Where NOT to go to pass the time

A collective sigh of relief goes up across the world this week, as, after several weeks of captivity, parents are finally being set free. Yes, school holidays have once again come to an end, and children everywhere are gathering up their pencil cases and musty lunch bags and being packed off back to their classrooms.

Of course lots of parent do relish these special weeks spent at home, re-bonding over the craft box and cooking up a cupcake storm. Other parents however, particularly those who aren’t naturally programmed to moulding papier-mâché and making their own play dough, sometimes find these long periods of time a little bit tricky to fill.

Once the novelty of an alarm clock free morning and a sandwich-making free evening has worn off, and you’ve spent several days watching your creative child stick tissue paper and glitter directly onto the dining table and build a cubby in every single room, it’s likely you might start thinking of other places to spend the day.

‘Other places’ that aren’t at home, to be more precise. Places that won’t involve you having to vacuum up afterwards, and require the odd bit of plastering and repainting when the playing goes wrong.

If and when the weather doesn’t cooperate and rain pours down day after day, soft play centres – the sort with swinging ladders, tunnels, slides and multi-coloured balls – are a tempting refuge. It’s true that spending a day at such a place is likely to knock at least a year off your lifespan and leave you with a nasty chest infection, but at least you are safe in the knowledge that, short of the odd friction burn and heat exhaustion, your children can knock themselves out without actually coming to any real harm.

The downside of these play centres is of course the entry fee. It’s generally on par with a central London mortgage repayment. And to add insult to overpriced injury, the parent is also charged just for the privilege of sitting, watching and breathing in the rancid air.

After you’ve set foot through the door and all shoes have been removed and stored in a pile under the counter, you will of course remember that the obligatory socks are still sitting at home in your child’s drawer. So your wallet is forced to come back out again and a new neon-coloured nylon pair (Easyjet style, Harrods prices) are passed over the counter to your child’s outstretched little paw. They of course will claim to love these new socks more than life itself. You will consider them hideous, and likely deposit them in the bin on the way out.

Finally the door (or gateway to hell, depending how you look at it) is opened, and your newly socked child is set free, static sparks flying in all direction as they run across the matching nylon carpeted floor. Reluctantly you follow suit and enter the room. Your ears are met with the thunderous sound of a hundred children all screaming, yelping and hollering in delight.

Just audible beneath this din, is a distinctive white noise. The low-level humming of a gaggle of mothers, all rocking backwards and forwards on their plastic seating in a desperate, shared pain.

Moving forward into hell, you spot the only beacon of hope in the entire place – a café at the end of the room. As you draw closer, the ‘café’ takes the form of a scratched up old counter and a chiller cabinet stocked full of last weeks’ salmonella and botulism experiments. Located somewhere beyond the coffee maker and the enormous display of food colouring and MSG is the kitchen, with it’s impressive line up of deep fat fryers spitting out grease all over the floor.

Unsure about which of the food would kill you and which would just make you sick, you settle on a hot chocolate and a purple coloured muffin. How wrong can you go with hot chocolate? It’s made inside the machine and spat out into the mug below. The muffin, which admittedly does look slightly solid around the edges, at least claims to contain a type of fruit.

The unwashed looking child behind the cash register takes the remainder of your money and hands you a numbered baton. You’d much rather just stand and wait for your order, but apparently loitering around the counter is not allowed. You must go to your table and wait to vibrate.

Not particularly keen to strike up a conversation with anyone in sight, you are forced to walk the length of the room in search of a table free of rubbish and off-putting inhabitants. You hurry past mothers dressed head-to-toe in stone washed denim and others dressed head-to-toe in fleece. You rush past those on day release from the local young offenders institute, and scuttle past those who obviously favour hemp on a stick to soap on a rope.

