Happy New Year

Well, Christmas is done for another year and what a voyage of discovery and new experiences it has been. Not least of which is the pillow fight that my 8 year old daughter is currently having in her bedroom with the 11 year old boy from next door… I have as much experience with 11 year olds as I do with sky-diving so I hadn’t a clue what he’d want to do when he came round to play for the first time after school today. But from the shrieking coming from the next room I think he’s enjoying himself. The actual objective of him coming over was to practice his English a bit – he’s Portuguese but he’s going to the same English school as mine while he’s here in Budapest. I’m not sure ‘I’m gonna get you!’ was the vocab practice his mother had in mind, but I am sure it will come in handy.

Pickle has also treated me to a genuinely new encounter – being locked in my own bathroom by a 6 year old. Who would have thought that a little pipsqueak like my Pickle could jam up a door handle so thoroughly just by hanging off it with all his insignificant weight as to require Nobby to take the door off its hinges to rescue me? I suppose I should be grateful that Nobby was around or else passers-by might have witnessed me lowering myself out of the window by my bathrobe-belt in a bid for freedom. Thankfully the door was not a right-off so all’s well that ends well.

I am pleased to report that I did indeed fit everything into the suitcases for our jaunt to the UK, although I had to borrow an extra one to bring all the Christmas treasures back again. Weighing the luggage before going to the airport was another unique experience. Mum helpfully trotted in with a set of bathroom scales to help me… they looked oddly familiar… in fact it was the same set of bathroom scales she had when I lived at home 20 years ago. Unlike myself I’m afraid they have not aged well (!) and they were not very flattering when reading my weight. I knew that there was no way I had gained half a stone over the festive period so I got off and tried again. Only for them to read even heavier the second time. I was really on a hiding to nothing trying to get an accurate feel for the weight of the suitcases, especially since they only showed stones and pounds and my maths is ropey at the best of times. But at least I know what to get my Mum next Christmas.

However, THIS Christmas little did I know that I was completely wasting my time with the frantic shopping, the endless wrapping and the careful packing. It became evident early on once Poppet had opened all her parcels that I need only have bought one thing this year and that no other toys, books or gadgets would be needed the rest of the holiday season. The Transformers lay untouched, the chocolate oranges remained intact. We didn’t even play the traditional 4 hour game of Newmarket on Christmas night. Suddenly the entire family became hooked onto one game – Uno Extreme. It’s a very simple card game to which some cunning game-designer somewhere has added a new twist. When you are required to pick up a card from the deck, you instead press a button on a little machine which randomly spews cards across the table for you, anything from 0 to 10 cards at a time. Pickle in particular thinks it’s terrific and I have it on good authority that my sister missed it so much after we brought it home that she went out and bought one for herself. Never has a family been so united in it’s obsession, (well at least not since I loaned the DVD box-set of ‘Lost’ to Pickle’s class teacher and hooked her entire family to their TV screen… )

I wonder what my brother will make of it all once he returns from honeymoon. Yes, the poor devil missed out on the family turkey-and-sprouts-fest this year as he was sunning himself and his new wife in Las Vegas. He was very dutiful and still texted me at midnight for the New Year – he was in Jamaica by that time, having apparently climbed a waterfall as his day’s activity whilst we were lazing around in our pjs and watching the dog play in the snow here in the sub-zeroes. They threw a superb do for their wedding, although they had to make do with fake snow from a foam-cannon for the Christmassy pictures. Nobby, Poppet and Pickle all performed their duties to perfection, as did I in my champagne-testing capacity although I think his be-kilted friend from school upstaged me with his mine-sweeping activities in the conference suite next door. Somehow he got away with snaffling a dozen bottles of wine from the tables while the delegates were dancing so that we wedding-goers could all carry on drinking once the bar staff had gone to bed. I never saw a sporran used for smuggling wine before…

The other hero has to be Patchy Pete the clown who entertained all the kids during the speeches. At first glance he appeared to be this little old man in a shabby patch-work suit whom the assembled children, high on sticky toffee pudding and chocolate party favours, would make mincemeat of in ten seconds flat. But an hour and a half later on he had them all wrapped round his little finger, sitting neatly in a row and roaring with laughter. Several parents were also enjoying the high jinks, I was among them - frantically taking notes on my napkin for future kid-control emergencies.

