Counting electric sheep
Things were tough last Friday night. A recent rash of local house break-ins had me edgy, and a pretty violent lightning storm boomed itself around my bedroom in surround sound and killed any chance of sleep stone dead.
I dozed fitfully and dreamed of weapons that I could use against a potential burglar, then had vivid and graphic nightmares about the various ways my weapons could be used against me.
Gradually more and more members of the family joined me in my bed as the night went on, and I woke in the early morning to find I’d been breastfeeding the dog.
THERE’s a day that can only improve by comparison.
Playing God
Try to imagine for a few minutes that you’re a Deity, a remote entity looking after a country roughly the size of France, and in this country there are several billion people all milling around doing their workaday jobs and living happily.
Life is good for this country for several years, you’re doing a good job it would seem. Then one day a small group of terrorists moves in to the country and starts creating havoc… what would you do to take care of your country?
Would you:
a) Detonate an atomic bomb thus killing said terrorists instantly, and sacrifice several billion happy people so that your country is doomed to restart its population from scratch?
b) Recognise that the country’s own law inforcement is making good progress with the identification and capture of these terrorists, and maybe help them along a bit with re-inforcements via your super powers?
c) Run away?
-o0o-
Sir Fartsalot developed a fairly high fever last week, bugs are rampant this time of year and I had run away to Galway for a girlish weekend thus depriving him of my antibacterial b@@b juice… a bad dose of the snots had taken hold of him. Immediately I was faced with the question above, and from all angles I was ordered to choose answer (a) and it was inferred that I would be a bad mother not to.
“Bring down that fever!! Bring him to the doctor and get him antibiotics!!! Quick!!!”
What nobody seems to realise, is that a fever in a person (above the age of… say six months let’s say) is a very GOOD thing. It means that the body realises there’s something wrong, and it’s reacted by kicking all self defence mechanisms into gear. Roast dem germs out. Swollen glands rock!
Why everybody has this urge to dose a fever with paracetamol in order to surpress it is beyond me. Why I’m ordered to nuke the kid’s immune system with antibiotics is just plain lunacy!! Yet, it’s an argument I have again, and again, and again, and usually my theory works but nobody seems to notice. Echinacea, a good diet and gallons of water works most of the time… the chidler’s antibody population blooms.
Weird.
This phobia we have, this distrust in our own immune systems is a beautiful cash-cow for pharmaceutical companies, but people are blind to it. They have us terrified of influenza under any name, they have us overdosing on vaccinations, and they terrify us with threats of the potential with that ever-steady mantra they sing: ‘better safe than sorryyyy!’
It’s all bollocks, I say. Not nearly enough stock is placed in a mother’s instinct like it used to, but then again there’s no money in that so things shall remain exactly as they are and I shall argue and be deemed a bad mother and I don’t care one little bit.
Burning the cradle at both ends
Every day. Every sodding day.
Every day I wake up and swear blind that I’ll go to bed early for a change. I hate waking up… that is I hate waking up when I know I have to get up; I love waking up and finding out that I don’t have to get up for another two hours, no surprise there, my homo brethriens. My best friend is the snooze button on my mobile phone (the same phone I won two years ago! I’ll miss my Ericsson should I ever go iPhonebound).
It’s just so HARD to go to bed at night.
From 08:00 to 21:00 every day, I belong to somebody else, many people in fact. Six dependants depend on me to keep them alive and happy, and this causes quite a lot of noise, because I can’t deal with them all at once: My baby needs input and a clean bum-hole. My eldest son needs music and attention and someone to remind him to stop grinding his teeth. My daughter loves to hang around with me and do things with me and asks me constantly to look at her doing funny things, which is a beautiful gift and something I adore and enjoy very much, but only in medium doses. My dog needs exercise, a luxury I’m too lazy to afford him which cuts me up, and he whines and gives me big dark sad eyes to rub salt on the wound. My cat meanders around my busy feet and trips me up… and through it all, my husband needs silence while he sleeps. Daytime silence, three children and a large dog – these are difficult things to shuffle!!
-o0o-
And so the last child is tucked into bed, and Einstein’s theory of relativity kicks in.
Silence. Pure, peaceful silence, the possiblities endless.
And so I dive for the fridge for a can of beer, and I wonder how to fill my night. And while I wonder how to fill my night, I fall into the Facebook pit and drown in stupid television and give in to the munchies and waste my hours on pointlessness. When 11pm comes round, I feel unfulfilled and ignored. I can’t go to bed unfulfilled and ignored!!!
-o0o-
It seems to be a common theme among people, that need to burn the candle at both ends. Two hours of selfish time is just not enough when you’re a nightowl like me. Sleep tortures us and wakes us up at night time and hates us the next day, and stolen naps create demons with sticky eyes, it’s just not fair. You know what I mean.
I vote for a re-jigging of the 24 hour clock… Days should be longer and weeks shorter for starters, I bet the moon would be up for that. The sun might get in the way somewhat but we’d get used to it pretty quickly with a bit of black-out lining and a heavy duvet. It can’t be all that difficult to arrange, the re-invention of time!?