Eventually, several trips past scattered prams and regurgitating babies later, and you are finally settled into your plastic seat. You’re sitting just about near enough to the rope cage to see your child fly past, but not so close you can smell the feet. You finally have your ‘refreshments’ and enough dog-eared celebrity magazines to help pass the time, while you wait for your child’s colour-coded wristband to expire.

An hour passes and your child shows no signs of tiredness or even the slightest willingness to leave. The litre bottle of water you’ve just washed down the muffin with leaves you with little choice. You must leave the safety of your seat and brave the bathrooms.

The smell hits before you’ve even pushed open the door. The floor is swimming with something and none of the cubicles have locks, let alone anything resembling a loo roll. Hopping from dry patch to dry patch, you mentally calculate if you’re still covered by the tetanus jab you had for your holidays last year. Emerging from your cubicle you find a small crying child stood opposite your door. His trousers are around his ankles and his Thomas pants are full of something they shouldn’t be.

You briefly cast your eyes back to the liquid matter on the floor.

Now you’re faced with something of a social dilemma. Do you make a hasty escape and hope the soggy child’s mother is about to appear, or do you take possession of the said soggy child and go off in hunt of the careless owner? It’s not that you’re necessarily an uncaring cow with a heart of stone, but clearing up your own child’s accidents is one thing – sorting out the mess of a child with a shaved head and a cubic zirconia in one ear is quite another.

Luckily for you, the mother of ‘mini thug’ swoops in on him and drags him back out into the room, his Thomas pants still dripping across the floor.

Emerging back into the fresh air (the word ‘fresh’ becomes relative in a place like this), you decide that your senses have taken enough of a beating for one day. You spot your fuchsia-coloured child refuelling at the table and seize the opportunity to grab them and make a beeline for the door.

On the way home your exhausted child in the backseat tells you that it was worth all the pain. But it’s only taken 2 hours up of the day, and now you’re emotionally drained and financially crippled. To cap it off, the bottom of your jeans look slightly damp and the car now smells suspiciously of wee.

 

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How NOT to stop kids having sex

I haven’t had much time to write recently – work and migraines have been getting in the way – but today I saw a headline flash past my eyes and I had to have my say.

So what caught my attention? Condom’s for 12-year-old boys, that’s what. Yes, you read right. 12-year-old boys.

12-year-old boys who will, I guess, then be on the hunt for 12-year-old (or God forbid, younger) girls to test them out on. For many reasons, this has to be so, so wrong.

The ‘Hotshot’ condom, which has been ‘downsized to fit its 12-14 year old customer base’, is already available in Switzerland, and, if the manufacturers have their way, will be heading for the British high street and your kids wallet soon.

Lamprecht AG, the condom manufacturer behind this controversial contraception for kids, claim they set off down this path in response to a study conducted on behalf of the Federal Commission for Children and Youth. A study which showed that  not only were more 12 to 14-year-olds now having sex, but that an alarming number of them didn’t use any form of protection.

While as a parent, the idea of children so young having sex is a deeply disturbing one, and quite difficult to get my head around, it is hardly shocking news. It seems that every time you open a paper these days, there’s yet another pair of gormless babies staring back at you, sat there dressed head-to-toe in Mothercare’s finest and clutching their very own ‘hasn’t got a hope in hell’ baby.

When you see such a case of under-aged stupidity, it’s hard to know who you want to slap round the face first. The naive idiots apparently vying for the title of ‘World’s Youngest Parents’, or their own parents sat besides them, insisting that of course little Tracey and Dwain will make great parents – if they ever look up from their respective DS’s for long enough to notice what’s just popped out of Tracey and slid off the sofa.

So yes, there’s no getting away from the fact that (some) kids these days obviously have no fear of getting down and dirty with the person sat next to them in class. Nor that – judging by the sheer volume of pram-pushing girls in their Hannah Montana t-shirts – these kids ever think for a millisecond about the possible consequences of their actions.

England is now the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe, so I guess, on paper at least, arming kids with protection is a good idea. Or it would be if it wasn’t so wrong.

