parenting

iGameMom

26 Apr: iGameMom visited little ol’ me recently, which is how I discovered her brill blog: she reviews and recommends kids’ games and apps and the like. I just downloaded a free a Curious George app, which is well worth a click. Enjoy.

She’s not perfect, she’s my daughter

Before you have kids, you fantasize a perfect being based on the choicest morsels of the parents’ body and soul: inshalla, my child will have Daddy’s button nose and Mummy’s indestructible teeth, his Calvinistic work ethic and her knack of being given jobs by friends, his talent at Angry Birds and her ability to sprint after a departing bus in platform heels while exceptionally drunk.
What you don’t imagine, is a child made up of all the offcuts: Mummy’s enormous conk grafted onto Daddy’s bowling-ball bonce, his science-baffling foot diseases combined with her shedding toenails, his inability to find his own belongings mixed with her incendiary temper at losing things. Continue reading »

Survival for Parents

Alain de Botton, you are a bad man. Coming in here with all your philosophy and wisdom, upsetting innocent people like myself who are just standing about with their fingers in their ears going “la-la-la” and pretending it’s not happening:

“To a parent of small children,” he tweets, “(it is) astonishing they might as adults move abroad so one would see them only once a year – and survive”.

Indeed, as a mother of a two-year-old and a three-year-old, it does astonish me. In fact, I will go so far as saying it is patently not true: they may well go abroad (after all, I did) but I will not survive. Not if today is anything to go by…

Walking out of the gym’s on-site creche, I turn around to berate the younger one for doing something infantile, and when I turn back Curly Girlie is gone. Vanished. Like she was never there.

Behind me, a long, empty corridor runs back to the gym. She’s been bugging me to see where I go to “do running” – has she snuck back there?

To the left, stairs descend to the toilets and other mysterious basement rooms. She needed a wee – has she come over all independent and trotted off down there?

Outside the glass sliding doors – which parent-hating numbskull designed the building with a set of sliding doors right next to the creche, I ask you? – lurks: (on one side) a swimming pool filled with green winter water, (on the other side) an industrial estate, (straight ahead and up a bit) a railway line, and (straight ahead and down a bit) a dingy underpass leading to the car park.

My heart rate hits a level I could only dream of on the cross-trainer: a railway line; an unattended swimming pool; and, my mind helpfully chips in, gangs of mad child thieves. Continue reading »

The very hangry Mummy

Before I discovered that motherhood is like being permanently on Candid Camera, I honestly thought that bedtimes would be lovely. Well, what the Donald Duck did I know about anything back then, eh? Bedtime is not lovely: it is sent to try us.
Tonight, 7pm
Goodbye Sun, hello Moon, warbles the TV and I perk up: oh good, it’s nearly wine o’clock. “Come on you two, let’s get ready for bed and have a story”, is what I think I have said, but apprently my mouth has translated it to, “Come on you two, can you start a fight with each other and then pull down the curtains while trying to hide from me?”.
7.15pm
The curtains are rehung. The kids are in the bathroom, eating toothpaste and whooping like it’s Lord of the Flies. Irritation starts in my stomach: oh no, I’m getting hangry. Continue reading »

Airport playgrounds – now please. Thanks

Rather like a toddler who repeatedly pushes beads up its nose and wonders why they get stuck, we keep going on holiday with two small children and wondering why it’s not the relaxed experience of yesteryear. You may well recall that my lucky-mushroominess doesn’t extend to airports.
This time it was a mere six hours at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (fog). Compared with our eleven hours at Alicante back in January, this was child’s play, although the crummy situation was greatly exacerbated by the fact that there was no… child’s play.
Which brings me to my point: where are the playgrounds in airports? Continue reading »

I lost my birthday present. I’m still not over it

Feb 27 – It is so nice when you get a surprise birthday present and so un-nice when you lose it five minutes later. Someone in Volketswil Kindercity found and enjoyed some very special Vollenweider choccies this morning. I only hope they pass on their good fortune – as opposed to, you know, handing in … Continue reading »

Mother tongue

Another era is drawing to a close right now, taking with it my job as chief translator for the secret language I share with Alpha Blondie.

“Dah wah BIIIG dang dong!” he might say.

“That is an especially large dinosaur” I explain to blank-faced father, family and friends. Continue reading »

Blogito ergo sum?

What I love about reading blogs, is the moment when a complete stranger hits my nail right on the head. This is what life would be like if I had social contact more than twice a week. Following the links this morning lead me to Slugs on the Refrigerator, and entrepreneurial Kat Goldin’s comment, “what … Continue reading »

Open wide and say, er..?

Is it bad that in my third week of a Masters degree in Professional Writing I’m fantasizing about becoming a dental hygienist? I went to visit a dental hygienist today, which may have something to do with it. I took both kids along, but that’s a whole other blog entry. Needless to say, you can’t … Continue reading »

The pain in Spain

For a lesser Gluckspilz than myself, my latest holiday “experience” might be proof that I am a travel companion to be avoided on account of my dismal luck in foreign climes. I’ve previously detailed my airport ordeal, while departing from Chad, where I got stuck for four days and then covered in insects. My latest … Continue reading »