It’s bein’ so healthy as keeps me goin’

As you know, I generally enjoy ill health.  I like to moan and whinge and have some low grade malaise hanging around in the background at all times.  This is partly because I am training for my old age when I can really hit my stride in terms of listing my illnesses and showing random strangers on buses my scars, and partly because I am so knackered from the onset of middle age and chivvying three small children about that I catch everything going.

 

You may wonder, given my predilection for coughing up a lung and wailing about it, why I don’t just go to the doctors and shut the fuck up.  Or why I have such a rabid hatred and morbid fear of doctors and hospitals in general.  On this damp Sunday night in February while the children are all hunkered down at their father’s house or in their cot, and husband is grinding away at the coal face of poker in order to win me a luxury Sicilian villa with hot and cold running chandeliers, I shall tell you.

 

Now, I am not known for the darkness of my blogging, but the NHS tends not to be very amusing unless you have private health care or live in Cuba (apparently the best free health system in the world), so If you’re waiting for the jokes, the first two paragraphs were it.

 

Things were mostly fine until I decided that I wanted to have babies.  Not brilliant, but manageable. 

 

I did have an interesting run in with the incompetence of the health service when I was sixteen and succumbed to a nervous breakdown.  When my parents first hoicked me off to the doctors because I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read a book and couldn’t be left on my own for more than ten minutes without having a panic attack that made me want to vomit, my doctor’s suggestions for better health were ‘beer’ and ‘rugby’.  I was somewhat dumbfounded.

 

Needless to say, beer and rugby did not help me get better.  Nor did anything else the NHS failed to do for me, like getting me a counsellor.  My letter telling me that a counsellor was available to see me, came three months after I was ‘well’ again and a year after my initial consultation with the GP.  Timing is everything.

 

This is why I tend to try to avoid their tender ministrations when my emotional plumbing occasionally goes a bit hay wire these days.  I am still not convinced that beer and rugby will help. I know people will say I am probably in denial or being resistant, but hey.  Everyone has standards.

 

Nope. It was the pregnancies that really did it for me.

 

I have always been rather loathe to write about my experiences at the coalface of baby making.  I know I am very lucky.  I had some horrible experiences, but I did end up with three very gorgeous and very healthy children, which is the point of the exercise.

 

I am fully aware that there are other people out there who haven’t been as lucky as me.  Other, lovely, totally deserving people like La Belette Rouge and Red Shoes, people who should be having babies and who can’t. 

 

So, to them, and others like them, I apologize sincerely for the content of my next few blogs and will totally understand if you choose to skip them and come back when things are more ‘booish’.  Nevertheless, it is my blog and my pain and I’m going to write about it.  In depth.

 

You have been warned.

Sunday 22nd February – I channel Violet Elizabeth

Am feeling a bit less gruesome today.  I am fine as long as I lurch from feeding place to feeding place with not much hanging about in between.  It is always better if there is a chaise longue of death somewhere around for me to loll on when my batteries start to fizzle out.  I realise that this is not a viable life style for a woman with three children and an extremely grubby kitchen, so despite having talked myself out of going to the doctors again this morning when I got up and didn’t feel like Madame Death, I have now reluctantly, and with much Violet Elizabeth style sulking, talked myself back into it again.  Bah.

Jason suggested that we plan our yearly Boo household holidays in order to cheer ourselves up and remind ourselves that a bleak Midlands landscape smothered in drizzle is not the only view in the world.  This was a good idea and has sustained me in frenzied bursts of internets activities throughout what has otherwise been a fairly long day. 

We dreamed of last year when we spent a month in Canada.  We found a very cheap, clean and functional looking house in an area we like for under two thousand pounds for the month.  So far, so brilliant.  Then we added air fares for five people on top.  Not so brilliant but still maybe viable if we go back to visiting Asda and whittling our own shoes out of turnips.  Then Jason pointed out that this is all well and good, but he is a contractor.  This means that he is self employed and whores himself out to corporate bee hatches for money.  This also means that he doesn’t get sick pay and holiday pay and all that other stuff.  Usually his pay packet compensates for this.  Unfortunately when we go on holiday he doesn’t earn a pay packet and the losses he will sustain by taking a month off work are suddenly added to our holiday ‘costs’, and make our eyes water.  We gulp a lot.

