Eddie

                     
                                                                              

So I've gone and done it haven't I? Rocked the balance in our home and provided Bob with a male heir; selflessly given our oestrogen rich house a boost of testosterone. Someone Bob can scratch his balls with; shout obscenities at the TV with when Man City's eleven men morph into ballerinas for ninety minutes, and someone to roll his eyes with when we girls morph into dragons once a month.

I can't pretend I wasn't apprehensive at the prospect of sleepless nights and toilet training all over again, but there are no lengths I won't go to in the pursuit of Bob's happiness; and I'm happy to report he's been sleeping through since day one and seems to have accepted that the lounge floor is not his private lav.

Yes, this great gift to Bob has come in the form of a puppy. Overnight we turned from a twelve legged family to sixteen - just like that. Well, actually, not just like that, we did spend a few weeks checking daily the website of Pound Puppy, (the same rescue centre we found Sally six years ago) waiting for the right dog to appear. And appear he did. I knew at a glance he was the boy for us; not that I had many stipulations; all he needed to be was small, a puppy and male. He ticked all three boxes. Two phone calls, five days and 126 miles later, he was spewing in my lap as though my life wouldn't be complete without another travel sick youth to contend with. To his credit though, he was infinitely more subtle in his nausea than Chicken and Tuna, vomiting his breakfast daintily into a tissue before attempting to tuck in once more as though he'd magically produced another meal.

To say he's a distraction is like calling The Vatican a church. (Hence my tardy blog post.) Since I sat down to write today - a mere ten minutes ago, I've had to pull him off my computer lead, pull him off Sally's neck, wrestle him for my flip flop and race him to the letterbox before he reduced the post to shreds. His waking hours are spent inadvertently wreaking havoc. Nothing escapes his inquisitive gnashes - doormats, tea towels, gas fire coals, candle wax, school bags, toilet rolls, (no one's told him he's not a golden Labrador) violins, (although, I suspect that's a deliberate act as he howls and yelps from the first flourish of the bow!) socks, snails, magazines, toes, fingers, noses, even a full bottle of wine, dragged from the wine rack in our absence became the victim of his scrutinising explorations. In fact, the only thing he doesn't chew is a raw hide chew; these he barks at suspiciously and leaves lying around to be tripped over by unsuspecting feet. When he's not trying to reduce the house to an apocalyptic wasteland and terrorising Sally, he's yanking branches off shrubs in the garden and dead heading the geraniums.

                                                                             

But it's Sally who suffers the most as it's she he invariably springs upon when the egg box loses its allure. She accepts his assault with surprising good grace with only the occasional snap of retaliation while I tell her reassuringly that she'll thank me when he's grown up and they're the best of friends. She's still to be convinced. All in all, he's a PPP - Puppy Pain in the Posterior! Although, have you ever met a puppy that isn't? It's their duty to the canine species; a test of our worthiness as guardians and protectors. If we pass, and see them through to adulthood, the rewards are infinite - loyalty, devotion, unconditional love, laughs and a soothing coat to stroke. Dogs don't bear grudges or judge you or point out your moustache and bingo wings. Sure, they might crap and piss in corners of the house you never knew existed until you finally pinpoint the smell, but so did Chicken and Tuna!

Dogs don't need new shoes every five minutes because their paws have grown again ("What do you mean you can't feel your toes? I only bought those last week!"). Dogs don't require spring, summer, autumn and winter wardrobes; Chicken's favourite alliteration is SSS - Spring / Summer Shopping Spree. Dogs never say, "Can I have an ice cream?" "Are we there yet?" or "I'm not eating that!" They'll never ask for a pony or storm off in a sulk because you won't let them join Facebook. My list could go on and on until it rivalled War and Peace for page numbers.

 

However, what dogs don't give us is enough time, especially when they're snatched from us prematurely. Their seven years to our one ensure an all too brief love affair. I firmly believe the pain inflicted by each lost pet can only be soothed by another - hence Eddie. A tiny rascal of teeth and mischief now, but on that dreaded day when Sally leaves us for doggy heaven, Eddie will guide us through our grief with a furry paw and a wagging tail. Well, that's the plan anyway. Maybe I should have stuck to kids!

