Web-Slinging and Grand-Theft Pastry

With work being as it was for both of us this year we hadn’t had a holiday by the end of August. And then our daughter started school in September, constraining us around term-dates for the next decade at least. So. Here we are. Paying a massive premium for a holiday that would have been 10 degrees hotter a month ago. Still, it’s nice to have a rest and let the mind wander a bit. I’d like to say I’m mulling-over possible solutions for the Euro zone crisis or the plight of Palestine… but I’m not. I’m fixated with the problems in my own back-yard. And out the front. Namely spiders… and foxes.

Spiders first. There’s increasingly greater numbers of increasingly big eight-legged guys surrounding our house. And they’re aggressively target-ambitious. To date, locations of huge and surprisingly-thick webs (seemingly spun overnight) have included: the space between two hedges above our front gate; filling the entire external frame of the back door; and between the seat and the handlebars of my moped. We had joked about a load of them catching one of us and dragging the unlucky victim to an underground cavern as offering to a giant spider over-lord, like in that Harry Potter film*. But when they started targeting the entrance gap in the netting around the kids’ trampoline, I really started to get concerned - have they actually learned to go for smaller human targets?

We’re currently on holiday and I’m worried that, without my daily demolition of their night-shift progress, they’ll get a real strong footing and we’ll come home to a suburban approximation of the film Aliens.

As for foxes, while there’s no obvious sign of a child-abduction plot from them, they have actually started on a pretty solid campaign of larceny. I talked in a previous post (Learned Wisdon #16) about them ripping into our bins, but now they’re stealing our food deliveries.

On a Saturday morning we get milk, bacon, eggs, sliced bread and croissants left on the doorstep by the milkman. To the great disappointment of my daughter, for the last three weeks the only thing left when I open the door is milk and sliced bread.

The bacon and eggs I can understand, but the croissants?? Their instincts and digestive-systems surely aren’t designed for continental breakfasts. [looks out window, sees fox in beret and stripy jumper cycling past with onions round neck]

Anyway, it’ll be a short-lived problem. It’s only a matter of time before I wake up to find all the region’s foxes cocooned in webbing on our lawn. Hopefully. (Must remember to research any recorded cases of spiders and foxes forming an alliance to achieve unified strategic goals with unexpectedly powerful efficiency… may possibly have to go less specific on the search terms)

By the way, for those of you who know where I live, obviously all that ‘currently on holiday’ stuff was artistic licence. Don’t get any burglarisation ideas. Really I’m sat at home right now with a f*cking big guard dog spider-fox-army.

* the one with the spiders

Learned Wisdoms

#42: Occasionally taking children out of school for the odd few days for holidays during their early years probably isn’t a problem to their development, but be careful with their understanding of the official line or you will get an angry call from the headmaster…

Teacher (at the end of a Thursday): “Toby, don’t take your gym bag home tonight – you’ll need it for P.E. tomorrow”

My friend’s nephew, Toby (clasping his gym bag firmly as he walked out the door): “Actually Miss, I won’t need it tomorrow… because I’m not going to be very well tomorrow”

Taking Back The Living Room

We didn't expect to have a nice, tidy, toyless lounge at this point, but it had got ridiculous. The corner of the room earmarked for toy storage was full-to-overflowing and toys were (even in 'tidy-mode') on all surfaces in all parts of the room, smothering it like those parasitic vines that cover trees and suffocate them of their tasteful decor, calmness and ability to sit-down comfortably.

It came to a head when, in a discussion about taking toys she'd grown out of to the charity shop (because there was no space for them), our daughter looked around the room and said "But there's space there" [gestures with both hands towards the small piece of floor between the sofa and the telly]

Time for a change...

Our little boy recently got big enough to start sleeping in the bottom of the bunk bed. I'd taken his cot-bed out of their room and given it to friends. And into that space we moved the toy cabinet and 95% of the play-shrapnel that had been covering what was once a living room where adults could sit in the evening without being reminded of the film Big.

It was surprisingly liberating. And, added bonus, having more things to do in their bedroom when they wake up buys us a little bit of lie-in time on the weekends before they both slip out of their room, climb silently onto our bed and jump heavily onto our sleeping, unprotected bodies. (My default sleep-position has evolved into a lying-down version of the footballer-in-a-defensive-wall pose.)

