Bad Santa

I’ll probably go to Hell for this but I have to come clean and admit my very real dislike of shopping mall Santas. They have no air of mystery, no magic – they just take parent’s money, give the kid’s a cheap present and spit them out onto the street again.
I was thinking along these lines as I waited for the husband beside Santa’s grotto in a shopping centre last week. The queue, some 40-people deep, was made up mostly of stressed, grumpy parents who couldn’t believe the price of a visit and kids who didn’t really believe the dude was the real Santa.
“Is Santa from Creggan mammy? I thought he was from the North Pole. Do they speak in Derry accents over about the North Pole?”
As I stood there I got all cynical thinking this Christmas lark can get a bit fake if you let it. From the rubbish shopping mall Santas to the notion that one must spend a fortune to have the truly picture perfect festive season – all woolly jumpers, warm fires and smiley faces.
Perhaps it’s because I’m older and jaded by the ever-lengthening holiday season, the Christmas music beginning on Halloween, the in-store decorations getting dusty even before November’s out, all presided over by the retail juggernaut. Is it wrong to want the real magic of Christmas, the one that doesn’t cost anything?
And I wondered if the real Santa, as in the real one who doesn’t charge you £12.50 for a three second conversation, ever gets a bit cheesed off with the whole shenanigans. I wondered if he has ever been tempted to fire off a few cheeky replies to those millions of Santa letters he gets.

Dear Santa,
I left milk and cookies for you under the tree, and I left carrots for your reindeer outside the backdoor.
Love, Aoife

Dear Aoife,
I am severely lactose intolerant. Milk gives me debilitating cramps and the reindeers really hate carrots, as in like totally HATE them. Whoever started this milk, cookie and carrot rumour needs a good slap. You wanna make me happy? Forget the milk; leave me a tall glass of red wine, one of Dad’s big cigars and some Toblerone for the reindeers.
Thanks!
Santa

Dear Santa,
Do you see us when we're sleeping, do you really know when we're awake, like in the song?
Love, Jessica

Dear Jessica,
You are really that gullible, kid? Good luck in whatever you do in life, I'm skipping your house.
Best
Santa

Dear Santa,
I really, really want a puppy this year. Please, please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE, could I have one?
Danny

Hey Danny,
That whiny begging stuff may work OK with your folks, but it doesn't fly up here, right? You're getting a stupid Christmas tree jumper and Simpson’s socks...again.
Santa

I think I need a large dose of Christmas spirit or indeed a miracle. Perhaps if Santa left me a new Apple MacBook Pro (with all the apps, in silver please) I might be slightly less cynical next year….

Santaphobic no more....

There hasn’t really been much chat about Santa in our house over the last few weeks until the weekend. Then bam! – out come the catalogues. Bam! – foot long lists. Bam! – Santa may put his head between his legs and kiss his ass goodbye because he is either going bankrupt or he’s going to have to organise a huge overdraft facility with the nice people at the bank (Hi there Brid!).
We had PSPs, Ninetento DS’, Lightning McQueen DVD and TV sets, expresso machines, ice-cream makers, wide-screen TVs, vacuum cleaners with personalities and stupid names like Henrietta. I was half way down the list before I realised the kids had been consulting the Curry’s catalogue instead of the usual Argos one. If I hadn’t have rectified the situation Santa’s sleigh would have groaning under the weight of several tons of electrical equipment with smiley faces and a ridiculous amount of pointless white kitchen goods.
I remember the days when our two boys were severely Santaphobic. Every year my comedy shopping mall Santa photographs take pride of place on the mantelpiece alongside the nativity scene. I have several good shots of Daniel’s tonsils, one of Santa trying to flee from a raging Caolan, two or three of the husband and I sitting alongside Santa, smiling pathetically whilst trying to restrain a child and one of Santa holding his face after Caolan clawed his skin while trying to make good an escape over his shoulder and out the window.
The past few years have been a little better. The photos a tad more civilised – no assaults, no screaming, no drama.
They now know that the big man in the red suit really is a good guy. Yes he’s a strange and mysterious bearded man who breaks into our house in the middle of the night. Yes he sneaks around and eats our food but hey, he also leaves some really good stuff.
And this year Caolan, our middle son – the one who loved to run into walls with the wash basket on his head and breaks everything he touches – will actually star as Santa in the school play. This is a big thing for us. Since the child has only been in the school for four months I’m not sure they actually know what they’ve gotten themselves into. I suggest that the front row wear crash helmets and St John’s ambulance are on standby. Also I shall request a few extra fire extinguishers be available, or maybe I might call ahead to the fire station and tell them that the school will probably be on fire at around 10.15am next Wednesday.
After what was probably the worst year in living Breslin family history this Christmas will be a strange one but we’ll make the very best of it for our kids.
All the family will be here. My husband and I will fall out over who makes the best stuffing, my sister and brothers will drink too much home-made mulled wine and have to retire conveniently early before the dishes are done. We’ll all wear stupid party hats and fight over the remote control. The kids will scream, we will shout, but we shall be thankful for our blessings – for our beautiful and wonderful family, the great times we shared with our Dad over the years, and the good times that are still to come for us, for our health and the love we all have for each other.

The week that was...

I’ve just finished what was probably the most difficult and surreal week of my life.
My father was laid to rest after three days which passed in a blur of tea, sandwiches and sympathy. Hundreds of people came to our house, hundreds more called and emailed. It was wonderful to see how much a positive impact my Dad made on so many people’s lives.
It was a week which saw my children introduced to death for the first time. It wasn’t something I had intended to do, but we tried to make the whole process as natural and as normal as possible.
And the kids – mine, my brothers and sister’s kids – were like little rays of sunshine in what were some really dark days.
As we walked towards my parent’s house on the morning of the funeral my boys pointed out a rainbow which seemed to arch perfectly over their home – starting in the front garden and ending in the back. Granda made that, they said.
When I showed them Granda laid out in the wake house I heard Daniel tell his younger brother that the coffin would bring him to heaven. Caolan asked his older, wiser sibling about the logistics and practicalities of how exactly the coffin would fly to heaven his brother informed him that it had been fitted with special rockets.
The night after my father’s funeral the lights in the entire city went out for three hours. As we sat around in my mother’s kitchen talking by candlelight my boys told us the blackout was caused by Granda who may have fused the electrics while he was fixing the central heating in heaven, much like he often did at home.
And my brother’s beautiful newborn son made a guest appearance at the funeral. It was quite moving to see a child starting off on life’s path being part of the final journey of his grandfather. It was quite overwhelming, yet still beautiful, to be a first-hand witness to the juxtaposition of life and death.
And despite the sombre proceedings there were a few lighter moments too. I discovered that Bishop Edward Daly is a huge fan of this very column (I swear I shall never again take the Lord’s name in vain) as is President Mary McAleese, who wrote a beautiful personal letter to my Mum a few days after the funeral after she read about my Dad in this very paper.
While standing outside our house I saw my uncle, who had just returned from Las Vegas, lighting people’s cigarettes with a lighter shaped like a naked lady who shot a double flame from – lets just say incase the Bish is reading this – the area around her cleavage.
All in all it was the week from hell. My family have been living under a dark cloud for the past few months with my Dad’s illness. Some day soon the sun will shine through.

Me and my Da

My Dad died this week after a long and courageous battle against cancer.
Although we were expecting his journey to end soon I still feel lost. My Dad was such an anchor in my life that I feel totally set adrift in the wake of his passing.
He and I were very much alike, from the same soul. I inherited my fighting spirit from him, that and the deranged notion that I’m constantly and consistently right.
Of course I learnt a lot about parenting from my Dad. He instilled a strong sense of self-belief in us from a very young age, something I try and do for my own children. He told us that we were capable of doing anything we put our mind to. I have the feeling that had I told him many years ago I had aspirations to be an astronaut he would have sought out courses, took me to the NASA open day and bought me the fancy space suit. Had I mentioned I fancied a career as a fisherman, he would have got me a second-hand boat, painted it up all nice and waved me off with a smile from the pier.
He was the head of our house and was the person my brothers, sister and I went to when times got tough. He always made it better – when I was five years old and fell off my bike to when I was 25 years old and having some serious journalistic-related troubles – our house was always a beacon in the dark, he was a guiding light bringing us home.
My dad was a great man. A man who championed equal rights as a young man – he was a leading light in the Civil Rights movement. He was a great teacher who left a lifelong imprint on the lives of thousands of pupils. He taught us, his children, great values – values I have passed onto my own children and I hope they will pass on to their own.
He was a man who firmly believed in doing stuff himself – some people call it multi-tasking, others control freakery – a trait I have also inherited. Although he was a teacher for 33 years, our next door neighbour thought he was a motor mechanic, as he was constantly fixing our beat out 1976 Nissan. After school he installed central heating systems, built conservatories, renovated houses. He was man who very much grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and shook every fibre out of it.
To us he’s not really gone, he’ll live on in all of us. We’ll continue on our path in life with him walking beside us, in spirit now, rather than in person. He’ll still provide the words of wisdom, only now he’ll whisper them in our ear. He’ll still be the strong suit of armour when we face our greatest fears.
Although I am heartbroken I’m so grateful, blessed and proud that he was my dad, I was his daughter.

