Wednesday 30 October 2013

Braaaaaains

Bloody zombies. They get everywhere.

Regular readers (hello, mum!) will be aware as part of my burgeoning mid life crisis I've taken up running. Specifically, running away from zombies. Yesterday, I got home from work to find the Wife and Kids were out. Torn between going out for a run or having my first poo in peace for seven years I came to the conclusion that running was better choice.

I was about five minutes into the run when my phone ran. It was the Wife.

"Hello. We're just about to come home. Be back about half five. The Girl is being non compliant. If I put you on speaker phone can you ask her what she wants for dinner and see if you can get her out of the tantrum?"

"I'm, like, being chased by a zombie at the moment."

*Distantly* "Girl, Dad's on the phone. He wants to know what you want for dinner."

Boy: "Spaghetti!"

The Girl said;

"HULK SMASH PUNY HUMANS!" 

Or words to that effect.

"What do you want for dinner, Girl?"

"I AM GODZILLA! YOU ARE TOKYO!"

Or similar.

"Are you a bit grumpy?"

"REDRUM! REDRUM!"

"It's not working, love."

*rrrrrrrrrrrrrr*

I sighed, and started running again. I  hadn't got very far (because I'm fat) before I got a text message.

Just got Girl out of tantrum by running over a pheasant.

Because there's nothing like an avian suicide to perk up a four year old girl.

The rest of the run was relatively uneventful save for a couple of zombie attacks and the fact that, for reasons I don't quite comprehend, the app kept making me skip. Not, like, boxing skipping.

Like; "tra-la-la!" skipping.

This turned out to be rather liberating right up until a truck driver yelled a word that sounded suspiciously like "BUNT!" at me.

I returned home to find a Girl beaming from ear to ear, with no trace of the previous Satanic possession.

"FIONA!"

She yelled, and pointed at me.

"Look, Boy! It's Fiona!"

"Who's Fiona?"

"You are!"

"Why are you calling me Fiona?"

"Duh! Because you own us!"

"What? That makes no- oh, wait... THE OWNER."

"That's what I said! We're zombies and you own us!"

"Zombies don't normally have own - "

"Braaaaains!"

"Get off! Stop biting me! "

In effort to distract them I decided to ask about their encounter with the pheasant.

"We were driving along and he crashed into my window and he died."

The Girl said, with wide eyed earnestness.

"Poor Lucky died!"

"Lucky?"

"The birdie. That's what we called him. "

"Of course you did."

"Braaaaains!"

"STOP DOING THAT!"

"Look, dad!"

Said the Boy, holding my cycling head torch to his forehead.

"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! I AM A GARLIC. "

"No, you're an idiot."

I said.

There was a brief interlude into this insanity whilst we had dinner. During which I said to the Boy (jokingly) ;

"I'm grumpy, Boy. Would you mind if I hit you?"

On hearing this the Girl flung a protective arm across her brother and yelled;

"DON'T YOU DARE! "

"Oh, ok. Can I hit the Girl instead?"

The Boy replied (without looking away from his dinner)

"Go for it."

What a little darling.

Sunday 13 October 2013

Pointless

"Parenting," you often hear parents say,  "is a thankless task." Parents often say stupid things, such as;

"How many times have I told you not to do that?"

"What's that sock doing on the floor? "

And my personal favourite;

"Do you want to tidy your room?"

Of course parenting is thankless. You're looking after psychotic egomaniacs. And now, in the spirit of gleeful hypocrisy, here's what drives me batshit nutty bonkers.

Ironing

No one in the history of humankind has ever reached the end of their life and said;

"I may not have lead an interesting life. I may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I'm glad I did all that ironing. "

And when it  comes to kid's clothes you can bet your arse you've entered a world of futility. The scientific definition of a femtosecond is the time between a six year old putting on a perfectly ironed school shirt and it looking like it's been fed to a giraffe.

"The" Instead of "Fuh"

Childhood speech impediments can be very sweet. For instance the Boy said "Ephalent" instead of Elephant for years and I never got bored of it. I still occasionally say "Par cark" instead car park, and chicks really dig that.

However, the Girl is made of nails and pig iron, and as such her speech impediment is more... robust. She has proved completely impervious to any attempt to convince her to say "the" instead of "fuh". Mostly this gives her a bit of a Basildon twang, the sort you hear from seventeen year old women pushing their six children in a single pram whilst they take their pit bull for a walk to the tattoo parlour.

However, on occasion it causes fairly dramatic misunderstandings. Such as when she was regaling my mum with the story of when she saw a man dressed as Scooby Doo queueing to board an EasyJet flight.

"I saw Scooby Doo! "

"Really? Where? "

"Fuh queue!"

