Hermann the German

I have a horrible feeling that I am about to commit  murder.

I have a house guest for half term. Hermann only arrived five minutes ago, and he is already dominating my life.

He is sitting on my worktop covered loosely with a tea-towel.

Hermann, lest you wonder, is a German sourdough friendship cake. The idea is that you add to him, then give bits of him to your friends and eat the remainder.

As my daughter has lots of friends and likes cake, I agreed to let Hermann into our kitchen. He comes with instructions, which are always scary.

‘If I stop bubbling then I am afraid I am dead,’ the instructions declare gloomily.

Oh no. I have my family squawking for food. I have my guinea pigs bellowing for veggies. Now I have to remember to feed Hermann as well. I really do not want the death of a sourdough cake on my conscience.

But then I remember the last German house-guest I had. He used the mixing bowl for his cereal. A mega-pack of Shreddies lasted two days.

Compared to that, the cup of flour, sugar and milk that Hermann requires is a doddle. Long live Hermann!

 

What is the Point of Men?

I find myself asking this question at least every, ooh, 30 seconds. Anyone who works from home and also has a husband who works from home will understand why.

They take up space. They are fussy about children’s wet feet, and don’t notice their own large footprints on the carpet. They ask you if you saw ‘that article in the newspaper’, when the only time you ever get to see the newspaper is when you are lining the guinea pigs’ cage with it. They take root on the computer, un-glueing themselves only to watch news programmes. They forget entire conversations (“yes, I have told you at least fourteen times that I am going out tonight so you are looking after the children”).

Small ones aren’t much better. They shout. They get you to time them on a stopwatch while they try to beat their record for running around in pointless circles. They forget to put their pants on or take their smelly socks off. They kick every passing lamp-post (what is that all about?)

In short: we should just go off and live in a female commune and knit lentils and breastfeed our teenagers (girls, naturally).

But this morning I was reminded why it is worth keeping a pet man.

I forgot to set the alarm for son’s Wind Band rehearsal (Wind Band being something for which he is eminently well qualified. Like father, like son). And so we had to go to school in the car. Only the car was snowy.

I do not need a man to scrape snow off a windscreen, I thought. But then the car refused to move from its comfy white bed.

Definitely a job for a man.

While I’m at it, the decorators who are currently transforming our house are men. Only a man would be crazy enough to balance ladders on stairs to paint an attic ceiling 500 feet up.

The postman who has just slithered through the snow to bring my Boden summer dresses is a man. The one who will return them to Boden when I look in the mirror and see a middle-aged frump staring back at me will undoubtedly be a man.

And best of all: while I was busy being late for Wind Band, my husband went all the way down to the vegetable plot in the snow (which is rather like walking to the moon and back), retrieved my full green bin, and put it out for the bin men.

I think I see the point of men after all. Especially mine.

Eating My Words (with a side order of fries)

A couple of weeks ago, I pontificated in this very blog about how McDonald’s should stick to providing plastic tat with their plastic tatty Happy Meals. My children want junk, I said proudly, not yet more books.

As with so many things to do with parenting, I was forced to eat my words on Tuesday.

My daughter has been nagging for several weeks for a Happy Meal. As we had to wait for an hour for her brother, I spotted my opportunity to be a good mother (while granting her wish) and an even better one (knowing for sure that she would reject junk food unless it came with an equally junky toy).

“Very well,” I said. “But they’re giving away books, so you won’t get a plastic poo-ing reindeer.”

“I don’t need a plastic poo-ing reindeer,” daughter replied. “But I do need some chicken McNuggets.”

Humph. Well, at least I got the Good Mother points for saying yes.

In we went. “Don’t forget you’re getting a book,” I intoned. Memories of the plastic voice changer that enabled us to do convincing Justin Bieber impressions are fresh in my mind.

We sat down. She opened the box. “Ooooooooh!” she squeaked. “A sheepdog story!”

