Snail Trail
As I bent over the bathroom sink scraping snot off Puppychild’s school jumper’s sleeve with a toothbrush (her own toothbrush – heh heh), it struck me that I was in a timeless club of parents who, since the birth of school uniforms, are cursed with the plight of snail-trail sleeves.
It also struck me that there is a sad lack of evolution in the school jumper trade. A row of buttons has foiled the snot wiping technique in blazers and shirts since what… the 20’s? Surely it snot too hard to find some sort of equivalent for jumpers and tracksuit tops?
And while they’re at it, what’s wrong with stitching a thumb-hole into school jumpers to save the wearer hours of labour trying to gouge one out with an overbitten thumb-nail? TAT bought a jumper recently from TK Maxx with such a thumb hole already stitched in… that impressed me no end, but then again I’m fierce easy to amuse these days…
El Duderino
The naming of the foetus is an epic task, especially when you haven’t met it yet. Of course there’s always the option of naming it after its zone of conception, but who wants to live their life with ‘Ballybunion’ for a moniker?
Baby name books are pointless, especially Irish baby name books. From Morrigan to Aoife to Siobhán, everyone has something mean to say about a name, (Siobhán your knickers, yer da’s on his way…) or somebody already knows a person by that name and doesn’t like them, or it rhymes with something rude… or maybe it’s just plain naff. Nah, if you ask me, the only way to choose a name is to scan the credits at the end of a film – this method always spews forth interesting possibilities.
Take my friend for instance… she’s due her babby in three weeks time, and she loves the name Charlie. She cannot name her kid Charlie, however, because her surname is Brown. Hell, Snoopy hasn’t been aired for years, if you ask me she’s on to a winner, but her family won’t let up nagging her into changing her mind.
Then there’s my other friend, who gave birth last month and named her baby girl ‘Kitty’. It’s not short for anything, Kitty is her name and Kitty is what she shall be called. I love it, but it’s undoubtedly quite an eccentric name, which beautifully mirrors a very eccentric family. My family is not eccentric, at least TAT’s side isn’t… I can imagine the multitudes of rolled eyeballs, the quick snide remarks directed towards the stoner family at the Christmas table. It’s just not worth it.
No, The Accidental Terrorist and I came up with an idea long ago, we had a flippant moment during a private viewing of The Big Lebowski:
Dude.
Why can’t I call my child Dude? “The Dude. His Dudeness… Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing” to quote The Dude himself.
Yeah, yeah, I know why I can’t call the child ‘Dude’, because someday he’ll grow up and will most likely want a job that doesn’t involve canvas or scripts, or burger flipping. Such is life. Or is it?!?! Such is the beauty of the Irish language perhaps… like the phrase ‘Mahogany Gaspipes’, the word ‘Dude’ could be Irish – all you have to do is add a fada and an ‘i’ somewhere, and the problem is solved, as follows:
-Duaid; short for Duaided, means ‘Evil Death’… who picks on a kid named Evil Death?!?
-Dúid; short for Dúidín, meaning ‘Pipe’. Grandad would be so proud.
-Dóid; meaning ‘Fist’… again, schoolyard politics are in favour of this one.
-Díud; short for Díthugad, meaning ‘Extermination’… a future in pest control perhaps?
-Diúd; short for Diúdán, meaning ‘Giddiness’, which is fitting.
-Duíd; a version of ‘David’, which my mother called me during the first three weeks of my confusing life.
But maybe the most fitting yet:
-Dúd… meaning ‘Mouth‘, because his would be one more to feed.
I do so hope it’s a boy!
Cheese before bedtime
Last night, as I drifted off to sleep I was visited by a tall Greek Adonis with four tongues and two penises. He had an imagination that had no limits, and was as flexible as an Olympic gold medalist.
Somewhere deep in the night, I was roused from sleep by my cat, who was sitting on the doorstep and rowring through the letterbox loudly. Rather than get out of my bed, I asked the Adonis to let the cat in seeing as he was closer. Unfortunately, being that he was a figment of imagination, he lacked the opposing thumbs necessary to un-do a deadbolt… so I had to do it myself.
