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.

Green legs and dead dogs

So the party’s over and the mountain of mess is still hanging around. Our grass is red and yellow, our neighbours are traumatised and last count we had three black eyes among the guests.
Daniel turned six on Saturday and we had our party at our house. There were 31 six year olds, a scattering of babies and a few mums, dads and grandfolk. I baked three cakes and bought about £35 worth of sweets and enough lemonade to fill a bath.
The magician we always book to entertain the kids was previously engaged elsewhere so we too it upon ourselves to provide entertainment. Although something of this scale should really have been planned well in advance the husband and I, being kid’s party professionals at this stage, decided two hours would be time enough to whip something up. Maybe in a parallel universe where seconds are longer it might.
So with two hours to go and nothing to entertain the kids with we decided we’d paint a stack of crisp boxes with white emulsion, stick them together with masking tape and pretend they were cars. Only thing was when we did it they looked like a stack of crisp boxes we painted with emulsion, stuck with tape and pretended they were cars – in other words pathetic.
The idea was to give the kids paint and brushes and let them loose to create bright coloured box cars they could wear to race. But in an incredibly stupid move I stapled my thumb to a box and the husband, who in all fairness has very scant artistic flair when it comes to box cars, tried his best to save the day.
Disaster is maybe too strong a word to describe what the end result was, but one notch down from disaster appropriately paints the picture. There was talk of scrapping the boxes and instead parking my Mum’s Ford Focus in the garden and letting the kids loose with the paint brushes, but we couldn’t distract her long enough to swipe the keys.
The husband also fashioned what can only be loosely described as a ‘race track’ from bin liners and masking tape in the living room. Words failed me when I saw the fruits of his imagination, and I wasn’t struck dumb with awe. I think that was the exact moment when I gave up the will to ever invite 30 children into my home again.
There was the usual bumped heads, black eyes and sugar-induced meltdowns, two people left one shoe less than when they came and a few went home with green coloured limbs, but the fact that they actually had all their limbs intact when they left was in my eyes a victory.
There was a slight hoo-ha when some of the girls spotted a little cross marking the spot where our neighbour had buried their dearly departed dog near their oil tank, but the mass hysteria and screaming stopped when ice cream cones where produced and Fluffy was soon forgotten.
All in all a fabulously memorable day.

Barbie sucks....

My oldest son’s 6th birthday is this weekend.
It also marks the sixth anniversary of my transition from mere mortal to mother.
Six years ago we met the little boy who would change our lives forever. We didn’t know what we were doing when we set off on this rollercoaster ride of parenthood together, us and him. He was there when we fumbled our way into parenthood, went from DINKs (double income no kids) to SINCs (single income no cash). He was there when we stumbled blindly around his first year, figuring out what worked, balancing, sacrificing, Experiencing the gorgeous baby haze, the bellyaching laughs, the sheer joy of seeing him smile, the terror of seeing him ill. He is and continues to be the blueprint from which we seek guidance on our other children. And because of that unique experience we’ll always share a special bond with our first born.
We made all our mistakes with him and learnt together, but we’ve got him here, to his sixth birthday relatively unscathed and relatively sane. Well no actually, scrub that last one.
Now in previous years I’d be stressing for weeks in the run-up to his party – will enough people show up? Will the other mums judge me on my shabby not chic abode? Will the cake blow up? Will anyone end up in casualty? Will the bouncy castle burst? (you know what five year olds are like for leaving lit cigarettes lying around) – just the usual stuff.
This time though, I think through experience, I have decided to leave my stressing till 24 hours before the big day and compress the manic behaviour into one day. I’ll take Friday off to stress, bake, clean and stress some more.
I think I’ve created two monsters with the birthdays I put on. There’s no plain party and simple cake here, that wouldn’t wash. They expect drama and theatrics, fireworks, dancing girls. Each year we have to outdo the last birthday.
Caolan’s birthday party in January had a pirate theme. The husband and I were up half the night transforming our kitchen into an underwater paradise and Granda had to fashion a mammoth functioning treasure chest out of photocopier paper boxes and a bit of sellotape.
Daniel’s is a Speed Racer themed affair. So it’s race tracks out in the garden, paint shops, pit crews and podiums all round. I’m baking a race car cake but will have a Plan B Sainsbury’s special in place just in case.
Caolan was invited to a party this week by a little girl in his nursery class. He was all for it, as his experience of birthdays thus far has been mostly of the boyish variety – all cars, pirates, Power Rangers and football. This little girl was having a Barbie themed bash the thought of which Caolan’s brain simply could not compute.
He told his little friend he wasn’t going on principle as Barbie, princesses and fairies (of the type who don’t leave cold hard cash or presents for teeth) are blood sisters of Beelzebub himself and that the promotion of pink stuff and girly things mustn’t be encouraged. Well no, what he actually said was “Barbie’s stupid”.

