Children and Animals

Actors say 'Never work with children or animals.'
Here is a newsflash: children are animals.
I should know, I have become the zookeeper at my own private wild beast reserve and the inmates are pretty savage.

No sooner did I boast on Facebook that my adorable offspring had mastered the idea of letting Mummy and Daddy sleep in on a Sunday morning - possibly something to do with Mummy growing horns and a tail if she is rowsed before 9am on an official 'day off' - than Small Person number two takes it upon himself to get up at 5.30am on a Friday morning and require the rest of the household to do the same.

Little bugger.

He also decided to whisper in my ear for permission to play on the DS, knowing full well he was banned from it yesterday. When I answered in the negative he decided to ask again, in case the previous answer was some aberration, possibly due to the fact that I had been deeply asleep the second before he opened his mouth. It's understandable logic, I should think: small brat demanding attention at some ungodly hour or delightful dreamworld most probably featuring a fit bloke serving me margueritas under a palm tree beside a sun drenched ocean? Hmm.

I mumbled the second 'No!' a little clearer and louder, yet still he persisted. A third 'NO!' prompted a slightly longer 'Pleeeeease' out of him for the next round until I was compelled to sit up and order him back to bed and to sleep for at least another hour, to which he gave me his own 'NO!' Aaaargh! By this point Nobby was grinding his teeth in frustration as the time remaining for us to shake off the savage beast, relax enough to drop back off and get in some reasonable sleep before the alarm sounded at 7am got shorter and shorter.

Eventually, as Pickle decided that shouting and throwing a pillow across the room might help me change my mind and relent, I dragged myself out of my pit to chase him back to his room. As I pursued him out onto the landing what did I see? A vision in pink PJs standing sleepily outside her room with a big frown on her face, and then asking 'Can we go swimming now?'

You know, I blame whoever's clever idea it was to keep Hungary in a time-zone such that the sun comes up at 5am and sets at 8pm. Clearly whoever it was did not have much of a social life and could not appreciate the beauty of sitting on your (or someone else's) terrace until ten o'clock at night without having to resort to floodlighting to see your glass of wine or fifteen litres of mosquito repellent to retain the ability pick up your glass of wine without needing to promptly drop it to slap fruitlessly at your arms and legs. Jeez I wish I could spend five minutes with that person... wielding a wet kipper.

In case you think I have been having any better luck with animals, Ha! think again. The dog is perpetually on the boil at the moment, fairly inevitable really when you're covered in black fur in 95 degree temperatures. She does love a good swim though, so since the nearest body of dog-swimming water is a good drive away I invested in a plastic paddling pool for her. But do you think I can persuade her to take a dip in it? She's deigned to dip her paws in, drink some of, then exit across the barren, dusty lawn to accumulate a good amount of mud on her feet then leave a trail of prints into the house before flopping in her favourite cool place - the downstairs loo. I've tried getting in with her, dragging, pushing, persuading, ordering her in but no. For now we are stuck with a hot dog.

And the children are after MORE pets when we get back from our holiday. We did agree that Pickle could have a hamster for his birthday but of course that didn't sit well with Poppet's Fairness Gauge and she now wants a rabbit. Not just any rabbit: a dwarf ginger-coloured rabbit. Because all pet stores have them don't they? Well, let me tell you about rabbits. Whilst we were in France we visited some friends who own rabbits and I generously rescued one of them from the clutches of my daughter and her friend after watching them push it round the garden in a pram, bounce it on the trampoline and dress it up in ribbons all afternoon. Coming over all Mother Earth I popped the poor creature on my lap for some respite and let it curl up for a nap while I chatted to my friend.

Half an hour went by before I decided we ought to be making tracks and I finally allowed Poppet to take the rabbit back. As she picked it up off my lap I felt a kind of damp sensation on my knees, then a trickling down my leg. Meanwhile Poppet shrieked with surprise as she realised there was something trickling down her leg too - and coming from the rabbit - so she quickly dropped it. Back into my lap. I had not realised until that moment just how much a rabbit can pee.

