The Harridan

It is fair to say that my current job has few measurable rewards, and rather a lot of setbacks, and that successes are generally of the domestic kind. At the end of the day, you might find me talking at my husband or having a lively internal conversation with myself, recounting the triumphs of my day. Like this:

“I did three loads of washing and cleared the pile to HALFWAY! Cha-ching!”

“The vomiting has stopped!”

“Noah has not had to have his uniform changed by the teachers. I cannot smell any wee WHATSOEVER! I can use his trousers again tomorrow and there will be NO IRONING!” (high-fives self)

etc etc. And so, I thought I would share my latest success with you, in the spirit of Over-Achieving, Type-A Mothering and Needing a Proper Job. It is of the domestic variety, and it is probably boring, but it is also actually quite genius, even if I do say so myself. Ahem.

It was Multi-Cultural Day at school last Friday, and we were asked to dress the kids in their national costume. Our New Zealand national costume encompasses everything from jandals and sunburn to gumboots and woollen singlets to traditional Maori outfits and pois and pounamu and t-shirts with L&P logos emblazoned across the chest. Barnaby was keen on dressing like a Maori warrior, mostly because he would get to take wooden weapons and sticks to school. I was resourceful, and made his costume from cardboard, string, a hemp bag-for-life, cotton handles, and the wool insulation torn from my Abel & Cole delivery. It was a triumph of MacGyver-like proportions. See below:

SUCCESS. Like my rainbow cake, but not cake. Or rainbow-coloured.

It turns out I am quite good at this stuff, and smug, and competitive, and alarmingly focussed – at the expense of other things, you could say. A success, therefore, but not without its flip-side of drama and blood. I would really like to be able to say that no-one was harmed during the making of this Outfit of Authenticity and Michael Van Der Ham-like tailoring-innovation, but alas, the new IKEA sharp craft scissors were left out on the bed during my frenzied cutting and pasting and colouring-in, and Casper, sensing weakness and parental distractedness, ferreted them away like a little dangerous monkey, and they were then used to cut the baby’s finger. Not entirely off, as I am sure was intended, but a good way through the pad of the ring finger on MY TINY BABY”S LITTLE HAND. And there was more blood than was believable, and we thought about taking him up to the A&E, but then I reasoned that Social Services might get alerted, and I just didn’t have the strength for any more of those kinds of episodes, and so we DIY-first-aided and he is ok and his little tiny baby finger is healing very well, no thanks to his psychopathic brother.

The lesson in all of this could be thus:

Just send the kids to school in an All Black jumper. There will be less joy, but also less blood. Presumably. See Noah in his no-effort-no-blood-slightly-bummed-out-but-too-bad Costume of Equal Authenticity:

And in other baby-accident-related news, Ned was charmingly climbing on our antique post office chair last night, and I pointed out to Mark what a clever little baby he was, and Ned was beaming, clearly proud of his gymnastic abilities, and we had a moment of parental pride, and then he fell off into the corner of the TV and smashed his brow and has a black eye.

And I had a haircut following a fit of despair, and it was daring and short and angular and scary, and now I look like Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics. Not in a good way, though. Sort of like this:

Once again, I fall for Aveda’s calming head massage and peppermint tea. WHEN WILL I LEARN that they collude in making me look experimental and a bit daft?

And I went on the school trip to an Orthodox Synagogue and found the man quite attractive, and found myself becoming increasingly drawn to the kosher section in Waitrose.

How was your week?

