Green fingers...

Worms and snails and puppy dogs tails, that's what little boys are made of. Well that's what the contents of the youngest boy's jean pockets are anyway.

The waiting game

I am formally playing the baby waiting game. This baby is due to arrive in six days time, but at this stage I feel like I can’t possibly go the distance.
It truly feels like this has been the longest pregnancy in history – peppered with such sparkling highlights as five-month long bouts of morning sickness, cleaning products sniffing obsessions and spaghetti bolognaise phobias.
I’ll be glad to be ‘normal’ again. In fact I plan a maternity-style bonfire to rival any eleventh night affair, except mine will be packed to the rafters not with tyres, old sofas and placards bearing derogatory remarks about people of another persuasion but stacked with horrendously unflattering elasticated waisted maternity jeans, matronly looking flowery tops and bottles of gloopy Gaviscon.
Something peculiar happens to a girl in the last weeks of pregnancy. People no longer converse normally to a heavily pregnant woman – they want to talk about babies and nothing else. I find myself starting conversations with people about topics as broad ranging as the recent budget to the situation in Iraq. No matter what the subject people turn it around to bumps and babies.
“What about that budget eh? Bit dramatic, everyone’s up for the chop.”
“Never you worry your pretty little head about that silly old budget, you concentrate on cutey little baby blankets and pink fluffy bunnies.”
“Ammm, OK then.”
And why is it that people feel that it is OK to invade the space of a pregnant woman? Complete and utter strangers, who would walk past a ‘normal’ person without saying a word, are suddenly over patting the bump and taking great pleasure in scaring you with their nightmare birth story.
The last few weeks of pregnancy are torturous enough without having to hear about ladies whose actual heads exploded in childbirth or who went actually mad, as in like seriously mad – mooing like a cow and everything – with the pains of labour.
Forget the cutesy ‘Baby on Board’ t-shirts mums-to-be are prone to wearing, I’ve put in an order for a few ‘Back off the Bump or Die!’ and ‘Pregnant and Dangerous, stay well clear for your own safety!’ t-shirts.
I was to take a tour of the new wing at our hospital last week to familiarise myself with the place. The midwife who had been explaining the place described the new multi-million facility as ‘like a hotel, a spa even.’
I don’t know what these midwives do of a weekend but the last time I went on a luxury break it did not involve excruciating pain, and abundance of drugs – perhaps I’ve been frequenting all the wrong places – and the most I went home with was a ‘complimentary’ bathrobe, not a tiny human being who will drain my finances for the next 18 years. Also, as far as I know you can stay in these hotels for a little longer than six hours before they chuck you out.
I seem to be suffering from severe grumpiness; no one is safe from my wrath.
As for those scoundrels who call, Facebook and text constantly asking for news of the baby I’ve taken to switching the phone off and have left a message along the lines of….
“You have reached the O’Neill residence. There is currently no news, no sign, no shifting and no ‘word of me yet’. I am still the size of a small semi-detached house and extremely, extremely irritable. If you’d like to leave a message please do so, refraining from mentioning anything that will tip me over the edge to insanity – topics to avoid include jump start cables, 10-month-long pregnancies and 15 pound babies. Should your message annoy me in any shape or form I shall dispatch my children to your abode, have them daub poster paint stick men on your living room curtains and bad words all over your car. This will then be entirely your fault. You have been warned. Ba-Bye!

My name is Leona and I'm a cleanaholic...

