Jail's no place for kids....

Due to the fact that my baby daughter has got herself into a non-stop round-the-clock feeding routine I am often found sat in front of the telly these days.
Finn has helpfully buried the remote control somewhere out in the front garden in a mass grave which includes a monster truck, three plastic soldiers and a half consumed apple.
We haven’t yet purchased a combined metal/plastic/rotting food detector to locate these items so I am forced to watch whatever channel is on – because hauling myself off the sofa and across the room is simply too much like hard graft and the boy hasn’t yet mastered working the buttons to fulfil my channel switching bidding.
Something happens to a person’s mind when they are subjected to too much daytime TV. I can physically feel my brain cells exploding while viewing the morning entertainment shows. And as for the chat shows, it takes a lot of coffee and chocolate biscuits to chase away the dark clouds of despair after witnessing yet another poor young mother air her dirty laundry for the entertainment and amusement of a vulturous audience.
And not only am I subjecting myself to such drivel, the youngest boy is learning by the example set by Mr Daytime TV. If this continues he will begin to handle his toddler group disagreements by suggesting the other little folk ‘talk to the hand, coz the face ain’t listening’, chanting ‘DNA test, DNA test, DNA test’ loudly at random parents and informing little girls in the group that he ‘ain’t yo baby daddy’.
In a move to salvage what little working brain cells we have left I decided to tune into a few kid’s programmes instead. One, in particular, made me ponder what influence aforementioned Mr TV – someone I trusted with the education and supervision of my children – was having on my kids.
This programme was set in a prison, as in a joint where convicts hang out.
The Slammer, as it is called, is a fictitious prison for entertainers who have ‘committed crimes against show business’ ¬– like being totally rubbish or dropping a ball while juggling as opposed to grievous bodily harm, armed robbery or actual murder.
The prison has all the trappings of a real joint except the wings are adorned with beautifully coloured triangle flags and balloons. The inmates – instead of serving their time and facing a parole board – earn their freedom through the medium of dance and song in the Freedom Show performed in front of a crowd of invited school children.
The mind boggles.
The head honcho of the joint is a big, jolly governor who wears a spangled white suit and gold bow tie, you know like the real ones do. There’s even a long-term ‘resident’ of the prison although apparently he’s not doing a 10-year stretch for manslaughter he’s inside because he’s a very bad ventriloquist.
Now apart from feeling rather uncomfortable about a children’s programme being set in a prison – call me strange but I much prefer the old tea shop or nursery school setting – I object to the fact that the programme makers are glamorising the jail setting.
I often threaten my children with jail – ‘if you don’t tidy your room I’m going to call the cops and they’re going to haul your sorry ass off to jail’ and ‘you can get a three-year term for telling your father to shut up’ – and I don’t want them imaging this place full of colourful bunting, friendly, helpful staff, chips for dinner and daily variety shows for their entertainment. I want them to imagine cold windowless cells, grey-coloured slop for dinner and terrifying cell mates with names like ‘Skinner’ and ‘Buckets of Blood’
I want to instil in my kids a healthy fear of breaking the law and jail in general. Programmes like this, regardless of their comedy aspect, might give today’s kids a false representation of what incarceration is actually like – some of today’s youngsters might be sorely disappointed when they grow up to be criminals and find that jail isn’t half as much fun as it looked on the telly. Hell, some of these kids might fall into a life of crime just to get a chance to see Diversity or Aleshia Dixon in a prison concert.
Come back Mr Jeremy Kyle all is forgiven.

Watch your back Mr Kipling..