Things I am a bit ashamed of:

This cake:

To be fair, and in my defence, I had “help”. The cake was supposed to be a VERY CLEVER dinosaur cake, for Casper’s 3rd birthday yesterday. I had very grand plans for it, but the children all woke up on Tuesday in pools of vomit, and so couldn’t go to school, and so my cake making day was besieged by three keen, yet entirely unskilled, chubby-fingered, sugar-hungry, dirty-fingernailed children. And at some point, I just surrendered to the horrible colours and the lumps of misshapen royal icing (which were supposed to be dinosaurs, apparently) and the bits of picked-off cupcake all over the floor and the split icing which oozed with waxy butter and the sticky jam that ended up being eaten from the jar with a spoon under the cloak of the dining room table. It was all really unfortunate. And, after all that, here is the only evidence that anyone was tempted to eat it:

Not the cake, mind, but the weeping orange pterodactyl made of food colouring and sugar. The cake has since been shaved, the green scraped off, the cupcakes dumped, and tonight I covered it all up again with chocolate icing. Yesterday’s revolting cake becomes tomorrow’s school cake sale offering. You can’t call me wasteful.

And yes, I think Casper is holding a packet of matches. Ahem.

More on the birthday:

Casper wore a dinosaur polyester sweaty suit. He lost the headpiece quite early on, which velcroed under the chin, giving him a very tight hat with a tail-bit that was covered in spikes. He also had green polyester dinosaur shoes, but was wearing them under the Scooby Doo boots. Now THIS is a good look on the day of your third birthday. Comfort, as always, is overrated:

The Baby. After the party food, just before he grabbed my legs, and vomited all over my boots:

Casper was given a crocodile hand puppet for his birthday. It disappeared in our communal garden. I thought it would be in the shrubs. It wasn’t, so then I thought one of the privileged little kids who share the garden and who are largely cleaner, better-behaved, and therefore sneakier than my children had STOLEN IT. I made a poster, a plaintive, begging poster that I stuck on the swings to SHAME the thieving children and their complicit parents into giving us back the crocodile, and I took Casper and Ned into the garden to call loudly for the crocodile to come back, throughout the day. Here is the poster:

(It used to read “Taken from the garden 23 March” but I felt, at the last minute, that ‘taken’ was a mite accusatory, so coloured in the words and turned them into a black birthday cake, and replaced it with the gentler ‘gone‘). It was a mournful vigil. I was very cross with the thieves. I spoke to the gardener about the theft. She popped in tonight and handed me both the crocodile and the poster. It was in the shrubs. European Innocent Non-Thieving Children Of The Communal Garden – I apologise.

Aaaand the baby broke into my handbag and stole my last Tom Ford lipstick and stuck his finger into the tube and mushed it and ate quite a bit of it.

That is the third Ford lipstick the children have somehow mangled. There must be a lesson in this for me, somewhere.

Oh man, the weekend has been so spectacularly horrible that I can only stand to recall it in severely edited short cold sentences.

1. I had to go out in the evening three times IN A ROW.

2.I went to Farringdon to have some drinks with ex-work colleagues. (I had a job about 6 years ago, ok?). I learnt that the office has since been demolished, and they found a 14th century anthrax pit underneath. Thats probably why I have eczema.

3. Only one man took an interest in me at the bar. And he was daggy.

4. The rugby was on, so Mark stole away for the whole of Saturday afternoon. Which meant I had to take all four of the pesky kids to a birthday party in Hyde Park. The Baby was inexpertly dressed by a hasty Mark, and had no shoes on, and no jacket. The big kids were so horrified that the majority of the six year olds at the party were girls, that they took themselves off into a bush and poked everyone with sticks. There were tears, mostly from the soft European kids.

5. We got home at 6. It was cold, and we had no key. Mark had the key, in his pocket, in a pub in darkest Acton. We went to Whiteleys to get warm, wait for Mark, and eat pizza.

6. Casper went mental, and screamed for Mark. I thought he would stop. He didn’t. We ruined the pizza-dining-out-experience of about 15 people.

7. Casper ran away, and the security guard found him, and asked me if that was my fluffy-haired little girl. I said yes.

8. Casper kept screaming, and screeched that he needed to do a wee. There were no toilets in the pizza restaurant, so all four of us had to haul arse to the end of the shopping mall. When we got there Casper said he wouldn’t go to those toilets. He sobbed. We went back, lost Casper again, found him again, teetering near the escalators. We sat down. Casper started weeping that he wanted to go back to the toilet. I said:

“Too bad. You’ll have to wee in your pants, fella,  because WE AREN’T GOING BACK TO THE OTHER END OF THE BLOODY MALL.”

