Great expectations
“You all think Christmas just happens. You think all this goodwill just falls from the freakin sky. Well, it doesnt! It falls out of my holly jolly butt! So you can cook your own damn turkey. Wrap your own damn presents. And hey, while youre at it, you can all ride a one horse open sleigh to hell!”
Lois Griffin, ‘A Very Special Family Guy Freakin’ Christmas’
I went to a really lovely carol service last night, everything was frosty breath and little donkeys and talk of Bethlehem… but then I was discovered. Laughingboy drew attention with his chaffinch impressions… epic tooth grinding that even managed to drown out 250 voices all singing at once. In a bid for peace, at one stage I just stuffed his bib in his mouth to chew on. He looked like a kidnap victim, but hey.
Nice people started to talk to me and noticed that I was missing from their flock, but there are only a handful of ways that I can guild the fact that I’m just too damn lazy to go to Church with the kids on a Sunday. Sundays count for 50% of my weekly lie-in potential! Push it forward to lunchtime maybe and we’ll talk.
“Join us.”
“Yes, join us… you’re one of us now!”
“Join ussss!”
It’s difficult to do a legger when you’ve a wheelchair. They were all pregnant too… I touch my belly and wonder if this child will be born blue-eyed and blonde, despite the absence of genes to tell it to. If it is, I’m giving it to Brangelina.
-o-
Go and visit the Corner of Jocelyn Testes Harder. Hers is the kind of Christmas we should be having!
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #3
They should dedicate a whole chapter to this problem in them maternity books, but so far I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere. I don’t know why.
There are three types of people out there who can get away with wearing dungarees… toddlers, the downright quirky, and pregnant women. My advice to the latter is; when you are unstrapping yourself in order to pee (which is a common thing these days let’s face it), don’t turn your back to the toilet as you do so.
What! It’s a very serious problem!
Pee-soaked dungaree straps can be the difference between a good day and complete and permanent loss of sanity, y’know.
Conduit for Kismet
I thought it was all about me yesterday, but it wasn’t. I thought the mysterious turn of events that held me in its favour was payback for a good deed I had done, but it wasn’t. I was just a conductor for a greater power.
This is how it happened.
I got into the car to go shopping for a few bits… the dodgy CD player in the car worked first time, which never happens, normally it would quite literally drive me to distraction. Every single one of the fifteen traffic lights I encountered on the way into the town turned green, just as I approached them. When I got to the supermarket, there was one basket left with my name on it. There was one jar of coffee left on the shelves which happened to be the brand I love, in the size I would normally buy it. The queues for the tills were at least five people long when I finally got to them, but just as I went to join the nearest one, a new till opened up and beckoned me forward… I went through during the supermarket’s busiest hour in less than three minutes.
Then, happiest of all happinesses, while purchasing an eight-pack of Guinness cans at the off-licence, I got carded.
Ask any thirty-year-old female out there… to be mistaken for an eighteen-year-old in an off-license is an unbelievably good thing. They almost didn’t sell me the alcohol because I couldn’t produce identification, but I wouldn’t have minded at all. I was grinning from ear to ear as I left the premises, which is when I got ambushed by a bloke with a sponsor card on the street. Apparently he was an ex-heroin addict who had kicked the habit, and was cycling to Cork to raise funds for Drugs Awareness. I was so happy, I gave him twenty euros which was slighly more than I could afford, as I discovered shortly afterwards when it came to paying for my parking ticket. I stood for a while wondering what to do, then I saw the wallet lying on the parking machine. An ID card lay inside.
“LINDA!!!” I shouted into empty space. A lady turned around from the other side of the parking lot, caught luckily by the accoustics, and returned to reclaim her wallet very thankfully indeed. She gave me three euros… more than enough to pay for the ticket. Strange.
Later on, I won a game of poker at home against The Accidental Terrorist, and Billy the Stoner. I won because my good day had given me the confidence to bluff well, and wound up with twenty euros in my back pocket.
So… effectively, Billy the Stoner paid for an ex-heroin addict to cycle to Cork, and THAT, boys and girls, is Kismet.
Mind the bump
There’s nothing like a bumper shopper to make a dull task more interesting. You know that other person who just randomly happens to start their shopping experience at the exact same time that you do? You get that awkward laugh as you both find you need to weigh your broccoli at the same time… you gaze over their shoulder to see which baked beans they prefer out of sheer bored curiosity? Maybe both of us have children who, without any need for introduction, choose to play hide and seek together. That’s a bumper shopper.