Three weeks into the new school term and we’ve all come down with the lurgy bug from hell. This particularly nasty bug – we’re talking dizzy heads, razor-blade tonsils, severe grumpiness, hallucinations, coughing like a 60-a-day smoker – claimed the youngest boy as it’s first victim. As soon as he ceased with the hacking cough the oldest son came down with it, then the middle boy got it then finally 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.
The baby has stayed strong and bug free throughout – testament to the power of breastfeeding.
And as usual, the husband didn’t get the bug. This, he swears, is because of his superior O’Neill genes. The O’Neills of old, he says, spent their days out on the battlefields of Ireland fighting and hacking off heads – and in the process getting a good bit of fresh air – while the Brehans, my smarty pants law-making ancestors, spent their days in darkened, dusty rooms reading books and being generally wise and condescending.
And so we all spent our youngest son’s second birthday party attempting and failing miserably to overdose on sugar-based products and consume salty snacks. I know we’ll look back and laugh at the camcorder footage of us all wheezing and puffing while blowing out the candles and of the ‘Happy Birthday’ chorus peppered with bouts of loud hacking, rattling coughing.
Despite my sorry state I still managed to bake the boy a cake. I modelled my masterpiece on the white bunny rabbit he so lovingly named Rambo. The cake was a glorious concoction of sponge cake and coconut buttercream icing with a few chocolate buttons for the eyes, nose and mouth. When I unveiled it at the party everyone assumed it was a little dog. I couldn’t find the words to tell them it was supposed to be a rabbit. I just bit my lip and tried not to cry.
A few years ago (when my cake baking abilities were still sub-standard) I made the oldest boy a cake in the shape of a white racing car. I was so pleased with my creation I showed it off to my sister who later described it as, and I quote, ‘a roast chicken cake’. I later described her as ‘a cow’ and said she was jealous of my far superior cake decorating abilities. In hindsight she may have had a point. The thing looked like a raw chicken with go-faster stripes down the two sides. I can’t imagine what the attending children thought….‘Mummy, why is Daniel’s mum asking us to sing while he blow outs candles stuck on top of an uncooked chicken?
I used to be a rubbish cook. In my student years I would regularly muck up making even Pot Noodles. I literally couldn’t put the hot water into the plastic container without having a minor scalding-related catastrophe. I once made a cheesecake for the husband –who was then my boyfriend – which had the consistency of vegetable soup. He ate it and from that day to this when someone mentions cheesecake in conversation he makes an involuntary retching motion. Years later he married me despite my glaringly obvious flaws in the kitchen. That’s true love right there people.
My cooking has improved enormously over the years. This is partly due to the fact that children are brutally honest when it comes to food. If something looks like boke – which my cheesecake certainly did – they will inform the chef in graphic detail. So I bought myself a cook book, studied hard and am now renowned in our family for my cooking. And it’s for the right reasons, not for making stew that tastes like socks actually smell.
My cakes have also risen in standards in the years since. It is now a rule that I bake a cake for every birthday, anniversary and celebratory occasion in our family. People actually look forward to sampling my next creation as opposed to the past when they would stock up on the indigestion remedies and make sure the doctor’s surgery has a spare appointment slot for the next day.
For the middle boy’s last birthday I created an edible dinosaur world complete with volcano. For the oldest boy’s affair I made a massive Ben10 Omnitrex cake. The husband usually requests vanilla cream cake for his birthdays and I fashioned a strawberry marshmallow pink christening cake for the little girl’s big day last week – although the marshmallows were, in all honesty, a last minute idea used to mask the fact that I made the icing a tad too runny.
I’m not one to blow my own trumpet but Mr Kipling, if you’re reading this, watch your back, I now too make exceedingly good cakes.

The Green-Eyed Little Monster....

On the day I was born my father brought my 9-year-old brother and 7-year-old sister to see me in the hospital. It was not a particularly pleasant meet and greet. My brother asked if I could be taken back and swapped for a boy baby. He said he absolutely did not want another flipping sister, he was already quite fed up with the one he had. My sister stated quite clearly that she was our Daddy’s favourite and that me, blowing in here with my chubby cheeks and cutesy gurgles would not, repeat not, be stealing her crown.
I suppose the passing of 35 years has seen them arrive at some form of acceptance of me. The same can’t be said about our littlest lad. The passing of seven weeks has seen little or no acceptance of our baby girl.
He uses several methods to show his displeasure at her arrival – from giving her a welcome slap on her face to simply pretending she doesn’t exist. His new trick is to stand beside her pram while she slumbers peacefully and yelling ‘Argggghhhh Baybeee!!!’ in his best and loudest scary voice.
We held the baby’s christening at the weekend. The priest conducting the ceremony informed us beforehand that this was the first baptism he had done in this, his new parish and that he was more than a tad nervous. We sat up in the front seats of the packed chapel and threw him smiles of encouragement and thumbs up signals every so often.
There are a few reasons why we don’t sit in the front seats in chapel and those reasons are called Daniel, Caolan and Finn. At least from the back of the church it’s easier to field questions about God, religion, the universe and everything without being given the evil eye by the priest for talking during Mass.
Daniel, who turned around to whisper to those seated behind him that he finds the whole ‘God thing’ really boring and that he was missing ‘Monster Jam’ to be here, sighed dramatically and loudly throughout the ceremony. I thought it unwise to threaten him with violence in the house of God but I pulled a muscle in one of my eyelids by overenthusiastically issuing a variety of ‘wait until I get you home’ looks.
Caolan, the boy who can ask approximately one question per second and never waits for an answer, inquired from the front seat what the big deal was about God. He also wondered aloud if ‘that fella’, as in the priest, ‘ever talks about anything else except God’ and why ‘that boy’, as in Jesus, was holding his heart in his hand (as seen in the Sacred Heart picture), why said heart was glowing and how said heart could properly function when he was wearing it outside his jumper as opposed to under his skin.
As the husband tried to hush the boy he turned his line of questioning to other things. He wondered if God was friends with Santa – who is also all seeing – and if God believed in vampires. Without taking a breath he wondered why God was actually given the title ‘Almighty’, if he was in possession of laser beam eyes and also if he was as tall as Godzilla or in the same height bracket as, say, Spiderman. He also questioned why no one has ever caught sight of this God fella. If we’re honest with ourselves, people, these are the questions we’d all like answered.
He continued to interrogate the husband while I tried to free a hand to render him either unable to speak – or if that didn’t work, unconscious – and concluded loudly with a ‘we’ve been here for like, half and hour, and he has just went on and on about God, God, God the entire time.’
The littlest lad got fed up with the focus being solely on his sister and while we stood around the water font he entertained the congregation with a strange dance reminiscent of drunken Ollie Reed on the Terry Wogan show. I don’t imagine the church choir knew ‘Wild Thing’ with which to accompany his moves but I don’t think he cared much. He was determined to steal his sister’s thunder on her special day.
The rest of the service was spent physically restraining the boy from getting up and getting down, strutting around in the aisles like a mini Mick Jagger.
The green-eyed little monster has a future on the X-Factor for sure.

