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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How to play in 2010

Nothing probably highlights how dramatically the world has changed, more than when you watch your kids play – and see the toys they now play with.

As a child, playing was something that took real hard work, it was never just handed to us on a plate. Games had to be invented and imagination put into overdrive, and of course, if we ever looked like we were bored for a millisecond, we were sent out to weed the front drive.

I played with dolls that cried and wet themselves. I climbed up trees and galloped around the field next like a horse. I had a hand puppet called Spit the Dog and a bin called Dusty. I remember being wowed by the revolutionary Rubik’s Cube and simply blown away when we got our Commodore 64. Amazing thing that was, it had a cassette deck to rewind the games and a whole 64kB of RAM.

Now that may seem unimaginable to techies in this decade, but you’ve got to remember that this was at a time when the microwave oven was only just becoming part of the kitchen scenery, and having a Soda Stream was the very height of cool.

These days most dolls have a better wardrobe (and car) than I do. Hell, my daughters Barbie has her own private jet and a tour bus with a built-in spa. Go into any toy shop and everything now seems to walk, talk or dance. Batteries are a given and an Internet connection more often than not a necessity.

Light years in development since the humble Commodore 64 , computers of today are small enough to fit in your pocket and powerful enough to launch a space shuttle.

Technology has certainly gotten out of control. You know that for sure when you can play 18 holes of golf in your living room, buy a pair of shoes from someone on the other side of the world and spend every spare minute caring  for a 1 dimensional pet – though seriously, what is the draw of looking after a puppy on-screen?

Change isn’t a bad thing of course, it’s just what happens. I know at the age of 8 I’d certainly rather have been able to jump around on an interactive dance mat with my ‘Bop It’, than have to sift through tonnes of gravel looking for another weed.

The other day I was watching my kids at play, spreading small plastic toys across the floor and building cubbies. Then the zoo animals came out, and my son decided to use a book to make a small tent, so that a pair of cheetahs and a goose could have a sleep – or so I thought.

But this is 2010 and the cheetahs had no intention of sleeping. Instead they were in there with Barbie’s laptop, staying connected to the world.

“Cheetahs are talking to Nana Dee on Sky”, my son informed us. That would be Skype to you or me.

“No they’re not”, responded my daughter, “they’re reading an email, then they’re going to watch Eastenders that Mummy downloaded last night.” Yes, it’s a very modern world our children are being brought up in.

God only knows what toys the next generation will have to play with, but I’m sure by the time I’m shopping for my grandchildren they will need a degree in mechanical engineering, a V8 engine and a litre of environmentally friendly rocket fuel.

what you can do with a pile of sand

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Here’s a little gem from youtube that’s well worth 8 minutes of your time. I’d even go so far as to say I guarantee you’ll also end up watching it more than once… and utter the word ‘Wow’ at least half a dozen times.

The video shows the winner of 2009′s ” Ukraine ‘s Got Talent “, Kseniya Simonova. Her ‘talent’ – drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table – is incredibly mesmeric to watch, as the continuous flow of images tell the rather emotional story of how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky – then war planes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying – then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos, from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

During The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, one in four of the population was killed, with 8 to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. Little wonder then, that so many in the audience were moved to tears and this incredible artist went on to win the top prize of about $ 75,000.

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Click on the picture below to watch this truly amazing performance..

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Demon children and saintly spoodles

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Taking your child away on holiday can sometimes be a very dangerous thing to do. In only a few short weeks they can morph into a human being barely recognisable from the one you once knew. As routine, balanced diet and consistency goes out the window, everything you ever taught them seems to follow, including good manners, eating habits and general all round intelligence.

In the case of my 3 year-old, this certainly seemed to be the case. He left Perth a mild-mannered, book loving, happy eater, and arrived in England a screeching, uncontrollable terror. Who wouldn’t eat a single vegetable. Including beans. Coated in tomato sauce. Made by Heinz. Heavens above, what child refuses those?

What the hell happened up there at 33,000 feet you might ask? I’m still pondering the very same question myself – but looking back it’s easy to see where it all went so wrong.

A stranger to sugar and capable of sleeping for up to 4 hours in his afternoon nap, my son found his world being tipped upside down as he was dragged from his bed and shoe horned into the car on the way to the airport. There we were, in the middle of the night, singing to try to keep him awake. Dragging him behind us at speed, force feeding him cookies (albeit low-fat ones) to coax him on a plane he didn’t want to go on, and then telling him he must then lie down and go back to sleep, with bright lights and dinner trays clattering all around him.