When you spend the night nagging your sexual fantasies about how bloody useless they are… that’s when you know your hormones are in serious jeopardy.
Chasing Nirvana
I love the hype over legal high products… are they a good idea? Of course they are!! So they’re not tested properly, but people will take anything to get them out of the drudgery of modern life… isn’t it better they take the ‘herbal’ stuff than real? Robbing drug-barons is fun in and of itself, and if some of the burden and danger is taken away from the wee kids stuck in the middle with exploding baggies stuck in their innards, that’s got to be a good thing. The whole industry needs to be wiped out or legalised somehow.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m no stranger to the odd spliff. I’ve tried mushies once or twice… hell, I even took a whole sixteenth of an ecstasy tab once! Yeah, I’m a real wild child.
Would I try the stuff they sell in head-shops around here though? Not a chance in hell! The ability to stay in control means a lot more to me now than it used to, but in different circumstances, maybe…
anyway, the point is moot, they don’t really work. If you dig into the ingredients, you’ll find perfectly benign substances like guarana, black pepper, cocoa extracts, naughty substances that have been diddled slightly… in the right proportions they may well produce a slightly altered state, but there’s the rub… people who take them feel nothing at first. So they take more. And then maybe one or two extra ‘for the road’. Next thing you know they’re in a hape in the corner begging for a cup of sugary tea and a teddy-bear. No wonder the psych-wards are filling up.
Anyone who wants to shut those head shops down, needs a slap and a doobie. Let the gobshites take untested tablets, Darwin will take care of them. At least the opium cash-crops are going to rot!
Back of the hand
“Fuck off, you stupid fat bitch!”
I love watching Supernanny. Okay, so she’s a tad twee and parents cry way too bloody often for their own good, but it’s wonderful to watch other parents fail. It reminds me that even if I’m failing in some ways too, that nobody’s perfect. Is there any such thing as a non-dysfunctional family? Would The Simpsons be such a success if there were?
The above quote comes from a five-year old boy, spoken to his mother. You can tell he’s potentially a good kid, his diction and pronounciation regarding curse-words are second to none, even with missing teeth interrupting his fricatives. An intelligent kid, whose problem is that he’s just simply loved too much. His mother takes it, every soiled little last word of it, and dies a little bit inside.
Isn’t that madness? The running theme throughout most families of tearaway kids on the show, is that the parents can’t stand to chastise their children because they love them so much, they don’t want to hurt them. That is a seriously cruel thing about nature, the necessity for tough love. I don’t know how many times I’ve retreated to the bathroom in distress after I’ve had to dent Puppychild’s wee fairylike spirit with a firmly spoken NO. Watching her features drop into a look of pure hurt like that – having her tell me that she hates me- she always forgets later about the extremes of her revolt, but I never do. They should just extract the sympathy nerve from a mother during the birth of her first kid… that would soften the world’s problems entirely.
I don’t know why they don’t send Jo Frost to prisons, it’s never too late for tough love. Anyone who looks at her sideways would have to sit on the bold-chair for as many minutes as years they’re alive… listening to Celine Dion, maybe. That would set anyone on the right path.
Bloggers for Haiti
Can you imagine it? No, I mean seriously, can you imagine it with your eyes closed in a dark room when you’re all alone – what it might feel like to wander down a street with not an item of clothing to your name, the stench of rotting bodies all around you – everything you’ve ever known and loved, crushed under tons of detritus. Can you imagine hearing someone you love trapped under rubble, gasping for help and waiting… waiting for help until the voice gets quieter and quieter until it is no more? Would your kids have survived? If they got sick how would you protect them?
I can’t. I can’t imagine that sort of horrific chaos because I’m a seriously lucky individual and hopefully will never have to go through that. Humanity made me remember what I have to be thankful for and there’s no price you can put on that. Well… maybe the price of a family Chinese takeaway and a half-way dacent bottle of wine – if you’re one of the lucky ones, maybe you have more to give, maybe less. Sometimes money is too precious to be drunk.
