Happy Birthday Sunshine

My eldest boy, Daniel, celebrates his seventh birthday this weekend.
According to him something weird happens when you turn seven in that you magically and mysteriously grow up overnight. A boy in his class told him that when you turn seven you wake up two feet taller, two years wiser and your mother, who the night before was the light of your life, is suddenly a total and utter embarrassment.
This is the same little chap who told my boy that blood sucking vampire bats can fly into your room at night if you leave your window open and that zombies frequently reside in bedroom cupboards.
This little boy may think he’s a mini Derek Ancorrah but judging by the failure of his previous predictions to come true I’ll not be rushing our and buying my boy longer trousers or more advanced books. As for me becoming an embarrassment, I’ll not be swapping my work clobber for nightwear and turning up at the school gates in my pyjamas to pick him up.
Yes, I’d say the morning of his seventh birthday should be pretty much run-of-the-mill normal.
For the past few years we’ve hired a bouncy castle and a magician for the boy’s big day. This year he has decided that he’s too mature for that and secretly persuaded the husband to order him a mammoth inflatable obstacle course for the back garden.
The thing has a huge nine-foot high slide, rope bridges and various other death-defying accessories. The husband was thinking of complimenting the heart-stoppingly dangerous looking (but completely safe, he assures me) contraption with some flaming fiery hoops that the kids can jump through on their bikes and maybe even a live tiger, so that they can stick their heads in it’s mouth for a picture.
So it’s all booked and paid for and that is precisely why he turned to his father this time. If it were up to me I’d have them simply running around the garden, kneepads, helmets and factor 50 sunblock in place. The boy knew I would never have allowed an inflatable contraption, which wouldn’t look too out of place on one of those Chinese torture game shows, to take centre stage at his birthday party.
Maybe I am an overprotective mum, maybe with my constant insistence that he doesn’t put himself in unnecessary mortal peril makes me an embarrassment.
Seven years ago this week I remember ordering the husband to drive no faster than 20 mph back from the hospital while our precious cargo was in his new baby car seat in the back. Now the child’s going to be hurtling down a mammoth nine-foot high inflatable slide side at approx 70mph, no doubt while stuffing cake in his mouth. How times change, how my boy has grown up.
Happy birthday sunshine.
X

Burglar hats – 3 for a £1

The woman up the street had her car window smashed and her handbag stolen yesterday afternoon. My middle son was playing out in our driveway at the time of the incident and I asked him if he saw anyone.
"I saw a man," he said.
"What did he look like?" says I.
"He was big and wearing a hat," he replies.
"What kind of hat?" I ask, thinking that the boy could possibly help the police who are up searching through hedges a few doors up.
"It was a burglar's hat," he says. "You know, like a black hat with the word burglar written in big letters across the front of it."
Handy those...

What having kids is like....

I met an old friend this week who’s just about to have her first baby and is a bit unsure about what to expect. This is a young lady I went to many a music festival with and had many reckless and hilarious teenage adventures. Together we loved several uber-embarrassing eighties bands with, now looking back, frightening passion.
Over coffee she asked me what it was like having kids. Such a broad-ranging question and the words ‘brilliant but brutal’ didn’t quite sum it up. So I broke it down for her and she ran screaming, arms flailing in a dramatic fashion, from the coffee shop. That last bit was a lie, she might have just looked a bit shocked.
Here’s a bit of what I told her she could expect…

Happiness
Joy and happiness, a depth of which you will never have experienced before. It will pale even the time you won the signed Bros single “When Will I Be Famous’ from their fan club in 1987. No seriously, it will.
When you’ve have the most rubbish of days and feel like the sun will never shine again you will look at your child – his big blue eyes, his flawless, chubby face – and know he is one of life’s truly beautiful miracles. He will giggle, or ask a bizarre and randomly hilarious question and you’ll honestly think you’re the luckiest and happiest person in the world, nay the entire universe.

Tiredness
Remember that time we stayed awake for three days and nights to see every single band who took to the stage at Donnington Monsters of Rock festival? Remember the tiredness, the sleep deprived hallucinations, the mindless babbling and dark circles which no amount of industrial-strength concealer could ever mask? Envisage that exact tiredness, draw on that zombifying lack of energy and multiply it by 10, because that’s the kind of tiredness you should expect to feel every day for the next 10 to 15 years years. Enjoy!

Worry-edness
Is that just a heat rash or is it deadly meningitis? Is that a big tumour up his nose or is it a carefully lodged small ball of orange fluff? Will he play in our garden without accidentally drinking the home heating oil straight from the tank? Will he run away and be abducted if I even so much as loosen my vice grip on his hand? Will I ever be able to relax again, ever?
Be prepared to worry from this day forward until the very day you die, no matter if your kids are five or 75. Yes, yes, enjoy that one too.

