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…..