 

For Monty 2007 - 2013

A happier dog you couldn't hope to meet. x

The Beach

If you were about to conjure images of a semi-clad Leonardo DiCaprio, I advise against it, you'll only be disappointed.

Although the beach, along with my holiday, is now a distant memory, I had the draft for this written so you're getting it anyway!

I don't know about you, but a beach is integral to my summer jollies. The thought of a holiday spent in the mountains or doing anything other than toasting myself to within an inch of crisp is simply not a holiday. Sightseeing is for the cooler months and city excursions are for weekends, but summer holidays must include a beach where my body can recover and recharge after the toil inflicted upon it during the arduous twelve months.

Year after year I honed this practise into an unfailing formula when I would return from a fortnights R and R and launch head first back into the stresses and strains of daily life with gusto, ready to thwart fatigue and rugby tackle stress.(For a week at least!) Until, that is, (you can guess where this is going can't you?) children stamped all over my perfectly cultivated formula with their tiny, little feet rendering the point to my holiday null and void from our first venture together.

My days at the beach, as they were once enjoyed, consisted of swimming, reading, listening to music, people watching and sleeping; in a nutshell - slobbing. At the risk of sounding strange, I am at pains to find a more luxurious sensation than waking gently to the sounds of lapping waves and mellow chatter in foreign lilts while my bones crack after having spent an hour asleep on the bare earth with nothing more than a straw mat for padding. You can keep your swanky health spas; so long as my chin is plastered in my own dribble and I have a perfect impression of my beach towel imprinted on my cheek, I'm in paradise! Once full consciousness had been restored, I would then saunter into the sea, stomach sucked in, oblivious to the fact that half my bikini bottoms had worked their way up my bum. I could only guess at the positions I adopted while in my public land of nod. Happy days indeed!

Much as with 'Walkies' (blog #14), when it took the entire morning to get out of the house to walk the dog, a black hole similarly sucked away our time when fraught mornings were spent gathering equipment and applying sunscreen in layers so thick a flame thrower couldn't penetrate, in an attempt to reach the beach before the dreaded clock struck 12pm when we would have to race back under the cover of shadows to avoid the slightest ray of post midday sun touching their delicate pink skin.

If, by some stroke of order, we managed to reach Mecca for 10am, I would hastily unpack the plethora of buckets, spades, revolving things, seahorse moulds and plastic sieves that had threatened to break our backs in their transport, in the never dying hope that Chicken and Tuna might be occupied sufficiently to allow me a little time in which to tan my hide to leather like in the good old days.

 

There is clearly a law declaring that desperation should never, under any circumstances, be rewarded. Not only did the buckets, spades, revolving things, seahorse moulds and plastic sieves sustain their interest for no more than four and a half minutes, but even my enthusiastic attempts at building a sandcastle were met with alarmed expressions while I knocked seven bells out of Ariel on the side of their bucket only to produce a 'plop'. Their indifference to the point of boredom left me exasperated to the point of adoption.

Chicken and Tuna, as toddlers, just didn't get the point. The soft shingle should have proved a sensory mystery as it ran through their inquisitive fingers, rather than the child torture they deemed it to be. Each time their hands grabbed mindlessly at the tiny, smooth stones, they would look at their palms in horror as though they had plunged their hands into a vat full of scorpions before thrusting them at me to rid them of the vile offender.

As for the sea; how dare I allow the gentle swell to lap over their feet - was I mad? It was wet! Defeated, I would begin packing away our beach paraphernalia while casting dagger like glances at the mothers smugly achieving their all over tans while lazily watching over their offspring frolicking predictably in the surf like the children of my dreams.

So, for the past ten years, when offered words of sympathy in the form of the old adage "A change is as good as a rest", I would respond either, b******s or, "Why didn't I stick to dogs?"!

