Dear Dave

  Slippery slope

Dear Dave,

So much for a life of freedom and leisure now the kids are all at school. They're taking it in turns to have a mysterious illness which involves a day of dizziness, three days of feeling not too bad and then another week of stinking cold, sore throat and coughing. The result is that as soon as one feels better, the next is lying on the sofa, huddled under a blanket and coughing over the remote controls. Combined with the February holiday, this means I've barely been able to leave the house for over a fortnight.

It's not even over yet. Fraser stumbled out of bed this morning, ate half his breakfast and then stumbled back again, croaking mournfully about a headache. If the other two are anything to go by, he won't get much further than the lounge until Thursday. Then his right ear will start to hurt and he'll whine incessantly.

Joy.

Ho well. The scary thing is that this spate of sickness has lasted so long, it feels like they've all got older in the meantime. Marie has discovered Nintendo, Lewis has lost his ability to stay out of arguments which don't concern him and Fraser has taken to sitting around in a hoodie while exuding an unpleasant odour. Two weeks with the heating on and the windows shut has turned the house into an incubation chamber. All my little Pokémon have evolved to the next stage.

Is it just me or is the fact that they've gone from calling farts 'bottom burps' to calling burps 'mouth farts' the beginning of the end?

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children, sickness

 
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  Making school seem attractive

Dear Dave,

Sorry you're under the weather. I'm not feeling too great myself. It's the usual blend of sore head, indigestion, lethargy and achiness. Could be a virus, could merely be parenthood - it's hard to tell.

The last couple of years haven't been so bad for random illnesses. I thought leaving parent and toddler behind had cut down my exposure to fun and exciting diseases. This winter has been one bizarre virus after another, though. Barely a week goes by without comparing notes in the playground with other parents, matching symptoms of sick children and trying to work out who gave it to who and whether it's swine flu... again.

Getting fed up now.

To make it worse, Fraser has got to an age where he's liable to milk a minor sniffle as an opportunity to stay at home all day and play the Wii. Last Saturday, he declared himself unwell shortly after getting up and refused to get dressed or eat anything except toast for the whole weekend. He simply found himself a controller and took up residence on the sofa.

When Monday morning rolled round and he claimed to be too ill to go to school, I was dubious. He looked tired but he didn't have a temperature, a runny nose or spots. Heck, he didn't have so much as a cough. I suspected a bout of pre-pubescent Man Flu.

That said, he didn't really seem himself, although he could have been faking it. I began to regret sending him to drama class...

I wasn't sure what to do. In these situations, my mum used to say stuff like, 'In a couple of years you won't want to have time off school. You'll have too much work to do.' This was hardly motivational. Surely all the more reason to kick-back and get my strength up while I had the chance? Besides, I hated school for a number of reasons and was keen not to go - telling me it was only going to get worse wasn't hugely inspiring.

I decided against taking a similar approach with Fraser. Instead, I checked there was nothing else bothering him that he was attempting to avoid. He reckoned there wasn't but he was adamant he was incapable of making it through the school day. Reluctantly, I kept him home. I'm sure he could have coped if he'd had to but I figured he was probably at least a little ill and there was no harm letting him rest up for a day.

The only problem was, I could quite easily envisage us having the same conversation the next morning and the one after that. Given the opportunity, he might try to make a week-long holiday out of it and I wasn't having that. I'd attempted persuasion and already dismissed using guilt and duty. What to do? Then it occurred to me that all that was required was making the thought of staying home less pleasant.

I told him he had to stay in bed and rest for the morning without computer games. In the afternoon, I gave him a talk about the facts of life.

The next day, he was up like a shot and off to school without even the slightest quibble.

Coincidence? I'll let you decide.

Get well soon.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS I think I'm going to go back to bed. I may have struggled on with far worse at various points over the last ten years but I didn't have much choice - there were children constantly around to feed, change and entertain. Just because I didn't take a sick day then, doesn't mean I shouldn't take one now I can.

I only hope my mum doesn't find out and phone up later for a quick chat about birds and bees...

Labels: sickness

 
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9:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Understanding working parents

Dear Dave,

Happy New Year! I hope you had a good holiday. We're finally back from visiting my parents' house in deepest, darkest Norfolk - the land of turkeys, farmers and dial-up internet. Even dial-up didn't seem to be working very well this time, though. So much as checking my email became a torturous exercise in dropped calls and lengthy load times. Renting a carrier pigeon began to feel like a worthwhile option. At least it did until my cousin popped round to visit and told me his connection had been running slowly too and so he'd had BT out to check the line. The reason it wasn't working properly?

Too many people had shot it.

Presumably they'd been firing at birds which had settled down on the wire for a rest but you never know - sometimes the need to make your own fun in the more isolated areas of East Anglia can lead to pretty desperate measures. Either way, though, my avian-powered p-mail solution seemed unlikely to work. As soon as the poor pigeon stopped to get its bearings it was going to end up as the lunch of some lunatic with a shotgun. This didn't really seem worth it for the sake of a selection of spam and a load of Facebook updates about the snow. I decided to not worry about it, letting the world wide web pass me by for a few days. It was a pleasant rest.

There's only so long a man can go without receiving Photoshopped pictures of cute, fluffy animals, however, so we've fought our way home through the bad weather, taken down the Christmas decorations, re-stocked the fridge and fired up the wireless router. Hurrah!

Even better, despite the cold, the school is open and all the kids are well. I've got some peace and quiet to sort through my inbox that I wasn't necessarily counting on. I fully expected one or more of the children to wake up with a cough or sniffle this morning and thus force me to decide whether they were well enough to go. Sometimes it's obvious, as they have a high temperature and goo is streaming out of every orifice, but usually it's more debatable. A slight temperature and a minor sore throat could clear up by the middle of the morning or it could have developed into full-blown pneumonia by lunchtime. How am I supposed to tell?

Fortunately, one of the advantages of being a stay-at-home parent is that there isn't normally a problem if one of the kids has to stay home as well. I can err on the side of caution and let them doze on the sofa, dosed up on Calpol and surrounded by tissues and sick bowls. Sure, it's annoying if I've got jobs planned or I was intending to head to the shops, but I don't have to organise emergency childcare or phone my boss and grovel to be allowed to take a day off. It's all nice and easy.

Take the last day of term before Christmas as an example. Marie got up complaining that she wasn't feeling very well and then sat on the stairs moaning. There didn't appear to be much obviously wrong with her but she'd been looking forward to the final day activities and the very fact she didn't want to go meant something was up. I decided it would be best to keep her off, reasoning that it would be unfriendly exposing her classmates to a potentially nasty virus only a few days before Christmas. After all, doctors and teachers are always stressing the importance of not knowingly sending an infectious child into school. (Although, bear in mind, if you ever see a kid in the playground glowing with fever and streaming with goo, you can pretty much guarantee they have at least one parent in the teaching or medical professions.)

I dropped off the boys and got to feel smugly self-righteous when the dad of one of Marie's friends mentioned that his child was suffering in a similar way even as he shoved her through the door into school. He'd got to get to work and he was hoping it was nothing and it would be cleared up by the middle of the morning...

Truth be told, it initially seemed to be him who'd made the right call. Marie was very tired all day but not tangibly unwell. Her symptoms could be explained by a lack of sleep combined with a natural desire not to venture outside in the cold. If anything, she was more polite and better behaved than normal. She certainly whined and argued a lot less. She lay on the sofa for most of the day while I got on with packing for the trip south. I wondered whether she could have gone to school.

We had to be up early the next day to catch our train, so we set lots of alarms and tried not stay up too late. I was woken at 3am by Marie complaining she was feeling sick. I found a bowl, calmed her down and went back to bed. It took me a while to doze off again and then I was woken at 4am by Marie complaining that she had actually been sick. Luckily, she'd caught it all in the bowl so there wasn't much clearing up, but I was still rather tired when my bedside erupted in bleeping at 6:30. I wasn't entirely prepared to discover we'd had four inches of snow and getting to the station might be an issue. We got ready and I went to call a taxi, hoping for the best. Just as I reached for the phone, however, Marie threw up her breakfast.

This presented something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we were considering taking a vomiting child for an eight hour journey on packed trains through weather which could conceivably leave us stranded somewhere between Darlington and Doncaster. On the other, I'd spent an entire day packing and we had non-refundable tickets.

Taking the financial hit would have been painful enough but there were only two days until Christmas, so even if we delayed, the chances of Marie being entirely well before travelling down were slim if we wanted to make it for the big day. We wouldn't have been able to get seats on another train anyway. If we were going to go, we had to go right then. I began to regret ordering the kids' presents online and having them delivered to my folks.

It was time to make a decision.

I grabbed a handful of plastic bags and called the taxi.

It turned into a very long day. The taxi struggled to make it the solitary mile through town. Our first train was almost an hour behind schedule before it so much as made it back the mile the other way and passed our house. The carriage was overcrowded with extra passengers who'd had to abandon plans to drive or fly. I almost got left behind in Newcastle as I transferred our luggage to the guard's van in order to free up space for people to stand. We missed our connection...

And all the while, my little biological warfare unit breathed in and out, adding an exciting cocktail of germs to the warm air circulating around us and dozens of others. Every so often, she made retching noises. I hid her up a corner by the window where her pale, drawn features weren't so obvious and I tried not to picture one of those contagion maps they have in the movies, showing bright lines of infection spreading out across the country in an intricate web from the initial source as carriers split up and move on to the next leg of their journeys. I'd probably have felt less shifty if I'd left her with the neighbours and taken a backpack full of anthrax instead.

We got steadily closer to our destination, however. We changed at Peterborough, then Norwich and eventually found ourselves with only one more stop until we reached The Middle of Nowhere. We were almost there. So close...

Then Marie retched. It had a different sound quality from previously on the trip. It was deeper. More liquidy. Kind of ominous.

"I'm going to be sick," she wailed.

I grabbed one of the bags and shoved it under her chin. (Having learnt my lesson with random carrier bags, it was a see-through plastic freezer bag to minimise the chance of holes.) I was barely quick enough. A torrent of evil burst forth from my daughter and flowed into my proffered receptacle. Then she took a deep breath.

...

There was more.

...


And a little bit after that.

...