The three day week… yet another thing I’d do if I was Teeshirt.
Babyniverous
Why is it that when people admire babies, they speak of cannibalism?
It’s happened several times to me and Sir Fartsalot. A young wan who helps me out with Laughingboy from time to time, she wanted to melt my baby down and spread him on toast. A neighbour pinched Sir Fartsalot’s leg, and told me she wanted to just sink her teeth into it. My cousin wants to gnaw on his bellybutton while she watches Coronation Street.
I myself have yearned to chew on his chubby cheeky cheeks from time to time, and I find myself alarmed that nobody finds this disturbing in the slightest. It’s all so Salad Fingers.
Have you ever witnessed this bizarre behaviour?!? What does it say about us as a supposedly socially savvy species; that we want to absorb the baby’s purity and digest its essense like the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal, maybe… or maybe we sense that the baby’s flesh is tender meat and we get peckish? Why people get so vicious when they see a set of baby bobbly toes is beyond me.
I bet it’s just because we want to become one with the purity. How primeval… but it makes sense to me now.
Never mind!
As you were…
FUBAR dog.
What do you get if you cross a sheep with a rat? A reep maybe. Or a shat.
Apparently it’s none of the above. Apparently you get one of these:
It’s a cross between a Bichon Frise and a Shitsu, what I might call a Scut. Certainly not a dog, that’s for sure.
When it was placed in my charge for the weekend, I accepted gracefully for the sake of the entertainment of Puppychild, but swore to take the piss out of it at every available opportunity, as you do. I bathed it, and made it look like a drowned rat and laughed at it, and laughed at it again when it re-appeared the next morning fluffier than a tumble-dried tampon.
Since introducing it to Laughingboy however, I’ve changed my mind. It respectfully pawed his chest and snuffed in his ears and made Laughingboy giggle and put up with the wild thrashing arm-flaps that ensued. It fell asleep on the kid’s chest and ignored the grabby wetness of a six month old baby with great temperance. My estimation of it went up several notches.
Then, when it came with me to the bathroom while I pee’d and curled up to scratch its itch by my feet; as if to say ‘If you run out of bogroll, I’m always here in emergencies…’ I fell another 10% in love.
Should my friend return on Sunday looking for her dog (?) only to have me tell her it’s dead while I sneakily hide it in the shed… you wouldn’t judge me, would you?
(Yeah, it was me that put the hairclips in its barnet. Not because it’s cute, but because the poor pissant can’t see for its messed up fringe. I can identify with that.)
I miss Worzel Gummidge :(
I have been told today by two seperate people out of the blue that I need a Christening cake. I had no idea that there was such a thing. I have decided that I won’t bother, but will obsess about this constantly for the next week until the last second when I will change my mind and most likely pay over the odds for something that tastes a bit weird. I know that now, but will do nothing about it because that’s just the way it is. Acupuncture would probably fix this kink in my general thought pattern, but I can’t afford it! I need a new head. That’s what it is.
(image thieved from here)
Pass the Bread Soda
That’s the thing about eight-seater taxis… you’re so muffled up the front in the driver’s seat that you can’t hear the bloke behind you spewing his Bacardi all over the kip so by the time you find out about it, it’s too late.
There’s an Aviation Day in Newcastle happening right about now, I had meself all geared up to bring the kids for a bit of face-painting, flight simulating and skydiver admireage, but it just wasn’t meant to happen I reckon.
Nope, it just so happens that our eight-seater taxi is also Laughingboy’s only mode of transport so one whiff of the pen in that taxi when I opened her up was enough to convinve me to make other plans. The heat of the sun had warmed her insides up a little, see, so the vomitus belch of stench that erupted was so strong it just wasn’t worth tolerating for the sake of an interview with the Irish Air Corps.
Fuuuck.
AND I’ve lost my rubber gloves.
Winter Year Weirdness
When I pull into a parking space I like to glance quickly into the car parked beside me, this tells me if I can get away with slamming my door against their enamel, as you do.
Today I did just that. Pulling into a space in a crammed carkpark underneath a large shopping complex, I scoped out the black 4×4 with its chaste paintwork beside me and was dismayed to see a little head floating in the back seat of the vehicle. She had big sad eyes and a head on her like a dandelion clock. Someone’s Granny. Awww.
They could’ve left her with an aul’ Woman’s Own or a lollipop or a crochet hook or even a Nintendo, but they didn’t. Not even so much as a crack in the window. She gave me the BDI as I assembled my array and made me feel guilty.
It made me wonder what sort of parent I’d be to my aul’ pair someday, should I be lucky enough. Would I let my mother run naked on the beach in just her nappy? Would I bring them to Lidl high on coke and let them run riot in the aisles and would my dad tug on my hem in Tesco, wheedling for Viagra (not ’till after dinner I said!)?
Then I wondered what sort of child I might make to my kids… would Puppychild read Tolkien to me as she tucks me in in my nineties and let me eat custard lollipops on Sundays? I must be more mindful of this in the future in preparation for Plan B, should my plans to bugger off to Africa eventually fall through. Plan C might be driving into the Grand Canyon high on my first ever shot of heroin… I haven’t really thought that one through yet.
