Crocs my arse.
‘Would you not put some aul’ shoes on the poor child’s feet?’
they say to me, eyeing me up and exchanging worried glances with onlookers as Sir Fartsalot wombles barefoot, only two weeks qualified as a provisional walker. It’s adorable.
He jaunts around on hot tarmac and stony patio and squishy grassy patches, on sharp pebbles and fluffy carpet, the more textured the better. Touch is so important for learning and what better way than through your feet? I’ve no idea why they make shoes for babies. Welly boots are pretty much all they need. Shoes are often too tempting for babies to remove anyway… have a look at the floor of your local toy shop or supermarket, littered with socks and sandles they are, in a little oddsock parade of wasted money.
And ANYWAY, runners are a hazard to your health!
I’ve always thought it funny that sports brands advertise shoe support so well and get away with it. They put cushioning in every available crevice of the sole of your foot and tell you that you’ve just parted fairly serious money for something that’s great for your feet when it’s entirely the opposite case! They have us all suckered!!!
Think about it, if you support something, you make it weaker don’t you? If you try to correct something that’s already perfect, say by walking around on just your left leg and a pair of crutches for a year… chances are you right leg won’t thank you for it. It’s why marathon runners usually end up with dodgy knees, apparently.
Imagine running barefoot through a forest on a warm summers day after a rainshower to absorb it of all its squelchy nourishment, and tell me it doesn’t sound tempting. And how good for your body would it be if you actually went and did it every now and then?
I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and loved every word of it, it all made so much sense.
Doesn’t it?
Which reminds me…
Here’s a video showing you how to put your cat in standby mode:
Maybe this trick will distract the neighbours from the baby’s feet for a feckin’ change.
Would yeh ever go an’ shite?
This post will be a load of crap, but sometimes talking shite is all I have left.
This is especially true for every conversation I’ve had with Laughingboy’s teachers or nurses at school over the last three weeks. He hasn’t seen his schoolroom in over a month, thanks to this bizarre diarrhoea spate he’s been suffering, so they call me up every now and then to check his status.
For the last week, however, there’s been nothing excrementally newsworthy to tell them… the poor kid hasn’t produced so much as a nodge of poo whatsoever, so I don’t really know whether he’s better or not, meanwhile much-needed summer camp respite is on hold.
There aren’t that many ways to express this fact politely though, it’s hard to phrase the problem nicely… there’s:
-He hasn’t produced anything solid, nappy-wise.
-No bowel-movements as of yet.
-Bowel openings are a negative.
I yearn to just come right out with… “The little shit hasn’t had a dump in ages!”
…but that wouldn’t go down too well.
It was out in the garden earlier when I smelt the spurious hum. Laughingboy was swinging in his hammock with a smile on his face, Florence and the Machine was blasting through his earphones and he looked like he was in the zone… you know, that zone.
I whisked him out sharpish and brought him to his bed where I whipped off his tracksuit bottoms and tore at his nappy like a five year old at Christmas, hoping for a flash of brown underneath.
But it wasn’t to be.
I suddenly heard my mother’s voice, that wise poem she used to recite under the right circumstances:
Poor aul’ child, broken hearted;
Paid ten pee, but only farted.
Did someone call for a waahmbulance?
I can’t pause for long, there’s a young man in the kitchen that wants to dance with me. I’ve been dancing with him for two hours now, he likes a slow waltz to the beat of his heartbeat, he keeps his hands on my shoulders and I firmly grasping his buttocks. An odd jig now and then might take his fancy in a frisky moment, but for the most it’s a slow dance he wants.
All I want is to turn my hand to whiskey and blog, but he doesn’t understand. He shouts with violent gestures and pounds the air with his fists and I watch the face I love so much boil in its furious redness and I know he doesn’t really mean any of it, he just wants to dance and there’s nothing bad about that.
Even now, as I sit and type, he sings and talks and chatters and pleads with me to dance with him again. He talks and talks, and shouts and yawns and still he won’t go to sleep, this man of mine.
And then I give him the bottle. His third of the night, if you don’t mind. He drinks it down, and talks himself to sleep in the corner and I daren’t move him, lest he start shouting at me again. The abuse I get from him is heavy, but it underweighs the good parts, his constant want to entertain me is flattering and I love his ways of making me laugh and I love his love and the way he makes me feel real and I know I could never leave him.
