One word of warning is to watch what you wear. Don’t wear low-rise jeans. At some point, your rescue services will be required at the top of the squashy play warren and you will end up scaling five yards of rope netting to collect your child with the top half of your knickers on show. I was still wearing rather fetching (and large) M&S cotton maternity pants for the best part of a year post-birth. Nobody needs to see that when they’re enjoying a soggy panini. The same goes for low-cut tops. I misplaced a breast pad in the ball pool once – I probably forgot to re-clasp the old feeding bra, or maybe I just neglected to tuck my boob back in at all. I wonder if it’s still there somewhere . . . I dread to think what else is submerged beneath those balls: lost breast pads, hairbands, plasters . . . We should just accept that the most appropriate attire for such outings is leggings and a T-shirt. Or high-waisted jeans. And remember to pack socks . . . because the aforementioned sock sogginess is still preferable to the risk of a verruca.
You will ‘catch up’ with your friend in ten-second chunks of conversation only, these chunks sandwiched between your combined offspring’s food/loo/behavioural issues. ‘I’m thinking of applying for a new job actually, but – Will you stop climbing up the slide?! – Did I tell you what happened at Claire’s sweep? She was already 3cm dilated and – Come here, NOW, Mummy’s getting REALLY CROSS!’ Eventually, once you’ve got the gist of each other’s life updates, it’s time to make a move.
It then goes without saying that your children won’t want to leave this noisy hellhole. There may be tears and/or protest planking in the Mega Maze. That’s why you must always make sure you have back-up unhealthy-snack bribes to entice them back to the car. And wine in the fridge when you get back home, obviously.
I should note that, if you go in half-term, or with a gin hangover from the aforementioned night out, soft play is much worse than an afternoon in the living room. It’s total carnage. Just stick Megamind on.
* * *
‘I hate soft play. There’s no collaborative play or negotiation going on. It’s just sugar-fuelled children intent on inflicting maximum pain on each other via the mediums of plastic-ball throwing, trampoline ninja-kicking or three-pronged attacks down the slide on to unsuspecting toddlers. It’s the infant equivalent to Lord of the Flies.’
Joanne, Sunderland
* * *
What a Mess (I Blame the Toys)
I have lost count of the number of times James and I have found ourselves staring, with slightly pained expressions, at the chaos that is our living space. Home is where the heart is, by all accounts, but I can’t say my heart belongs to the house I’m living in at the moment, despite having been there for three years. We eat and sleep in it, I spend at least four days a week begging my children to calm down and stop charging around inside it, but it’s a far cry from the family home we’d had in mind.
Perhaps it was foolish of us to buy a ‘project’ – though, in our defence, it was the one and only house we could afford at the time so we put an offer in despite the laminate flooring smelling of wet dog. It ticked enough boxes (three bedrooms, not in the ghetto) and although it was far from ideal (no bath, no utility room, no useful storage of any kind, no parking, horrendous and worryingly phallic 1970s mushroom-patterned tiles), we were like Kirstie and Phil’s dream-property hunters – we saw the potential.
Unfortunately, property potential amounts to jack shit when you have neither the funds nor the time to realise that potential. There is no spare DIY time when you own small people. We had not thought it through and now live in a constant state of ‘We’ll sort it out at the weekend/next month/next summer.’ Three years’ worth of failed weekend/next month/next summer sort-out promises have left us with some interesting quirks. There are times when I couldn’t care less about our habitable (but ultimately a bit shit) house. But, sometimes, the frustration of not easily being able to fix things with the kids around annoys me beyond belief. And, I’ve discovered, James is the same (hence our pained expressions and lots of sighing).
Pre-kids, we simply would not have put up with a barely usable sink and a hallway chandelier light with no bulbs (we were supposed to investigate both the leaky washbasin and non-standard bulb sizes back when we moved in). Never in a month of Sundays would we have made do with an old bedsheet as a curtain because the blind fell down (we were supposed to investigate stronger blind-fitting options . . . about two years ago). Pre-kids, if somebody had suggested that I would start – but fail to complete – painting the hideous mahogany kitchen units, I would have laughed in their face. (Nobody is that bloody lazy; clearly, you wouldn’t make do with a half-painted kitchen, for God’s sake . . . oh right, yep, that’s now on next summer’s To Sort Out list, too.) Given that the pair of us struggle to find the time to fart without the boys interrupting, I think it’s a fair assumption that this ever-multiplying list will be rolled over for evermore (at least until we come to sell the house and an estate agent tells us the penis tiles really have to go).
And then there’s the general mess. Home may not be where the heart is, but it’s certainly where all the crap is. And, as we engage in regular look-at-the-sodding-state-of-the-place conversations, we’ve discovered we share a common hatred towards the things we regard as the root cause of this endless untidiness: toys.
