Daddies… know your place!

He was just a small kid. I noticed he was tired at the start of the karate class, his punches were lacklustre. Throughout the Satory Dragon creed, through the warm-ups, even through the highly energetic high-kick lesson the kid was tired and thirsty much like the rest of them. Karate lessons can be hard going that way.

Ten minutes before the end of the class however, his father walked in. I could tell that this random man sitting suddenly beside me was the kid’s father, because out of the blue the kid’s attention was sidetracked from his Sensei, he kept a special reserve of backward glances for this stranger who somehow didn’t seem to notice the admiration. The kid’s activity miraculously transformed. His Katas were sharp, precise and well-timed, he was a pleasure to watch all of a sudden… child certainly knew his stuff. I donated a corner of my eye to the bloke beside me who was nose-deep in his smart phone and felt sad for said child. (What if it wasn’t his Dad?! Maybe was child’s first childhood crush??? (Ew.)) Turns out it was  indeed his dad, pops had the velcro shoe straps pre-unwrapped, ready for exit sharpish. Burger-time, perhaps.

How strange is that though? That a kid will suddenly perform amazingly in the presence of a parent who doesn’t seem all that bothered… maybe the kid’s obnoxious and this guy is used to it, I don’t know… I just wish he could’ve seen that transformation!

It was like Puppychild’s Christmas play. I and her Daddy were (slightly(!)) late, the concert had already started and as I mooched a spot just inside the main door of the crammed hall, I spotted her searching randomly through the faces in the audience. I saw it straight away, the fact that she felt alone. When she spotted her Daddy’s dodgy haircut through the crowd however, I saw an amazing transformation – she sand loud and proud, her beaming smile did her Angel costume great justice. She pulled faces mid-song and elbowed her buddy beside her…

…’That’s my Daddy.’

There are some parents out there that can’t see that magic and it kills me. It’s an ultimate sort of love and it’s far greater than any salary or smartphone, greater than anything I’ve ever known. It’s a sort of power, maybe. To leave a superpower untapped is criminal, if you ask me. It’s another thing about parent-hood that they never tell you about, the power to inspire greatness in a random dude. How do they not see it, those random few?

I’ve learned exactly half of Xtreme’s song ‘More Than Words’ on the guitar.  I spent half the time in college that I was supposed to. My house is semi-clean, semi-cluttered. I’m a half a job, a quitter, a loser even.

But that’s good, right? If there were no losers, there’d be no winners. You can’t have night without day, hey.

If I’d been more commited, I would’ve told you about Laughingboy’s brush with botox last month. Not just for those with more money than sense, the stuff happens to be quite useful it seems. I was only too happy to have them inject poison into my kid, in fact.

He mutated earlier this year, you see, from a little boy into a strapping young man. His schoolteachers panicked and swiftly ordered larger equipment to handle him, I rushed out to buy big-boy clothes and meanwhile Laughingboy suffered.  Nature would have it that a child’s bones grow first, but their surrounding supportive tendons can take up to a year to catch up.  Cruel, isn’t it? Seems Mother Nature’s a bit of a half-a-job, too.

That’s what the botox was for, to relax those muscles, to make them sleep and stop hurting while his cells multiply.  You should see the difference it’s made! No longer frog-legged, no longer squirming in his wheelchair, he’s his old Laughingboy self again, but taller.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… I’m so glad he lives in the 21st century.

It started last week on the bus to Galway with friends and a hip-flask and several spurious games of dirty 20-questions. It travelled through a night of drinking and dancing and marshmallow fighting and on into the next evening for several sober games of cards and deep thought and soulful talking… old wounds were unexpectedly torn apart and spilled upon the kitchen table, our agonies seemed less agonizing once their funny sides were pointed out. It was like drinking champagne after a long walk through a desert, only it wasn’t champagne, it was peppermint tea.

The following night, I returned home and received the welcome of a queen. I was quite pleased to see that my pretty flower hadn’t been eaten by slugs too.

Say hello to my pretty flower!

Of course, a dampner can be placed on such an idyllic weekend upon close examination of snapshots stolen by an inebriated trigger finger… embarrassment is bound to ooze at the state of one, and the drunken poses one can pull when suitably excited. It made me think of old photographs, and the restriction that was imposed on their subjects.

“Stay fucking still, you little shit.”

Before daguerrotype photographs were replaced by better photographic equipment in the ’60′s, there was no barstool posing, no sneaky bathroom shots or arms-length group photography. They had to sit with as fixed an expression as possible, and a serious face is the easiest to hold for the hundred seconds it took to expose their images. It’s a sad thing missed, all those instances of happiness that happened back then, it’s as though they never happened.

It’s only eighty years later, and my one-year-old is taking his own photographs, albeit very spurious ones. How times have changed.

‘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.

-The Labyrinth of Genre

-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)

This is what real love looks like.

-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.

-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!

-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.

-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!

Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify 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.

Bansky’s image

Ban Peppa Pig!

… ah no I’m on’y messing. I do love her so.

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.

(image thieved from here)

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?

-o0o-

It’s not your lungs you need to worry about though, it’s the other thing… the thing that was in most of what you just ate. Crisps, diet (‘zero’) drinks, chewing gum, diet yoghurts, artificial sweeteners, breakfast cereals, aspartame, aspartame, aspartame. It’s in sugar-free children’s medications, in a bid to prevent tooth-rot. It’s in 1200 of the products you consume, and it’s very slowly mucking up our genetics and making us say things like… ‘isn’t it funny how people are dropping like flies with cancer these days?’.

Unstranger’s recent post reminded me of E951, the toxin that in 1980, was voted against by the FDA Public Board Of Inquiry on the grounds that the data was flawed, there were brain tumor findings in animal studies, and there was a lack of studies on humans to determine long-term effects.

Aspartame was since approved spuriously via pressure from Donald Rumsfeld, apparently. Urm… ok.

“The official story is that aspartame was discovered in 1966 by a scientist developing an ulcer drug (not a “food additive”). Supposedly he discovered, upon carelessly licking his fingers that they tasted sweet. Thus was the chemicals industry blessed with a successor to saccharine, the coal-tar derivative that foundered eight years later under the pressure of cancer concerns.”  (according to this)

Aspartame basically metabolizes into Formaldehyde from amino acids and methanol, which eats you (so to speak) slowly, causing severe health problems at exceptionally low levels of exposure. It disguises itself as illnesses such as Lyme Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Hypothyroidism, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and Attention Deficit Disorder, to name just a few.

Some of the symptoms of aspartame poisoning include:

Headaches, Dizziness, Muscle spasms, Rashes, Depression, Fatigue, Seizures, Tachycardia, Insomnia, Hearing Loss, Anxiety attacks, Loss of taste, Joint Pain, Vertigo, Tinnitus, Irritability and Breathing difficulties.

Because it metabolizes into a poison, it is believed that it can also trigger or worsen things like brain tumours, Alzheimer’s Disease, Diabetes, birth defects, epilepsy, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Parkinson’s Disease.

Side effects can occur gradually, can be immediate, or can be acute reactions, but!  It’s a billion dollar market, so SHHH!!! don’t tell anybody!!

Here I sit with a tobacco pouch with the words ‘Smoking can damage the sperm and decreases fertility’ emblazoned in BIG lettering on its side. I have no sperm. I have plenty of children.

I’m worried about the warning that’s absent from my bottle of 7UP Free that should state ‘This product contains a chemical which eats holes in your brain. Do not consume if pregnant.’

But there will never be, because there’s no money in that lark.

Because we could all be run over by a bus tomorrow, I guess.