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...?

Ten weeks and counting

Oh crap. The summer holidays are only two days old and I am already knackered.

For starters, my ears and my brain are aching from the constant stream of questions from Mr Pickle. Today's corker:

'If you had to invent a human, what would it be like?'

'Hmm,' Mummy says, 'I think humans are already fairly well designed so I'd probably just get rid of stupid things like tonsils which serve no purpose other than introducing young mothers to the joys of handing their offspring over to blokes with masks and very sharp knives.'

Pickle, on the other hand, has several improvements in mind, including an extra pair of eyes which sleep during the day... I can actually see the value of it, as long as they were in the back of my head for small boy monitoring duties. He's two weeks shy of eight years old and STILL wanders off in crowded shopping centres. The bugger.

Anyway, my body is aching like I've run a marathon after football training this morning, where I joined in the game with both my kids and all their team-mates for the end-of-year party match. At first I just hung around the goal 'defending' and let the little ones go after the ball but I have to say after a short while all those Friday evenings when I used to play 5-a-side at work fifteen or more years ago came flooding back to me. And I got stuck right in and scored two goals! Nobby will be very pleased. Pickle was ecstatic and treated me to the full 'jumping on top of the goal scorer' celebration style. He scored two himself while Poppet scored her penalty after the match, it was great. I probably did run a marathon during the hour we played; I am gonna pay for it tomorrow believe me.

Nobby, incidentally, is in Cardiff playing golf with his mates. He deserved the trip after a couple of pooey weeks at work, but it would have been nice if England had been able to perform as well as his wife and kids against Algeria last night. Sounds as though there was some serious sorrow-drowning going on afterwards, judging from the croaky phonecall from him at midday.

Speaking of drowning, we had a freak rain storm here just before the game started last night. Pickle and I were driving home from a friend's house and nearly had to swim to get here. I have never seen anything like it. Of course when we got in the satellite signal was down and we couldn't get the game on, though we soon found out that was the least of our worries when Pickle spotted the water dripping through the spare room ceiling. We had a wonderful game of 'Spot The Puddle' roaming the house with a pile of old towels to throw in front of leaking windows and walls. Only four others thankfully, then we nipped next door to watch the game on their Portugese satellite and sent a text to the landlord to get his arse round here with a bucket at his earliest convenience.

So I am getting through my list of fun activities to keep the children amused rather rapidly. We've been the cinema twice already - Nanny McPhee and Toy Story - we've been shopping in Budapest for clothes and presents to take with us to France, and we've been to a barbecue.

Now what?

Poppet helped with today's choices by remembering that she left her (correction: my) handbag in a changing room in H&M on Thursday so we had to schlepp back to the Hungarian equivalent of Oxford Street to retrieve it. Thankfully some nice person had handed it in, probably because there was no money in it. Still the shop assistant grilled me about the appearance and contents before she would go and get it.
'It's small and black with a long strap and contains bubble gum, Tictacs, a compact mirror with Hannah Montana lipstick, a notebook and a pair of Barbie shades.'

On the way back we bumped into some sort of parade made up of different groups in traditional costumes either dancing or singing their way through town. It seemed to be a celebration of mostly Eastern European groups with lots of big skirts and headscarves, frankly we didn't have a scooby-doo what it was all about but we stopped to watch anyway. There was some very loud drumming further along from us which didn't sound very Hungarian. Sure enough a group of dancers from Martinique pranced and wiggled past, sandwiched between Slovenian Folk dancers and a small Croatian choir. Oh well, it kept the little darlings amused for ten minutes.

In an effort to be a good teacher Mummy now I'm qualified (got the final assignment mark on Tuesday, I PASSED!!) I've started a daily diary of 'What Have We Learned Today' to make sure we don't just sit in front of the TV or Wii or DS all summer long. So far we've had quite a detailed First Aid session, concentrating on choking and bleeding, though touching on CPR and how to avoid catastrophes that require it after Poppet fired up the hair dryer in the bathroom while Pickle was in the bath... If I thought I was moving fast at footie today, that night I left skid marks as I raced in to yank the cable out. We now also know for future reference that water and electricity do not mix.

We've touched on cookery with a discussion on how crepes are made, with a little side-bar on religion with the origins of Shrove Tuesday. We've examined christenings too as we are going to one in a couple of weeks.