Actually, the kids were on top form the whole holiday, considering they slept in 5 different beds in 10 days and covered a few hundred miles in the car. All I can say is god bless Nintendo DS. We have two consoles now and it has never been quieter in the back seat of the car when the Nintendogs and My Sims are playing. Of course, Nobby now wants to graduate to a Wii after thoroughly road testing one at a friend’s house. I have video footage of him and his mate virtual-boxing in front of the telly in their playroom, although it’s a bit wobbly as I was laughing so hard while I took it. I guess I may be persuaded sometime in the future considering we are no nearer to getting BBC1 here in Hungary and I don’t fancy the new Dr Who much anyway, but we have series 4 of Lost to get through first so I can probably dig my heels in for a couple more weeks.

For now it’s back to the routine, which I didn’t miss one iota while we were away in view of the fact that I didn’t have to cook or clean or iron for 10 glorious days. But I confess that I am enjoying the peace while the kids are in school, especially since this evening’s activities have been so noisy and I had no excuse to shush them on behalf of the neighbours because they were part of the pack. Tiggy and I are back to our customary post-school-run walks in the park, which is currently under 3 inches of snow and giving me every excuse not to go too hard at the post-Christmas speed-walking just yet in case I slip and hurt myself. Mind you, the crazy joggers are still huffing past us every few minutes, risking their necks for their daily fitness session. Good luck to them, I say; I’m not ready for my spandex just yet, even though, like Nobby, when I undress the ol’ post-mince pie physique is less Mr Beefcake and more Mr Cheesecake. But the thigh-length duvet-coat covers a multitude of sins while it keeps me warm in minus 5 degrees all day long, so my first new year resolution is don’t leave home without one. The diet will wait.

I have had my first run-in with the local fire department here in Hungary. As opposed to my visits from les pompiers in France, this time there were no stray dogs or broken limbs involved - they were putting up the Christmas tree in front of the opera house in downtown Budapest. K and I had been out for a girly dinner and saw all the flashing blue lights as we walked down the road looking for a taxi afterwards so we decided to stay and watch. Did you know there is a custom built hole in the pavement outside the opera house especially for the Christmas tree? Now the guidebooks don’t tell you about that one, I expect the rest of the year it just looks like an ordinary man hole. Unfortunately the massive tree they unloaded with an industrial crane had a far bigger trunk than the hole so we were treated to a display of amateur chain-saw tree surgery by torch-light. It was K who pointed out the universal phenomenon we were witnessing – like queue jumping and football - when there’s a hole in the road and work to be done there’ll be 2 guys doing the work and about ten standing around watching. Not that I’m complaining about having a dozen firemen to gawp at after half a bottle of wine, mercifully there was a distinct absence of arse cleavage given that it was sub zero temperatures at that time of night. d I have to say I much preferred the firemen’s uniforms to the usually workman’s jeans showing a crack that you could park your bike in.

I have also had another run-in with the postal service. Well, technically I haven’t actually torn anyone off a strip given my language handicap but if our postman dares to come by in the near future expecting a Christmas tip he’ll be getting the tip of my Christmas tree up his nose after his latest stunt. On Wednesday I decided to pop home in between a Hungarian lesson and fetching the kids from swimming as it was pelting down rain and Tiggy had been outdoors for a couple of hours. She’s not using her shiny new kennel yet despite all my efforts to coax her in there – comfy blankets, tasty treats, my favourite cardigan… at the weekend I even squeezed in there myself to try and persuade her it was better option than freezing to death in the wind and rain but all I succeeded in doing was laddering my tights and cricking my neck –so being a bit of a softy I wanted to get her out of the rain and into the basement instead. I noticed something wet and droopy sticking out of the mailbox so I hurried out to fetch it trying to think what I might be expecting other than the newspaper and another pile of bills. (To quote Blackadder, ‘I feel like a pelican; everywhere I turn there’s an enormous bill in front of me.’) It turned out to be the batch of photos and personalised Christmas cards I had ordered from Kodak, beautifully packaged in a cardboard envelope. Which was by then water logged and starting to disintegrate. I threw open the mailbox itself expecting to find something extra special filling it up, and there was the weekly newspaper, all wrapped in cellophane, impermeable to water even if he’d chucked it on the floor. Oh, and a couple of bills.

