Desperately Wanted / Desperately Unwanted

I am so looking forward to day that I am not woken up to cries of

“ Mummmeeeeeee, can you wipe my boppom?!”

I groan, and lie there in the dark for a moment, feeling disgruntled and thinking, yes, I can, but so can you, before admitting defeat and rolling out of bed and downstairs to the waiting bottom.

It won’t be long now until this phase, like the nappy era, is over.

No one is going to wipe her bottom at school in September.

I remember as a child just not seeing the absurdity of the question I asked my Mum in the midst of this phase; “Whose bottom do you like wiping most?”

There is a lot of talk in my house about whose job it is to do certain things. Ben isn’t at all flexible and will refuse to do a job, if it is not written down under his name on the meal time rota for that day. And yet he will think nothing of getting Patrick to take out the recycling or tidy his room for him, tasks which aren’t written down at all but are generally expected of Ben.

I insist that getting Emilia’s hairbrush is her job, she thinks it is mine.

One morning she was howling about the injustice of having to go upstairs and find it when I had apparently just come downstairs and could have got it for her. I was ignoring the noise which had, without missing a beat, turned into being about another issue as she fell over on her way to her room.

“Mummy, you don’t care.....I hurt myself” she wailed.

“I do care” I replied, “but you are always wailing, how do I know that you have hurt yourself? You are the boy who cried wolf, so I don’t take any notice, especially when I am busy getting things done before school.”

“Mummy, you’re only busy with us in the morning, then you have the whole day to do what you want, I have to work hard at school all day....(woe is me, etc, etc.)”

It did make think though. Does she really believe that without her and the other children around I am completely redundant and my time is my own? (9.15am until 12.15pm, all of 4 mornings a week.) Therefore, by her reasoning, outside these times I should be completely pandering to them.

Interesting theory.

They won’t always need me to the extent they demand now and I got a little glimpse of the future recently. As an incentive to get themselves ready on a school morning, I say that once everything is done that they can do as they like until 8.30am. Inevitably this is screen time.

At 8.30am I looked in at our open plan living room/ dining room to see in every corner someone on a screen. Ben was computer programming on the desktop, Patrick was playing on the Wii, Emilia was writing a story on my laptop and Rachel was watching television.

“Time for school” I announced brightly.

There is not a flicker, no one reacts, they all just continue staring at their screens as if no one spoke. I am completely ignored. In fact it takes several nagging attempts and a power shut down before I can tear them away and get them all out of the door.

This is how you go from being desperately wanted to desperately unwanted in one short morning. Could this be the shape of things to come? Straight from their bottoms to the back of their heads.

A Squash and a Squeeze Theory

People often think that having four children is a lot and ask how we juggle it all. It just depends what you are used to, if four is the norm then that doesn’t seem that difficult. It is all a matter of perspective, if you have two children, you may think we have double the work. That is only the case with a few things, like bedtime stories, (why I do them all individually I don’t know?) also reading homework and fingernail and toenail cutting.

My children’s nails seem to grow at a phenomenal rate. It seems I cut them all and in no time their nails seem to be long and dirty and it is time to do it again. When I actually counted up, I worked out that, including my own, I am responsible for 100 fingernails and toenails. No wonder it feels like I am constantly wielding the nail scissors.

It is all relative though. It is like the Julia Donaldson story of a Squash and a Squeeze; the old woman moans her house is too small and is advised to bring all her animals into her house one by one, until she really knows what a small house feels like. Once she shoos them all out, she appreciates her space again, stops complaining and is full of frolics and fiddle-dee-dees.

This is pretty similar to what goes on in our house and I am all for filling the house with people and animals anyway, but it has the added bonus of making us feel like a house with only the six of us is relatively peaceful.

Here is our own version of a Squash and a Squeeze, and you can see what I mean.

"With a couple of dogs to look after for Kate,

A house built for 6 feels crowded for 8.

Then bring in my nephew, my sister and Gran,

And other odd bods - what a curious plan!

Then count in my Dad  who is only one more,

But the house is a squash when you add in all 4.

And inviting in-laws in for coffee will mean

What was comfy for 12 is cramped for 14.

But when neighbour Dom appears on the scene

With the Scotts from next door – it’s gone up 19.

A ring of the doorbell brings kids off the street

So it’s 21 now  -  hope they don’t want to eat.

And as they traipse in with Bertie their cat,

The Jehovah’s witnesses call for a chat.

So what started as 6, is now 24

People and animals -  ceiling to floor.

My kitchen is bedlam but before it gets worse,

The visitors suddenly start to disperse

And gone are the godly, the kids and the cat,

And there‘s space once again in the room where they sat

And though it’s quite fun to have people around,

It’s quite roomy in here I’ve suddenly found

With relatives returned to homes nearby

I could swing a cat now, if I wanted to try.

Now everyone’s gone and we’re back down to 8,

With the dogs in their basket and now here comes Kate

And as soon as she’s taken the two dogs away

The house breathes a sigh as there’s now room to play.

With just 6 of us now it’s so quiet and I feel.

That having 4 children  is not a big deal

And we're full of frolics and fiddle dee dees

Our house is no longer a squash and a squeeze.”

I do love the chaos and I am really very happy to have this busy happy household of visitors, just so long as they are not queuing up for me to cut their nails.