                                                                              

Pause

I'm sorry I haven't been posting, the summer holidays proved too big a distraction and now I'm working on another project. I hope to be back in the saddle mid September.
See you then.
Martha

Pears

The day Heather died was a sad, sad day. Chicken was nearly four and Tuna had just turned two, both old enough to feel the acute pain the loss of a pet inflicts. Knowing that only another dog could fill the gaping hole, we began the search and found Sally within a couple of weeks. Sally is a Labrador cross rescue dog, abandoned with her litter crawling with all sorts of mini beasts. It took the rescue centre six weeks to get them into shape when we became the grateful custodians of Sal aged twelve weeks. Even though Heather's puppy months were years past, I remembered all too clearly the havoc she wreaked, so Bob and I weren't against the idea of taking on an older dog who had cut its teeth on somebody else, but the girls were adamant they wanted a puppy, and as it was their childhood memories we had at heart, a puppy was what they got, complete with a mouthful of teeth just waiting to be cut.

Despite her teeth which could slice through flesh like a shard of glass, she was an instant hit, endearing herself to us with her silky fur, hazel eyes and zest for fun. The girls were always forgiving of her explorations into their toy cupboard when beloved cuddly toys would emerge missing noses, ears and stuffing in her pursuit of all things needing to be chewed. They even forgave her gnawing on them with tear streaked faces when she regularly mistook their wrists and ankles for juicy bones, such was their love for her. In their eyes, she could do no wrong. My eyes were not so easily swayed.

With the doggy shrink's words still fresh in our ears, (our lesson had been well and truly learnt with Heather) we were determined Sally should know her place in the family from the start, and that place was not at the head. (A place she still tries to dispute even now, six years on.) This was demonstrated primarily by confining her to the downstairs of the house and the floor - the furniture is for none molting species only. The kitchen had the added bonus of being tiled, thus facilitating easy wiping of inevitable accidents whilst in the process of house training; accidents which seemed to occur with far more frequency during the hours of darkness. A suspicious mind might read malice into the coincidence, suspicions which could be further aroused by her favoured spot (partially obscured behind a pillar near the kettle ensuring a sleepy brain never failed to feel her night time endeavours between their toes), but I couldn't bring myself to believe that an innocent puppy could have a contriving mind - she was a puppy - not a criminal mastermind. 

We passed a few tense nights while she whined and wailed at the injustice bestowed upon her, but she eventually settled into acceptance and the whining abated. My ultimate goal was to have her so well trained that her enforced confinement would become unnecessary, her own obedience would keep her from venturing up the stairs, but I knew that was some way off - of course, she was still just four months old after all.

After a couple more months, she appeared content with her position in the family and we heard fewer and fewer complaints until eventually the nights passed in silence. Similarly, we were presented with fewer toilet mishaps each morning and were becoming quietly confident that it was now safe to enter the kitchen without encountering a poo lurking between the door and the kettle. I began to speculate on the necessity of the door, nothing more than speculate, but the seed had been planted and was preparing to germinate after one particularly drunken evening.

One day, I came across a handful of pears rotting in the fruit bowl which I immediately removed and left next to the waste disposal to await their fate. As children are unfaltering distractions, that was where they remained until Bob came home and questioned the pears.
"I'm chucking them away," I informed him not expecting a counter attack.
"Why? There's nothing wrong with them."
"Nothing wrong with them? They're practically compost!"
"No they're not! All they need is a bit of surgery."
"Well you eat them then!"
"I will!"
And that was the last either of us thought about the pears as the wine flowed a little more freely than usual that night. (It must have been the fumes from the pears that put us in the mood!) As the evening drew to a close and our thoughts turned to bed, I was left to lock up and Bob retired before me. As I came to shut the kitchen door in my customary fashion, I looked at Sally. She was sleeping peacefully in her bed as though nowhere in the world could be as comfy. My drunken eyes saw the epitome of obedience. I decided to speculate no further on the necessity of the door and decisively left it open.