Terminator Baby

The KGB loved it, the Japanese favoured it in the PoW camps of World War Two and here, in a quiet corner of Derry, my one year old is using the age old sleep deprivation technique to torture us. We call it 'Torture by Baby'.
The child, that's him pictured above, is not unlike the Terminator. He hasn’t slept a full night for over two months, and still he keeps on trucking, relentless, leaving us to steer this beat out, sleep deprived juggernaut along the road of parenthood bleary eyed and disorientated.
The child wakes us at 1am every night and no amount of work or cajoling will get him back to sleep before 4.30am. We have tried, quite literally, everything – tough love, controlled crying, begging, praying, offering money – nothing works. He wakes the entire house religiously every night.
Getting through a day while only having clocked up three hours shut eye is no joke. And as this form of torture leaves no physical marks on people, the perpetrator, I mean child, comes away looking cute while we carry around bags the size of bin liners under our eyes.
We weren’t all that with it before, but lack of sleep has left us totally unable to act and think coherently. Take for example last night – a night when the madness that blights the O’Neill household was on full and proud display.
At midnight the dog barked maniacally in the kitchen. The husband woke up (for this was during one of the short 30 minute bursts of actually sleep we did get to relish) and shouted at the top of his voice to no one in particular: “Who’s that barking?”
To which I, quite sensibly, replied, “It’s the dog.” At which point he came back with a “are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure. Unless our older children have been driven so mad with sleep deprivation they have taken to impersonating household pets to express their displeasure at the situation, I’d say that was definitely the dog.
Thirty minutes later the oldest child woke up shouting for me in his usual alarmist manner. I stumbled across the toy strewn obstacle course that is our landing and made inquiries as to what the matter was and told him that unless he was informing me an axe-wielding lunatic was in the house I would rather prefer if the matter could possibly wait till a more reasonable hour.
“You know that blind man who we talked to at Sainsbury’s today?” he asked.
“Yip,” said I.
“His dog, the guide dog. He brings the blind man home, takes him across the road, sees for him?
“Yip,” said I.
“What if the dog goes blind too?” he asked.
“Well Dan, that would indeed be an unfortunate turn of events,” said I. “I suppose the guide dog would have to get a guide dog himself. Good night.”
And off to bed I went for a grand total of 45 minutes until the alarm went off.
We will not be broken by these methods of torture, we will not give in. We may be half the people we were when we first started off on this road to parenthood, our children may have rendered us half-wits but we will survive. We will overcome.

I suppose I could describe Halloween in the O’Neill house as a mixed bag of lethal sugar rush inducing pound shop sweets and those dark chocolates which taste nice but bring on a migraine later.
We spent so long perfecting our costumes that we forgot to buy trick or treat sweets for the kids in the street. We spent an hour hiding behind the sofa when the doorbell went while the husband was despatched on a sweet mercy mission.
We spent the rest of the evening apologising to little kids while handing out cheap, nasty pound shop confectionary that they’d probably be regurgitating on their living room floors later on.
Because we have a dog, opening the front door in our house has to be a carefully synchronised affair. There’s no careless throwing open of the front door and greeting the morning with open arms and a song in our house. You want to open the door, you got to make sure someone’s guarding the kitchen door because there’s a large slobbering beast just waiting to pounce, flatten and gallop without grace off into the horizon. But enough about the husband, I worry the dog could escape too.
So on Halloween night there was a family at the door, two pirate parents and three kids dressed as confused fairies – one was a zombie fairy, one was a pirate fairy and the other was a standard issue run-of-the-mill typical everyday fairy.
So I opened the door and made a fuss over their costumes, and while they were pretending to be impressed by my cheap sweets I heard the familiar sound of claws slipping on the wooden floor, trying to gain momentum. Then there was much screaming and much running as the dog took me off my feet and galloped out into the night after the pirate fairy family.
He’s a big friendly Labrador, he wouldn’t hurt a fly – but he has a beard phobia and chased down said pirates to voice his objection to their fake facial hair. Then his attentions were drawn to three Santas heading off to a house party. When the husband – dressed as a zombie Rastafarian – caught up with him in the car he had Jesus pinned to a wall at the bottom of our street.
As we headed off to see the fireworks Caolan, dressed as a really scary vampire, had consumed a few too many of the lethal pound shop sweets and had a mini-meltdown. As he stood howling in the street, the husband and I found the sight of him screaming open mouthed, vampire teeth in place, full make up and costume quite hilarious. Us laughing made him worse, which made us worse. We missed the first half of the fireworks and the child’s makeup was ruined. Disaster.
We dressed the baby up as a demon. He had his face painted red along with his hair. The face paint said it was safe for young kids, non-toxic and will wash off easily with soapy water. Yeah maybe water with paint stripper mixed in it, applied by a sand blaster. Baby bath is no match for this stuff. A week later the child is still raspberry coloured.

Blasted tooth fairy

I’m in the process of drafting an angry letter in regards the tooth fairy’s failure to show on Halloween night to pick up items owed to her, the cow.
Dan lost one of his front teeth during the Halloween festivities and stuck it under his pillow for retrieval by said fairy. Next morning, to his horror, the tooth was still there, there was no coinage to speak of. The fairy had forgotten him.
We couldn’t imagine what had happened. Had the tooth fairy perhaps had one glass of wine too many and forgotten about us?
The next night the tooth vanished and three quid was left in it’s place along with a note that read:

“Hey Daniel!
This is the tooth fairy, what’s the craix?
Sorry about last night, was shot down by a stray firework over Creggan and spent the night in casualty getting my singed wing fixed up. Nice tooth specimen, by the way.
Thanks!
TF
X

Mummy Fight Clubs

Hands up, I admit it, I couldn’t go the distance, couldn’t hack the pace, I just wasn’t strong enough. I am a mother-and-toddler group drop out, so sue me – actually scrap that last bit, the ATM machine laughs maniacally when I venture within 20ft of it.
I went to two different mother-and-toddler groups when my eldest child was younger and thought I had been magically transported through time to the playground of my primary school circa 1980. There was cat fighting, dirty looks, back stabbing and much judging of parental techniques and physical appearances.
My first experience was none too great. I may as well have stood up and admitted I was a card-carrying member of a Satanic cult when I mentioned I was a working mother.
The second group I went to was a gathering of level seven yummy mummys. I could hardly breathe the air was so thick with Channel No5 and my retinas where frequently burned when the sun happened to hit overly large diamond rings or the go-faster stripes on their designer prams.
One of the mothers was a fully-fledged member of the breastfeeding mafia. When I informed her that I had bottlefed my oldest son, after having great trouble feeding him myself, I know she felt an urge to take me out to the hall and beat me around the head with her umbrella. Fair play to her she fought the violent urge but informed me gently that I had poisoned my child and that he would grow up to be tres stupid.
The idea that these mothers' groups are meant to be a place where sleep-deprived, vomit-smeared mums can swap advice on how to get your baby to sleep is, in my opinion, laughable.
If you're worried that your daughter is 14 months old and still crawling instead of walking? A better mother than you will boost your anxiety by bragging that her son was walking at eight months.
Your son's vocabulary is a bit limited and you think he might have a hearing problem? The best mum in the world will tell you her 11-month-old uttered his first full sentence yesterday.
And now, my theory has become proper fact. An Australian study has found mother-and-toddler groups can make mothers feel even more guilty than usual by allowing mothers to compare themselves, and their children, to others and find faults.
The study, a proper one by a fancy psychologist, showed that playgroups reinforced the ‘good mother syndrome’, which is how society expects an ideal mother to be.
From my own personal experience I’ve always thought that mother-and-toddlers groups should be renamed fight clubs and are places where women can go to beat each other up over parenting techniques, make each other feel guilty, judge one another on appearances, laugh at other mums who can’t shift the baby weight, backstab, bitch and ridicule. That and let their kids play together.

Careers advice for vampires...

My two sons have decided on vampirism as a career path.
Up until last week my oldest was keen on becoming a rock star. My middle lad had his eye on a job within the ranks of Translink as a part time train driver with a spot of superhero work at the weekends. I had hoped they’d become an accountant and a bank manager, but what can you do?
This week, after getting all dolled up as the undead for a school Halloween party the pair have had their heads turned by the thought of a career within the blood sucking community.
I suppose it was the whole immortality, being a creature of the night, morphing into a bat, looking fierce while wearing a fancy black cape that attracted them to the particular profession. If I’m honest I’d say being an accountant would be boring in comparison.
I, of course, will support them in any way I can. I even went online to inquire as to how one actually becomes a vampire. Oddly I couldn’t find any courses available at our local tech. The only thing similar was a 10-week online course entitled ‘Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts and Witches Legend and Reality’ available on the government’s careers advice website.
Now I don’t think the course has any practical elements. It probably involves a lot of chatting about vampires instead of actually tutoring people on how to properly and professional extract blood for consumption. My boys would really need to know the ins and outs of steering clear of wooden stakes, avoiding garlic cloves, holy water and sunlight and also how to see adequately in the dark.
I’d say they’re on the right road with regards primary training at the moment – frequently moping around during the day looking miserable, wanting to stay up all night and randomly hissing at people. And they have been honing their scare tactics by jumping out of cupboards roaring “ARGGHHHH!!!” at Granny.
I haven’t told them that one of the main elements on the vampire job description form is that they have to drink actual blood – no more lasagne, chips or pizza for them. It’ll save me a fortune in grocery bills.
However, if they do decide to give up on the vampire career they could always use their training elsewhere.
They might think of following another career which requires a stony cold heart and blood sucking abilities and become traffic wardens. (I kid, some of my best friends are traffic wardens)

The budster

So I am severely allergic to our dog. That's him there looking like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
I honestly thought that the wheezing, itching and sneezing was a natural reaction when faced with an animal who chews up your soft furnishings and clothes. I asked the doctor if contempt can manifest itself into an allergic reaction for I’ve been feeling kind of funny since the dog dragged my beautiful, brand new winter boots into the garden and chewed off their gloriously high heels.
I’m allergic to a lot of things it turns out – pollen, dust, getting out of bed, annoyingly cheery people. Ironically I think I’m allergic to Periton, the allergy cure. I usually take the tablets but one morning last week I couldn’t find them so I took a few big gulps from the bottle of the kid’s version that’s been in our bathroom cabinet since 2005. Then I drove to a meeting. A proper grown up meeting that required all present be reasonably alert, of rational mind and at the very least awake. I fell down on the last two categories, and almost fell down in reality.
I may have overdosed, it may well have been past if use by date but I think the last time I felt that jolly, that nicely drunk, was when an old friend of mine made poteen in his father’s shed in Carnhill, circa 1994. There was a bit of double vision, a bit of gentle swaying when standing upright, there were a few jibberish rantings, a bit of dramatic wincing when going outdoors and a lot of hiding behind sunglasses muttering stuff about going home to sleep this off.
Thank God the people I met where long-time clients of they may well have thought I was off my head.
I’ve told the husband that it’s either me or the dog, one of us has to be kept permanently outside. He says he’ll paint the kennel interior a nice lilac colour and stick up a few pictures to make it more homely for me….