Training camp for mas and das

So teenagers these days are to be able to take a GCSE in parenting, to train them on what it’s really like to have a baby. Now I’m all for GCSEs in babies, but why can’t the rest of us have them too? God knows some of us are completely clueless about parenting.
Despite my bleary eyes I can see a niche in the market and I’m going to go right in there and build a training camp for parents.
It’ll have to be somewhere in the countryside (so no one can hear you scream), and have room enough to house several large torture chambers. For that is what parenting is mostly about, torture with a few laughs thrown in.
Please find below my business plan that I’ll present to Invest Northern Ireland come Monday.

Project Name:
Training Camp for Mas and Das

Project synopsis:
In my torture camp, I mean parent training facility, we’ll initially keep the parents awake for five days and nights, throwing cold water in their faces at frequent intervals. We will employ several staff to scream demands for biscuits, to sing songs they’ve never heard of and for warm bottles of milk throughout the day and night. At night time parents will also be furnished with a large and heavy sack of potatoes and forced to walk round and round the facility till Dawn, when they must start the whole process again.
Those still with us after the first initiation test can avail of the smelling spa, where various aromas are pumped into a specially adapted room (ie one with no windows and no way out). Here they will experience the very real smells produced by small children – eau de eye-watering nappy, three-month old fish finger down the sofa scent and puke, lots and lots of puke.
We also have plans for a demolition area where the most precious belongings of parents are smashed, scraped and flushed down toilets. We will need extra cash from InvestNI to source lavatories capable of fully flushing fancy mobile phones.
There will, of course, be an area assigned to handing over all personal finances, bank accounts, savings etc to our trained staff who will then inform the parents that they actually hate them, their hair is stupid and their taste in music is ‘whack’.
There will be an area nearby for dads to hand over their nice cars to be squashed into small compact cubes. We have secured a deal with Vauxhall for 3,000 no-frills Zafiras to be delivered to our training site as replacement vehicles. Dads can pay extra to take the crushed car cubes home as a sad reminder of their life BC (before children).
There are also plans for a fashion correction department where mums can hand over their Diesel denims and Jimmy Choos to be replaced with standard issue ‘Mom jeans’ – comfortable, reliable, practical stretchy denim jeans with extra pockets and elasticated waists which treble the outwardly visible size of the derriere in three seconds flat.
We have high hopes that this facility will indeed train Northern Irish parents in the ways of child rearing and just require the funds to set it up.
Project Cost: £15m

What do you think? Answers and suggestions to the usual address.