Anyway, I am pleased to say that my Christmas spirit returned by the weekend and we put up our tree and lots of fairy lights and a crate-load of accumulated Christmassy objects the children have crafted at school over the years – a cardboard fir tree here, a paper-plate ‘bauble’ there, and the all time classic painted gingerbread cookies which Tiggy sneaked off the tree and into her bed while I wasn’t looking. We are now proudly displaying the customary fake tree (no pine needles for me, I have enough to moan about) whose upper branches look as though they’ve had tinsel vomited all over them while the bottom third is completely bare. But the kids had a lovely time and didn’t lum for a whole hour.

Now all I have to do is work out how to pack all the presents into 2 suitcases without the kids seeing and without the baggage handlers destroying them. Any pointers would be gratefully received.

Verbal diarrhoea

Poppet woke up with a bad dose of it this morning, My ears are still ringing now from the 15 minute drive to school during which I don’t think she even paused for breath. She was adamant she had to relate every detail of her very elaborate dream about cyclones and spinning houses to Pickle and me. Then afterwards she says ‘That was a long dream wasn’t it? Can you write it all down for me when you get home?’ Hmm, I’m not sure about that, but I will definitely hide the Wizard of Oz CD. Of course once she’d finished, Pickle was bursting with a hundred suppressed stories of his own which he then couldn’t pause even when his teacher needed to talk to me. I don’t know where Poppet gets it from (I can feel my Mum smiling at that one!) but she passed it on to Pickle in spades, and did you know these small people don’t come equipped with an off-switch?

Still, at least dream-stories and observations about how many fellow classmates wear Crocs at school means they stop lumming for five minutes. ‘Lumming’ is an expression created by Rose’s own Poppet when she had just attained kitchen work-top height at toddling age and spent her days up her mother’s bum giving it ‘Lum [love] some!’ to whatever Rose was touching. Now it is fully integrated into our motherly vocabulary because the little buggers still do and at much louder volumes. And with all the Christmas adverts on the TV at the moment the lumming is reaching critical mass and the next ‘Mummeeee, please can I have… oh pleeeeease’ may well make my head explode.

Now whilst the kids are getting more vocal and demanding, by contrast the dog has lately become more skittish and nervous. What with her super-sensitive doggy hearing I imagine her head exploded several days ago from all the noise, although it could be an after-effect of all the injections she’s been having (which are now finished, thank goodness). We already knew she’s a sensitive soul after the peeing incident during the move. But now every loud noise is setting her off, to the point where she won’t come into the garage to get in the car for the school run until the kids are already installed with the doors shut so she can’t hear them. (Yeah, I know how she feels!) Plus in the woods this morning there were a lot of crumblies out on a ramble in the rain and one old chap opened his umbrella as we approached. It was one of those lazee-boy automatic brollies where you just press a button and it shoots up all on its own with a whoosh and a click – I had one back in my school days which used to shoot off the end of the stick so I could use it as a missile but that’s another story. Anyway poor Tiggy was so spooked she turned and ran back in the direction of the car leaving me looking like a right spoon trying to call her to me in amongst all these rain-caped and brollied senior citizens. Eventually she responded to my whistling and thigh slapping and came over but giving the oldies such a wide berth she went right across to the other side of the road and nearly got flattened by the poo lorry (sewage truck, another another-story.)

Hey but the onset of Christmas has one huge plus – the Advent Calendar. This is the one month in the year when for 24 days straight the little darlings will get themselves out of bed and down the stairs unaided instead of having to be kicked out and carried. We bought one of those Playmobil ones which makes up a little scene piece by piece and Pickle is really excited about who is going to open the box with Santa in it. There is the additional advantage of helping them with some maths as they are doing alternating days and learning their odd and even numbers on the sly and not eating chocolate before school as with the conventional calendars. Ha! I still know a trick or two.