It was a recipe for disaster from the start, and the rest of the holiday carried on in much the same vein. Erratic bed times, long stretches in the car, sporadic mealtimes containing all the wrong foods and a difference set of people every time he woke up. To say he was a fish out of water was an understatement. More like a little boy in a parallel universe.

As a direct result of this holiday madness, and so not really his fault at all, his behaviour often veered on the side of manic. Energy levels went through the roof, ears sealed off to reasoning and his mouth went into screeching overdrive. And all in a country where you are no longer allowed to ‘discipline’ your child in public … tricky.

He now saw eating – unless the food in question came under the food group ‘treat’ – as an unncessary inconvenience, and as mentioned before, anything that had once grown up from, across or dropped to the ground was now met with a pursed mouth and muffled cries of “Don’t like it”. A tad frustrating, especially as the week before he’d happily opened up for aubergine and olives.

The ‘highlight’ of this out-of-control behaviour came however, at perhaps the very worst time possible of our entire holiday. I’d go as far as to say, that in the collective 12 years my offspring have been alive, never have I wanted to hang my head so low in shame.

While visiting a potential school for my daughter, my son reached deep into his inner demon and pulled out quite possibly the worst behaviour that the inside of the headmasters office has ever seen. He spread crumbs far and wide (from a biscuit off the tea-tray he’d launched himself at), squeezed his juice box across the polished table and pulled himself back and forwards across the floor like the member of a crack commando team. He climbed on the window seats, threw cushions on the floor and very nearly pulled down the curtains – 4 times. He struggled when I picked him up, pulled at me when I put him down and slithered to the ground when I put him back in his seat. The entire time he screeched and shrieked and laughed like a nutter possessed.

It was pretty toe-curling stuff, as any parent could well imagine.

There we were, talking about school reports and untapped potential and trying to give a good impression. And there was  my little monster – who would also be eligible to go there in a years time – bouncing off the walls like Tiger on a mixture of crack cocaine and speed.

The only saving grace in this whole embarrassing ordeal was that the headmaster knew better than to judge the entire family based off of the actions of its smallest member. As well as being a parent,  he was also my old English teacher – the teacher who had in fact inspired me to start writing in the first place, many light years ago.

Should this worrying tale of holiday woe begin to put off any parent thinking of taking a break, then fear not, it does have a happy ending.

After the episode at the school, sugar was abruptly cut out of his diet (which was unfortunate for him as this happened before Christmas). Within days he started to ease off his high and calm down again – apparently it takes at least 2 weeks for somebody to go cold turkey where the sweet stuff is involved. Now back in Perth, my son is already back to his old self, and get this, better than before. His manners are perfect, he’s calm and controllable and best of all, he’s eating vegetables faster than I can get them on his plate.

Not that I’d ever recommend killing your child’s routine and dragging them round the world to help knock them into shape, but on this occasion, it seems to have done the job.

Incidentally, the same also seems to be true of Charlie. He went into the kennels as a naughty, barking, escape artist, and come out a changed dog. He is now well-behaved, quiet and far more obedient than the 2 year-old Spoodle that went in. He didn’t even make a run for it the other day, when I accidently opened the garage door without shutting him inside first.

Now, if my daughter had gone in the same direction as my son and the dog, I could have said I had a hat trick on my hands. Unfortunately the excellent behaviour she showed when away (which was enough to get her offered a place at the school) has worn off some, and been replaced with the somewhat emotional and pouting little girl of before.

Still, can’t win them all, and 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

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Sign your name across my skin

I’ve never really got the fascination with tattoos. It seems to me a very extreme (and permanent) way of expressing how you’re feeling at that exact moment, but doesn’t really take into account how you might feel in years to come. After all, over the course of a lifetime names come and go, ideas and trends change and something that might be considered cute and girly at 18 will probably look downright stupid at 50.

And surely the effects of gravity on skin is not a tattoos friend? That bright and delicate flower you might have on your shoulder when you’re young enough to think it’s a good idea, will surely just become a faded pile of squiggles around your mid drift when you’re old enough to know better.