This could be said for any man, many men. They’re all the same.
Mine is one year old. I’ve never had the opportunity to raise a man before, but it’s comforting to know that they’re born like this, that they can’t be changed. It’s up to us as mothers, as sisters, as girlfriends and wives to find a way through it, to as close as what could be described as harmony as possible,
even if it does mean hitting the bottle.
Puppychild wrote a book…
…and won an award!!
I’m so proud.
She was very nonchalant about it, it didn’t seem to occur to her to be proud of the achievement at all… so much so, she forgot to tell me about it. I was reading the school newsletter when I saw her little name pop up in the section about the ‘Write-A-Book” project her school takes part in every year. She was one of two kids in her class to achieve a special merit.
I pee-d myself a little bit with excitement and shrilled scornful surprise at her for not telling me. She flushed and smiled a little bit, then returned to her own planet, and I to mine.
I grew a writer! How great is that?
Dub Boy Angst
Laughingboy invented a new music genre today, I call it Dub Angst:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Isn’t it lovely? If I play it back to him during a shouting spell he calms right down instantly, but only for the duration of the track. I may have to record an album and turn him into a gazillionnaire.
I created the file using the ‘LaDiDa’ app(lication) for the iPhone. Sorry. I’m aware that last sentence made me sound like a tosser, but technology does have its perks.
Syntax Error
-Your brother’s a retard!
The second those words left my lips, I felt the scarlet rise. It just slipped out. To a room full of parents of kids with special needs too, no less.
Cringe. The flush burned my cheeks and made the capillaries on the tip of my nose tingle. My heart skittered like a ball of grease on a hot frying pan while the clock ticked a silence of undefinable length.
-Yes it’s true.
Somebody else nodded.
-You need to show them what words to use in self defence!
*nodding*
-True, true…
I was at a meeting to discuss Sibling Workshops, an initiative ‘they’ have set up to help families with disabled children. See? ‘They’ aren’t all bad! Brothers and sisters of kids with special needs have all sorts of issues that I had never even considered. Like… when a special needs kid passes a milestone it’s an amazing feat worth certificates and rounds of endless applause, yet nobody says a bippy when his younger brother passes the same milestone. From small droplets big waterfalls grow.
My question was about teaching some sort of self-defence mechanism to kids prone to bullying in the street… but it kind of came out funny.
I think my filter needs replacing.
Bromidrosiphobia
I was paring her colouring-pencils with a retractable blade when I asked her if she had any homework tonight. She replied that yes, she did, but Sophie didn’t because it is her birthday. Birthday?! Buggerty fuck… wasn’t there something about a party??? What time is it now… somebody find the invitation, quick!
Already an hour late (*face-palm*), we changed our clothes and found our missing shoe and packed wipes and nappies and bottles and ‘where the hell are my Goddamn keys’ed and brushed our hair and sped away sharpishly.
Airfield house is in Dundrum, which is a busy suburb just to the south of Dublin City. It’s full of apartments, commercial complexes, fancy hospitals and shopping malls but right in the center of all of this confusion, is a farm of all things. I’d never heard of it before today, it was a pleasantly odd find.
To say it was pissing rain, however, would be an understatement. It was the sort of rain that bounced off dry earth and got you wet from underneath, the sort that doesn’t allow for much petting or feeding of any sort of animal, most of whom were dug in for the day, squeamish of getting their wattles wet.
I found the party squished into a tent at the bottom of this farm, a beautiful sculpture of woven cloth and bamboo sticks stood sentry outside its door and an enormous noise came from within.
Eighteen children, twelve adults, a handful of babies and their paraphernalia were stuffed into this tent, along with two long tables, a tonne of teeny chairs and a food presentation table. There was clearly no room for yours truly and her Sir Fartsalot of fidgety baby tendencies.
I set up camp outside under my umbrella until the foodal servage was over, at which point the rain cleared, and people burst from the bulging doors of the party tent. Some regarded me with oddness and declared that I looked like a leprechaun sitting on a treestump, others looked at me with jealousy as they expired the final gasp of farty carbon dioxide hum from their lungs and gulped fresh taste of freedom and wished that they had done what I was doing, all along.