My daughter loves sheepdogs more than anything on the planet. She has two sheepdog hand-puppets and a life-sized stuffed sheepdog in her room. I had to sign up to Facebook solely in order to follow the antics of her all-time best friend ever – a sheepdog called Mineshop Muttley.

And then she spots what comes with the book. A sheepdog finger-puppet.

Well, her joy knew no bounds. We spent a happy time popping cardboard Muddlepuddle Farm animals out of the Happy Meal box and playing at schools with them. Then she read the sheepdog story to me. She even enjoyed getting her chips out of the stable door.

“Mummy,” she said as we left a convenient hour later. “That was the best Happy Meal present I’ve EVER had.”

Well, what do I know? After all, I’m just a parent.

Richard Hammond and the Porn Shop

I was about to turn our usual corner on the walk home from school on Friday when my nine-year-old son stopped me.

“No!” he said. “We need to go down G —-.”

“Why?” I wondered. He is not a child who likes to deviate from his routine.

“Because I need to go to the porn shop.”

“The porn shop,” I repeat slowly.

I know exactly the shop he means. It has a sign on the door warning people that they might be offended by what lies within. I am sure that notice is specifically addressed to me.

However, I have read articles about being open with children. Oh, hang on: I wrote those articles. And so I will not say what I’m thinking. Namely:

YOU WHAT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU NEED TO GO TO THE PORN SHOP? WHICH HORRIBLE CHILD HAS BEEN PUTTING THESE IDEAS INTO YOUR INNOCENT HEAD? I WILL BE REPORTING THEM FIRST THING ON MONDAY MORNING!

No: I will be that cool parent who chit-chats to their offspring about their porn habits while knitting a willy-warmer.

“Um, why do you need to go to the porn shop?” I ask.

“To look at the DVDs.”

DVDs????? OVER MY DEAD BODY, SUNSHINE.

“The DVDs?” I say faintly.

“Yes. There might be some Richard Hammond ones.”

Oh lordy.

“Richard Hammond?” Against my will, mullet-sporting fetishists are now in my head. What have I done to deserve this? I have already had one bad dream this week about being bucked off a zebra; I really don’t need one about naked Top Gear presenters.

“Yes,” he says, rather impatiently. “Daddy found one in the porn shop.”

“Daddy went to the porn shop?!”

“He took me there last week. We got a Blast Lab DVD.”

Hang on a moment.

“Um … which porn shop?”

“The one at the other end of G ——-. The one that people take their old stuff to and get money in return.”

Oh. That shop.

I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

“Yes, of course we can go to the pawn shop.”

Crunch Time

I have a new car. And not new as in ‘not our old one’. As in actually, genuinely, really and truly never previously driven by anyone else.

This is the first time I have ever owned a new car in my entire life. And so I am ridiculously proud of it.

In fact, I am officially a Stepford Car-Owner.

I am parking several miles from Tesco and walking the rest of the way, so that nobody can scrape my beautiful bodywork in a parking bay. I am excessively cautious around the treacherous school gate. I am undoubtedly the most careful driver on the road. All I lack is a neon sign on the roof saying KEEP AWAY FROM MY LOVELY NEW CAR.

The children are being re-trained in the ways of Stepford too. After ten years of clambering around our old rust-bucket with muddy shoes on, they are having to learn that it is not necessary to stand on a car seat. Nor is it necessary to leave half-drunk cartons of juice in the footwell so that someone else treads on them, releasing a sticky fountain all over the muddy books that also lurk there. Eating, throwing paper snowballs, sticking things to the windows: all banned.

So is car sickness. So are Zhu Zhu hamsters (car sickness and the internal workings of Zhu Zhu hamsters was a bad combination even in our stinky old car). I might as well ban breathing while I’m at it.

Last week, I opened the window to throw out a hair.

“Mummy, what are you doing?” asked my seven-year-old.

“Throwing out a hair, of course,” I replied. “I am not having STRAY HAIRS in my lovely new car.”