It was just as dawn was breaking that I began to stir, aware of a particularly rancid smell in my nostrils. At first I blamed the miasma on Bob, who was not usually innocent of such actions, but then it penetrated my sleep fully and I recognised it at once; even Bob was not capable of such a revolting stink - there could be only one culprit. I got up and allowed my nose to lead the way. It led me to the vacant bedroom below which had recently been re-carpeted in small looped, Pure New Wool (imported from New Zealand if my memory serves me). As I tentatively approached, I already feared the worst not realising that my worst was nowhere near bad enough.

I peeped my head through the door with eyes screwed shut while preparing myself for the scene. Where once there was an expanse of pristine carpet in a neutral shade of Clotted Cream, it now sported chocolate coloured splats putting me in mind of a Dalmatian. It was immediately apparent that Sally had not only succumbed to the temptation of upstairs, but she had diarrhoea as well. It was also apparent, that the only way she could find to alleviate her discomfort was to deposit it all over the one and only spanking new carpet we possessed, as opposed to - anywhere!

I raced downstairs fully expecting to find a trail of liquid poo, imagining the poor thing had lost control, but I found nothing except Sally, fast asleep once more in her bed, and an empty space where the pears had once been. She lifted a sleepy head, exhausted from her night's exploits and attempted a wag of her tail.
"Don't you dare try to get round me with those soppy eyes and faux innocence!" I shouted at her, my suspicious mind working overtime.
"I knew I should have stuck to dogs - not bloody puppies!"

 

Sally - aka - Moriarty 

Spew

 If you're new to this, then you won't yet know,

    To keep abreast with my story's flow; to Percy Street you need to go.

 

I hadn't realised they were travel sick when they were babies; a milky spew was a regular feature of our day whether we travelled by foot, car, bus or train, so my mental leap to travel sickness didn't happen until they were toddlers when it became hard to mistake as anything other. Any more than twenty minutes in the car brought forth biblical gushes from Tuna which I would attempt to catch in a carrier bag before it reached anything that would necessitate a valet. Sometimes this was hard to achieve. If I were driving and unable to pull over safely, I was forced to let the spew fall where it may and sniff the consequences. As toddlers are generally not yet acquainted with curries and red wine, the spew came out more or less resembling the way it went in - orange, and thankfully, odourless, so I never found myself dry-retching while doing eighty MPH down a motorway.

I was hardly new to the concept of travel sickness, my mum is a long standing sufferer; even Heather was car sick as a puppy. Within the first mile of our first journey with her, when she was a small, trembling wrinkle of black fur, we watched with dumb expressions as she deposited something in Bob's lap that looked like it should have had legs and a personality. With travelling to work by van our daily ritual, she was exposed to the tedium of travel sickness twice a day, regurgitating her meals on each trip. (It was easy to determine her condition as travel sickness as Bulimia is uncommon in dogs.) I kept a stash of carrier bags in the glove box and quickly became adept at spotting an immanent flood, expertly timing her expulsions until I had a near perfect success rate at catching them in a bag, despite her efforts of avoidance, still apparently preferring Bob's lap. Thus began our long relationship with the vet, where we learnt regular exposure was the only cure to allow her system to acclimatise, which eventually it did and she soon out-grew it; the same can be said of Chicken and Tuna - except on trains.

Trains have long been our preferred mode of transport, largely due to the fact that Bob won't fly, so the South of France became our annual excursion as it was the furthest we could get over land within a reasonable time. We were grateful for the opening of the Eurostar by the time we were venturing on the journey with the girls, sparing us choppy channel crossings on the Hovercraft which tested even the strongest of guts.