One other revelation, whilst at the same house, was that Nobby's lament that dogs only ever do 'silent-but-violent' farts is not entirely true. As I was reaching for a cloth to wipe up the rabbit pee, a very rude trumping noise echoed round the kitchen. The only other person in the room was a golden labrador called Nelson, who looked at me with that dumb expression that only dogs can muster which said 'So?' It's the same look I get from Tiggy each evening when she's let out a huge belch after wolfing down her dinner.

Yup, I am definitely gonna need a zoo license before long. Either that or become an actor.

Holidays, ha!

So you think teachers get the whole of the summer holidays on the beach with hot and cold running waiters bringing them margueritas all day long? Well, I can tell you its not true. I had to 'go into work' yesterday - now there's a phrase I haven't used in, oh, nearly ten years.

I had to drag the poor skunks along of course but they were reasonably well behaved once I stuck a screen in front of each of them - DS for him, Garfield 2 on DVD for her. I could have let them run around the school letting them sort out strategies for delaying getting to lessons and where to hide other people's stuff but the place is still a bit of a building site. Actually, it's a lot of a building site given that all the furniture and materials from the old site are arriving at the weekend and term starts in five weeks.

*My* classroom (hee hee!) is still empty, although Pickle was very impressed that there is a little room to the side with a sink in it, 'You've got a sink, Mummy!' The toilets are still being renovated to replace the full sized bogs with little ones for the pint-sized pupils on my corridor but they're 'waiting for parts' so there's a lovely line-up of porcelain in the hallway and some nasty looking holes in the floor in the bathrooms.

They're 'waiting for parts' to finish the reception area as well so when the prospective family I was meeting with arrived they were greeted with a masterclass in breeze-block walling and a crash course in building-materials dodging. No, it wasn't really that bad, I am just very cynical in my old age after years of run-ins with teeth-sucking workmen either shaking their heads in defeat at the size of the task or faithfully assuring me it would all be done in a week then disappearing for a couple of months.

Still, the family were really nice and very understanding about the enormous undertaking of simultaneously moving a school and adding three year groups and I was introduced to the cutest little girl, bright as a button but too shy to utter a word to me. We made a jigsaw and read some books while all the adults discussed the grown-up business and then I decided to throw her in the deep end with the ultimate test - I took her to meet my kids.

And an extraordinary thing happened. My children were even more shy with her! I couldn't drag more than a mumbled 'hello' out of them. I wonder if she knows the power she has, or how much I'd like to borrow her to get an occasional break in the noise round at my place? Later, Pickle told me 'She was really, really cute Mummy, but I didn't fancy her.' Hmm, I am the tiniest bit suspicious about that.

Once she'd gone normal service resumed, of course; fighting, arguing, wrestling, pinching etc. All taking place, I might add, in the Prinicpal's make-shift office. It also included some particulalry lairy behaviour from my boy who decided to demonstrate to my new boss, his new headmaster, his turbo-powered super-speed running, which consists of sticking out his little bottom, farting loudly then sprinting away.

Class.

I have never been more ready for a holiday in my life. Luckily we leave on Saturday for two weeks of all-inclusive fun at a resort hotel in Turkey, with hot and cold running kids clubs and hopefully a good line in margueritas.

Bring it on.

Road rage

Argh, I need a traffic rant!!

It has just taken an hour to deliver the children to their day-camp and finally get back home again. And that does not include stopping to chat, having decided I can't take any more of Pickle jumping up and down yelling, 'Come on! stop chatting! I'll give you twenty kisses to stop chatting, Mummy!' (They don't realise how rarely Mummy gets opportunities to talk grown-up instead of pondering which Pokemon I'd rather be.)