Then she was done. We'd caught all of it. Delighted, I tied a knot in the top of the bag, inspected it for leaks and then wondered what to do with it. Since Marie had had nothing but water for hours, I was able to marvel at how thin and clear the vomit was.

I have a very vivid memory of going to the fair when I was around Marie's age. There was a game where you had to bounce a ping pong ball on a table and attempt to get it to land in one of a number of jam jars. Success brought a prize - a goldfish swimming around in a freezer bag full of water. I had several shots at that game and then spent the rest of the evening proudly clutching my trophy. It was the only pet I ever had that was completely mine.

As I made my way along the aisle of the swaying train, clutching my bag of sick, I couldn't help musing how my lot in life had changed over thirty years. I staggered past the ticket collector, inadvertently waving my prize at her as the train juddered round a bend, and I felt slightly bereft without a gleaming goldfish to show off.

Admittedly, it would have been the world's unluckiest goldfish but, hey, it might have gone some way to disguise the bio-terrorism I'd been involved in. As it was, the poor woman looked afraid, gave me a wide berth and hurried off to phone Special Branch. We only just got off the train in time. It wasn't out of sight before a couple of helicopters full of commandos caught up with it and the whole thing disappeared in a cloud of tear gas and abseiling men with guns.

Greeting me with a hug, my mum raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything.

I think I'll be a little more understanding next time one of the kids' friends gets sent to school despite having a sniffle.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children, housedad, school, sickness, travel

 
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2:15 PM - Permanent Link - 1 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  When computer games go bad

Dear Dave,

The kids are all finally back at school. Hurrah! That only took a week. Doubtless one of them will come down with something else in a couple of days but, in the meantime, it makes a nice change not having anyone in the house lying around under a blanket, sighing deeply. Being stuck inside for so long as been a little much on occasion. At last there's no more bickering over whose turn it is to play the Wii and I can open a window and do something about the smell of stale children in the lounge.

Phew.

Anyway, it's been a long week full of grumpiness, illness and TV involving annoying puppets. My patience is running low. I've also had to witness the kids play quite a number of computer games. Some of them have been good and some of them have been bad but the children have been too under the weather to care.

I haven't.

It's set me to pondering where bad games come from. Obviously, at a basic level, making a bad computer game is incredibly easy. You hire the cheapest team you can find, set them to work on an interactive version of an upcoming animated family movie and then insist they have it finished by a fortnight on Thursday. This technique never fails. That said, it's also a bit like creating a TV movie about three blokes digging a hole. The chances of it being anything but awful are so slim, no one will go near it. They might give it a quick shot if they're lying around under a blanket, sighing deeply on a weekday afternoon, but they'll soon switch over to something else.

Far worse are games that are good enough to want to finish but that contain easily fixed issues which cause the player to swear in frustration on a regular basis. Where do these games come from? It's stupefying. I so frequently play games with major flaws that could have been corrected with minimal effort, I can only assume that designers introduce the problems on purpose. Perhaps it's a clever trick to give them some straightforward improvements for the sequel.

In case you ever get the urge to design a bad computer game yourself, here's a list of stuff to include:

• A final boss that's ten times harder than the rest of the game - Game too short? You could add extra levels, different game modes and some additional side challenges. Or you could just triple the length of the final enemy's life bar and force the player to do the last half hour of the game over and over again until they finally get lucky and kill the thing...
  
  ...only to discover it's not really dead and they have to fight it again. In the dark. Armed with only a carrot.
  
  Hey, if they get totally stuck, they can always go watch the ending on YouTube.


• The whole game again... but backwards! - Not content with merely making the final boss too hard? Make the player traipse back through the entire game to find it.


• And then forwards again - Even better, leave the boss at the end but put a door in the way. Make the player have to traipse back to find the key.
  
  Players will really love the extra value for money they're receiving. They may even like the idea so much that the next time they go to the cinema, they'll insist on watching the middle of the film three times before they get to see the last ten minutes.


• An unhelpful save system - This is perhaps the simplest way to make a great game almost unplayable for normal people. Just don't put save points in the middle of long levels. That way, if there's a power cut or they have to stop (because a child is vomiting, for instance), it's right back to the start. To really rub it in, include mid-level checkpoints but no way to save them.
  
  For an extra element of surprise, make save points twenty minutes apart, except for a few that have an hour in between them. This will regularly catch out players attempting to sneak in a quick section before bed.


• Excessive darkness - Make the game full of shadows and coal mines so players spend the whole time leaning forward and squinting at the screen to locate all the important small, black objects they need to find...


• Excessive brightness - ...but then throw in the occasional jaunt to the surface of the sun so they're spending more time fighting with the brightness menu on their TV than playing.


• Fiddly motion control - Why let players press a button to open a door when you can force them to reach out with the controller, turn it and pull it back? That's far more immersive. Particularly since it's uncomfortable when sitting down and doesn't work half the time.
  
  Making a quick shake in one direction perform a reload while also having a quick shake in a very similar direction perform a 180 degree turn is always good for a laugh.
  
  This is option is currently restricted to Wii but it's coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2010. Start coding now!


• Meaningless difficulty selection - Designing something that's too easy or too hard is a slightly lazy way of creating a bad game. Add a touch of style by making it the player's fault. Let them choose a difficulty level from at least five options but without giving them any clue as to what difference the choice makes. Only allow them to choose before the game starts and don't let them change their mind without starting a new game. They're bound to get halfway through and wish they'd made a different choice.
  
  Of course, you could make the game do exactly the same thing whichever option they choose. But that would be evil...


• A complicated, but dull, back story - So, you have a bald space marine who has to run through endless corridors fighting horrific creatures? That's kind of generic. Better make your game stand out by having it all to do with a war between the Volban and Arg'jan over the future of Hascan supplies left behind by the GRR/kan, as retold by fffffffFxxx units scattered throughout Losdan by the advance Saswan team consisting of the marine's ex-wife and best friends. Add some incomprehensible flashbacks and a touch of betrayal.
  
  Sigh.


• No plot recap - For best results, briefly mention several vital plot details at about half an hour into the game. Don't refer to them again for the next fifteen levels until they turn the whole story on its head. At this point, assume the player recalls the information perfectly. So what if it's been six weeks since they played that bit? They should have been paying attention.
  
  Bonus points if the info is in the original game but the big reveal isn't until the sequel...


• A dodgy translation - Nothing makes a hackneyed plot and complicated back story more enjoyable than a stack of non sequiturs and some garbled grammar (apart from maybe plenty of atrocious voice acting and characters who spakest in pretendye Medieval parlance, forsoothe!).
  
  Watch out, though. Mess up and poor translation can become a bonus feature. I was playing a game the other day in which I kept having to open lots of 'difficult chests'. These were impressive and gaudy but, strangely, they all opened really easily. I only figured out what was going on when I was opening one of the plain, ordinary, 'simple chests' that were also lying around. I laughed quite hard.


• Lots of alarms - If someone is breaking out of a prison or breaking into an alien stronghold or just plain breaking stuff almost anywhere, they should expect that some alarms are going to go off eventually. It's even a good indicator that they've been detected and it's time to run away. Alarms are great... in moderation.
  
  When a fire alarm goes off in real life, it should keep blaring until the fire brigade arrives or the building burns down. It's only sensible. In a game, however, ten seconds is plenty long enough to blast out a noise which is designed to be grating. This being the case, you should consider having the thing wail for at least fifteen minutes.
  
  For added irritation, make the section after the alarms go off really difficult so the player has to repeat it many times. Also throw in plenty of dialogue and verbal instructions so they can't turn the sound down.

And there we have it. A few suggestions to get you going. How they normally get past QA is a mystery, though. Many of these issues could be fixed in an afternoon. Maybe they're such a fundamental part of gaming culture that everyone simply puts up with them. No one thinks, 'Hey, it doesn't have to be this way...'

...

Hmmm... Maybe this sort of thing doesn't just happen with games. Perhaps I should go ask the kids what I do all the time that really drives them up the wall. You never know, I might be able to improve their customer experience without much effort.

First, however, I think I'll go test the batteries in the smoke alarms...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: computer games, PS3, sickness, Wii, Xbox 360

 
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10:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Always have a back-up plan

Dear Dave,

Last week was the week.

The week when I didn't have any school holidays to contend with. When my calendar was free of tradesmen and essential errands. When I didn't have parents staying, cleaning to do or school trips to help out on. Barring a quick visit to Iceland to pile a trolley with food and arrange a home delivery, last week was the first week in nine years when I was totally free to concentrate on getting some writing done and plan for the inevitable future in which I'm no longer a housedad.

With fear and trepidation, I sat down just after nine o'clock on Monday morning and began to type. Time was spread out before me, rich and fertile and filled with seemingly infinite possibility. At last! A chance to think and create, an opportunity to -

Whirr. Click.

At five past nine, my screen went suddenly blank.

It would be nice to say that this was due to some sort of epiphany on my part - that I realised I should really have a lie down and then go for a coffee somewhere in celebration of my freedom. There would be something almost inspiring about me switching the computer off and walking away to enjoy a well-deserved rest from all my housedad labour. It would be a simple lesson to all the crazy, over-stretched people out there run-ragged by the goading of self-imposed expectation. Just relax, take a deep breath, think about what you're doing, go eat a muffin...

Unfortunately, the reality was that the hard drive in my laptop died.

As you can probably imagine, this wasn't very relaxing. By the time I'd figured out the problem, replaced the drive, re-installed everything, recovered as much data as I could and sobbed into my coffee, it was Wednesday. On Thursday, Fraser woke up with symptoms which, when described to other parents in the playground, had them backing away, making little signs of warding and muttering about swine flu.

Then Sarah got it. Then I got it. Now Marie has it.

It's Monday again and Fraser is still off school. Lewis appeared slightly disappointed to be the only one fit and healthy and able to go. He cheered up, however, when I pointed out the alternative was to stay home with his brother and sister and listen to them grump and whine all day about not feeling very well. In fact, I suggested a swap - I offered to go to school for him if he stayed behind to look after the others.

He was out the door like a shot.

Ho well. Maybe I'll get some writing done next week. You never know, perhaps I'll even have a lie down or go for coffee instead.

(Assuming Lewis hasn't come down with this by then, of course...)