Life will never be the same again-edness
Once you have kids your life will never, ever resemble the life which you now lead. That’s not always bad. You will leave behind lazy Sunday lie-ins, holidays that you come back from relaxed as opposed to super-stressed, skipping out of the house with just your handbag, watching intelligent programmes on TV, a tidy house and reading newspapers on the day that you actually buy them. But if you didn’t have kids you could never truly appreciate the serenity of watching a baby slumbering peacefully because you wouldn’t have lived through the ear-splitting racket that they make during the day. Without kids you wouldn’t, with a clear conscience, dance around your kitchen impersonating a crazy chicken either, or know all the words to the Postman Pat themetune. And, truth be told, you haven’t lived until you’ve sat through your 300 viewings of Chipmunks, the Squeakquel in one weekend.
Without kids you wouldn’t know such exhilarating highs and worry-induced lows that pave the path of parenthood. Life is never boring with kids, never dull. They brim with colour, vibrancy and enthusiasm for life, which if you let it, can be utterly infectious.

Awh shucks, thanks.....

This blog has been nominated for an award in the MAD Blog Awards. Well, I’ve actually been nominated in three categories - funniest blog, best new blog and blogger of the year. Pretty cool stuff, thanks awfully.
So, if tales of my misery and maniacal family life has ever risen so much as a smile with you, scoot on over to www.the-mads.com and throw me a nomination as well.
Thank you kindly for reading every week both in the Irish News and here. Thank you for laughing intermittently at our misfortunes and misadventures. And most importantly thank you for joining us for the often bumpy ride of our family’s adventure. It's been fun.
x

Obey the laws of the Jag Clinic

Had loads of fun this week embarrassing strangers who asked me when the baby was due. They’d look at my ever-increasing bump and inquire as to the estimated date of arrival. I’d look at them all dumbfounded and ask them what the hells bells they were talking about.
My strange fascination with making people squirm started off innocently enough when I took the baby for his swine flu jab. We were forced to join a queue of screaming kids and grumpy parents on the street outside the outpatients department of our local hospital. A few irrationally inpatient fathers and a sprinkling of gale force conditions were also thrown into the mix to
compliment the relaxed ambience.
When we were done queuing outside – a monotonous hour-long ordeal – we queued a little more to get pens to fill in forms about our children. Then we got into another fabulously long queue to have the jab administered.
All in all myself and the little man spend approximately three and a half hours of sacred Saturday morning time standing in a line. His time was broken up into carefully thought-out segments. For the hour he spent outside in the elements he mostly kept a firm grip on his precious curly hair in case the gales would blow it away. He wiled away these 60 minutes by expressing his displeasure through the medium of screaming.
Once we got inside the child was able to release his hands from his head, safe in the knowledge that his locks weren’t going anywhere. He spent the hour we queued for a pen laughing maniacally, running away down darkened corridors and screaming loudly, approximately 3cms from my eardrum, when I picked him up.
We queued through his nap time, through his lunch time and into the afternoon.
We lost our places in the queue several times. It was a dog-eat-dog type of queue made up of really grumpy, hungry, tired parents. Once you stepped out of line, you no longer existed in their eyes. It was harsh, but those are the rules of the jungle, and the jab clinic.
When we eventually got to see the nurse I was a tired, irritable, queue weary, broken shell of my former self. I could barely string a sentence together, remember my name or speak actual English. It was a bridge too far to have to make idle chit chat. So when she asked me when the baby was due I just stared bleary-eyed in her general direction. I suppose she took my silence to mean that I was not six and a half months into a pregnancy, just big boned, and the poor girl stuttered and stammered apologies and excuses. It was the first time I laughed that day.
I wasn’t laughing later though when the baby had a bad reaction to the jab, turned into a fever-stricken stunt double for the Exorcist and was sick at half hourly intervals during the night. I wasn’t laughing for the next three days when he performed quite spectacular feats of projectile vomiting for our general entertainment and ranted and raved his way through an extremely high temperature.
I regained my sense of humour though when I played the ‘what do you mean, pregnancy bump?’ card at the tills in Sainsbury’s and a sales person who stopped me in the street.
So I’ll add enjoying making people squirm to the long list of pregnancy symptoms I’ve had to endure this time. It’s now filed away alongside extreme grumpiness, a hatred of the sight, smell, taste or mere mention of Spaghetti Bolognaise and, of course, utter imbecility.

Taxi-bus for O'Neill....

