Caolanisms 2010

My middle boy, Caolan, is five years old today and in celebration I thought I’d give you all a small glimpse into his crazy world, in the form of a few classic Caolanisms. Don’t stay too long, as prolonged exposure can lead to permanent derangement.

“Rebecca threw up in school today. How come girl’s puke is pink? Is boy’s puke blue then? So how come when I throw up it’s like green. Does that mean I’m an alien?”

Accompanying his father to the pet shop to buy a special whistle to stop our dog from barking.
“I know we need a whistle, but I don’t think the dog will ever be able to blow that, it’s too small, he’ll probably swallow it and choke. Also will a whistle not get annoying after a while too? I think I'd prefer to hear him bark, if he's whistling all day long it will make my brain hurt."

“What colour is my brain? And will it not fall out of my ear when I sleep on my side?”

His reaction to our car engine going up in flames in busy city centre traffic last Christmas.
“That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Do it again.”

To Santa on a visit to our local winter wonderland village.
Santa: “Hello little boy. What would you like for Christmas?”
Caolan: “Yip, hello. Are you really from Lapland? See those tissues on your table there, they’re from Tescos. Did you bring them over with you or did you buy them here?”
Santa: “What’s your name?”
Caolan: “Caolan, what’s yours?”
Santa: “John.”

To my mother in a buttering-up exercise regarding chocolate biscuits.
“Granny, there’s a girl in school with yellow hair and she’s beautiful. But not as beautiful as you. You’re a total babe, missus.”

On being questioned as to why he was attempting to flush a bath towel down the toilet.
“I was just trying to unblock it.”

“Stop nagging, you’re giving me a sore head, like really sore. I told you already I will not break any more windows. God almighty woman will you stop going on about it.”

On being questioned as to why his bedroom wall was covered in red and green poster paint at Caolan height.
“It wasn’t me. It must have been the dog. He’s kinda tall too”.

“Why do we have to have another baby? There’s hardly any room in the back seat of the car as it is. And what about the sofa? How's another baby going to fit on there. It's just mad."

To the little boy who arrived at his party with a card (with a monetary gift enclosed)
“Where’s my present? You can’t come in unless you’ve brought me a present.”

Just some of the reasons we love our boy. Happy birthday sunshine.
x

Blood and gore does not a good party make

We’re having a shindig for our middle boy next week, he turns five. Now I don’t know who he has been conversing with, I suspect perhaps J-Lo’s party planner – a woman familiar with big budget productions – but the child wants a dinosaur party complete with a seven foot volcano with dry ice and smoke. He wants a life-like dinosaur with a motion sensor (that’s on sale at the toy shop for a mere £450). And he has also demanded, I mean requested, that we construct an elaborate dinosaur bone yard in the back yard and kit all his mates out as palaeontologists.
What the boy wants and what the child gets will probably be two completely different things.
The child will get a few balloons, a dinosaur card and a cake that I burnt down the kitchen to bake. We can’t break with tradition.
Regular readers will know that in reality I go all out for my kid’s birthday parties. None of this hour in the adventure centre and cake for my lads. Oh no. It’s three weeks of hard core stressing over what other mas will think of my house, 30 screaming kids, kitchens on fire, kamikaze-related bouncy castle injuries, permanently painted limbs and mental trauma caused by discovering doggy graves in neighbouring gardens. That and the twice-annual threat of divorce over the husband’s glaring lack of artistic skills and enthusiasm for 4-year-old birthday party planning.
Case number one – the oldest boy’s last race car themed birthday when 10 minutes before the party started the husband displayed a startlingly lack of preparation and indeed thought by taping three bin bags to the living room floor, drawing a chalk line down the middle and calling it a race track.
Case number two – the time he stapled (a skill, by the by, he does not excel in) crisp boxes together and told a crowd of 4-year-olds they were racecars. Maybe had I slipped a bottle of whiskey into their birthday punch drinks they might well have believed him. From where I, and the kids stood, they looked like badly stapled crisp boxes. I think the word one of the children used was, and I quote, ‘super cr*p’.
They are still talking about it in the playground. I think most of the time parents just bring their kids along just to see what hilarity ensued when I let the husband loose unsupervised with a pair of jaggy-edge scissors.
I will not stand idly by as my reputation as a fantabulous party organiser is ripped to shreds by lack of artistic flair or an ‘it’ll do’ attitude.
The husband was this week taken off planning duties when he suggested that we compliment the dinosaur theme by splashing fake blood on the walls and put the ‘man getting eaten by T-Rex on the toilet’ scene from Jurassic Park 1 on loop on a big screen in the kitchen.
This party will be the stuff of legends, for all the right reasons this time…