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

----------------------------

To all the American Daves and non-Daves out there,

Ally at OurMilkMoney.com is looking to talk to housedads about their experiences in order to write an upbeat article about involved fathers. You can contact her via the site. (Her email address was one of the things which I didn't manage to save!) It's a nationwide directory of local businesses run by self-employed parents, so it's worth checking out.

Labels: housedad, sickness

 
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10:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Fee, fie, foe, fum!

Dear Dave,

No, I don't know where the smell is coming from. Sorry. If you've cleaned the carpets, the upholstery and the children, you may be stuck with it. I suppose it's possible one of them threw up in a drawer and didn't tell you. Or maybe they taped a banana to the back of a curtain a month ago. Who knows?

I wouldn't worry about it. Invest in some scented candles, open the windows whenever you can and burn toast on a regular basis. If it's really desperate, you could always spray the house with air-freshener. This last option is, however, the olfactory equivalent of wearing a toupee - it's not going to convince anyone and they're just going to wonder what you're hiding underneath. Better to shave everything off and go bald with pride - or, in this case, get creative and make a real stink. Buy a pet, take up home-brewing, creosote your wardrobe, whatever you like!

After all, it's still a year until you potty train Daisy and it'll probably be another year after that before you feel entirely confident about keeping your socks dry on a daily basis. There's no point doing anything drastic like buying a new sofa for a while yet.

Not that that would do any good anyway...

Yep, don't think you can simply move house when Daisy turns five and leave the stench behind. Somehow, despite all my children being out of nappies, toilet trained, able to wipe their own bottoms and generally capable of keeping their dribble in their mouths, the aroma is getting worse.

Up until recently, I could maybe have blamed this stench on lingering stains of curdled milk left over from when they spilled their no-spill cups as toddlers or I could have passed it all off as the residual whiff of bodily fluids which overflowed when they were babies. Unfortunately, now the weather is getting warmer, the real problem is obvious. When I come down to the lounge on a Saturday morning, the children have usually been playing in there for quite a length of time already. The combination of kids, closed windows and a couple of hours of sunshine leaves the air somewhat... chewy. There's also something of an odour. It's a cloying mix of stale sweat and farts.

Gag.

To be fair, not much of it is Marie's fault. She's going through a relatively sweet-smelling stage in between being a toddler and a school child. It's also possible that our lounge has developed the ability to spontaneously produce methane. Since no one is prepared to claim responsibility, I can think of no other reason why the place constantly smells of bottom burps.

Oh hang on, perhaps the boys just stink. Excuse me while I check...

Goes and sniffs one of them. Passes out.

Several minutes later...

Erm, yeah... They totally pong.

They also don't care:

Fraser was away at Boys' Brigade camp at the weekend and we were nervous how he might get on. He hasn't been to anything similar before and we weren't sure how he'd react to being in a strange place with new rules and lots of people he didn't know very well. On a more practical level, he gets disastrously travel sick and they were going to be doing lots of toing-and-froing in minibuses. We doped him with travel pills and crossed our fingers.

Happily, he had a great time. He also avoided hurling...

...in the minibus anyway.

He woke up at 4 am Sunday morning and spewed. When he told me this on his return, I was rather eager to get his pyjamas and sleeping bag into the washing machine.

"It's OK," he replied. "They're clean. I wasn't sick on myself - I was sick on the mattress and over onto the floor."

I relaxed a little. "That doesn't sound too bad."

"Uh-huh," agreed Fraser, "it didn't even get the person in the bottom bunk."

I tensed again. The rather belated addition of this little detail made me wonder what else might be missing from Fraser's account. "Are you sure you weren't sick on your clothes and sleeping bag?"

"The leaders wiped them down. They don't need washed."

"Er... I still think they should be washed and you should have a bath tonight."

This made Fraser grumpy. "I don't need a bath - I got wiped down too. I want to wear the same pyjamas tonight."

I fished around in his bag and pulled out his pyjama top. "Really? Even with this large patch of caked sick on the sleeve?"

"Oh, I didn't see that," he said but didn't actually seem that deterred from wearing it.

I noticed the offending item had been left loose in the bag with all his other clothing and his trainers. Everything was contaminated. I sighed. "I'm going to put the washing machine on and then it's bath-time, OK?"

"Why?"

"'Cos I say so. Get moving..."

Against this kind of attitude, there isn't much to be done. I guess when the boys are older, there might be some hope of masking the stink with deodorant but I'm reluctant to go down that road too soon. It's just personal air-freshener after all. It might make them smell of mountain streams but they'll still be sweaty and farty underneath. At least at the moment people can detect this from a distance and thus receive some warning not to get too close. Leaving them smelly is a public service...

So, really, don't stress about that faint scent of wet fish you can't track down. Even if you do eradicate it, your kids will doubtless replace it with something else before long. Embrace the stink! Make cabbage soup, juggle with rotten eggs, fart whenever you like! Your friends without children won't understand and will think you're mad but, let's face it, they think that already. Just go wild.

All the best. I'm off to purchase a sheep.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS Excuse of the Week:

And the award goes to... Fraser! When asked why there was a trail of blood drops beginning on the sofa, leading across the lounge carpet and out onto the hall carpet, he replied, "I didn't realise my nose was bleeding until I got a tissue. I thought it was snot."

Labels: children, sickness

 
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9:20 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Trying not to breathe on the sandwiches

Dear Dave,

Lewis was seven yesterday.

He was also dizzy, disoriented, tired and running a fever. This was a shame for the poor boy. He did cheer up somewhat, however, when he got to stay home and lie around playing his new computer games all day.

This morning, he's still off school but feeling much better. I, meanwhile, am feeling dizzy, disoriented and tired. It's possibly the start of whatever he has or perhaps it's simply the on-going symptoms of parenthood. Who can tell?

I'd quite like to lie around playing computer games all day. Instead, I've got to do the catering for a score of seven-year-olds who are turning up to a birthday party tomorrow.

Super.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: sickness

 
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12:00 PM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Dr Seuss - the truth!

Dear Dave,

I don't know about you, but I find that a family holiday simply isn't complete without vomit.

It doesn't matter how far I've journeyed, the sights I've seen nor how much I've been ripped off over a cup of coffee, if I haven't had to deal with a vast eruption of sick, then I feel that a vital part of the experience has been missed. Like a dog claiming territory, my family seems determined to leave its mark wherever it goes. Whether it's Tobermory, Glasgow, St Andrews or Belgium, we can boldly say, in the manner of latter-day Caesars, 'We came. We saw. We puked our guts out. (And then we left... in a hurry.)'

We took a trip to Cambridge at the weekend. On our last trip to Cambridge, Lewis was sick after we got a lift in a car. The only other occasion we'd been previously, both Lewis AND Fraser hurled in the train on the way home. I think Lewis may actually be allergic to the place - this time he was sick during the night.

I was watching TV in the lounge of our accommodation and missed the main event. He'd woken up feeling queasy and been too dozy to shout for help. Nonetheless, he'd managed to stumble through from the bedroom to the bathroom. Unfortunately, he'd made his usual mistake in these circumstances of sitting on the toilet to be sick rather than sticking his head down it. This is normally hugely messy. Sarah got to him in time, however, and steered him to the sink.

Cue titanic chunder.

I was blissfully unaware of this until it became apparent that he'd clogged the drain. I had to be called in then because... well... because, let's face it, no one else wanted to deal with a seething basin full of putrid sick.

As I reached in and guddled about, I couldn't really blame them...

After that, it was a case of preparing for the worst. I was fairly certain he'd emptied out the entire contents of his stomach but I couldn't be sure. I searched the small suite we had in the B&B for suitable receptacles for high-velocity regurgitation. Since there was no kitchen, my options were limited - a coffee cup, the ornate waste bin and the drawer of the table beside Lewis' bed. None of these seemed ideal.

I eventually found a thick paper bag we had with us, showed it to Lewis and put it next to him. At that point, Marie started to make retching noises in her sleep. Since she was sharing a bed with Lewis, he wasn't too happy about this turn of events. I reassured him, told him to lie down and went in search of more bags.

When I returned with a plastic carrier, Marie retched some more and I ran to crouch beside her. Then Lewis coughed ominously as he dozed off again. I went round the bed to him with my bag open, ready to field any noxious torrents. As I got there, Fraser started to moan in his sleep on the other side of the room. I scurried to him. Then Marie worked on her hairball some more. I hurried back. Lewis shifted some phlegm. I moved round. Fraser groaned. I...

I gave up and made camp in the middle of the room with a torch, a book and my emergency sick bag. I sat there for an hour before they were all peaceful and then I slunk off to bed, certain I would be woken in the middle of the night by some sort of unpleasant disaster or other.

I was very confused in the morning when my alarm went off and the kids were still asleep. I checked Lewis' bedside drawer just in case. It was empty. The kids, the carpet and the mattresses were all fine. Phew!

In retrospect, though, we maybe shouldn't have let Lewis have lots of pink yogurt for breakfast and then immediately taken him on public transport.

Never mind - his shoes were remarkably easy to clean.

I'm considering writing a sequel to Green Eggs and Ham. It will be called Dubiously-hued Food and a Very Bumpy Bus Journey. It will go something like this:

I've wiped up vomit in a boat.
I've removed it from an angry goat.
I've wiped up vomit in the rain.
And in the dark. And in a train.
And in a car. And round a tree.
It is so very carrot-y!

I've scooped it into a box.
I've washed the vomit from my socks.
I've cleaned it up around the house.

I've wiped it up both here and there.
I've wiped up vomit EVERYWHERE!

We haven't decided where we're going on holiday in the summer. Maybe we'll come visit you.

Be afraid.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: sickness, travel

 
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9:15 AM - Permanent Link - 4 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Christmas sneeze

Dear Dave,

There are a few phrases I never expected to have to say as a parent. I feel that someone really should have warned me they might come up. They include such things as:

'Why are you wearing your brother's socks on your ears?'

'Don't slide down the stairs naked - you'll give yourself carpet burns on your bottom.'

and

'Where did you find that poo?'

I've also had plenty of unlikely conversations. Only a minute ago, I said to Lewis, "Stop swinging on the banisters, you'll pull them off the wall. How many times do I have to say it?"