9. He refused to eat, and ran off again.

10. Mark called to say that he was caught talking on his mobile phone by the cops, and lost 3 points on his licence.

11. He forgot to come and pick us up, and just drove home instead, and so I demanded he come out again, but then I fled the pizza restaurant, and he arrived when I was gone, and I was stuck outside our flat in the cold, with shrieking children, way past their bedtime, and no key again.

12. Sunday I was shaking with post-traumatic stress disorder.

13. Monday, a phone call from school. Noah’s bottom exploded in the lunchhall. Please come and pick him up as quickly as you can. He will need a bath.

It was all so awful. Here are some photos to cheer us all up.

Noah, he of the Squirty Bum, dressed as a Victorian boy on a longboat in Maida Vale:

Noah, again, cutting strawberries, in a photo destined for school to show the teacher he is Improving His Small Motor Skills:

Aaaaaand Barnaby, who makes fruit salads in an OCD fashion:

The Baby, who is never, ever clean:

A spooky school photo of the eldest pesky kids:

And Afghan biscuits, baked for the Japan Fund. HOW good are they???

No one from Social Services has visited me, or called, nor have I had a letter. I am assuming that I will be left alone, provided that no more incidents happen, or more correctly, that no more incidents get noticed. Which brings me to Monday morning. The Monday Morning Of Awfulness And Resulting Sweaty Armpits.

As you may recall, our filthy buggy got stolen a few months ago, and so now we drag the enormous, new buggy  ( although slightly mouldering in places) down the stairs at night, and up again in the morning. It is just another extra difficult job to do when you are trying to get five people dressed and fed and lunches packed and breastfeeding done and ties found and jackets on and then have to walk fast for 25 minutes to Edgware Road, getting stung in the eyeballs by miniscule black pollution-bits which make your eyes water and your mascara run and your hair gets quite fluffy in the panic and sometimes there are taxi drivers watching you (and I don’t think it is with admiration). Anyway, Mark decided on Sunday night to lock the buggy up halfway down the stairs with a bikechain. Presumably, to make things easier for me.

But OH! He also forgot to give me a key. So, he races off to work at 6am (What? Weird. Suspicious and a bit double-life-y, if you ask me) and I am all unusually very sorted with everything under control and we have about 4 minutes to spare in the Great Ugly Race Against Time and then I look for the key and there is none. I call him. It goes to answerphone. I swear a little bit. He calls me back, and says:

Mark: The key is on your pink key ring.

Me (really angry, but without the leisure of time to fully express it): Oh. Ok. Better go find it, then, in the minute and a half I have left! (Hangs up violently, which, of course, can’t really be done with a push button phone. But there you have it).

Of course, there is no pink key ring. It has joined the thousands of other lost, terribly important things that choose to disappear at inopportune moments. I start getting really panicky. (I should point out here that I have never been late for school drop-off, because that is a thing that Other Parents Do. I like getting the approving smiles from the staff when I arrive on time, and I am scared of having to sign the Late Book.  I am also smug, praise-seeking, and probably a bit of a dick.)

Anyway, while I am searching for the key, getting really sweary, I tell the kids to put on their jackets and wait outside but DO NOT GO UP THE STAIRS! Precious minutes tick by. I finally give up, and decide to take the very small pushchair to put the baby in, and Casper The Reckless Wonder has to go on the scooter.  Not good, but what else can I do? I really don’t want to sign the Late-Person’s Book! Because that would be like, failing.  It is 6 minutes past 8. DANGERZONE. I yell at them all to get up the stairs, quickly! NOW! But they are not where they are supposed to be. They have “disappeared”. I hear giggling. They are all rammed together, hiding under the metal, rusty stairs. Cracking up at their miserable, terrible, annoying and ill-timed joke. And the baby……where is the baby? The BABY!

