From the heart. You better listen.

I saw soooooo many creative and inspiring hand-made cards for Valentine's this year. But with it being half-term, there's no school and therefore no one to make cards for. Good news for me as I get to make zero effort, but also good for the six-year olds of Edinburgh because this is the collaborative effort from me and Jamie*:

Australasians, I'm sorry it's too late for you to print these to give to friends. North Americans, there's still time.

*When I say 'collaborative effort', I mean that Jamie drew it, wrote Happy Valentine's Day on it, and went to bed. The rest is my doing.

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The Alternative Christmas Gift Guide

It's that time of the year when the air is filled with the dulcet tones of my progeny chanting 'I want that, I want that, I want that' at every commercial and catalogue they see. Lengthy and precise letters to Santa have been written, and every adult within a ten mile radius (whether we know them or not) has been instructed what to buy.

Gifts for the girl
Steven and I have been arguing about to what extent to give into Maia's wish fulfilment. Never has a more gender-stereotyped child walked this Earth. The feminist in me objects to at least 80% of her list; she does not need anything in her life that solidifies her notion that girls are vapid and superficial.

The girl wants a Barbie head, ergo I will get her this one. I win.


The girl wants a My Little Pony, ergo I will get this one. Two- nil.


Gifts for the boy
Not as contentious as his sister's. Batman-centric.

I've mentioned before about Jamie's deep-seated fear of bears. Will a poster of Batman Bear change his mind?


Nah, probably not. This ursaphobia is seriously disruptive to our lives: the hall light needs to be on overnight with their bedroom door open, he requires a chaperone in every room in our own flipping house for fear of The Bear. Bat-Bear is cool, no doubt. But this level of fear calls for some aversion therapy:


Worried about finding youself inside a bear's stomach? No need. So plush and cosy.

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Best friends always hold your hair back

This is all I'm capable of today.

Expectations of the hours 12AM to 7AM this morning:



Reality of the hours 12AM to 7AM this morning:

'Sorry about that.'

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The Thrill-fest continues: Games for half term

This is a follow-up to my post of games to play over the summer holidays. Our ingenuity knows no bounds.

Paper, paper everywhere
Requirements: paper, markers, scissors, blue tac, persistence
Object of the game: colour like your life depends on it, cut all your drawings into confetti, stick confetti to All The Things:
Who is the winner: The manufacturers of Blue Tac, Dyson

Where in God's name is it?
Requirements: A supernaturally large spider, a house with lots of places to hide
Object of the game: Find the spider before it kills the family
Who is the winner: The blissfully unaware. Pharmaceutical companies. The spider.

Clipe (a Scottish word meaning tattle-tale or snitch)
Requirements: other people behaving anti-socially, a sense of injustice
Object of the game: Go somewhere where a lot of people are likely to be behaving like psychopaths (ie soft play). Every time someone pushes you, bumps you, looks at you sideways, or doesn't take turns go and tell your mum.
Who is the winner: The person with the biggest Injustice Complex.

What colour is this animal's pubic hair?
Requirements: pictures of animals, markers, attention to detail
Object of the game: Self explanatory.
Who is the winner: I'm not sure. Probably no one.

Poop Bingo
Requirements: A high fibre diet
Object of the game: Draw up a bingo card of all the places you will go over half-term. Every time you need to poop while you are at one of these places, place a mark in the square.

Who is the winner: First person to make a vertical, horizontal or diagonal line wins.
Bonus round: Fill your entire bingo card.

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Being put in my place

Scene: Bedtimes stories

Me (reading): Little Dolphin jumped out of the water...
Maia (interrupting): I love you.
Me: That's nice, I love you too.
Maia: I was talking to Dad.

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Another year closer to shuffling off this mortal coil

No birthday is complete without a card from Maia's range of Boobie Cards for Special Occassions.


Maia might be a breast girl, but Jamie is clearly a leg man. Or an ear man. I'm sticking to legs.

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More adventures with geriatic neighbour

Scene: The foyer of our building.
Characters: Me, Jamie, Maia, Geriatric neighbour, Geriatric neighbour's daughter

Geriatric neighbour: Why, hello there!
Me: Hello!
Geriatric neighbour: Have you met my daughter?
Me: I think so! Hello again.
Neighbour's daughter: Hello.
Geriatric neighbour: And this is Jamie.
Jamie: Hello.
Neighbour's daughter: Hello.
Geriatric neighbour: And this is Maia.
Neighbour's daughter: Hello.
Maia (pointing): And these are Mummy's boobies.

