He dropped her name into conversation a little too casually and made my ears prick up.  He told me about how beautiful she was, how sound, sitting in his taxi surrounded by shopping bags.  I gave out to him for not finishing his sentences properly.

“She’s really funny though…”

“But not as funny as -” I prompted.

“But not as funny as you, of course.  She has lovely hair, too.”

“FINISH THE DAMN SENTENCE!!!”

I got given out to for being touchy.  Now on Sunday nights during ‘The All Ireland Talent Show’, TAT locks himself into the bedroom with the television wearing only a dressing-gown, and won’t let me in.  I hover with my swollen body trying to think of a good looking Irish male television presenter I can glean revenge with.  I fail miserably.

I don’t know whether I’m insecure because of Miss Perfection, or because The Accidental Terrorist’s viewing standards have slipped so low.

You know the way ‘they’ say that some African tribes intensely dislike having their photographs taken for fear a bit of their souls are taken with them?  I know exactly how they feel.

It’s a clever ploy that’s happened several times since Puppychild started school… professional photographers sneak into the building in the dead of lunchtime and snap a few quickies without warning, then they send a blackmail letter home with the kid later that day.

You have one week to pay the sum of €17.50 for a print of our photograph.  If you want to see it alive, please view the school’s notice board.

I got a letter like this last week, and took the bait.  Sure enough, there was a group photograph of Puppychild and her classmates, sitting angelically in a row outside the main door of the building.

It got to me that nobody had asked my permission to take that picture, or at least warned me about it so that I could have given her hair a pre-emptive brush.  It suddenly struck me that if I didn’t pay for this photograph, somebody else would get at it and could potentially do strange and unimaginable things with it.  I felt compelled to give these bastards my coal money, just to save my daughter’s soul.

It also occurs to me that there is now a negative somewhere in someone’s studio with my kid on it, and no amount of cash can get it back.  I’m highly bloody un-nerved by this.

I will be giving these people an envelope containing €17.50 in exchange for my daughter’s soul.  If they had asked for €190 for a print-off the size of a postage-stamp, I’d probably still consider paying for that, too.  I feel invaded.

Clever soul stealers.

This isn’t a rant, or a ‘poor me’ exhibition, it’s more of a ‘point-and-laugh’ sort of situation.  That’s all we can do, really.  It beats going insane.

We moved into this house a few months ago and I expressed on this here blog a genuine gratitude to the Council and to the tax-payers out there for providing a family with a special needs kid a pretty excellent house indeed.  It’s still an excellent house, but it feels sort of like a Karma explosion… as though we’ve used up our good luck for a while and it’s back to banging our heads against the wall again.

See… the reason this house is so great, is that we now have a mechanical hoist for Laughingboy so our backs are saved.  The only problem is that we were supplied with the wrong sling; the hammock-type thing that attaches to the hoist that holds the kid… it belongs to a different manufacturer so it doesn’t fit the existing unit.  I contacted the Occupational Therapist about this about eight months ago and the poor woman has been tearing her hair out ever since.

See… you’d think that the Health Board would sort this sort of thing, but apparently it ain’t their bag any more – they just don’t do grants because of cutbacks.  They told us it was up to the County Council.  The County Council told us to contact the builders, who couldn’t be contacted because their company went bust, because the County Council didn’t pay them for their work.  Therefore the hoist machine we have now is unpaid for, and nobody wants to know… we can pretty much forget about a properly fitting sling.  Time to start grovelling to politicians again? Ugh.  I hate grovelling.  I prefer manual lifting, thanks.

Then there’s Laughingboy’s wheelchair.  You know those circus acts where the clown comes speeding out like a mad thing on his ridiculously undersized car?  That’s what Laughingboy looks like.  His knees protrude grotesquely from the chair, his ankles covered in bruises because his legs are too long to fit onto the footplate properly.  He keeps sliding downwards into the chair like a naughty child at the back of the class trying to avoid his teacher’s glare, because his restraints had to be removed to stop them pinching his waist.  He cries a lot, but you would too if you had to spend most of your day strapped to a kiddie’s tricycle.

We… that is Motability Ireland, Laughingboy’s Occupational Therapist, his teachers and us, his parents, began lobbying for this chair seven months ago, and it looks like it’ll be another six months before the red tape is cleared and the Health Board can be assured that the existing chair cannot be adapted any further.  Only then will they think about clearing another one.

I’ve robbed a shopping trolley from Tescos in the meantime, if I pimp it out with a duvet and some pillows it should do the job nicely.  We could walk down the median of the motorway on the way to school and everyone could beep and laugh.  I’d wear a sandwich-board advertising the H.S.E., just to complete the irony.

You couldn’t invent this stuff, because if you did, nobody would believe you.

Murphy’s Law really stuck it in and broke it off tonight.

Laughingboy has a feeding machine.  He needs it because occasionally when I fed him by mouth in the olden days he would choke and turn blue, especially where giggles were involved, or distracting lights, or the need to shout took over.  I could not explain to the kid that we only have one hole with which to shout and eat, hence the two cannot be done together, so we built him a stomach extension instead and fed him that way.

I took the bloody thing for granted, didn’t I?

I hooked him up after school, filled his feed bag with yummy Paediasure, set the dose rate and time, and pressed the big red button.  Denied.  I switched it off and on again, and pressed the big red button once more.  Big flashy negative red letters razzed at me without a flicker of sympathy.  Undeniably denied.  I detached the clip at its side and peered at its innards, at which point a piece of broken plastic fell out.  I said some very rude words and Laughingboy laughed.  It’s well for some.

BUT!

K8 always has a back-up plan!  Yes!  In my crafty days back at the hospital when I had become but a shadow in the corridors, I had managed to steal a spare machine for this very occasion!  I laughed heartily as I unwrapped it.  I loaded it up and pressed the big red button.  I got an ‘Internal Circuit Problem‘ alarm in big red letters immediately.

Shite!!!!

I am spending my evening injecting fluid into Laughingboy’s gut at a rate of one 5ml syringe every ten minutes until his quota of 300mls has been absorbed.  It’ll be a Long.  Night.

Meanwhile Laughingboy laughs.  He knows there will be no school for the next 28 working days and he won’t have to fake so much as a raised eyebrow towards the cause.  Fuck Murphy and his laws I say.  Right up the Jacksie.