in which Jo wishes for a life without incident

Of course I am lucky, with my two whole and healthy children, who don't appear to have special needs. Roof over head, food on table. While my marriage may not be blissful, there is no abuse or court appearances. No middle of the night trauma.

So I need to stop reading the small things that go wrong as a personal curse from on high. I drove out of the vet's this morning thinking, aw, can I not just catch a break? And then lectured myself sternly about the break I've caught, see above.

And yet. Could things just not... just keep simple?

On Monday I went and bought a cage for the impending gerbils. I got a freecycled tank, but couldn't replace the broken side, then we went to Woodies to try and get perspex and stuff to make a lid, but they never have what you need and Axel was a prick about it to the extent that it made me cry. So I just bought a cage. For €85.... Then the gerbils and their bits came to €40, but it all looked great, they were happy scamperers, and we all loved them and were proud gerbils owners.

Til 8am this morning, when Olivia came in to say Munch had got her tail caught, and it had pulled away from the bone, and Nibble had pulled the rest of it off (vomit) and my small girl was fairly well freaked out. Aconite. Good for shock, highly recommended.

So the €85 cage has a platform that doesn't latch into place, hence the caught tail. Off to the vet, to hear the joyous news that Munch will have to have an operation to amputate the bared tail, and it will cost €120. FUCK.

Can we not just replace the gerbil, asked Axel on my return. Tempting. She was the prettiest one, too. Ai me. This is my fault for forgetting to secure the cage. I'm off to find Twistysticks now.

This is why I'm happy with stasis, why I can sit on the couch all day. It's safe. I know that I'm blessed, that I've caught a huge break. But please, can stuff just stop happening? Can I just get something right?

6

I can't believe my daughter is six tomorrow. Six years since she flew out of me, into my arms, with fierceness and will and laughter.

I used to think I was doing fine, but for the last few years I've been troubled by the sense of my constant failure.

Difficult, she won't let there be ease, she fights it almost all the time. She makes things so hard.

Perhaps this will purge early, perhaps when she gets a little older, things will shift and she will allow herself, and us, and me, a little more peace.

Because I look at her in her tshirt and jeans, and her six year old body with it's long hair and shining blue eyes is the perfect miniature of adult female beauty. We have spa night and as she lounges on the bed I take in her rosy, peachy, creamy perfection in awe and say I'm just amazed by how gorgeous she is.

'Why?' she asks, a spark in her eye, 'did you think I was going to be really ugly?' and a demonic chuckle bubbles out of her, with such humour and self knowledge. 'Did you think I was going to be gross?'

Today at her birthday party her aunt nods at her on the bouncy castle and asks if she's got a boyfriend - and I look up and there she is, wrapped around her best friend, head in his neck, a mini teen already.

It's bizarre. Six years of sharing our lives with this girl who makes putting her socks on into a trial akin to climbing Everest, but who also asks the most incisive questions, makes the most incredible art, laughs with the appreciation and comprehension of adult and when she wants to can be perfectly polite and sweet and selfless. I am terrified by the weight of responsibility my role holds, but also mostly, spectacularly proud.

And here, is a far more moving hymn to a daughter than this one. Beautiful.

what the fuck is wrong with people? (again)

I'm feeling a little incoherent with rage.

I just called the bouncy castle guy who'd said he'd come out to measure the garden for us. The lady at his landline number gave me his mobile. When I rang it, he said 'Hello?'

I said 'hi, have you got a minute?' in case he was working.

And he retorted: that depends. What do you want?
.....


That depends, what do you want?

???

It's his fucking business phone. What the fuck does he think I want? His first born? A massage??


GAAHHH the rudeness of people!!

oh, just one more

brief hiatus

Birthday parties. Gerbil tanks to construct. DS cakes to bake. Bouncy castles to organise. Never mind booking the limo.

Just kidding about the limo.

At least the forecast is set to improve.

But I'm tired. I've a friend doing the circular post breakup-notgettingoverhim-what'llI do- discussion through various communication media and that's taking up a little time and energy. Because I don't know, woman, you can see how successful my own attempts at relationship maintenance have been.