Addendum: In between writing this and publishing, Poppet has had another accident and needed another set of x-rays. She got hit by a hard football in the playground so we’ve been testing out our new medical contract, which I am pleased to say seems to be working fine. And the arm is NOT broken this time so thankfully I don’t need to call my future sister-in-law and break the news that her photographer had better devise a way to hide the attractive plaster cast on the wedding photos… I can picture the head explosion from here. Phew!

So the dog has pathogenic e-coli… Yes, that’s what I said: ‘Do what?!’. Just when I thought we were reaching the end of the daily pre-school vet visits, schlepping over to the surgery with two kids, one dog and a bag of sh*te (he’s been growing poo cultures), the vet calls me up to break the news. And how does ones dog pick up pathogenic e-coli? From eating other dog’s poo. Lovely. I always knew Tiggy was a dog of very little brain but I did like to think she had enough common sense to disregard her own or any other faeces. Apparently not. . So now I am administering daily pro-biotic tablets hidden in a lump of cheese as well as everything else which means I can’t go near the fridge now without her following me with her tongue out and a pleading look on her face. Yes, the dog likes cheese. Still I shouldn’t complain, it’s healthier than poo,

Meanwhile it is a winter wonderland here in Budapest. I am so miffed I don’t have my own skis because the park where Tiggy and I walk each morning is knee deep in snow with some cool looking slopes. A couple of joggers have swapped their Nikes for skis and it looks like lots of fun. Still, I have found other ways to amuse myself; I built two snowmen yesterday. While the kids were at school. Do you think I have too much time on my hands or what? I did achieve something useful at the same time, namely clearing the driveway and patio of snow, but I confess that was a bi-product of the snowman building. I’m not sure what came over me but I just had to have one! Tiggy thought I had gone completely mad, rolling huge balls of snow around the place, but she’s getting quite adept at catching snowballs in her mouth now. Pity she still can’t give a stick back when she’s fetched it or walk past doggy do without snacking but you can’t have it all can you?

What's all this white stuff?

Don’t mention the ‘C’ word. You know the one I mean. The one on every child’s lips as soon as the Halloween costumes have gone been packed away for another year. The one on every Grandma’s lips from the moment the grandkids go back to school in September - ‘I just want to plan ahead, darling…’ The one that ruins your weekly shopping because Tescos has to rearrange the entire store to accommodate the ‘seasonal fayre’ it wants to flog you and can’t possibly continue to stock Weetabix when there are chocolate Santas to accomodate.

NO! I said don’t say it! I am doing my best to get organised and catch all the last posting dates and work out how to smuggle the usual sleigh-full of presents to my mum’s house with a baggage allowance of only 20kg per person but I fear my C*******s spirit is still in the bottle at the moment. And I hadn’t counted on the dog getting sick this week and needing injections at 8am each morning, then pulling a ligament whilst romping round the forest yesterday so she also requires ointment applied to her foot 4 times a day ‘and please stop her from licking it off for at least 5 minutes afterwards.’ You what?

So to top off the week with a big fat cherry I have been snowed on 4 times today. It has been very weird because the snow cloud was caught on top of the Buda hills for most of the day so while it was semi-blizzard when we took Pickle to football practice right up in the hills this morning it was just cold and sunny with ominous looking clouds in the distance down in town at Nobby’s football tournament. Our house is halfway between the two and the snow finally reached us in swirling gusts at about lunchtime so I dug out the snow chains for Sharan just in case as we set off to watch Daddy and his mates kicking a ball about (ooh, I’m going to get hell for that one – I have been told time and again, no, it’s NOT just a game…) However by the time we reached the bottom of Gazdagret hill it was sunny again, with an ominous cloud in my rear-view mirror. Weird.