No child – boy or girl – could possibly be emotionally, physically or mentally ready to have sex at this young age. And  no 12-year-old boy is (or should need to be) emotionally mature enough to be trusted with something as important as preventing pregnancy or the spreading of a life threatening disease.

Most boys of this age aren’t even responsible enough to be left alone in a house with a box of matches. Some would probably forget to wash, eat or sleep if their parents didn’t remind them too. So who really believes that a randy pint-sized  man would ever want to make the effort, or for that matter feel comfortable enough to walk into a chemist and be asked – ‘Something for the schoolyard Sir?’

Of course there’s no disputing that such studies are needed to highlight how big a problem there is. Or that young boys must to be taught why they should be keeping it tucked away in their Ben 10 underpants until they are..  well until they are old enough not to be wearing Ben 10 underpants at least.

But that said, I think governments and Family Planning organisations are giving 12-year-old boys a little more credit than they actually deserve.

These kids in question aren’t having sex at ridiculous ages because they are maturing earlier than every decade that went before. Or because they are making an informed and intelligent choice about what they are ready to do. They are having sex because they see ‘Sex’ every which way they turn, and they think it’s cool to do it – and very uncool to have to admit they don’t. They aren’t going to suddenly get all responsible and grown-up just because they’ve got their own section at the condom counter.

So short of giving a free pack of 6 away with every computer game, or sticking them in with the fries when they up-size their Happy Meal, I really don’t see how providing  XS Junior condoms is the answer. If anything it gives out the worst possible message to horny young boys everywhere – that actually it’s OK to convince the girl who sits next to you in class to drop her High School Musical knickers, and hop onto the bean bag for some ‘recess’ action.

Really it comes to this. If you put aside every argument about whether selling condoms to and for kids is morally or ethically right, what about it being legally right? It’s bad enough that school nurses are allowed to hand out contraception at all, and that under-age girls can get the pill without their parent’s knowledge. But making condoms specifically for kids? The last time I looked the age of consent was 16 – and for very good reason.

Of course SWAT teams aren’t ever going to swoop in and arrest every person under that age for doing something they legally shouldn’t, but if you actually provide young kids with the means to have sex, surely it’s the same as encouraging them to break the law?

What’s next? School vending machine’s selling alcopops in pink plastic bottles endorsed by Brittany Spears? Or ‘extra light’ cigarettes, with packets that feature the latest Disney film.  After all, everyone knows that kids drink and smoke before they should, so why not make it more accessible and fun?

While we’re at it, why not go the whole hog and just let kids drive cars. I’m sure Toyota or Ford could design a ‘downsized’ car with booster seats and bigger peddles, so that their feet could actually reach the brake.

That would be crazy you cry, they’d end up killing themselves or someone else. Of course it’s crazy, and yes they surely would. Legitimising anything that kids are neither physically equipped to do or old enough to handle is a bloody stupid idea.

Yes, something needs to be done to stop young kids getting into bed and up the duff, but I fail to see how the solution will be found in a small, square packet labelled ‘Hotshot’.

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Reaching dizzy new heights

For the last three months I have been swimming around underwater, drunk as a skunk and battling a severe case of morning sickness. OK so that’s not strictly true, but I may as well have been as this pretty much sums up how I have been feeling. Everyday I have had to battle with a complete lack of balance and contend with a blinding headache. And these are just two of the perks that you get to experience when suffering (and I don’t use this word lightly) from vertigo.

Vertigo is one of those medical conditions that you probably haven’t even heard of before you get it and have absolutely no idea how horrible it can be to live with until you do. I know that I had always been under the illusion that vertigo was something people only suffered from when they peered down from a tall building, descended down a steep set of stairs or threw themselves off a bridge attached to an elastic band. For the record, that last one does come with it’s own medical condition. It’s called insanity.