I'll resist talking about teen vampire romance and further. But I got nothing else. Normal service to resume when I have an idea.

redner

I am bereft. I finished the Stephanie Meyer books yesterday. I want more, I'm suffering withdrawal.

They're so addictive! I went to a friend's house on Thursday morning, and sat there twitching for half an hour, wishing I was able to read more. I want to be back in that world of vamp angst and romance, all alight.

I wish.... sigh.

I'm embarrassed at reading them so compulsively - I texted Ciara to tell her I was finished, and she asked if I wanted to borrow the next one. No, I mean, I'm finished them all. And the same today when I met the mum of the 12 year old I borrowed them off, she was aghast. Yes, I've been neglecting my children and duties, alright!

Here's another, more damning confession. I might have, just out of curiosity, gone looking for some Twilight adult fanfiction last night - just for the purposes of research, of course. But sadly it's crap written by teens, it seems. I see a niche. Because my feeling is that the books are really missing the searing sex scenes that are implied. She owes us mothers that, surely.

stalkbook

Aw. I just friended an old friend. A school friend I used to love with a warm, admiring, sisterly delight.

And obviously through his page, I've just seen the faces of various other people I knew in school (I've kept up with feckin no-one really, considering the smallness of the world I live in). So right now I'm filled with a huge rush of the warm fuzzies, looking at the hardly aged faces of all these people I used to know and like and esteem, and love.

And even getting teary, looking at the photos of those faces then, impossibly fresh and unwritten.


I hated school, really, but the good thing was the friendship. It was co-ed obviously, and we had such fun, good clean nipple crippling fun. Ha. We learned to communicate with each other and laugh together and how to be friends. How to be pyhsically comfortable with each other. It was great, there was so much laughter. Even in our relatively dysfunctional class from broken and unhappy homes, we had a laugh.



I wish them all so well. Frosties and the Den and Pearl Jam and Home and Away. Ah, sigh.

confession

I stayed up til four in the morning reading the second Twilight book.

I'm not proud.

In my defense, I'd had to have a coffee at 11pm because I'd fallen asleep over my work and I had an hour and a half left to do. I'm not proud of that either. Coffee = medication.

But then the caffeine, werewolves, vampires and sexual tension suspense combined into a heady cocktail of not sleepy semi-arousal that had me reading avidly til four, counting hours of sleep but still not going there. Caffein and vampires do a dangerous mistress make.

Thought for today: Paul Noonan is your good-vampire boyfriend. Ohhhhhhh.

oh dear

'STUPID MAMA!' Bodhi shouted at me this morning in a growly voice, while we were playing.

'No, no', I protested weakly. 'Clever Mama!'



Yeah, right...

Yesterday we went to the beach, in Greystones.
There's a handy carpark, next to the beach, and a playground. It's been there a long time, and it's a couple minutes walk outside the town itself.

It seems I haven't been there in a while, as a friend came down to warn us the warden was giving out tickets - oddly he got me, and the friend parked beyond, but not the friend parked in the middle of us.

I was a bit irate as I hadn't seen a sign, the meter had been out of my view. And it's forty bloody euro. I could swallow twenty euro, maybe, with better grace, but forty feels like a rip off to me.
Of course he said he couldn't take them back, though we're told that's only the gardai, the private guys can., Feckers.

However, when I came back to the car and loaded in my tantrumming psycho daughter, I shut the door on the screaming for a second and looked up.

I'd parked right under the giant pay parking sign.

That's why I didn't see it.

You have to laugh, I suppose.

performance anxiety

So I spent yesterday making seventy strawberry buns and a cake for the wedding of the beautiful and wonderful Kate, who is dying of a headcold on her wedding day, boo! She called in the other day, all ill and busy, but with beautiful shiny gold rings in her pocket, and I wish I could have just tucked her up in a duvet with tea and care and let her have a little sleep. Instead I had to rush around making dinners amidst chaos and be no comfort at all.

