All the peas
My tea tastes shit and I’m a bit grumpy about it. It’s my own fault – I’ve been reusing tea bags to combat the financial drain of my eBay and Etsy addictions and the result is a decidedly below-par brew. Add my inclination to forget about the blessed thing for just that little bit too long and I’m left with the ultimate in grey and tepidly crap beverages. At this stage the only option is to give it a blast in the microwave (I could make a fresh one but that would just result in the wasting of another bag which we can little afford) but then all I have is a warmer but even shittier drink. It almost pains me to drink it. But I do.
The fact that I’m grumpy isn’t all tea related. It has been one of those pissier weather days that makes you wonder why the hell you haven’t moved to Spain. And I had to drag my sorry ass out of bed super early to get the kids (in the heaviest buggy in the world, with the most annoying rain covers in the world) to the doctors for the ungodly hour of … 9:30! (OK I am well aware that that is late in most people’s books but you’d be a fool to pick me up on that right now.) Then add the fact that the small ones refused to eat the yummy egg mayonnaise sandwich that I had lovingly hand-bought from Marks & Spencer’s. Then they both embarrassingly kept trying to run out of the lovely music class we went to leaving me chasing them all over the neighbouring café area and then cried their heads off when I dared to bring them back again. Then they screamed blue murder when I tried to put them down for their lunchtime nap until I gave them a little snack (because duh, they were hungry having not eaten the blasted egg sandwich) and read them several books. And then … then I notice that the outside of the bloody annoying bastard rain covers have still got a load of stuck on tomato seeds from some long forgotten rainy lunchtime snack that the stupid bastard pissy rain hasn’t even rained off. I mean what is the point of walking all over Camden most of the morning in the rain if it doesn’t even do you the courtesy of giving the rain covers a bit of a spruce? So, my question is, would anyone like to come round and clean my rain covers? Please? I’ll try to make a u-turn and be sparkling company. And I might even make you a tea.
Mega Burn
It’s 6:30am and I am skipping in my cold, dark garden. I am having another one of my funny I-must-exercise-right-now turns and I am looking for someone to blame. I mutter with each skip, grunt with each hop, and swear at those hops that result in me nearly falling flat on my (slightly pudgier) face as the rope catches on my (c)ankle. I am not very good at this. And become even worse the more I tire. After about 50 (non consecutive) skips I give up. That’ll do. That’ll burn it off. ‘It’ being Christmas.
Bloody f-ing Christmas. Sitting there all smug with your endless starters, mains, puddings and cheese courses. Mmmm cheese…. Damn it, there I go again. Cheese! Just get the hell out of my house will you? Am I going to be forced to eat you all up until you’re finally satisfied with yourself? Or shall I make a pasta sauce and freeze your smug little ass so that I can throw you out in a year when I find you sitting at the back of the freezer drawer looking thoroughly sorry for yourself. Well let’s just see if there are any crackers left. That will be the deciding fact… oh fuck it there are. Well just a little sliver then…
Yeah yeah, I haven’t written this either.
Yeah yeah. I haven’t written this yet.
Ok so they say that the most stressful life events are moving house, getting married and having a baby1. Getting married was indeed pretty stressful2, and yes, having a baby (or babies in my case: Just two. At the same time. Like, twins in fact) wasn’t exactly trouble free either3. But I think we really need to give due credit to the stress involved in arranging a children’s birthday party. And particularly doing so while in the process of trying to move house.
It all starts off so simply: About a month before their birthday I say to my hoosboond,4 “I know it’s potentially more stressful but I think it might be better if we hire a little room for the party this year so that we’re not so crowded in our flat. And then I can invite a few of their little friendies along and it’ll be cute and festive and we can sing songs, eat a party tea, bla-di-bla (ha-di-ha), etc”… I find myself getting all smiley and excited at the thought of the little kiddlies all sitting around singing and hopping to ‘sleeping bunnies’, having their party tea, blowing out the candles on the cake, cheering and then sending their little friendies off home with a little party bag containing a piece of cake and maybe one toy because we’re not bloody made of money you know!
Surprisingly, the black tar-like icing tastes delicious.