It is actually a symptom of a balance disorder, which gives a constant sensation of spinning or whirling and the illusion of movement, when no movement is actually present. An example of this would have been when I sat at the traffic lights the other day and the road in front of me looked as if it were moving towards me at considerable speed. It was quiet a surreal experience and had I not known better I would have sworn that someone had laced my green tea with a hallucinogenic mushroom or two. Throw in some dancing trees and a talking dashboard and the ‘trip’ would have been complete.

This sensation of constant movement is apparently classed as ‘subjective vertigo’. The perception of movement in surrounding objects is called ‘objective vertigo’. What do you know, it’s my lucky day. I seem to have been blessed with both types.

Now I have never had a good sense of balance at the best of times. I am likely to pass out on any fairground ride faster than the ‘Tea Cups’, I feel sick if I towel dry my hair upside and I couldn’t walk in a straight line even if it were 2 feet wide and came with a built in hand rail. So no, having a medical condition that affects balance is never going to be a good thing.

It came on out of the blue, just a week after my husband came out of hospital with his own clot to worry about. After a 3 day imploding headache, the loss of my peripheral vision and no sense of feeling in my hands I decided that I had reached dizzy new heights that I couldn’t deal with anymore. I checked myself into Emergency. One night and 5 different doctors later and the world was still spinning. I was told I was suffering from a migraine and was sent home the next day. 2 days later in a state of desperation I threw myself into my doctor’s chair and begged him to fix me.

30 seconds later he told me what was wrong, handed me a box of tissues and then told me there was nothing he could do. Funny how he knew to give me the tissues first.

Not knowing what had brought it on made it seem even more bizarre. It could have been stress (husband with blood clot – check), some sort of virus, a problem of the inner ear balance mechanisms or even something wrong with my brain. I heard that thought, I do have one. They did an MRI and double checked.

When living in a time where antibiotics are dispensed like Strepsils, it’s rather unsettling to be told that the prescribed remedy for what you have is, wait for it… ‘waiting’. Especially when it can take up to 3 months to go away. Worse still is being told not to get stressed.  Not being able to locate the butter in fridge can make me stressed, what hope did I have of staying calm when I couldn’t even cross a room without drifting off sideways or pick my son up without wanting to throw up all over him.

I left the doctors armed with a boxes of tablets to try and combat the dizziness and nausea. Ironically one of the side effects of the tablet was dizziness. I then went home to lay down and feel incredibly sorry for myself. Had I known back then how long it would last I think I might just have crawled into a hole and lost all will to live.

There are of course lots of suggested alternative cures on the Internet and plenty of books written about how to deal with Vertigo. Somewhere I read that using energy saving light bulbs can make it worse and strawberries can make it better. So I ate several punnets to compensate for all the bulbs that we use in the house and hoped they would cancel each other out.

I found vertigo exercises to try, limited myself to how much I worked everyday and tried to keep as calm and stress free as possible. I found someone to help treat the tight knots in my neck and back and made myself start going to Pilates again. I ruled out the Body Balance and Yoga class as I thought that trying to achieve a ‘Downward Dog’, ‘Tree’ or ‘One legged King Pigeon’ pose probably result in last night’s dinner coming right back out to greet me.

Then last week the whole family came came down with a virus, something that, unpleasant as it was may just have proved to be that proverbial cloud with a silver lining.

If you are eating, please don’t keep reading:

The force with which my Sunday Roast left my stomach, coupled with the piece of chicken that shot out as I blew my nose afterward (disgusting I know, but medically relevant) seemed to unblock my ear and reduce the severity of the vertigo. It has now been 3 days since I stopped popping my pills and (touch wood) I am finally feeling a bit better. Obviously if you find yourself suffering from vertigo, intentionally making yourself sick isn’t a route I would recommend, but on this occasion it seems to have done the trick for me.

So to cut a long story short, if you ever find yourself unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a bout of vertigo be reassured by the knowledge that as horrible as it is, it will eventually go. Until then, try not to get too stressed, it only makes it worse.

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