After that we look at Vegas baby.  The kids are mad keen to go back.  They love it there.  Jason is mad keen to go back. He loves it there.  I don’t mind it, but only if we do five star with chandeliers and hot and cold running service.  I don’t do flea pit in Nevada in over 100 degree heat.  I just don’t.  We look at prices.  It may work if we go for half an hour next Tuesday.  We put that to one side for future cogitation.

Then Jason decides we may be able to do a fortnight somewhere in Europe, sometime in May.  This way there will be significantly less travel costs and money lost and stuff and things and general down sizing and shrinking of stuff.  I decide I really need to go to Sicily.  I have always wanted to go.  It will be hot.  We can swim.  The kids can eat pasta and ice cream until it falls out their ears.  I can force them to trail around Byzantine ruins until they poke my eyes out with sticks and all will be well. 

I find a fabulous, fabulous site.  The first place I find on this site has won the Conde Naste traveller award for best villa in the universe ever.  Naturally this is the first one I click on.  I fall in love at first sight.  It is glorious.  It is gorgeous.  It is other superlatives beginning with G.  It is gargantuanlly expensive.  It is ten grand for a week.  Ten thousand pounds.  This is not quite what Jason had in mind. 

Naturally, now that I have seen it I have decided that this is the only possible place I could go on holiday.  I cannot get it out of my mind.  I look at other, significantly less expensive villas.  They are lovely.  Nearly all of them will do.  Some of them are even vaguely within our budget.  I desultorily make a list of these charming abodes.  Then the list explodes and disappears into the ether.  I take this as a sign that only the original villa will do. I realise that I am about to melt down into a massively petulant, whinging sulk from the darkest regions of the backside of my psyche.  This is a sulk which is totally shameful given the fact that a) Jason is willing to take us on holiday at all given our interesting financial situation and the fact that the money would be better spent on something practical like diminishing our mounting debts rather than adding to them, b) lots of people currently don’t even have a house let alone a holiday and c) it is not as if I am a deprived woman eating swede tops and living in a coal scuttle at the worst of times.  I am selfish and horrible.

I know this and still I sulk.  I decide that I must stop looking at holidays.  It is turning me into a raging egomaniac and if I cannot control myself I will have rung up and booked somewhere plastic melting and Jason will kill me.

I shall look again tomorrow when I have managed to get my internal Donatella Versace under control.

We did by the way, start by looking at English holidays.  We reasoned that English holidays would be cheaper, more accessible and less stress free than foreign holidays and that given the current financial crisis, it might be nice to stay somewhere local and support our ailing economy.  Noble sentiments I am sure you will agree.

We do not do hotels.  British hotels are generally hideous unless they are hand crafted and therefore eye wateringly expensive.  Plus we are noisy, sticky and disruptive and like to eat biscuits in bed at eleven o’clock in the morning should we so desire.  This tends to interfere with house keeping and other things.  We shun hotels unless we are pretending that we have no children.  It is safer that way.

It turns out that there are two types of self catering holiday in Britain today.  You can either stay in a modified dustbin complete with ash and potato peelings, somewhere in the middle of a sink estate in Scarborough for a fiver, or you can stay in a mansion for thousands and thousands of pounds.  I found a wonderful place.  It was gorgeous.  It was a renovated water tower.  It was near Warrington which I thought might bring the price down given the fact that Warrington is one of the lower circles of hell.  It may have done, but it was still six grand for a week. 

Six grand to stay in a water tower in Warrington.  For five you can come and stay in my glass recycling bin in Glenfield.  Sod it, I’ll throw in sandwiches and a duvet as well.

Saturday 21st February – Whingeing Not Drowning

The sun has been shining, the weather has been mild.  The children have been reasonably lovely all day.  Friends came round.  We went for lunch.  It was a great day.

And yet, I still feel ill.  Iller than I did yesterday when I thought I may be on the mend.

Even I, eschewer of doctors and the health system in general know that this is not good. 