So we sold our soul to the mumsy devil and finally bought ourselves a people carrier. The keys of our beloved Toyota were handed over and there was much crying and wailing from the husband. Before the deal was actually signed, sealed and delivered I could have sworn that I heard him tell the car salesman that he would have to prize the keys from his cold, dead fingers. Thankfully no such sacrifice was required and we drove away from Coolsville heading for middle-aged Mumsyville in a shiny new Ford Galaxy.
To be honest, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought. I had been having nightmares of a cavernous mini-bus type contraption, dull grey seats, no CD player and few bumper stickers saying ‘Careful Now!’, ‘Moms Rock’ and ‘Foxy Mini-Van Mama’. I thought the thing might feel like I was driving the 216 Derry to Belfast Express. That we, the O'Neill army, might appear something like the picture above while going from A to B.
But to my surprise the car is pretty darn nippy, quite funky and pretty easy on the eye. We got the one with all the trimmings – it even has dark tinted windows so it looks like the mafia are dropping the kids off at the school gates. I find these are also handy when you want to hide from other cooler road users – like people who drive Toyota Avensis’.
At least we all fit in the thing. Although if we have any more kids (a highly unlikely event) though, we may very well be driving the Derry to Belfast express.
The people carrier phobia hit a nerve with parents. I got a fair few emails from readers who faced the same problems and overcame them without half as much drama.
I like to think I provide a community service of sorts. I wouldn’t want any other mother to suffer like I did, so I’ll pass on the information. Eimear from Warrenpoint got in touch and told me of the fabulous MultiMac (www.multimac.co.uk/home) which fits four kids into the back of your car safely, without your husband going insane or your levels of cool dropping a jot.
It’s too late for us, but if we save one more family then it’ll be worth it.
If you’re looking for me today I’ll be busy travelling the northwest (in my people carrier) purchasing every Irish News I see. For if the husband discovers, through this very column, that there actually was an option available that would allow him to keep his car, I fear that in his vulnerable mental state this news might tip him over the edge. I shall also be depending on the 150,000 odd people who read the paper every day to keep schtum.
In other news my very brave sister-in-law Valerie, a hard-working mother of one-year-old Ruby, has been pounding the pavements of Derry every night, training for the London Marathon. She will take part to raise money for the Foyle Hospice, who took fantastic care of my Dad, and indeed all of us, in the last few weeks of his life.
If you’d like to donate to a great cause and cheer on Valerie please log on to www.justgiving.com/Valerie-Breslin.
Thank you!

People-carrier-aphobia

There are some weird phobias around. Many people have spider phobias, some a fear of heights, there are actual humans on this earth that are afraid of cotton wool. So I don’t feel so bad standing up and admitting that I, Leona O’Neill, am a card carrying people-carrier-aphobe.
With the birth of our new baby in July we will become a family of six. There are five seats in our current car. That’s one less seat than we have people, it simply doesn’t add up; no matter what way we do the sums.
Before the youngest child was born we had a few weeks of panic, not about the imminent birth, but about the fact that we’d have to get rid of our beloved Toyota Avensis. I wrote on these very pages about the husband’s elaborate plans to build an exterior extension onto the vehicle so as to keep it.
The mere thought of handing over his keys to a car salesman in return for a people carrier caused him actual physical pain. He scoured the country for an answer, and it presented itself in the form of skinnier booster seats, which would apparently fit alongside a baby seat and mean we could keep the car, and our relative coolness for another while.
That man spent three hours in torrential rain, fitting and refitting those seats, trying various configurations, while I paced the living room floor biting my nails.
Honestly when he eventually mastered it, when he made them all fit perfectly side by side, it was one of the proudest moments of his life. It was right up there with winning the boxing at the Reccy Club, North Queen Street, circa 1979. He was buzzing for weeks afterwards.
But now his bubble has burst. Now, there’s no alternative. When I look to the road ahead I see the O’Neill army in a big mini-bus-type contraption and it just fills me with dread.
I’ve nothing against people carrier drivers, nor do I think them nerdy or mumsy. This is a proper phobia.
I sit behind the wheel of one of those things and I instantly feel 10 years older. They are like a pair of boring, comfortable shoes. They’re a nice fit but rubbish to look at. I’m a perilously high heel kind of gal.
A lot of them are nice enough. Many of them come with great accessories – DVD players in the back seats, surround sound, panoramic windscreens, trousers with elasticated waists, a Susan Boyle CD and a life-long subscription to the Readers Digest, but that is just not me.
When we visited the showroom yesterday the salesman asked me if I was looking for a ‘Mummy Wagon’. I came over all dizzy and had to sit down while he fetched me a glass of water.
The husband, left unattended, scoured the small car section in a hair-brained scheme that would involve us keeping our current car, splitting the family into two vehicles and bombing down the road in a kind of O’Neill convoy.
We left without buying anything, again.
Time is fast running out. We either have to trade in for a people carrier or trade in one of the kids. Now there’s an idea…