The Baby, Dear Reader, has climbed up the stairs, past his brothers who have been absorbed in their parental trickery games, and is wandering along the pavement, teetering like a drunkard. And who else is in our road? None other than a carload of your local, friendly POLICEMEN. Yes, uniformed officers are just meters away from my unaccompanied little baby. It was another awesome moment of motherhood.

Luckily, though, they were there for some dramatic prostitute-y matter, and had not noticed the small unaccompanied teetering baby. This close, fellas, THIS CLOSE to real and warranted attention from the authorities.

PHEW.

And In Other News:

I have swapped my alarm clock for this Habitat one in black:

It chirps, sort of like a Robot Sparrow, with laser eyes, and a bit of bobbing of the head. It was supposed to be for Casper, but I changed my mind. But last night, on the virgin run, not a wink of sleep was to be had, because Robot Sparrow emits a red, unnerving, radioactive-esque light and bathes you in it. The numbers light the whole room in womby-red and pierce through your shuttered eyelids like a migrane. Turning Robot Sparrow to the wall just makes the light bounce back into your head. And then, when Robot Sparrow wakes you at 6:30 for the Morning Ugliness, you just want to break him. Charmless.

Anyway. So. Time for True Blood, episode three. Does Anna Paquin’s voice get less adenoidinal?

Ah yes, it is high time, I hear you all muse softly to yourselves, that I post something about my recent brush with the law. If you follow me on twitter, you will have a very clear idea of how Myself and The Law had a hypothetical fisticuff and The Law won. For a bit, anyway.

Ouch.

So, it went like this.

I was walking home with the four kids on Friday from school. We were one street away from our flat. We were walking the same route we always walk, that we walk every day, and have been walking for nearly two years now. The baby was in the buggy, Barnaby was walking ahead and waiting at the curb, Noah was just behind on his scooter, Casper was wandering along muttering something about Scooby Doo and little furry animals. A cop walked up to me, asked me if Barnaby was my kid (pointing to him at the curb) and I said that he was.

Cop: He is too far away from you. He is unaccompanied. That is putting him in danger!

Me: No, it is not. He is six, very road-safe, and we live here. We do this walk every day. He knows to wait. Look! He is waiting right now. There is no problem. We live just over there!

Cop: [Visibly outraged] Are all of these kids yours? What do you think you are doing, letting them run around like that? How old are they all?

Me: They are six, four, nearly-three and one. But they live here! This is our neighbourhood! We do this walk every day! And they are not anywhere near the road. Come on!

Cop: You don’t seem to understand me, madam. This is a very dangerous way of dealing with your children. You are clearly not managing them. They should be either in the buggy or tethered to your buggy. The road is dangerous, madam! The estate over there is dangerous! They could get run over, or snatched!

Me: Yes. The earth could also open up and swallow them. But until it does, I still need to get us to school and back, Officer. And unless you can propose a better way of doing that, then I cannot see how I can do things any better. I have four kids to get to and from school every day, and so we have taught them how to ride their scooters safely, and to wait at the curb. I do my very best to keep them safe. You can see that.

Cop: Your best, Madam, is not good enough. I will have to make this official. I will be contacting Social Services, if you continue to refuse to listen to me.

Me: WHAT? That is ridiculous! We are just walking home from school! My kids are responsible and streetwise and they know how to handle the roads, and the cars, because WE LIVE HERE! This is our home! We live in THAT flat, JUST OVER THERE! What is the problem?

Cop’s Partner: Madam, we are just trying to make it clear to you that these roads are not safe, and if you are just distracted for a second, your children could go onto the road and that is what we are trying to avoid.

Me: I understand what you are trying to say, and I appreciate your concern. Why does your partner think this is suddenly a matter for Social Services?