I have not been able to do certain things that I wanted to do to day, easy, simple things that I normally would not even think about.  I have not been able to eat what I wanted to eat today.  Everything I have done today has been horribly hard work.

I have not wanted to read my book.  I have not wanted to blog. 

Monday morning is doctor time.  Pooh, pah, bum.

Fin with the moaning.

It’s very, very boring.  Too boring to talk about any longer.

I am blogging out of sheer force of habit.  I have lots of things to say but no energy with which to do them justice.

I am going now to have a good moan and a bit of a whinge in the real rather than the virtual world.

Farewell cruel blog.

I will be back.

This is a bit like a Shakespearean death scene isn’t it?

Oh.

All right.

I shall just fuck off then.

Hope you’re all having a fabulous weekend by the way.

I really have gone now.

Honestly

Promisedly.

Fin

They Went to Sea in a Sieve

My amazing blogging friend Homeofficemum is going to do something crazy insane.  Oh yes.  Yes she is.

We are talking big time insane.

More insane like having another baby? I hear you cry.

More insane than taking a job artificially inseminating turkeys (do not mock. I had a friend who did this once)? I hear you twitter.

More insane than trying to build a rocket launcher out of old nursing pads and a shoe in the manner of The A Team? I hear you mumble.

Oh yes.

Way more insane than that.

She has decided that what she needs to do with her life, more than anything else, ever in the whole history of ever, is to become a crew member on a big clipper ship and sail from England to Brazil.

This is insane because:

a) she has a husband who is not going to sail on the clipper ship and who is an international man of mystery for a living, thus necessitating them already being apart for large chunks of time.

b) she has two small boys who are not going to be sailing on a clipper ship with her and who will need round the clock care while she is away.

c) she is a successful businesswoman in her own right, running her very own business and the very own business is also not going to be sailing on a clipper ship with her either.

Consequently, apart from the fact that she doesn’t have any live stock that need tending to, or invalid parents reliant on meals on wheels and Stannah stair lifts, it is going to be hard, hard work and involve much pain and trauma.

On the other hand, as with many such crazy insane type ideas it is:

• inspiring
• wonderful
• jaw droppingly adventurous
• cool
• achievementful

Who wouldn’t want to do it?

Well.

Me actually.

But just because I don’t want to do it, doesn’t mean I don’t fully endorse her right to charge crazily across the world in wild discomfort just because she wants to.  I think it is an excellent scheme of a plan.  I think it shows chutzpah and is the sort of thing that makes life worth living.  I have every admiration for people who seize their dreams, however bonkers they may be, and do them because life is short, and mostly full of grief and anguish, and if you can’t do what you bloody well want to every now and again, then what is the point?

Just because my dream involves shoes and cakes and lying on a giant hoverbed while Stephen Fry reads me my favourite novels, does not mean that I cannot appreciate the dreams of others.

So

Here’s the thing.

In order to make this crazy insane thing happen, she needs help.  She needs all sorts of help.  She needs your undivided attention at her shiny new blog here.  She needs your money, which you can donate on her shiny new blog.  She needs lots of money, eight thousand of your English pounds to be precise.  She needs your support, your love and your clever ideas and time to help her raise more money and more publicity and find cool sponsors and all that jazz.  She may also need arm bands, but I can see to that.

Then there’s the time thing.  She sails in September.  This does not give a woman with a husband, children, chores and a career a lot of time to do things like find sponsorship and raise eight thousand earth pounds.  These things take time, and there is not a lot of that available due to the current time crunch crisis credit thingy. 

Thinking caps on chaps.  Hands on purses/wallets and all hands on deck type thing.

Avanti.

Reels off down corridor doing some kind of sailor’s hornpipe and shouting ‘Arrr Harr Harrr!’ etc, enthused with bonness and all round Jolly Jack Tar feelings.

Friday 20th February – Casting Pearls Before Swine

Advance apologies for what will undoubtedly be a rubbish post.  In particular these apologise are extended to Saj who complains that my blogging is not as good in the school holidays due to the fact that my posts are rushed and don’t last long enough to finish a cup of tea. Normal service should be resumed next week.