Damn that tooth fairy

It’s been a week of comings and goings in the world of teeth – our eldest son Daniel lost his first baby tooth and baby Finn gained his first.
All week Daniel has been shaking his tooth and willing it to come out. Some of his mates in school are tooth loss veterans and know that loose teeth mean cash via the tooth fairy.
The going rate, according to one child, is £9. Another boy actually got a Nintendo DS from the tooth fairy. I told him that the tooth fairy I know only leaves coinage.
Daniel argued that the ‘Bottle fairy’, who we convinced him to donate his baby bottle to, actually left him a big, loud remote control car with a nice note of thanks. (The bottle fairy – sister of the dummy fairy and cousin of the tooth fairy – takes away bottles as donations to Santa’s baby reindeers and was the only way we got Daniel to give up his precious bottle of milk).
Now in my day the tooth fairy dealt in cold hard cash – 10p per tooth to be precise – and unless she’s now being sponsored by PC World I doubt she is dishing out computer games.
So I looked it up on the net, as I know the Tooth Fairy has gone all digital since my day. It seems the going rate is anything from £5 to £10 per tooth, but that some kids have reported getting up to £25. From my investigations the amount of money left per tooth seems to vary according to the level of income of the parents. This suggests that the tooth fairy either unfairly favours wealthy families, or she does not wish to encourage poverty stricken parents to use their children's teeth as an alternate, tax-free sources of income.
Daniel’s tooth came loose just before he was presented with a maths award at school. He walked up to the stage with a bloody mouth on him like a recently fed vampire and shook a bloodied hand with the principal, smiled a bloody toothless grin and ran back down to show all his mates the bloody gap in his teeth. A fiver was found under his pillow the next morning as was a letter explaining that as it was his first tooth he was at the top end of the earning scale but subsequent teeth would be far, far less valuable due to volatile markets.
Meanwhile the baby has been putting in his best efforts this week to push his first tooth through roaring red gums.
He wants to go down the traditional route to get his knashers – screaming through the night until morning, drooling everywhere, knawing everything in sight, being extremely grumpy. Quite frankly I’m going to go crazy with tiredness and may opt for the more conventional route – take him to the cosmetic dentist to have a set of Tom Cruise style dentures fitted to save my sanity.

No peeing on the plants

I am very lucky to have little boys with very strong wills and minds of their own. They don’t seem to have a timid bone in their body and aren’t afraid to speak up for themselves.
I had to take our oldest, Daniel, to the emergency doctors on Friday night with very alarming symptoms that read straight off the meningitis warning posters – very high temperature, cold hands and feet, aversion to light and noise, drowsiness, sore joints etc – scary stuff.
When we got to the hospital the doc checked him over and concluded that it wasn’t meningitis but a really bad infection, somewhere. He couldn’t locate the cause of the problem so he poked and prodded and then asked Daniel if he could pee into a bottle so he could eliminate a kidney infection.
Daniel refused to take the order, citing ‘NO WAY, DISGUSTING!’ as his reason.
Now from the time we potty trained Daniel we drummed it into him that he must pee in the toilet and absolutely nowhere else but the toilet. God knows we had a time getting that message across. He would pee everywhere except the toilet – on the living room rug, into his wardrobe, over the base of the stand-up lamp in the living room. In fact if the doc wanted a quite recent sample from Daniel he provided one three years ago into the potted plant in his GP’s office reception area.
As that wouldn’t suffice Daniel was ordered to the hospital bathroom to provide a more up-to-date version. But he wouldn’t go. He was provided with kidney shaped dishes, nice blue cups and clear plastic funny shaped bottles with fancy stickers on the side of it but still no joy. I had created a monster, the child repeated my mantra ‘humans don’t pee anywhere except the toilet. T–O–I¬–L–E–T right?’
So there was a brief exchange between my five-year-old and the doc while I stood there wincing. In the end the inevitable happened – Daniel won the argument and went home without having to wee anywhere, not even into the potted plants at the door, although I did catch him eyeing them up on the way out.

