…was a search term some one used to find my blog yesterday. Well HELLO, you there, with your arm hair queries! While I do have verdant blonde growth atop my arms, it’s mostly forearms, leaving the upper arms quite bald. So I won’t be much help, though I have been reading fashionable magazine titles of  late that suggest hair is very of-the-moment – full waxing is no longer as stylish as leaving your natural hairy bits alone, so throw away that razor and let go of your waxing specialist, and instead positively encourage your greying sparse thatches of hair to sprout forth from your underarms, legs and pubis! I can’t think of anything more chicer than a lovely leg covered in downy fuzz.

Anyway, you won’t find any actual helpful information here, on anything really. You will find a photo of a volcano cake, decorated really inelegantly by the children, though I am fully responsible for the icing, which was a split mascarpone and butter effort, and which wept sweet tears of bad chemistry and looked like curdled brown sick. I was so zen about it, and they were delighted, especially as the icing slid off in sloppy chunks which they said was an excellent reinterpretation of lava. Still, I must reiterate that IT WASN’T ME WHO MADE THAT UGLY CAKE BECAUSE MY CAKES LOOK GOOD.

Here it is, after they riotously studded it with so many poisonous sweets:

and then it languished a bit in the overheated flat, and it drooped and lava’ed itself into a pukey puddle of sadness:

But no matter! When you are seven, the grosser and more poo-looking, the better. See the happiness on the Middle Child’s face. Overwhelmed with birthday cake delight:

The Sad Bit

And yesterday was his actual birthday, and he was so incredibly horrible I cried, not just delicately, hidden away in a bathroom or something, but out in public, in the playground next to the school where hundreds of children were not hurting strangers while their mothers looked on. Oh no, that was just my small family of bandits, led by the Birthday Boy, resplendent in a birthday badge and a maniacal grin.

And that was immediately after I picked him up from school where he had gotten a Red Slip (that’s the baddest slip you can ever get and it leads to a meeting with the Principal) and he was banned from attending the after school gifted art class for being so difficult, and so when we got to the park and within about three minutes a mother was hollering “Where is your adult?” and I looked up from my phone (the shame!) and again it was my kid in the middle of it all. So I apologised to her for Casper pushing her kid, and I told him he needed to go into time out, sitting next to me, but he ran off, and I was incensed and embarrassed so I tried to chase him across the park, but he was quicker and shimmied up a climbing frame and left me at the bottom with shaking hands and heaving breathless bosom.

I called out, in my most menacing voice, kind of desperate now to grab him and slink off somewhere “Do you want a birthday cake tonight?” which got his attention, but then I remembered he wasn’t getting another one after the volcano extravaganza so I hastily changed that to “Do you want those M&S chocolate profiteroles tonight?” and he was like “YES, STUPID LADY!” And so I said “Then come down at ONCE!” and so he did, but I had to hold him fiercely in my human-straitjacket-hold to keep him from running off again, while he kicked and shouted and told me he hated me and that he had much more fun when he wasn’t born. Kick, scream, wrestle, stare from other mothers. Kick, scream, wrestle, stare from other mothers. It was very ugly and culminated in a swift exit from the park, but not before I broke and shouted “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY!” And he said that it was everyone else’s fault for annoying him and that I hated him and then, for effect, he shouted out “Sex with Ladies!” and I just set my jaw and walked on, with the tears kind of bobbing out a bit.

Happy 7th birthday, Casper. Let’s try to make it to 8. Meanwhile, I am going to find a child psychologist to fix us all before we break into a thousand little sad pieces.

Moving On From That Bit Of Horribleness

Here is the dog and his nose, up close:

And here is a pasteis de nata from the Lisbon Patisserie on Golborne Road. Really, they are like little bursts of custardy edible angels:

Cheering Up Now

Here is a movie of Otis, who is cute and so far hasn’t learnt how to make me cry:

Now I haf too wok again. The baby is asleep! No time for lunch!