I am tired. I am still feeling somewhat gruesome and I have done very little of merit today.  The children have also done very little of merit except for going out and leaving me in peace for large parts of the day.  Consequently I have nothing amusing to report.  I promise I will go to the doctors on Monday if things do not improve.  I do feel marginally better today.  I expect it was down to the hour and a half in the bath and the subsequent collapse into exhausted unconsciousness that followed.

I have decided that the winner of my impromptu ‘tell me something surprising’ competition which you may recall from the dim and distant past last week is Jaywalker over at Belgian Waffle.  Partly because she was genuinely surprising in voicing her belief that handling Knacki frankfurters is more repulsive than picking up dog pooh, and partly because she is having a crap week which is about to get crapper due to enforced incarceration in a ski lodge from hell with no internet connection.  A girl has to have something to look forward to, and although I admit a prize from me may be a meagre consolation,  it is undoubtedly better than a) nylon ski lodges, b) frankfurters and c) dog pooh. 

I have  been meaning all week to tell you about a random dream I had where I had to travel to East Grinstead undercover and take possession of a pig at the local railway station.  As I have nothing else exciting to tell you, this will have to do.  Today is the day.  So, when I got the pig I then had to smuggle it home without anyone knowing.  It was fraught with peril as my route took me through the party of a couple of friends of Unsuitable Exes, who I haven’t met or indeed given a passing thought to in aeons.  For some reason, in this dream, they were having a party in a deconsecrated church and my route with the pig took me straight through it.

I remember that I managed to get through on the way to the station alright. Mainly because I am reasonably boring looking and they all seemed to be busy dancing to hideous Seventies disco and playing ping pong.  On the way back things were greatly complicated by the fact that I suddenly became much more visible thanks to the wriggling porker in my arms.  I woke up in a muck sweat worried that my cover had been blown.  I have no clue as to which cover as the important parts of the dream like who I was doing the pig smuggling for and why the pig was so important, I have completely failed to remember.

I have no idea what this dream means, or indeed why these people who I only met three times in my life and didn’t really get on with when I did meet them, should loom so large in it.  I refuse to get Freudian about the pig and the train, so all in all I am stumped.  I have to confess that I preferred this dream to the last memorable dream I had which was that Oscar was really sick in the hospital with bile welling up through his belly button and I was stuck in an airport somewhere desperately trying and failing to get to the hospital.  It was even preferable to the one where I was on Strictly Come Dancing which had been merged with the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Running Man and I was being pursued across the dance floor by Bruce Forsyth and a lot of sequins.

So.  Perhaps it means that things are looking up in the Boo household.  I am hoping it means I will get some real sleep, feel better and not kill the children before Monday when they go back to school.  I am sneakily hoping it also means that Jason will win hugely on the poker tonight and this will mean we can pay off some of our more interesting debts and I might get some nice shoes.  I like this prediction best.  I’m still not sure where the pig comes into it, but I expect it’s deeply significant.

Thursday 19th February – Physician Heal Thyself

Today I had a nice day.  I really did.  My friend came round with her three children for the day.  Her three children and my three children played together really nicely, and in fact it was only two of my children that had an argument with each other, and when I ignored them because it was a very boring argument and I didn’t care what happened, they soon stopped.  My friend is an old friend who I met before we had children and we genuinely like each other and not just because we have children.  Consequently we had lots to talk about and lots of what we talked about wasn’t about children.

We ate lots of good food.  We ate too much good food, but this too wasn’t really so much of a problem.  The weather was actually quite mild and the kids played in the garden and we went to the park as well.  We got fresh air and exercise and didn’t see any snow.  We got muddy, but then this is England in February.  It is not unreasonable to think one might go out and get muddy, particularly if you are herding six children around.

Jason came home from work early and agreed to get us nourishing chips from the chip shop for our tea.  I was particularly pleased about this because my lovely friend did not leave until nearly five o’clock and another lovely friend was coming at six o’clock and there wasn’t enough time to tidy up the devastation in the house and cook tea.  Plus, I really like chips.