Big cows

Our middle boy, Caolan, visited a working farm with his nursery class this week and came back with some amazing stories – like the pig that threw yucky stuff in Sean’s face, the jumping donkeys and all the amazing flies that they saw. He also saw loads of chicken nuggets running around the farmyard.
He said he saw a gigantic cow, not an ordinary one, a gigantic one. He really couldn’t emphasise how absolutely gigantic this cow was. It was the size of a house, like really gigantic. Like if it stood in the middle of the road and you drove your big monster truck into it, the gigantic cow would just walk away unfazed and you’d be left there with this huge repair bill to get the gigantic cow-shaped dents knocked out of your vehicle. It was that big.
Now I’m quite positive that the good folk at this particular farm aren’t conducting strange size mutation experiments on their animals. It’s probably more like Caolan’s scant experience of seeing farm animals up close has left him rather confused.
It’s his city slicker DNA you see – half New Lodge, half Derry, the generations beyond that more Derry and Ardoyne – that has him confused about how cows and sheep actually work. It’s not their fault, these city folk only ever see cows and sheep on TV or when they’re whizzing by fields in their fancy motor cars.
But thankfully he’s got a quarter of country bumpkin Donegal DNA to keep him right. Therefore he might be able to get his head around the fact that those cows in the fields are far away and not just miniature in size and the one he saw at the farm was not gigantic, just up close.
Now if you understood the above sentence you too could have some country blood flowing in your veins, so thank your lucky stars.
There was some confusion this weekend as to whether the clocks go forward or back. On Sunday we ended up two hours behind everybody else all day when Granny, who should really have accumulated some wisdom with her years, ensured us the clocks actually went back an hour. So while the rest of the modern world put their clocks forward an hour, we were stuck in a two-hour time wharp. All manner of hilarity ensued, like having Sunday dinner when everyone else was going to their beds and arriving at shops an hour after they closed.
I think parents should be exempt from this time change anyway; it’s just another way to torture us through sleep deprivation. Regardless of what time it is kids wake in the morning according to their own body clocks. I had just got them all to sleep to the still ungodly hour of 7am. Now I have to put them to bed what is essentially an hour earlier than they usually do, therefore they rise ready to greet the day at 6am. Since the baby goes to sleep for the night at midnight, which is now 1am he gets up at 6am, which is now 5am.
Confused?
Welcome to my world…..

Miracle make-up

Our baby is either cutting teeth or in intensive training to be a sleep-deprivation torture specialist. I’m betting on the latter. In the past seven days I have had approximately four hours sleep. Not altogether in one long blissful slumber – more like ten minutes here, three seconds there, but it all adds up.
I am so excruciatingly tired I cannot think straight. I drove into the bright red and yellow barrier at the car park because the mush that was once my brain didn’t register that I had to furnish a machine with the ticket in my hand to bring it up. I imagine I thought it worked by magic or telepathy.
The husband immediately took over the driving telling me I was not to go near any form of machinery more advanced or dangerous than a vacuum cleaner until normal sleeping patterns resume.
Even though sleep is severely limited I still have to carry on my normal day-to-day activities as though firing from all cylinders. Regardless of how fall-down tired I am, I have to soldier on through the day getting kids out to school, picking them up, feeding them, washing them, clothing them, listening to demands, ignoring demands, registering complaints, disregarding complaints. It’s totally exhausting.
I have discovered, through the sleepy fog, an amazing invention just for mums. It’s not actually tailored for mums, more for those young, sassy types who like to party all night long and still look fabulous for their glamorous jobs in the morning, but hell it does the same job. It’s a make-up foundation that makes dog-tired skin look like you’ve had 10 hours sleep that turns scarecrows into stunners.
I kid you not this stuff must have been invented by God almighty himself.
I usually walk on by the make-up ladies in department stores – they are, after all, from another planet populated by beautifully orange-skinned people with drawn on eyebrows and I just cannot relate – but one showed me this make up and I will forever be in debt to the people of her planet. It’s called Bourjois 10- hour sleep effect foundation if you’re interested.
It’s been a good six years since I have had even seven hours sleep. And I have accepted the fact that 10 hours sleep is no more than a distant memory from my surly teenage years when rising before noon wasn’t cool. But this stuff will paper over the cracks until the kids leave home, probably in 40 years time.