*
Anyway, here’s a link to an easy way to help Haiti:
http://www.justgiving.com/Bloggers-For-Haiti
This is a simple idea set up by English Mum, a multiple blogger effort to fund Shelterboxes. Shelterboxes are basically containers full of basic survival equipment… tents, blankets, tool kits, stoves, colouring books, kitchen utensils etc… but they don’t come cheaply. Each costs about £500, but there is an undying dedication to send at least one box over. When I clicked the link early this morning, the site had raised £240. I clicked it again just a second ago, and found the number has amazingly jumped to £1,650!
A heartbreaking interview with a bloke who voices his frustrations at being able to hear his girlfriend and several other women screaming beneath a pile of college debris. It doesn’t have a happy ending…
…but this one does:
(Found at The Lede)
Please help English Mum shift some boxes!
*
Here is a link for UK outsiders – Shelterbox
An alternative way to donate – DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal
or UNICEF
Bend over and show me your dark side
I just love to have the shit scared out of me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I was never allowed to watch ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ as a kid – perhaps the curiosity became addictive in some way? Or it could be some genetic throwback from a previous life as a cave-dude, constantly looking for challenges. Fuck knows. I’m warped, with a curious fascination for oddities and the macarbe. It will be written on my tombstone.
Like this Thing in a Jar, for instance. When I found this website it gave me an itch to make a Thing in a Jar all for myself to store in the fridge and keep family members and Social Workers on their toes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
So, after a tough day’s bleaching and marinading and entertaining small people, I want to sit down and watch something intensely creepy and mindlessly horrific on TV to relax – that’s not so much to ask, is it? It just doesn’t happen though. Yeah, sure, there might be some horror flick on or other, but bar ‘The Host‘, they’re all pretty same-ish. There is a television show called ‘Scariest Places on Earth’ which would be right up my alley, if it wasn’t so shite. They pick a family full of whiners and handbag clutchers and ship them off to haunted castles and make them stay there with cameras strapped to their faces for the night. They move them from room to room and scare the bejeebus out of them with obviously rigged booby-traps. It’s painful.
They got it right once. The first time I stumbled across the show, they were running a documentary-type story about the crypts of Paris’ underground. They made a big deal out of a video-tape they’d allegedly found in a camcorder five levels down, owned by a person who’d obviously gotten lost. I watched in abject sympathy as this poor fucker almost soiled himself when he realised he was probably stuck in the bowels of Paris with occult symbols, powdered bones and tortured souls for the rest of his short life. The tape ended as a dark shadow appeared from one end of tunnel, attacked the film-maker and left the camera lying in a puddle recording hair-raising screams receeding into the darkness.
That episode fed my imagination for weeks. I told every living soul about this amazing TV programme and when I finally got to see it again, it was about the Knobend family and their amazing ability to scare easy. It’s amazing how many people piss their pants when a wee gizmo they’re holding suddenly starts flashing red lights, though I would absolutely love to be the person that operates that remote control. Why can’t they just give us the creepy facts, throw in a dodgy ham video and a Thing in a Jar? Now that would be entertaining.
Frowningboy
Plunged into the sudden creepy hush of a power-cut last night, my Mario Kart game crudely interrupted. Everything died, leaving me wondering for an instant if I’d suddenly turned deaf and blind… a cry from the kid’s bedroom shattered the silence… I wandered in with candles and put little minds to rest.
I rooted out the guitar and began to mess around, but a weird harmonic began to ooze into the chords. I put the guitar down, and listened. A strange noise sounded intermittantly, possibly the axe murderer who had just cut my power was trying to break the lock?? No such luck… I followed the sound into Laughingboy’s bedroom and winced as the tooth-grinding got louder and louder. It’s a totally different sound now, more like a rusty wood planer trying to smooth the underbelly of a hedgehog than the chaffinch sound I was used to.
I brought a candle close to his bed and prized his tensed jaws open for a look-see. The entire row of upper and lower teeth on the left hand side of his mouth are now ground to their bare minimum, his lower insisor grinding raw flesh causing pools of blood to appear on his over-effaced gum, yet he keeps grinding anyway. Presumably pain is relative to the poor kid.
