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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You Might As Well Have a Hotdog

There’s now a five-year-old living in our house. I don’t quite understand how, since I only just gave birth to her. Her birthday was excellent and exciting, beginning with mango pancakes in bed (thankfully she let herself be talked out of having soup), and finishing with pizza.

On Sunday we threw her an awesome Peter Pan-themed party, attended by seven Peters Pan, two Captains Hook, one mermaid, one Wendy (the birthday girl) and one Michael.

We played Pass the Parcel with an ordinary parcel because when I went to buy the fish and chips to put in it I found the fish and chip shop had shut down. Instead, the parcel contained a lame prize in the middle and a chocolate coin in each layer, which turned out to be ill advised because every time someone unwrapped a layer and got their coin, they promptly devoted all their attention to eating it and not to passing the parcel. Meanwhile, anyone who didn’t yet have a chocolate coin cried.

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A Very Peter Pan Birthday

The countdown to May Blossom’s fifth birthday has begun. It is agony for the poor child. Six weeks out she started with, ‘It’s a really long time until my birthday. It’s too long. I don’t think I can wait that long.’ Sorry, my love, birthdays come when they come. And if you think this spring is going slowly, you should have been here five years ago, when the months of September and October took eleven years, I weighed the same as the average delivery of topsoil and the two sides of my pelvis were huffily turning their backs on each other and sidling apart, like siblings refusing to have their heights compared.

Three weeks out she started saying, ‘I don’t want to hear it’s anyone else’s birthday before mine.’ Now we’re down to four days and she is crying each morning because FOR THE LOVE OF PETE WHY ISN’T IT FRIDAY YET? I think the thing she is most looking forward to is breakfast in bed. She’s been begging me for it for months, and I finally capitulated and said that on the morning she turns five I will serve her breakfast in bed. Then I asked what she would like. Leek and potato soup, and baked beans on toast. I can’t think of a worse breakfast to serve in bed. Except maybe fondue, because that’s both messy and flammable.

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Ten Years? You Get Less For Murder!

Ten years ago today, the day before I turned twenty-six, I went to a thirtieth birthday party for two people I knew. It was a circus/carnival-themed party. I thought long and hard about what my costume would be, because I knew there was a very good chance that my most recent ex-boyfriend would be there and thus I needed to not go dressed as a clown or a strong man or anything that didn’t lend itself to looking really hot and showing desperate and vengeful amounts of cleavage.

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My Wedding Advice

My most excellent friends Nic and Wilf are getting married today! So, in their honour, I present my top ten pieces of wedding day advice.

1. If your dress has buttons down the back with tiny button loops, do them up and undo them a few times before the moment when you are running forty-five minutes late for the ceremony. That is not the time to have your bridesmaid attempt to do them up for the first time. That will lead only to nervous panic and a call made to the seated guests for your bridesmaid’s all-capable mother to come in and help. If said mother is a nurse by training, this may cause mild panic among some of your guests, not to mention to your long-suffering intended who has been standing in front of everyone he knows for the best part of an hour, nervously cracking jokes accompanied only by his brother and his cat.

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Talking Turkey

It’s Thanksgiving! The day we eat turkey and gravy and stuffing and pie until we pass out; the day we move all the the furniture in my parents’ house a bit to the left; the day my mother spends running up and down the back lane simultaneously cooking two turkeys in two ovens — one in her house and one in her neighbour’s house, six doors up.

Actually, this year the game of Move The Tables From The Verandah To The Garden And Back Again Thrice As The Weather Changes was knocked on the head, with the decision taken early to just have the damn meal inside and not try to use the courtyard at all. It’s going to be cool and rainy tonight, so all the living room furniture has been moved into the garage and we will dine in dryness and warmth. Hurrah! But it’s a bit sad that all the guests won’t need to sneak, one by one, into Mum and Dad’s room to raid Dad’s jumper shelf , another traditional aspect of our Thanksgiving.

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Probably For The Best

Must dust cat.

To our dear friends whose hen’s and buck’s nights we failed to attend last night, the following conversation is what we were doing instead. Probably for the best we didn’t come, eh?

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Children’s Parties for the Back-yardless

May Blossom turned two a couple of weeks ago, which means that she now knows All The Things There Are To Know and All The Words To Everything, and it also means that I have now thrown two kids’ parties and am thus an expert in entertaining for smalls. Here is how to do it:.

Invitations: To get the numbers up, it’s useful invite people to your party. I used Paperless Post for electronic invitations. It is simple to use, has lovely designs to choose from and makes it easy to track RSVPs. We also chose to keep the party little this year, which was a good idea, so we just invited a child’s handful of very close friends. There somehow still ended up being twelve two-year-olds. That is a lot of toddlers. We must make more friends without two-year-olds (for a variety of reasons).

Location: Last year we had the party in a park that was a short drive away. That was fine and lovely, but logistically a bit hard. This year we went a thirty-second walk around the corner to the small local park, which would prove handy for H to trudge back and forth the whole time, escorting people to the loo, and getting extra jumpers and other forgotten essentials. We arrived to find OTHER PEOPLE were already having a party, so we scowled at them and set up on the other side of the park.

The other mob were about thirty seven-year-old boys being run ragged like they were in the Army Reserve by a hired PE teacher type of fellow. He had a broad-brimmed hat, a booming voice and a whistle. How is that a birthday party? They took up about eighty-five per cent of the park, leaving us the tiny strip of land next to the metre-high sheer precipitous drop down into the beer garden of the local bowling club. A perfect location for twelve toddlers. The parties managed to ignore each other like two cats who are forced to sleep in adjoining cages at the vet but know it’s only for a week. There were no turf wars. We were magnanimous when some of their guests came over to eat our fairy bread.  Who could blame them? Our party was clearly better.  Mostly because of the…

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Secret Fairy Business

Everytime a child says “I don’t believe in fairies” there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Sorry, fairies. It’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I’ve never really liked them. I hope that hasn’t left too many of them with asthma or one leg shorter than the other.

Fairies have always struck me as rather fey and ineffectual. Very pretty, of course, but what to they actually do? I don’t remember having any books about fairies as a little girl, and I didn’t own fairy wings or a fairy costume. As an adult I have lumped the whole fairy thing in with princesses: patriarchal nonsense that I want no part in for my daughter.

But then my cousin had a combined 30^th and 3^rd birthday party with her daughter. The theme was fairies. I decided that I wouldn’t make a big deal to May Blossom about my feelings on fairies, because as we all know, nothing makes you like something like your mother thinking it’s a waste of time.

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