AWOL Teddy

I’m reporting from CSI Foyle this week where I’ve had to file an APB for our beloved Teddy who has been mysteriously missing since Monday last.
I had thought about calling the police, after reading of an Australian girl who had a crack team of cops hunting for the teddy she lost at a railway station in Melbourne. But then I thought that me having to spend the night in Strand Road barracks on a charge of wasting police time might only serve to add to the obvious trauma my 4-year-old was already facing.
Teddy is a standard issue brown ted with one eye missing, floppy limbs and a scraggy disposition. He was last seen on the roof of our car outside granny’s house – the husband thinks he put him there while he belted the boys in. When the car arrived at our house, rather surprisingly, Teddy had apparently not survived the journey and disappeared.
This left us with a distance of around four miles to cover in our bear hunt – not the easiest of tasks to complete at bedtime with a car full of inconsolable children on a cold, dark, rainy night.
After a restless night where Caolan woke every 15 minutes shouting ‘TEDDY!!!’ in what I felt was an overly dramatic fashion we checked all the usual places Teddy has been found previously – next door neighbour’s trees, the roof of the house, the bin, under the muck heap in the garden, the fridge, the dog’s kennel, under the wheels of the car – but he was nowhere to be seen. We even checked the dog’s teeth for telltale bits of fluff and chewed fur.
Granny put the neighbours on level seven alert, describing teddy to one as, and I quote, “this old moth-eating looking thing with only one eye,” as Caolan sobbed beside her reeling in shock at her blatant disrespect.
As we contemplated fashioning some missing posters I recalled a story I read a few years back about a young couple, their little boy and a teddy who was thrown over the side of a safety rail on a steep embankment during a tantrum.
The mum climbed over the safety rail to rescue said Ted and tumbled down a steep 300ft hillside. The da, seeing the missus unconscious at the bottom of the decline, also climbed over the rail, slid down in the same fashion and knocked himself out. A passer-by had to call the emergency services who airlifted the crazy injured parents to hospital, saved the teddy bear and took the little boy to safety.
It’s amazing the lengths parents will go to to save their kid’s furry friends.
If anyone has seen teddy let me know.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time in a state of bewilderment at why boys do what they do.
Being a girl and all I can’t for the life of me see the big attraction in digging holes, smashing stuff, karate kicks, jumping off things or hitting stuff with sticks. For me hanging upside down from trees or throwing stones does not a good time make. Maybe I have just forgotten what it’s like to be a kid.
Mum and I were clearing a wardrobe in my younger brother’s room last week when we found a photo album. The album was full of the usual cutesy photos of my kid brother in which there was a bit of a recurring theme. As a boy he seemed to always accessorise his outfits with some sort of plaster cast or bandages. Broken legs, broken arms, staved fingers, concussions, bruised heads, broken noses. My poor mother spent so much time in the casualty department that they were actually going to start charging her rent.
I’m not saying it was all of his own doing. There was one incident when I thought it would be a great idea to create our own indoor adventure centre using a baby bath, a belt and a set of stairs. I felt he would be better suited for the dummy run so I strapped him in and sent him hurtling down the stairs at high speed. A concussion followed. Surprisingly my mother was not even remotely impressed at my innovative play ideas or my creative construction of the bath/slide and more concerned that my brother was still breathing.
Had she stopped screaming for just one minute, looked at the bigger picture and maybe tried a little praise I may well have be the chief engineer at Disneyland today. It’s their loss.
And the injured party was fine. He has gone on to become a famous concert pianist. In fact I could probably take the credit for knocking some sense into him. Before the bath incident the boy had strong aspirations of becoming a snooker player.
My own middle child has obviously inherited the clumsy genes from his uncle.
The child is incapable of finishing a week at school without some sort of physical injury. Last week he jumped off a wall and when I arrived to pick him up a scene reminiscent of Rambo greeted me. The boy was up on the counter trying to be brave while a teacher dabbed his busted knee. There were bloody paper towels strewn everywhere. This week the boy fell flat on his face in the playground and has a purple bump the size of an egg on his forehead. He spent his lunch hour with a family-size bag of frozen Rancho-style chips attached to the injury.
I fear the school might have to draft in a crack team of security personnel to protect the boy from himself.
Unlike his uncle he’s not quite a level seven injury magnet yet, Cathal’s calamity crown is safe – in the past few years he has slept through the Madrid bomb when it smashed all the windows at the front of his house, wrote off his SUV in a snowstorm the US and managed to escape injury when the steering wheel of his car actually came off in his hands while driving to Donegal. Those are some big shoes to fill.

Paper plate mate

Caolan has a new friend called‘Joe’. Caolan is a human child. Joe is a paper plate.
How the two became such firm acquaintances I do not know. The kids made them in nursery, stuck fluff on for hair, plastic eyes and smiley mouth. Now Joe is one of the most important people in Caolan’s life.
They have very little in common. Caolan lives, breathes, has a wonderful character and a sparking personality, Joe is a paper plate. He’s not even one of those fancy paper plates with the grooves around the edges, he’s just plain.
They don’t converse. Caolan talks to Joe about his day, his toys and asks his opinion on things. Joe just sits there being a paper plate, he never answers back.
We are now taken to task by Caolan about Joe’s human or perhaps paper plate rights. “His NAME is JOE!” he shouts when we disrespect him by referring to him as a paper plate man, or ‘that plate’
Caolan is now so attached he can’t go anywhere without Joe. We have to take it into town, to people’s houses, on car rides. Yesterday Granny mistook Joe for a regular paper plate and threw him in the bin. Caolan almost went crazy and fished poor Joe from the murky depths of the bin. He now has an air of eggs, teabags and bananas about him.
I fear Caolan and Joe’s relationship might not last the distance. Paper plates have a limited life expectancy and it’s only a matter of time before the dog eats it, especially now since Joe smells of rotting food.
Our boy may have to learn some tough life lessons – humans make better mates than paper plates…

Random Dan

Our neighbour met my two sons at our front gate recently. Daniel called out to enquire if she had asthma. When she denied this he told her and I quote.. “I don’t have asthma but I always have bad dreams about polar bears”. These are the kind of things my children frequently say to other humans – random and at times quite funny.
So for a kind of social experiment I thought I’d jot down some of the more profound and philosophical thinkings of our Dan over the course of one weekend. Here goes….

After I was 30 seconds late to pick him up at school…
“Where the hell where you? I was standing here for like a full minute. I had to carry my own bag, coat and everything. And as well those sandwiches you made were minging.”

“There was a bat flying around the outside of Granny’s house tonight. Caolan thinks his name is Batty, I said it isn’t, he’s called John.”

“You know zombies? You know how they’re all grumpy and angry? What if you baked them a cake or bought them a present, do you think they would still suck your blood?”

At 3.30am Saturday night
“Arrrgghhh!! My cupboard is trying to eat me!!”

“If a sheep saw a bold man doing something bad how could he tell the police?”

“I wish I was an octopus then if I had an itchy arm at the same time as I had an itchy leg I could scratch them both at the same time”

“What’s for dinner tonight? Chicken? Chicken? Why do you love chicken? I actually really hate chicken, it’s rubbish. We have chicken for dinner every single night and you give me chicken sandwiches for lunch. Well I think you are a really rubbish cooker.”

“How do vampires suck your blood? Do they have holes in their teeth with tubes in them?”

On passing a field in which a farmer is building a shed
“What’s that farmer doing? Is he building a toilet for his cows?

To a bank teller
“Give me £100 I want to buy a Wii. What? No I don’t have an account. What’s an account? I just want £100. That’s not the way it works? My mum comes here all the time and you give her money, give me £100.”

“I can’t sleep. I have a radio inside my head and I can’t switch it off. It’s playing Sharp Dressed Man over and over again really loud.”

“What do you call the street the doctors is on? Cabbage Street?”

Reciting his take on the Lord’s prayer which he says before meals at school
“Our Father, night and heaven, bless me for this chicken pie”

So there you have it, the ramblings of my six year old. I honestly don’t know where he gets it from….

Dickensian parenting

Charles Dickens was a weird sort of chap. According to his new biography he was quite unhappily married to Catherine, whom he blamed for burdening him with 10 children. He had OCD which lent itself well to some rather peculiar ideas on parenting. He would inspect his children’s bedrooms each morning and leave formal letters to show his dissatisfaction at the God awful mess.
Although we have a mere three children, they make the noise and the mess of triple that number. Since nothing else gets through to them, I thought I’d have the husband try a Dickensian approach with them – obviously without the outside toilet and bleak weather.
This letter was written by candlelight on parchment and left pinned to their door.