The End.

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If you go out the the woods today, you're sure of a big let down

Rather than speaking of our holiday in one mega-holiday redux, I'm continuing my strategy of boring you gently and gradually forevermore. How's that working out for you?

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People who say 'TREASURE EVERY MOMENT WITH SMALL CHILDREN' don't have small children. Or Moon Sand.

'Will you play with us?'

I remember being confused last summer when a significant portion of the people who were finding my blog through Google were searching some variation of 'What to do with kids over the summer holiday'. I'm not sure why, I've never purported to know myself. But with another year of parenting under my belt, I finally have some answers. Here are five awesome games we've been playing in the last couple of days. For those of you PC parents, don't worry: Almost all of these games don't have a winner.

Moon Sand
Requirements: 2 kilos of sticky sand in various colours, the 8" x 12" playmat included, cream carpets, Xanax
Object of the game: Combine the colours irreparably, track it all through the house, stain carpet, stain clothing
Who is the winner: The manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies

Baguette stop-clock
Requirements: A baguette, a watch with a second hand.
Object of the game: Walk down to the shop and buy a baguette. Use your stop-clock on the way back so that each child can hold the baguette for exactly 20 seconds before switching.
Who is the winner: Smug passerbys.

Is it still raining?
Requirements: A window.
Object of the game: Ask 'Is it still raining?' every twenty seconds until the answer is No.
Who is the winner: No one.

The Dice Game
Requirements: As many dice as participants
Object of the game: Everybody rolls the dice at the same time. If they're not the same, everyone says 'Oh no, let's try again!' If they are the same, everyone says, 'Yay, let's try again!'
Who is the winner: The last person not to die of boredom.

Flowers in the Attic
Requirements: Genitals, savvy.
Object of the game: Take an unhealthy interest in the private parts of your family. If not possible to physically interact with one another's genitals (see the role of Bi-Polar Policeman below), verbally speculate about each other's genitals at all times. One person (normally the tallest person, i.e. the parent) plays the role of Bi-Polar Policeman, whose job it is to walk The Tightrope of Sensitive Curiosity Versus For The Love of God Just Stop.
Winners: Therapists

DISCLAIMER: None of these games should be played by people with a nervous disposition, low boredom threshhold, anger management issues or high blood pressure.

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Flattery will not get you everywhere

Maia: Grandma, I love you.
Grandma: I love you too.
Maia: Grandma, you're my best friend.
Grandma: Thanks very much!
Maia: Grandma... can I see your boobies?
Grandma: No thanks.
Maia: Please? Please, Grandma, can I see your boobies?
Grandma: No thanks.

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Hallmark, DO NOT steal our ideas

Me: Hey, Maia, why don't you make a thank you card for Jane for your birthday present?
Maia: Okay.
Me: Why don't you draw a picture of Jane?
Maia: Okay. Maia: Look, I drew her boobies!
Me: She's going to love it.

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Public service announcement: Do Not Watch

Some people have noticed I haven't blogged in a couple of days. My mom even phoned to see if I am all right. I am not all right. I have been sitting, and rocking, in a corner, since Tuesday. Because that was the day I took the kids to see this:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

It's not too often I'm at a loss for words, but I can categorically say hand on heart and Girl Scout promise: THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE. I wasn't able to take a picture of our collective hatred (yes, even the kids hated it) lest I be deemed a pirate but it went something like this:


But it gets worse. Remember the object of my affections from Criminal Minds? Or, as he shall ever be remembered from now on: Simon.
Thank you, 20th Century Fox for ruining one of the few joys in my life.

And then today, looking for screengrabs, I find out that the readers of Time Out: London have given it an average review of four stars out of five:

IMDB after Rennie gets her hands on it?
My favourite review?
This is the world I have brought children into.

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A whole lot of Random

• Here is Anna super-modelling her coat, which she loved. And she wore it home, which made me very happy.
  
  

• I pinky swear that this photo isn't staged. This is where Steven put our bills yesterday. That's our frying pan:
  
  

• This week, I walked to the shop with a fox for the third time in as many months.

