Whose Kids Are These?!

I think someone switched my kids in the night. They looked the same, they sounded the same but all day yesterday they were total buggers and couldn’t possibly have been the adorable darlings I have been raising for almost 7 years. I suppose it didn’t help that I was in the throes of a migraine and really just wanted to hide in my bed in a darkened room. Normally when Mummy is ill they are really sweet, bringing me teddy bears and blankets and tiptoe-ing about. And in fact they did that on Tuesday night when I arrived back early from my Jujitsu class which is where the migraine started. I’ve only ever had about half a dozen migraines before and only since Pickle was born. I get the ‘visual disturbance’ variety which mess about with my peripheral vision and which frankly, if they weren’t so frightening, would be rather comical. There I was, in my kimono, facing a young chap who was about to try and hit me with the blunt end of a rubber dagger so I could subsequently throw him over my shoulder and get him in a head-lock, when suddenly I couldn’t see his nose. All his other features were intact but when I looked directly at his face his nose was missing. Then I realised I couldn’t see the mats to my right or indeed half of the rest of the class so I grabbed my bilingual friend and asked him to translate that I had to go and I scampered home to grab an Imigran and a dark bedroom.

Poppet and Pickle were still up when I arrived and brought me a few toys and made some effort to keep their voices down while I got some rest. But by the next day they had completely forgotten about it and I was literally the bear with a sore head all day. Oh well, I suppose you can’t see a headache, there’s no coughing or nose-blowing so it’s easy to forget to stay quiet and to build a cushion mountain on the new coffee table and shriek at the top of your voice instead. Why did it have to happen when they had no school?! They’ve been pretty painful on and off recently anyway, especially Pickle’s habit of teasing the dog into a frenzy and jumping about on the sofa. I have lost track of how many times I’ve told him off about it but he’s so thick skinned I reckon he’s developed rhino hide. Nothing gets through. At least the dog will fight back, although very gently as she’s such a sweetheart, except it hasn’t stopped him yet, even when she’s nipped him pretty hard. One day he’ll drive her too far and since she’s unlikely to get her mouth round ‘would you just f**k off and leave me alone!’ I reckon he might lose an arm. Perhaps that will teach him? Hmm, I doubt it. Dog-baiting is much more fun than getting your shoes on and your teeth cleaned for school. I asked him once how he would feel if someone was teasing him to distraction like that, hoping he might put himself in her place for a second. He replied ‘I’d lash out at them’. Not quite the ‘I’d feel cross and want them to stop’ that I was fishing for but slightly more sophisticated than ‘I’d whack them’ I suppose.

Oh well, they are both out today so it’s just me and the dog… and a bunch of gardeners 3 doors down buzzing away with hedge clippers and sounding like a swarm of enormous angry bees. What a day for my neighbour to choose to get her bush trimmed… Anyway, at least I can whang in some earplugs and update my Blog as it has been about 3 weeks since my last entry. I was thinking about writing it the other day whilst I was doing the ironing. The what? Yes, well I couldn’t find any drying paint that needed watching so I knuckled down and did some. I saved the shirts for my cleaner though; she is fantastic at them and can whip through 10 in under an hour. To help speed the job up I was listening to Nobby’s i-pod on shuffle, which was a strange experience. His taste is slightly different to mine anyway and at least he doesn’t get Disney songs every other tune like mine. But he’s recently added on a French course, which I can just picture him muttering along to on the train in the morning. But the I-pod treats it as any other track so you can go straight from ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ to ‘Working With French Pronouns’. Bizarre.

Anyway, I’d like to write more, especially about my recent trip to the UK to surprise my brother at his 40th birthday party, but this monitor is getting rather too bright for my fuddled head and I would like a little rest before the kids come home for lunch. (I’d also one day like to meet the mad French person who decided that 2 hour lunch breaks in the middle of the day were a good idea, so I can shake them warmly by the throat.)

I’ll be back.