A Matter of Trust

Babies can be funny.  And by funny I suppose what I really mean is infuriating and unfathomable.  S is now 5 months old and we have tried to get him into a routine of sorts when it comes to bed time.  Usually we put N to bed first, followed immediately by S.  He plays with his big sister a little and then is taken away to be stripped and prepared for the final feed of the day.  This often includes a good amount of play time as he lies on his changing table, naked, and able to waggle his legs around as much as he likes.  Which is a lot of leg waggling.  I mentioned Ian Woan in an earlier blog, and it is times like this that I am able to see the likeness, when he has the freedom to throw his legs around exactly as he likes there’s a definite shape to his left leg that suggests he is just lining up to rifle a free-kick into the top corner of the net.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

He loves this, the whole thing, the playing, the waggling.  We have a giraffe called Sophie, let me introduce you, here's Sophie

Cheerful isn't she?  Probably because she doesn't realise she's about to be chewed by my son.

Probably a common sight for many of you, Sophie is, after all, quite the popular toy.  But no matter how many other homes she has infiltrated, S loves her.  Chewing, pulling, he hasn’t mastered the art of making her squeak, but if it wasn’t for that B and I would be pretty much redundant.  As it is we are marginalised enough as he plays and chuckles and grins away.

A Drive on the Surreal Side

Driving can be dull, though it’s best not to ask B what she thinks.  Judging by how wild her eyes get and how white her knuckles are afterwards, car rides with me are more turbulent than tranquil, more joy-ride than joyful.  I of course think everything is going fine, until there is a little squeak from beside me and my wife’s hands shoot up from the thing they were crushing to cover her mouth.  It’s understandable really.  B learnt to drive at 18 and has therefore been driving for REDACTED years.  I learnt to drive when I was 28, which was a long time after B and so she looks upon my driving the way a mouse might think about a new neighbourhood cat, an unwelcome addition to its life that is likely to kill it one day.  

I've told you before.  I am not getting into a car with you.

A day not Wasted

We all like laughing.  The Best Medicine and all that.  In our house it is especially important, considering the number of ways that I am able to mess up a situation.  Just this evening I thought I would help and ended up destroying the fish fingers we were going to have for tea.  Just the other day B could be heard to wail, “How many times do you have to be told?”  Sadly it was at me rather than the three year old after I had managed to mess up a relatively simple shopping trip.  It has got to the point where one of B and I’s favourite sayings is, “One day we’ll laugh about this.”  Often uttered after I have managed to break something important, like the tea, or one of the children, or managed to pull a cupboard door off its hinges, or rendered something entirely useless just by walking in its general vicinity, also often uttered by me as I try to placate my distinctly unhappy wife.  The time that really engrained it in our lives though was nothing to do with me.  We were on our way down to stay with some friends in Cornwall and had made it about 4 hours into the journey.  At which point our car, which we had purchased 3 days before decided that enough was enough and just ground to a halt.  Nothing would persuade it to go (turns out the timing belt had snapped causing a lot of damage and an immobile car) and in the end we had to wait a good few hours for a tow truck to come and drag us all the way home.  At some point during that wait one of us uttered the words, “One day we’ll laugh about this,” at which we both burst out laughing and stayed that way for a good few minutes.  This may have been the result of the rising hysteria we both felt, but we were both much happier about life afterwards.