Unless you have the luxury of a playroom (future goal right there), a previously uncluttered living space becomes the Early Learning Centre with a raisin infestation. You can try to tidy up throughout the day (by putting stuff back into various Swedish toy-storage solutions) but you will soon realise you’re pissing against the wind. A small piece of my soul dies every time I hear the crash of Lego bricks hitting the carpet. Despite attempts to scoop them all up, I know that when I later go to check on Henry sleeping I’ll end up with a stray brick impaled on the underside of my foot. (‘Goodnight, my angel. Sleep tight, love you— Oww! Bastard Lego!’) I’m always finding toys in unexpected places, too: Power Rangers in the shower, Mr Potato Head’s ear in my handbag – I once found myself in bed with a Buzz, and I’m not talking the Ann Summers variety.
That’s not my only beef with toys. In fact, I’ve written an entire list dedicated to the reasons I hate toys, possibly prompted by the most recent Lego foot-impaling incident …
My Beef with Toys
You cannot get rid of them. The moment you start boxing up unloved toys for charity/eBay/the baby next door is the moment the previously neglected item becomes the best toy ever. That plastic tractor from the bottom of the basket he has never played with? Best toy ever, one of his favourites. Half a Sofia the First tea set gathering dust on the bookcase? Best toy ever, one of his favourites. (I have resorted to silently swiping toys in the dead of night and shelving them ready for removal, but Henry knows. I think he does a toy stocktake every morning.) A friend of mine had me wetting myself laughing when she described the time she had cleared out ‘a load of crap’ for a school jumble sale only for her son to have the mother of all meltdowns about being parted from the toys he’d never played with. She ended up paying money to buy back all her own crap. Kids are weird.
They come with ridiculous amounts of packaging. Once you’ve got through the cardboard, the plastic and the sodding metal ties, you will sometimes need a screwdriver to free your child’s Christmas toy from its box. I ended up out of breath and sweating after battling to free Optimus Prime. What the chuff is that about? I thought we were trying to cut down on waste these days.
There are never enough batteries. Unless you are an Organised Mum and have them stowed away in a cupboard alongside candles and blank greetings cards (I have no such cupboard, so birthdays are always fun in our house), you will be forever running out of batteries. We sacrifice batteries from the DVD remote to keep Fireman Sam’s Ocean Rescue Centre in operation (‘No film tonight, love, but at least Pontypandy is safe’). And when toys do have working batteries, they are quite – often, unbearably – annoying. I had to take the batteries out of Alfie Bear (if you don’t
have an Alfie Bear, this is not a void I suggest you fill). It’s not Alfie’s fault but, after five hours of ‘I’m a friendly light-up bear, I’ll teach you 1, 2, 3’, I have been known to hunt down that screwdriver for battery extraction and mutter, ‘Not so friendly now, are you, Alfie?’ He is currently mute, discarded in a toy basket (but is still the best toy ever, one of Henry’s favourites, if ever this was in doubt).
They break and everyone cries. The freebie toys from magazines and plastic tat from discount-stores-where-things-cost-around-£1 are the usual suspects, leading to tears of disappointment and the dishonest ‘We’ll fix it later!’ promise. I have a ‘fix it later’ drawer full of sad toys waiting in vain for somebody to buy some superglue. This will never happen – we will throw them out following the aforementioned look-at-the-sodding-state-of-the-place conversation.
Toys with hundreds of random pieces can piss off. I swear I own rogue pieces that never belonged to an original puzzle or game and have simply appeared like a toy plague – but I daren’t chuck them out (because of the stocktake). By the same token, there are the toys that go missing. Hats off to anyone who’s managed to keep the phone attached to the baby walker, and where the hell do those squeaky eggs go? Small toy pieces also become a genuine safety concern when you have an orally investigative baby on a mission to stick bricks down his windpipe. I spend my life shouting, ‘Don’t leave it on the floor, your brother could choke!’
They are an eyesore. Even if we were to get our arses in gear (and sort out the house), we’d still face this issue. There is simply nothing trendy about a multicoloured jigsaw foam mat. Ideal Home never features a strategically placed Playmobil recycling truck or a statement Jumperoo, does it? You might as well forget whatever home-interior theme it was that you originally had in mind – unless you were aiming for ‘Plastic-tat Chic’.
The price of them is extortionate. Aside from the discount-stores-where-things-cost-around-£1 items (purchased in an attempt to placate the whingeing between Next and Boots), toys are preposterously expensive. I begrudge paying a small fortune for toys that are often quite basic. Once you’ve invested, there is also the danger that your child will lose interest in the TV programme you, arguably, should have bloody shares in, given the merchandise you own.
‘I don’t like Fireman Sam any more, it’s for babies.’
Say what? You’ve got to be shitting me. Time to start making noises about having a clear-out – he’ll soon reclaim them as his best toys ever …
I’d like to take this opportunity to say how terribly sorry I am to all my friends who became parents before I did. In particular, I’m sorry for buying your children modelling clay, craft sets and toys with gazillions of pieces. I thought these were fun activities you would get out on a rainy Sunday afternoon before returning them to their rightful boxes. I didn’t know. Forgive me. xx
* * *
‘Polly Pocket. No words can describe the pain of standing on that little cow in the middle of the night.’
Lauren, Cornwall
* * *
Things I Swore I Wouldn’t Do as a Parent (but Do)
‘Don’t you just hate it when parents do that?’ I used to ask James with a chuckle, discussing all manner of annoying parental habits, safe in the knowledge that whatever ‘that’ was, you would never find me doing it. I didn’t have kids back then, obviously. The joke is now on me.