Back to 'normal'

We have finally returned to ‘normal’ after the long, long, jeepers creepers they were so very long months of summer. Normal in our house means everyone getting up grumpy in the morning, shouting a lot while mouth is full of breakfast cereal/toast/toothpaste and much finding of shoes and losing of minds.
Getting four kids ready and out the door is a task not for the weak. I know my kids will grow up thinking their mother was either a retired drill sergeant or directly descended from some random nasty European military dictator or other.
From the minute they rise in the morning I yell a chorus of orders. ‘You! Eat!’, ‘You! Shoes!’ and ‘You! No talking, brush!’, ‘You! Stop looking so cute!’ with a load of finger pointing thrown in for dramatic effect.
Such was my hurry to get the lads back to where they really belong that we showed up at the school, uniformed, suited and booted, the day before term officially started.
We rose early on Monday morning. I fed babies and threw bowls of breakfast at various people, shouted a little, told individuals to remove their sleeping, slobbering faces from the kitchen table, hunted for shoes under beds, cursed a lot and tamed some seriously unruly hair.
I packed them all into the car and set off with 10 minutes to spare until the bell (hey, get me). I should have guessed when we pulled out onto the almost deserted main road that things were amiss. I should have realised when we got to the school and the only thing moving was a big bit of tumbleweed gently bobbing along past the very locked gates.
I drove at high speed past the school, kids squealing with delight from the back. I gave a big ups to Jesus and Ford Motors for inventing tinted windows so that other ‘normal’ humans going about their ‘normal’ day-to-day business – like going shopping in their pyjamas – couldn’t see my utter mortification. And I’m glad that the windows offered some UV protection because I wouldn’t have wanted any innocent members of the public to have been scorched by the severity of my pure, undiluted embarrassment.


So off we went home to suffer another day in each other’s company. And by that I truly mean to enjoy the last day before the summer holidays actually concluded.
These ‘hiccups’ are all too common these days. I blame lack of sleep; the husband blames lack of brain cells.
I waited in last week for the obligatory visit from the health visitor. I arranged for the older boys to be minded so that we’d have a reasonably quiet house. I waited and waited and cursed a bit for having my day held back – for I am one extremely busy lady, really I am.
I cursed this lovely woman for keeping me from drinking coffee, eating chocolate biscuits and watching rubbish daytime TV programmes in peace. Heaven forbid she would have called half way through Murder She Wrote and I would have converse with her and miss who actually killed the rural hotel owner. I just couldn’t risk that.
Three hours later I was positively pacing the living room floor. When the TV presenter mentioned that it was Monday, not Tuesday I realised that the late health visitor wasn’t actually late, she was early. As in not due until the next day early.
A few days later I had the baby in town and met an old friend who cooed over my little girl and asked me what we had named her. I swear there was a 25 second delay where the question reached my ears, made it’s way through the sea of dead and malfunctioning cells in my brain, processed the question, registered it and sent back a message for communication through my mouth. My friend stood gawking at me while this slow process progressed and breathed again when my brain and mouth worked once more in unison and allowed me to utter my daughter’s name. I told her the child is to be christened Maolíosa Grace but for some strange reason about our house she is referred to only as Maggie Moo mirroring the nicknames of my boys – DanGo, Caolan Bailen and Finnbo O’Neillio.
Things may have gone back to routine with regards schools, but it’ll be a rather frosty day in hell when the word ‘normal’ is used to describe any member of the O’Neill house.