I repeated this story to a group of mothers as I was leaving a children’s party. Knowing me as they do, they were most amused by my transformation from scruffbag to Stepford car-owner.

Then I waved at them – and reversed into a lamp post.

I think I’ve gone off January after all.

Ban school trips? Sounds good to me…

If you were one of those parents dabbing your eyes in September as your precious bundle trotted off wearing shiny shoes and clutching their new book-bag, then beware. Starting school is a relative doddle compared to the horrors of the School Trip.

When your child starts school you are of course completely terrified (unless it’s your fourth child, in which case you might be quite glad). What if they fall off the loo and are lying there unconscious, unable to summon help? What if they choke on an un-cut-up grape? What if they somehow manage to scale the 20 foot fence and end up on a motorway? Such are the fears that cross the mind of even the sanest mother as she entrusts her splendiferous offspring to the clutches of school.

You soon discover that schools are on the whole perfectly good at looking after children. It’s actually what they’re for. Children don’t escape or lie unconscious in the loo. Yes, terrible things can happen – but for the vast majority of the time, children are safe and happy within the confines of the school walls.

But the moment you’ve stopped carrying your phone around ‘just in case’, it happens. A letter arrives telling you about the upcoming School Trip.

Much fuss is made about school trips being ditched due to unnecessary health and safety  legislation. But so far as I’m concerned, this has its advantages.

The first time my son went on a school trip he was five, I spent the day scrutinising the weather forecast and accident reports on the local news. The trip was to the local allotments, a mile from school.

Since then, I have been faced with multiple horrors. A trip to Bradford on the school minibus. Who was going to be driving? Had I personally given them permission to transport my child anywhere? Were they properly trained? Where was the proof that they hadn’t been drinking in the last, ooh, ten years? Why did anyone need to go to Bradford anyway?

Then came the big one: the day trip by coach to the seaside, followed by a sleepover at school. So that’s potential for road accidents and drowning – not to mention the chance of my daughter suffering concussion on the loo at night. Oh, marvellous.

And then there was the one I did actually object to: the coach trip to see Snow White at a theatre 30 miles away during the frightful weather last December. I did finally sign the permission slip, heavily amended. I give my consent, provided that there is no ice on the roads, and that the temperature is forecast to be above freezing. Wait until you have children of your own, and you’ll understand. Or words to that effect.

Now just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, my children’s school has produced a double whammy. Yes, my children are going on a school coach trip together. To Hull.

This is wrong on so many counts that I can’t begin to list them.

Now I have two options. Either I can take a double dose of gin and Valium and spend the entire day plugged in to police accident reports. Or I can volunteer to go with them. Because my very presence will obviously prevent disaster (and if it doesn’t, I won’t know about it).

So it’s good news for teachers. Next time you say you can’t face the red tape involved in school trips, remember this. Several gazillion anxious mothers will be secretly thanking you.

Nanny knows best…

Oi, you. Put those chocolate digestives away!

Yes, just when you thought it was safe to crack open the Creme Egg multi-pack for your child’s after-school energy boost (oh, and for your own elevenses), the government has stepped in.

The School Food Trust has produced an 80-page booklet including advice on feeding young children. Featuring such earth-shattering revelations as ‘sugar rots teeth’ and ‘fruit contains vitamins’, it even tells you how big your child’s plate should be (20cm in diameter, since you ask).

All fine and dandy – but do we really need this?

Like every other mother I’ve ever come across, I was determined to feed my children (well, my first one, at any rate) the perfect diet. I lovingly slaved away over organic casseroles and fruit purees, and filtered his drinking water. Occasional juice was organic, free from sugar and artificial sweetener; tiny bits of chocolate had to be Green & Blacks. Breakfast involved cooking and chopping.

Fast forward nine years and breakfast consists of Cheerios and toast. Coke, Cadburys and Haribo all feature on the menu (not the breakfast one: we’ve not quite reached that stage. Yet). So does frozen pizza. One child – the one who had mixed fruit salads concocted for him daily as a toddler – would now ideally eat only bread and plain pasta; the other views a snack-box of raisins – once the greatest treat on the planet – as prison-type fare.

