Finn and his Amazing Technicoloured stained jumper...

When we were kids, around four or five, my younger brother insisted on wearing a Spiderman costume everywhere he went. When Mum dragged us around the supermarket, he stomped around complaining in his spidey get up. At Mass Mum would be scolding him for laughing and he’d be sitting there in his spider web leggings and top combo and matching spidey balaclava-style headgear. She had to wrestle with him to make him don anything else. I am still haunted by the arguing, screaming, bargaining and bribery that went on the morning of his First Holy Communion to get him to wear a proper suit.
My youngest son is similarly obsessed with a Thomas the Tank Engine jumper I bought him. I rue the day I purchased that particular item of clothing for 70% off its original price. Even with the saving, it wasn’t worth the hassle.
I suppose I should have foreseen problems by his reaction when I showed it to him in the shop. He grabbed it from my hands and hugged it like his very life depended on he and that jumper being together forever. By the time we reached the tills he and the jumper were almost as one. The shop assistant had to reach over the counter with her zapper gun to reach the price tag while I reassured him that she was not trying to steal away his now most favourite thing in the whole wide world.
No he didn’t want a bag. Yes, of course he wanted to wear it now. No he wouldn’t take it off so that the girl could remove the safety tag. Yes he would agree to being lifted and hovered over the security tag taker-offer thing, just so long as he and the jumper were not parted for even a mili-second.
The boy wore the jumper home with pride.
He wore the jumper while he ate his dinner that evening. Yes, he is over three and has been eating independently for years but despite his vast experience in these matters he failed to successfully deposit entire forkfuls of spaghetti bolognaise into his mouth. His Thomas jumper was now slightly more colourful than when first purchased.
When bedtime rolled around the boy refused to take the jumper off. He argued that the garment could easily double up as a pyjama top.
We argued. He screamed. He won.
He fell asleep with his arms wrapped so tightly around his body (and his jumper) that it was impossible to remove it without waking him and thus setting in motion a terrible chain of events which would result in him keeping me awake all night wailing ‘Why?!!!’ WHY??!!!’ WHAAYYYEEE!?!’ etc etc.
The next day was a Saturday so thankfully we didn’t have the ordeal of having to force him to wear his nursery school uniform.
By midday hardened cornflakes, which had strayed from his breakfast spoon, joined the spaghetti stains. I broached the subject of washing the jumper and enquired if he could bear to be parted from it for even a 30-minute express wash. The running and the screaming insinuated that, no, that scenario would not stand.
By afternoon paint, butter and marker ink had joined the myriad of colourful and now pungent stains. We took him to visit someone and, despite the intense heat of their house and his desperation to show off his new jumper, we managed to keep his jacket zipped up to the chin, at least giving the illusion that we were relatively clean human beings.
The next day a new life form had formed on the jumper – a strange hybrid of butter, cornflake, bolognaise sauce and purple marker. I swear it spoke. It said ‘Please wash me’.
So I wrestled the boy to the ground, and I removed that jumper and stuck it in the machine. I tried to explain over the wailing that it was for his own good as he stood there screaming at the washing machine, his head moving in motion with the spin cycle. He wailed for the duration of the afternoon while it dried on the heater, screamed while I ironed the thing.
He’s wearing it now and will be until someone invents either an anti-screaming serum or super-industrial Finn-proof earplugs.

Put it in the safe place, never to be found again....

