Why, why, why, why, why, why, why?

I can handle the terrible twos, the tantrums, the screaming for sweets and stuff in supermarkets, the relentless cheek, the constant messiness and noise that being a parent brings. But carrying one particular parental cross really frays my nerves. The ‘Why?’ phase.
They’ve all gone through it. But a bit like childbirth you forget about the pain once it’s all over.
We are wading through the ‘Why?’ phase at the moment with our youngest son. Up until around two weeks ago he was satisfied with the standard ‘because I said so!’ response to the various instructions that I handed out.
But then he woke up one morning and, like those annoying application forms which demand 300 word answers to questions that really only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, he needed substantially more information.
“Stop drawing on the wall,” I would say.
“Why?” he would reply.
“Because I said so,” I’d say back.
“Why?” he would inquire.
“Because your father spend his entire weekend painting that wall and when he sees the artwork you have just fashioned on it he most certainly will not have a big smiley face like the one you just drew.”
“Why?” he would say.
“Because he’s a man, because he takes his DIY very seriously. Because he’s had to paint the exact wall 15 times since July.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because the people who invented washable paint obviously didn’t test it in a house with such a hardcore graffiti artist such as yourself Finn.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know, maybe they were experiencing budget cuts. Perhaps they tested the durability in a house full of little girls. Or maybe they haven’t discovered that markers bought from pound shops are practically invincible when it comes to cleaning.”
“Why?” he asked.
It would be worth it if they were actually learning things from all those bogus questions, but that's not really what's happening at this stage. I doubt he’s even absorbing the highly detailed and researched answers I’m giving him. It’s exhausting.
“Don’t eat those dog biscuits, Finn,” I say.
“Why?” he asks, crunching and chewing.
“Because they are for dogs.” I say, fishing them out of his mouth.
“Why?” he cries, distraught that I am denying him their chalky taste.
“Scientists in a big laboratory develop these food stuffs especially for canines. Enriched with vitamins and minerals, which promote a shiny coat and healthy teeth. They do nothing whatsoever for humans. Plus they taste like cardboard.”
“Why?”
“Because they are for dogs and dogs can’t write letters of complaint to major canine food manufacturers about lack of taste and flavour.”
“Why?”
“Because dogs can’t hold pens properly!”
“Why?”
“Argghhhh!!!!”
Yes, this can be quite annoying. But when I get frustrated I look into my baby boy’s blue eyes and I ask myself, how is this child going to know if pot pourri tastes nice, if dogs can type and pound shop pens are indestructible unless he asks me? If he didn’t ask why 125 times per day on subjects as varied as petrol and the moon, how will he learn useless facts about life?
It’s my job to teach him. And teach him well I will.
“Why?”…..

Worzil Gummage vs Dame Judy Dench hair dilemma

We always have music of some description in our house. The kids like certain types of music – mostly awful rock from the eighties due to the bad influence of my husband. When I have them locked down and trapped in my moving car I try and instil some culture into their brains with a little Irish and classical music, but they tend to shout over the top of the soothing tunes until I turn it off.

Daniel, our oldest is particularly fond of eighties music and the husband has notions that he will be the one to grow up, become a rock star and let his aging parents live a life of luxury at last.
Unfortunately the teachings of his father, featuring Powerpoint presentations on the finer points of AC/DC and regular YouTube viewings of Thunderstruck, have spectacularly backfired and instead of wanting to learn to play the guitar, the boy instead just wants to grow his hair long.

Once every eight weeks or so we take the older boys along to the barbers in town. They have got the same short back and sides in that barbers since they were knee high. Daniel refused to go a few weeks ago, stating he was going to let his hair grow long from here on in to see what happened.