I’m not sure if my aversion to being drawn on is my reluctance to have someone shoot ink into my skin with a needle, or because I have absolutely no desire to have something covering my body that in a few years I would no doubt regret. More than likely it’s probably because even at 34, my mother would still kill me.

Whatever the reason, I have managed to reach this point in my life with a completely ink free body. Not a Tweetie Pie, Celtic cross or a initialed heart is to be found on any inch, nook or crevice of my being.

It was the girl in front of me in the spinning class yesterday morning, that got me thinking about tattoos in the first place. She had children’s names (well I presume they were anyway) written in huge letters across the bottom of her back. It’s not that it looked terrible, it just seemed an odd thing to do. And a very popular thing to do, judging by the number of people walking around these days with the contents of a baby naming book etched on their skin. In fact an hour later I was in a Pilates class (yes, I was feeling particularly keen that day), and I noticed that two of the woman contorting like pretzels on the mats in front of me were also listing their offspring – this time around their ankles.

I started to wonder if I was the only one who believed having their names on a birth certificates was no longer enough.

Now of course I can completely understand the idea of celebrating your kids. But wouldn’t a t-shirt, or a photo frame do? Do you really need to wear their names on your skin for the rest of your life to show how much they mean to you? Who knows, perhaps I’m an uncaring parent, but I can categorically say I have no wish to have so much as their initials on me, let alone their annual school photos tattooed all the way down my back.

I guess that’s something they’ll just have to live with. And perhaps discuss in therapy later. That said, I do however have a set of silver dog tags with their fingerprints on. These I can wear whenever I want – and take off whenever I want. Makes perfect sense to me.

Who knows, maybe there’s something about getting a tattoo that I just don’t get. Along with multiple earings, nose rings, tongue studs and bellybutton piercings. I’ll admit it does indeed sound like I have an issue with pain, but I’ve had two kids so it can’t be that. I think it just comes down to taste, and preferring my art hung up on the wall, rather than looking back at me in the mirror.

Don’t lie to me

Any parent worth their weight in low sodium salt would probably agree, that children should be brought up knowing that it’s wrong to lie. Especially to their parents. But teaching this particular right from wrong can be tricky, especially when trying to push the message home to your child often entails telling a whole range of elaborate and complicated lies to begin with.

Believe it or not, the reason that we lie to our children in this way even has a name.  It’s called ‘Parenting by lying’.

So why do we even lie to begin with? Mainly to shield our children from the harsh reality of the world, and to protect their innocence for as long as humanly possible. Children already have quite enough on their plate, trying to get a grasp on their own tiny world, without also needing the complete low down on war, death, natural disasters and the wonders of childbirth.

We also lie to encourage their imagination; to teach them how to fabricate new worlds and interesting characters in their heads, so that they in turn will grow up to concoct intricate tales to tell their own kids.

And of course there are also those lies that we tell because we don’t know the answer to a question, or because we have already lied once, and have to carry on just cover our tracks. And those lies, that if the truth be told, just make our day-to-day life that little bit easier.

Oh what a tangled web we do weave.

“I’ll know if you’re lying to me” is a classic parenting approach that I often use myself.

Of course I won’t know, so that’s a lie for starters. All I’ll actually be doing is fine-tuning my Mummy Radar, making an educated guess and relying heavily on the fact that my trusting daughter still believes that I know everything that she does, says, thinks and feels.

Like a lamb to the slaughter, I’ve seen the fleeting look of panic pass through her eyes when employing this rather underhand tactic. I can hear her brain frantically ticking over as she quickly tries to weigh up whether she’ll be in more trouble for having finished off all of the biscuits, or for pretending that she hasn’t even been near the tin.

Luckily for her on that particular occasion, as she stood there with the last biscuit hidden behind her back, good sense prevailed. She confessed, apologised and promptly offered to make me a cup of tea. To go along with the last surviving biscuit.

Good sense wasn’t even in the vicinity however the time that she blamed her baby brother for the cup of juice spilt all over the floor. The fact that the ‘accused’ was strapped into his bouncer on the other side of the room, and come to think of it, unable to do anything more than wobble, didn’t exactly help her case. As I watched her suddenly clock her serious lack of judgement, the part of me that wasn’t telling her off actually wanted to take pity and explain that there’s no point telling a porky in the first place, if your story doesn’t even stack up.