We were just sitting down to our chips when Saj came for her first visit of the New Year.  It was lovely to see her.  We discussed lucky bras and new jobs (her) and discovering new biscuits (me). Cadbury’s chocolate and oat crunchy ones with chocolate chips, better than Hob Nobs we think.  Discuss and get back to me. We drank tea.  We had many gossips.  We agreed we needed a shopping trip soon.  She pointed this out when she found out that my Ghost bag is broken, my Boden boots are broken and my vintage coat is in the modern garage covered in cat piss.  I think she has a point.

Andrea and I do culture.  Saj and I do shopping.  Saj is a shopping ninja.  She owns my dream Choos.  The ones I had for my wedding which broke three days before when there were no replacements and I had to get a refund, causing me to melt down in hysterics.  Those shoes.  We are not the same size, so this is not so much of a problem as it could be.  Plus, she is my friend so I feel duty bound not to stab her.

It has been a lovely day, but underneath all this is the knowledge that I am dead tired.  I am still not sleeping.  Three nights I have been awake until two and then waking with raging nightmares.  I have bags that even Touche Eclat won’t cover. 

I also feel, and I hesitate to say this, but I feel pregnant.  Before we all start wailing and gnashing our teeth, I am definitely not pregnant.  I cannot, cannot be pregnant.  I am stitched up like a kipper to avoid any such issues happening again.  I have also just finished a particularly horrible period.

Nevertheless I feel pregnant.  This does not mean that I look like a shampoo advert woman where I am running about glowing and flicking my luscious locks around.  No.  I do not do pregnant like this.  I do pregnant like this:

• Bloated feeling and with weird weight fluctuations (half a stone on and off this week.  Eating just the same as last week)
• Heightened sense of smell to the point where everything makes me feel nauseous including things like shoes, carpets etc.
• Constant nausea like being sea sick ALL THE TIME
• Back ache that starts at my shoulders and goes to my ankles, paying particular attention to the weak hips that were knackered from the three babies I’ve already had.
• Stomach ache for no apparent reason.
• Weird food cravings, pickled onions and chard anyone?
• Sore bosom, as in don’t even look at my tits in that way or I will have to kill you.
• Bleeding gums
• Need to burst into tears every half an hour for no apparent reason, as in; ‘look, the dustbin men are coming.’  Waaaaahhhh!
• Piles
• Headaches
• High blood pressure
• Sudden fainting spells
• Anaemia, I look like Uncle Fester with hair, white skin, huge saggy shadows under eyes, lumpy bosom.

Which is why I got stitched up like the kipper the last time I talked myself into making babies.

I’ve felt like this since Sunday.  On Monday at the garden centre I nearly fainted in the restaurant and had to have a little sit down for half an hour before I could get up again.  It makes life harder than usual.  So you can imagine how much I have wanted to embrace half term and all the extra entertaining/running around that this entails.

I’m not giving in to it.  I refuse.  I have managed very well all week, but I am just a bit fed up now.  I should go to the doctors and get them to do a blood test.  I hate going to the doctors.  We know this.  They are patronising and crap.  I am going to do what my mother does in these situations.  I’m going to carry on regardless and ignore it.  I shall eat some iron and chomp some vitamins and be resolute in the face of adversity.

I have tentatively diagnosed myself.  I think I may be allergic to school holidays.  This is way more likely than me spawning more children.

I may well be cured tomorrow.  I’m getting the day off.  Oscar is in nursery all day, and the girls are going out with their dad who has a surprise day off and wants to take them out.  I have promised myself a day off in bed with my book and the remains of the new biscuits.  It is not what the doctor ordered, but it’s good enough for me.

Wednesday 18th February – Cheesey Peas = World Peas

I had Friday off to trip about London pretending to be childless.  I went out on Monday night with Andrea to eat nice food and watch Milk.  Not actual Milk, because that would have been too weird.  You know Milk, that film with Sean Penn? It was quite good. Andrea says it cements our reputation as a lesbian couple.  Her mother is beginning to wonder.  We spend as much time together as Jason and I, and we do things like going away for the weekend, hanging out at Rigby and Peller, eating romantic Christmas dinners and going to see films about gay rights activists.  I pointed out that this was fine by me, and that we are remarkably compatible.  If I leave Jason, it will definitely be for Andrea.  We will grow old disgracefully together on the porch at Shady Pines rest home for delinquents.

