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.