Maybe I felt sorry for her because I’m probably to blame in the first place. After all, I’ve already shaped her whole childhood with white lies, fiction and complete fantasy. It’s what parents do.

It starts straight out of the womb. As babies they howl and cry. So we jig them around, rub their backs and say “It’s OK, it’s OK” over and over again.

“No it’s not OK”, the babies are probably thinking. “My tummy’s sore, my nappy’s full and quite frankly I’m starting to feel sick from all this bloody rocking”.

From that moment on the lies come thick and fast, tripping off our tongues like seasoned politicians.

Firstly there are those lies that fall into the category of far fetched and thinly veiled threats – If you don’t eat your vegetables you won’t grow up to be big and strong. If you eat your carrots you’ll see in the dark.  If you eat your crusts your hair will go curly. If you don’t look after your toys I’ll throw them away. If you hear the ice cream van playing a tune, it’s run out of ice cream. If you say another word you won’t get dinner. If you don’t go to sleep you’ll never wake up tomorrow. If you don’t stop that now I’ll take you straight home. I won’t tell you again.

And my personal favourite – Mummy’s can’t hear when they’re sleeping.

Then there are the 5 main brush off lies that I’m sure most parents tell on average at least 10 times a day.

I’ll think about it – loosely translated to mean ‘It ain’t ever going to happen’
We’ll see – loosely translated to mean  ‘You’ll have forgotten in a few hours’
Maybe – loosely translated to mean  ‘Never, never, never going to happen’
I’m listening loosely translated to mean  ‘I’m not even remotely interested’
I’ll be there in a minute  – loosely translated to mean ‘I’ll be there in half an hour when I’ve finished whatever it is I’m doing’

And then there are the Mother of All Lies. The ones that involve a fairy collecting teeth, a bunny dropping off chocolate eggs and a large fat man squeezing himself down the chimney (regardless of whether you have one or not) and leaving a suspicious looking package at the end of your bed.

That last one is actually the stuff of nightmares, is you leave out the flying reindeer and the ‘Ho Ho Ho’. After all, we drill into our kids the danger of talking to strangers, particularly big, bad men. And then we tell them that if they are good, one will be coming into their bedroom late at night and watching them while they sleep. Probably the worst case of mixed messages if ever I heard one.

But of all the lies, the best one that we parents have up our sleeves must be the one regarding those clever little eyes we have in the back of head. This one works especially well when you have as many mirrors in your house as we do. In some parts of our home I really can see round corners, and that includes the fridge, the food cupboard and the biscuit tin.

A few years ago, quite out of the blue, the very existence of my second set of eyes was even confirmed.

My daughter and I went for our visa medical check up, and the doctor in question was giving my eyes the once over with a torch. “So how are my other set of eyes?” I asked him, with a straight face and a hidden smirk. “The ones in the back of your head?” he asked immediately “Oh those look fine too”.

My daughters face was a picture. A mixture of complete disbelief and total awe. “Would you like me to check your other eyes too? he asked my daughter. “But I don’t have any,” she said.”Oh but you do,” he replied “everyone has them, they just don’t work properly until you have your own children”.

He peered into her eyes. “Yes, yours are growing quite nicely.” he confirmed.

My daughter was practically buzzing with excitement when we left the surgery. “I never really believed you Mummy, but the doctor saw mine growing so it MUST be true.” God bless child friendly doctors, they earn every penny and more.

That was of course only a harmless little white lie, the sort which are sometimes said just to be kind. But where I wonder do you draw the line, and how can you teach kids to know the difference between those lies that are ‘OK’ and those that will be categorised as a ‘lifetime grounded to the bedroom’ type offense?

Like when Mummy asks how she looks in her new dress, obviously it’s best not to tell her that her bottom looks like the back end of a bus. Or that the dinner she spent hours cooking tasted horrible. Or that Daddy is definitely loved more because he shouts less.

Needless to say I’m dreading the day that my children find out Father Christmas is just Daddy, a red suit and 3 cushions. Or that the lost teeth that were supposed to become stars, ended up at the back of my jewelery box. Or worse still, that the Christmas Elf that follows them around and watches their every move from October onwards doesn’t actually exist.

Oh how my life isn’t going to be worth living, not least because my daughter (who always likes to state the obvious) will undoubtedly be very quick to point out that not only has her life been one long lie, but I’m the one that’s been telling them.