Today I got one of those rare nemesis bumper shoppers… they’re much more fun. She annoyed me when she didn’t say ‘thanks’ as I held the door open for her. She pushed past me to get the better pick of the trolleys. My mission throughout the shopping trip is therefore to piss her off in return. There are so many ways to do this – dropping tubes of KY jelly into her trolley when she’s not looking, or maybe I might use her temporary absence to shake up one of her bottles of soda to exploding point. Maybe I’ll snap open a tin of sardines and drizzle some fishy oil through the innards of her handbag while we’re queueing or poke my finger through the cling-film on her juicy steak chunks so that blood trickles through her shopping and onto her stupid shoes, it really depends on my mood which will be highly volatile until roughly April next year.
Pregnancy is a good enough excuse for anything… technically I could murder someone now, and get away scot free! For now it’s mainly being used as an excuse to watch porn and eat enormous amounts of toffee ice-cream and raw chilli (all at the same time). Hey… anything to distract me from unhealthy vices is good, right?
God be with the days before Christianity
I’m reading ‘The Mists of Avalon’ right now, a book about Arthurian legend from his mother and his sister’s point of view. In them days, it was all about appeasing the Goddess and natural ritual and Bardic poetry and such other lovely stuff, as Christianity and convents slowly crept into their consciousness.
I can’t help but be slightly jealous at the constant mention of the Bealtaine fires. May first every year, everyone in the community douses the home-fires, then celebrates life and re-birth during a giant hooley by a huge fire. As part of the ritual, it’s required by the Goddess that random people should couple up… so named the unity of the Great Mother and her young horned God. Not an orgy, no no, just appreciation for the exuberant healing powers of spring. It’s not just at Bealtaine either… they get to do this every quarter of the year to celebrate the ever-changing stages of life and death. This is most likely the origins of bonfires at Hallowe’en, then? Can you imagine loads of skobies all dressed up as Gardaí and Zombies all shaggin’ away after their sugar rush because the Goddess wants them to?
Pity they didn’t have Youtube back then!
Scandalliss!
I don’t get it!
I just joined a group on d’Fb called ‘Campaign against cutbacks in Crumlin‘ and did a bit of mooching to see what all the mammies and daddies had to say.
Small children and long waiting lists… cuts on cardiology and Orthopedics, to name but one or two, the coiffers apparently empty. I remembered suddenly a flashback of a news article about a brand new hospital in the City Center, due to start at the end of next year. How can that be? It’s to be a state of the art sort of place, with ‘up to’ 399 beds (each with its own en-suite bog), entirely covering an area of one million square feet of shiny angles glinting all over the kip. €750 million is how much they *think* it will cost, but given that the Luas’s grand total outweighted a space mission to Mars, I’m a dubious on-looker.
Pants. I’m not a patron of Crumlin, we attended the other two. It all started for us in Temple Street Children’s Hospital, a bizarre building full of stairs and corridors and lifts that can’t remember where they’re supposed to be. Statues of Mary and prettily hung pictures of pasta and paint and glue adorn the place and it has that oh-so-familiar smell of cafeteria and pee.
Then we were promoted to Tallaght Hospital for sick young ‘uns and were introduced to a mecca of enormous corridors and lifts that served us coffee. All you need to do is zoom in on the M50 and you’re laughing.
This new place is pretty much next door to Temple Street though. Just one hospital, to swallow up the existing three, in the worst place possible, right smack in the middle of Dublin City. It’s a complete bitch to get to, what with wrestling one-way streets and badly timed traffic lights and busy traffic sludge… with the added stress of trying not to crash into Luas drivers who shoulda gone to Specsavers… it’s a nightmare.
I’m sure it’ll be very pretty an’ all, but the only catch is, they have to sacrifice a load of today’s babies through lack of care, to do it. That’s sort of Satanic if you think about it.
And we’re all just standing here watching and saying ‘Ah jayzus isn’t that scandalliss?’.
I don’t get it.
No one gets hurt if they don’t act funny
There’s a very excellent scene in Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’ – I’m sure you know it. The Fun Lovin’ Criminals robbed a sound byte for their ‘Scooby Snacks’ track it’s that cool. Skip to 1:20 in the following video if you have no clue what I’m on about.
I was reminded of that quote tonight.
I stole Pacino’s cat. I fear that if it had been left with him any longer it would soon be an ex-cat. It’s tail is, for the want of a more scientific term, pretty crusty. It looks like you could break it off and smoke it.
I heard Puppychild giggling in the bedroom earlier… I went in to investigate to find her upside down, her upper shoulders dangling under the bed – she looked like a decapitated pink chicken. I heard the engine-roar of a large cat’s purr from the darkness somewhere.
“What ya doin’?”
“Playin wit the cat!” said a muffled child’s voice.
“Are you torturing that poor animal?!”
“Torture? That’s a good idea!! I like that!”