I don't know why it never occurred to me that they could be train sick; buses, cars, planes - yes, but trains? Being a travel sick child myself, trains had never posed a problem, so I assumed the same for my children. Hmm, you know what they say about assume don't you? It makes an ass out of U and me. Of course, the trains I travelled on as a child rarely got above thirty MPH, while the Eurostar and TGV have added a hundred to that when they're dawdling; but that still didn't explain why Tuna sent her breakfast on an outing down her front before we'd even reached Waterloo, a twenty minute local journey. Perhaps that's why I still didn't make the connection with train sickness, choosing instead to speculate on a bug. Or perhaps my brain categorically refused to accept the prospect of thirteen hours spent with a train sick child; that would have had me land locked on Blighty until she was old enough to catch her own sick in a bag!

Blinded by my refusal to allow the nagging doubt at the back of my mind a voice, I instantly brought out the bag of entertainment carefully chosen to keep the girls amused through the long hours to be endured. Then I smelled it. A large man sitting across the aisle produced his mid-morning meal that smelled like the grease tray at MacDonald's had made passionate love to a hillock of brie. He proceeded to eat as though he had trotters rather than hands and swilled it down with a sizable bottle of coke. Although he tried to contain the inevitable burps, (he ate it faster than a Japanese eating contestant) they were feistier than he could control, and we were forced to listen as they escaped in a series of grunts. I was nearly sick myself until I was distracted by a plastic bottle systematically hitting Bob on the head. It appeared the child behind us had presumed the crown of hair in front of him was demonic and needed a good beating. Try as the mother might to restrain him, the little shit resumed his efforts at every opportunity, forcing Bob to perch forward on the rim of his seat to avoid the blows, but fear ye not, he's made of strong stuff, and it proved only a minor distraction from FourFourTwo.

Do you remember the old British Rail Intercity advert with shoes morphing into slippers and chess pieces yawning while being gently rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the train and a lullaby softly whispering to kick off your shoes and be lazy? Well that was just like our journey - if you'd smoked the entire grass stash of ten Jamaicans!




I turned my attention to Chicken and Tuna while trying extremely hard to close off my nostrils from the culinary onslaught of the fat man across the aisle who'd brought out seconds, and dodging the occasional missile launched from behind. We began the journey bristling with more tension than an electric fence and the best was yet to come. As though the Gods were using me as a demonstration of stupidity, I force fed the girls fruit. Not nice, solid fruit like a banana, but berries; black, straw and rasp. I can't tell you why, they weren't even hungry! I suppose the 5 a day propaganda had me well and truly hooked. Next I brought out the colouring books. As every seasoned travel spewer knows, attempting anything other than complete stillness with eyes trained forward is asking for trouble; but the brave, naive, trusting things that they were coloured Dumbo and Baloo with grim, unquestioning faces.

As we were approaching the outer suburbs of London with leafy pastures of English countryside just visible in the distance, all the colour drained from Chicken's face except for a pasty grey. "I feel sick Mummy," she whined. (Why do they never tell their dads?) Thinking I could dispel the feeling with positive thought, I instructed her to put down the colouring pens, lie back and try to go to sleep, which she unquestioningly did. Then I looked at Tuna who was barely eighteen months old. She stopped scribbling a messy knot of blue ink over Snow White's face and I watched as her own face melted like the German Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he gazed upon its deathly contents.

"Tuna! Do you want to be sick?" I asked with stupidity reluctant to leave its willing host. I've often wondered why I ask, "Do you want to be sick?" Of course she doesn't want to be sick! Who the hell wants to be sick? You may have to be sick, but that is completely different from wanting to! So I should never have been surprised when the answer was a flat "No" just prior to an almighty heave. I really need to re-phrase the question to a more specific, "Are you going to be sick?" the results may be less messy.

She trained her large, brown, tear filled eyes on me and I had my answer, but nothing of use to hand having not yet invented my SEK - Sickness Emergency Kit containing nappy sacks (due to lack of holes) and more tissues than a Kleenex factory. I snatched FourFourTwo out of Bob's bewildered hands and thrust it under the flow of liquidised berries, instantly realising that magazine paper has all the absorbency of a duck's back and my stupidity knew no bounds. I was powerless as the sick rolled down the page, across Thierry Henri's midriff and toward me like an avalanche speeding down a mountain. With Tuna still gushing like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, all I could do was watch it pour into my lap. At that moment Chicken sprung awake with inflated cheeks. "Use her dress!" I shouted at Bob. His perplexity passed in adequate time for him to grab the dress she was wearing, which thankfully had a very full skirt, and hold it under the flow. The material bulged like a bowl under the weight but mercifully held up under the pressure.