Quick as a flash, he replied, "Yes, but you normally say it to Fraser..."

Ho hum. I'm kind of used to the bizarreness of parenthood now, though. Not much throws me. I have to rely on adults for my surprises. Like last Saturday night, when Mike said, "Turn the heat down or you'll burn off all the alcohol."

That simply can't be a common utterance for ministers of religion.

"I haven't added the alcohol yet," I shouted above the surrounding chatter and cheesy Christmas music. "The recipe says I've got to boil the other ingredients for ten minutes before I add the wine. It's still got a little bit to go."

Mike peered suspiciously into the huge pot I had bubbling away on the hob. "It looks like you've put some wine in."

"That's just the dregs from the last batch."

"Ach, it'll be fine. Pour in the plonk. Some of us are waiting."

"OK, OK," I said, unscrewing the tops of three bottles of cheap red and emptying them into the pot. Then I stirred the resulting concoction with a wooden spoon, spices and slices of fruit whirling around. It all certainly smelled like mulled wine, which was most of the battle. I was reasonably hopeful that it would taste like mulled wine too and I tried not to sneeze in it.

I seem to have had one disease after another the last couple of weeks - cold, cough, stomach bug, you name it. What with the end of a long term approaching, all the kids at school are worn down and there are loads of bugs going about. It was so quiet walking along the road the other morning, I was convinced the bell had already gone and we were late. Turned out that we were on time and everyone else had merely decided to stay home, crank up the heating and hide under a blanket.

Wish I'd thought of that plan.

I've been stumbling around, following the normal routine. The man in the corner shop treated me like I was mad when I bought six packets of throat sweets at once. Maybe he was right. I should probably have given up, hidden under a blanket for a couple of days and let the kids run wild. Instead, I've chain-sucked Lockets and risked menthol poisoning in an effort to make sure they make it to all their usual clubs and activities.

At least the kids haven't succumbed to any of the illnesses yet. Doubtless they're saving them for next week but I should have recovered by then.

When we had our annual Christmas party, I was still feeling grotty. Nonetheless, several helpings of hot, spicy wine did improve matters somewhat. Once the contents of the pot had warmed up, I ladled myself another medicinal dose and then filled Mike's cup as well.

"Cheers," he said and we turned our attention back to the room.

All the children present had vanished upstairs to the lounge where they were being mysteriously quiet. I hoped they were happily playing computer games rather than dismantling the furniture but I didn't dare go find out. Judging by the number of adults packing out the kitchen, no one else was too keen to risk breaking the spell either. Friends and neighbours mingled together. Every so often, someone remarked, "The children are being very good." This was a cue for every parent in the room to glance nervously at the ceiling and then mutter something about 'going and checking in a minute' before shiftily returning to their drinks.

Useless Dad and my sister-in-law, Catriona, had found each other and were introducing their spouses in an excited exchange of business cards. My niece, Lisa, was chatting with Kate and cooing over baby Luke. Trevor was showing off his tattoos and shrapnel scars to Ned. Scary Karen had Rob trapped up a corner and was regaling him with the details of the birth of her children. By the look on his face, she'd got to the part with the spatula on the train.

A dozen other people swirled around. Everyone was mingling nicely.

That or the combination of mulled wine and over-the-counter cold remedies was making my vision blur slightly. It was hard to tell.

"So...?" said Mike.

It was that time again.

"So...?" I echoed, playing stupid as always.

"Thought about where you're headed yet?"

"I've got a few days break coming up. Sarah's taking the kids through to her parents before Christmas. I'll get a chance to do some things round the house, like re-grout the shower and clean the carpets, and then I'm going to have a lie down. Just me, the Xbox and some beers."

Mike didn't look impressed. "That's not what I meant."

"I know."

He shook his head. "It's only another few months now."

"It's nearly a year!" I replied, incredulously.

"It's nearly a year since Marie started nursery," said Mike, not having any of it. "How long does that feel?"

"Like a few months," I sighed.

Mike nodded. "She'll be at school before you can blink. Better be ready." He ladled himself some more mulled wine. "I'm busy enough without coming round here every week to counsel you."

I wasn't entirely sure if he was joking.

"I do think about it," I said and blew my nose. "There really is plenty of time left, though. Once I've had a rest and I'm well again and Christmas is over, I'll maybe have a better idea what I'm going to do."

"And who you're going to be?"

"That's what I meant."

Mike was sceptical. "Are you sure?"

"Uh-huh. You've made the point enough times recently; I've just about grasped it now."

The words came out sounding more irritated than I'd meant.

He was right, of course. I've spent so long as a man in a woman's world, constantly having to explain my existence, that it's come to define me. 'Housedad' isn't merely my job - it's what I am. Looking after the children is my justification for being. There's a chance that I'm going to get to September and feel redundant. I'll lose the place I've made for myself in society and mope around in a haze of self-doubt and imagined social rejection.

"Sorry," I said. "Look, honestly, I'll figure it out but... for now I'm still a housedad. I know there'll be something the other side of that. Something soon. I'm just going to have to make my way barefoot through that darkened room littered with LEGO when I come to it, though. I'm too tired to be prepared."

As if to confirm this, I had a fit of sneezes and sagged against the worktop.

Mike thought for a moment but then took pity on me and decided not to press any further for the time being. The interrogation was over. "You do look like you could do with a rest. Do you want someone to come round and help you with the Xbox and the beer?"

"Forget that," I said. "I'd have to get dressed. I'm planning to loll around in the armchair in my pyjamas... Now, excuse me, I'm going to go rescue Rob before Karen decides it's her turn to show off her scars..."

I squeezed my way through the throng and pulled Rob clear in the nick of time, roping him into handing round mince pies. I set about serving drinks. There was more chatter and laughter and thankfully someone swapped the CD over to Christmas carols. It was all very pleasant.

Eventually, however, I couldn't resist any longer and I had to go and check on the kids. I was hugely pleased to find that four of them were playing on the Wii and the rest were keeping amused with toys I'd scattered about.

There was only one small problem - there were crumbs everywhere. I had to use one of those unexpected parental phrases. "Did it rain crisps in here?" I asked.

Most of the children ignored me but Marie was quick to pipe up. "No," she said, giggling. "Don't be silly. It can't rain crisps. It snows crisps..."

That pretty much answered my question.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: christmas, housedad, sickness

 
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1:00 PM - Permanent Link - 2 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Attack of the snot

Dear Dave,

Never tempt Fate. The poor girl has no self control. Give her a couple of vodka martinis and it can lead to all kinds of trouble...

I believe I mentioned last week that I hadn't had to use the buggy in months. I also commented to someone else that my family had been mysteriously well since the summer.

I suspect Marie may have inhaled some germs at that very moment.

Three days later and she now has a stinking cold. The kind where she lies around mournfully in a sleeping bag, demanding her nose be blown every three minutes. I spent the entire morning watching Bob the Builder with her sitting on my lap and a box of tissues by my side. When we went outside, she barely had energy to climb into the buggy, let alone scoot anywhere.

This afternoon I couldn't get warm. I put my thickest jumper on and that made no difference. I turned the heating up and that didn't help. I started wearing my coat, hat and scarf. I still felt cold... in the lounge... with the heating on... I finally had to resort to stuffing a hot water bottle down my shirt. I suspect that I may not be feeling that well by tomorrow morning.

To make matters worse, it turns out I'm old:

I've just done Fraser's homework with him. The textbook reads: 'Skin is elastic. If you pinch the skin on the back of your hand and let it go it springs back into place. An old person's skin does not spring back into place but forms wrinkles.'

Sure enough, his skin twanged back into shape instantly. Mine stayed in a sharply defined ridge long enough for me to forget why I was staring at it and wander off in search of some Werther's Originals.

I'm thirty-five and I'm falling apart.

I think I'll go and have a lie down.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: sickness

 
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11:00 PM - Permanent Link - 4 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Getting younger

Dear Dave,

It's that time of year again...

I've got older.

Yes, technically I get older at the same rate all the year round but psychologically aging is restricted to annual updates every autumn, complete with candles and bad singing.

Actually, this time, I haven't got older. I've officially got old:

The library wanted me to fill in a questionnaire about their new checkout system. It's highly impressive. There's a barcode scanner for your library card and everything. Using a touchscreen display, you tell it whether you want to return books, borrow them or renew them. Then you just put the books on a little shelf and it knows which ones they are. By magic. One by one, the titles come up on the screen as tiny Librarian Pixies frantically do their job. The thing even prints out a receipt.

Of course, with all the button pressing and scanning, it's not really any quicker than the old system of a human librarian stamping the books. More often than not, one book in the stack won't register, requiring a careful analysis of the receipt to work out which it is. Sometimes the system thinks a book is already out when you try to borrow it or already in when you try to return it. This means searching out a librarian anyway.

When the machine gets it right, though, it's very, very cool.

Still, the first question on the feedback form scared me. It wanted to know my age and had a selection of age ranges to choose from. I realised that by the next time I intended to return to the library, I would no longer be grouped together with 25-year-olds - I would be consigned to the same dark tick-box as those who were only a day short of 45. (You know, the kind of people who might be in awe of an automatic book detector and describe it as 'cool'.)

I made sure to make a special trip to hand in the form before my birthday. Being 35 apparently puts me in an entirely different age bracket and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

Happily, there is some leeway in where the division lies and not everyone puts it in the same place. I got sent a brochure yesterday from an organisation that runs Christian courses and retreats and they had a few specially developed for 18 to 35-year-olds. I was so flattered to be lumped in with school-leavers, I nearly signed up, despite most of the options involving travelling a long distance to sit in silence for AN ENTIRE MONTH.

Then I remembered the weekend on spirituality and creative arts I went to a few years ago which put me on the organisation's mailing list in the first place. It was an interesting course but I was surprised when I turned up and found the hall packed full of middle-aged women. They were all very welcoming and pleasant but got mildly confused whenever I mentioned my kids. Turned out that the course had a heavy Catholic slant and they'd assumed I was a trainee priest.

They were plain-clothes nuns.

All of them.

Much as thirty days of peace and contemplation surrounded by young women sounds tempting, I'm not sure I'm ready for that either.