However, she'll survive it, she's made of stern stuff. First the girl writes about eating pussy, and then she insists on boob cakes for her wedding.

So I had to make a pretty cake too, in the hopes that her mother won't hunt me down and kill me.

Still, hopefully she wants the boobcakes in the spirit of all things goddess :)

So anyway, I am smack in the middle of the ohnoohnothecakeistoodry,thehorror! horrors, not sure how long they will last. I would so love to be able to bake without worrying about it, will I ever be that good?

But apart from that, I hope it doesn't rain, I hope you have a beautiful and stress free wedding, Kake, I mean, Kate and Jeff, Rescue Remedy Champagne cocktails sound good.

music to weep to premenstually

Ahhh, Dr Hook. Hormones, they're scary things. This song is everything I know I shouldn't. No harm in a little dip in the waters of romantic depencency, now and again.



I'd sort of forgotten about the Artic Monkeys despite listening to their first album on repeat obsessively for about six months. You couldn't weep over them really though. How does a twenty year old sing these lyrics with the authority he has? I think they're a phenomenon. Bless them!

ammendment

I see I repeated the indoor slide link in the last post. I was really drooling over designer Fatboy beanbags.

no time for posting

but really still waiting for an eccentric internet millionaire to take a fancy to me...

take a look here and have a search around, see things like this... or this...

or in my wildest dreams (idea courtesy of Lottie)...

And while I'm with the linking, don't go to milkmoon if you have children, Ciara will make you cry.

the return and rise of the scumbag

In desperate times, the lawless will survive, I suppose.

When I was in my teens, Bray had a fierce reputation. Hard lads from Tallaght were afraid to come out here. Or maybe that was Shankill. Or Ballybrack. Whatever. Bray was dodgy, there were spates of stabbings and beatings, and crime, and heroin addicts off their heads

coming to rob the off licence Axel worked in every Methadone clinic day, or dole day, and the Gardai would be polite on the phone but never ever show. He grew up coming home from school being stopped every day as he walked through Wolfe Tone Square, for a 'fair search', where he'd be pushed against a wall and have his pockets emptied of cigarettes.

A lot of that culture is gone now, grown up, some are dead, from lifestyle or suicide; some sold up when the houses were worth €350,00 and moved on, and newer, non-council house families moved in and changed the demographic. And the new kids on the corner are more used to their benefit going farther, big screen tvs and new cars and enough food on the table and cheerfully doing a bit of dealing, allowing them to buy luxuries.

All this sounds unpleasant of me maybe, but it's people my husband knew by name, shared classrooms with, really. No scales on his eyes. It's a long time since I heard a story of a Saturday night with blood in it.

Apparently robberies are on the rise again. Last week, my friends were in the Porterhouse in Bray, smoking outside, and someone suddenly punched one of them in the jaw, lifting him up in the air and flat on his back. Then they walked away laughing, a bit of fun. And the bouncers knew them, so they laughed it off. When my friends called the guards, the bounders fobbed them off, sent them the wrong way. At Axel's gig on Saturday night in the Noggin Inn, which had a serious reputation when I first heard of it, for the first time in my knowledge, a fight broke out on the dance floor, someone pushed someone else, and a dog fight erupted all over the pub, someone bit someone's ear half off, ambulances called. My brother had a party that an extra 150 strangers turned up to. He's been on the dole for a while since losing his job, but he's been doing great, taking up exercises and yoga and meditation and getting healthy, had given up smoking blow, but went on a bender at this party that he said took a week to recover from. And some scumbag crashed the party and made off with his laptop, presumably while he was out of it.

It's all mounting, I feel. Hard times are back. Unemployment and violence I'd forgotten about. Resurfacing, bubbling up between the cracks of the Celtic Tiger veneer. Woooo, ooo, remember the eighties?

Be safe, everyone!

cute squirrel story

Look how much they use their tails to talk!

A warm cuddly furry balancing and communication device... kinda makes me wish I had one.

From Darragh.