Let’s be realistic. Who really has time to make scrambled eggs and muffins on a school morning? When you get up at 6.20, even Cheerios and toast are something of a miracle. Though I suppose we could drive to school instead of walk, then we’d have time to chop up apricots for home-made fruit porridge. Ho hum.

In fact, that is obviously the answer. Ditch the four-mile walk and drive them to school and back instead. That way I will have more time to make tofu risotto and herby pilchard pasta. When I collect them, I will feed them their celery and cucumber sticks instead of the current post-school Cadbury’s Chomp that keeps them occupied for the first mile or so of the walk.

Now I can just look forward to their faces when I tell them that it’s herby pilchards for supper tonight.

The truly potty list

For once: I have reason to be smug.

A survey of 1,ooo mothers by Cow and Gate has produced a list of the 36 toddler must-do activities.

They cover old chestnuts such as feeding the ducks, picking fruit, wearing pants on your head and pooing in the bath. And I am proud to say that my children have done all of them (except grow cress in the shape of their name. What’s that all about? Oh, and they didn’t stay overnight anywhere when they were toddlers either. And I don’t think anyone should answer the phone until they’re about 25 and able to hold a phone conversation that doesn’t consist of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But 33 out of 36 isn’t bad).

As I look at the list of paper planes, scribbling on walls, and jumping in muddy puddles, though, I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing.

Ah yes: vomiting in your parent’s dressing gown pocket. Daddy’s dressing gown pocket, to be precise. Ho ho.

And while I’m at it, how about:

Snipping the whiskers off a cat

Telling a Tesco assistant that Mummy has a stuck poo

Shouting very loudly: ‘Daddy, why is your nipple so big?’ during the praying bit of a carol service. It wasn’t a nipple: it was a notebook in his shirt pocket.

Asking Granny why she has a beard

Giving your also-toddler sister (who previously looked like Rapunzel) a DIY crew cut

Setting the alarm off while fiddling with the white goods in the Co-op, and being ‘arrested’ by the security guards

Pulling the wallpaper off your grandparents’ bedroom walls when you’re ‘having a nap’

Asking a student with low-slung trendy trousers and visible undercrackers, ‘why are you wearing a nappy?’

Sucking up your hair with a hoover hose

 

What would you add?

 

The original must-do list:

1. Made a mud pie

2. Baked a cake

3. Finger painted

4. Sung loudly in public

5. Climbed a big hill

6. Picked fruit

7. Danced with no inhibitions

8. Made sandcastles on the beach

9. Been chased by a monster

10. Jumped in a puddle so hard the water went in mummy’s shoe too

11. Belly-flopped

12. Fed the ducks

13. Blown bubbles

14. Had a teddy bears’ picnic

15. Chosen a favourite book

16. Ridden on the top of double-decker bus

17. Visited a museum

18. Been on a train ride

19. Fed an animal

20. Grown cress in the shape of your name

21. Worn pants on your head

22. Ridden the tea-cups at the fair

23. Flown a paper aeroplane

24. Pooed in the bath

25. Stayed the night away from home

26. Ridden on daddy’s shoulders

27. Scribbled somewhere you shouldn’t

28. Cleaned your own teeth

29. Answered the phone

30. Mastered a party piece

31. Had a “first love”

32. Bought something in a shop

33. Set your sights on a future career (pirate, fairy or builder, perhaps?)

34. Told a fib

35. Made up an inappropriate nickname for someone

36. Broken something valuable

In A McMuddlepuddle

What is the world coming to? First Peppa Pig is being blamed for toddlers getting their wellies wet. And now McDonald’s is ditching the plastic Happy Meal toy and giving away a book instead.

Yes, for the next four weeks, McD’s will become the country’s biggest retailer of children’s books and will give out nine million copies of Michael Morpurgo’s Muddlepuddle Farm.