Are you listening Feis Mammies?

So yummy mummy Kirsty Young has accused us ordinary mums of seeing our children as an extension of our own successes. She thinks that by plonking our offspring in front of Baby Einstein, sending them out to Mandarin Chinese lessons and forcing them to attend ballet lessons we’re trying to turn Junior into the next Sir Isaac Newton, and therefore living out our own failed dreams.
The millionaire mum, who has two young girls, says stay at home mothers are the very worst culprits. Thanks Kirsty.
I’ll admit hovering around the ‘How to Have the Most Brainy Child in the World’ department in Easons and even picking up ‘Quantum Physics for Toddlers’ and seriously pondering a purchase.
So how does one know if one is a pushy parent? I considered the following online questionnaire and have submitted my answers, maybe you should too. I am eagerly awaiting my official Pushy Parent membership badge and bumper sticker in the post.

Question 1 – Do you give options?
No, I just make demands and expect them to be carried out, to the letter, on time, every time.

Question 2 – Do you hear the word ‘no’?
Of course I do, but only when I say it.

Question 3 – Are your reactions appropriate?
They certainly are. I find screaming and throwing a strop to be perfectly appropriate behaviour for a grown up who doesn’t get their own way. Also bashing stuff with tree branches and kicking household appliances.

Question 4 – Have others complained about your ‘pushiness’?
Yes they have and most have found a stay in hospital is often as refreshing as a week-long holiday.

Perhaps I’m not a fully fledge Pushy Parent yet, but as my kids grow I will endeavour to put opportunities their way. I’ll buy violins, drum kits, trumpets. Whatever they show an interest in I’ll encourage. Not because I want them to be an extension of my own obvious greatness, I just want my kids to be the best they can be. It’s their life, their future.
For example, my oldest son seems to like all things medical so I encourage this behaviour by letting him watch Casualty and cheering while he operates on Action Man’s dodgy ticker with a desert spoon. I do this not because I myself tried and failed to be a doctor but because, in my twilight years I quite like the idea of him becoming a medical professional and therefore having prescription drugs on tap to aid my planned hardcore eccentricity.
My middle child wants to be a rock star. I encourage his singing and air guitar antics because in my eccentric twilight years I quite fancy the idea of hanging around rock concerts in my prescription drug-induced blissful state.
My youngest child will hopefully decide to progress from sticking magnetic numbers on the front of the fridge to become a bank manager. Thus funding his old mum’s prescription drug and rock concert preferences.
So there you have it Kirsty Young. You haven’t got all us pushy mums worked out. Try and stick me in a category will you? Well, when you work it out, stick that in your pipe and smoke it. I suppose you’re now going to tell me that letting children under seven smoke pipes is bad parenting too Kirsty?

Hey Santa!

The Christmas school holidays are over tomorrow and although it was great spending time with the kids, it’s like that old saying: ‘Kids are great but it’s great being able to hand them back’, like to the parenting experts – their school teachers.
Not that they aren’t glad to be going back also. A certain type of cabin fever sets in in the O’Neill house when we spend too much time together under the one roof – for example more than two hours. People start sniping and getting agitated, calling one another names, insulting each other’s appearance, pointing out annoying habits etc. And the kids can get a tad tetchy too.
The last two days Daniel and Caolan have spent the day sitting in their rooms, playing with their Santa toys and presumably writing letter of reply to Santa, noting their dissatisfaction at their lot this year.