And today we all learned something new together after looking up the word 'Degu' on the internet after seeing it written on a cageful of admittedly large-looking gerbils that Pickle has his heart set on as his birthday present. This has been a source of much discussion for some time now between Nobby and me. He's not too keen on having little pets although I am sold on the idea having owned ten gerbils when I was little myself. My Mum will probably have something to say about that when she comes next week since I remember it as a joyful experience, not at all smelly and with no nocturnal disturbance... hmmm. We not sure if the fact they only last a couple of years is a good or a bad thing given we may move again in twelve months.

Anyway, I was expecting to find Degu is the Hungarian translation for gerbil and that they just grow bigger here. But no. A Degu is more closely related to the Chinchilla and the Guinea Pig, a social, diurnal rodent (sleeps at night, hurrah!) with a penchant for chewing, burrowing, chewing, running about and chewing. They have a bubbly personality and an expected life span of 5-7 years, although some live as many as ten.

Well there's something new I learned today. I can't wait to see Nobby's face when I tell him...

Innit tho'

It's rapidly becoming like an episode of Men Behaving Badly round here. Pickle has developed a habit for asking those searching questions you'd often see Gary and Tony contemplating over beers on the sofa. Luckily he's not yet asked,

'Which do you prefer, bottoms or breasts?'

but he's certainly gaining in imagination.

On Saturday he asked his Dad,

'If you could go into the television and be part of what's showing on the programme, would you go in there?'

As it happens Dad had a ready answer since we were watching England's opening game of the World Cup so he said, 'Definitely, and the first thing I'd do is go and shake that goal keeper till his teeth rattled.'

Yes, we are also gripped with World Cup fever. The wall chart sits in pride of place on the kitchen door and the boys are diligently filling in all the scores as we go along. I've memorised the teams in our group so I can join in the banter because its all everyone's talking about at the moment. When the new headmaster of the school came up to me on Monday asking if my new favourite player was Green I was sufficiently clued in to be able to tell him to bugger off.

Schools out tomorrow. Holy shit that means I have ten weeks to occupy my little darlings without going totally stir crazy. There is some light in the middle of the tunnel with our trip to Turkey - we're going all-inclusive this year, somewhere with hot and cold running childcare as well as buffets, so we both get a proper rest. Also the kids and I are off to Paris for a week, my folks are coming here for a week, then Poppet has her first trip to camp.

Meanwhile everyone with a birthday during the holidays has been trying to squeeze in a party before everone sods off to sunny climes. This weekend there were three parties, mercifully both children were invited to all of them so Nobby and me did get some free babysitting so we could wander the shops without all the 'Are we going home yet? I'm hungry! I need a wee!' following us around. But still we ask ourselves, why is it our kids have better social lives than us? Having said that, now all parties have dried up for ten weeks, as I was saying, WTF do we do all day long?!

You'll be interested to know Poppet asked me, in one of her whimsical, nostalgic moods ealier as we were leaving school for the penultimate time.

'Mummy, will you teach me during the holidays? I'm going to miss having lessons.'

Yeah, I'll let you know how that one pans out.

One thing to avoid is any stress. Doctor's orders. I have tried several times to write a post to describe what happened to me a few weeks ago (and led to this huge blogging gap), but I wasn't able to get my tongue in my cheek yet to make light of it. But now I'll have a go.

One Sunday at the end of May I found myself flat on my back at the bottom of the garden with a young man tearing off my t-shirt and bra and manhandling my chest. No, Nobby and I were not engaging in some al fresco friskiness, more's the pity. The young man was a paramedic and the clothes tearing to get the ECG electrodes stuck on me. Believe me there was nothing romantic about having to have my post-children boobs moved to the side to make way for the wires.

They say you can measure the pertness of your rack by trying to hold a pencil underneath them. Trust me, I could probably manage a small branch of WHSmiths these days.

Anyway, it was one way to survey the Hungarian emergency services and in my husband's humble opinion they are crap. I collapsed in a heap at the end of the garden after a spot of lawn mowing and weed strimming; my windpipe was closing up so I thought I was in some sort of anaphylactic reaction to the plants I'd been chopping down. Nobby and the neighbours were trying to keep me awake and calm the children down - well, trying to calm Poppet down who was in hysterics, Pickle was more fascinated about what could have caused it and how to treat me. He's got a bright, analytical future ahead of him that one.