Have you picked up yet it’s been a football kind of a day? Nobby’s company had their annual inter-departmental tournament and despite the fact that this time last week he couldn’t stand upright having put his back out with a particularly violent sneeze (?!) Nobby insisted on playing. These tournaments have come up several times before in the past; after all I have been a football widow for the better part of twelve years now. And although I used to enjoy standing on the touchline for hours on end yelling encouragement, these days it’s not quite the same when you have two little monkeys pulling on your trouser leg moaning ‘Mummmeeeee, I’m booooooored!’ two minutes after kick-off. I had to boycott most of the French competitions after the first one over-ran by about 3 hours and I had to make my way home alone on the train with two small, tired, hungry kids and leave the car for Nobby so he could follow on when it eventually ended. In the old days I'd just have met him in the pub. But I have to say I was very impressed today; these guys could teach the French a thing or two about running to time and they laid on lunch too. Needless to say my two stuffed themselves with free chocolate bars all afternoon then ran around like loonies whenever the pitch was empty. HoweverI am pleased to report that Nobby’s back held out and his team came second out of seven.

Then as we all exited the dome we discovered the world had turned white. That cheeky cloud had followed me down the ruddy hill and dumped all over us while we weren’t looking. Poppet and Pickle were very excited and immediately set off to make their mark on the pristine layer of white in the car park. And now all they want to do is cut out paper snowflakes to decorate their rooms. Plus of course, what does snow mean when you’re 7 years old? What question have I already heard ten times since we got home?
‘How many sleeps till Christmas?’
Aargh!

Wedding wear

There is a wedding in the offing. My big bruv is getting hitched at Christmas. In their wisdom he and his intended have assigned bridesmaid and pageboy roles to my offspring and Nobby is an usher so at least it’s up to the happy couple to sort out the monkey suits for all of them. My sister’s husband is also an usher so she and I have assigned ourselves the roles of Chief Champagne Testers and Bar-Props while everyone else is busy doing their thang. However I still need a suitable outfit for myself, and this has been causing me some problems.

Nobby and I took a stroll round a few party-dress type shops at the weekend while the children were on a play date to the cinema. There were some interesting, imaginative outfits on offer, and we met some enthusiastic if slightly unhelpful assistants – I guess it’s my own fault for not looking up the Hungarian for ‘classy yet comfortable and suitable for a wedding at one o’clock in the afternoon’ that I found myself being shown all things satin and taffeta and tied up with bows. After two of them poured me into some purple cat-suit style thing which clung to every curve that I decided I’d rather be up to my neck in popcorn and cola in front of Madagascar II with Poppet and Pickle. I mean I’m all for figure-hugging and I am willing to employ industrial strength lycra support to be able to pull it off, but my bruv hasn’t shouted me dinner in a long time and I want to be able to enjoy the wedding feast without risk of taking out some elderly uncle’s eye out with my popping buttons.

So the search continues. Although the only store I will be visiting tomorrow is the ski-wear shop because we are due snow here this weekend and last year’s gear is halfway up the kids’ arms so we are risking serious loss of appendage if I don’t get them some new jackets pronto. I wonder if I they’ve invented the wedding shell-suit yet?

Bombs in Budapest

Nobby took the day off on Friday so we pootled off to town for a bit of culture – Bodies The Exhibition . The children were horrified that we wanted to go look at preserved human bodies with their insides exposed (“Were there any eyeballs? Did you see a brain?” “Yes we did.” “Eeuuurgh!!”) Don’t get me wrong, it was all very educational and took me right back to my Biology A Level studies, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that the exposed femur on the skinless chap with the football bore more than a fleeting resemblance to the thing I gave Tiggy to chew on before we left.

Anyway, on the journey into town we passed a line of police cars outside a building site which had been cordoned off. ‘Ooh, it must be a body!’ we decided; clearly our modern diet of CSI and Waking The Dead makes us bypass more benign explanations such as a protest against the construction, or a gas leak and leads us straight to murder and mayhem. But I did wonder why the army had just turned up as well... On our way home we were heading past the same building site, only to be re-directed to a safe distance because they had since blocked all the neighbouring roads and created a traffic jam to rival France’s finest. We were very nearly late for the school family assembly where Pickle put in a memorable performance of ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ along with the rest of his class.

