Eau De Dead Frog

This is the diary bit.  The bit for me and my children when I’m old.  So if you just want to get on to the comedy highlights I suggest you read the new Gillian McKeith entry and skip this one.

Tilly went out for the day with her gran, which left us with Tallulah and Oscar.  Normally this is alright as when you’re used to herding three and suddenly one disappears, two seems terribly easy and you can be really nonchalant.  It didn’t work that way today.  Tallulah was very put out that we are still celebrating Tilly’s birthday and that it isn’t hers yet.  She is now at that age where she realises that sulking about another person’s good fortune is not really socially acceptable, so she tries really hard bless her, but sometimes it’s all too much.  Yesterday this manifested itself by her desire to stage manage every part of the festivities and merely present Tilly with things as if all by the sweat of Tallulah’s fair brow.  It also came out in a nasty bout of jealousy about the fact that Tilly had been given some paper money.

Tallulah can’t count properly yet, but is fully aware that paper money is worth significantly more than ordinary coins.  In her self appointed role as the Silas Marner of Glenfield this caused her untold grief yesterday when Tilly ended up getting thirty five quid from various people, all as paper money.  She kept sidling up to our visitors and announcing: ‘D’you know? D’you know that Tilly has got paper money?’ to which the poor person would say yes, only to have Tallulah fix them with her beady eye and say: ‘And.  And. I haven’t got any paper money at all.  And. Do you know that it’s my birthday in five weeks?’ to which the poor person would say yes, only to have Tallulah fix them with her beady eye and say: ‘Well. You could give me paper money for my birthday couldn’t you? And that would be fair.’ To which the poor person could only say yes once again, because if they didn’t Tallulah would kill them and jump on their bones.

This morning, despite the fact that Tallulah was going to a birthday party herself later on in the day she was annoyed because she had found out that Tilly had also got £24 saved up from Christmas and so she had even more paper money than Tallulah had anticipated, which was a cruel blow, especially when you have saved furiously for two weeks and got the grand total of £1.78 and a Canadian quarter with an English money back guarantee.  And if you add to that the fact that a day out with Granny is their equivalent of winning the lottery anyway, it was a bitter blow to bear.

Because the upcoming party was all that she could think of that would cheer her up, it was pretty much the sole topic of conversation for the entire morning apart from when she came in to ask me what I was cooking for lunch.  When I told her it was asparagus she nearly had a fit until I told her that my asparagus was far too delicious to waste on her and she wasn’t even getting a sniff of it.  She then chilled out and asked me if I remembered the time on holiday when we had planned to go and feed the asparagus, but we couldn’t because daddy wasn’t very well.  I confessed that I had no recollection of this and was she perhaps thinking that asparagus was a kind of bird, and not a vegetable, which it most surely was.  She concurred that she had indeed thought it was a bird and then asked me what we had been going to feed when daddy was poorly.  I had no idea.  It was very troubling, but it was better than talking about Matthew’s party and what kind of sandwiches there might be, and if naughty Lucy was going to be there, so I spun it out for a while.

After lunch we wrapped the parcel and wrote the card.  Oscar got very cross and decided that the only place he could possibly be was on my knee.  I was otherwise occupied trying to get ‘m’s’ and ‘w’s’ the right way round, so gave him a piece of paper and a pen with which to amuse himself.  This did not go down well and he disembowelled the pen and threw it across the kitchen floor in a fit of temper.  When I simply put it in the bin he then decided to have a go at pinching me to see if that would help.  It didn’t.

After the party and Tilly’s trip out we met at my mum’s for a cup of tea before going home to get ready for the Saturday night Doctor Who ritual (God knows what we will do in a few weeks when the series finishes.  It will be terrible).  The girls had an ice cream tub each and tried to make rose petal perfume.  Tallulah hadn’t got the idea of rose petals being the main ingredients, and by the time she’d put in some twigs, some grass, some leaves off the apple tree and a blob of cuckoo spit that she had stuck on the end of her finger it wasn’t as fragrant as Tilly’s, particularly when she stirred it up with a mangled and decidedly evil looking magpie feather and dropped a beetle in there by mistake. 

Tilly, needless to say, managed to throw her ‘perfume’ all down her new dress, thus saving me from having to bottle it and keep it on my dressing table until it started creeping about the house trying to kill us all in our beds.  I was very grateful for her clumsiness.  Oscar meanwhile was eating an apple, in between wiping it across the grass and trying to shove it up the cat’s bum whenever it came into view.

The girls were very sad about the perfume.  Mum tried to console them by saying that these home made concoctions always go mouldy anyway and the best way to make perfume that lasts is to put in some ambergris.  They asked her what ambergris was.  She explained that it came from a dead whale.  They put their heads together and then had to be virtually pulled out of the pond by the scruff of their necks because they had found a dead frog carcass and decided that one aquatic creature was much the same as another and if they made up another batch with dead frog in it, it would last forever.  Thanks mum.