!  Phew!  I spoke to my mum afterwards, and when she had finished picking herself up from the floor laughing she pointed out that it would have come off easily if I’d drilled a hole in the bottom of the  bucket to relieve the pressure.  A useful tip for the future no doubt.  She sounded very knowledgeable about it, so I presume that either me or my brother has been this way before.

After we got back from our trip out the girls were playing upstairs and Tilly came running to see me, trailed by Tallulah.  Tilly was in one of those breathlessly expectant states of excitement which meant that she had either discovered how to turn lead into gold or had found something which she thought was really going to get her sister into trouble.  The lead thing turned out to be a red herring and it was just the usual.  Tallulah is an avid collector of tea sets.  If you ever ask her what she wants for birthdays or Christmases a tea set will be somewhere on the list.  She has several.  One of her nicest ones is a really beautiful carved wooden one that my friend Rachel bought her. It comes complete with wooden tea bags on strings, lumps of wooden sugar and wooden cake.  It’s excellent.

As exhibit A for the prosecution Tilly had one of the tea cups in her hand.  She showed it to me wide eyed and bushy tailed, positively quivering for the kill.  In the bottom of the cup, in fact, half way up the sides of the cup was what looked like melted chocolate.  I enquired further.  It turns out that it was melted chocolate.  When I asked how come it was melted and how come it was in the bedroom, where they are not allowed to have any food of any kind, particularly not quantities of melted chocolate, it turned out that Tallulah had been smuggling portions of her sweetie time upstairs in her cheeks like a hamster.  Once it was sufficiently melted she was drooling it into her tea cups so that she could pretend it was coffee and play proper tea parties.  Yum yum.

I was a) disgusted, b) impressed at her ingenuity (we have discussed before how I find it much harder to get annoyed about naughty things which show some creative flair) and c) splitting my sides with laughter.  I tried to be cross, but unfortunately me falling about all over the floor and holding my sides put paid to that trip to the naughty step and I had to make her vow never to do it again before sending them both packing.  Tilly was quite disappointed that fireworks hadn’t erupted, but was forced into laughing along with everyone else, bless her scheming, black little heart.  We’ve scrubbed the cup, raided the giant tea set mountain to make sure there is no more evidence of chocolate based drool products and vowed never to speak of it again, except to you obviously….