As a professional reader and writer, I should of course be doing a happy-dance. But I’m afraid all I can say is: bah humbook.

Over the years, my children – who were, bear in mind, never, ever, EVER going to darken the doors of McDonald’s – have been entertained by ridiculous bits of plastic Happy Meal tat. Five hundred mile car journey? Sorted by the Happy Feet junk that came with three soggy fish fingers. Day out with grandparents? Enlivened by the plastic pop-up squirrel and my daughter chirping ‘he’s lost his nuts’.

Books are all very well, but re-re-re-reading Muddlepuddle Farm does not begin to compare to the hilarious voice-changer that kept us (and sundry passers-by) occupied on the two-mile walk home from school before Christmas.

What McDonald’s needs to recognise is that people (big ones as well as small ones) don’t like surprises. McDonald’s giving away books is as if John Lewis had suddenly decided to start selling push-up bras to toddlers.

McDonald’s is known and loved (ahem) as the purveyor of junk food and child-pleasing plastic rubbish. We all know that, and we’re all happy with that. Sorry, but I will not be spending whatever-it-is on a child’s weekly allowance of salt and saturated fat in order to get a book I’ve already got three copies of.

If I’m going to pollute my children, I want to go the whole hog and get the plastic tat too.

J’accuse … Peppa Pig

Yes, that’s right. Peppa Pesky Pig.

For the first four years of my children’s lives, I was the perfect mother. In one respect, anyway. My children did not watch television. No: who needed it? We had books, board games, a huge craft box, more books, wooden bricks, more books and … yes, more books.

When other parents talked about CBeebies at toddler group, I felt marvellously smug. What was CBeebies? Ohhhh, I see. It’s a television channel. Ah, we had only just got Channel 5, never mind a new-fangled black box thing with extra channels.Yes, I was such a fabulous mother that I had no need of an electronic babysitter (and, of course, I had the two most articulate children in the universe to prove it). The fact that the only thing I watched myself wasLocation, Location, Location might possibly have helped, but I wasn’t going to mention that to anyone, lest my smug credentials be dented.

But then along came Peppa Pig.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I found myself with the television on one afternoon. By accident, obviously. On the screen was a cartoon pig about to jump off a diving board to retrieve a lost dinosaur (or something). Well, Cash in the Attic wouldn’t have gripped me – but Daddy Pig did. And when they all fell over on their backs, laughing, I was hooked.

So I set the video recorder (yes, video recorder) to record at the same time the following day, and I played it to the children. And we did the same the next day, and the day after that. And so Peppa Pig and her family came to share our lives. Just five minutes of pigginess a day. Where was the harm in that?

And then came the day that I wasn’t organised enough to set the video to record, so I taped a whole bundle of Stuff that turned out to be m-m-m-m-me-me-me-me-more-Milk-shake. And yes, you guessed it: the children were mesmerised.

After that, there was no turning back. Come Outside, Thomas the Tank Engine, Fifi and the Flowertots, Numberjacks … all of them were in our playroom.

Well, the Numberjacks were educational. And Fifi was full of circle-time type messages about being kind and helpful to wasps. And Auntie Mabel taught the children what to do if a chip pan caught fire. And Thomas the Tank Engine … um, Ringo Starr narrated it well.

But it is of course only a very short hop from Auntie Mabel and Pippin showing us round a bread factory (bread, bread, bread, made of wheat or rye…) to Horrible Histories and Tracy Beaker. And from there, you are heading straight to hell in a handcart driven by Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Thanks to that trio, my nine-year-old son’s ultimate ambition is to blow up a caravan.

While it’s tempting to put that frightful trio (and the entire Brainiac crew, while we’re at it) in a caravan and blow it up myself, I have to remember that it’s not their fault that my children are now would-be television addicts. Nor it is my fault for having had a moment of weakness four years ago. No: it is all the fault of one cute little piggy and her diving champion dad. Oink!