Alongside ground-floor-reclamation, there's been a couple of other nice developments recently:

• Our little girl has started putting clothes on herself, which reduces dressing-related time/stress by 33% in the mornings (I've still got to clothe my trouser-repellent little boy and *heavy sigh* myself... recent optimistic google search: "buy Wallace & Gromit-style auto-dressing machine")
• The kids are able to clean up after themselves a bit. Even our little boy, when he spills milk on the floor - if passed some kitchen roll - will do a pretty effective job of wiping it up, then go and put it in the bin. Brilliant. (Is 2 too young to start teaching a child to mow a lawn?)
• My little girl makes me laugh in ways beyond just-being-really-cute. We were walking by the Thames in Putney early one Sunday and Boris Johnson was there preparing to do some filming. We walked right by him and I said to her, "That man there is the mayor of London!". She looked at him, turned back to me, shook her had and softly said, "No. I don't think so."
• They play together really nicely, which is great because - while I really love playing with them - it's nice to have the occasional minute on the evenings & weekends when I can move away to do something without being whined at for neglecting my duties as a ballet-student/pirate/bear-hunter/Justin Bieber
• They're starting to show an interest in sports. My little girl even expressing retrospective disappointment that I didn't take her with me to watch Huddersfield in the League One play-off final last weekend... I'm savouring her current enthusiasm, as I'm pretty sure it'll be gone about 17 minutes into the first Town game I take her to watch

While the kids certainly aren't perfect (they frequently whine if I won't carry them; often have toilet-accidents; and are prone to dissolving when immersed in mercury), things have started to feel a bit easier recently. To the point where, after resolving toymageddon, I did even catch myself thinking "Well. Isn't this lovely? It's like the end of an episode of Quantum Leap where everything's fallen nicely into place. And things will probably just keep getting easier from here..."

Then my little girl ran into the room naked, jumped onto the sofa and gyrated around while singing "I'm sexy and I know it" over and over again.

Oh boy...

Learned Wisdoms

#40: You'll be excited when your little girl enjoys doing karaoke with you on the playstation. Even more so when she graduates off the Disney disc onto the chart versions. Then less so when she latches onto Aqua's Barbie Girl and sings it repeatedly, i) because there's some pretty negative messages in there that may detract from her learning that a woman is not dependent upon anyone else to make her feel good about herself, that self-esteem comes not from others but from within, and that the pursuit of social acceptance should never drive us into degrading situations; and ii) because it's shite

#41: If your kids' increasing ability to do things for themselves is conflicting with carry-both-children-up-the-stairs-to-the-child-minder's-flat-every-morning being the cornerstone of your exercise regime, then recognise that the 'as they get gradually bigger, I'll get gradually stronger' logic doesn't actually seem to hold anyway (as your gradually more achy spine and gradually more clicky elbows will testify)

Playhouse of Horrors

My wife would like to get a playhouse for our kids in the garden. We’ve talked about it a few times and I‘ve always been very negative about the idea without really knowing why. When she pushed for my rationale the justification finally popped out from deep in my subconscious… “Because a vagrant will use it as a toilet”. [Insert your own confused silence. We both did]

I do tend to see all the potential problems with a thing/scenario, rather than focusing on the likely positives. This can be useful at work and in other circumstances where it gives the chance to mitigate probable issues. But it does mean I’ve got more concerns floating about my head each day than anyone reasonably needs. (I spent a whole commute last week considering how I’ll cope when I someday get sent to prison for a crime I didn’t commit.)

However it turned out that my vagabond-dung-angst was actually based on life experience - when I was growing up, a hobo did once sleep in our back garden and extensively fertilized our back doorstep.

But discovering the odd smelly surprise probably never really hurt anyone. Maybe it's even character building. It would obviously be really nice for the kids to have a playhouse. And I refuse to live in fear. It’s like the war on terror*. If we’re scared to go on buying playhouses as normal, then the pooping-drifters win.

Another slightly more likely unlikely scenario, given their huge numbers in our area and recent instances of attacks on humans, is that one morning my little boy opens the playhouse door to find a bewildered fox in there. Still a long-shot though - I just did a google search for "Playhouse Fox Incident" and found no wendyhouse-specific cases to back up my apprehensions.

(And if you ever get a pub quiz question “Who did special effects for the 'Without Incident' episode of 1950s TV show Playhouse 90?”, I can tell you the answer is Jim Fox.)