Cop: Because you are not listening, Madam.

[on and on to infinity and beyond, until they get into their cars to take off, leaving me open-mouthed, scared, and furious. I decide to act.]

I go over to the car, knock on the window, ask for the cop’s name and number, then he gets out and makes it official. Which means, Dear Reader, that when faced with the prospect of me following it all up with a compliant, he preemptively strikes by reporting me both to the station, and to Social Services.

It was awesome. A moment of parental glory. All of those years of not killing the children through neglect or recklessness, all of those years of not going to jail for criminal activity, all of those years of behaving well and never once being an arsonist/kleptomaniac/bad recycler suddenly seemed a Proper Waste Of Time.

So, I wait for Social Services to come and pronounce me actually not worth their time. The real tragedy here is that while the police and social workers spend time on our case, someone else who actually may be in real need of help is being left to wait. Some small child.

Saturday was spent marching up to the police station, all six of us, and me laying a complaint for the intimidation and the bullying and the lack of sense and the way that the police now feel like a threat to me and my family and the unnecessary nastiness of involving Social Services when we were actually having a difference of opinion concerning risk management, and crying, and speaking to a sergeant and an Inspector, and being sweet-talked and placated and PR-ed and then, finally, getting an apology for the way that I felt I had been treated. Yada yada yada.

We walked home, me still snivelling, saying that I was not sure how I could go about my normal daily mothery business of ferrying the chilluns around without being scared of policemen who might decide to report me again if they saw something they subjectively didn’t like, and then an unmarked police car pulled up ahead of us and Original Cop climbs out and walks towards us. He shakes Mark’s hand, turns to me, and apologises. I say to him that threatening people with investigation by Social Services is not the best way to handle these kinds of situations, and that perhaps listening to me would have been a better way to deal with things. Snivel, snivel.

And so there it is. My Brush With The Law. Anyone else been involved with the coppers this weekend, then?

This week, the earthquake happened to people we know, and to lots of people we don’t know. It has been so horrible and dislocating to see the footage and to hear the voices of bleeding, shocked New Zealanders and to watch the aftermath of complete ruination. Our family are safe, and our friends are ok, but their houses are cracked and damaged, and so, I imagine, are their spirits. We watch the death toll creep steadily every morning, and scan the reports from The New Zealand Herald, and we keep crying when we see the faces of those people who died on Tuesday. And the babies…oh, the babies. We have been grabbing our own pesky children frequently and randomly this week, feeling grateful that we have them in our arms for at least six seconds before they wriggle away/headbutt us/cry because we are squashing them just that little bit too hard.

So a blog post feels a bit redundant and ill-judged, but you gotta get back on the horse, I suppose. And so a brief photo shoot of us at Jamie Oliver’s new not-quite-right restaurant in Westfield where we had lunch on Friday, the last day of the blissful half term:

The kid’s menus were actually red plastic viewfinders. Weird. The food all looked a bit day-glo coloured and samey. And here is Casper (he is now too old to be called Custard. He turns 3 this month, and we all have to grow up, some time), looking like he has suffered a head wound, but it is only jam, dudes, only jam:

Because clean hair is overrated.

And a few thoughts, if I may:

1. I asked a man for £50,000 today. He may give it. I hope so. (File this curious snippet under “Secret Genius Project Sketchy Titillating Details” if you will).

2. I made a cake with beetroot. I have done it before and it wasn’t very good then – this one, although layered in chocolate and cream cheese (it makes me feel a bit ill just writing that) – tastes like dirt, and metal, and has turned the skin on my hands a pale puce. And now, I must eat it over a day or two because no one else will touch it.

3. When I walk along the grey and drizzling London streets, I practice talking like a Baltimore gangster in my head. I say things like “Yo” and “What’chu been callin’ me?” and “I’ll whip yo ass” and stuff like that, and although I am getting pretty good at it, it will serve no actual purpose in my life in any real terms.

Everybody does that though, right?