Hair

Washing hair is a bit of a chore. At one point the Girl had hair about the length you normally see on a concert cellist. It was so long you had to erect scaffolding before you could start to wash it. So it took about forty five minutes to wash, condition, comb and dry. And since I'm a man, whenever I try to plait her hair she ends up looking like a scarecrow. As for the Boy, regardless of how we cut his hair I'm unable to dry it without making him look like Hitler. Bath night in our house generally resembles a rather dark version of the Wizard of Oz.

Batteries

Everything these days takes batteries. The Boy got a wooden train set for Christmas one year and even that took batteries. And they never take standard size batteries, they all take tiny ones with serial numbers for names that you can only buy from specialist retailers and which cost the soul of your first born child.

We invested in rechargeable batteries, which saves a fair amount of money but comes with the disadvantage of having to hold a "battery amnesty" every two weeks to charge the bloody things up. This involves opening every single toy, normally with a screwdriver. Because if you don't, creepy shit happens. We were bought a musical table (yes, you read that right) that, when the batteries were low, would suddenly switch itself on and play music eerily out of key. Usually at three in the morning. Which meant I'd wake up thinking Freddy Kruger was coming for me.

Monopoly

I'm not a fan of board games, but Monopoly holds a special place on my mantelpiece of hate. Aside from the fact that you win the game by aggressive land purchases and uncompromising rental contracts (and if that doesn't scream fun for all the family I don't know what does) there's the fact that the result is normally a forgone conclusion within twenty minutes but you're forced to grind on with the game for another four hours. Even the "quick" version takes at least two hours. That's not a game, that's a job.

But mostly I don't like it because I've never won, regardless of how hard I try. In the past week I've played the Boy twice. He beat me both times. I cheated the second time and kept stealing money from the bank when he wasn't looking (I'm not proud). He still beat me. When we finished he slapped his forehead and said;

"Oh, man. I was trying to let you win. "

So I got the Girl to tell him where she saw Scooby Doo.

Thursday 3 October 2013

Skool Daze

Well, now we find ourselves with two children in school. It seems like only yesterday that we were dealing with incessant crying, sore bums and wall to wall poo. Actually, it was only yesterday and its probably better we move on.

The Girl's first day at school was relatively smooth sailing. Especially given the Boy's pep talk in the car.

"You'll really like school, Girl. My favourite thing is play time and golden time. "

"*Ahem* The LESSONS are really good too, aren't they, Boy? "

"Not really. Especially maths and English. They're rubbish."

"I don't want to go to school! "

"Brilliant. Thanks, Boy. "

And so the Girl went into school knuckling the tears from her eyes. Her teacher, a kindly and well meaning sort, took her hand and said;

"Come on, let's go and find some girls to play with."

Not realising the Girl doesn't like girls and, when cornered, acts like a wounded wolverine. Fortunately, thus far there haven't been any a fatalities, which is a blessing because we wouldn't want the Girl impacting on the school's OFSTED rating. The people in the village might get a bit churlish. And the lack of homicide is all the more surprising since the Girl told me tonight that her friend and future husband told her today that he wants to marry another girl, called Molly.

"No one wants to marry me. "

She said, forlornly. My initial reaction to this was to go over to Molly's house and shout through the letterbox;

"Keep your hands off my daughter's boyfriend!"

And then use weed killer on her lawn to write the word "SLUT".

But, once again it turns out that what (to any right minded person) is a perfectly rational reaction, society at large deems "not socially acceptable" and "criminal damage"

All of this has led to the inevitable parents evening. Last night was my turn. Naturally I'd completely forgotten about this, so the Wife greeted me with this information as we passed each other on the doorstep, me returning from work, her on her way out.

I have a lot of time for teachers.  I've mentioned before that I spent a short time teaching in primary schools and am well experienced in the buffoonary and grade A arseholery of some parents. So I have no problem going to parents evening. At least I didn't right up until the Wife said;

"You have to be there for six fifteen. "

"Ok."

"It finishes a half past eight. "

"Ok.. Wait... You mean half six, right? I mean... ha, ha, ha... I'm not going to... TWO HOURS?"

What is there to talk about at a four year old's parents evening?

"Our learning goals for this term are for the Girl to; keep her arse in her trousers for longer than five minutes and to stop yelling 'I'M PUNCHING MYSELF IN THE NOO-NOO!' "

It turns out it was a forum to discuss how the school, the governors and the parents could improve the school. This was all done (but too frigging long). Annoyingly, they served wine and Is bloody well driven down there, as getting slaughtered would have made the whole thing more bareable. More annoyingly, the elderly governer I was on a table with pounded five glasses in the first half hour and spent the rest of the evening alternating between sleeping and dribbling.

Meanwhile the Boy remains completely unchanged by his return to school.

"Why haven't you put your trousers away? You got distracted, didn't you?"

"OOH! ANT!"

Still, his drawing is coming along nicely. Here's a picture of his mum.


That's a saucepan, by the way.

It's not a penis.

Really, it isn't.