After the longest few minutes of my life, I was shuffling them into the toilet while Bob produced fresh clothes from our cases (an advantage of travelling by train). On returning to our seats, I couldn't help notice how quiet our carriage had become with only a lingering whiff of grease and brie.
"Where's everyone gone?" I asked Bob who had resumed position and was casually flicking through The Times.
"Moved seats," he said uninterested.

As I watched the girls snuggle down into their respective bunny and lion cunningly fashioned into pillows, I couldn't help a broad smile stretching across my face. I turned to Bob and said, "Well, that's one good reason not to stick to dogs. Heather never cleared a carriage like that!"

The summer holidays are now upon me so my posts will become fortnightly.

Walkies

So, gone are the leisurely dog walks, spontaneous dinner reservations and lazy weekends spent in a haze of drunken socialising, replaced with a quick turn of the local playing field, never being arsed to eat - let alone go out to eat, and weekends still spent in a drunken haze but only after 4pm, and alone, as our friends were now avoiding us as though we had a red cross on the door. I'd said goodbye to brushed hair, plucked eyebrows and white jeans and hello to elasticated waists, big knickers and a determined hair sprouting from my chin. Ah, the joys of motherhood; I always knew it was a daft thing to do! Just getting out of the house to walk Heather before lunch became my only objective of the day; despite being woken with the birds, it was an objective which proved more erratic than my hair. Once or twice I actually managed it, with the help of Fifi and the Flowertots and a strategy planned out in meticulous detail the night before. It went something like this:

• Be rudely awakened at 5am and discover I'm not Anna Friel or a lesbian and it had all been a dream.
• Feed Tuna whose screams were that of someone else's baby when I was Anna Friel.
• Go back to sleep while Tuna feeds and hope for a recurring dream (but maybe without the lesbian bit this time).
• Be woken again at 7am having only managed a dull dream about cutting my fringe with a pair of nail scissors - oh wait, that wasn't a dream.
• Give Chicken her Shreddies and attempt to eat a bowl of Bran Flakes with Tuna (a permanent resident of my hip) slapping at my spoon as though food is for other mothers - not hers.
• Feed Heather and watch her sneer at the offering as though it were rotting slug slime rather than Nature's Best lugged back weekly from the homoeopathic vet.
• Spend the next hour wiping Shreddies off Heather's back and Bran Flakes out of my hair. Empty and re-load washing machine.
• 9am (already!): Attempt to put Tuna down for her mid-morning nap. (I still hadn't learnt to ignore Gina Ford.)
• 9.05am: Give up and resign myself to another shower-less day.
• Top and tail Tuna while Chicken amuses herself by poking her in the eye under the guise of scientific experiment before noticing Heather has snuck off with another shitty nappy.
• Retrieve nappy, berate Heather and Chicken for having given it to her in the first place.
• 10am: Dress Tuna before placing her in bouncy chair to amuse herself while I dress Chicken.
• 10.05am: Remove Tuna from bouncy chair and attempt to dress Chicken with one hand.
• 10.10am: Try to catch Chicken.
• 10.30am: Give up and bring in Fifi and the Flowertots in all her distracting glory.
• 10.45am: Review Chicken's attire and delude myself that no one will notice that the dress is on back-to-front.
• 11am: Make another attempt at putting Tuna in bouncy chair while getting myself dressed.
• 11.05 am: Remove Tuna from bouncy chair and hastily dress myself while she screams herself sick on the bed.
• 11.10am: Review my attire and delude myself that no one will notice my dress is on back-to-front.
• 11.15am: Suffer fall out from termination of TV while coaxing Chicken into the bathroom to brush her four teeth by promising a resumption of TV later in the day.
• 11.30am: Attempt to brush my own teeth while Tuna slaps at my toothbrush firm in her belief that clean teeth are for other mothers - not hers.
• Fill bag with spare nappies, baby wipes, Sudocrem, crayons, paper, snack boxes of raisins, water cup with the non-drip lid, sun cream, plasters - sod it - put in the entire First Aid Kit.
• 11.45am: Frantically look for sun hats and Chicken's shoes while Heather whines like an air raid siren in anticipation of her walk.
• 12 noon: Strap them into Phil and Ted's while drowning out Tuna's screams (who won't stop until we're on the move) with Steppen Wolf's 'Born to be Wild' on a loop in my head.
• 12.10pm: Leave the house and take just one deep drag on the cigarette I have carefully positioned in a tin box by the gate before crunching it out and returning it to the box to await tomorrow's deep drag.