I feel my payback may be right around the corner, just about the time when the hormones kick in.

When smelly children need surgery

Everyone has heard about those kids who stick something up their nose.

I’ve often thought what sort of idiot, albeit a pint sized one, does that? Images of a manky, sniveling little boy, with a crusted up, snot smeared face and unruly hair spring to mind. The sort of child who pulls wings of butterflies and feasts on worms and bugs. You know the type, they usually feature in the local paper, with a picture of the child proudly clutching the spanner set he somehow misplaced up his nasal cavity and his proud parents beaming away behind, quoted as saying “We wondered why all the magnets in the house kept sticking to his face.”

I also wondered what happened when this unfortunate event occurred. How did the child in question breath, when their nostrils were stuffed full of unidentifiable stuff? How did the parents not notice that little Jimmy had snorted his peas off his plate instead of eating them? And how on earth do they ever get the ‘foreign object’ back out again?

Last week I found out that I have one of ‘those’ children – oh what a proud parental moment that was. So off the back of that, I can now confirm the following. Yes, breathing is indeed restricted with something lodged up your nostril. It is easy to miss something different about your child, if it’s not visible to the eye. And believe it or not, it can take surgery.

The first clue that something was where it shouldn’t be was that my son smelt horrible, with a nasty whiff about his person that would come and go. The type of odour that simply refused to budge, even with much vigorous washing and twice daily teeth brushing. It’s hard to say exactly what the smell was even, somewhere between sour milk and a rotting vegetable perhaps. Fairly unpleasant in other words.

The pong went on for quite a while, until it escalated to such a point that my maternal alarm bells started clanging loudly in my ears. By this time I could no longer hug him on my lap without having to turn my head away to gasp for breath. Regardless of how much you love your child, no mother wants to sit and bury their nose into a compost heap every day.

Granted I do have a particularly sensitive nose, and could even detect a smoker walking 5 floors down and 500m away when pregnant, but this time it was more than me being fussy. So why wait till I was gagging you may ask? Well, apart from the whiff he was perfectly healthy. We checked him all over decaying flesh or rupturing boils, and like I said, he was washed and brushed regularly. Perhaps it was the fear of having a child diagnosed with halitosis that simply riddled me with fear.

So anyway, off to the doctor we went, where I told him that my son smelled horrible.

The doctor, as I expected, looked at me like I was something of a heartless cow when it came to my mothering care and concern. Then he looked into my sons mouth, and lo and behold spotted tonsils the size of walnuts. Or Brazil nuts. Or was it almonds. Anyway, regardless of the nut, apparently they were enormous and stopping all the air flowing down his throat. So the enlarged tonsils were blamed for the smell and I was referred to an ENT specialist to discuss having them removed.

A few weeks later we sat in front off the consultant. “He smells” I said, bracing myself for another raised eyebrow and resisting the urge to let out a “Mooo”, like the nasty Friesian that I am. The consultant looked at my son, turned him both ways and then informed me that he probably had something stuck up his nose. OK. Didn’t see that one coming. His nose certainly didn’t look any bigger than normal, and as far as I could remember, I hadn’t noticed him foraging around in the tool box and sniffing up a spanner. Perhaps it was a piece of Lego, or one of those wretched little Polly Pocket shoes I’m always telling my daughter to clear up.

Next stop for the doctor, the mouth, and his enormous tonsils were confirmed. They were then linked to his excessive sweating, loud snoring and irregular breathing at night, the long periods of time he spends awake and chatting in the early hours of the morning and his inability to shift a cold or cough. Well that cleared up all of those annoying habit’s then. I was told they needed to be whipped out ASAP, and as luck would have it, he had a slot to do it in a weeks time.

Marvelous, that would be the same day my husband was flying to Sydney for a week. Multitasking is one thing, but multitasking with a sick child alone is a whole other ballgame. By this stage, heartless cow was now looking more dazed and confused cow.

The night before surgery arrived, and with the bags all packed and ready for hospital, I promptly threw up. And then again. By 9am the next morning my husband had turned a rather sludgy shade of green. By 9.30 my daughter had been sent home from school. Or rather brought home, there was no way I was trotting into the school office to collect her dressed in my pyjamas.