Sirs,
On inspection of your quarters I find a number of glaring irregularities, which I must insist you address forthwith. I implore you to take a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of yourself, your rooms, your home and your gardens as I, along with your long-suffering, even-tempered mother, am weary from talking to myself. My meaning is – maintain the following rules or your elderly, eccentric Aunt Jemima could be acquiring herself two new small but noisy tenants.

The expression, sirs, of your artistic abilities should be at all times confined to paper. Walls, doors, windows, faces and canines do not a fine canvas make. Desist with this behaviour immediately.

I shall continue to maintain that you gentlemen have an abundance of fine leisure equipment for which to pass the time. There is scant need to excavate the garden. I urge you both to steer carefully off this path of destruction. Poor Mrs Pickwick needed a large dose of Dr Foster’s sedating tonic after falling waist deep into a muddy hole while admiring the Rhododendrons. This behaviour will not serve.

There can be no good reason to place the bodies of recently deceased insects under the pillows or in the teacups of your kind and gentle mother. On more than one occasion your actions caused her to scream aloud, use unladylike language and exhibit many afflicting symptoms and expressions of terror and distress – most unattractive in a lady I find.

I find the volume of your collective voices most unnerving and much reminiscent of a ship’s fog warning horn. I must insist that you speak more gentlemanly whilst in company and desist from using language more fitting to a gutter-mouthed dockhand. I must also ask that you refrain from shouting the chorus of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ persistently and educate yourself on the remaining lyrics so as not to drive us to distraction.

I hope this correspondence finds you both in good health

Your Father

Wacko Jacko broke my windows

So the fascination with the recently deceased King of Pop continues.
Daniel watches too much Sky News. Apparently there is a ‘problem’ with Michael Jackson and where he is ‘going’. I assumed the dude was ‘going’ to the big disco in the sky. No, Daniel says, they haven’t decided where he is ‘going’ yet.
“Why doesn’t he come and live here with us?” he asks.
“Amm,” I say. Our house is manic enough what with the bloody dog, the mad Belfast man and the three small, noisy children. I really don’t have room for a deceased pop star and all of the associated issues.
“You don’t want him to live with us?” he asks.
“It’s not that…” I say, using the time to think of a careful and appropriate response that doesn’t involve the words rotting corpse, awfully questionable lifestyle or ‘hell no, there’s no freaky dead pop star living under my roof’.
“Is it because of the dancing?” he asks. “You’d be worried that he might break a window or something else. The way he does those high kicks. His shoe might come off and break one of your ornaments.”
“Yip,” I say. “That’s it. It’d be the high kicks and the flying shoes that would put me off.”

Happy birthday sunshine

Our baby Finn, that’s him there a few months ago, is one year old this week.
On Sunday we’ll celebrate the arrival of this sweet, gentle little soul and the fact that we’ve got this far without anyone’s mental or physical health being compromised.
One year ago this week we were adjusting to life as a family of five. Finn’s arrival was like an alien had beamed straight into our living. With two older kids we had just about gotten used to the eight hours of sleep, the reasonably civilised dinner times, the evenings of relative peace. When this little dude came along he brought with him his own specific schedule. Highlights of which involved sleeping in short, sharp bursts of 15 minutes and much washing of putrid clothing and any surrounding fabrics during his explosive nappy phases. I’m sure he’ll thank me for sharing his toilet habits with the general public when he’s reading this in 16 years time.
But in 16 years time, if he continues reading this, I want him to know that, despite the volume of dirty washing, he was a real light in all our lives.
We’ll always think of him as our credit crunch baby. Born into very uncertain financial times, the child never failed to make us laugh or smile. A true joy to watch over and a real source of amusement. We have spent hours laughing at this little guy crawling, getting stuck under chairs, sleeping with his backside in the air and shouting at the dog. We had forgotten how funny spaghetti covered faces were, how deliciously sweet freshly bathed babies are, or how lovely it is to be greeted in the morning by a big wide smile instead of a surly ’10 more minutes’.
We had forgotten how much baby paraphernalia came with the little tykes, and how even a trip into town could take hours of preparation. And how, despite all the preparation we’d still spend the entire time in a city centre café feeding the child or in a stuffy, stinky mother and baby room changing nappies.
Those torturous teething phases of sleepless nights and restless days had also been somehow put to the very back of our subconscious, filed in there alongside ‘weird stuff in ears or noses’ and ‘terrifying trips to the casualty department’.
If we had forgotten all that, our little Finn reminded us just how beautiful life can be. He reminded us of how there is no greater sound than a giggling baby, no better sight than a slumbering one.
Happy birthday sunshine.

It’s been a tough couple of months. There were many dark, dark days.
There were times we thought we wouldn’t make it through, times we teetered on the brink of insanity, times when we prayed the good Lord himself would come and end our unbearable suffering. But we’re feeling much better now the schools are back.
I’m not too old to remember the dread I felt as the end of summer loomed and we had to go back to school. It used to really annoy the younger me to see ‘back-to-school’ offers in shops in July, taunting students trying to enjoy their holidays.
This summer I frequently fell dramatically to my knees before those same signs in prayer to the patron saint of time and space continuum (Saint Bernard I think). I would loudly beseech him to find it in his heart to skip over a few days in August so that the calendar pinned on my kitchen wall would read August 1st, 2nd, 3rd and then skip to the 31st, which has “Kids back at School. Alleluia!!” written in big red letters all over it.
Call me a miserabilist but I would have gladly – if this was the level of sacrifice required by Catriona Ruane and our education department for such a mammoth ask – give my actual right arm to make the summer holidays shorter. Would it make a difference Catriona? Would the inclusion of, say, a kidney persuade you any? I’m thinking a long weekend in July or maybe just a week in August.
My sons, however, do not share my extreme views on summer.
My oldest was not exactly relishing his return to school. On the morning of the big day we found his lovely new sensible school shoes lodged in the guttering outside his bedroom window. As they were filled to capacity with rain, he had to see in the new term wearing his battered old trainers. Best, not soggy, foot forward I thought.
The thought of eventually having a full 30 minutes of peace and tranquillity to perhaps read a week-old paper or actually watch a programme not hosted by a large and annoyingly cheery purple dinosaur was all that got me through those nightmare summer months.
I had thought that it might be a good idea to camp outside the school on the eve of their return, just in case we might be late and have to spend even a second of official school time still in each other’s company. The husband thought this might make us look like bad parents. But judging by the mums and dads practically galloping into school with their children underarm we weren’t the only ones who were relieved to see September.
Happy holidays? I say ban them.

The dog

The dog has certain noise-related issues.
The gentle hum of a bluebottle’s wings, for example, can whip him up into a barking frenzy. A person might exhale loudly two miles away and the dog’s outside barking menacingly in case they might have fancy ideas about coming over here and sighing loudly near a blade of our grass.
We’ve consulted the books and Internet on how to deal with these barking problems and one said when the dog barks throw water in its face. Did I mention the dog is mentally challenged? Every time I open the back door he races up, stands there while I throw freezing cold water in his face and then runs away soaked. He hates it but every time the door opens he’s there. The dog either has the memory of a goldfish or, as I strongly suspect, is tres stupido.
So today I made lunch for the middle boy – a culinary delight of beans and toast. The child complained about the substandard beans and told me that from now on ‘if they aren’t Heinz then it ain’t happening’. I worry for the boy. I fear he’s picking up street talk from those crappy American made-for-TV movies he is forced to watch in the afternoons at Granny’s.
So he goes out to the garden to play with the dog. Someone has the audacity to cough nearby and the dog’s flipping out, barking, jumping at the fence and making a general nuisance of himself. I fill a full pint glass up with ice-cold water and open the back door. The water had already left the glass and was in mid-flight when I realized the boy was directly in the line of fire. Ice cold water right in the cooter. That child will never disrespect my beans again.
Reminded me of the time I sat in Castle Court during my lunch hour. This was back in the old days when there were fountains and water features below the escalators. While I sat there chatting on the mobile a mother and her young daughter came down and sat beside me at the edge of the water. The mother impressed upon her daughter that she’d be less than pleased if she got her new clothes wet. There was a couple of loud ‘don’t you durr’s, and a few ‘I’ll tell ya naa-ow’s” as she fixed her immaculate make-up and salon fresh hair in a compact mirror.
I hadn’t realised that the sleeve of my jacket had been soaking in the water for a good 10 minutes and when I went to put my coat on the soaking wet sleeve and the good pint and a half of stinky standard issue shopping centre fountain water flung up in the air and hit the ma directly in the face.
There was a brief moment reminiscent of the cowboy films when the two boyos stand face to face before they draw their guns. Similarly there was a brief moment of silence and shock before the ma started howling at me, water and expensive make-up dripping from her face.
I tried to explain the coat, the sleeve, the stinky water, and the mistake. She just rolled off every obscene word she knew, and fair play to her she was quite knowledgeable.
I tried to offer her tissues, apologies, to burn my coat right there and then in a symbolic gesture. In the end I had to just walk away explaining to everyone from there and the front door that ‘it was the coat, water, sorry’, ‘coat, water, sorry…’
I ran all the way back to the Irish News in case there’d be an angry pitchfork and burning torch-wielding mob of immaculately made-up ladies vying for my blood.
There wasn’t and I survived another day to soak another innocent by-stander..