So we’re going for it. We are going to get a playhouse. And if my irrational worries mean getting up every morning to check it for tramps, angry foxes, and miscellaneous faeces before letting my kids into the garden, then that is what I shall do. For I love my children. And I am free man… (At least until that crime I didn’t commit thing happens.)


Learned Wisdoms

#24: If your mother-in-law ever asks you why there’s such a big lock on your shed door, just say it was the only one you had lying around when you put your shed up. Don’t say “Because I’m psychologically scarred by a childhood incident and believe that, every chance they get, beggars will spread their cack over all my things. More tea?”

#25: Once you’ve got the kids to bed on evenings when your wife is working late, if you spend your spare time writing and working out, you’ll be slightly disconcerted to notice that you’ve already gravitated naturally towards using rec time for hobbies you’ll be able to continue once you’re wrongly imprisoned.

* Yes. This matter is just like 21st century world issues with terrorism

Men Are From Earth, Women Are Also From Earth (Where No-One Enjoys Tidying Up)

I just spent 15 mins folding and putting away clothes. It wasn’t awesome. I would have rather done something fun for that quarter-of-an-hour and let the heap on the landing grow for a couple more days. However, tidying-up the clean washing (within specified post-drying timelines) is a job I signed up to in The Anderson Peace Treaty of 2010. Before that, a lack of appreciation for each other’s priorities was causing a few household skirmishes…

Despite my natural tendency for a bit of cosy mess, I have always put effort into ensuring my children grow up in a nice environment, free from e coli, strangle-hazards and potential falls-from-height. However, in the early days, my wife would have described my contribution at home with words like "lazy", "self-centred" and "f*ck-knuckle".

Essentially, there was a sizable gulf between my view of acceptable commitment to house work and my wife’s perception of the required efforts.

This was largely because, while I was still merrily oblivious, she had recognised the extent to which our non-child-based leisure time was restricted by having a kid alongside a career each.

Her earlier acceptance of this was probably because women are forced to start coming to terms with constraints and sacrifices the moment they get pregnant:

No alcohol/pâté/rollercoasters > No energy > No lean torso > No comfortable position to sleep in > Huge physical trauma > No break from being the dedicated nutrition-facility for a small human

… whereas a man’s journey over that same period tends to be:

Gain designated driver for nights out > Get 2 weeks off work
(It's little wonder we're a bit behind at first.)

When my wife’s maternity leave was over, we divided the household chores roughly in half and both kept largely on top of our stuff. However, maybe due to some maternal nesting instinct thing (or perhaps because it’s pretty standard to not want sh*t strewn all over your house), it became clear that my relaxed attitude to clothes-putting-away was really infuriating my wife. And I couldn’t understand why she wanted to spend all our free-time ration doing chores instead of enjoyable stuff.

Eventually I came to terms with the fact that there just is a load more stuff to do in the house. It still feels like Norris McWhirter should be appearing to verify my record-breaking stats on weekly volume of garments returned to wardrobes, but I get why the amounts are exponentially higher than when you’re just a couple. (Post-birth, not only are there all the baby’s little costumes, your things also need washing more frequently due to constant non-specific baby-engendered soilage.)

It only takes a couple of day’s neglect before our house starts feeling like the inside of an arcade 2p drop-down. So, until we earn enough money to employ a maid or (ideally) a team of trained cleaner-monkeys, I should probably keep trying to deal with my little jobs before I have a work-out or sit down to watch telly. But, on the flip-side, my wife also recognises that, to avoid going mental, there’s got to be a reasonable point each evening where we both stop and relax.

Learned Wisdoms
#15: If someone at work says you look "a little bit tired and out of shape", complaining about this to a woman who’s carried a human for 9 months, pushed it out of her vagina, been up in the middle of the night breast-feeding for 6 weeks and can no longer go for a run without a-little-bit-of-wee-coming-out is not a strong move.
(The scene ends badly, as you might imagine, in a cavalcade of anger and fear.)

#16: In the division of house-hold chores, put the bins out is generally a good one to pick. It’s perceived as a high-value deliverable, but actually only takes a few minutes.
However, if you live in a suburb where foxes frequently rip open bin bags and scatter the contents all over your garden, you may want to think twice about signing up for it. Particularly if your wife is a good negotiator who can easily make a strong case for pick up the disgusting bin-mess that’s covering the entire lawn being an implied sub-task of bins out.