Sugar freaks

In the blink of an eye our baby is six months old. It was only yesterday that we were bringing him home from the hospital in baggy newborn sleep suits. Now those clothes look like they wouldn’t cover one leg.
After six months of a pure liquid diet the little man is sampling the delights of solid foods – well mushed foods to be precise. We’ve had bananas, pureed apples, pears, sweet potatoes and rice. The trick is, experts say, to introduce as many foods as possible slowly to see what they like.
Although we’ve been on this food trip for just 10 days I’ve already discovered that he’s a spud freak. From country stock you see, quarter Donegal, he knows what’s good for him. None of this fancy pureed butternut squash and chickpea risotto for him – plain spud, no nonsense and he’s happy.
Of course the spud mania will last only as long as we keep sweety related incidents out of his life. It will only take one mouthful of cake or a crumb of chocolate biscuit to turn him from a placid cutie into a cookie monster.
People may call me an organic nerd but I care what goes into my kid’s systems. They never have soft drinks, ready meals or junk food. I’m not a total anti-chocolate dictator but sweet consumption is kept to a bear minimum.
We managed to keep our middle boy Caolan away from sweet stuff until his first birthday. The child was breastfed, weaned on organic vegetables and fed fresh homemade meals until he was one year old. On his first birthday he made a break for it and fell face first into a big sticky birthday cake, managing to consume three or four mouthfuls before we brought him up for air.
God help us that was the very minute our child’s world became a galaxy of delicious sugar laced flavours and day the ‘give me more’ nagging started.
“More sweets, more cake, more juice, more ice cream, more of them round jammy things with the stuff on them that looks like jam, and has that jam stuff in the middle (jammy dodgers)..”
Our two older kids are practically wheelie bins, bottomless pits with regards food consumption. They are what they laughingly call ‘hungry’ on average every 16 minutes, even after meals. I notice it coincides with advert breaks for junk food on the TV, so in line with my new zero tolerance approach the TV will have to go the way of the toy cars who blare ‘Who Let the Dogs Out and the Bob the Builder telephone who annoyingly inquires ‘Can We Build It?’ at 3am and can’t be switched off. We’ll bury them in the back garden for future generations to dig up and enjoy. We’ll think of it as our contribution to world history.

My husband's an alien

We just had the week from norovirus hell.
The sickie bug struck last weekend and claimed our middle son as it’s first victim, as soon as he stopped puking the oldest son came down with it, then the husband got it then I was floored by it after a full seven days sans sleep, wiping floors, moping brows and shoving seemingly endless supplies of bed clothes into the washing machine.
While I was still able to stand up I pleaded with various chemists to give me something to make my two boys better. I described the symptoms – severe grumpiness, inability to be sick into provided receptacles, floor puking preferences, hardcore complaining during all daylight hours, conversing about puke all night through, looking generally down in the mouth – but I was told I couldn’t really give them anything. Apparently this particularly hellish bug is ‘doing the rounds’ and we would have to ride the storm.
The baby didn’t get the bug at all, thank goodness, testament to the power of breastfeeding. He just laughed at the rest of us moping around feeling sorry for ourselves.
It may have been mini-hell, but there were some funny moments. This megabug left us all a bit wacky when it hit – there were some feverish ramblings. The oldest son, who had been making pancakes in school the day before he succumbed to the bug, woke up screaming ‘PLEEEASE, I CAN’T EAT ANY MORE PANCAKES, I’VE HAD 20 and the husband swears I woke up singing the theme tune to ‘Minder’. I always hated Minder.
Hilarity also ensued when we would race to the bathroom, a puking child underarm to discover that all puke that needed to be puked had been puked up enroute. Feeling pukey yet?
We were all floored for at least three days. The husband strangely fought the superbug for just two hours and then bounced back. This is a trend that has been a constant in the 13 years we have been together – he rarely gets sick and when he does he goes the whole hog. I swear I can count on two fingers the times he has actually been ill – once with chickenpox in 2001, once with pleurisy in 2003. He doesn’t ‘do’ flus or colds, tummy bugs, food poisoning, sore throats etc like us mere mortals. I may have married either a robot or an alien.