Ok, ok, I spelt “Christensen” wrong. Apologies to all pedants, and possibly to the Danes. I should have checked, but I have unshakable faith in my ability to spell all things right, all of the time. After all, my word skills were honed from a tender age at the knee of the very best wordsmith in the Southern Hemisphere (quite possibly THE WORLD) – my mother, who whips me at Scrabble effortlessly, again and again. She may not have taught me lipstick application, but she did school me in the dark arts of Strategic Word Play and Mostly Very Good Spelling. And so my public spelling-shame hurts me more than it does you, Dear Reader. Just so’s you know.

Anyway, there were some triumphs this week. Most notably the Rigby & Peller sale which happens every year just off Portobello Road. It is housed in the 20th Century Theatre, an old, ah, theatre, and it is full of Rigby & Peller lingerie and bikinis and corsets and Spanx and everything is so cheap it makes my heart beat a little bit too fast. So I got a year’s worth of bras and knickers (and one perhaps questionable bespoke 1970’s pink boned slightly mental and not exactly fitting corsetty thing that I imagined would make me look a bit like Madonna in her cone-bra Jean Paul Gaultier phase – which, er, doesn’t) that together were once worth a combined total of £824 exactly. And I paid the measly sum of £150. Oh, how my top drawer now overflows with mismatching lacy things! I would post a photo, but it may be straying into the too-much-information-about-your-intimates area. Or not. In fact, I took a photo of my racy hoard last year. Ahem.

Anyway, the other important triumph (which incidentally proves that I am both Young and Hip and a little bit Stylish) was that we went to see Mark Ronson at the Roundhouse in Camden. SO STREET. It was good, he was deliciously quiffed, and when Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes came out and sang “I only want to be in your record collection, wa hoo” I nearly passed out. But then there was some loud DJing and it was like 10.30 and we were a bit tired and my ears were ringing and so we snuck out.

AND WE MISSED BOY GEORGE!

There are no words to describe the horror of missing Boy George. No words. So you get a line of wordless despair:

Ok. I feel  bit better now. Before I go on further though, I have to just one more time refer to EyelashGate. Look at what two weeks of living with them did to me. Princess Wonky Eye from Big Haired NutterLand:

Needless to say, they have gone, and though I sport less eyelashes than I used to before I was MOLESTED by the eyelash shopgirl, I look like a normal person once again. PHEW.

Things I Regret This Week:

Yesterday I was at the lights waiting to go and buy more glasses for our Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste (more on this later) and I came across a new baby with his mother and father and I asked how old the baby was and smiled and said I had four and then I weirdly followed them up the street sharing all evangelically-like about my Gina Ford love. The dad totally thought I was mental, possibly in a baby-snatching way.  The mum just looked tired. I really regret it.

Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste

Once back from my new-parent-stalking and laden down with the finest Marks & Spencer £1 wine glasses we got ready for our party. I wore this rather lovely 50’s dress bought yesterday in a ten minute trip to TRAID on Westbourne Grove:

with a flower in my hair, 2 x Spanx and hold-up fishnets. TRIUMPH (although sitting down was out of the question).

And here are some photos of my tapas board excellence:

I was very bad at pronouncing “rioja” and I wasn’t very good at hosting the tasting game, and my cake had a latte cream on the top which separated and looked a bit vomity, but it was FUN! There was the Jackson Five and tales of South American jaunts and an enormous bottle of Veuve Clicquot and mucho red lipstick. It must be noted, however, should you wish to host your own Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste that all that abundant joyfulness and deliciousness and conviviality leads to the driest of dry horrors at 4am. Just so’s you know.

PS The baby continues to be very goodlooking.

Bad news.