I have a habit of putting all my important documents – tax affairs, insurance details etc – away in safe place. The process is the same. Something comes in through the post, I open it, wave it at the husband and tell him that I’m putting it away somewhere safe. The safe zone is not specified at the time. It is usually in one of 10 cupboards in the kitchen; on top of the fridge; in one of three drawers in the kitchen or six drawers in the bedroom; the glove compartment of the car (if it is even mildly car related); one of my six handbags or into the pocket of whatever coat I am wearing at the time.
This method usually serves me well until, that is, I have need of super important document. And when would that ever happen?
I enrolled my youngest son in nursery school this week. I had put the application form in my current safe place (stuck behind the calendar which is pinned to the notice board). And took it to the school. They told me I needed his original birth certificate. I knew it was in another safe place, so safe that it probably will never be found ever again. I cast my mind back three years. What was my favoured safe location for my really important documents then? Bottom drawer of the kitchen? Stuffed into tan handbag? Inside a plastic bag shoved to the back of the cupboard under the stairs? There was no telling, so I had to conduct a massive and sweeping search operation of the house and attic.
And I failed to find it. But I did find a video tape of my oldest son when he was just a baby. Back then we used videos in our camcorders instead of your fancy discs, and transferred them chunky VHS tapes to play in our gigantic video recorders. Slimline was not in fashion then.
The tape had ‘Daniel at eight months’ scribbled on it. And I remembered it being filmed as if it was yesterday. We were living in Belfast and my Mum and Dad had come on their weekly Saturday visit. Being the first ever grandson Daniel was hero-worshipped for a time, until all the rest of them came along and royally spoiled it all for him. Mum had filmed my boy in his high chair just staring at the camera for a full 30 minutes, intermittently pointing. She had then taken it home, copied it, stuck a note on it saying ‘hilarious’ and posted it off to relatives up and down the country, who no doubt wondered what the hell type of mind-bending drugs she was consuming to find it entertaining.
I brought it into the living room and attempted to load it into the video player. Yes we kept the thing, we’re hoping as an antique it’ll be worth money when we sell it at a space-age auction in a few years to fund our wild retirement years. But something was blocking the way. I despatched the oldest boy to the kitchen for a torch and on closer inspection I found what the problem was. Inside the machine was a full packet of peppermint poppets; a pancake circa 2009; a gooey substance that may have started off life as a banana; an empty packed of cheese and onion crisps; a number of wrestler cards; the remote control for the DVD player which had disappeared last year and a plastic dinosaur gifted to us by McDonald’s when we purchased a kid’s meal.
My youngest boy had been using the defunct video player as the perfect and safe place to store his important items.
Why didn’t I think of that? Anyone looking for my insurance documents or Will they’re in my new safe place – stuffed inside the video recorder, to the left of the banana.

Every cloud has a silver lining...

I have a reputation for breaking cars. I have broken around five at the last count, not including the one that burst into flames as that was beyond broken, it was annihilated.
All these cars had ‘problem clutches’. When the first clutch went it was put down to faulty mechanics, when the second and third cars developed clutch problems the husband suspected something was amiss. The fourth and fifth time he took completely different cars to the garage he refused to listen to the mechanic who said the problem was not car-related, more woman-driver related. But the husband finally took notice was when the fireman - who was putting out the blaze in our sixth car - commented that the smoke smelled much like a burning clutch and that he was also married to a bad driver.
The husband told me that from that moment on, I was forbidden to operate any type of machinery more complicated than a vacuum cleaner.
Only problem is we have had several ‘problem vacuum cleaners’ in the years since and I fear I might be demoted to 'not touching anything more complicated than a remote control'. At last count I have broken nine of vacuum cleaners. I blame the enormous amount of dust and dirt four children and a dog accumulate. The poor vacuums just couldn’t cope. The husband thinks that I am killing them.
He had bought an industrial stand-up cleaner from a well-known DIY store not three months ago. It was a superb piece of machinery with so many pipes, buttons, settings and fittings it would have put a Nasa Space Shuttle to shame. In fact the only thing it didn’t do was space missions – at least I don’t think it did, I really must read the instruction booklet again.
So at the weekend I did the usual sweep of the house with the vacuum, dragging it around the rooms and bumping it up the stairs, shoving it under chairs, stretching the lead to breaking point to fit around corners. And then I heard the familiar bang and saw the standard puff of smoke rising from the thing.
I informed the husband that another vacuum had bitten the proverbial dust and blamed the sheer volume of work it, and therefore I, had to do for the malfunction.
There was much shaking of heads, much tutting and loud and theatrical exhalations from the husband as he tried to fix the thing. Then there was a knock at the door. It was an electricity man informing us that due to a persistent fault somewhere in the vicinity the electric supply would have to be switched off for a few hours in our street. I could tell by the husband’s face he wanted to confess to the electric man that it was probably my serial murdering of vacuum cleaners that was causing said persistent problems, but he bit his lip.
So at 2.30pm the X-box fell silent, the Internet could not longer be accessed, the TV was blank. We sat there in silence for a time, my family and I, staring at the blank TV screen, unsure of what exactly to do in this rarest of rare situations.
Our family, having been stripped of the things which crave our attention day in day out, were forced to talk to one another.
So we talked, and we laughed and we took bits off the condemned vacuum cleaner and made things from them. I made a space-age hat with a hose pipe and a curtain cleaner attachment; the husband made a very impressive rocket propelled grenade launcher from the main body of the machine; my boys made science-fiction-style guns with poles and filters.
And I remembered why all the people in that room were my most favourite people on this earth.
Thank you NIE.