Moving house

We’re putting our house on the market in the coming weeks and are currently getting it ready for public viewing.
When we were discussing this move we calculated that since we got together some 12 years ago we have moved house 11 times. 10 times around Belfast and once to Derry.
We once moved house to a rented house on a Saturday and moved out the next day so that might not count, we didn’t even unpack the boxes.
When we were in Belfast we must have viewed a hundred of houses over the years. A number stand out in my mind. One had an actual shrine to Gerry Adams with burning candles, the lace table, framed pictures cut out of newspapers, the works. Another had a life size statue of Our Lady at the top of the stairs. At another, which I brought my mother along to view, the gentleman who lived across the street greeted us enthusiastically with a friendly wave from his bedroom window wearing a smile and nothing else.
I don’t want our house to be on a list of scarily memorable houses that viewers speak of at parties to their friends so we have to make changes. We shall downscale our mammoth security measures, what we call our Caolan or Captain Destructo-proofing – or childproofing as other people call it – and paint every available surface magnolia.
This house has been a lived-in family home for four years and has several scars to prove it. The smiley faces my kids have drawn on the landing walls are cute but will have to go. The locks and bolts we installed to keep the kids from stuffing bananas into the DVD player or eating all the soap in the bathroom will have to be taken down. We will have to unscrew things that have been screwed down like, and I kid you not, our TV which was actually bolted to the unit (don’t ask). And screw back the things that have been broken off – like the two gigantic kitchen cupboard doors which Captain Destructo took off the hinges when he was going through his ‘I have superhuman powers and will prove it to you two by breaking everything that I touch’ phase when he was two.
The husband went to the “It’ll do the way it is” school of DIY. You have to have a GCSE in “I’ll do it tomorrow” before they let you in, and an NVQ in “Complaining whilst DIYing” is preferred but not necessarily essential. He got an A in that anyway so he’s set.
When we first moved to this house he put the undercoat on a large wardrobe so that it matched in with the colours in our son’s room. That poor wardrobe has waited four years for the next coat. Our house is littered with half done jobs. The hall walls are a different colour from the stair walls – he’s been ‘doing that tomorrow’ since 2005.
We may have vast experience in moving house but the vast majority of it was before we had children. Now we are going to have to get our home to showhouse standards and keep it there until some other person makes this place their home.
That will mean that the children and the dog will have to live in the garage with all the clutter, toys we can’t bring ourselves to throw out, Christmas trees and broken lawnmowers. They are all just too darn messy to live in the house. The husband and I aren’t allowed to sit down anywhere in the main house and must spend the next three months standing waiting in the hall for viewers, smiling maniacally, telling strangers that our neighbours are lovely and pretending that our house always looks like something out of the Next catalogue.

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…

Happy birthday sunshine

By the time you read this the social event of the year, nay decade, will be in full swing. No, not Barack Obama’s inauguration extravaganza, our Caolan’s 4th birthday party.
My little guy turns four and we are inviting all of his nursery class friends, his young cousins and friends from the street. Don’t ask me why I do it but there are over 30 children expected to attend. That’s 30 pairs of shoes trampling cake into carpets and going crazy on the white stuff (sugar).
We’re having a pirate themed ‘do’ and I’ve enlisted the entire clan to help out. Uncle Aidan will man the Captain Caolan’s Tattoo parlour which will involve him drawing moustaches on faces and anchors or mermaids on forearms. Granny will man the door, furnishing kids with pirate bandanas and eye patches as they come in. The husband will be in charge of weaponry ie dishing out foam swords and making sure kids go home with all their limbs intact and as many eyes and ears as they came in with.
I’m in charge of getting stressed out over burnt birthday cakes, if there are enough cheesy puffs to go round and how other mothers will judge me on my more shabby than chic home.
This time four years ago I was getting stressed out over when and indeed where my second baby would eventually arrive. Parts of Altnagelvin Hospital were under construction and I left it to my husband (as I was in considerable pain) to direct me to the labour wards. Unfortunately he had not been listening at the ante-natal classes when the midwife told us the extremely important information as to where the new maternity wards had been moved to and we found ourselves wandering around a windy construction site filled with burly builders.
Oh how the husband and I laughed as they told us you can’t summon the lifts from this floor and that the only way up or down was via the scaffolding on the outside of the building. Oh how the blood drained from their faces when I informed them that they then would be delivering our next child and that we shall call him Bob, after the famous builder.
So our son arrived, in the real maternity ward an hour later. And from that day and hour he has brought sunshine into our lives. He’s a real sweetheart, has no patience, could eat for Ireland, is afraid of robot spiders, rarely sleeps all night, loves scary Dalecks, hates friendly monsters and can sing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ for two hours straight using the same two verses. He breaks everything – toilets, car doors, fridges, remote controls, cups, mobile phones, shoes – and has boundless energy and a fearless spirit. His favourite phrases are ‘Why?’ and ‘Give me…’ and he makes everyone’s day brighter with his laugh.
And that’s why we love him.
Happy birthday baby bear.
x