Men are funny creatures at times. I know I have a house full of them – big, small, human and canine.
Through my own scant neurobiological studies I have found men and women’s brains are wired differently. Men let only one thing occupy their minds at one time. Women have a million different thoughts, plans, lists, requests and demands all vying for attention in there.
When the male and female brains collide, strange things can happen.
Us mums are the ultimate multi-taskers. In any 24 hours we must be all things to our kids – taxi driver, nanny, nurse, entertainer, bank manager, cook, cleaner, teacher, counsellor and referee. Men’s brains actually short circuit and melt if over tasked. I’ve seen it with my own eyes – there are still bits of brain on my garage floor.
Our tumble dryer broke at the weekend. If you, like me, live in the part of the world where it has been official monsoon season since Christmas you’ll know how much a catastrophic event that is.
So I phoned a random repair man and he said he’d be out before the day closed. In the meantime my mother arrived around and proceeded to try and fix the thing herself. By fixing I mean using a screwdriver to remove the front panel, frowning at the inner workings and shaking her head. Of course the woman couldn’t get the front panel back on again.
So the repair man arrived and squeezed into the tiny enclosed space the dryer is kept in the garage – think train toilet – while my mother and I looked on throwing electrical appliance related questions at him without stopping for breath.
“Who took this off?” he shouts over our questions, pointing at the front panel.
“Me,” says my mother all coy.
“I could go to jail for even looking at that,” says he.
Now I’d be pretty well up on the legal system, being a journalist and all, and I doubt gazing upon broken washing machines is a jailing offence. I looked it up on the PSNI website – Murder, yes, and also stealing cars, pillaging, plundering and general scalwaggery. No mention of washing machine panels.
And so we continued with the questions. Yes, our husbands are adequate DIYers but it’s not very often we get a real live white appliance expert in our grasp and we weren’t for letting him go until we gauged his opinion on why the fridge was making a funny humming noise, the toaster timer was out or why the dishwasher leaked on Wednesdays only.
So he gets the spare part he brought out of his tool bag and stands there with it.
“You told me it only needed this,” he growls. “You never said nothing about the front panel being off. And stop asking me questions. And you shouldn’t have taken that off. AND I COULD GO TO JAIL!”
Maybe it was the relentless questions, the lack of tea, or us laughing at this poor flustered man that made him blow up. Or it might have been me telling him that it was my tumble dryer and if I so wished I would take off that front panel, decorate it with fruit and dried flowers and dance around the garden.
But blow up he did and began shouting obscenities in that tiny space at the back of our garage, scattering birds from the trees and scaring kids.
He shouted at my mother that she must buy the effing machine part off him there and then for £100 and fix it her effing self. He called us mad effers and I told him to get out.
And so my mother is still in the garage, still frowning and still shaking her head at the tumble dryer. And despite all this hard work, the thing is still not working.

Rambo

So we purchased the new teddy brought him home and are eagerly awaiting the Eureka moment when we think of a suitable name.
None of your wishy-washy names here – no fluffykins or bunny – we’re thinking along the lines of either Rambo, Freddie or Buster.
The older boys have had teddies since they were babies – Bo and Teddy. Bo’s a yellow and green dinosaur, Teddy’s just your run-of-the-mill standard issue brown fluffy ted. The two toys are like family members and it’s taken as read that the husband and I would lay down our lives if either the two were in mortal peril.
Like the time Bo got stuck up on the roof of a two-storey house. He didn’t get there himself, the husband was throwing him up in the air for a joke and he got stuck in the chimney.
Nobody, not least the husband, was laughing when he had to get out the old rickety and woodworm eaten ladders from the depths of the garage and attempt a rescue using sewer rods in a force seven gale as two small children wailed below.
In a shock move, the rabbit is pure white and therefore extremely difficult to hide the inevitable stains on when the child becomes so attached to the thing it joins us for, and in, dinner. I asked the shop assistant did the same rabbit come in spaghetti bolognese colour. She said no.
And so here we begin our adventure with Rambo the rabbit. Long live Rambo.

Die Wasps, Die!!

If you are member of the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Wasps look away now, for the next few paragraphs may sear your very iris’s due to their graphic and violent nature.
We have a serious wasp problem at our house. At any one time there are three or four stealthing around, hiding in curtains, crawling up shirt collars, hanging around hair brushes.
There was a time when I thought all God’s creatures deserved peace and an equal place on earth. That was before our wasp dilemma turned me into a ruthless killing machine. The husband and I have a body count. I’m winning. He uses the Derry Journal which only serves to stun the little buggers. I use a nice thick glossy like Elle Magazine which sends them off to that can of fizzy orange in the sky before they even know what hit them.
He does get points for drama though and has effectively built us up a strong reputation for being a household who won’t take this yearly invasion lying down. He has pinned a dead wasp to the back door to strike fear into hearts of the other foolhardy wasps who may think of venturing inside. He’s also got a handwritten warning sign up there to let them know what we are really capable of, complete with graphic drawings of wasps in various states of decapitation.
For all these pesky wasps have accomplished over their evolutionary journey I doubt they have mastered the power of speech, learned to read or decipher diagrams. But it makes the husband feel better and in all honesty I have witnessed a few wasps come to the door, read the sign and buzz away shaking their little furry heads.
What are wasps for anyway apart from making people look stupid in the street? Have you ever noticed how the arrival of a wasp beside someone’s ear flicks a switch in their head turning them into really bad wedding disco dancers? There all waving hands in the air like they just don’t care and doing the knees-up spinning around jig like your young, drunken cousins used to when the DJ put a Pogues number on.
For the next few weeks we’ll have to try every trick in the box to keep our house from being overrun by winged beasts.
Last year was, let’s be honest here, a laughable disaster.
My husband and father found a wasp’s nest in the remnants of a tree stump in our garden and felt throwing buckets of floral disinfectant over it while hitting the nest with a spade might kill them. They were more likely to have laughed themselves to death, but there seemed to be a lot more of them around afterwards. Many, many sweet smelling wasps with sore heads looking for revenge.
The year before that we had the husband’s brother tackle the problem. He found the nest in the eaves of the house. He put it in a plastic bag, then in a bucket, filled it with water, set it on fire and then hit it with a spade. There were many, many angry wasps with scorched eyebrows and wet feet hanging around looking mean after that.
But every year they still come back for more.
I may take the pacifist approach this time. I may call them to the table and thrash out a deal. Yeah, with my Elle Magazine.....

Dublin

We took our two older kids to the U2 concert in Dublin recently and it was quite an experience for them as well as us.
We took three different trains, which was really exciting for the first 20 minutes. After this the questions and the whinging were the soundtrack to the rest of our journey.
The lads, who are massive U2 fans themselves, were amazed as we wandered around a Dublin well and truly gripped by Bono fever. I guess they were surprised to find it wasn’t just them who thought Bono was as cool as God himself.
Momentarily they forgot about Michael Jackson, a figure they have been slightly obsessed with since his demise. I knew I would have to cut back my Sky News consumption when I heard Daniel explaining the whole Wacko Jacko story to his younger brother on the train.
“Michael Jackson, right, he was black but now he’s white,” he explains.
“How?” asked young Caolan.
“I don’t know, I think he might have washed his face with the bleach Mommy puts down the toilet. But then, right, he died and turned into a zombie. And now, when he walks down the street the path lights up, like even when he’s just going to the shop. And also since he turned into a zombie he’s a far better dancer. And as well as that he brings elephants back to life and can blow down trees.”
“Wow,”
I had worried that there might perhaps be a few better role models around than a disco dancing zombie with a high-pitched voice and a questionable lifestyle so I was glad when Bono and his gang came back into fashion.
The lads stayed with my brother and his wife in a ‘are we really ready for parenthood’ experiment. They are expecting their first child in a few months and this night was a test drive of sorts. The kids fleeced the couple, having them buy pizza they didn’t eat and rent movies they fell asleep half way through. The kids ate ice-cream past their bed time and threw up on the beautiful cream rug that adorns their plush living floor. They survived unscathed, the adults were a little bleary eyed and exhausted in the morning.
And as for us, we had a great time at the concert. The sight of four middle-aged men from north Dublin prancing and dancing about a stage brought cheer to many, not least Dublin’s hoteliers as well as roadside purveyors of silly pink cowboy hats.
We noticed that every shop, bar and restaurant within a 5-mile radius of Croke Park had their CDs on rotation. Bus and taxi drivers talked of nothing else. Dubliners lucky enough to be on the main route to Croker turned their houses into make-shift shops selling everything from €5 bottles of water to black and white photocopies of Bono in his trademark shades. It seemed everyone was out to make a few pounds off the already recession ravaged O’Neills.
And so there was warm beer and wet rain, packet trains and empty purses but Bono and the lads put on a good show, and if nothing else he reminded us all that new Ireland is still talented, still confident and still strong. The husband and I just need to borrow some of his boundless energy to help flame our own financial fortunes.

Lord grant me patience...

Grumpiness is a terrible affliction and one which every member of our house suffers from at least once during any given week.
At any one time there is someone sulking about something. Even the dog rolls his eyes and sighs. Lately, though, I’ve been the biggest culprit. Everything from the rubbish weather to the way other people behave drives me insane. And I know kids learn from example which means when I whinge about things, they learn that whinging works and whine more, which makes me whine about them whining. You see? There’s a vicious, snapping, whining circle forming right there.
I’m usually a glass half full, rose coloured glasses type of gal but recently I’ve morphed into a person so irritable that smashing the glass and stamping up and down on those blasted rosy glasses makes me feel a little better.
But today I will change, and follow this prayer on the path to serenity or at least to the sunny side of the street….
LORD GIVE ME PATIENCE…
Grant me the patience to smile serenely when I check my bank balance at the ATM and the strength to wait until I get back into the car to have the subsequent mild psychotic episode.
Help me to relax about insignificant details, beginning tomorrow at 07:41:23 am GMT.
Grant me the serenity to stay calm when middle child is running around Debenham’s ceramic department pretending to be an airplane, and allow me the overdraft facilities to pay for any damages caused.
Help me to keep my mind on one thing ... oh, look, a chocolate biscuit ... at a time.