Calm house of chaos 2012

There’s a book somewhere in my house containing instructions on how to stay calm. It contains nice quotes and ways to instil harmony to your home and life.
One quote stands out for me. It’s that one’s personal space is a reflection of one’s mind. It should be orderly, beautiful, and presentable. If I could find that book amongst the mess in my home I could dazzle you with inspiration.
I thought about this ‘tidy house, tidy mind’ ethos when I surveyed my living room last night at 9.30pm, just after by children retired for the evening. Readers, I would have taken a picture of the scene if I thought your delicate eyes could handle the terror. My offspring had left what looked like the horrific aftermath of a fabric and spaghetti-based tornado.
Bits of debris, in the shape of hooded tops and t-shirts were strewn all over the floor. The Christmas tree had been bombarded with worn socks and there was a selection of underwear hanging from frames and ornaments on the fireplace.
The baby’s highchair had a two-meter zone of discarded spaghetti bolognaise around it and two of my lovely sofa throws lay on the rug disguising a milk/cereal puddle. The floor was a minefield of plastic toys and guns that kill not with bullets but by causing you to slip and fracture your skull on tiled floors.
And for comedy effect there was a pair of boy’s trousers dangling from the light fitting.
Every evening when my offspring go to bed I have a ritual.
1. I stand at the door of my living room and I survey the damage. I sigh dramatically. On alternate days I place my hand on my head in a theatrical fashion.
2. I ask the husband what could have possibly happened to create such an awful mess. He shrugs his shoulders and extends bottom lip, flops on sofa and takes ownership of the remote.
3. I begin a clean up operation, which lasts 20 minutes (approx), stand back and admire my work. I sigh contentedly.
4. I walk to the kitchen and repeat instructions from number 1.
I do the same ritual three or four times a day.
I spend far too many hours cleaning and tidying my house and it never seems to make any sort of impact.
I’m not a total clean freak but when I tidy one room another messes itself in my absence. My children are incapable of moving anything from A to B without spilling some manner of liquid or substance all over the floor – the aftermath of fashioning a bowl of cereal requires industrial cleaning.
I now work from home all day. I’ve started a 24/7 news website for Derry www.newswireni.com, if you’re interested. That means I work for up to 16 hours a day. In between working I clean and answer the many whims of my many children. There seems to be very little time for trivialities such as sleeping or eating. In reality it’s not the mess that is driving me crazy, it’s the constant cleaning.
I visited a woman’s house recently I didn’t know very well. She has five boys. As we went into her living room I saw the familiar writing on the wall, smudges on the window, TV bolted to the unit for safety, door handles broken, light switches coloured in with multi-coloured markers. I wanted to hug her, tell her I was a fellow mother of unruly, although quite impressively artistic, children. Over the sound of her youngest son clanging the remote control on a heater I wanted to swap stories of children breaking windows with projected shoes or plugging sinks and turning on the tap to see what happened. But she seemed oblivious to the noise, content in the chaos. I wanted to know her secret but I couldn’t hear her over the sound of one of her sons roaring into the karaoke microphone he had received as a gift from Santa.
I left that house vowing to be more like her in 2012 – content, accepting of the mess my children create, calm in the chaos.