I lift up my infant to smell his bum
Not a quick sniff of the general area but a deep, investigative inhalation of nappy aroma achieved by burying my face deep into the arse of his sleepsuit. Pre-children, I once heard a mum comment, ‘You know it’s not your own baby’s poo when it’s a foreign smell.’ I had a little chuckle to myself about how sad her life must be.
Three years later, and I’m pretty confident I could pick Jude’s nappy out of a twenty-strong nappy-sniff test. They should add that as a round to The Cube.
I refer to my husband as ‘Daddy’
(And no, this isn’t in any way kinky.) I have tried so hard not to do this, not to become one of those couples who are happy to exist purely as Mummy and Daddy. But, now and again, I let myself down and ask James, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Daddy?’ before looking around and realising the kids are in bed. And Daddy hasn’t even batted an eyelid at the loss of his actual name. Arghhhh.
I care less about what I look like
Not all the time – there are times when I care more. (I care quite a lot when I know I’m going to come into contact with people who knew me before I incubated two small humans, my worst nightmare being them thinking that I have ‘let myself go’.) But daily life with kids gets in the way of self-maintenance, and sometimes I neglect to shave my legs, lazily throw my hoody on again (the comfy one with the baked-beans stain) and find myself stood in the kitchen shovelling fish fingers into my gob straight from the baking tray. In those moments I conclude that, yes, I have indeed let myself go.
I tell lies
Sometimes, a lie is the only way to conclude things. ‘Oh no, look, the bakery is shut, sweetheart, so we can’t have any cakes today!’ spoken as I hastily steer one or other of my children past the open bakery because I have no parenting backbone and cannot be arsed to put my foot down with a no.
I have, at least, discovered I’m not alone in occasionally offering a slightly stretched version of the truth for the sake of ending an otherwise infinite conversation. A friend of mine recently posted the following transcript of a conversation she had with her three-year-old on Facebook, under the heading ‘I’m way too tired for this …’:
Chester:
When Daddy was a little boy, did he live with Granny and Grandad?
Me:
Yes.
Chester:
Where was I?
Me:
You weren’t anywhere, as you weren’t born yet.
Chester:
Was I big?
Me:
No.
Chester:
Was I little?
Me:
No.
Chester:
Was I in the jungle?
Me:
Yes. Yes you were.
I comment, ‘Gosh, she’s grown!’ every time I see the offspring of friends or family
I mean, it’s kind of a given, isn’t it? Kids grow. Daily. If you don’t see your goddaughter for six months, it is highly probable she will have got bigger. Regardless, I always feel the urge to say, ‘She’s getting so big now!’ and/or, ‘Look how grown up they both are!’ as a conversation starter at any social gathering. I’m really boring.
I talk crap. Actual crap
Engaging in detailed dialogue about things which are neither interesting nor particularly savoury has become a talent of mine. A firm favourite is a comprehensive chat with James about the size/colour/consistency of our off-springs’ excrement:
‘That was a nasty one, look it’s got like tiny black wormy things in it!’
‘I think that’s the banana coming out. It was like that last night, so I googled it.’
‘I much prefer it when they’re a bit more solid.’
‘Me too.’
‘Fucking hell, we’re sad.’
Perhaps we’ve resorted to this humdrum debriefing about nappy contents and other dull matters (when Jude had his nap/how much of his sandwich Henry ate at lunchtime/it having been ‘good drying weather’) because we’ve discovered that attempting any kind of grown-up conversation with small people at large is pointless.
Occasionally, we forget this lesson and start talking seriously about our work meetings/mortgage rates/weekend plans but, after being interrupted every third word and dodging toys that are being thrown at our heads, we forget what we were going to say anyway.
I bribe my children
‘I’ll never bribe my children,’ I once said. Ha ha ha ha. Bribery is actually the sole parenting ‘tactic’ I’ve mastered that seems to produce favourable results. I’m not alone in this: bribery is the backbone of
parenting for 99 per centfn1 of the population. Behind every well-behaved child there are Percy Pigs, right? The remaining 1 per cent are using some kind of witchcraft or sorcery.
Maybe we ought to stop being so hard on ourselves and just modify what we call this tactic; rather than bribing our children, we’re simply making use of coercion, negotiation and rewards. We’re teaching our children that their actions and behaviour have consequences, as in:
‘If you eat all your salad, you can have a biscuit.’
‘If you behave nicely at Hey Let’s Play, you can have a biscuit.’
‘If you let Mummy phone the insurance company in peace for a moment, she’ll give you a biscuit.’
Balls, there’s definitely a biscuit theme here. I’m genuinely having a pang of worry about the boys’ teeth now so, in future, I’m going to ration the biscuits brush them for longer.
I shout
At home. In the car. In Primark. I know it all looks a bit Shameless and it doesn’t ever solve the problem but, on a bad day, that’s just how I roll. It’s bloody difficult not to lose your temper as a parent. (See Just One of Those Days, here.)
The Unmumsy Mum Page 8