NotSheep

It’s been a quiet week. Ish. Because let’s face it, when you’ve five children, you don’t get much closer than ish to quiet without throwing them all out, and while I’ve sometimes been tempted, I haven’t really got the energy…

Mostly I’ve been parenting by remote control - that is, I’ve been sitting about and trying to keep tabs on what’s going on around the house without actually getting up and going to look. Freddy’s magnetic-rod episode resolved itself, to everyone’s relief (although I have to admit that a sizeable chunk of my relief was that my part of the process was over) - and that’s as much as I’m going to say on that subject. Toby realised that when counting to ten on his fingers, he didn’t have to take one hand at a time - that he could go right thumb, right pointer finger, left thumb, right middle finger, left pointer, etc. I love watching their faces as their minds figure these things out.

Before getting up on Wednesday, I sent various children to various rooms to ensure they were tidy. In some cases, I asked specific questions: Were there toys shoved in the corner between the two sofas in the living-room? Was there anything on the floor behind the door? - and so on. Assured that everything had been tidied, I emerged from upstairs, only to (re)discover that the children’s definition of “tidy” was very different to mine, and that “no” in response to “are there books under the table?” actually meant “yes, about 24 of them”. Hrm. We were expecting guests - them and us using the excuse that I needed a tiny bit of pink yarn for mice’s noses (and why on earth would I have any pink yarn here?) - so I felt obliged to at least provide a clear path from the front door to somewhere they could sit and have a cup of tea, so further orders were barked instructions were given. Shortly after receiving a text-message from the guests telling me they’d be here in about thirty minutes, I was informed by Barney that he’d been in the bathroom, throwing up. Lovely. He went on to spend most of the rest of the afternoon in the bathroom, repeating the performance. He did occasionally emerge - long enough to throw up on his bed, for example, and later, long enough to go into George and Freddy’s room and throw up in a corner there - and not say a word about it. I only discovered what had happened when I went into the room and thought “ew, it’s a bit whiffy in here”, headed for the window to open it and stood in something wet, which I am absolutely certain was only the spilled water from the cup he’d had (and the only reason I have for my certainty is that I want it, okay?) When asked why he hadn’t said anything, he told me that he thought that Freddy or George would tell me - they’d both been there at the time - but apparently neither of them had noticed a thing - either the act or the whiff

At one point I sent a text-message to twitter saying that Barney was sick - or rather, thanks to predictive phone-text, “pick” - and shortly received a twitter back from him telling me I meant “sick”. Not too sick to be pedantic then.

Despite the necessity for regular jaunts upstairs to check on Barney and the fact that I was already tired, I enjoyed seeing our guests - I hope they enjoyed it too. I realised, after they left at dinnertime, that they’d brought a bag containing food which I could have provided for them for dinner

By the time my own children had been fed, it was too late for Freddy and George to go to Cubs, and Barney was certainly in no fit state for Scouts, so they missed yet another week (they’ve missed the last few because we’ve been away). Not much we could do about it though.

On Thursday morning I took George for an appointment with an Occupational Therapist. The appointment was for a very specific reason, but of course, with the NHS operating the way it does, we had to waste an hour on a basic assessment of his motor skills - none of which has ever caused anyone concern. I could have told her this in the first ten seconds, of course, but that’s not the way the system works. I’ve come home with a “sensory questionnaire” to be completed and returned, which I will do, despite my lack of faith that we will actually get any help from that direction.

In the evening, Jack and Toby decided to settle the argument of who should get out of the bathtub first by playing rock-paper-scissors. They managed to get an extra ten minutes in the tub by doing this, as it was just too cute for any parent to have the heart to drag one of them out

Barney finally pulled out the molar that has been loose and annoying him for the last week or two, then mentioned that he’d a collection of teeth, all of which he was planning to leave under his pillow in order to make a small fortune from the tooth fairy last night…er, yeah, sure.

As for me…I’ve been making children of all ages happy (although admittedly none of them are my own). I’ve been knitting hats with skulls and crossbones for a friend who fell for those I’ve made my own children - two of the three she requested are now complete, and I should be able to get some orange yarn tomorrow for the third, so she should have them next week. And the biggest kid I’ve made happy this week was C, friend of Barney, son of my friend K, whose Pokemon website crashed in January and who has not been able to figure out what the problem was or how to fix it. It was a fairly straightforward fix - a corrupt portion of a database, but of course as with all such things, you have to be able to diagnose the problem first, and the host had disabled the tools which might have provided a button saying “fix this”, so it had to be done with text commands, which isn’t difficult, but you do need to know what the commands are! - and it took probably ten or fifteen minutes of my time to get it all up and running again - and he is now very happy. I’ve said I’ll put a shout-out to his site here, so those of you who have any interest in Pokemon (i.e. not me ) - please click on the image below to take you to his site - leave a comment and you’ll make him even happier.