So here I stand, teetering on the precipice of middle-age, wondering whether to jump before I'm pushed. The funny thing is, though, I actually feel significantly younger than I did a couple of years ago. I'm getting unbroken sleep. I can bounce along the pavement unencumbered by buggies, toddlers and changing bags. I don't feel the need to live on chocolate bars and biscuits. I'm not coming down with a cold or stomach bug every other week. Best of all, people have finally stopped being surprised by how young I am. This doesn't necessarily sound like a good thing but what it really means is that I'm no longer looking old for my age. Result!

If this youthful trend continues, there might be life after children yet.

Wouldn't that be great?

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: sickness, sleep

 
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9:00 AM - Permanent Link - 1 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  A picture of ill

Dear Dave,

Hope your family is doing well and you're enjoying having Sam at school all day now. Don't get used to it, though. There's always something. For example, my kids had a random holiday at the beginning of the week and Marie's not been feeling too good the last couple of days:


The phlegm is strong in you, young Jedi... but... are you sure that robe is entirely regulation?

It's rather put a hold on getting anything done.

Ho well, maybe in 2010 next week.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: sickness

 
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8:15 AM - Permanent Link - 4 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  One down...

Dear Dave,

I hadn't taken that in at all.

Nope.

Even now, I can't entirely believe it but I guess it must be true. After all, you should know.

Sam's starting school?! Today!?!?

I really thought he had another year of nursery. I'd forgotten the cut-off date is different in England. The end of February is the dividing line here in the Scotland, rather than the beginning of September. Lewis' birthday is in March so he was five and a half before he started Primary 1. Sam's only just turned four! That seems awfully young...

Still, hey, you've got one to school! He probably looks really cute in his little uniform and they'll be gentle with him to begin with. It won't be much different from nursery initially, except you'll actually have to get him there on time. It's in a few weeks, when he has to go for the full day, that it will hit you both. He'll become grumpy as he grasps quite how much of his life school is going to consume for countless years. (Then they'll teach him to count those years and he'll simply go into shock.) You, meanwhile, might get a little peace (if you can time Daisy's naps right).

You'll wander the house, wondering what you should be doing without a small child demanding your attention. Obviously you should be sitting down with a cup of coffee but it may take several days to come to terms with that. Having only one child to look after will seem like a bizarre luxury. Even though caring for Sam when he was small took all your time, looking after Daisy will feel like you're slacking now that your skills have been honed.

Try to enjoy it rather than feeling guilty. Grab a break when you can. Kids are great but they're hard work. It's been a long slog getting this far and it's still over two years before Daisy starts nursery and you get a regular opportunity to relax.

The end of being on call 24/7 is a step closer, however.

Unless...






Have you considered having any more?







I'll let you ponder that one for a couple of days. (You're probably too busy gibbering to read anything else I have to say on the matter anyway.)

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS Don't get too used to Sam being at school, by the way. He might only be in for a two hour introductory session today but that should be plenty long enough for him to acquire three colds and a stomach bug. He'll be sneezing his lunch all over you by the middle of next week.

Labels: school, sickness

 
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9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Temporary role-unreversal

Dear Dave,

Looks like, once again, I spoke too soon...

It turns out that while the children were recovering from the plague, I was merely succumbing to it at my leisure. Scary Karen was very keen to find out all about it when I phoned her yesterday to explain why I couldn't bring Marie round to visit. She asked so many questions, I don't think I can go through it all a second time and I'll spare you the slimy details. Suffice to say, my digestive tract spent much of the other night in a concerted effort to expel its contents by the nearest available exit. Sarah's sleep was disturbed so frequently by the sound of me retching that when she woke at half-six and all was quiet, she felt the need to get up and check on me as I dozed in the lounge. You know, just in case I was dead.

I was propped up on the sofa, groaning mildly to myself, as News 24 went round in an endless, half-hour loop before my eyes. The main story was about how much food we waste. It was accompanied by pictures of rancid salad being thrown into a bin. This wasn't hugely helpful but I'd lost the remote and any ability to move. Sarah changed the channel to breakfast TV for me and went back to bed.

Later, three children bounced into the room and started arguing with each other. I ignored them. They ignored me. I watched the weather forecast for the twenty-eighth time in seven hours.

"What's the weather going to be like?" said Sarah, entering the lounge.

"Dunno," I muttered.

"You just watched the weather forecast."

"Uh-huh," I grunted. I knew the forecast had been on. I was vaguely aware that it probably hadn't changed much during the night. If I'd only paid attention one of those twenty-eight times... "Wuh?"

She looked concerned and lowered the questioning to Neanderthal level. "How cute was the girl talking about rain?"

Even this was aiming too high. "Uh? Girl?"

She patted me gently on the head. "You really are in a state, aren't you?"

"Ug?" I said and mournfully huddled deeper under my blanket.

Luckily, Sarah had a few days off work anyway. Well, lucky for the rest of us, that is. I'm not sure she'd really planned on spending her holiday around a smelly, incapable husband and a trio of demanding and constantly complaining children.

Of course, the kids are always like that but much of it is directed at me. Worse, having a substitute domestic servant presented more opportunities for complaint.

It's not that Sarah can't manage. I'm fortunate that she can cope with looking after the children on her own. I know plenty of housemums whose partners wouldn't know where to start if left in charge without warning for twenty-four hours. On the handful of occasions in the last eight years when I've been too unwell to move, I've been secure in the knowledge that both the kids and the house will still be intact once the delirium has passed. There may be a little more mess than usual and the fridge will probably have been emptied but there's no great risk of disaster.

That's not necessarily how the kids see it, however. I resurface and they act like they've had to train up a newbie, fighting over each other to tell me all the things Sarah got wrong, couldn't find or spilt.

It's not her fault. Although looking after children isn't rocket science, any individual child tends to have a complicated list of care instructions that has been developed and honed over a lifetime. Put three children together and the combined manual of likes, dislikes, medical history, social calendar, pending treats and suspended punishments is impossible to take in all at once.

Lewis gets out of school at 3 o'clock but Fraser comes out at 3:20. Lewis gets eczema cream on his arms and legs when he gets up and before he goes to bed. Fraser does too but he applies it himself. Marie gets it in the morning but only on her wrists at night. They all have different toothpastes. Fraser won't eat cooked vegetables, Lewis will put up with them, Marie prefers cooked to raw.

None of them likes change.

Sarah can do something perfectly valid, like cut up the boys' toast, and they'll complain that that's not the way Daddy does it. Marie, meanwhile, will complain if her toast isn't cut up. There's no way that Sarah can possibly know all these things but the kids make a fuss nonetheless.

I trust her but the kids aren't so sure. They live on their nerves in case she gives them the 'incorrect' cup or cuts up their carrot the 'wrong' way. It gets a little draining for everyone after a while, I imagine.

This came to a head when, after a long day, Sarah sat the kids down for tea. She'd cooked a pizza. Unfortunately, I'd bought different frozen pizzas from normal. When she plonked it down on the table and it was square, they simply couldn't work out what incompetent thing she'd done to achieve something so unnatural...

Marie followed this up by whining about her fork 'not being colourful enough' and then wittered on about how she was 'the ring-master of the colourful forks'.

Apparently, it was all a bit much.

They survived the incident but, when I stumbled down to the lounge once the children had gone to bed, Sarah said, "Now I understand why you buy beer."

"Uh-huh," I replied and switched on the TV. It was the weather forecast. I still didn't manage to take in the details but the girl was cute.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"Think so," I said. "Thanks for looking after the kids."

"That's OK but I'll be glad when you're able to take over. Have I told you how much I appreciate you lately?"

"I appreciate you, too," I said. It was the truth. "I should be well enough to go buy food tomorrow."

"Good. The fridge is empty."

"Uh-huh," I said and closed my eyes. I must have drifted off. When I woke up, the weather forecast was on. It was bedtime.

The rest did me good, though. I'm mostly fine now. It just may be another day or two before I can look salad in the face again...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS When I went out to buy food, I got rained on. For some reason, I wasn't expecting that...

Labels: sickness

 
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11:15 AM - Permanent Link - 2 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  There's nothing left to mix cakes in

Dear Dave,

Greetings from The House of Ill. When I said we would be spending the first week of the holidays lying around in our pyjamas I hadn't really envisaged that we'd all have sick bowls by our sides...

I knew something was up on Friday when Marie started demanding to play computer games and complaining that she didn't want to leave the house. That's not like her. She didn't eat her lunch. Then she didn't want to go to her swimming lesson, despite loving swimming.

In an ironic twist, the boys were desperate to go because it was the last one of term and a chance to play about with giant floats while being squirted with a hose. They normally hate swimming lessons. We struggled to the pool but Marie sat mournfully on my lap and refused to go into the water. The instructor looked at me like I was being a soft touch. Still, I knew something was up. When we got home, Marie didn't eat her tea. She decided she wanted to go to bed two hours early.

An hour later, she got up and demanded breakfast.

This turned into rather a long argument but she seemed a good deal perkier. She had some milk, bounced on the trampoline and went back to bed at her normal time. In retrospect, maybe the bouncing wasn't such a great plan...

I woke at half-past three in the morning to a plaintive cry of 'Daddy! There are crumbs in my bed!'. Considering the kids never eat in bed, I was pretty certain there wasn't a good explanation to be had for this turn of events. I went through to Marie's room. Sure enough, there were crumbs in her bed. Dry crumbs. I didn't want to turn on the light, for fear of waking Lewis who was in the cabin bed above her, so I led her to the bathroom for an examination. Someone appeared to have crumbled a bowl of Shreddies in her hair

She'd thrown up several hours previously, not woken, rolled around in the product and then stayed asleep long enough for it all to go hard.

Gag.

I ran her a bath, plonked her in, changed her sheets and then gave her a good scrub. She went back to bed and I did some laundry. It was almost five before I was tucked up again myself. I'm out of practice with having disturbed sleep, so I was somewhat dazed by the whole experience. My main consolation was that she wasn't sick again...

Not that night, anyway...

She wasn't sick Saturday night either but she was very restless and kept waking up needing a cuddle or a drink or a beachball or whatever else sprang to mind. Sunday night she was sick again. Saturday, I felt sick. Sunday, Fraser was sick. Sarah hasn't been feeling too great. Lewis is fine... so far.