Two weeks to go know until the new baby arrives and I’ve become a lean, mean cleaning machine. Well maybe not so lean, but big, fat, mean, cleaning machine doesn’t really have the same ‘roll off the tongue’ ring to it.
I have quite literally gone mad cleaning our house in preparation for the new arrival. It’s not really surprising really. One of my biggest pregnancy cravings this time around has been the delicious smell of Sainsbury’s disinfectant floor wipes. I carried a packet of them around in my bag in case of emergencies – like random cleaning emergencies. Like the time we went to a restaurant and the highchair needed a swift wipe before we deposited the youngest boy there.
Our waitress tried to fob us off with a quick spritz of, frankly inferior, wishy, washy spray and a swipe of a damp cloth. After she left I produced my emergency wipes and I can safely say that that particular highchair has never, ever been so gloriously clean and beautifully sweet smelling. The thing was quite literally reflective.
Yes the husband, other punters and restaurant staff thought me crazy, but may God forgive me, once I get a whiff of those lime and eucalyptus infused wipes I just go into a hazy trance. God knows I would have cleaned the entire premises from top to bottom had I been permitted.
They say that this nesting urge in pregnancy is thought to be caused by both biological and emotional factors. Most females in the animal kingdom experience similar patterns of cleaning and preparation when they are pregnant. Yes, but how many female gorillas are you aware of who feel an overwhelming urge to colour code their wardrobes or thoroughly vacuum their front lawns?
From birds to bears, female animals appear to have an intrinsic need to prepare ahead of time for our new arrivals. It is believed that females are programmed to experience this nesting instinct in order to ensure that their offspring will be cared for properly after birth, and, of course, have superbly clean cupboards and adequately colour co-ordinated relatives.
This week I have kind of gone off the Sainsbury’s wipes and find myself strangely drawn to Cif Multi-Purpose anti-bacterial spray. The air in our house is thick with the aluminous blue liquid drops. Everything and everyone who is stationery for more than two minutes is sprayed and scrubbed down.
I am like a drug addict, any excuse for another hit. I cleaned and disinfected the husband’s car – seats, windows, doors, boot space and all. It had been cleaned recently yes, but it hadn’t been really thoroughly disinfected since, like ever.
I go home after work and seek not the comfort of the sofa, the mop and bucket is my new friend. I collapse in a heap come 11pm, exhausted by the effort of steam cleaning the inside of my kitchen cupboards and vacuuming the garage’s cement floor. Many nights, after hours of constant cleaning, I haven’t even the energy to converse with my nearest and dearest. Unless it’s to converse about cleaning or the availability of new cleaning products.
The kitchen is on fire, is it? No, no I simply can’t find the energy to lift my head from this cushion, just leave me here, go and save yourselves. I would truly like to lie here until my head stops spinning. What’s that you say? WHAT? The patio doors have mucky paw prints on them? Get me some Windolene spray and some kitchen roll STAT!! Those windows will be gleaming if it is the last thing I do.
If you’re looking for me this week I shall be in the cleaning product department of my local supermarket and sample sniffing new forms of disinfectant. I am also available, for the next two weeks only, to clean houses at reasonable rates, say the price of Sainsbury’s floor wipes.