Day in day out, my predictable bullet point list varied less than Margaret Thatcher's hair do's. I was lost in my belief that it must be possible to get up, dressed and out before the Shreddies stopped working their magic; I mean, we now had cameras on Mars, advances in medical science were unprecedented - surely it wasn't too high to aim? Apparently, it was. Before I'd even the chance to un-clip Heather's lead, Chicken would shout she was hungry. But faint heart never won fair time to walk dog; out came the snack box of raisins while we dashed around the field in the hope it would placate Heather enough to buy me a guilt free afternoon.

But what was it all for? Had I not had a dog I could have been spared all that anguish, accepting our days would begin and end with only the garden as our contact with the outside world; being lazy by nature the thought was certainly appealing, but also suicidal. Walking Heather gave our days structure and purpose (albeit haphazard) without which I may as well have given in to that determined hair on my chin and allowed it to grow and grow until it could eventually strangle me, a fate I might have welcomed without some semblance of a daily routine.

 

If the point to having children is to make you appreciate the simple act of getting out of the house with your clothes on the right way round and being able to eat your breakfast without it ending up in your hair, then I was getting it like a sharp stab in the ribs. Surely, it begs the question - why didn't I stick to dogs?

 

Water

Chicken was twenty two months when Tuna was born. (They are so called because chicken and tuna are the only foods they will jointly eat now, sparing me the chore of providing two meals or alternating starvation.) Chicken had shown only mild curiosity at the hospital, (having not yet recognised Tuna as the new play thing I had so selflessly provided her with.) however, once back at home, her mild curiosity turned instantly to disdain when she said, "Why that here?"
"She's your new baby sister, remember? You visited her in the hospital," Bob clarified.
"Don't want it."

Suddenly an image, clear as day flashed into my mind. It was of me, my face a rippling undulation of wrinkles accentuated by a thick smear of red lipstick as though applied with my feet. I was trapped in a room full of dolls all clamouring for tea.

"Back in a minute," I announced and ran out of the door, into the car and straight to Toys R Us. I returned shortly after with a brand new Baby Born complete with car seat, feeding apparatus and more changes of outfit than Sue Ellen Ewing.
"Here Chicken, look what your baby sister's bought you, isn't she generous?" I said enthusiastically pulling the bribe with its many accessories out of the bag. Her eyes stood on stalks and immediately rushed for the doll in a state of apoplectic excitement exclaiming, "Have it, have it!" as she ran, arms outstretched. However, I wasn't willing to hand over the goods until I had achieved the desired result. I tightened my grip on the doll's arm and said, "You know it's from Tuna don't you?"
She looked to Tuna cradled in her grannie's arms sleeping peacefully for a change, before looking back to the doll and repeating, "Have it!"
I persisted in basic but loud vocabulary, "Present from Tuna - not daddy - not me - Tuna. You understand, yes?"
She eyed me suspiciously before eventually conceding, "Yes."
"So now you like Tuna, yes?" I prompted. (I presume that's what you would call, 'leading the witness'.)
"No!"
"Then you can't have it!" I said lifting the entire bag above my head like a petulant child. (The image of me as a mad, wizened old woman was a compelling force!)
"Martha!" Bob and my mum snapped in unison.
Of course I knew my behaviour was irrational, so I begrudgingly handed over the present, but not before I said, "Here, it's yours, but you do like Tuna now don't you?"
"Martha!"
"Okay, okay," I resigned. I watched Chicken toddle off to play with her hard earned toys and shouted one last attempt, "Remember, Tuna bought it for you!" but her ears were already deaf.