We're all keeping a sick bowl close. Except there aren't quite enough. We have three between five of us, which has turned life into a constant logic puzzle as we manoeuvre ourselves round the house in suitable combinations of people and vomit containment devices. (Marie always needs an adult present; three children together is asking for bickering; Fraser and Marie are liable to set each other off; Fraser's constant complaining is too much for any adult to bear for long; everyone needs to go to the toilet on a regular basis but to be close to a bowl at all times. It's a logistical nightmare.)

I'm tired. This is leading to me being short with the kids. Turns out they can all hold their own now, though:

I nipped out to buy some groceries at the weekend. When I got back, Marie was sitting at the kitchen table and she said, "Can you get me some water?"

"OK," I said, putting my bags down and sticking a loaf of bread in the cupboard.

She looked pleased. "Are you back from shopping now?" she asked.

"No, I'm still there," I said sarcastically. "I'm still working out what to buy." I got her a cup and started filling it with water.

"Can you get me some water?" she said again as she watched me get her some water.

"What do you think I'm doing?" I said, exasperated.

She grinned. "Still shopping."

I was defeated.

Things are looking up, however. We briefly ventured outside this morning into the sunshine. It was just about t-shirt weather.

"It's too bright," moaned Fraser.

"It's too hot," complained Lewis.

"I don't like it," whined Marie.

Fraser started walking along the road with his hands over his eyes and Lewis instantly tripped over. Marie wanted carried.

On this evidence, I think they're mostly back to normal...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS Rob popped round for a quick visit, wearing a face-mask and rubber gloves. He'd heard about my child-induced forgetfulness and my issues with leaving vegetables in the microwave, so he'd run this sign off for me at work:



He even laminated it. Bless him...

Labels: sickness

 
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8:15 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Preg-head

Dear Dave,

It's official - the kids' schedules are fuller than mine. Their combined list of activities has been impressive for a long time but now their social commitments outweigh mine on an individual basis. They visit friends, friends come here, they arrange gatherings at the swing park and they go to swimming lessons, drama class and goodness knows what else. Amidst this whirlwind, meals and homework, baths and toilet breaks all have to be slotted in.

Of course, their friends have busy lives also, and organising a play session can turn into a lengthy negotiation to find over-lapping windows of opportunity. I start off by suggesting Thursday lunch-time to a child's mum and end up with Tuesday afternoon, by way of Saturday tea-time and Sunday morning. Occasionally, I lose track of the details. Three days later, I struggle to remember who I invited and when and if they're coming.

The other week, I forgot about a lunch engagement entirely. A friend rang up in the morning to check it was still OK to bring his little boy round to play with Marie and it took me a minute to even recollect making the arrangement. Then I had to apologise profusely and admit that I'd double-booked us. It was embarrassing and scary. I'd only spoken to him a few days previously. It felt like I was losing the plot.

This was on top of a string of other minor mental oversights I'd had. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me.

Not long afterwards, I tried to sort out an issue by email and the woman I was dealing with blamed a lapse of short-term memory on 'preg-head'. I'd never heard of it and looked it up. Apparently, it's a condition in pregnant women and the symptoms are general abstraction and emotional instability. The article reckoned that the cause is distraction due to worry, planning, preparation and organisation.

I was sceptical. Surely that's just being a parent.

I've heard a couple of other explanations for ditziness during pregnancy. One is surging hormones inducing mild craziness. This can't be fixed but at least it implies the problem will go away once the pregnancy is over. The other explanation is that a gestating baby essentially plunders the mum's brain to make its own. This can be alleviated somewhat by eating oily fish.

Distraction, though? I'm sure being huge, constantly needing the toilet, not being able to sleep and all the other fun side-effects of pregnancy are pretty distracting in themselves but the distraction from the child only gets worse once they've popped out. I frequently have to hold three conversations at the same time while checking my email, eating a meal and doing the washing-up. This takes a certain level of concentration to avoid misunderstanding, indigestion and electrocution.

As I considered my research, I couldn't help thinking that if preg-head is all down to distraction, it would continue unabated until the kid left home. Then I suddenly realised I was standing in the middle of the kitchen holding three pairs of swimming goggles and I couldn't remember where I was going.

Merely contemplating distraction had been enough distraction to push me over the edge into total confusion. It continued for half an hour. With respect to the questions of what I was doing, why I was doing it and where I was supposed to be, I was unable to recall more than two answers at any given moment. I wandered the house, packing sandwiches into a bag of towels and feeding the children their swimming trunks. It was frightening.

I'm convinced that there's more to preg-head than distraction but maybe distraction is an issue. If so, then the problem doesn't end at birth - those who look after children constantly are liable to suffer bouts of disorientation from time to time. It certainly explains my own forgetfulness. In fact, it's that or I'm pregnant. (Let's see: fatigue, mood swings, food cravings, irritability, weight gain, no period... Argh! The symptoms fit!)

I already pass off moments of incompetence as offspring inspired lunacy. When the kids are around, I can point to them in explanation. When they're not, it would be good to have a proper name for my ailment. Distraction doesn't get much sympathy. If I could claim a medical condition, that would be far better. How about parental block? Or offspring overload? Mention of kid confusion, kinsanity or the onset of a primary carer moment might be good as well. It would also be reassuring to everyone involved, myself included. Take my current issue with green beans as an example:

I've discovered that all three of my children will eat lightly cooked green beans. The kind they like, I have to buy fresh, trim and then bung in the microwave for two minutes. The trimming is a bit of a faff so the beans are usually one of the last things I prepare. I slice off the ends, put the beans in a bowl and nuke them. Then, three hours later, when Sarah gets home and I go to heat some vegetables for our tea, I find the beans still in the microwave, looking decidedly shrivelled. If I did this occasionally, I wouldn't be worried. Unfortunately, I've done it at least twice a week for a month.

Thankfully, I've now realised that I'm not losing my marbles. I think it's safe to say that I'm simply coming down with a bad case of parent-head.

As I see it, there are three ways to minimise the effects:

• More sleep. (Drat.)
• Less distraction. (Double drat.)
• Writing things down. (Yawn.)

I suppose that at least the last one is do-able, even if it does sound dull. Recently, I visited someone else who has three young children. She had drawn a timetable out for the week and stuck it to the wall. Scarily, it listed stuff such as having lunch. I don't believe I'm that far gone yet. Although, now that I think about it, did I have breakfast today? Darn. No wonder I'm feeling hungry. OK, maybe I should go and... erm...

What was I going to do again?

Nope. Can't remember... Maybe I should have written it down...

Ho well, just in case I am pregnant and this is all down to hormones and brain shrinkage, I'm off to eat sardines in a cold shower.

Wish me luck.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: housedad (vol.3), sickness

 
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10:45 AM - Permanent Link - 0 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  In Bruges

Dear Dave,

Shoot first, sightsee later...

For some reason, as I fought my way along a cobbled pavement through a coach-load of Italian teenagers going in the opposite direction, the tag-line to the film In Bruges kept springing to mind.

With hindsight, it was probably because I was actually in Bruges at the time. Still, it would have been sensible advice in any other over-priced, medieval European city.

With one hand I clasped a waffle and with the other I clung to Lewis as he told me in great, yet unintelligible, detail about level 3-6 of Mario vs Donkey Kong 2. "...and then you jump this way and go up past the thing and then the other thing comes down next to the platform on the other side of the purple bit..." We pressed forward through the other tourists.

The waffle had cost slightly more than half our normal daily family food budget. It was going soggy from the rain.

I gritted my teeth. We were on holiday. We were having a cultural experience. We were going to enjoy it.

"Are we lost?" asked Fraser from somewhere behind us.

"No," I replied. "We know where we are, we... just don't know where we're going."

"We're never going to get back to the holiday house!" said Lewis, sounding genuinely concerned.

"My socks are wet," squealed Marie.

"We'll get back soon," I said, "and we'll get dry and we'll eat our waffles."

"Do we have to go out tomorrow?" asked Fraser.

"Yes."

"Awwww," he moaned. "Why?"

"Because we're on holiday," I snapped. "We haven't travelled hundreds of miles to sit on a sofa with the curtains drawn and play computer games."

"Why not?" said Lewis.

"Er... because we could have done that at home."

"Why didn't we just stay home?" asked Fraser.

I shook my head in despair. I didn't entirely have a good answer for that. "At least we're not being forced to listen to Max Bygraves tapes by a crazy Spanish sea-captain," I muttered to no one in particular.

"What?" said Lewis, Fraser, Sarah, Marie and a handful of fifteen-year-old Italians in unison.

I took a deep breath. "Well," I began, "when I was small, we were on the top deck of a ferry and it started to chuck it down and..." I launched into an account of various family holidays I'd endured as a boy. It kept the children entertained as we plodded on. There was a strange symmetry to distracting my kids from getting soaked in a foreign land by recalling tales of getting soaked in a foreign land as a kid. Deep down, I knew I'd turned into my parents, though. Both of them. What were we doing?

It had all begun several days earlier on a cold, wet beach in Zeebrugge...

We'd taken the ferry overnight from Rosyth and stepped out boldly to explore. We could have caught a coach directly from the ferry port to Bruges but the boys get bus sick very easily so we thought we'd catch a train. This involved exploring Zeebrugge on foot.

We won't be doing that again.

We were travelling remarkably light for a family of five but Sarah and I still had an enormous rucksack each and the boys both had a small backpack. We'd left the buggy behind and so Marie was forced to walk. This made life interesting as we blundered our way along the hard shoulder of a dual carriageway, searching for civilisation while a gale whipped sand and rain into our eyes. The nearest railway station was closed. There were no shops, only a row of job centres and temp agencies. The boys started to complain that 'abroad' was very cold and they didn't like it.

We trudged a mile into town and found another station. The building was being renovated so we had to stand on the platform in the rain to eat our sandwiches. We did manage to get a train, however, and we didn't have to pay for the kids, so that cheered us up a little. We got to Bruges and ate waffles. This cheered us up some more. Then we hunted out the self-catering house we'd rented for the week. The rain bucketed down as we went.