No, this was strictly a drive-by drop-off but it still took an hour thanks to a massive traffic jam going past our house - again. I thought while school's out the traffic would be better but something obviously threw a spanner in the works where the traffic lights at the end of the road are concerned. Because that's all it was, no accidents, no arse-cleavage wielding road diggers, just dodgy traffic lights which seemed to have re-sequenced themselves to only let one road out at a time.

I swear one of these days I'm going to take matters into my own hands and make those lights mysteriously disappear overnight. The times when they've been completely kaput the traffic has flowed with ease, with most drivers being surprisingly generous and considerate. I reckon those red lights get to us when we're behind the wheel; the idea of being controlled and forced to pause our journey by some glowing three-eyed lollipop disturbs our psyche somehow and we all develop rebellious streaks, seeing how many amber lights we can jump and leaping on the horn when the chap in front won't join in the game. I swear I've developed a new condition - 'Traffic Tourettes'. When driving round Hungarian roads I just can't seem to help blurting out obseneties, 'a***hole!', 'f***wit!', 's*** for brains!', and the occasional 'You could get a b***** TANK through there!'.

No wonder the children are so well versed in rude words.

Though, thinking about it, I have an inkling that the traffic chaos might have something to do with last night. There we were, ten-thirty at night, Nobby catching up on emails, kids catching up on seeing-how-far-we-can-push-mum-and-dad-with-this-bedtime-plan-before-one-of-them-explodes, and me catching up on red wine and a good book trying to ignore the shrieking from my adorable offspring.

Then suddenly the whole house went dark. And pretty damned quiet for a change!

Pickle deduced the obvious - 'Power Cut! everyone into my room!', he announced and I dutifully bounded up the stairs, less to obey him and more to ward off the impending melt-down from the ever-dramatic Poppet who was already saying 'Ohmygod!, Ohmygod!' despite the fact that the streetlights outside her room hadn't even gone off so she could see perfectly well and the fact that if she'd gone to sleep already like we'd told them to she'd never have known about the stupid power cut!!!

Luckily I had a torch handy so I could get the candles out without too much trouble and we spent the next two hours melting our bits off (the air-con was down of course, so we had to resort to the old-fashioned method of opening a window, shock horror) and trying to settle the kids back down in one bedroom. Ha ha. Not a chance.

Pickle came over all authoritative and broke out the glow-sticks left over from Halloween. How on earth he found them when he doesn't even know which drawer his pants are kept in I'll never fathom. He proceeded to create a double-ended nest on his bed so he and Poppet could sleep together, placing glow-sticks all round the edge to light the way to the emergency exits. Cute.

Nobby and I had fun trying to remember which lights were on when the power went out and diligently unplugged the TV and computer, reminiscing about the 70's and those heady pre-marriage-and-babies days when we spent many an evening by candlelight. Around half past midnight, just as we were dropping off slathered in mosquite repellent by the open window, we found out that we'd both forgotten to check the overhead light in our bedroom, as the place suddenly lit up like Blackpool illuminations and a swarm of mossies headed our way.

So, I can only imagine that the traffic lights had a similar experience - being up half the night to the excited children and getting woken up when someone finally got the elastic bands at the power station wound back up tight enough and hit the magic button - which explained their sluggish behaviour and the 2 mile tailback this morning.

I decided to come home from the drop-off via 'the back streets' to see if it was any quicker. It involves going over rather than round the hills, which means risking the car suspension and all my tooth fillings on the patchwork, potholed roads, not to mention my paintwork from mad drivers whipping past out of nowhere. Note to self: next time you're tempted to use the back roads, wear a sports bra and take some clean undies.

Anyway, by the time I got back to the traffic lights in question, an unavoidable bottle-neck to get to my house due the presence of yet another hill with no way over it, I was definitely shaken, not stirred and cursing my luck since I would need to leave again to pick them up in only two hours. Then, oh! Someone had switched off the traffic lights. And guess what?

There was no queue!

I rest my case. Now, where did I put my blow-torch...?