Whiiiiiiiiiinnnggeeeeeee

Oscar has reached another interesting milestone in his developmental path.

It is called: ‘The whinging phase’.

You won’t find it in Penelope Leach’s ‘Mother and Baby,’ but I am telling you, it happens to every child, as sure as eggs is eggs.

In some ways I am quite glad he has moved on from the would be dictator phase. That was quite wearing, for us, for him and the carpet on the naughty step.

I think his anal retentive phase is one that is going to last approximately eighty odd years, so there’s absolutely no point worrying about that at all.

Quite often you will hear someone older and wiser than you look sagely at your child as they are doing something spectacularly inappropriate.  They will nod, suck their teeth in the manner of one looking at a car that needs repairing, and say: ‘It’s a phase they’re going through.’

What they fail to tell you is that one phase morphs seamlessly into another phase.  There is no time at which your child, my child or anyone else’s child is not going through some kind of phase or other.  The best we can hope for as parents is variety and entertainment.

Sadly for me, the whinging phase is not very entertaining.

It consists, as you might expect, in a great deal of whinging.  This whinging must be carried out in a kind of high pitched, keening whine, much like the sound of a dog being ignored trying to get your attention.

What they are whinging about is largely irrelevant.  It is more the sound quality they are after, that piercing, relentless noise that shatters  calm and means that you must have nerves of steel and preferably be stone deaf for it not to get on your tits in the largest way possible.

At first, you think that it is important to find out what the child is whinging about. After all, you reason, if I find out what the matter is, then I can fix it, and the child will stop moaning.

Do not fool yourselves.  It will not happen.  You will fix whatever the problem is, and they will just be annoyed that you have removed their ability to whinge.  It will take them anywhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes to find something else to whinge about so that they can do what they originally set out to do, which is bug the living crap out of you in the name of their perverse entertainment.

Oscar, yesterday for example whinged:

‘Maaaa maaaaaaaaa! Ta looooooooo laaaaaahhhh says that Derek put her claaaaaawwwwsss in my baaaaaaaaack’.

This said at a pitch designed to make bats drop out of the sky thanks to the disruption of their sonar, and in a sing song sort of way which made it almost impossible to understand the first time around.

I will not respond to any noises made in this way, so this necessitates me saying: ‘Pardon’, several times until he gets the message and then speaks to me in something like a real human voice.

I said: ‘Did Derek have her claws in your back?’

He looked at me, shocked to the core that I would ask such a thing and not just go and laser beam his sister to death on the spot as he had so clearly requested by the power of the unspoken word.

I said: ‘Well, did she?’

He said: ‘Noooooo, but…..’

At which point I said:

‘This conversation is now over.’

And pointed him to the door.

This was not how things were supposed to go at all, so he had to come back several times and have another try at it, all of which met with equal failure.

Resistance is futile.

I’m wondering how long it’s going to take him to find this out.

Probably the duration of the summer holidays I reckon.

I shall buy ear plugs on Monday.