When we eventually dripped our way inside, it was surprisingly nice. Rather too nice, in fact. It was packed with antique furniture that we had to immediately tell the children not to drip on. The owner very proudly told us that Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson had stayed there during the filming of In Bruges. Since I'd only heard of the movie thirty minutes beforehand thanks to a poster in the Tourist Information Centre, I maybe wasn't as impressed as I should have been. Still, I searched the house later for toenail clippings to eBay.

The place was very different from our own home, adding to the adventure of the holiday. The only real issue was the stairs:



No not those stairs. Admittedly they had gaps in the banisters big enough for an adult to fall through, forced me to duck, were slippy and wobbled worryingly but it's the next flight I'm really talking about:



Not the kind of obstacle you want between a three-year-old and the toilet, first thing in the morning.

Marie simply wasn't allowed to go up and down on her own.

The next day, once we'd dried off, we started doing the usual tourist things. We went on a boat trip on the canals and took a horse-drawn carriage ride round the old town, we went for walks, searched out swing-parks and hit the shops. We avoided buying lace souvenirs but we did stock up on chocolate. We only got soaked through a couple more times...

There were a few instances where it was an effort trying to herd the children but everything was so much easier than it would have been even a year ago. Once we'd got the kids down the stairs in the morning, they could amuse themselves while we slept on. We even went a whole week without a buggy or changing bag or a packet of wipes.

Actually, no, we managed without the buggy and a change of clothes for Marie but we only went a day without a packet of wipes before we realised our mistake. The kids had some candy floss at the circus, got it all over themselves and then tried licking it off. For the rest of the afternoon, everything they passed stuck to them - dirt, leaves, small dogs, other people's wallets, historic monuments, buses and each other. It was a disaster. We ended up rolling half the town into a big, sticky ball just trying to get home. The locals weren't pleased. We may be just about done with changing bags and buggies but I suspect that I'll still be carrying around a packet of wipes with me on the day I help Marie transport all her stuff to university. (I'll probably still be telling her not to lose her gloves and to say 'please' and 'thank you' as well, but that's another story.)

In the middle of the week, we took a train to Brussels to have a look round there. We found a decent swing-park, more rain and the hugely ostentatious town square. If there was much else to see, we didn't stumble across it. By that point, I'd run out of first-hand stories of holiday mishaps and was resorting to tales that my grandparents had told me to keep me distracted on cramped, three-day car journeys to Spain. I wandered around saying things like, "Look at that statue and did you know that your great-grandparents once got locked in a church with General Franco?"

We spotted the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier but both the boys thought it was rather a waste using up so much space to bury one person that nobody knew. Then we found a shop selling Pokemon merchandise and they were happy.

On our final day in Bruges, the boys and I sat in the main square while Sarah and Marie went shopping. An old local came over, looking for a chat. He asked where we were from and then told us that the only way Bruges has to make money is to rob tourists blind. He then pointed out that half the ancient-looking buildings around us were erected in the twentieth century. When I mentioned that we'd been to Brussels, he said, "The town square's wonderful but there's nothing else to see."

I suspect that he didn't work for the Belgian Tourist Board.

A different elderly man (I just seem to attract these guys) accosted us the following morning as we were preparing to get off the ferry. He'd been visiting friends in Holland and they'd suggested he cycle from the port. Because of the bad weather, he'd left his bike at home and had attempted to take public transport. He'd apparently ended up following us as we desperately searched for a means of escape from Zeebrugge. He, too, had been glad to make it out alive before nightfall... If he goes back, he's going to catch the bus directly to Bruges and find his way from there.

I nodded sagely. It was the only sensible course of action. I only wished I'd known that a week earlier.

Next time I go anywhere, I'm going to go stand in the queue to leave as soon as I get there and wait for an elderly gentleman to give me the inside scoop on the place. It will save so much time.

We survived. The kids got to see somewhere foreign where the buildings are strange, the money is different and slightly fewer people than normal speak English. They also got to bag a whole heap of Pokemon tack. Could have been worse. Lewis is keen to go back again, despite not wanting to go in the first place and kicking up a fuss every time we tried to leave the house when we were there. Marie's happy because she got to buy a pink, sparkly necklace. Fraser's just pleased that he's no longer the only kid in his class who hasn't been to another country. He was pretty miserable at the start of the holiday, though. He didn't want to go and then acted like it was the end of the world when Lewis accidentally stood on his hand in the soft-play on the ferry.

I took him back to the cabin to put a plaster on his finger and calm him down. He slumped dejectedly on his bunk.

"You don't really want to be here, do you?" I said. "Would you rather have stayed at home?"

He looked sheepish. He clearly wanted to agree but was worried he might get into trouble for telling the truth.

"Do you want to hear a secret?" I asked. "You have to promise not to tell it to anyone. Do you promise?"

He looked interested. "OK."

"Well," I said, "I'd rather have stayed at home too."

"Really?" he said, perking up like a housedad who's just spotted another man entering the room for parent and toddler.

"Yes, but Mummy really wants to go on this holiday and I love Mummy very much, so we're going and we're going to have a good time. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"Do you love Mummy very much, too?" I asked.

"Yes," said Fraser.

"Then stop being so grumpy, please."

"All right," he said. "Can I play my DS now?"

"When we get back down to the others."

He made as if to complain that he wanted to stay in the cabin but then stopped. We shared a grin and headed downstairs. The holiday went much more smoothly after that. We even had a pretty good time...

Hope everyone's well and that you had an excellent Easter.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS Lewis felt sick on the ferry journey home. I told him to hurry to the toilet. Dutifully, he went through, but he'd misunderstood. Rather than stick his head in it and throw up, he sat down to pee.

Then he threw up.

Fraser started feeling ill. I gave him a travel pill. He threw up in the sink. The output was the colour of the travel pill. Marie was delighted. She spent the rest of the day running up to strangers and yelling, "Fraser was sick! It was pink!"

Charming.

PPS When we finally reached home, I watched the trailer for In Bruges and fell about laughing.

Labels: sickness, travel

 
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9:30 AM - Permanent Link - 3 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Nobody expects the Spanish I/O error

Dear Dave,

Some things didn't really change when I became a housedad. Bringing up kids is very like running an IT project - for some reason, I'm always behind schedule.

With IT projects, the difficulty is that there are always unexpected snags. Typical issues range from a logical inconsistency in the specification (i.e. you've been asked to do the impossible) to a discovery that the highly paid contractor brought in to handle the tough stuff was bluffing all along and has spent six months playing Minesweeper. If you're really unlucky, the project will simply open up a vortex in the very fabric of nature that sucks in time and money and dumps them out beyond the galactic rim. (That's never good).

Obviously, it's possible to figure some leeway into the production timetable but, if you don't know what the problem is going to be, it's difficult to know how much time to allow for solving it. Maybe it will only require someone nipping to Curry's for a cable. Maybe it will send the whole project back to the drawing board. Who knows? Probably best to allow twice as long as you're really hoping, though.

Of course, putting vast amounts of blank space in the schedule 'just in case' gives a bad impression, so it doesn't usually happen. Then, halfway through the project, someone leaves the team or the customer suddenly needs the product in a hurry and management has to cut corners in order to get the job done. The easiest thing to do is remove from the schedule the time and manpower set aside for contingencies. Voila! The whole project is back on track... as long as nothing goes wrong. Management may argue that this is the kind of emergency that all the padding in the schedule was for, but the truth is that these are management problems that should have had padding of their very own. In reality, what's gone is all the time required to cope when it turns out that the software you've bought in from another company doesn't do all the things the salesman said it would, doesn't work at all or has manuals that are written entirely in Danish (apart from the bits in Braille).

Somehow, management is surprised when the project over-runs...

Maybe it's an unwinnable battle. If, by some quirk of fate, a project did ever come in early, the customers would simply start trying to think of 'little' bits to add on. These would almost certainly involve starting again from scratch and the project would end up over-running anyway.

Similarly, with children, being late can be inevitable. If, on a good day, it takes ten minutes to get everyone's shoes on and get them out of the house for school, there are going to be other days where it takes twenty. Setting aside twenty minutes is asking for trouble, though. You don't want to be waiting outside the school for ten minutes in the rain. Equally, you don't want to be hanging around at home for ten minutes - the kids will complain loudly about being bored, take their shoes off again and then lose them. They will arrive very late for school, wearing their slippers. Yep, leaving too much time for a task can make you later than leaving too little. You'd be better off allowing fifteen minutes on a regular basis and simply accepting the fact that you're going to be five minutes late on any day that one of the children gets distracted and tips his milk into his ear rather than his mouth.

That said, with a little knowledge and planning, it's possible to avoid being horrendously late all the time. Bearing this in mind, here are a few tasks that I've found unexpectedly hard in the past. You've probably encountered most of them yourself already but they may not have seemed like that big a deal. Please remember, however, that the time taken to solve these issues is proportional to the square of the number of children you have. Thus, now you have two, you need to allow four times as much space in the schedule for:

• Getting them to wear appropriate clothing. I tell my kids that it’s raining and they’ll need to put their raincoats on.
  
  Without looking out a window, they say, ‘No, it’s not.’
  
  I argue for a bit, they don’t put their raincoats on and we step out of the door. They immediately start screaming that it’s raining and run around in a panic like they’re the Wicked Witch of the West and someone’s just dumped a bucket of water on them.
  
  I say, ‘It’s almost stopped. You’ll be fine.’
  
  They argue for a bit and demand their raincoats. Eventually, I give up and they go in and put their raincoats on.
  
  The rain stops, the sun comes out and they complain it’s too hot in their raincoats.
  
  They refuse to take them off.
  