The curly-haired lunatic

My youngest son has a mad mop of wild and curly hair. He inherited these curls from his father and my own father, who both sported what can only be described as big fancy ringlets when they were small – we have the pictures to prove it.
The child was born without a solitary hair on his head, he was a baldy coot for six months before a mass of blonde curls materialised almost overnight. Everyone we meet comments on the child’s locks. I smile and agree that they are indeed gorgeous; I don’t divulge that a crack team of hair stylists (well one super stylist – me) were required to make him look even semi-human before we left the house. Nor do I tell them that there was much screaming, much tugging of combs, much frantic detangling and much cursing to give him the appearance of just stepping out of a saloon.
When we were kids my sister had beautiful curly hair, which she would spend hours trying to straighten. When she was young – back in the olden days you understand – straighteners, much like colour televisions and motorised vehicles hadn’t yet been invented. So the old head on the ironing board trick worked wonders for her.
I used to think her mad. Having straight hair I longed for her curly locks, spent nights sleeping in a sitting position wearing ridiculous rollers, using lotions and potions and singeing my hair with curling tongs to little or no effect.
Now I can kind of understand her curly-haired frustration, having spent months trying to tame and manage the snarlicious wad of hair-tangle that has grown atop my boy’s head.
The husband says be done with it and give him a short, back and sides military-style cut like the other two. But I can’t stand to let those delicious curls go.
I’ve tried everything to tame it. The leave-in conditioner just makes him look like a stereotypical TV version of a second-hand car salesman (don’t they always seem to have greasy curly hair?) or even an Italian football manager. The specialist, expensive detangling spray which promised to give him a sleek and smooth, manageable ‘do’ instead gave him the rather startling appearance of a lunatic with an elaborate and pungent, super sticky candy floss hat. It didn’t say a word about that in the instructions. Looking around at young bucks these days though, the backcombed bird’s nest atop one’s head look is apparently all the rage. Perhaps we’re just a bit behind the times fashion wise, and our youngest child is truly fashion forward.
But it’s not just the appearance. I only have to mention the word brush and the child runs screaming in terror in the other direction. And is it any wonder? With the appliance of a brush his hair takes on a whole new appearance, think Sideshow Bob on a particularly awful hair day.
Whereas my other boy’s hair responds meekly to a swift brush and go, the smallest boy’s locks demand extreme attention, bribery and much coaxing to behave, rather like the boy himself.
There will come a time when we have to take the child to the barbers and have those gorgeous curly locks shaved off and with it, much like Samson he will lose the power of cuteness. I dread that day. I dreaded it so much with the other boys that I attempted to regain some control over their cuteness and chopped their hair myself – with the result that they both took on the appearance of scary Dame Judi Dench look-alikes, not cure at all. I had to drag those boys, under the cover of woolly hats to the barbers for the standard £5 ‘my ma went mad with the scissors and this is the horrific result. I know, I look simply ridiculous, please, please fix me’ do.
But the curls stay for now, and so does the cuteness.

Bored, bored, super bored.....

A big ball of anxiety is gaining momentum as the day approaches. The fear of what lies ahead seems to be building day after day. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we don’t know if we’ll be able to get through it but we must muster the strength from somewhere and face our greatest fears – no, not the impending birth of our fourth child, the school holidays.
Being a working mother, and a work at home mother to boot, the words ‘summer holidays’ strikes fear into my heart, turns my blood cold and brings me out in a nasty rash. A tad dramatic, you might say, but the thought of three little boys ‘helping’ me around my home office makes me hyperventilate.
We barely make it through a weekend with our minds and limbs uncompromised. The two older boys, who are now obsessed with wrestling, seem to spend every waking minute practicing their moves. And I seem to spend an awful amount of precious energy conversing in a loud and angry tone – what some people might otherwise refer to as shouting.
“Stop strangling your brother,” I holler as the middle boy locks his arm around the oldest boy’s neck.
“I’m not strangling him, this is called the Corkscrew Elbow manouvre,” he shouts back. “He’s only after doing the Eye Gouge on me with that wooden spoon, before that he did the Double Backbreaker from the kitchen table. By the way if you’re looking for it the curtain pole from the kitchen window it’s out in the garden. Daniel thought that if we broke it in half we could have Gladiator fights. The curtains are out there too, we made capes from them but they were too long and were slowing us down when they dragged along the ground.”
We are now facing 68 days, that’s 1,632 hours or even 97,920 minutes, if you like, of non-stop bickering and fighting, complains about the lack of facilities, being bored, the weather being rubbish, the distinct lack of sugary substances and the prospect of our house being overrun with other people’s equally bored, equally complainy kids.
When I was a kid we ran around the street in the summer holidays, entertained ourselves and came home at bedtime wrecked. Seemingly they don’t make kids like they used to. Kids these days want to be constantly and expensively entertained. They want computer games and fabulous coloured garden equipment to break.
We don’t have such things in our garden, so my kids swing on the washing line and break the plastic patio furniture by hitting each other with the chairs in heated battles.
One of our neighbours has a strategy in place for when the school’s close. He bought a huge bouncy castle, has spent weeks constructing a wooden adventure centre – it’s not complete yet, it may actually turn out be a wooden cage which I think would be more useful – water slides, fantastic swing sets and football nets. Frankly the guy is making the rest of us look bad with our rubbish plastic slides, our rusty swings and our goalposts made from jumpers. But it’s the rest of us miserable penny-pinching parents who will have the last laugh when every single kid in the neighbourhood congregates in this guy’s totally free mini-version of Disneyland.
Last year, through these very pages, I offered my actual right arm to the Education Minister if she found it in her heart to shorten the school holidays to, say a long weekend in July. I did not include my actual arm in the correspondence but still the woman hasn’t written back. What’s the craic Catriona? Surely an extra right arm would come in tres useful about the Education Department, perhaps for a bit of typing, or for washing windows?
I’m not holding out much hope with her, to be honest. I think she’ll probably just ignore me again. We may just prepare ourselves for the long, hot summer months to come, baton down the hatches, order the tranquiliser darts now and hope for the best.
Check out my blog on www.leonaoneill.blogspot.com.