As it turns out the bulldozers at the site had uncovered an unexploded World War II bomb. Not quite the murder mystery we had imagined, which wasn’t so bad as we were rather over dead bodies after the exhibition (the parma ham pizza was not the best lunch choice in hindsight) but still pretty exciting. Nobby called the office which is located within the ‘blast radius’ (we watch ‘24’ as well, see how easily the terminology comes?) to find out that had he been at work he would have been on stand-by for evacuation! We shared the gossip with the other expat parents at the school who were very excited too. But the Hungarian Mums were somewhat blasé about it, apparently unexploded bombs turn up on construction sites fairly routinely here given the bombardment during the war. I guess we sometimes forget where we are now.

Well, I notice it has been about a month since I last Blogged, how does the time pass so quickly? I have a couple of valid excuses for my slackness. One being that I had to turn the study into a bedroom for a week while my sister and parents were here and I didn’t think my Sis would want to find me tapping away into the small hours while she was trying to get some sleep. Another excuse is the weekend I just lost to a migraine that completely floored me from Thursday night to Sunday morning. Big thanks to Nobby and K for rescuing me from the school runs and general childcare while I lay in my darkened room.

It’s been quite hectic recently though, with the half term holidays, a lovely week with my rellies, meeting up with Rose who was also in town staying with her Mum… and a Halloween party for all the kids in both my children’s classes at school. I have to say that throwing a bash for 22 children and a dozen adults wasn’t the nightmare you might imagine, thanks to a tonne of face-paints, a table full of goodies and a cleverly constructed witches cave with spooky music. Oh, and an unseasonably glorious sunny November day really helped – I wonder what the neighbours thought of all the witches and vampires jumping on our trampoline and swinging off the climbing frame all afternoon. I was oddly serene afterwards as I took down the spiders and pumpkins which festooned the house.

That is until I stepped into the post office the following day – now THAT is what I call stress. Let me explain. A Hungarian lady we know sent us a parcel. I wasn’t home when the Postie came so I got a slip in Hungarian which I sussed was something to do with a delivery but couldn’t fathom where I was supposed to go with it. I asked a semi-bi-lingual lady at the Tescos post office, who sent me to another local post office, where I had to resort to calling K to translate over the mobile as even my pals the Berlitz phrasebook and sign-language were falling flat. Eventually we confirmed I need to go to the big sorting office in downtown Budapest, so off I trotted, slip in hand, putting 15 minutes on the parking meter as this shouldn’t be too hard now, and after all we’re not in France any more, right? Wrong.

All the signs in the sorting office are illegible to me of course, so I stood in the wrong queue for the first 10 minutes until someone showed me the way. In the new queue the person in front of me handed over a similar looking slip to mine, the man went in back for a moment, returned after 30 seconds with a parcel, gave it to the person and it was my turn. I handed over my slip, the man went in back, returned with a parcel about 5 minutes later, put it on the floor next to him, tapped on the computer for a bit then started to talk to me in Hungarian, shaking his head ominously.

The only phrase I know in Hungarian is ‘I don’t speak Hungarian’. Luckily a nice old man in the queue behind me spoke English and stepped in to give me a hand. And then he started to have an argument with the post-chappie while I stood there staring longingly at my long-awaited parcel. It turned out that although my parcel was *physically* still at the sorting office, it had *officially* already been returned to the sender because they only keep them for 10 days and I had shown up on day 10. Some official notification had already been sent to someone that it was going back so I wasn’t allowed to have it, even though it was right there in front of me! The old chap was getting very cross on my behalf because it seemed they were all for telling me to go away empty handed and letting them return it, even when I had him explain that the sender had moved away from Budapest 2 days after posting the parcel so it was going to come straight back to the sorting office when she didn’t answer the door. At this they decided it would be ok if the sender could telephone the sorting office to confirm that I could have the parcel. ?? Isn’t that what she was doing by mailing it to me in the first place? Argh!!

Anyway, I am risk of ranting here and I had been so enjoying leaving the French bureaucracy behind. I don’t know how it followed me. Since that incident, which was indeed resolved by a phone call from the sender when I eventually tracked her down in Dublin, although in theory I could have had anyone make the call, how on earth did the post office know it was her who sent it? I have entered a twilight zone of triplicate forms, successive help-desk visiting and standing in line like I’m at back at Disney but without the thrill-ride at the end of it, and this was just to return a £1.50 battery. So I have a feeling there is more yet to come.