Maybe the Eskimos have it right, but shuffling off in the direction of Wexford waiting for the elements to get me seems a bit rough. I might wander up the Dublin direction and do a Mad Mary on it and dance and sing in my finery or something else entirely.
Haunting a 4×4 in a carpark, though… that plan’s way down the list I tell yeh.
(image from http://deadpandas.blogspot.com/)
Jehovah’s Witnesses – My Dirty Little Secret
There are many places in this house that escape my cleaning routine. I may visit them twice a year, maybe not at all; the greasy crevice between the oven and the cabinets being one such place for instance. Euughh.
Another would be the place behind the giant shoe-box underneath our bed, apparently.
I spotted the glossy magazines while searching for spare change this morning, they grabbed my interest as a very strange place to keep magazines, so I pulled them out to have a better look. I turned page after page in total shock at both the images, and the fact that each page was so well-worn and crumpled by such apparently sweaty eager hands. I felt so confused and dirty at having found TAT’s little secret, and wondered what I should do with it.
See, I understand that a lot of men hide porn from their wives and I would be delighted if these magazines indeed were porn, but they weren’t porn at all, they were five different issues of WATCHTOWER, a Jehovah’s Witness rag that usually finds its way into the recycle bin around here (away with your claims of oozing purity! I reserve the right to be a total fuck-up, thank you very much!).
So what am I to do? Am I to throw the magazines on the coffee table in fury during a dramatic confrontation with TAT over a dirty-great-big fry-up one morning?
“WHAT’S THIS?!?” I might scream… “IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TELL ME ABOUT? AM I NOT MEETING YOUR NEEDS HERE OR WHAT?? ARE YOU TALKING TO STRANGE MEN AT THE DOOR BEHIND MY BACK NOW, IS THAT IT??”
…and so on and so forth.
No, that seems too much like hard work. Instead I shall tell all his friends so that they may look upon him with great awe and ridicule, for that is what it is all about, for God is a woman and likes wine and has a sense of humour about these things.
(I hope!)
See you in Hell.
xx
me
The Health Fuckup Executive
I’m very envious of those parents who can just bring their kids for vaccination jabs and be done with it, without worrying about what this stuff is actually doing to their immune systems. My protests seem so absurd, why the hell not give the kid something to ward off deadly diseases if it’s freely available?! How irresponsible am I to even CONSIDER not vaccinating them? The dirty great big needles loom over my babies and I do it anyway. Bar useless influenza jabs, the rest are just not worth gambling on, surely.
Puppychild got her two jabs against a multitude of diseases last month. I got a nasty dose of the flu straight away, then passed it to the Accidental Terrorist who then caught pneumonia. He’s been floored for almost three weeks, hemorrhaging money as he goes. Coincidence? Dunno. Dunno.
Sir Fartsalot got a BCG (tuberculosis jab) on July 5th. The teeny pinprick hole in his skin did not disappear, it slowly grew and grew, and turned into an abscess. A large purple eye-shaped growth with a pus-green pupil gazes at me and wills me to prick it out of its misery and all the while my boy-o cries. He cries when I feed him, when I pick him up, when I strap him into his car-seat, lots of tears and red-faced misery usually follow. So much suffering, so much blood-stained gunge erupting from my babóg’s arm.
It’s so un-fucking-fair that the HSE cannot sort its shit out.
I read that in 2002, a previously dodgy EVANS BCG was withdrawn from public consumption, to be replaced by the SSI BCG.
An article written in 2005 states that there have been 152 reports of local complications like Sir Fartsalot’s since the new vaccine was rolled out. I can only presume that the figure has doubled by now. I brought the kid to the doctor, to a local A&E (where I was told to bugger off because they’re not insured to treat babies), and to a paediatric A&E. They told me not to worry, that it was a normal reaction, that they get this sort of thing all the time.
ALL THE TIME???
I read that occasionally, such swellings result in lymph node infections which is a very serious thing indeed.
‘Not to worry!’ they say. O, but I do worry. I worry a lot.
Meanwhile Sir Farsalot hasn’t yet had his 6-in-1s, a process that was supposed to begin two months ago. The vaccination program for children looks like this:
- At birth: BCG tuberculosis vaccine (given in maternity hospitals or a HSE clinic)
- At 2 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine)
- At 4 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C.
- At 6 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 12 months: Measles, Mumps, Rubella, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 13 months: Meningococcal C, Haemophilus Influenzae B
- At 4-5 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C; Measles, Mumps and Rubella (by second injection)
- At 11-14 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus
- At 12 years: Human Papillomavirus (Girlz only)
That looks like a rocky road to me. A road full of miasms that will give our great-grandchildren strange side-effects, I fear. I don’t know what to do.
Why on earth do people still trust the HSE after all its fuckups? I sure as hell don’t, especially not with something as important as my kids, but yet those around me tell me I’m crazy.
Better crazy than dead though, hey?