I’m working up a steady input of Magnesium into Laughingboy’s diet as suggested by Jo, but not wanting to bombard him suddenly with too much, the dose is too small yet to make a difference. Maybe the next few weeks will show a change, I hope so.
In the meantime, necessity got me inventing… I cut a section of gum-sheild to the size of his two front teeth, then tied a cotton-covered hairband around it in the style of a friendship bracelet, stretched nice and tight so that the wee bit of plastic stays in place. Once strapped around his head, the shield refuses to budge – it takes a bit of watching for salivary purposes but otherwise it’s perfect!
It took me a while to figure out who he looks like with the gizmo stuck to his teeth, then it hit me;
He looks exactly like Shelley from South Park:
Poor Frowningboy.
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #4
PAIN
It’s the one question that everyone asks; when the subject of babies crops up, the look of fear on their faces is unmistakable. They wonder why I’d willingly offer up my body to excruciating hell like that, and tell me they’d go the ‘too posh to push’ way if it came down to them. I can see why they’d say that, but I can also see how vastly misled they are. It’s the film industry… they love the gushing bloodiness, the portrayal of the sweaty monster screaming and cursing at its husband… they make the whole ordeal seem so vulgar and hellish, it’s no wonder so many women opt for the cesarean section.
THE MYTH
In truth, childbirth is not the most painful thing that can happen to a body. Childbirth is about endurance, not about pain. Pain is what happens when you break your leg, or suffer from an abscess. It’s something that involves destruction or infection, something that happens to let your brain know that there’s something wrong. Childbirth is entirely different, so it’s really not fair to taint it with the same brush.
Childbirth is all about creation, and as such it feels different. Yes, the pressure hurts a lot, but it comes and goes, that’s the beauty of it. You get a two-minute rest in between contractions, even in the thick of it, and these two minutes are pure bliss because the void is so beautifully apparent. And, what’s even more amazing, is that once the whole ordeal is over, the pain is over, completely forgotten in the blink of an eye. There are no splints, no metal plates to be inserted, no antibiotics (unless there are complications of course), the pain just… goes away.
One woman I spoke to even told me that she had a pretty amazing orgasm while giving birth once. She has four children with another on the way, and there’s not a chance you’d entice her into a cesarean section if she had a choice. Nor is she particularly masochistic I might add, as I noticed once when she caught her finger in the car door. A bigger whiner you wouldn’t find – yet the concept of labour excites her no end! Go figure.
Of course, there’s the part where one is required to squeeze something the size of a large bag of spuds out of an opening the size of a postage-stamp… surely that’s got to hurt just a tad? It does, no kidding, but here’s where Mother Nature shows her infinite kindness. When… um… things are stretched beyond a certain point, the nerve endings in the area shut down so that in reality, you only have about ten seconds worth of screaming agony. Okay, so it’s a pretty long ten seconds, but it’s not the five hours they portray on television, not by a long shot.
Me? I’ve never had an orgasm while giving birth, I chose the way of the epidural, the drug that is so amazing, you really don’t care that it takes a syringe the size of the Empire State Building to administer it. I would have happily stabbed my spinal cord repetitively with the syringe myself, if there hadn’t been an anaesthesiologist around to do it for me. It makes you want to vomit, it makes your thighs itch uncontrollably, but it gives you a clear enough brain to enjoy the experience. I too was a woman who swore she’d be able to give birth without pain relief, but as a midwife once asked me in the throes of things; “Do you think you’re getting a feckin’ medal for this or something?” She was right. There are no medals for martyrs, that’s the whole point.
THE TRUTH
Pethidine is the Devil’s drug. It hurts. It doesn’t stop labour from hurting. It leaves a numb-spot on your ass for months afterwards and leaves your baby more stoned than Woody Harrelson. Don’t be fooled.
Nitrous Oxide is great craic, especially when the midwife leaves the room and your birth partner gets to have a go and the midwife returns to find everyone gasping in hysterics because there’s a crack in one of the ceiling tiles. It’s that much fun, it should be illegal. Its only downfall is that after a while it feels like you’re swimming in mercury and you end up in the horrors, so less is most definitely more, but very very very funny with it.
