New morn, new born

They were playing Michael Jackson when we went in, not, perhaps, as auspicious as I might have liked but when someone is holding the door open for you at 5:30 in the morning I think it’s a bit impolite to ask them to change the radio station.  The moment was perhaps made a little better by the fact that my wife had just cracked her first, and last, mid-labour joke, remarking to the receptionist, as we were walking at a snail’s pace into the hospital stopping every few steps as B went into agony and doubled over, “Can you guess why we’re here?”  I can’t even blame the gas and air as we hadn’t got that far yet.  It wouldn’t have been so bad but as we made our incredibly slow way through winding corridors which stretched out like tunnels in the ‘Railway Children’, B kept telling me that I needed to make sure that her joke got into the blog

Hope you enjoyed it.  Please make requests for further guest blogs by B in the comments.  She’s said if we get to 100 she’ll think about it.

A Cry for Help

(This post was originally written last Tuesday, but has been delayed due to excessive busy, as well as lack of sleep and general bad temperedness, read on for the details)

Wit’s End - Where jokes go to die.

It’s a story that will be familiar to many of you, but here is my own version of the old classic, “Help, I’m the parent of a two year old who refuses to sleep and won’t do anything she’s told.”

As with all good stories this one starts with a change in the weather.  The hot weather has really messed us up unfortunately, none more so than the little tyrant.  Although it has been a particularly hard time for my wife who is (I hope I get this right) 28 weeks pregnant, but whose bump, according to the funky little bump chart measurement thingTM (I am available for all your technical term needs) is actually measuring about 3 weeks bigger than it should be.  This,  coupled with the heat (did I mention it was warm?), has made things extra difficult for B looking after the monster.  

Another side effect of the hot weather, which has been really quite warm, is that N has not been going to sleep.  I choose to assume it is the hot weather as then I can lull myself into the, probably foolish, hope that once it cools down a bit this will improve.  I have devoted words on this blog already to the subject of my daughter’s exceptional sleep regime so I won’t rehash that, except to say that things are in no way as bad as they were for the first 10 months of her life, which we affectionately refer to round here as the lost months, and I am very grateful that I have bumped my sleep average up to about 6 hours a night now, positively blissful.  However, gratitude aside, it is getting just a little wearing that whilst N will sleep all the way through now, which sounds great, we need to drill down into those numbers just a little.  Let me especially highlight the Time of First Sleep (TOFS) number which is currently fluctuating between 9 and 10:30pm.  Which when you compare that with the Time of First Awakening (TOFA) number of 5-6am leaves you with an equation which spits out the nightmarish number for Length of Sleep for Two Year Old (LOSFTYO) of around 8 hours.  This may be enough for you and me, it is not enough to prevent my two year old daughter from turning into a whining, exhausted, misbehaving wreck of a little girl.

We have tried a number of things to solve the problem.  From cutting out the afternoon sleep which she has still been having - doesn’t work as she won’t go to sleep much earlier and she becomes impossible to deal with by about 4 o’clock if we try that - to trying to get her to sleep in longer in the mornings - also hasn’t work as she has a built in Daddy’s Going Downstairs, Must Go Down With Him (DGDMGDWH, I think she needs to work on her acronyms) alarm which goes off whenever she hears me creeping downstairs.  Unfortunately she is just at the moment in a cycle where she is not getting enough sleep, is hot and bothered, and is driving us both crazy.

Anyway, this is all a fairly long winded preamble to letting you know that for a while this blog may have to come with a Danger, Lack of Jokes (DLOJ) warning sign while we all wait for things to cool off.  Oh and hopefully this hot weather will stop as well.

Down the Garden Path

It’s got hot.  Very hot.  So hot that the internal combustion engine that keeps me warm in the coldest temperatures in winter is currently squinting at the thermometer and relishing the fact that it has finally found some serious competition.  It has bought itself some training shoes and recruited a personal trainer and is really getting into shape, I think it’s building itself up for the heating Olympics.  This will likely sound familiar to many of you who also feeling the heat a bit, but I say it to try to explain why I am currently struggling to put one word after another in a way that is anything other than arrant gibberish (it may also go someway to explaining why I find the word arrant quite so bewitching.  It clearly means nothing at all, but has the potential to go with pretty much everything to brighten things up, much like salad cream really.

Swinging Doors

We’ve reached that stage with N.  You know the one.  The one where what you thought were innocent doors are actually revealed to be secret playground equipment (which sounds like a great name for an indie band made up entirely of 7 year olds).  You don’t remember that?  Let me refresh your memory/tell you about what my life is like at the moment.

Squeak

Squeak Squeak

“N, stop playing with the gate!”

Squeak Squeak

“I said stop it”

*Looks round to find N swinging wildly on the stair gate with her foot stuck trying to extract it from between the bars.*

This has happened on numerous occasions in the last few days, and it is often followed by plaintive and slightly sheepish cries for help as one of us has to go and pull her out.  

It’s not just the stair gates though (although those pieces of apparatus are probably the most worrying considering they are the only hinged items in our house that I put up, and whilst my DIY skills are cosmically great, it turns out stair gates are tricky things to get right. At least she doesn’t swing on the gate which is across the arch into the kitchen, mostly because my wife had to take it down because I put it up so badly that N could basically walk underneath it).  Anything with a hinge, it turns out, is fair game for a bit of fun.  The doors are swung on wildly, seemingly in an attempt to cause a draft ferocious enough to cool down the vicious heat of the British summer.  Even the door on the little play oven that sits in the lounge has been receiving the treatment.  Not so much with the swinging, but it has been clattered into the wall on a number of occasions.