Last night I went out again.  This time I went to meet Expateek.  Not content with stabbing Pochyemu last week and bundling her into her car boot, she is now spreading her trail of blogger killings up the country.  She will be heading for Edinborough today guys.  You have been warned.  Luckily the knives at the restaurant were not sharp enough for serious maiming.  Although she did try to crack my jaw on the way home in the cab!

We met at Bobby’s restaurant.  I wanted her to sample the local cuisine.  Leicester has a huge Asian population and some of the finest curry houses outside of Birmingham.  Bobby’s is a superlative vegetarian restaurant that has a fantastically varied and delicious menu.  You can try things there you would never get in your bog standard takeaway.  Lots of the dishes are Gujurati, from North West India.  I highly recommend crispy Bhajia.  These are thin discs of potato fried in a light batter with coriander.  They come piping hot, served with a kind of chilli dipping sauce and are absolutely delicious.  I can only eat three or four hundred before I start to feel a bit peaky.

I don’t get to go to Bobby’s very often because my immediate family disapproves wholeheartedly of vegetarian fare.  Jason’s standard complaint is that it would be nice if it had meat in it.  Although as Expateek and I allowed ourselves to be rather over served last night, I bought home the remains of our feast and he didn’t complain too much as he shovelled it into his face.  He did draw the line at the Matter Paneer, but that was the only thing he balked at.

Matter Paneer by the way is a dish of curried peas and cheese.  It sounds horrible I know, but it is actually delicious.  It is made with a mild, curd cheese almost like feta, but much less salty.  It is cubed and fried and mixed with a mild curry sauce with peas in it.  I love it.  I also like to shout ‘Cheesey Peas! They’re cheesey! They’re peasy! They’re cheesey peas!’ whenever I order it.  I did resist last night, which was very restrained of me, although this was running through my head.

We also had dhosas.  I love dhosas but they’re impossible to get in regular Indian restaurants.  Dhosas are large, thin pancakes, about the size of a wrap but much thinner.  They are rolled into a tube and stuffed with spicy potato and I love them, love them, love them. 

So after all that, a fantastically light and fresh Biriani, and some gorgeously moreish channa dhal (chick pea curry) we were stuffed.  Too stuffed to take advantage of the sweets and puddings.  When the bill came we were given free sweets, beautiful diamonds of almondy paste, sweetened with condensed milk and decorated with silver leaf.  I couldn’t even look at mine.  Too, too full.  How terribly sad.  I always mean to save myself for dessert and never quite make it.  My eyes as my mother used to say, were definitely bigger than my belly. And my belly was bloody enormous.  I looked like one of those dogs in the Hans Christian Andersen story of the soldier with the Tinderbox.  My eyes were as big as soup plates.

After all that there was no way I was going to fit into the boot of the car, being rather more egg shaped when we left than I was when we arrived.  This is the secret of visiting with bloggers without fearing for your life.  A hearty feed means everyone is too sluggish and fat to kill or be killed.  We just need fattening up for Christmas.

Lots more lunches, dinners and afternoon teas would be the absolute answer to bringing about world peace.  Everyone would be too full to think of some new and horrible type of genocide.  We would inhabit a world where cake, tea and the afternoon nap reigned supreme.  I could live with that.

Fancy solving the ages old problem of world peace by just going out for dinner with a new blogging friend.

Tuesday 17th February – Half Term Survival Tips

Here are few things I learned today:

• Never put your vintage leather coat down in a place where a stray cat might decide to use it as a pissoir.  You may think it will take a simple trip to the dry cleaners to remove the smell of fetid cat urine from your apparel.  You will be horrified to find that it is going to cost £48. You will then be forced to take it home and store it in the garage again until such time as you can bear to put it back into a warm car and take a trip to another, less astronomically priced dry cleaners.
• Never decide to have a time saving shower before you go out for the day to visit your friend who has four children, two dogs and a cat.  Particularly when you decide to take them to the local playground, which seems to be coated in some kind of black, oily, tar like substance which then adheres to your clothes, hair and skin and doesn’t really come off despite repeated washing.
• Never decide to then go and feed the ducks without first checking whether the river has burst its banks thus rendering the footpath impassable due to a seething wall of surging brown water.  Your children will refuse to believe that it is more than just a puddle and that you can easily splash through it to find the ducks.  They will then have hysterics, teetering on the brink of the rapids whilst covered in a black, tar like substance.  You will be forced to gather them into your arms to remove them from the threat of being swept out to sea, thus coating the rest of your person in the black, oily substance and mud.
• Never decide that having your husband pick you up on his way past from work will be preferable to the train, even if he suggests it.  He will find out that what should have been a minor detour out of his way becomes an epic trek across the county,  involving several traffic jams and four muddy, oily individuals in his car.  He will moan constantly on the way home about how he should really be doing some work and you will have fleeting thoughts about homicide being as how you didn’t even suggest the bloody thing in the first place. 
• Never mention your thoughts about your husband’s plans to rescue you from the train station in case he takes the hump and shouts gruffly that he was ‘only thinking of you,’ and ‘just doing you a favour,’ because it’s half term.  Terms like: ‘If that’s the sort of gratitude I can expect’, may be bandied about.  You will be glad that VW Tourans do not come with optional axes, as the urge to use one will be rising by the minute.  You may want to sit on your hands at this point.
• Never give your two year old son options on what to have for tea when you are in a hurry because you are going out to meet a blogging friend.  What started out as a ‘likkle bowl of pasta’, will morph into ”oops’ and then possibly, ‘biscuits’, until it firms into ‘tuna sandwiches and Wopsips’.  At which point you will be climbing the walls, simultaneously trying to open tins of tuna whilst discarding oily clothes and brushing your hair.

In short.  Think of moving abroad for the duration of half term.  This tactic should be used simultaneously with finding a flexible boarding school/kennels for the children.

Monday 16th February – Never Cross a Shaking Granny

The first day of half term.  What joy.

I have survived.  This is a good thing, I think.  Although when I think of the days to follow I think maybe a swift termination may have been the best I could have hoped for.

Today we were supposed to be meeting one of the mums from school and her kids.  We were going to hang out.  She texted me yesterday to say that her boiler had exploded and she had to hang out at her house waiting for the boiler repair man to arrive instead of with us.  I had much sympathy.  Her week is already shaping up to be fun.  I did not offer to keep her company.  I have done my penance with broken boilers already.

I suggested to granny that we might do something instead.  We had actually got a reasonably organised half term and there previously hadn’t been any room in it for trips with granny.  This is always a shame, as trips with granny invariably involve cake.  As it was, fate had decreed that today would turn into granny trip day.

She picked us up and we swept off into the wilds to the very posh garden centre.  The vp garden centre sells not many plants but does have a branch of Thorntons, a coffee shop, a restaurant, tropical fish, Bill Oddie’s bird treats and a deli.  Everything you purchase at vp garden centre is fourteen times more expensive than the equivalent elsewhere, even if you buy it from Harrods.  This is the first law of the garden centre.

It used to be an independent garden centre, and despite being very expensive, it was rather nice.  Now it has been taken over by a chain and is gradually turning from very nice into very crap.  I used to like  going there because their puddings were always immense and extremely varied.  Sometimes I would even buy plants.  It was always an adventure.

Today we had an adventure but it involved granny going hairless because all the plates were dirty.  She complained three times and made them hand wash ours before she started to shake with rage and the manager had to be called.  I made sure there were no sharp implements around and decided to intervene only if I thought that physical restraint might be necessary.  As it was she was remarkably calm for an incensed  granny.  I have seen worse.  She only shook a bit, and she did refrain from swearing.  She didn’t lunge at anyone and was actually quite kind to the manger who luckily decided to take her seriously and give us free desserts.  Disaster was averted.

I don’t think the children have ever seen granny combust before.  It was a salutory lesson and they were remarkably well behaved, despite being full up to the eyebrows with sugar and very beady.  You know, that bit where their pupils shrink to the size of pin heads (see yesterday’s post on children v. addicts) and they start to talk in a kind of Daffy Duck type way.  Shortly before they crash into a sugar low and become fractious and irritable. 