• Yesterday we had a coffee morning at the nursery and one of the other mums has a newborn baby. When she started nursing him, Maia turned to me and said, 'This is so exciting.'

• Oh, and Cool Girls? See the date? It's skirt due day! There's a lot of finished skirts in the Flickr pool but I'll not start blogging about everyone's skirts until tomorrow. Because if everyone else is just a tiny bit like me, there will still be some last minute Top Secret sewing.
  

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We need to move house

I've mentioned before that 72.7% of our building is populated by geriatrics. This can be a good thing, say if you need a stand-in for professional photographer to take your picture in the back garden. Or you're suffering from a deficiency of small talk. But it can be bad, because they are around a lot and are likely to witness all sorts of things perpetrated by your children. Remember when Jamie pressed his wee man against the window at our nemesis neighbour? Well, he later died. Probably unrelated, but it can't be underestimated how dangerous children can be.

Scene: Our front car park. A convergence of generations.
Elderly neighbour: Why, hello there!
Me: Hello.
Maia: Hello, man.
Me: This is John. He lives upstairs from us.
Elderly neighbour: My goodness, what a big girl you are now! You're not a baby anymore!
Maia: When I was a baby, I drank milk out of mummy's boobies.
Elderly neighbour: --
Me: Well. Okay. We best be going.

See? Dangerous.

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He fought the anaesthetist and the anaesthetist won

It couldn't have gone better yesterday. Jamie got to drive this motorised car through the hospital corridors and park it at the operating theatre.

This is some mighty strange stuff.

Unable to find any veins in his little hands, he was told to 'blow up the balloon' attached to the anaesthesia tube. Which he did, for an unfeasibly long time. The doctors and nurses were all:

'Umm, Jamie lie down.'

They harvested a large amount of this:

It was probably glittery, and most definitely had Space Debris

The doctor went:

Take that, adenoids!

Back in the ward, he discovered the joys of Xbox for the very first time, and spent six hours doing this:

I don't even know which character I am.

On the way home we stopped at McDonald's so he could have a milkshake. In the car, he said in a panic, 'What's that noise?!' It was:

Birdsong

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Sorry about this incommunicado business

It was a very busy times last week with all the nearly dying stuff going on, Jamie's first appointment with a developmental paediatrician, my first lingerie purchase in four years, Maia's 11PM disco dance-off with her 6'4" second cousin, and lots of Top Secret crafting for the Alice and Wonderland swap. And tomorrow? A very big day. This is the diagram the hospital sent to explain the operations Jamie is having tomorrow:


Clearly, putting grommets into his ears is one. That was easy. The sci-fi bit happening bottom left represents an adeniodectomy. Rather alarmingly, the surgeon told me it was standard practice to scrape them off with a razor. But she prefers to burn them off with a laser. I'm so happy she's a show-off. He has the lowest pain threshold in the Western Hemisphere so we can expect hijinks there, it's nil by mouth from midnight which is going to be so much fun for the all-day smorgasborder, and for some general angst let's throw in the general anaesthesia. But the chance that he might be able to hear better (and that I might not get quite so many, 'Wot? Wot? Wot?'s ) will hopefully be worth it. Wish us luck!

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Warning: contains awesomeness

Remember when I said everyone was getting a Thinsulate-based gift for Christmas? They did. They took a lot longer to make than you'd think. Because drawing on Thinsulate with markers is actually very hard.

For Jamie, in homage to The Love of the Dida, a Ryvita cosy:

For Maia, in homage to The Love of Boobies, a pretty brooch:
For Steven, in homage to His Love for Me, a Thinsulate covered notebook:

And look, he likes it so much he's already on page three!

Please try not to be overcome with jealousy. Maybe one day you can marry into my family and get hooked up with Thinsulate gifts too.

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And then Jesus did what?!

Today was our very first nativity play and it was adorable. Before you start wondering when Rudolph met the baby Jesus (or the baby Cheesa as Jamie says), it was a pageant of two halfs. First, the religious bits. Second, the carols. Although he's been rehearsing for more than a month Jamie eyed the proceedings with his usual, 'What the hell is going on here, then?' But it was funny seeing what those crazy kids were doing, and he enjoyed himself.