  When we eventually arrive at our destination, people wonder why we’re wet, late and sweaty. I just shake my head and sigh…
• Getting them to do stuff for themselves. Marie kicks up a huge fuss about drying her own hands. She's currently lying on the hall floor yelling for help because a small part of her lower arm is still wet. She's actually holding the towel in her other hand but wants me to go through and combine the towel and arm with some gentle rubbing action. Suffice to say, she'll be yelling a while longer - probably for several minutes after the water has evaporated of its own accord.
• Getting gloves on a toddler. Their fingers go everywhere apart from the right place.
• Getting them to stop doing stuff for themselves. Of course, if we're in a big hurry and I pro-actively decide to dry Marie's hands for her, she'll absolutely insist on doing it on her own... Really... really... slowly...
• Going to the shops to buy milk. Between getting them dressed, toileted (including the washing and drying of hands) and actually persuading them to leave the house, going to buy milk can take longer to organise than a trip to Paris without children.
• Going to Paris with children. Like going to buy milk but with added luggage.
• Keeping gloves on a toddler. It doesn't matter that it's freezing and you've just spent five minutes getting the things on, the kid wants to see her fingers...
• Feeding them five portions of fruit and veg a day. It's not so much getting them to eat it, it's supplying it:
  
  
  Why I have to go to the shops so often: 5 family members x 5 portions per day x 2 days = 50 portions. We also require around 8 pints of milk and a loaf and a half of bread. Hang on a minute while I just nip to Tesco again...
• Cheering up a toddler whose hands are cold. If you can just get them to calm down for a minute, you might be able to get those gloves back on. (Briefly).
• Working out when they're ill. When my kids were small, it was easy to tell how ill they were from the number and amount of toxic substances oozing out of them. These days there's usually less to go on. They'll complain of aches and pains, cough a couple of times and then sneeze. Questioning them uncovers that they've been feeling 'not that great' for 'a bit'. Taking their temperature reveals that one ear has a mild fever and the other is dead. (Repeated attempts cause the symptoms to swap randomly between ears. Shaking the electronic thermometer produces a rattling sound).
  
  Since I've now spent nearly eight years clearing up toxic substances despite having had various strains of plague myself, I'm low on sympathy for minor cases of the snuffles. Still, I don't want them going rapidly downhill the second they leave the house. I can do without being summoned to school halfway through the morning to explain why I sent in my highly contagious child. (Teachers are scary).
  
  Coming to a decision always takes forever.
• Explaining the difference between live-action TV drama, cartoons, documentary footage, the news, CGI and real life. As for theatre, well: 'Yes, those are real people pretending to be the real people who normally pretend to be the pretend people in Lazy Town but if that one falls off the ladder it will really hurt. And, yes, it is just a story, but vegetables really are good for you.'
• Avoiding drowning in Fimbles. Soft toys. Everywhere. Stuck now. Can't... make... it... to... the... door...
• Being understanding. This takes a surprising amount of effort. What I really want to say is, 'I told you you'd get cold hands.'

There we go. Hopefully, with this knowledge, you should be able to leave enough time (but not too much) to achieve most goals. I wouldn't count on it, though. The kids are bound to find some new way to slow you down.

At least you can take consolation from the fact that you're not in charge of the software for the government's ID card scheme. I hear that's created a vortex that's spitting stuff out. They're having to deal with giant space spiders, unicorns and sudden downpours of odd socks.

Whatever happens, we're never going to be as late as them.

Probably.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: children (vol.3), corporate madness, IT, sickness

 
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10:30 AM - Permanent Link - 6 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  Bleargh

Dear Dave,

We're all suffering from one illness or another, the mice are back and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was unexpectedly rubbish. I'm pretty fed up.

I've been coughing for three weeks and I'd just like to feel better, thank you very much. Fraser has some kind of virus that's making him tired, achy and argumentative. (Well, more argumentative than usual). I don't think he'll be at school tomorrow. As I write this, it's late at night and, over the baby listener, I can hear Marie sounding pretty choked up. This could be a long one...

Still, on a positive note, Marie has a place at nursery after Christmas. I can hardly believe it - it's even a morning one. I'll have two and a half hours each weekday where I won't have any children to look after (during term-time, at least). The possibilities seem endless. It's not a case of not knowing what to do with myself. It's a case of not knowing what to do first. I hardly dare imagine it.

Interestingly, Marie can't imagine it.

"What should I do once you're at nursery?" I asked her.

"Come and collect me," she said.

"Yes, I'll collect you from nursery but what should I do all the time you're there?"

She looked blank. "Play with me?" she ventured.

"No, I'll be somewhere else."

She considered the thought that I exist when she isn't there and seemed to reluctantly accept it.

I asked her again. "So what should I do?"

She laughed. "Go to work!"

I wasn't impressed.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Labels: housedad (vol.2), nursery, sickness

 
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12:30 AM - Permanent Link - 1 comments - Post comment - Links to this post

  All I can remember is Jeremy Clarkson

Dear Dave,

Sorry to hear the sleeping has gone out of the window again. I've rarely had to deal with children playing tag-team parent waking so I don't entirely know what to suggest. Daisy's so young that there probably isn't much you can do - if she wants to wake up in the middle of the night, she will. (Controlled crying is always worth a try, though). At least Sam's at an age where you can threaten him with reprisals if he doesn't ignore her and go back to sleep - I find that turning off Marie's night-light for a few minutes is usually enough to get her to settle down.

You've got my sympathy. I've had plenty of experience of sleepless children. I refer you back to the tricks I've learnt. Probably the most important is to have a DVD you want to watch in the player ready to go. That way, if worst comes to worst, you won't be stuck watching phone-in quizzes as you while away the small hours of the morning with a grumbly baby. It's worth making sure the DVD has subtitles so you can still follow what's going on above the whining and crying. Other options include web-surfing using a Wii, Teletext and MTV. Personally, I have many memories of semi-consciously watching repeats of Top Gear I'd recorded on TiVo. It was amusing and it didn't matter if I missed dialogue here and there thanks to a screaming baby or if I 'rested my eyes' for entire sections.

Actually, there are parts of Marie's early life where I remember more about three nutters destroying caravans in entertaining ways than I do about much else. Sleep deprivation addles your brain. I got to a point where I was functioning on autopilot most of the time. The boys were up from half seven in the morning until eight at night. Marie woke at eight in the morning and was up until eleven at night with only an hours nap in the middle. I stayed up until half past midnight to get some time to myself to help stave off insanity. Frequently, Marie then woke up at three for an hour or two of crying.

In retrospect, this was pretty horrendous but, at the time, I was cocooned in a hazy mist of zombie-dom. With one child at school, one at morning nursery and another needing regular feeds, bottles and nappies, my timetable was always laid out before me. It wasn't so much that we had a routine, it was more that there was only one way to fit everything that needed to be done around everything which had to be done. I could muddle though the day without much thought. I don't actually recall wandering around with my arms stretched out, muttering 'Brains... Brains....' but, then again, I don't actually recall very much at all.

I do have a very strong recollection of Richard Hammond trying to make an amphibious vehicle out of a camper van, however.

Strangely, that's more useful than you might imagine. By concentrating on that memory, I can make other recollections surface. I can bring back thoughts, feelings and experiences that would otherwise be forgotten. It doesn't just work for Top Gear, either - by thinking about a book I've read, a film I've watched or a computer game I've played, I can remember something of what life was like at the time and possibly even specific events from that period. Little else jogs my memory so well, apart from thinking back over times when I've been ill or exhausted. I can remember those occasions very clearly too.

This means that many of my most vivid memories are of multimedia delirium, where illness and entertainment have coincided.

For instance, I know I had gastric flu a couple of weeks after Final Fantasy VII came out. I clearly remember where I'd got to, how I felt and what our old lounge looked like from that combination of gaming and vomit. Going from that, I can also work out the time of year, how my job was going and any number of other little details. When I felt too ill to even play a game (which is very ill, by the way), I sent Sarah to the video store to find a film with explosions. She came back with Die Hard with a Vengeance - proof, if ever I needed it, that I married the right woman.

Similarly, the fifties version of Day of the Triffids is linked inescapably in my mind with the first week of my chickenpox eruption, the second week is brought back by thoughts of playing Fable on Xbox. Mention of the forthcoming Fable 2 just makes me feel queasy.

The Hellboy movie recalls a cough so bad that I had to chain-suck Lockets and sleep sitting upright in an armchair.

My one experience of sleeping rough is all the clearer in my mind because I bought West of Eden by Harry Harrison the next day. The memory of trying to keep warm while lying in a binbag on a hillside in Derbyshire is made sharper by the memory of reading about horny, humanoid dinosaurs while very, very tired.

Other people's recollections seem to be triggered by different things. Sarah's memory is jogged by smells. My mum's is organised around food. It's like she uses what people ate as some kind of mental hook. She'll tell me news she's read in the paper about an old school friend of mine that I don't even remember and, when I look blank, she'll say something along the lines of, 'You went round to his house once. You had chicken.' I'm not sure whether I find it more weird that she remembers what I had to eat or that she thinks I'll remember it too.

Quite what this tells us about any of the people involved, I've no idea, but I've been trying to work out how my kids best remember things.

Thinking about it, the descriptions they came up with to differentiate between the parent and toddler groups they went to when they were small are telling. Fraser referred to his as, "The pink one, the one downstairs and the one near John Lewis." It was an aspect of the location which stuck in his head. Marie talks about, "The one with Craig, the leaving one and the snack one." It's the most significant event of each one that makes hers memorable, whether it's the attention of a particular helper, the quality of the snack or me slinking off for three-quarters of an hour while someone else takes over.

Lewis' preferences are harder to remember (the irony!) because most of the time he just copied Fraser. Probably, given free rein, he described them with phrases like, "The one with jigsaws." He differentiates places by what's there because he has a good memory for what things contain. We keep trying to make a little more space for him in his bed but he always knows when something has been removed.


There's a bed under there somewhere...

Maybe there's some way I can use this knowledge to get them all to remember to wipe their feet when entering the house. If only I could work it out...

Ach, the scary thing is, even if I did work out a theory, I'd probably forget it unless I caught a cold and then watched a movie.

Ho well, maybe you can mull it over while you're watching Pirates of the Caribbean at three in the morning. Let me know if you come up with anything.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS Marie has a frighteningly good memory, actually. She was watching Laura's Star on DVD the other day. She hadn't seen it for a while but she was quoting the script with ease. The film got to one bit and Marie described what was happening and followed it up by saying what was going to happen next. "And then Laura goes up to the roof and she meets a robot cat and she says, 'Hello, little cat, how are you?'"

Sarah was freaked. "How do you remember that?"

Marie just smiled. "It's a good thing to say to a robot cat if you find one on the roof."

Sarah found that kind of hard to argue with. They went back to watching the film.

Labels: children (vol.2), children (vol.3), sickness, sleep

 
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