Best be out with it then: Aveda took one look at my face and declared they wouldn’t touch my eyelashes. Because of the whole “that’s-weird-how-they-are-superglued-to-your-eyelids” thing. So I am still sporting them, and I still look mental, but now they are coming apart and slowly lifting off, but not enough to actually LEAVE MY EYES ALONE, just hanging there, looking a little bit leprosy-eque. Wednesday I am going back to them what did it, probably weeping, begging to have them off and to be returned to my former normalness. I am totally traumatised.

So, anyway, we have two things to discuss. Firstly, my cousin and his wife had a baby girl yesterday, in New Zealand, called Anna Josephine. She is their fourth child after three boys. I am delighted for them, and think that is an excellent name, but of course, it all leads me to wonder what I shall do if I never have a girl baby. What will I do with all of my stuff? Who shall I counsel about the dangers of the Eyelash Shop? Whose hair shall I (badly) plait, and who shall I take out for manicures and afternoon tea? The boys REFUSE.

Compounding the pain, I read an InStyle magazine article on the weekend all about Helena Christiansen. She has an 8 year old son, and the interviewer was at their apartment in New York, and Christiansen showed the interviewer her special wardrobe full of archived fashiony gems, bags and shoes and YSL frocks and all the usual fabulous things. But  – and this is the part that chilled me to my very core – these things were not being archived for poor handsome son Mingus. Oh no, because he is a small boy who presumably once grown won’t get into a lather about owning Herve Leger bandage dresses and various 2.55’s.

Christiansen said they were being archived for HIS FUTURE PARTNER!

Ouch, man. That sucks badly.Doesn’t Christiansen know she won’t like his Future Partner? And that said Future Partner will not be deserving of the legendary stuff, and she will be annoying and bratty and won’t fit them anyway? The General Rule Of Daughter-In-Laws seems to be thus: They are a bit horrible and don’t deserve your son.  Why does Christiansen not know this?

And I know this: my daughter-in-laws are NOT getting any of my cool stuff. Let that be written on my headstone. And, also, obviously, I need to have a daughter OF MY OWN. Preferably quite soon. Luckily, I have googled how you do it. After all, this is all very well:

but it doesn’t solve the Archiving Problem.

The other thing I have to discuss is the disturbing and theologically challenging school-run discussion of this morning. It went like this:

Barnaby (scootering along the A40): Christians go in water, don’t they? Holey Water.

Me: Ah, not all Christians. Are you talking about baptism?

B: Yes! We saw a picture at school of John doing it. How many people did he put in Holey Water?

Me: Well, um, lots. And Jesus.

B: Yes, Jesus, too! Why did the people in the Holey Water have faces like this? [makes sour scrunched-up face]

Me: Um, maybe because the water was cold.

B: Cold? Why did they go in the cold water? That was mean of John.

Me: Well, it isn’t always cold. Sometimes it is as warm as a bath.

B: Do you have to wear your swimming togs when you go in the cold baptising Holey Water? Did Jesus?

Me: Ahh, maybe he wore his clothes. It was probably a river.

B: Did they go in the Holey Water to get clean?

Me: Kind of. Symbolically. Do you know  what “symbolically” means? It was to clean their insides. Sort of.

B: But how does the cold Holey Water get into their insides? Does it hurt?

And so on. I think I ended with “ask your father”, while yelling at Noah to hurry up, and wiping the tears away from the merciless rogue eyelash poking. I have no idea how to answer some of these questions. I fear I am about to be Found Out.

The eyelashes are going to be removed on Saturday. The glue bits are losing their blackness, and are looking whitish and lumpy, which I fear may suggest to the casual observer that I am harbouring a very slow-moving type of eyelash lice. They simply have got to go. The orange Essex-y girl who put them in swore I would not only get used to them, but become addicted. Ha! It has not happened yet. I find myself quite un-addicted to things that hurt and make me look scary to small children (including my own). Anyway, til Saturday, that day of sweet upper eyelid release. Hoo-bloody-rah!

