A father's ponderings on twins and their devious ways
There are a couple of words that Hannah and Lauren use at the moment that I wanted to record somewhere before they pass out of use and we forget about them.
Fizzy is descriptive of food that is either spicy or sharp. Examples would include chicken tikka or salt and vinegar crisps. (“Ooh, Mummy,these crisps are a bit fizzy!”)
Twinkly is what happens to your hands or feet if you sit on them so long they go numb: when you get up they “go (all) twinkly”.
We’ve just got a new phone at home. Being the kind of person I am, once I’d set it up I went upstairs with my mobile and rang home to check it could be heard OK from all over the house. I let it ring a few times then hung up, at which point a little voice chimed up from downstairs: “Daddy, the phone was ringing!”
Being the kind of person I am, I of course replied, “What, like this?” and redialled to make it ring again.
“Yes!” called the voice.
“Stop, phone!” I shouted back and, lo and behold, the phone stopped ringing. I redialled again.
“Come on, girls,” I called, “1… 2… 3… stop, phone!” As if by magic, the phone stopped. I just had time to reflect on the fact that nobody had joined in with the “stop, phone!” when the voice called up again.
“Daddy, can you stop that now please?”
Now, I’m not being ungrateful here for the wonderful gift of our two daughters, but it wouldn’t have hurt to show just a bit of amazement, would it? When I were a lad, any kind of technology used to amaze me half to death. Whenever we drove into town, Dad would get the ticket at the entrance to the multi-storey car-park, the barrier would raise, but the car would never move forwards until Simon and I had shouted “Go, Mickey Mouse, Go!” from the back seat. Even now, a father myself and holder of a driving licence for the past 15 years, I’m not 100% sure how that all worked. It was just magic.
I think it’s fair to say the threshold of amazement is falling. If somebody had made the phone ring and stop with the power of their voice when I was 4, I would be worshipping them as a god to this day.
My Mum and Dad tell a wonderful story about waking up one morning, when Simon and I were two, to the delightful sound of children’s laughter from the next room. They lay in bed listening to our shrieks and chuckles until eventually deciding to peep in and see what was causing such enjoyment. What they found was each of us standing over a full potty, gleefully flinging handfuls of poo at each other. There was poo everywhere: on us, on the carpet, on the walls, on the curtains.
How I’ve laughed every time I’ve heard that story! Ha ha ha! Imagine that! Poo everywhere! Ha ha ha! I even mentioned it in my best man’s speech at Simon’s wedding. How everyone laughed! Ha ha ha!
Fast forward 28 years (a phrase I’ll be using a lot in this blog). Hannah and Lauren were about 18 months old. I got a phone call at work from my wife Nicola at around half past three. “How soon can you get home?” she asked urgently. I offered a guess that I could leave by five. She said, “Just get here as soon as you can. It’s Poo-ageddon.”
I left work immediately.
When I got home, the house was eerily calm. I noticed a draught coming in through the kitchen and went to investigate. The back door was open, but there was nobody outside: just two dripping wet highchairs and the hosepipe hanging from the outside tap. Coming back indoors I noticed a strong smell of disinfectant in the kitchen and dining room.
I finally found them all in the bathroom: girls in the bath, Nicola wearing apron and rubber gloves, and with a smear of something across her forehead that, under the circumstances, encouraged me to keep my distance. It turned out that by a terrible stroke of fate, both girls had simultaneously suffered from a nasty bout of diarrhoea whilst wearing ill-fitting nappies. By the time I’d arrived home, the results had been efficiently eliminated from the girls’ clothes, hair and eyelids, the highchairs, the floor, the table and the walls. Nicola was just about coming round to seeing the funny side.
All in all I count this one as a lucky escape for me from the demons of my pre-school past, but if Nicola has to cope with too many of these on her own it can only lead to an unhealthy blame culture. Let’s face it: it’s my fault. They threw poo because I threw poo, and someone decided I had to pay. Simple as that.
I was trying to get the girls out of the house this morning for school. It’s a mission at the best of times, but today it’s snowing which means (a) they’re extra-excited, and (b) they need more layers applying before we can leave. As I was trying to get their woolly hats on without disturbing their hair bobbles, and guide twenty wriggly fingers into four pairs of over-sized gloves, they fell effortlessly into one of those modes where one of them does something perfectly harmless just to piss the other one off.
Picture the scene: the hall of our house is approximately 2m square and contains two doorways, a cupboard, a wooden chest, the bottom of a flight of stairs, me, two small girls and around 300 pairs of shoes. I’m stumbling around trying to zip up coats, apply hats etc. Lauren, now fully equipped and ready to go, is standing right in front of Hannah, wearing a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression and bobbing up and down holding her skirt. Hannah, who I am trying to get ready, is ignoring all my barked commands because she’s too busy stamping her foot and shouting “LAUREN! STOP CURTSYING!!!”
The only thing that gets me through moments like this without having to go for a nice lie down is the fact that I know Simon and I were just the same, if not much worse, when we were that age. We’d use anything to annoy each other, and it was always something innocuous so that the one doing the annoying could shrug innocently at Mum and Dad when it came to the hour of reckoning. I’m just disappointed at our lack of range that we never thought of curtsying.
Hence this blog. It’s therapy, really. Please bear with me.