Grant me peace when sons attempt to flush bundles of school jumpers down small toilet and the foresight to find the emergency plumbers number quickly in the Yellow Pages.
Help me to consider other people's feelings, even if most of them are like so hypersensitive.
Help me take responsibility for the consequences of my actions, even though they're almost always never my fault.

Keep me open to others' ideas on parenting, misguided and completely deranged though they may be.

Help me to be more laid back, and help me to do it without any errors whatsoever.

Help me to take things more seriously, especially laughing, drinking wine, going to great parties, and disco dancing.

Grant me the power of mind control, just temporarily, that I can silence four-year-olds with a wave of my hand. That indeed would be handy.
Grant me the second sight so that I may win the lottery (only kidding, scrap that one)

Thanks Lord!

Amen

Super bored

The school holidays are only half over, we’ve already been on holiday and now the kids are super bored.
Daniel’s grown a big bushy beard and Caolan has hollowed out a coconut and believes he’s his new best friend. Well, maybe that’s actually not exactly true but the two of them are acting like castaways, sitting cross-legged on the landing floor complaining about the weather, total lack of sugar and leisure facilities.
They’ve even taken to writing a diary……

Day 28 of the school holidays
Mood: Dire
Our captors continue to taunt us with promises of visits to the park only to withdraw them because of the stupid apocalyptic weather conditions. They force us to eat sensible cereal for breakfast, fruit and vegetables. The only thing that keeps us going is the hope of escape, and the vague satisfaction we get from ruining the odd piece of furniture or freshly painted wall. Tomorrow we may eat another houseplant or put more lipstick on the dog.


Day 29 of the school holidays
Mood: Giddy
Today our attempts to kill our captors by leaving Power Ranger figures on the stairs almost succeeded, will try again tomorrow. In an attempt to repulse our vile oppressors we once again filled the bathroom sink with muck, water, toilet roll and red sauce, will attempt to transport this mixture to their favourite chair or their bed.

Day 30 of the school holidays
Mood: Mildly content
Annoyed our captors with synchronised sleep depriving, incessant pleas for obscure things at ungodly hours of the night, slept in the next day. Slept soundly in the knowledge those vile people had to get up and go to work despite scant sleep.


Day 31 of the school holidays
Mood: Fierce
Dug up a small tree from the garden and dragged it around the house throwing muck everywhere. This gesture was an attempt to make them aware of what we are capable of and to strike fear into their hearts. Think we are getting through to the female captor who said on more than one occasion that she thought she was going to go ‘insane’ and that she was ‘so over these school holidays’. Our devious plan is working.


Day 32 of the school holidays
Mood: Dire
There was some sort of gathering of their evil accomplices, we were asked to ‘behave’. We must learn what the opposite of behave is and use it to our advantage. Spent the evening spitting chewed crisps into glasses and taking one bite out of sandwiches and leaving them back on the plate.

There’s only 42 days left of the summer holidays. It has to stop raining sometime soon. In the meantime I’m writing a letter to the education minister pitching the idea of parent-friendly summers. I am proposing that teachers hold classes in their own homes all day every day – even at weekends – during the summer months. Why should it be only us who have to put up with our kids during summer?

Holiday meltdowns

So we’ve had our annual family holiday, the first with baby in tow, and we all came home with all our limbs and our sanity reasonably intact – a plus in my eyes.
We were only really going down the road to deepest, darkest Donegal but travelling with a baby meant we had to pack the car to capacity with baby paraphernalia. There was no room to breathe enroute and the kids had their little faces squashed up against the windows, frightening other road users the whole way there.
We eventually found the most gorgeous of cottages up on a mountain overlooking the beach. We had just cows for neighbours and the nearest shop was 35 miles away (we all had a little panic attack about that particular fact at various stages throughout the week).
There were fun times, relaxing evenings and in typical O’Neill family fashion a fair few meltdowns.
Everyone had their off day. Daniel threw a monumental hissy fit on day two when we took him to a gorgeous countryside park, filled with ornamental lakes, rose gardens and ancient castles. He was upset about the distinct lack of shopping facilities in this, the wildest of wild parks. On another day Caolan flipped his proverbial lid because he didn’t like the rain (of which there was aplenty). I cracked under the pressure of trying to entertain three young children for days in Donegal and stopped the car at the roadside and dramatically threw all my Bord Failte documentation in a bin. The husband just tutted a lot and muttered bad words under his breath.
One day we had a synchronised meltdown in the car whilst parked in Donegal Town. Everyone was shouting to have their opinion/complaint/request/insult heard and the baby was screaming. There were maps being waved about and people were being called derogatory names. The Lord’s name was taken in vain a number of times. Several American tourists hurried away from the scene in case by gawking they would somehow be sucked into our world of madness and mayhem.
In Donegal they think the Highway Code was the name of the Furey Brother’s fourth album. It certainly takes a little getting used to the rules of the roads. For example when in Donegal did you know that it’s the law that you must park on top of the lines between two spaces or on a roundabout, that many of the Donegal road signs point into lakes or at cows in fields or that it’s normal to abandon your vehicle at traffic lights to nip to the shops? But get those wacky racers out of their cars and you’ll find that Donegal people are gorgeous, friendly, funny, warm and welcoming.
We saw some strange things. There was an old man we used to meet on the road outside Portsalon who took his Shetland Pony for a walk every day wearing a pristine suit – the man, not the pony – the pony had on a dog collar and lead. There were various old ladies in scarves carrying baskets of scones and farmers in fields with peaked caps drinking mugs of tea; there was a crowd of sheep queuing up at a bus stop. They were probably all planted by Bord Failte for the benefit of American tourists. Whatever, it made us laugh.

Summer hols

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to organise our summer holidays. I thought we might go abroad, somewhere nice and sunny, but the recent heat wave and the severe grumpiness that it induced in my lads told me we’d be better off somewhere cold and miserable, so we’re staying closer to home.
Now that my older boys can speak up and tell me what they want in a holiday I’ve really had to work hard at finding something that suits everyone. I made them all write me a list of things that would make their idea of the perfect holiday come to fruition.
The lads list of demands went something like this:
The destination must have.
1 A gigantic toy shop
2 At least 20 sweet shops
3 A Playstation or Wii
4 An abundance of muck
5 A bit of a beach so we can dig gigantic holes to bury the dog/Daddy/the car in.
6 Chocolate on tap.
The destination must not have…
1 Vegetables
2 Homecooked dinners (We want beans every twice daily for a week)
3 Naggy mas telling us to go to bed before 9pm.
Unless Willy Wonka’s gone into the self catering business and is renting out his chocolate factory complete with computer suite and manmade beach I doubt we can meet all their demands. Donegal will have to do.
Now I have had problems before going on holiday with my kids. Last year we went to a B&B which professed to be kid friendly then turned out to be the complete opposite. Regular readers will recall that on that occasion we were asked to keep our small children quiet. Apparently the sound of children laughing hurt the only other two guest’s ears. These people also took exception to rock music, thought disco smoke machines where the work of Satan and that people who hung around outside chip shops where devil worshippers. We left after one night.
This time I have been really careful about where we will stay. Self catering seemed to be the best option for us, because of the fact that my children are insane.
I have trawled through self catering websites for weeks trying to find somewhere really perfect.
I’ve sent hundreds of emails, sounding totally neurotic. I’ve asked if the properties were anywhere near lakes, ditches, rivers, caves, mine fields, shooting ranges, nuclear waste dumps, warzones etc etc. Anyone who knows my middle child Caolan will attest that he is no ordinary child, indeed he has aspirations for a career in stuntmanship and is a magnet to disaster.
So I got a variety of answers and was laughed at frequently. One man told me that his property was beside a lake with gigantic crocodiles. I professed I wasn’t aware that crocodiles were a native species to that region.
Another woman told me her property was the most child friendly place in the known universe and when I looked it up on the net it was perched on the edge of a large cliff. I don’t know about you but having a 200ft drop to the raging ocean just yards from your front door doesn’t scream child friendly to me.
We eventually found somewhere Caolanproof and we’re currently in the process of wrapping them all in industrial-strength cotton wool.
Happy holidays!!