It's (maybe) a girl!!

We went to the hospital this week for our last scan before our new baby arrives. Since we’ve been there before a few times before the consultant and the midwives know us pretty well. We tend to get the usual laughs in the corridor. “You two again,” they shout guffawing. “Order up for another baby boy”. Oh how we laugh and laugh.
You see they know our history, they know we have three beautiful boys; they know that the O’Neill gene seems to be superhuman and O’Neill babies tend mostly to be of the male variety.
While we waited in the corridor a lady who had just had her scan sat beaming at us. She told us she had finally got the news she was having a girl. I asked her how many boys she had. Nine was her answer. Nine boys. Nine boys fighting over the remote control and wrestling on the living room carpet. Holy mother of God, I thought. I do not want to be that soldier.
When we went into the scan room the midwife was asking if we might think about auditioning for the Channel 4 documentary “Eight boys and counting.”
We all laughed. I told her I had my bag packed and although we weren’t sure what the baby would turn out as the thing was packed to the gills with hand-me-down baby grows with tractors and burly, hairy builders on them, perfect for our probably boy.
The radiographer said he could see the sex of the baby and he could tell us now if we wanted to know. We said no we’d wait. He said that he could see quite clearly. We said no, it’s grand, we’ll wait. He said that he could see, here, look, here, like he could tell us like right now and put us out of our misery. He was practically jumping off the seat. I said no. The husband said yes.
The midwife asked the radiographer to whisper the news to her. She squealed and jumped up and down, hugged me, shook hands with the husband. We stood there thinking they were both mad and then gave in.
“It’s a girl,” he said. The scanner guy was so delighted, I swear there were tears in his eyes.
The last time I felt shock like it was when a taxi driver hit our car on a roundabout a few months back. But very unlike that unpleasant time it was a pretty fantastic shock. It was a shock with a lot less bad language and a few less taxi drivers calling me a visually and mentally impaired female motor vehicle operator. This was more like an undiluted sunshine shock; it was pure joy and surprise.
We asked him ten times if he was sure. The husband asked him another five times after that. He had gone a funny colour and had to sit on the side of the bed. He could foresee our bank balance disappearing before his very eyes and imagined that he’d have to have his wages paid directly into the Next baby department for the foreseeable future.
You see he’s used to dealing with boys. Baby girls are a whole new pink infused world. Baby boys are made from muck and snails and puppy dog tails, little girls are all sugar, spice and all things nice and expensive.
All the husband could think of was future gentleman callers, the fact that he’d have to buy a shotgun and adapt a more menacing demeanour for such occasions and how he’d have to train our boys in the fields of mortal combat. He was also concerned about if we were still time enough to enrol her in the local college for nuns.
Boys have ruled our house for a long time. Things will have to change. There will be no more burping the theme tune to Top Gear, no more bad words, no more muck pies and eating worms. And, as well as the husband, our little boys will have to make a few changes too.
They have a few concerns of their own – mostly over the lack of room there’s going to be on the sofa and the fact that a girl might like puke-inducing girlie things like Dora the Explorer or shopping. Also my boys have a long-standing, deep dislike of Barbie and have vowed that if she ever dare darken our doorstep, Action Man with the moveable laser eyes could not be held responsible for his actions.
Of course, I would have been equally as happy if the child would had of been a boy. I’m of the mind that as long as it’s healthy, I’m happy. But after seven years of buying blue stuff, tripping over cars, trucks and slipping on muck brought in from the garden, it’ll be nice to shop for frilly dresses and go to tea parties – even if there’s a chance Action Man might go crazy and shoot the place up with his laser eyes.