Ham Shank
Several highly disturbing thoughts swirl around my head on a daily basis, it seems unfair that I shouldn’t declare at least one of them here;
Laughingboy is but eight years old now, and he will grow into a man, even if this idea seems absurd to me… there’s little I can do to stop this happening. Men have needs, needs that require locked bathroom doors and copies of Victoria’s Secret. Laughingboy will have needs too, I get preludes every now and then when I unwrap his nappy of a morning to be greeted by a wee stalker winking at me. If your average bloke chokes his turkey at least 356 times a year, who’s going to do that for Laughingboy?!? Do I bring him on holidays to Amsterdam for a month around his birthday to make up for lost time? Do I put an ad in the local newsagents window for some willing lady to do the job every Tuesday?
I once caught a middle aged lady giving her poodle a ham shank on a park bench one day… I wondered then what would happen if she had a disabled son instead of a stupid looking dog? Hang on, I just have to go and vomit for a second…
…that’s better.
I wonder if most people in my position would ever think about the dangers of re-absorbed baby-batter and the side-effects thereof, or is it just me? Mothering is such a weird job sometimes.
In dire need of a nap
Laughingboy has discovered the roof of his mouth. He wrote a song about it last night which was 182 verses long, and being the clever kid that he is, he knew that in order to get the entire song finished before school, he’d have to begin at 4am. ‘Iggle iggle diddle iddle iggle iggle diddle iggle…’ ad finitum. It’s very pleasant to listen to, but not in the wee squishy hours of the morning.
Then I discovered in my sleepy crankiness while loading Laughingboy onto his schoolbus, that somebody had come along during the night and torn my sapling plum tree to shreds. It’s literally in ribbons all over the front garden, with just a wee pathetic stalk jutting out from the ground where the tree used to be. It yielded three plums this summer, they were delicious. What sort of cretin tears up a baby plum tree?
Then I was treated like a lazy boyfriend at the opticians and was badgered into giving a reason as to why I haven’t called them in such a long time. They told me I have Blepharitis. I didn’t even know I possessed a Blephar.
It’s going to be a weird day.
Tit for TAT
Gerry Ryan actually stopped talking about himself for long enough to let a very interesting subject through on his radio show this morning. That subject was male breastfeeding. Yes, that’s male lactation.
A young man named Ragnar Bengtsson, a Swedish father of a two year old boy has decided to conduct an experiment on himself to see if he can produce breastmilk in order to supply his future children. His theory is that if he stimulates his moobs on a three-hourly basis (playing havoc with his image at college), by December he should have stimulated enough hormones to produce milk.
This has been done before, apparently. In some cultures where powdered milk is unavailable, the death at birth of a baby’s mother has led its father to suckle the infant successfully to weaning stage. This fact amazes me… that throughout history, and in some parts of the world today, men are breastfeeding babies.
Three things are needed for boob-juice. Mammary glands, a Pituitary gland, and a hormone called Prolactin, normally produced by the Pituitary gland in the later stages of pregnancy. Men have (potentially) all of the above, given that they are born with the first two, the third requirement can in theory be stimulated into action without the help of artificial hormones.
I wish this guy the best of luck, without any fear of this idea taking off in Ireland whatsoever. Sweden’s male to female roles in the workplace are quite the reverse of what’s happening here, with 90% of women in the workforce and 16 months of paid maternity/paternity leave in most, if not all jobs in the country. This means that the concept of the ‘stay at home dad’ is far more liberal there. Children therefore bond with both male and female role models which can only be a healthy thing.
In Ireland however, men hold on to their well ‘ard image tightly while still wishing they were curled up in somebody’s womb. Most would happily pass a law against public breastfeeding, seeing it as an abomination, the destruction of the true purpose of breasts – the titty wank. It’s probably an unhealthy mindset, but I’m a sucker (sucker, gettit?) for butch. If I caught TAT suckling our future new-born child I fear I would grab that child and run as far away as possible from the beardy freak. But then, I’m not Swedish.
Having a child suckle a hairy boob, that’s an entirely eerie concept. Yes it produces skin-to-skin contact which is excellent for a baby’s psychological growth, but it somewhat blurs the idea of a nurturing mother, doesn’t it?
Then again, there are many women out there who don’t like the idea of breastfeeding for the fear it will saggify their breasts and muck up their nipple alignment which is devastatingly entirely true. Some don’t do it because they don’t have time, others are completely horrified with the idea. Isn’t it the right thing to do for the father of the baby to give breastfeeding a go if this is the case? Far healthier for the child, and daddy gets a taste of that wonderful bonding feeling that is a totally unique experience. It’s win-win, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?!?!?
PS… I’ve discovered via a link on the article’s web-page, that breast cancer among Swedish women has DOUBLED since the 1960′s. Coincidence or Kismet? I wonder…