Caolan's 4th birthday party

Our middle son turns four years old in a fortnight and I’m planning his first big birthday party at our house.
In previous years he was still young enough to accept a small gathering of family and friends, a bit of dinner, a cake and presents. Now he’s a older he has caught on that birthdays mean inviting his little friends over to trash our house, trample cake into carpets, fight with fellow guests, play music way too loud and throw up in the hall. This apparently, for it seems I have forgotten my wild teenage party-going years when the above description would have been a typical Friday night, is what constitutes a great time.
And so this year he wants a pirate party. He wants pirate plates, cups and cakes plus a real pirate to provide entertainment. Now there lies a problem. Unless the oil tanker hijacking business runs dry off the East African coast I doubt those guys would be looking into the children’s party entertainment business so we’ve booked a magician instead. If he peppers his routine with a few ‘Ahoy me Hartys’ and ‘arrghhh, land ahoy’ and the hardcore pirate fans among the bunch will be happy.
Although I truly love organising parties for my kids I find it all a tad stressful. Previous parties were organised to militaristic precision and went well, albeit with a few hiccups.
There was the time I borrowed my mother’s food processor thinking I could whip up a birthday cake an hour before the party. The thing couldn’t handle the pace and blew up, almost setting the kitchen on fire. As we cleared the black smoke from the kitchen mum told me it had never once done that in the entire 27 years she had used it. She was swiftly dispatched with her still smouldering antique mixer to Sainsburys to get a shop-bought birthday cake which we had to ruffle up a bit and pretend it was homemade.
There’s always the usual bumped heads, cat fights, fisticuffs, puking after too many sweets, falling off the bouncy castle melarky. That’s the adults, the kids are worse.
A friend of our family once bounced a little too enthusiastically on her grandson’s bouncy castle, literally bounced off onto a concrete patio and spend the next two months with her entire upper body in cast. We would often meet her walking around the supermarket, both arms outstretched like a zombie. I dare say if she didn’t laugh about the incident she’d cry.
So here I go again to organise the biggest, best bash my boy has ever seen. I may be stressed but I’m creating memories here. Even if when they grow up the only thing they remember about their parties is the burnt birthday cake…..

Creche for men

It’s a well known fact that the male species can’t handle shopping. Unlike women they approach it like a chore, some even look upon it as a form of torture and therefore it makes them grumpy and irritable.
Taking male humans outside their comfort zone – within five feet of a TV, 10 ft from a source of food or refreshment, off a comfy seat – is never a good idea. And so this year, having four male humans in my family, Christmas shopping has been a mini nightmare.
There’s the whining about going to ‘those women’s shops’ ie any shop that doesn’t sell toys, there’s the “I’m tired” complaints as soon as we leave the car, there’s the grumping at other shoppers when they get in their way, the trolley rage, the queue rage – and that’s just the husband. The boys drag their feet, want everything, throw diva tantrums and all of them need half hour tea and bun breaks.
Women shop in a completely different fashion – for enjoyment. Women I know (as in my die-hard sale loving sister) could shop for ten hours without once taking a break. She once queued outside overnight in freezing conditions just to be the first person into a St Steven’s Day sale. She’s like the Terminator when she gets in there. That’s hardcore, awe-inspiring, inspirational even.
Most men shop in a completely different way – frenzied, flustered, frustrated and maniacal. If you’re in town today look around at all the fish out of water. There’s the man in the chemist buying five boxes of the same talcum powder as a present for his missus, there’s the man trying and failing to remember his partner’s dress size, there’s the guy buying enough bubble bath to sink the Titanic. And they’re all wandering around, looking anxious, bumping into each other. Or there’s the other ones following their partners around looking glum, carrying a mountain of bags and hyperventilating because they’re sighing so loudly and frequently.
I always thought it would be a fantastic to have a type of crèche for husbands during Christmas. Us girls could leave them there, forget about them for a few hours and collect them when all the shopping is done.
They could recreate their comfort zones in this hubby creche – their favourite chairs, a remote control in one hand a cup of tea in the other, football on the box. It would save a lot of Christmas headaches. It’s an idea for next year…
Wishing everyone a lovely, peaceful and happy Christmas from the O’Neills.