Sleep deprivation and bowl haircuts

One. That’s the average number of hours sleep I’ve been getting this past eight days.
Five. That’s the total number of teeth the baby is pushing through raw roaring red gums.
Three. That’s the number of times I thought I was literally going to go insane with sheer exhaustion.
Two. The number of brain cells I have left to speak of after a week of severe sleep deprivation.
There has been a lot of restlessness, irritability and greatly disturbed sleep patterns, sore gums, flushed cheeks and intense dribbling but I’m sure my symptoms will start to improve when I get more sleep.
The kid’s teeth are much like buses. There are none for ages and then they all come at once. Every night he wakes at 11pm, fuses and screams until 6am.
The night revolves around me trying to figure out what he wants. If I had one of those machines that deciphers babies cries a typical 30 seconds with Finn would tell me this…
“I want to sleep, no I DON'T want to sleep. Can you not hear me woman? I WANT TO SLEEP. What are you doing I told you I’m not tired!! Sleep is for the weak. God I’m so excruciatingly tired I cannot function. Give me that dummy. Take that blasted dummy away. Here, give me it again. Take it away it’s burning my gums. Give it back, take it away!!”
And so on, for seven hours.
Over the past few nights I have tried everything to get him, and therefore me, some decent sleep. I have wheeled him up and down the hall in his pram, paced up and down the bedroom rocking him in my arms and drove him around the streets of Derry in the wee small hours just to get some shuteye. It worked alright until I slowed down or stopped when, much like in the Hollywood blockbuster Speed, he would explode. Not literally, you understand, just in a fit of screaming. Although there were times the screaming was so intense I thought human combustion might have been his next trick, leaving only his little smouldering dinosaur socks.
In my sleep deprived state I didn’t really have the energy to get totally embarrassed by having a picture of my 6-year-old self broadcast on RTE last week. Because my brother is playing a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, the RTE crew came to our house and filmed us all. My mother clearly felt I hadn’t suffered half enough and gave the TV crew pictures of my brother and I when we were small to put a bit of history into the piece. So there I was fabulous bowl haircut, Christmas tree jumper and horrendous brown flairs on national television for, in my opinion, a longer than necessary 10 seconds.
When normal sleeping services resume, if I don’t expire due to exhaustion in the interim, I can look forward to dying of embarrassment.

Burglar steals comedy socks

There are days when I curse the hour the thought of getting a dog entered my head. That hour usually follows me discovering the remains of another item of either furniture or fashion he has consumed. When he barks for hours at his own reflection, eats precious teddy bears or digs a hole big enough to bury him in I am tempted to do exactly that. It’s true to say that our Buddy adds another, completely different level of stress to our house. But, perhaps through having our mental wellbeing worn down by his eccentricity, we love him.
We appreciated him all the more this week when we heard the news that nearly every house in our street was broken into except ours. Early one morning last week the Budster woke us all up going bananas at the patio doors, barking like a dog possessed. We thought that, as usual, Buddy’s supersensitive ears had picked up on a cheeky fly buzzing by the back window or that someone a mile away sneezed, unsettling the balance of his universe. The husband treated this disturbance in his usual manner – shouting at the top of his voice from bed for the dog to shut up, that he was going to wake the entire house, thus waking the entire house himself. The dog barked and the husband hollered. The dog must have thought the husband was barking too and barked some more and the din seemingly scared the latchicos who were thinking of breaking into our house away.
And so the burglaries were the talk of the street all week. My kids overheard and freaked out. In their minds the only people allowed to sneak into our house in the middle of the night are those bearing cold hard cash or shiny gifts – the tooth fairy and Santa.
And so the nightmares began (theirs) as did the sleepless nights (mine).
Picture the scene….

Time: 3am GMT
Location: Our house
Current mood: Dire to diabolical

Daniel: “Arrrrrgggghhhh!!!!!!!”
Me: (rushing into his room in a panic, expecting to have to throw some serious Ninja shapes and whack an intruder with hair straighteners) “What! What! What!”
Dan: “Someone stole my sock, MY SOCK IS MISSING!!”
Me: (having lost the will to live) “No one stole your sock Daniel, go to sleep”
Dan: “Well it was here when I went to sleep and now it is missing. It was probably the same people who stole Robert’s TV and Joe’s car. Phone the police.”
Me: “OK, I’ll have them put out an APB and a missing sock report. I’ll tell them a burglar came in and ignored all our valuables but made away with your dark green sock with comedy bats on it. I’ll get CID to do an artist’s impression, we’ll get every single member of the force onto this, no stone will be left unturned. We’ll get your sock back, son, don’t you worry about that.”
Dan: “Really?”
Me: “Of course, it’ll be on Sky News tomorrow when you wake up.”
Dan: “Cool”.

The moral of the story is that Buddy and his quirks are really annoying at times but so long and he and the husband stay crazy Dan’s precious socks, and the rest of our valuables, are safe.

Girls don't puke pink

I think I’ll just come out and say it, I dread other kid’s birthday parties.
I always have my own kid’s parties at home because attending other children’s soirees at indoor adventure centres is, for me, a bit like having forks poked in your eyes on the seventh circle of hell.
Now I know that many parents feel having their parties at these establishments is fabulous (and it is – I’m just a whingy old bag) but for me surly teenagers dressed up as a clowns and cheap chicken nuggets do not a fun time make.
Took the kids to a birthday party the other day at such an establishment, which, in all honesty, was pretty crazy.
Perhaps I’ve led a sheltered life, perhaps it’s old age creeping up on me but the music was too loud, the lights too flashy and the sugar too easy to come by. I had a headache within five minutes.
It may have been the strobe lighting – which I’m told is all the rage at six-year-old’s parties – or the rave-style music but my oldest boy Daniel threw up on the dance floor.
Whilst trying to put flashbacks of my disco attending days at Derry’s finest dancing establishments out of my mind I noticed a strange phenomenon – puking seems to be contagious in the under-10s.
When our Dan hurled on the dance floor the little dude dancing next to him hurled too, then the little girl next to him threw up, the chap next to her just wretched a bit but didn’t puke. The dance floor was like a sea of regurgitated chicken nuggets and cake. (Sorry if you’re eating your lunch while reading this. Stop now, enjoy the rest of your chicken nuggets and pick up again here when you’re done).
It’s a safe bet that Daniel won’t be invited back to that particular friend’s party next year. I dare say the mothers think he’s too much of a loose canon.
On the way home my middle lad wasn’t fazed by the domino puking he had witnessed and was more amazed that little girl’s puke wasn’t pink, as he had long thought, and was in fact the same colour as boys puke. So not only was our party experience fun but educational as well.
Our lads took part in the school sports day on Friday. In the run up to it they were both a little apprehensive that they might lose a race and look silly, especially since me and their Daddy would be cheering them on by the sidelines.
I did what most mums would in such a scenario and gave them a gentle pep talk on the way to school. It went a little something like this…
Daniel: “What if we lose?”
Me: “You won’t lose”
Dan: “But what if we do?”
Me: “Look lads, it’s like this. You are both O’Neills, that’s a proud name. Generations of O’Neills before you put their heart and souls into everything they did. Feel the weight of your ancestors upon you today when you go out to the field behind the canteen. Bring me back the medals for the spud and spoon race or don’t come home at all.”
Dan: “OK”.

SuperMa

I am seriously contemplating becoming a superhero.
I’d be SuperMA – fighting for the contentment of parents, travelling the world righting really annoying wrongs.
Now in doing this I’m not going to tackle the real heavy stuff like saving lives and rescuing people from burning buildings. I’ll leave that up to the big guns like Superman and Spiderman. No, I’m going to tackle things like illegal parking in mother and baby spots and grumpy people who tutt and glare at crying babies.
Now obviously I have no superhuman powers so I’ll have to improvise.
First off a quick trip to B&Q where I shall purchase some laser eyes to allow me to sear deep grooves in the front bonnet of BMWs whose childless drivers insist of parking in the mother and baby spots. I nice big SMA (my trademark logo – SuperMA gettit?) lasered into their shiny paintwork might make them think twice about being so inconsiderate.
I shall leave a note, which will read something like this… “This is to inform you that mother and baby spots are strictly for harassed mas who often have to carry two kids and restrain another while pushing a trolley, negotiating car park traffic and rummaging about in their pockets looking for pound coins, bank cards and car keys.
“They have extra room at both sides – not, as you probably imagine, for the extra body width of fat, lazy mas who couldn’t be bothered to walk the extra distance to the entrance – but to allow parents ample room to do the backbreaking, often acrobatic act of getting a baby out of a baby seat.
“Thanks for your attention on this matter. Apologies for scrawling this longer than actually necessary note into your exterior paintwork, I ran out of paper. Thanks!! Signed SMA”
In my capacity as SMA I shall also be scouring the country wreaking vengeance on ice cream men. For as lovely as ice cream from a van is when you’re a small child, when you’re a parent it’s a whole different kettle of fish. Now I’m not casting aspersions but my inbuilt neurosis prevents me from accepting that hygiene is a level five priority for these guys. Then there’s the ‘music’ or the tinny bell sound blasting out of speakers loud enough to hear from five streets away. That’s an awful long time to have to listen to the tubular bell version of the A-Team theme tune and children whining about ice cream. Ice Cream men are going down, I’m coming for you Mr Whippy!
In a totally non-violent, more finger wagging way I shall also be targeting dog owners who let their pooches use the pavement as a toilet – the offending article shall be propelled at their living room windows – boy racers, smokers and wasps.
I shall leave no stone unturned in the hunt for people who really annoy me. Should you require assistance look out for me, I shall be wearing a colourful uniform fashioned from old curtains – for SMA also champions thriftiness – with a belt tooled up with baby bottles, laser guns and Calpol.