Then before you know it I’ve gone around every local supermarket and found that they don’t bloody stock monkey nuts at this time of year: it being the end of November they’re only stocking ‘festive’ nuts and apparently monkey nuts aren’t considered festive enough. (They may have a point.) So instead of giving up on the monkey nut trail idea like a sane person (or as sane as a person can be who thinks a monkey nut trail is necessary in the first place), I find myself saying ‘That’s ok, I shall simply replace real monkey nuts with cut out pictures of them instead, and while I’m at it I’ll print out a load of monkey colouring-in pictures for them to have on a table in a ‘craft section’ of the room. I find approximately 50 different monkey/ape themed colouring-in pictures (which should just be enough for the 8 attendees), and even use Photoshop on one of them for a couple of hours to remove the copyright watermark. I then find myself thinking, “ooh then maybe I can make little mini colouring-in books to put in their party bags along with their – what now seems like a rather measly – slice of cake and a small bottle of party bubbles”. Fortunately, in an uncharacteristic moment of clarity, I decide that that is going too far.
Rock star for a day? Joni decides that fame is not for her
By the time the actual party starts I have developed a somewhat noticeable twitch in my cheek and soon find myself shouting at my hoosboond that ‘it would really help if you could get the booze out of the car now???!’. While a nagging thought at the back of my mind tells me that I might have lost touch with the whole point of the party, I still can’t stop myself from blu-tacking all those blessed (but not festive) monkey nuts along the corridor, even though most of the guests have now arrived and are enjoying themselves in the room WITHOUT HAVING FOLLOWED THE MONKEY NUT TRAIL TO GET THERE!!
The ‘I’m losing touch with the point of today’ monkey nut trail that nobody followed
Drowned monkey biscuit
There aren’t many times I pop open the bubbles, but surviving my children’s birthday party is definitely one of them
1 A google search tells me that Kalms once asked 2000 people which big life events – moving, having a baby, getting married, changing jobs, etc. – caused the most stress. They obviously deemed it unnecessary to include other somewhat key stressors like chronic illness, death, etc, but maybe they didn’t want to get people down.
2 Largely in our case because I insisted on making it an all singing, all dancing festival, event of the year kind of do, decided to hand make various key elements of it and then ran out of time to actually make them.
3 Three days of pointless agony before someone sliced me up, dragged them out, chucked them in intensive care while muttering words like ‘having trouble breathing’ and then insisted we all stay in hospital for weeks while they tested the bejesus out of the little blighters.
4 Hoosboond = husband. I’m just not that big a fan of the word husband. It sounds too grown up and dull. I’m not entirely sold on hoosboond either, to be honest, but I’ve yet to come up with something better.
5 The cool Orangutan from The Jungle Book who “wants to be like you-oo-oo”
This totally sums up my (intended) attitude to parenting. How ironic therefore, that yesterday and today I have been snoozing a “make playdough” reminder. This is clearly fate. I shall delete the reminder and pour myself a wine instead. Job … Continue reading
Joni and Frank‘s lunch story (Joni 1 Frank 0):
Joni likes scrambled eggs.
She will eat them from a spoon or delicately with her hands.
She will also eat toast and flakes of salmon.
For pudding she likes toast dipped in yoghurt, yoghurt by itself and strawberry and apple fruit purée.
Frank does not like scrambled eggs. Frank will spit or claw them out of his mouth if you feed them to him on a spoon or if he feeds himself.
Frank will pretend that he’s eating toast but is really just chewing it til it is soggy and then letting it fall down the sides of his chair.
Frank also does not like flakes of salmon.
He prefers to grind them around his high chair tray with his hand or fling them over the sides.
Frank also does not like his previous favourite chicken and apple.
He likes it neither in pieces nor puréed up like mummy did yesterday and which he gobbled up happily.
Frank likes yoghurt. He likes yoghurt even when it is really puréed chicken and apple covered in yoghurt.
Frank is an idiot.
Frank is up for adoption.
Joni and Frank‘s Dinner story (Joni 2 Frank 0):
Joni is cautious but realises that she still likes flakes of salmon.
She likes to eat them delicately with her hands or sometimes lets mummy feed them to her with her own.
