Billy, Don’t Be A Hero

Seven year olds can make their own fairy bread. That’s dinner for the rest of the year sorted. 

I’m a long way through the writing of this first book but I’ve hit a little wall. It’s not a big or hard wall, and it’s nothing to do with the book (which will be great and excellent so my publisher who reads this need not freak out and go into labour or anything), it’s just a wall with a sign on it that says ‘nearly there: reduce speed now’.

It’s to do with the fact that if I keep writing at the rate I have been I will finish it well before the deadline and then what fun will having a deadline be? For surely the only point of a deadline is for it to cause enormous trauma and misery to me and everyone around me, right? Like the deadline for my thesis at university, which was approached correctly, by doing bugger bloody all for months on end and then writing almost the whole thing the night before it was due.

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The Man Who Had No Birthdays

Someone’s kid has an extendable arm that only comes out when there’s a chocolate fountain. Handy. 

May Blossom turned six on the weekend and her two requests for her party were:

1. A chocolate fountain
2. No siblings

The first request we could accommodate. We borrowed a device called a Sunbeam Choccy, melted together a kilo of chocolate and a cup of canola oil, and Bob’s your auntie’s live-in lover: there’s your chocolate fountain. Happy days.

The second request was more challenging, because I believe family should celebrate birthdays together. Even if some of the family are behaving like complete shits. I’m a big believer in encouraging children to be kind and loving, and to celebrate each other’s successes and happiness. Garnet’s beliefs are fundamentally opposed to that.

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RUN NOW!

Baffling contraption

As we are wont to do from time to time, H and I have started a small health kick. It’s not a high kick. We’re not idiots; we don’t want to put our backs out. It’s more like the miniature kicks you use to move a school bag to another room when your arms are full of laundry and mail.

Our motivating forces are vanity and pain. We’re not getting any younger. One of us has just turned twenty-one for the second time. And while he doesn’t look much older than the uni student who used to drive a campervan to parties that he was the first time he was twenty-one, his sore back is telling a different story.

As for me, well, I recently read one of my stories live at a comedy club for the first time (you can listen to the podcast here, if you’re so inclined), and let’s just say the official photographs made me look further up the wrong end of the Bardot-Brando Continuum than I’m happy with, jowel and chinwise. And as Presidential Candidate Trump has shown us, bronzer is only going to trick people so far. So, it’s time for action.

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Life’s A Treat

Last week Garnet turned three. He’s not a hundred per cent ok with that. The boy has a complicated relationship with the ageing process. He likes being three, but he wants to be a three-year-old baby. In all the games he and his friends play, he must play the baby. The baby pirate. The baby brother in Peter Pan. Baby Cottontail in Peter Rabbit. He’s dipping his toe into the world of superheroes with a character he has invented called – you guessed it – Superbaby. He gets strangely cross when people call him a big boy.

About a month ago he toilet trained, and apart from a small amount of unorthodox backward loo sitting and a misunderstanding about where you are supposed to stand during a standing-up wee (tip: not on the toilet seat) it went off without a hitch. I heaped praise upon him, as you are supposed to, telling him over and over what a good big boy he is now and wow, what a grown-up fellow, gosh. He didn’t respond with ecstatic pride like I expected, instead getting very quiet. After a day or so he finally said, ‘Mummy, can I please not be a big boy? Can I just be a little boy who wears underpants?’ Sure, be a little boy who wears underpants and MAKES HIS MOTHER’S HEART EXPLODE WITH THE CUTENESS. I think the subtext there was also ‘Please could you shut up about my undies and my age and just let a person’s toiletting habits be his own business?’ And of course I can. You know, except for blogging about it, obviously.

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