Unleash Hell!!!

My boys have their sports day this week. Not that they’re fiercely competitive creatures, unlike myself, but they do take the whole thing quite seriously. This could have something to do with the pressure piled upon them by the hands of history.
You see the O’Neills have a long and colourful history throughout Ireland as fabulous warriors and chiefs. If you happened across a chieftain in ancient Ireland, chances are he was an O’Neill, or at least knew an O’Neill who taught him all he knew. He may not have got his title by winning an egg and spoon race, but he was top dog nonetheless. And the Breslins, or the Brehans as they were known back in the day, were ancient lawmakers, strategists, thinkers and were pretty darn cool in their own right.
The battlefields may have changed from the windswept, bloody fields of old Tyrone to the ‘big green’ behind the canteen at our primary school, the weapons no longer swords but eggs and spoons, but the eyes of their ancestors are upon my boys, and they must uphold centuries of honour and win.
The O’Neill boys, that's them above training for the three-legged-race, are certainly bull-headed, determined and fiercely proud. Take, for example my middle boy Caolan. During last year’s nursery ‘five times round the football pitch’ bike race the child was frontrunner until the sun reflecting off sparkly handlebar tassels on a nearby princess bike temporarily blinded him. The resulting bike pile up left several children slightly injured, shocked and dazed. My boy abandoned his mode of transport, untangled himself from the mess of bruised knees and cut elbows and ran, bloodied knee, ripped trousers and busted lip to the finish line. That, folks, is a shining example of the O’Neill perseverance.
This year, as always, I shall be dishing out a pep talk before the big race. Something along the lines of….
“Right lads, this is a historic day. The eyes of your forebears are upon you this fine, but slightly overcast morning. Just as the ancient O’Neill warriors took to the battlefields of Ireland in centuries gone by you, my brave sons, are taking to the modern battlefield of the green behind the canteen.
“Those O’Doherty and Sweeney lads might think they’re something special, and those McLaughlins and Coyles think they own this day but just remember this – on a sunny summer’s morning in 2002, in a small chapel overlooking Donegal Bay (and a Shell petrol station) the historic union of two ancient Irish families – the Brehans and the O’Neills occurred. You, my sons, were born from that mystical and magical union. Consider yourself Gods – Gods amongst men. Poseidon and Zeus have diddly-squat on Daniel and Caolan O’Neill.
“Remember, when you are tearing down that field with a colourful bean bag on your head, that your ancestors are running behind you, they’ve got your back, they are propelling you forward through time and history to that finish line. For O’Neills always win, sons. As in like, always.
“Recall the sacrifices of your ancestors as you muster the strength to beat your classmates at the egg and spoon race. Your forebears may have proudly wielded shiny swords of iron and you may this day wield shiny spoons borrowed from the canteen, but the aim is still the same – beat your enemies and bring home the glory in the name of all things O’Neill!
“Now take this blue poster paint, paint your faces and backsides blue. Frighten your opponents with scary faces, growling noises and crazy behaviour like your ancestors once did. The sun will not set on this day if you bring shame on the O’Neill name. Show no mercy! Win me that three-legged-race, bring me home the trophy for 100 metre sprint, beat everyone at the egg and spoon, and run like the wind to the finish line in the sandbag on head race…. or don’t come home at all.”