Hey Branson! Watch your back!

The husband and I need fret not a minute longer about our non-existent pensions. For our middle child is going to be the next Richard Branson and we shall enter our twilight years rich beyond our wildest dreams.
My boy and his friend have set up their own business, selling miscellaneous items of various worth (2p all the way up to 10p, with some luxury items up to £1) to friends and neighbours.
They have set up a stall of sorts on the pathway at the front of our house. It’s a very quiet cul-de-sac so there’s not a lot of footfall. But they are thinking big and if they are to be millionaires they have to start somewhere.
They stock a wide range of items – when I drove past today I was offered a half chewed pencil void of a lead for 10p. I passed on that but was interested in a black DVD player remote control that looked awfully like the one we own, it even had the same black electrical tape that our one has sported since Finn broke it in half trying to hammer imaginary nails into a wall.
I bought said item for the extortionate price of 40p.
Caolan has so far pedalled the entire contents of his own pencil case and a good portion of his brother’s.
He sells works of original art, mainly pencil sketches of stick men with guns and colourfully attired zombies, at discount prices.
Entire unopened packets of biscuits have been going missing. When questioned, the child told me he is selling them to his friends at 5p a pop at his stall. Taking into account his costs, labour, rent and rates, he is still making a profit of 75p per packet. Which in my eyes is a business victory.
I got an inkling he had a business mind when I took him shopping. I had picked up 20p change from the car instead of a £1 coin I needed for the trolley. When we walked all the way to the shop I discovered my mistake. The boy announced that he had £1 in his pocket and that I could have it only if at the end of the shopping expedition he could have the £1 and the 20p by means of accumulated interest.
There are no flies on him.
I remember having my own business at his age. Myself and my friend from across the street fancied ourselves as miniature florists. There was a lady in our street who had a gigantic overgrown bush at the front of her house, which would burst into bloom for two weeks of the year with magnificent magenta flowers. My friend and I would wait until the flowers were almost ready to fall off, pick a few, mix them with some greenery and sell them to our neighbours for a staggering 20p a bunch.
We actually met the lady who owned the bush on our travels. She asked us where we got the lovely flowers. We lied, told her we gathered them from another location, and to our shame she bought her own flowers off us. We only charged her half price at 10p. We did have morals.
I remember the sheer joy we felt counting our profits. £1.30. We thought we were millionaires. We bought so many sweets in the shop we need an actual plastic bag to put them in. We ate them all and my friend was sick on her living room rug, which is always a sure sign of a good time.
So I’ll let my boy keep his stall, and I’ll encourage his mini-entrepreneurial spirit. For it is he who will be paying for myself and the husband's terribly posh and expensive old folks home further down the line.