Tens machines are only good for the people who get to watch you jump every ten seconds from the electric jolt. They find it hilarious, but you won’t. Yes, it distracts you from the pain a little bit, but frankly what is far more entertaining, is placing one charge on each one of the testicles of your loved one, and then zapping him while he sleeps. Laughter is an excellent pain reliever, especially the evil type.
Last but not least; Yes, you will most likely crap yourself while in labour. As foul as that sounds, it’s the last thing that’ll be on your mind at the time, so why give a shit*?
Bizarro jewellery… you know you want it.
*Did you come all the way down here to see if that was an intended pun? Don’t you know me by now!?!?
How to deal with tattoo dislikers
Freezing Brass Monkeys. What do you do when your kid’s stranded four towns away and you want him home safe, but can’t drive to him? You drive anyway.
Eddie Blizzard had visited the night before… snow lay everywhere as though an over-zealous cake-maker had decided frosting was going out of fashion. A cupful of salt and a lot of revving finally got me there and back just about, even if I did knacker the car’s clutch on the climb back home. My boy was safe. I had food and fuel, and nowhere else to be. What more could a body ask for?
I very quietly patted the dashboard as I got out of the car, and thanked Betsy for being so reliable and promised to make a better effort to keep her serviced this year… I said it quietly because The Accidental Terrorist and his mates were hanging around and I’d like to keep my talking to inanimate objects just between you and me, to be honest.
A snowball pelted me in the ear. A small pride of kids were hiding behind a snowy knoll and were ambushing the men who stood in the doorway to my house smoking fags and belting the odd half-assed chunk of ice back in the direction from which they came. Puppychild stood in safety in the sidelines and giggled at the hilarity of it all.
I suddenly felt a snowman coming on…
Made to order. Can ship to Australia.
A half-hour later found me thawing the kids in front of a roaring fire and mopping misfired snowballs off the hall floor. I heard a muffled thud and boyish laughter. I peeked outside.
Our snowman decapitated, the gratuitous death of childhood innocence, it was pure carnage that lay before me. The kid swung his stick back over his shoulder, and took aim for the midsection of my poor snow-dude.
“Oi!!!” I sauntered outside in my teeshirt and wellies. The kid froze, so to speak. “What’s the story, bud – what did that snowman ever do to you?” He dropped the stick and took a step backward. He stood right into a pile of Wouldye’s crap, but you couldn’t tell because it was all covered in pretty whiteness.
I told him off for a few seconds, but it fell on deaf ears.
“Wat’s that on yer arm?” he asked, and pointed at my tattoo.
“It’s a tattoo.” I said.
“It’s weird.”
“So’s your face.” I said.
“D’you have other tattoos?” he asked.
“Yes, a few, but we’re getting off the point!”
“Why d’you do that? Put tattoos on you?” he wiped snot from his glowing nose… it froze instantly on his sleeve.
“Because if I get kidnapped and murdered and the murderer tried to cover up his crime, he’d want to chop me up, wouldn’t he? He’d knock out all my teeth first, then he’d pry all my fingernails off with a monkey-wrench, then he’d further try to hide my identity by cutting my limbs off to dispose of separately. By my tattooing as many limbs as possible, the murderer knows that disposing of my corpse would be a pain in the ass, see? So… he’d come looking for somebody else, wouldn’t he? Furthermore, if he’s watching me right now like all experienced murderers are (especially around here), he’s bound to choose you, isn’t he?”
The kid’s chin began to tremble. He mumbled something about my being crazy.
“MOMMY?!!” he shouted towards a group of women in a faraway cul-de-sac.
“Your mommy can’t help you now, kid.”
He legged it, as fast as his Ben 10 booties could carry him. I am heavily protective of my snowman.
To be sure to be sure, I found the patch of dogshit and began to roll it around. I made a head out of it. Then I replaced his smile and his cap and gave him a wink and blessed all who smashed his face in.