Spiders

I have been irrationally terrified of spiders since a very young age. People say that it’s stupid to feel fear from something so tiny or that they are more afraid of me than I of them but that’s not true. If they were wire my brain and the spider’s brain up to some kind of complex scientific fear calculation device I would bet everything I own that my levels of anxiety would be through the roof whereas the spider might be just slightly concerned that he is locked in a room with a clearly psychotic giant woman screaming and swishing a rolled up newspaper around like a pirate’s sword.
Living in Belfast did nothing to ease my spider phobia, as everyone knows that
Belfast has the highest population of the biggest, scariest, hairiest spiders this side of the rain forest. When I was a young journalist people would often arrive at the newspaper office with mammoth spiders they had caught in their houses for me to view and write stories about. They often contained these beasts in poorly constructed receptacles – flimsy cigarette boxes, lunchboxes with holes in them, used tissues – and after we captured them on film they would escape through the office to haunt me another day.
They say these fears and phobias are passed down from our parents, something I doubt – my own mother would frequently lift mammoth spiders and put them outside without so much as a flicker of fear. Nevertheless I don’t want my boys to fear spiders just because I’m insane so I try and tone the craziness down.
When I see a spider these days I take a deep breath instead of screaming, I project an exterior expression of calmness when every molecule in my body is urging me to fashion a flamethrower from a tin of air freshener and a lighter and annihilate the eight-legged monster.
The last house we lived in, in Belfast, backed onto a waste ground where, I’m just guessing here, at some stage a nuclear bomb went off and affected the DNA of the local spiders a la Godzilla. They were so big we actually heard them click clacking their way across the wooden floor. I swear they were intelligent too, always hiding in the curtains and under duvets.
When we moved from Belfast to Derry a few years back we brought some friends of the hairy-legged monster variety to our new house. The husband was tasked to get rid of them and I was confident he did.
Last weekend we decided it was time to clear out the garage and dump a lot of stuff we don’t need. We happened across a big box that hadn’t been opened since the move and I ripped it open to find a scene from that Arachnophobia film – horrible, thick and indestructible webs and an army of gigantic spiders with big sharp teeth and really irritated expressions (the last bits I may have imagined).
I placed the box on the floor and asked my two boys, who were helping me, to go and ask Daddy if he would please join us in the garage for a calm discussion about our little friends and their situation with regards their future.
After much discussion the city council rubbish dump was chosen as the next port of call. The husband’s previous attempts at eradicating wasps nests with floral disinfectant and a spade (don’t ask) resulted in swarms of really angry, sweet smelling wasps with sore heads. He has since been taken off all pest control duties so we left it to the nice man at the dump (the incinerator).
The box of spiders was loaded up and the kids were told they were off to live in the countryside were they could enjoy hours of fresh air, sunshine and freedom to spin webs where they liked without the fear of rolled up newspapers hanging over them, just like the extended family of mice we found last week.

Jesus explained

My oldest son has a hard time getting his head around religion and all it’s complexities.
I believe they subtly introduce God and religion in his primary school early on and try and break it down for their young minds to understand.
Unfortunately Daniel hasn’t really grasped the concept and I am absolutely clueless to help him, having, may God forgive me, spent most of our teenage years standing outside mass chatting.
I overheard him explaining the whole God thing to his younger brother.
Daniel: “Jesus, right, he died. But he wasn’t shot or anything. He died from working too much”
Caolan: “What? Like mammy?”
Daniel: “No. He didn’t work on a computer, he made stuff.”
Caolan: “What like?”
Daniel: “He made nice things, like Disneyland and cream buns.”
Caolan: “And was he a baby forever?”
Daniel: “No he was just a baby when he was baby Jesus, then he got big and now he is invisible.”
Caolan: “And what other super powers does he have, can he shoot lasers from his eyes?”
Daniel: “I think so, and he also has a beard”.
Caolan: “Where does he live?”
Daniel: “Dublin.”

I know that little boys are made from snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails but when I signed up to be a mother of three boys I knew nothing of the muck and yuck that came with them.
I arrived at the nursery to pick up my middle son to find him sitting in the middle of a muck pit digging with his hands. He came rushing over with what I thought was a little cute daisy for me in his hands. It wasn’t a pretty flower but a big, juicy worm that I instinctively flung from his hand in a millisecond. Turned out this worm had been his companion all afternoon and he had become somewhat sentimentally attached to it – he called him John. Therefore he took exception to me propelling his mate 10 ft up in the air, way over a fence and onto the roof of the credit union next door.
The screeching only stopped when I promised I’d send Daddy up on the roof after work to rescue John and place him back in his soily home.
We got into the car and made our way home. Caolan seemed at ease with John’s rescue plan. When we reached the roundabout near our house Caolan put his clenched fist over beside my face and told me that he had kept another friend – he called her Mary – a far superior, fatter, juicier, wrigglier worm than John. He had kept her safe in his pocket since lunchtime in school.
If you were in the vicinity of the Strand Road roundabout in Derry at around 2pm last Friday and you witnessed what you thought was a deranged woman, screeching while going round the roundabout three times, I apologise. I was using screaming as a medium to express horror about having a big worm dropped on my lap. The screaming, I found, was also useful in helping me fashion a plan of action. That plan, unfortunately for Mary, meant flinging the thing out the window into traffic.
This column is dedicated to the memory of John and Mary Worm. RIP.

Kids equals crazy happy

I was reading an article last weekend about studies in the US concluding that having children doesn’t make you happy. It stated that over the past few decades social scientists have quizzed parents and have found evidence that there is almost zero association between having kids and happiness and indeed lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction and mental wellbeing were reported in parents than the childless.
If those scientists had asked me I would tell them having kids has most definitely upped my levels of happiness one million fold. There are times I laugh so hard at my kids I can’t breathe. With regards to my levels of craziness, or whatever the scientific definition of crazy is, they are off the ricktor scale.
I’d say that as a mum I get less sleep but more laughs, my house is a at times a mess but my home is blessed with three incredible boys and seeing the wonder of the world through a child’s eyes is truly amazing.
I remember the things that made me happy before children – a glass of wine, new shoes, a night out – and call me boring I wouldn’t in a million years swap it for the things that make me happy now – family life. Way back in the day Saturday nights would be spent out on the town, now I’m not ashamed to say we’re more likely to be found on the sofa surrounded by kids, popcorn and a DVD.
I met a girl I knew from years back recently. Even back then she always stated she never wanted to have children – they were too noisy, too messy, too much bother. There was nothing medically wrong with her, unless hating children was a medical disorder, she just didn’t want them.
There she was all salon-styled hair, manicured nails and big shopping bags full of new clothes and fancy furnishings for her no-doubt immaculately presented house. There was I, the other extreme, with my three kids and hair that hasn’t seen the inside of a salon in two months. The only thing I had hold of were tiny hands pulling me in the direction of different items of interest. She found it remarkable that I could carry a conversation over the din of three kids demanding things loudly.
She was also amazed that I looked exactly the same as I did before I had kids. I wondered for a minute if the reason this girl had veered away from motherhood because she had been misinformed that when babies are born, parents actually sprout horns, a tail and get a greenish tinge to their skin.
I think the second my youngest boy swung a heavy Eason’s bag at his brother and accidentally hit himself and they both began screaming and shouting was the exact second she thanked her lucky stars she didn’t have kids and tottered away on her expensive heels.
Perhaps for some people having children brings misery. Not me. My kids make me 100 per cent happy, make me laugh every day and amaze me with their various talents – be that spitting great distances, disco dancing or drawing pictures of me with crazy purple hair and orange eyes. I’m not rich and I’m often dog-tired, but having these boys is the most rewarding thing I have ever done.
If those scientists had asked me if children make you happy I’d have said: “Straight up they do. My kids have an outstanding capacity to help me look at the bright side of life. Amen”.

Bloody vampires

We’ve just spent a week cooped up indoors, all five of us and the dog, while rain of apocalyptic proportions made dents in the pavement outside.
The kids where off school for a full week for the May Day bank holiday. That was seven whole days, or 168 hours if you like, or even 10,080 minutes that we had to entertain two high-energy kids within the confines of our house.
We had planned to go places and do stuff (that doesn’t cost money) but every day we woke up and looked out at a monsoon. Every day we were rained out and stayed in.
After day one the kids were at each other’s throats – there were several calls for brother disownment; the air was filled with screaming and threats to man and teddy.
By day three the husband wanted to get rid of the dog. He had taken to eating the legs of the dining room chairs out of sheer boredom and barking at his own reflection in the patio doors – the dog, you understand not the husband, the husband only barks at other dogs.
On day five the sun eventually shone and we all came down with cabin fever, or some similar yucky virus. Because we had been sat in front of Sky News for 120 hours we were convinced we all had piggy flu without the fun of a sunny holiday, which would have really rounded off a rubbish week. Alas no we didn’t, but two of us did have to visit the emergency doctors, which at least got us out of the house. We spent the next two days lying around the living room shouting insults at each other and coughing.
It is nothing short of a miracle that we have survived this week of hell with our sanity uncompromised. If this is a taster of what we laughingly refer to as our summer will bring then God help us.
Vampires were big news in our house this week. Daniel was told by a school friend that they climb up under your duvet at night and drain your body of blood, which I suppose is a fair and adequate job description.
Daniel was an unbeliever until he asked his dad to clarify what a vampire was.
“What’s a vampire?” shouts Daniel from his bed one night.
“It’s a zombie who sucks your blood out,” shouts Daddy from downstairs, “Now go to sleep,”. The two boys were both downstairs wailing within three seconds.
“How do they suck your blood,” asks Daniel the next day. “Do they have special holes in their teeth?”
“No, no, no,” says Daddy, trying to be all informative and put the child right, “why would they need holes in their teeth? They bite your neck and drink your blood.”
“Aaggghhhhhhh!” says Daniel.
Now anyone knocks at the door it’s the vampires calling, a noise from upstairs is the vampires climbing in through the windows. When I did a quick ‘tidy up’ of Daniel’s toys before friends called (I piled them all into his wardrobe and closed the door) and they all crashed out in the middle of the night it was the vampires coming to get him.
Bloody vampires. It was the husband who started all this so he’ll have to get up on the roof with the yard brush and whack any creatures of the night who happen to swoop by.