I spent the following weeks looking at my boy, his hair growing wild and free, sprouting up in clumps at the top, sticking out at the sides, curly in parts, poker straight at others.
I know in his head he has an idea of what he wants his hair to look like, perhaps he imagines himself like the guy on the front of Mills and Boon novels, all flowing, shimmery locks of such glossy power they make girls faint. But unfortunately, as well as a bad taste in music, my boy has inherited his father’s brand of strangely behaving hair.
My husband is probably the only man on the planet who can grow a naturally multi-coloured beard. And the hair on that man’s head is curly at the crown and poker straight at the back and sides. If he were to grow it long it would result in some manner of terribly frightening curly mullet.
A few days ago I bluffed the boy into thinking that hair grows twice as fast when it’s cut a bit and persuaded him to let me loose with a pair of electric cutters. He was rather apprehensive, and wisely so, as the last time I was let loose with the clippers he ended up looking like Dame Judy Dench.
So I set about trimming the wild locks, going at his hair with the same enthusiastic motion and vigour I display when tackling unruly hedges in my mother’s garden. The end result was a tidy hairdo that would be more fitting to an accountant than rock star.
The boy looked in the mirror and went berserk. He accused me of making him look stupid, of stripping him completely of his street cred. He said his friends would no longer want to be his friends now that he looked like Daniel O’Donnell and that I had completely ruined all chances of him ever fronting a heavy metal band.
The next day he refused to go to school. In the end we had to dig him out a woolly hat from the depths of the hot press and I had to write a note to his teacher.
Dear Ms Tracey, Daniel will be wearing a woolly hat for the foreseeable future in class as, due to a dreadful electric clippers accident, he looks like Dame Judy Dench (again) instead of Michael Hutchinson. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. Thanks! Daniel’s Mum.
It’ll grow out and he’ll be back fronting his Primary Five class heavy metal band again in no time.

Vampire parenting

My friend and his wife became parents for the first time a few weeks ago. They live in another part of the country but by the power of Facebook we have been able to follow the first few weeks of their beautiful baby boy’s journey, and their own transition into the super scary world of parenthood.
We’ve seen the hazy, dazed first photos from the hospital. The pictures of him arriving home, complete with the picture of my friend driving 25mph on the motorway. We watched over the next few days as the shellshock sank in and the bags under the eyes got a little heavier. And we’ve seen their boy get cuter by the day.
They are hopelessly in love with their boy, as all parents tend to be, and at times hopelessly lost in new parentsville.
My friend told me he didn’t sleep the night they brought his boy home from the hospital so concerned was he that the mere act of closing his eyes would cause the child to stop breathing. And when the child coughed in the night, he and his wife contemplated ringing the doctor. In fact, he confessed, they had thought on rushing him back to the hospital. We’ve all been that particularly neurotic soldier, I told him, and explained our own newborn Exorcist-worthy projectile boke experience complete with phone calls to the doctor and parish priest.
My friend has traded his nippy, sporty car in for a sensible, reliable one with bigger boot space. He swears that the tiny bundle of cuteness that he adores has totally turned their world upside down and inside out. The child is three weeks old and he is already worrying on university fees.
I suppose it’s because I have been down this road once, twice or four times that people like to bounce ideas off my addled, sleep-deprived brain. Usually they get nonsense replies to their inquiries, but from time to time, even I have to admit, I talk sense.
I told my friend becoming a parent is a lot like becoming a vampire. Your old, human self – the one used to the nice cars, not worrying about stuff, a reasonably clean and presentable house, sitting on chairs void of sticky sweet substances which are a nightmare to wash out – dies in a painful and dramatic way. But, I told him, you do come out the other side of this humongous transformation with immortality, superhuman strength and a penchant for fresh blood. OK, perhaps without the taste for blood, but the other stuff is true.
Then there’s the love. The massive love. The boundless, eternal, life changing, enormous wealth of parental love. Before your own child comes along you look at friend’s babies and perhaps think ‘super cute’. They are maybe on a par with puppies, those baby polar bears you see on posters and fluffy kittens. But when your own child comes along you would happily, without hesitation throw yourself under a bus to save them from harm. That you would gladly take on a ferocious grizzly bear with your bare hands if it threatened your offspring. Having children gives you superhuman strength. Parental feelings are that powerful. That terrifying.
When you hold your son or daughter in you arms, feel their warm body next to yours, feel their warm, gentle breath on your skin. That is a thing of beauty, nothing on earth can compare. Not the most beautiful art, the soul stirring music. Everything pales. Those little wonders is what living life is all about.
When they giggle and laugh at nothing but your smile, they are sharing the meaning of life. That joy, of simply being alive, of enjoying that exact minute, enjoying every moment is what they are ultimately teaching us. As we grow older we forget. Our children are there to remind us. Never mind yesterday, don’t worry about tomorrow. Live for this moment and enjoy it. Laugh, love, live.
The highs of parenting are so high it’s a wonder we don’t get vertigo, and the first few weeks of parenthood are a mixture of dizzying highs and lows.
My advice to him and to all new parents is the same. It’s best to just buckle up and just enjoy the ride.