She also likes black olives. She treats them like peas and plops them into her mouth happily.
She also likes pasta in tomato sauce and snatches up the pasta tubes on the tips of her tiny fingers.
She will also happily gobble up puréed chicken and apple left over from lunch time.
For pudding she likes banana chunks and apple and raspberry purée.
Frank is stubborn and still does not like flakes of salmon.
He gives them a cautionary taste and then scrapes them from his tongue.
He likes to scrape his tongue so much that he sometimes makes himself sick all over himself and his tray.
He doesn’t like mummy feeding him and shakes his head from side to side and flails his hands around.
He pretends he likes olives, but really he just puts them in his mouth to suck them then takes them out again.
He likes to play a game of making the bits of olive smaller and smaller until they’re barely there at all, but still he doesn’t swallow them and spits them into his bib.
Frank thought that he liked pasta in sauce, but really he likes to rub the pasta sauce all over his face so he looks like the tango man.
He licks the pieces of pasta then places them carefully back on the tray all the time grinning and giggling.
After 30 minutes of giggling and playing with tiny olive pieces Frank realises that he’s still hungry.
He is indignant that Mummy isn’t feeding him properly!
Frank screams.
Now Frank likes puréed chicken and apple.
But he only likes puréed chicken and apple for eight spoonfuls.
Then Frank no longer likes puréed chicken and apple.
Now Frank likes apple and raspberry purée.
He likes apple and raspberry purée even though it is really puréed chicken and apple covered in apple and raspberry purée.
Frank deserves a good kicking.
Frank will be leaving us tomorrow.
A long, long time ago in exactly the same galaxy, country, city and indeed London borough as now, there lived a girl. This girl was bored with her job which had become overly stressful and which was, quite frankly, getting her down a bit. She decided it was time to see the world. Again. (Because she is a spoilt brat and had already been around the world once before. But not that spoilt because she did fund it all herself actually. Which reminds her that she still needs to get round to getting the money back for the mis-sold payment protection insurance. But that is another (rather boring) story.)
And so throwing caution and PPI payments to the wind, she gaily pootled her way around various faraway lands, missing most of her flights, spending all of her money and while doing so sent silly messages home to her friends and family. In response, these friends and family told her that she had a bit of a knack for the silly message and urged her to do more writing. Not wanting to rush into things, however, and because she is an expert in putting things off, she thought about it briefly and then went back to her boring office job for another five years.
At this point she was made redundant and again had time on her hands to reflect. She took part in an elaborate career assessment program paid for out of guilt by her redundancy-making company and came to the conclusion that yes, indeed she did want to think about moving on, but was still not exactly sure where she wanted to move to. Again people said to her that she had a knack for the silly message and should branch out beyond the realms of boring IT. Other people said encouragingly that she could become the new Kate Adey, or Julia doo-da hiking person or Rachel doo-da gardening type (pretty much any (female) BBC presenter, in fact), or what about a speciality ‘Dear John’ break-up letter writer (based on a particularly good one penned for a previous disastrous relationship), a speech writer, a teacher, a hat maker, in fact ANYTHING other than your boring IT office job Kate, for God’s sake what are you thinking?!?…
Still not wanting to be too rash, however, and just to make absolutely sure that it really truly wasn’t her thing, she decided to give IT one more chance. So in a terrifyingly ambitious side shuffle from database computer shit to website computer shit she started another boring IT office job and stayed there for a good solid three years. During this time, her extra-curricular activities centred themselves around getting married and having twin children (watch this space and that space for more details on those ludicrous adventures) but then, during her long, drawn-out maternity leave that niggly ‘what-if’ feeling came back to the fore. And so it is that ten years after the first person first told her that she had a bit of a knack for the silly message, she decided to make writing that silly message her main occupation1.
Which brings us to now. We are here. We are doing it. We are mothers who are hovering close to insanity! Well I am. But I’m rather hoping that there are other people out there – mothers or no – who feel the same way too. Otherwise I’m just someone who is openly admitting a bunch of rather deranged and at times embarrassing details about my life that no-one else in the entire world can relate to. Oh well, why not?
Hovering Close to Insanity 