Santa,
This is Daniel and Caolan O’Neill. I suppose you’re kinda wondering why we’re writing to you this late after Christmas. But I suppose you could take this as being an early warning for next year.
Well, we would very much like to clear up certain things that have occurred since the beginning of the month. While filled with illusion we wrote you a letter asking for an Nintendo DS, A Wii and a PSP each. We positively destroyed our brains with school work the whole year. Not only was I, Daniel, the first in my class, but I had the best marks in the whole school. I'm not going to lie to you, Santa, there is not one single person in our entire neighbourhood that behaved better than me and my brother. Like no one.
Well, on Christmas morning we woke to the sound of toy trains chugging along a toy track. You totally disregarded our wish list and left us educational toys and things that look slightly second hand. We wanted a bloody Nintendo DS, A Wii and a PSP each. We wrote you three letters, told you in person twice. Do you even remember meeting us and making those promises. Were you infact drunk?
What were you thinking leaving us some books, a train set, a remote control car and a few random action figures? You are clearly senile. You are not welcome back next year, we’re blocking the chimney with the large lego blocks you left us. Get past that fatty!
You have taken us for fools the entire year. You gave that bad boy across the street a quad bike. Are you crazy? He was a maniac behind the wheel of that pedal tractor you got him last year. The people of this neighbourhood will never again be safe to walk the streets.
Don’t come back next year, you’re not welcome. You come to this house we’ll torch your sleigh and you’ll be walking back to the North Pole, just like we have to since you didn’t leave us those Lightning McQueen bikes we asked for.
Regards, well not really
Daniel and Caolan O

My resolutions....

Well after much pondering I present to you my New Year resolutions. Understand that these are set in stone. Understand that I will most positively, definitely stick to, no matter what – even if it upsets the balance of the universe. A tad dramatic, yes, but that’s how very serious I am about stuff.

1. I will try to be much less serious about stuff, relax more with regards insignificant details, beginning January 3rd at 07:35:24am GMT exactly.

2. I will try to be less rude and hostile to my bank manager – I will answer his persistent phone calls and desist in crossing the street when I see him. I may even invite him for Christmas dinner next year and introduce him to one of my single cousins. A bank manager in the family would be very handy for getting credit which I can ill afford to pay back.

3. I will try to be more rude and hostile to the alternative religious freaks/catalogue salespeople/telephone providers who call to my door three times a week at the crazy teatime hour trying relentlessly to convert me to their random religion/fashion boutiques/telephone services. Instead of listening I shall perfect my mental powers of persuasion, or the Vulcan death grip, to convert them all to the Jedi faith.

4. I shall attempt to improve my concentration, ahmm what was I saying there? And keep my mind on one thing….oh look a bar of chocolate.. at any one time.

5. I will no longer waste my time relieving the past; instead I will spend it worrying fiercely about the future.

6. Invent something, like time travel or a space-age device that sucks up crumbs and small household debris into a magic bag that can be emptied straight into the bin. I have been talking about this for years and eventually someone is going to get there before me. What? Who’s Hoover when they’re at home?
7. Give more strangers advice about how to raise their children. While I have never claimed to be an expert in raising children, I do have some pretty strong opinions on the subject developed over years of doing things exactly right and without flaw. I shall also try to be open to others' ideas on parenting, misguided and completely deranged though they may be.
9 Learn and use my children's names properly without prefixing them with ‘Jesus Christ!’, ‘God Almighty’ or ‘PUT THAT KNIFE DOWN!’
10. Promise to never to make another ridiculous and impossible-to-stick-to resolution list again.
Wishing each and every one of you a peaceful and prosperous New Year. Here’s hoping all your dreams come true, even the one about losing 10lbs in January.
Love and warmest wishes from the O’Neills.