When we got home I sent them out into the garden to run about.  Oscar and Tilly discovered Antarctica with the final bits of snow that are still sulking about the garden.  Tallulah thought Antarctica was boring, so I commandeered her to help me cook tea.  Pasta has never been stirred so lovingly or so well before.  Although I do worry about her standing so near to the gas hob.  She has such a lot of hair and it is so very unruly I am afraid she will go up like a human torch.  She looks like a dandelion clock with legs mostly.  I may have to buy her a hair net if she intends to keep on stirring.

My Name is Katyboo. I am a Parent

There is a phrase in the bible of addiction known as ‘The Big Book’.  It talks about how alcoholics drink.  It explains that unless an alcoholic stops drinking completely they will always drink to excess.  It says:

‘Half measures availed us nothing’.

I love this phrase.

I have read ‘The Big Book’. 

 My name is Katyboo and I am not an alcoholic. 

But I used to live with one, which is how come I know this stuff.

Even though I no longer live with my particular addict, I often think about this phrase.  Mostly in relation to the children.

Children are a lot like tiny addicts in my humble opinion.  I find myself thinking of the guidelines and advice given to addicts and the insanely ill people (me) who choose to live with them, far more than I do about the  child tastic wisdomosity of Gina Ford or Dr. Miriam Stoppard.  It is much more helpful.

Take the; ‘Half measures availed us nothing,’ phrase.  This is exactly what children are like.  Exactly. 

• Why have one bowl of cereal when you can have twelve? 
• Why just paint that tiny part of the paper silver when you can have silver paint dripping from every orifice, crack and crevice until the paper literally disintegrates under the weight of paint?
• Why have a balanced meal? Why not just eat grapes and nothing but grapes until you are shitting half digested grapes because you’re walloping them in faster than they can get out?
• Why have one Go Go, when you can have eighty five of the small plastic death traps scattered all over the bedroom floor?
• Why wear one lot of clothes when you can wear twelve lots, all at once, or every five minutes of the day, or indeed no clothes at all, particularly during heavy snow fall?

You see? You see?

I do sympathise.  I have these feelings around books and cakes.  There are never enough.  Never. 

On the other hand I try to confine my addictive tendencies to one or two small, relatively unimportant and ultimately manageable areas of my life.  I would never for example, choose to buy a book if it meant the difference between that and feeding my kids.  My kids on the other hand would watch their mother starve in the gutter if they could have a new, shiny thing that was the current object of lust.  There would be no remorse.  Well, not until the next meal time, or when something was on a high shelf and they couldn’t reach.

Then there’s the Twelve Steps themselves.  Here they are.  I have removed the references to alcohol and replaced them with references to parents and children.  You will see that it works very well as a guide to parenting.

1. We (parents) admitted we were powerless over children—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.  We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. This power was called ‘The Television’.
3.  We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the power as we understood Him (this explains our willingness to allow Mr. Tumble into our homes). Thus freeing up our time to sleep/have a life, while the children were enthralled by this power.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We agreed that we were lacking in many skills and that it was a wonder that the authorities hadn’t been called in yet.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being (and the internets) the exact nature of our wrongs. Particularly our excessive use of television and bribery in the form of sweets for good behaviour.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character, but only if he gave us something that worked better.  Super Nanny and the naughty step were unacceptable substitutes. 
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. We became morose and hostile when this didn’t happen and even resorted to television and sweets for ourselves.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Except the children, obviously. That would be admitting defeat and showing weakness.  Then they would know they had won.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. This is where the get out clause for the children comes in.  It is not good for them to feel superior to their primary carers.  We also didn’t make amends to our parents, even though we knew how difficult parenting was and how horrible we ourselves had been.  We could not stand the gloating.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Except in the case of our children and parents, obviously. 
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out. i.e. watch more television.  We were pretty sure his will for us included that Buffy Box set and the House Seasons 1-4.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to parents and to practice these principles in all our affairs. i.e. watch more television, allow your children to watch more television and do not apologise for a damn thing.