Looking back at the photos now, there are a number of Chicken cuddling Tuna and even one of her kissing the top of Tuna's head, either the camera really does lie or my memory is somewhat fuzzy, because days filled with screaming and petulance seem to prevail in my memory banks. Tuna would scream if not in my arms and Chicken would respond to my seemingly single focus by belligerently refusing to do anything I asked of her. My demands were not unreasonable; I wasn't asking her to prepare a family roast dinner.
"Don't unscrew the cap of that two litre bottle of water, you can see I'm feeding Tuna and completely powerless to stop you. I said don't! No! - Don't tip it upside down and allow the contents to pour all over the floor. I said don......Why you little ****!" I mumbled under my breath as she stood splashing in the lake she had created. "No, no, don't take off your nappy! I said don..........." As I was pinned to the sofa with Tuna guzzling happily, I had to sit back and watch the show as Chicken now splashed in her own wee as well as Evian. The drama continued when Heather decided the indoor paddling pool looked like her sort of fun and joined Chicken in splashing it up the walls and furniture, before drying her wee soaked paws on the sofa where she leaped on her retirement from the game. In the meantime, my mouth had dried up like a lizard's eye ball (the norm with the onset of breast feeding, hence the water) intensified by the vision of my precious water supply seeping between the floorboards.

With delirium brought on by dehydration, I thought I heard a knock at the door. Sadly, it was not my imagination as Heather quickly confirmed by leaping from the sofa and barking manically. I slunk into the cushions hoping that my silence would send them on their way.
"Mama, mama, door, mama!" Chicken began shouting as she toddled, bare arsed between the front door and the sofa, skilfully avoiding Heather as she too felt the need to alert me to the knocking door which I could only have missed if I'd been dead!

I was now faced with a decision. Do I allow whoever it is at the door to believe I have left a toddler home alone with a manic dog or, do I get up and answer the door? I chose the former; until that is, I was greeted with the peering face of the health visitor squinting through a gap in the curtain, at which point, I waved cheerily as though I had been expecting her all along.

I laboriously pulled myself up from the sofa with the hungry Tuna (who didn't share Chicken's picky eating habits) still nestled in the crook of my arm unperturbed by the chaos ensuing around her. I opened the door, "Hi Martha, you were expecting me weren't you?"
Shit! Was I? "Yes of course, come in; ignore the mess, it's not usually like this, we've just had a little accident." Chicken was now naked, sprawled flat on her tummy and splashing in the remnants of her paddling pool like Jacques Cousteau laughing as her splashes made Heather sneeze.

The health visitor gazed upon the scene with undisguised concern before turning to me and saying in a tone reserved for the recently bereaved, "We're here to help you know? Anything, anything at all." Really? I thought, Could you clear up this mess then? She continued, "And there are people you can talk to - about anything. We understand it can all get a bit much at times and we don't want you to suffer in silence."
I suddenly grasped her inference; if the kids and dog were tipping me over the edge, they were there to take them off my hands - NO! "Thanks, thanks," I spluttered, keen to reassure her before she called in the SS. "It really isn't usually like this, it's just that Chicken got hold of the water you see, it's a funny story when you think about it." Her countenance turned from concern to pity in one slick movement forcing my words to halt in my throat. There was little left to say except, "Thanks, I'll bear that in mind."

Once she'd gone, I convinced myself she was racing back to base to write a damming report on my state of mind and it would only be a matter of days before the ominous knock would come to take my children away. I called Bob who thankfully talked sense into me as I sobbed, "Why didn't I stick to dogs?"