Pants

Patrick came downstairs one morning last week wearing two pairs of pants.

“Patrick!” I said exasperated “take one of those off and go and put on your uniform, you don’t need two pairs of pants on.”

“He does if he is playing golf” pipes up Emilia.

“What? Why would he need two pairs of pants to play golf?” I said, in all innocence.

“In case he gets a hole in one” she replies.

Not bad for 7.30am. Certainly too early for me, and for Patrick clearly, who put in, “or if I am playing cricket.”  

I tried explain that cricket didn’t work with the punch line, but that joke had gone over his head, he was thinking the extra pair was going to protect his balls from the cricket ball.

Later on, I discovered that he had not taken off the second pair and had worn them both all day. Briefs over boxer shorts– not a great look, hope he didn’t have PE.

I remember Ben doing the same thing on occasion and absent-mindedly putting on two pairs, either that, or wearing one pair twisted so that his waist was through the tight leg hole and a baggy waist was around one thigh. How that could not feel totally uncomfortable and wrong all day, I don't know.

He obviously has a high discomfort threshold. Once, Ben forgot to take his pants off when getting changed for school swimming. He just put his swim shorts over the top. He only realised when he came to get changed again. He was only 5 at the time and not knowing what to do about it, just put his school trousers over the top of his wet pants.

Rachel has no such inhibitions about going commando and we’ll frequently discover halfway through the day that she isn’t wearing any pants at all. She dresses herself mostly and goes straight for the trousers. Clearly she thinks knickers are over rated.

There must be some family ‘pant blindness’ gene going on here.  The children’s Great Grandmother was living in an old folks’ home where she kept insisting that someone had stolen all her knickers. It was later revealed she was in fact actually wearing eight pairs. That is one way to keep warm I suppose.

I am not sure what it is about having warm bottoms, but another pant incident happened when we were children, when my Granny on the other side of the family came to stay with us. She wanted to warm her knickers before she put them on, so she laid her great thermal bloomers on the grill pan and put them under the grill to warm up. (Presumably she didn’t have a radiator in her room.) Anyway, she forgot about them and they burned and she was forever after known as Granny Grilled-her-knickers.

Let that be a lesson, Grannies and hot pants are never a good combination.

Top Dog

At the moment we are the classic nuclear family, if by that you read nuclear in the explosive and potentially disastrous sense of the word, otherwise we are the nuclear family; 2 adults, 2 children, 1 dog, plus some. (4 kids, 2 dogs.)

Children are always going to want a pet, it must be a natural instinct to want or need something to lord it over, be in charge of and control. The kids love it. As much as all the other plus points of having a pet to care for are nice, this really is the bottom line, the not wanting to be last in the pecking order.

I am all for pets, but don’t actually want the long term responsibility that inevitably falls to the parents when the novelty wears off. This is why in our house we borrow dogs, so it is always a novelty, and give them back before they become a chore. My theory is that in the children’s selective memory they will believe they grew up having a dog, but we needn’t actually go to the bother of getting them one.

Since this week we have not one, but two dogs, it works even better. There are two leads, so that minimises the arguments over whom gets hold them...or so I thought. Before the dogs even arrived, Emilia and Patrick had come to an amicable arrangement that she would take charge of the girl dog, Millie and he would have the boy dog, Toby.

One morning I just took the girls out to walk them. Two dogs, two girls, one each and no argument...what I didn’t bank on was them both preferring the same one, the female black Labrador who didn’t pull on the lead quite as strongly. We managed to keep the peace though with turn taking, negotiation and distraction.

You can see from Rachel’s face and demeanor that she absolutely loves the fact that she is not bottom of the pile anymore. She is constantly saying “No!” to the dogs, and telling them what to do and where to go. She enjoys the power of giving them their food, taking their leads on and off and generally bossing them about.

The children rose early the first morning we had the dogs and were nagging me to get out of bed so we could get outside and walk them. Talk about role reversal, on a school morning without dogs, it is me nagging them to get up. This enthusiasm was fairly short lived though, later in the week, they were less fussed and it ended up being just me walking them by myself. (Which is quite blissful, it has to be said.)

It is easy to romanticise the idea of a dog. It is lovely to see the child dog relationship develop. When you witness the scene of Ben reading in his hammock in the spring sunshine, with the faithful dog lying beneath, or of Patrick running along with the dog at his side, you can see the temptation. It is so heart warming to see Rachel and cousin Charlie cuddled up with the dogs in the dog bed, or Emilia trying to teach them tricks. On these occasions I really have to persuade myself getting a dog is a bad idea.

Also, what has been particularly gratifying is that the dogs recognise me as chief of this family, even over Mark. We were out walking and I detoured to deposit the bag in the dog waste bin, Mark called the dogs to continue walking the opposite direction with him, but after initial obedience they came running back to find me, causing him to remark,

“You are obviously the Alpha dog round here.”

Mark is Beta dog, as he had the same problem persuading the dogs to leave him to go off with Ben when I wasn’t there.

As much as I know deep down that if it was Mark who fed the dogs, it would be him whose authority would be recognised, it  does feel good that someone sees me as top dog round here.   

Perhaps it is me then, not Rachel, who is so desperate to be in charge.