Xmas play 2008

By the time you read this my two boys will have rocked the Christmas play at school and may even be signed up to star in Steven Spielberg’s new film.
Our middle child is playing Santa’s little helper in the nursery production of The Christmas Story and our oldest boy is playing a wolf in the Primary Two version of the same.
Caolan has to wear red tights for his part. The little man has taken objection to this as tights are obviously for girls and any pair we see in shops have girls on the front. So I’ve been dragging him around shops asking for red ‘school play tights’ while nodding and winking at shop assistants. They, of course, think I have a severe eye condition or am quite mad and are of no help.
When the teacher told me that Caolan actually has a speaking role in the play I
almost combusted with pride. My little three year old boy has to stand in front of hundreds and speak into a microphone. That should be no bother to him, it’ll be getting the microphone off him after his lines. I just hope he doesn’t insist on giving the audience a rendition of 50 Cent’s In Da Club which, although it is a cracking tune, isn’t really all that festive.
Daniel is a wolf in his play. He doesn’t have a line but has to run around looking quite fierce and growling at everyone. Not a great deal of acting required on his part there, he can just channel his first-thing-in-the-morning self for inspiration.
There was confusion last week when the teacher informed the husband that we had to pay £5.50 towards ‘the play’. The husband wasn’t aware that the kids were actually going out to see a play in a fancy theatre and that it was infact a completely different play to the nativity one in school. Confusion ensued when the husband asked the teacher what the £5 was actually for, and I quote “special effects, pyrotechnics or is there a neon light over the manger?”. The teacher was dumbfounded of course and told him it was an entrance fee.
I then had to listen to a 10 minute phone rant from himself about charging parents to see their own kids sing Jingle Bells before the matter was cleared up.

10 things I now know

Now our baby boy is here I have been spending more time at doctor’s surgeries, queuing for immunisations or baby clinics.
I find there’s nothing quite like waiting for an hour and a half in a room full of screaming children to dampen the spirits. The only good thing about these visits is the camaraderie with fellow mums, the advice, the laughter, the understanding.
One such visit was lightened by conversations on the quirks of motherhood. Below are 10 things I know now.
One – you spend the entire day, morning to night, run ragged doing stuff but actually getting nothing done, and there are quite literally not enough hours in the day. You will often not know what day it is.
Two – you can go days without speaking with another human being. When you do they shy away because you a) have not washed you hair in five days b) didn’t have time to hide the under-eye bags with makeup and c) ramble like a crazy woman because you have forgotten how to interact with fellow earth dwellers.
Three – can quite adequately survive on three hours sleep a night and still muster the strength to function, smile and laugh.
Four – us mothers have no fear, we shall not shy away from projectile vomit, explosive nappies, wee, snot, spiders, spots or spit.
Five – where a luxury break BC (before children) would have been a five star spa weekend in west Donegal, these days it’s a sit down and a luke warm cup of tea.
Six – you’ll spend eight hours getting yourself and the baby ready for a trip into town ‘to go shopping’ only to spend the entire shopping trip in a café feeding the baby until the shops close.
Seven – Your conversation après-baby revolve solely around the baby and it’s bodily functions. Other people will find this boring and tell you to shut up, don’t listen to them. Talk for hours about your birth experience in graphic detail. Show visitors to your house the recording your husband made of the birth with the sound turned up real loud. It’s a right every parent has earned.




Eight – The breastfeeding diet. The thing they don’t tell you in the books is that you can eat whatever you want – mountains of cakes, chips, crisps and buns – and mysteriously not put on any weight while you breastfeed.
Nine – Babies change your life, put paid to your social life, takeover your house and car, spend all your money and cause no end of worry but they are worth every single penny spent, every single grey hair, every single night out that never was.
Ten –There is nothing, nothing like the smell of a newborn baby’s head or the sheer bliss of being wrapped up under the duvet, feeding a chubby, contented baby while the world sleeps outside.