Small children gathered around Sir Fartsalot and I, wiped their small hands on my umbrella and wetted and spiked the baby’s hair and named him Tedward and shook the raindrops from sapling trees, and then ran inside again to see the Hello Kitty cake all bedecked with sparklers.
Airfield house must be a beautiful place when there’s time and sunshine to explore. I’ll re-visit it someday, when there’s cause to, or maybe for no reason at all.
Current Affairs
By the time we’d hit the vegetable isle, I decided I’d had enough. Sir Fartsalot was perched in the in-built trolley seat and was also looking pretty pissed off, and not knowing the laws of physics, he seemed pretty confused, too.
Every time I touched him… ZAP. Every time I touched the trolley chassis… POP. Static electriciteh on mah trolleh. Pain in the arse.
I could either:
a) Ditch the trolley and just stuff the groceries into various crevices and pockets I had hanging around, but I’dve gotten into trouble doing that.
b) Take off my shoes and socks and declare myself strange.
c) Earth the trolley somehow, some other way.
So that’s what I did. I wedged my keyring into the metal arch of the trolley wheel and arranged everything so that the keys dragged on the ground, then tested my idea by hyper-accelerating to the butcher’s department. Dubiously I touched the baby’s nose and…
…nothing. Score!
I got strange looks. Very strange looks.
“Your keys are on the ground, love” – I got. Or…
“Don’t leave them behind ya! Haha!”
I nodded, and thanked, and I felt like the biggest weirdo on the planet, but at least the electroshock therapy wasn’t getting in the way of the retail therapy any more.
Why don’t supermarket trolleys have earthing-strips?
(I realise this is an increadibly boring conversational topic, but I don’t care. I’m bored.)
Image stolen from Slavenka and Obi
A nation of pigs
Something is happening to the children of Ireland. Since I’ve twigged its cause, I’m seeing it more and more every day… or rather hearing it.
Just as the older kids are all awesoming in their slightly yankee twangs, the smaller ones are picking up weird but very sweet English accents which fall out in questions and inflections and introductions like these:
-Hellaw, mai name is Peppa Pig, and this is my little brutha Geoooooooje.
-I thought your name was Sarah?
-Neeeeuo. It’s Peppa Pig, and he is my little brutha Geooooooooooje!
It’s the fathers of Ireland that I feel sorry for. Peppa’s father Daddy Pig (obviously), is portrayed as an awful gobshite. His entire family constantly poke fun at his obesity and make him run and climb things because they know he’ll make a tit of himself and they can all point and laugh. He’s hopeless at flat-pack assembly and general DIY and while this may be true for a lot of Irish men, they don’t need reminding of it so harshly.
AND I worry about the erosion potential of Irish soil… our government will have to pay out millions to fix the pot-hole damage caused by the increase in incidents of children (and adults) jumping in muddy puddles. It’s all very irresponsible.
Ban Peppa Pig!
… ah no I’m on’y messing. I do love her so.
Stoner’s brainwave
I’ve never met a mother who hasn’t feared summer-time to at least some extent. The mumblings start at this time of year, roughly a month before primary school children are released from captivity to stare blinky-eyed into the sun (or at the television), to revel in their freedom for a whole entire two months. That’s a life-time to a small child, and to it’s parents, and to it’s neighbour’s flower patch for that matter.
How to entertain one’s offspring, but? How to keep them feckin neighbour’s kids from hanging out on your shed roof and torturing your dog all the live-long day? Throwing stones at them gets you in trouble, I found that out the hard way.
I’ve had the most amazing idea in the whole world though.
When them idjits from Dragon’s Den read this they’re going to be throwing millions at me for even TWO percent of the intellectual rights to it.
Prepare to be amazed…
-o0o-
…I got to thinking, why not attach a giant hamster-wheel to the side of your house, but hook it up as a generator at the same time. It would entertain the kids, cure obesity and solve your energy crisis simultaneously!
Think of it this way… a half hour of television would cost ten minutes on the wheel. To re-charge a DS would cost forty-five minutes. Send the dog running on it at high speed for half an hour, and that’s your dishwasher cycle right there!
-o0o-
It’s an un-tapped sustainable energy source that’s just waiting to be abused and I invented it! A Nobel Prize would look lovely beside me Wii, so it would, if anyone’s asking.