I think it would be fair to say that so far ‘Operation Tonsil’ was not going to plan. With all of us (except the patient-to-be) now rolling around clutching buckets, the surgery was postponed for a further week. My son carried on watching Thomas, completely oblivious to the lucky escape he had just had.

A week later and into hospital we all went, lugging three enormous bags of essential items with us, only one of which was half unpacked. The other two sat in the corner completely untouched. My little boy was taken away by scalpel welding men in blue coats, and two nail biting parents sat in his dismal little room and watched the minutes tick by. Time does indeed go by much slower when you’re waiting for your precious offspring to survive.

On the way to be with him in the recovery ward I heard him long before I could see him. Weighing in at only 14kg, and just minutes out of a general anesthetic, I rounded the corner to find two nurses unsuccessfully trying to pin my little boy down onto the bed. Like a child possessed, he screamed blue murder and understandably thrashed around as he tried to figure out where he was and why he felt so odd. I have to say his show of strength was pretty impressive for his size, however it meant that he somehow managed to pull the tube out of his hand, and as I laid down with him to try and calm him down, he nearly catapulted me off the bed.

That night in hospital went as well as could be expected, considering the small and depressing room, the one colour suits all food and the rails of the bed that fitted in just perfectly between each of the vertebra down my spine.

For some unknown reason, all of the nurses also saw fit to raise their voices by several decibels as they barged into the room to check his stats, every 15 minutes throughout the night. To make continuous sleep even harder, each time they left they failed to close the door properly behind them. This left me with little choice but to climb over the rails of a ridiculously high bed, close the door myself and then climb back up and over and in again – in the dark. And all without waking the small restless child sprawled across the majority of a very small bed.

Did I mention this was a private hospital? No, I wouldn’t have guessed it either, if I hadn’t spotted the price list on the way in.

So now we’re home and I’m sitting with my little ticking time bomb of pain. Apparently he’s going to get a whole lot worse before he gets better, and he runs the risk of bleeding if he doesn’t eat toast everyday. Toast? I can’t even bribe him to open his mouth for ice cream right now. As far as he knows, his throat has just been attacked with a cheese grater.

This week is all about keeping him medicated up to the eye balls and preventing the dog from bouncing all over him on the sofa. It would be so much easier if he could understand why a day out ended in all this pain, but bless him, he doesn’t have a clue. Instead his sad little face looks up at me and I can just tell he’s thinking “What the hell did you let them do to me, you cruel and heartless cow?”

Oh, I almost forgot. The smell. That, I’m pleased to say, is gone. The ‘foreign object’ is still just that, as we have no idea as to what it might be. Let’s just say that if you blew your nose and that shot out onto the tissue you’d be somewhat alarmed, and probably feeling more than a little bit sick.

It’s sitting on the dresser right now, entombed in a plastic tub. I’m not exaclty sure why I’m keeping it, maybe so when he’s older I can whip it out and say “You may not have eaten worms and bugs as a child, but you did stick this up your nose. Happy 21st!”

Loving Mother’s Day

So, did the flowers, chocolates and assorted lovely Mothers Day gifts from my 2 little offspring make up for the countless painful hours that I spent in labour on their behalf? Absolutely.

Nothing makes a mother feel more loved and appreciated than the handmade offerings that are slaved over for many days by her children. Nothing beats waking up to see two faces peering at you over the duvet, demanding that you get up straight away for their ‘surprise’. And no shop bought card could ever be as special as one that is made with 100% undiluted love – and a craft cupboard load of tissue paper, glitter and glue.

I know that out of all the breakfasts eaten throughout the year, none is appreciated more than one whipped up by your child. Whether it might be a soggy piece of toast and a beaker of milk or a congealed Weetabix that has taken on the texture of setting concrete, it all tastes that much better because you didn’t have to make it yourself.

I was actually treated to smoked salmon and a poached egg this morning.  Admittedly my daughter did have some help here, but, as I was immediately informed upon entering the room, she did wear the oven mitt and was in sole charge of rolling the salmon.

With an offering such as this how could you ever possibly hold a grudge over the mind numbing pain brought on by your pelvis shifting for hours on end and your muscles contracting like bellows.

It’s funny how when you are a child you believe that Mother’s Day is all about the parent. When you grow up and become a parent, you actually realise that the day is really all about the child.

In my daughter’s case, it really was all about the child. This was the day she entered the world.

Playtime

An Aussie influenced playground..

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