What I need to know then is this: Which will come first, N growing out of this phase, or me having to purchase and hang new doors? With my level of skill I may need some practice.

Answers on a postcard please to

The House With No Doors

Squeaky Lane

Trapped

SW1 1NG

Or you could just pop it in the comments, whichever you think is easier.

A Close Shave

Wimbledon is in crisis.  No, don’t panic, they still have strawberries and I believe the cream situation is also under control.  No, this is, if you can believe it, a problem for the well-manicured lawns of SW19.  For, you see, a number of players seem to have grown rather too fond of the grass.  So fond in fact that they have developed a habit of throwing themselves at it rather hard in an effort to make an imprint of their body in it.  This extreme act has, understandably, caused a startling number of injuries and withdrawals from ‘The Championships.’  At current count there have been twelve retirements through injury (though not all of them can be attributed to the grass mania which is sweeping the tournament) and one player is currently in the midst of a medical timeout, (he’s up and about now.  I bet you weren’t expecting a live tennis blog when you came were you?)

Mystery not-injured-anymore player has just gone 2-1 up in the first set on serve.   

It is becoming pretty clear now that this is my year, I have never had a better chance to win Wimbledon than this year. As long as I don’t get struck down by the mysterious grass malady, I think I could go far.

I’m joking of course, I’ll have a much better chance next year when they turn the whole complex into one big soft play to avoid injuries, and decree that the only competition that will be played is mixed doubles where one of the competitors must be 3 years old or younger.  I’d take me and my daughter against any of them in a game which took place in the revamped Centre Court, otherwise known as the biggest indoor ball pool in the world.  Remember when you see the announcements in the press that you heard it here first.  It really is a fool-proof idea which has the added benefit of giving at least some of the players an excuse for squealing and whining like toddlers.

Uninjured player now at 1 set all and is 3-2, on serve, in the third set, he is looking very sprightly as well

Anyway, back to grass.  You see I had a slight run-in with the grass in my own garden just this week,  and when I say a run-in with the grass what I mean is a run-in with my lawn-mower.  And when I say run-in with my lawn-mower what I really mean is that I ran over the wire powering my lawn-mower which meant that having mowed a neat little patch, and then a running track down one edge, progress was halted for quite a while as I attempted to patch up my mess.  This was a relatively simple job for one of my undoubted DIY ability.  All I had to do was get a terminal block and connect the wires up in it and Bob would, in fact, be your Uncle.  This was accomplished with little hassle and I was soon on my way mowing like a champion.  Until there was a massive bang, followed by another explosion, at which point the lawn-mower, understandably I’m sure you’ll agree, decided that discretion was the better part of valour and refused to play its, fairly crucial, part in the mowing of the lawn.

Having established, through the medium of sparks flying everywhere, that the green wire and the blue wire shouldn’t be able to come into contact (although I would like to offer, in my defence, the mitigation that I am colour blind.  I realise that this is not much mitigation as they are the only two wires in there, but I feel something needs to be said in my defence) I then spent the better part of half an hour trying to strip the wires back enough so that they would fit into the terminal block, but not so much that they would be dangling out and therefore at risk of causing my entire garden to go up in flames.  I’m afraid to tell you that my natural talent and flair for all things practical failed me at this crucial juncture and even though I thought I had managed to get the wires just right I still couldn’t make the lawn-mower do any actual mowing, instead it just stood in the middle of the patch it had just mowed sulking and muttering something under its breath about health and safety.

It eventually dawned on me that perhaps, amidst all the pyrotechnics, a fuse may have possibly blown.  Unfortunately, the time now being somewhere in the region of getting up and going to work time, such a thing was unobtainable and thus the adventure with the lawn-mower came to a rather premature end.

The Garden in better days.

I have decided though that this may, in fact, serve a greater purpose.  All we need to do is to get the players at Wimbledon to pop up here for the weekend and spend some time in my garden.  There’s so much grass here they’d be cured of their grass infatuation in minutes.

Final update on unidentified, totally fine man: 8-9 down in the final set, play has been suspended due to slight sog.

Potty Coaching

Job interviews are a phenomenon I am fairly sure only Dr Who can fully get his head around.  With his comprehensive knowledge of timey wimey stuff I eagerly await the episode where he gives a full and convincing explanation about how time can be so quick during the inevitable ‘write nonsense about a hypothetical totally unrealistic and unrelated to the job you are applying for’ test element of the selection process and yet slow down to such an extent that it is always a surprise when you leave an interview and people are still not taking the intergalactic express to commute to work.  Surely that sort of time-bending shenanigans is just begging to be tackled in an episode of Dr Who.

All Grown Up

Your chips will never be the same again

Let me talk to you about hot sauce.  Oh go on.  A really good hot sauce is a transcendent experience.  You see a really good hot sauce has the potential to completely ruin your meal because:

a) You will not be able to taste anything else for the rest of the day

and

b) Why would you want to?  

This is a really good hot sauce remember, which, when done properly is just the most sublime of tastes that there is (except for maybe a raspberry which is just the greatest flavour of them all).

It is not just hot sauce that is like this though, sometimes you experience something which just spoils you for everything else.  Something which is so far and above your ordinary experience that it leaves everything else lacking in lustre just a little, something which is of a quality that it seems as though it will never be matched, even though you keep trying to recreate the moment.