Zombie Shepherd? That's the Christmas play attire sorted...

My kids love Halloween. The love it because they’re handed a full licence to eat sweets and the air is full of frights and fireworks. And surprises for the Mums and Dads.
We went for a great Halloween spooky walking tour with City Tours in Derry (www.derrycitytours.co.uk). There was howling winds, gothic Cathedrals, our ancient city walls, ghost stories, gravediggers, ghouls, banshees, scary monks and zombies. It was superb. We arrived home cold, wet and well and truly spooked before 10pm.
At 10.15pm my middle son told me that his class were having a costume party the next day and he needed an outfit. Being a competitive character, like myself, he insisted the standard was exceptionally high, better than everyone else in the class, nay the school, nay the universe. I was not to pull together just any old rubbish, he wanted one of award-winning standard as there was a bar of chocolate and a 50 pence piece up for grabs and he wasn’t going to lose out on that kind of cash to no cowboy or fairy princess. I, of course, hadn’t bought him a costume yet since Halloween was three whole days away and it was far too soon to be bothering with stuff like that.
This type of scenario normally unfolds the night before a school Christmas play when Caolan, after swearing blind for weeks that the school will provide all costuming needs, wakes screaming at midnight to inform me that he in fact needs full shepherding regalia and paraphernalia for the next morning as he has a speaking part and he will be ‘stage front’ for an hour, and therefore in all the parent’s photographs and camcorder footage. Hence the reason why my son has appeared, for the past three years, in a fleece sofa throw, with a pillowcase tied around his head by one of his father’s belts and holding a yard brush to act as a shepherding staff.
In those moments on Thursday night, when images of me sewing and snipping until the small hours loomed in my horizon, I contemplated sending that child into school in his DIY soft furnishing combo/shepherd’s uniform. But no, the boy wanted to be a zombie mummy. How about a zombie shepherd, I enquired, thinking with a little white face paint and perhaps a few dark circles under the eyes I might just pull this together. No, an Egyptian mummy zombie with no links to the shepherding profession whatsoever was requested. Nothing more, nothing less would be accepted.
And so began a night that saw me hunt out my baby boys babygros from last year, raid the first aid box for bandages, and dig out my sewing kits and scissors for my grand costume scheme. I got creating, soaked the bandages in tea for that aged effect, dried them with a hairdryer and began the laborious and lengthy task of sewing them indivually onto an old babygro that I wasn’t even sure would fit my boy.
At 4am I hung my masterpiece on the kitchen door and summoned the husband, who had spent the hours following midnight sewing dreadlocks onto Daniel’s pirate hat, into the room so he could express his awe and show his amazement at my creativity.
He laughed. He winced. He spoke. It looks like a gigantic baby grow, he said. A gigantic babygro that someone went mad with the scissors with and stuck (badly) a handful of browny-coloured bandages to. What’s it supposed to be, he enquired?
The thing was deposited into the kitchen bin.
Our Caolan was the best zombie shepherd at school that day, no questions asked.