Apparently it took a good ten minutes to get through to an ambulance then another thirty for one to show up, though this one was only a car containing paramedics to assess me, who seriously enraged a panic-stricken Nobby by strolling through the garden as if they were attending a picnic not a prostrate and barely conscious woman. Still, they called for back-up pretty sharpish when they couldn't get a reading on my blood pressure and I was whisked away with a blues-and-twos escort all the way to the hospital. And NOT the one that butchered Pickle's head I am pleased to say.

Especially because I wasn't allowed to leave for three days. Yup, apparently, although there was no single cause for my turn, it was sufficiently impressive to keep me under observation for twenty-four hours followed by bucket loads of tests. Probably nothing to do with the fact that Monday was a bank holiday and all the doctors must have been at the lake, considering I was left in my admittedly posh but still desperately boring private VIP suite for eight hours straight the next day. Not sure what they observed through the closed door. (Do you get the feeling I was climbing the walls in there? Because I was. The TV was all in German, the nurses didn't speak a word of English and I couldn't even get a coffee because I'd been bussed in wearing my gardening clothes carrying no money.) Nobby was a saint. He brought me books and mags and even my laptop and a few DVDs. The best thing was definitely the flask of PG Tips, which was extra special considering the water was off at our house that day and he used everything he could cobble together for a cuppa for me. Now that's love.

So from Tuesday I saw a cardiologist, an audiologist, a neurologist, a gynaecologist and several generalists - it was like a Maureen Lipman BT advert 'You've got an ology?' I was poked and probed and xrayed and scanned. I even had to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours to check the ol' ticker.

But thankfully there is nothing seriously wrong with me, some anaemia, some exhaustion, possibly some release of anxiety from handing in my final assignment AND being offered a full time job the previous week (!! more about that next time).

Also my potassium was low so I was prescribed bananas - I'm on at least three a day now and hope to be swinging through the forest canopy pretty soon. If I can just stop searching the children's hair for nits long enough.

Dog for Sale - free kid included in the price

I was just getting over a touch of the Mummy-taxi blues, having driven Poppet, Pickle and Nobby to their separate play-dates on Saturday morning - parties for the kids, football tournament for Nobby; Pickle pipes up with 'what are you going to do for the next four hours Mummy?' as I handed him the birthday present I had chosen, bought and wrapped for his little friend, GRRRR....

Today was going relatively smoothly by comparison and Mummy went on her own play-date with some of her favourite shops, dragging the rest of them along for the ride. Retail therapy has been on the cards since my first trip to the vet with Tiggy on Wednesday evening where I found out she has a heart problem. It's pretty worrying actually. She'd been acting like a little old lady for a while, not so much running about with other dogs, happy to sit in her kennel all day and panting a lot. I thought at first it was all the extra weight she's packed on recently but apparently not. The vet treated her every day for the rest of the week, including 8am Saturday morning (highly anti-social in my book but needs must) when he took a few vials of blood to test for Lyme Disease, eek. Meanwhile she's not to exercise for fear of exacerbating the heart problem.

So now we are operating something of a shift system in the garden with her mate Ike from next door. We do have a fence and we do have a couple of gates but so determined are these dogs to wrestle the living daylights out of each other the fence is looking like a swiss cheese so the gates are pretty much useless too. It also turns out that Tiggy has been sneaking next door in the mornings after I leave for school and eating Ike's breakfast. He's still a pup so he has two meals a day and our wiley old dog has devised various decoy strategies to lure him away from his bowl so she can help herself. No wonder she's been getting podgy. That's another part of her treatment - diet.

Oh, and carrot.

Plus the odd espresso.

Yup, I'm sure the man knows what he's doing. The carrot is for fibre to help the weight loss although she really doesn't like it. First night I diced the carrot and mixed it in the biscuits but she proceeded to spit out all the carrot and just eat the biscuits. I had carrot all over the floor - that told me didn't it. So tonight I grated it up really small so it would stick all over the biscuits... somehow there was still about half a carrot left in the bowl afterwards. This dog has skill.

The espresso is to try and raise her heart rate because it is permanently slower than normal, it doesn't increase even after a good run about with Ike. So the vet suggested trying caffeine. So I made her and me a little coffee the other day; would she go near it? Nope. I reported back to the vet that she didn't want her Lavazza; he gave me a 12ml syringe. Oh the joy. Picture if you will a 25kg dog wedged between my legs and me trying to squirt warm coffee down her throat. And then please tell me how you get coffee stains out of white cotton... note to self, wear overalls when medicating the doggy.