This is his very authentic shepherd's costume. I didn't even make the tea towel, that's how busy I've been.



I apologise for the quality of the video. It was so crowded I had to kneel on the floor right next the mother with the best video camera official videographer and hold the camera aloft with both hands and tape blindly. And if my hand is unsteady, it's because Maia took advantage of my hands in the air stance and enthusiastically felt me up with both hands. I'm looking forward to buying the official video and listening to her murmurings of 'Mmmm, boobies!' over the kids singing.

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Astronomy and toilet training

Welcome to Week One Million of toilet training Maia. And by Week One Million, I mean Week Four. It just feels like Week One Million, because of the amount of laundry we're doing. Or the number of plastic bags we're accruing filled with soiled clothes either destined for the laundry, or in some cases, the bin. We're trying everything: gentle encouragement, praise, not so gentle encouragement, rewards, pleading, voodoo. But the girl will just not poop where she's meant to to. I'm at the end of my tether, I'm willing to try anything. And by anything I mean astronomy.


Sheesh, astonomy is complicated. Every single day, all these planets are moving, into different alignments, different convergences, into houses, out of houses... What does it all mean? And what does it all mean about pooping? I've been charting everything. Charting all these variables and how they interact with each other. And I came up with this:


If you're not an astronomer like me, you might need a bit of guidance to read this chart. Every coloured line represents a scenario and where they intersect, an outcome. So 'Fully clothed' and 'In public' results in pooping at the soft play centre. If only I'd consulted my charts before that happened. This week we've at least moved into the 'Sheer Bloody Coincidence' meridian, and she's had three on the toilet. Whether or not we're temporarily or permanently in the House of Toilet-Trained is not clear though.

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Ask the expert

All day long I'm asked questions. Why? Wot you doing? Why? Where we going? Why? As her newest developmental milestone, Maia has taken to parroting back the last word of everything I say as an incredulous question. Like this:

Me: For the love of God, stop acting like lunatics!
Maia: Lunatics?!
Me: Yes, lunatics!
Maia: Lunatics?!
Me: Yes.
Maia: Why?
Jamie: Wot you doing?
Me: Crying.
Maia: Crying?!
Me: Yes.
Maia: Why?
Me: You guys are so relentless.
Maia: Relentless?!
Me: Yes, relentless.
Jamie: Mum, are you happy?
Me: Yes, ecstatic.
Maia: Ecstatic?!
I run screaming from room.

And the curiosity of a four year old knows no bounds. My favourite conversation with Jamie yesterday went something like this:

Jamie: Mum, do you have a wee man?
Me: No, because I'm a girl.
Jamie: Does Maia have a wee man?
Me: No, she's a girl too.
Jamie: Does Maia have a bum?
Me: Yes.
Jamie: Do you have a bum?
Me: Yes, everybody has a bum.
Jamie: Even Daddy?
Me: Yes, even Daddy.
Jamie (thinking hard): Which do you like more, doing wee or doing poo?
Me (thinking hard about which one answer would be less mortifying when he inevitably tells everyone at nursery): I dunno Jaim, it's too hard to call.

It's not just the kids. Yesterday Steven asked, 'Should I grow a mustache for November?' This question isn't as strange as it initially sounds, November is apparently Movember. Where men grow mustaches to raise the profile of prostate cancer. I initially vomited and said no but then Twitter said yes and I realised I could blog about the mustache every single day so I said yes but now he's chickened out with some rubbish about being taken seriously at work. Because he works in an office, not as a porn star, so mustaches might not be taken seriously.

It's gotten me thinking. All these questions, all day long. I must be some sort of expert, like Dear Deirdre or Dear Abby or maybe even Mystic Meg. I bet there are loads of questions I can answer for you guys. So please email me any of your questions to theexpert@kitschycoo.co.uk and I'll round them up and answer them to the best of my abilities. They can be personal like 'When did you realise that you were so awesome at Photoshop?' or esoteric like 'What's the difference between Dida and cracker Dida?' or I can offer advice like 'How can I stop people from staring at me on planes?'. Or maybe you just want to know if someone has a wee man or a bum. Because I am the expert on that. Please do send me some questions though, because I'll be really embarrassed if no one does and I'll probably have to delete my blog or something.

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