The Nursery Blues

Got an awfully bad case of the Mummy guilts last week.
My youngest son, who has been attending nursery school since September, had a day off because he was sick. I wrapped the boy up in a cosy blanket, fed him warm toast and worked from my laptop within ear’s reach of his pitiful pleas for more tea. We lazed around the sofa watching Thomas the Tank Engine, reading books and generally, bar the temperature and the occasional violent regurgitation of foodstuffs into plastic receptacles, had a lovely day.
When I brought him into nursery on Wednesday he cried, begged me to take him home. He said, in front of his teacher, that he didn’t like school, he didn’t like his friends or the toys and that the nursery staff always burnt the toast they give them at break time (which I later found out to be a blatant lie).
My heart broke for the little guy – you and I know that lightly browned toast is a basic human right in most civilised countries – and for a brief moment I did consider taking him home.
The teacher told me that taking him home would be the worst thing I could do. She said that the child would still be sitting on that sofa, watching Thomas the Tank Engine and hollering for more toast when he was 22 years old if I didn’t make a stand now. So I kissed my boy, told him I would be back soon and I walked away, the sound of him screaming ‘Mommy’ ringing in my ears.
You’d think by this stage I’d be well versed in leaving crying children behind in nursery schools. You’d think that by now I’d know that five minutes after I left he would have been distracted by some shiny fire engine and would have forgotten all about me.
But no, the Mummy guilts hit bad. I sat in the car outside. I got out of the car and went to walk back in to get him. I got back into the car. I took out my phone and dialled the number of the nursery to ask if he was OK. Then I hung up before they answered, they would think I was a neurotic Mum.
There are big windows along the front of the nursery. So I formulated a plan whereas I could catch a glimpse of my boy and go home happy, safe in the knowledge that he wasn’t screaming the house down with the most severe case of detachment anxiety those nursery workers had ever encountered.
So I inched my way along the school wall like a spy and peeked around the corner to see if I could see my son. And there he was near the window, playing happily with his friend, not a tear in sight. In fact that boy was laughing like he hadn’t a care in the world.
I drank in the scene for a minute. Him forcing a toy horse into the driving seat of a miniature Ferrari, his friend stealing the car and knocking over the horse. And then he looked up, saw me and although the windows were sealed and soundproofed I could fathom, judging by colour of his face, that the sheer volume of the screaming emanating from the depths of that child’s lungs was exceptional, even to the ears of childcare professionals who had years of experience in their field.
Before I ran away I saw that the boy beside him was screaming, the girl to the left of them was crying, the boy at a nearby table began to cry. I can only imagine that the simple matter of me spying on my boy to see if he was crying after me set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to half that nursery wailing at their teachers well into the afternoon.
Sorry…

Why, why, why, why, why, why, why?

I can handle the terrible twos, the tantrums, the screaming for sweets and stuff in supermarkets, the relentless cheek, the constant messiness and noise that being a parent brings. But carrying one particular parental cross really frays my nerves. The ‘Why?’ phase.
They’ve all gone through it. But a bit like childbirth you forget about the pain once it’s all over.
We are wading through the ‘Why?’ phase at the moment with our youngest son. Up until around two weeks ago he was satisfied with the standard ‘because I said so!’ response to the various instructions that I handed out.
But then he woke up one morning and, like those annoying application forms which demand 300 word answers to questions that really only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, he needed substantially more information.
“Stop drawing on the wall,” I would say.
“Why?” he would reply.
“Because I said so,” I’d say back.
“Why?” he would inquire.
“Because your father spend his entire weekend painting that wall and when he sees the artwork you have just fashioned on it he most certainly will not have a big smiley face like the one you just drew.”
“Why?” he would say.
“Because he’s a man, because he takes his DIY very seriously. Because he’s had to paint the exact wall 15 times since July.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because the people who invented washable paint obviously didn’t test it in a house with such a hardcore graffiti artist such as yourself Finn.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know, maybe they were experiencing budget cuts. Perhaps they tested the durability in a house full of little girls. Or maybe they haven’t discovered that markers bought from pound shops are practically invincible when it comes to cleaning.”
“Why?” he asked.
It would be worth it if they were actually learning things from all those bogus questions, but that's not really what's happening at this stage. I doubt he’s even absorbing the highly detailed and researched answers I’m giving him. It’s exhausting.
“Don’t eat those dog biscuits, Finn,” I say.
“Why?” he asks, crunching and chewing.
“Because they are for dogs.” I say, fishing them out of his mouth.
“Why?” he cries, distraught that I am denying him their chalky taste.
“Scientists in a big laboratory develop these food stuffs especially for canines. Enriched with vitamins and minerals, which promote a shiny coat and healthy teeth. They do nothing whatsoever for humans. Plus they taste like cardboard.”
“Why?”
“Because they are for dogs and dogs can’t write letters of complaint to major canine food manufacturers about lack of taste and flavour.”
“Why?”
“Because dogs can’t hold pens properly!”
“Why?”
“Argghhhh!!!!”
Yes, this can be quite annoying. But when I get frustrated I look into my baby boy’s blue eyes and I ask myself, how is this child going to know if pot pourri tastes nice, if dogs can type and pound shop pens are indestructible unless he asks me? If he didn’t ask why 125 times per day on subjects as varied as petrol and the moon, how will he learn useless facts about life?
It’s my job to teach him. And teach him well I will.
“Why?”…..