So it has been fun this week, not. And then Poppet comes in crying this evening after a trampolining fight with her brother holding her wrist and swearing blind he jumped on it and 'it feels broken'.

Crap.

See, last time she did this (told me her wrist felt broken after a fall on the spiral staircase) mummy didn't believe her and just rubbed in some Arnica. 24 hours later she was still complaining so I sent her off with her Dad for an x-ray, telling her not to be such a drama queen and lo and behold: a fractured wrist.

This time I wasn't sure though. Little girls get very attention seeky at nine years old and frankly I couldn't tell the difference between the fuss she was making for this allegedly broken wrist and the high pitched ballyhoo when her brother was squirting her with the plant sprayer. What do you do?

So we went to the hospital, with me quizzing her all the way about how it happened; somehow the story kept changing. In the waiting room she decided it probably wasn't broken after all and we should go home. Well, nasty Mummy made her go through with the examination and x-ray just to see if she was willing to stick with her story. You'll be pleased to know there was no fracture, the doc reckoned she saw a 'contusion' and wrote her a note to be let off PE for two weeks... me, I'm not sure how you see a bruise on an x-ray but I thanked her anyway.

So please cross everything that Pickle and Nobby can stay fit and healthy for the coming week or I will have to take out more adverts to move 'em all on. I have my final essay deadline looming next Saturday night. I have to choose 4000 words about formative assessment and put them in a meaningful order and then I am FINISHED!! But I can't see my getting it all done if all I'm doing is taxiing family members to various medical appointments. I've already been hijacked to stand in for Rose at a lunch with her Mum tomorrow since she couldn't get over when the ash cloud hit.

So send happy thoughts... and if you're interested in taking on a slightly used dog and an over-acting pre-teen do let me know.

What a weekend

Surreal and weird weekend.

It all started with sleep deprivation when my mother's mobile decided to deliver a text message to my phone at 1am. (I am implying that the technology was the blame rather than admit that my Mum might have forgotten about the time difference and texted me at midnight on a Friday night...)

Then Pickle had first a bad dream and then a bad case of missing Mummy. I don't mind him cuddling up in my bed so much now he's over the 'let's see if i can stick my toe in Mummy's ear' stage... but now he snores. Loudly. Nobby caved before I did though and more or less threw the little blighter back into his own room.

Next day Poppet ate curry. Yes, curry. Mrs Fussy Knickers herself had some home-made Jalfrezi in a piece of pitta bread and stunned Nobby and me into silence for once. She proceeded to Chinese noodles later on plus she's been eating banana muffins like they're going out of fashion. I'm trying her on chili tonight, watch this space.

Meanwhile Tiggy is in disgrace having been 'caught short' two nights running. Now, imagine you're a dog, you can't get out of the house for a poo, you scratch at the back door and whine a bit but Mummy and Daddy have already been up half the night with their own pups and ignore you. Where are you going to lay that turd? In the basement obviously because you don't want the smell anywhere near your bed. So, on the nice easy-to-clean tiled floor or the tiny solitary piece of carpet that Pickle uses as his 'spot' for playing on the Wii.

The carpet of course. Twice. She's definitely in the doghouse that one.

Never mind, things pepped up when Nobby's team won their game on Saturday - you never heard celebrations like it; trust Man Utd to leave it till the 92nd minute so my husband can take the roof off with his cheering.

Me, I went to town on the garden with a lawnmower, a set of shears and a strimmer. Then I had a bonfire. It was great! Brought back memories of weekends at my Grandad's house playing pyro-maniacs with the weeks collection of cartons and papers in the days before recycling.

During all of this we received several phone calls from Nobby's Dad who stayed with us last week with his wife; they were working their way back home via Vienna and Prague. They only made it as far as Prague before the volcano's ash cloud closed the UK airports and they've been stuck there ever since. Only trouble is that they 'did' Prague in the three days they were expecting to stay and now they're a wee bit bored. And the hotel decided to up its prices to cash in on the stranded holidaymakers so they had to move as well. Nasty.

Could be worse though - my brother-in-law got stuck in Lisbon with a group of people from work after a team building event. After four days of waiting for the ash to fall they decided to try and make it home over-land. On a bus. He's giving us regular updates of their progress on Twitter and Facebook. They've about 1340 miles to go...

... and someone just broke the 'no farting' rule. I think he'd rather be in Prague.