On to more pleasant things. On Sunday Barnaby turned six. He got a big plastic Nerf gun from his parents. Once, I would have freaked out about the gun and would have vetoed it, and googled something to thrust at Mark in order to support my tearful and worthy-sounding assertion that it would be bad for him and his development and he would become EVEN MORE violent, but now, six years and three days into this journey of parenting, I couldn’t actually care any less.

“Gun, you say, Boy? Box of matches? Gaffer tape and an illegally downloaded copy of Grand Theft Auto and a can of solvent you want for your birthday? Yeah, ok. Just play with them all in your room where I CAN’T SEE YOU. I am trying to read September’s Vogue/play Lexulous/practice my eyeliner application/buy stuff on eBay.”

And so on and so forth, in the world of disengaged parenting, of which I am the Master Guru.

But I did make a spectacular cake which I have forced everyone who has ever met me, even briefly, to look at, and to make appreciative “ohhhh”ing noises over. I have bandied it about on FaceBook and Twitter because it is a Genius Masterpiece of Enormous Proportions, even if I do say so myself. LOOK!:

I know. It is freakishly good. It tasted good too. It had about three packets of butter, and quite a bit of food colouring. It was not a cake for parents with only one child. It was a cake for parents of multiple children who had crossed that gaping chasm of “Idealism” and reached “Resigned Compromise and a Bit of Shame”. I crossed that one such a long time ago (see para 2).

But the cake triumph and general birthday jolliness all had an unhappy ending when Mark fell ill with a mysterious sleeping sickness, and blamed the food colouring. Which is all very counter-intuitive, because food colouring makes you hyperactive, innit? Not fast asleep on the bed in the middle of the day for hours and hours on the weekend. He did say there was some sort of accompanying stomach-trouble, which is all too uncomfortable to imagine, but the point of all of this food colouring malarky is that one by one, all of us got sick throughout the week.

Mark: Aha! It must have been the food colouring!

Me: Say wha’?

Confused face. Anyway, Ned turned one today, and we couldn’t have a party because Barnaby and Noah were too busy being pale-faced, sweaty and spewy in a delicate collapsed pile of little boy bones on the couch. I had my turn last night, and we suspect little baby Ned will have his turn tomorrow. Woo hoo! How marvellous it is to be part of a big family as we all succumb one by one to the filth and degradation of stomach buggery. As it were. Ahem.

I shall post some photos of Ned’s fake birthday and his cake (which will be colourless, just in case Mark’s food colouring paranoia turns out to be true). And a photo of my blessed, naked eyelids.

Ouch, mine eyes have taken a tumble into a vat of black adhesive and plastic replica eyelashes obviously ripped from a very old and plastic doll. The accident happened because I am vain. Look what vanity does to your formerly perfectly acceptable normal-person lashes:

Subtle? Er, not so much. Not really stylish either, unless footballer’s girlfriends and Liverpudlian women score on your Style Radar. And they hurt, and I can constantly see big black feathery awnings atop my periphery, and they feel like they are made of dirt. I am sure there is a burgeoning cyst growing underneath the glue, but who will ever know? My real lashes and skin have been BURIED ALIVE UNDER PROSTHETICS! They have been glued to my eyelash skin and onto the length of my real lashes. They last for about six whole weeks, but apparently, some will fall off in two, and I will begin to look wonky-eyed. If I try to get them off myself, according to the panicked forums I have (now) read on the subject – (nothing like researching these things, ahem) my poor real eyelashes will come off. In protest, probably. So I wait, looking like an extra from The Boat That Rocked or like I have really tried very hard for the school-run-dress-up show, or just like I am MENTAL and have a very inappropriate and heavy hand with the tranny mascara. Imagine how odd I look at 8:25am at the school gates, in 2-degree weather, puffing and sweating with bits of dried scrambled egg on my rabbit fur coat, with my pale skin and light-coloured brows, shamefully sporting these babies:

I have become a high-maintenance-stay-at-home-mother who is incidentally hosting a private retro-themed disco on her face. The shame.

Did somebody say “Cliche?”

And some cheese: