I’m not a big believer in twins creating their own languages. There’s been no evidence of it in our family anyway. They do, however, make up the odd nonsense word just like any other children. Hannah and Lauren’s favourite and most hard-wearing such word is “googy”.
Googy covers a whole range of bases. It’s a nickname! It’s a substitute for any other noun! It’s a fast-acting catalyst to monkeying about! For example:
Hannah: Googy!
Lauren: Yes, Googy?
Me/Nicola (through gritted teeth): Open… wide…
Lauren: What is it, Googy?
Hannah: Er… Googy! (helpless mirth ensues)
Me/Nicola (curiously unaffected by helpless mirth): Come here NOW and BRUSH YOUR TEETH!!
Googy has become one of those mixed blessings of parenthood. On the one hand, the girls just wouldn’t be their cheeky selves without it. On the other hand, they wouldn’t be such a pain in the arse without it either. Every now and then there’s an incident that swings the pendulum very much one way or the other. One such incident happened a couple of days ago, as I was still in bed. There was a little conversation going on just outside the bedroom door which I had the good luck to overhear:
Lauren: Googy?
Hannah: Yes, Googy?
Lauren: What’s the French for Googy?
Hannah: Er, it’s… (pause to adopt correct accent)… Gaugisse.
Praise be to Googy. Where would we be without it?
Another little faux-innocent needling session is going on as I type, on a par with the “STOP CURTSYING!” incident. They’re mostly mumbling, so my attention was only drawn to it when Hannah shouted angrily, “NO, LAUREN! MY BABY HASN’T GOT FAT EYES!” The conversation went on something like this:
Me: Lauren, stop annoying Hannah.
Hannah: But Daddy, but she said my baby has got fat eyes!
Me: Lauren, just stop that.
Lauren (grumpily): OK. (Back to a sotto voce mumble) She’s got a blue coat, Hannah.
Hannah (mumbling): Yeah, she’s got a blue coat. And red cheeks.
Lauren: And pink lipstick.
Hannah (in delight): Yeah, pink lipstick!
(Pause)
Lauren: And fat eyes.
Hannah: NO LAUREN!! DADDY!! LAUREN SAID MY BABY’S GOT FAT EYES!!!
Me (distractedly): Girls, can you just keep the noise down while I blog all this…
As a Man of a Certain Age, one of the most significant events for me in recent years was obviously the release of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. I was particularly pleased by this cinematic landmark because Hannah and Lauren had, until that point, only seen the new episodes, and I was growing increasingly anxious that they might come to accept them as The Star Wars Films, with the originals seen as some kind of quaint curiosity for old duffers. When I think back to my parents commenting that Tom Baker wasn’t the real Doctor Who, it still seems like a lot of fuss about nothing. But if I just change a few of the words – change it to me, for example, insisting to obliviously shrugging daughters that Ewan McGregor isn’t the real Obi Wan Kenobi – the situation suddenly takes on a horrible gravity, of the kind that could keep me awake at night.
So, it was clear the girls needed to be correctly indoctrinated as soon as possible. Well in advance, I alerted them to the fact that the DVDs would be released shortly, and managed to arouse some kind of passing interest, albeit in the arrival of what they called “a new R2-D2 film”. Clearly there was no time to lose.
On the day the DVDs arrived I came home as early as I could from work and the girls and I sat down, with an appropriate sense of ceremony, in front of the telly. By about half an hour later, any thought of educational progress had been abandoned and I would happily have chewed my own leg off for just a few hours on my own with my DVDs, my memories, and a kitchen foil tube for a light sabre. Here’s what happened.
As you can see from the picture on the right, Hannah and Lauren have lovely long blonde hair. Part of my routine every morning is to comb this and tie it back into a pony-tail. (Well, two pony-tails – one each. But I digress.) The purpose of doing so is supposedly to keep their hair clean throughout the rigours of the school day. And yet despite this, the combing process is invariably a tearful one due to the presence of foreign matter in their hair. After years of painstaking analysis I am yet to positively identify the nature of this foreign matter, although I have reduced the list of candidates to the following shortlist: congealed treacle; tree sap; an unidentified school dining hall substance; epoxy resin.
Every morning, then, we go through the same basic conversation:
H/L: Ow Daddy! Ow! Ow! It’s hurting!
Me: Keep still! I’ll be finished soon! [combs faster]
H/L: OW-WUH! [starts crying]
Me: Nearly done. How do you get all this sticky stuff in your hair anyway?
H/L: [tearful] I don’t know, Daddy!
L/H: [i.e. sister of the combee] I didn’t do it…
Me: Well girls, if you want to have such lovely hair you’ve got to keep it away from sticky things, OK?
H/L: [through sniffs] OK, Daddy.
Me: Because if you’ve got lovely hair we need to comb it to keep it clean. If you don’t want to have your hair combed, you’d need to have short hair like me.
H/L: OK, Daddy, I promise.
Me: Good girl. And then there’ll be no tears tomorrow.
[Repeat on daily basis]
The girls are currently going through a lengthy process of choosing their future husbands. I applaud their forward-thinking attitude on this one: marriage is a big step and not one to be entered into lightly.
A few weeks ago, Lauren announced that she was going to marry Daniel Lally because he’s “a lovely chap”. The next morning the two were inseparable in the playground before school, and over the following days Lauren took a number of love tokens into school for Daniel, in the form of drawings of them getting married and such like.
Within a few days, Hannah threw her hat into the ring and announced her intention to marry Daniel Lally. Happily it turned out that that was OK because Lauren had now set her sights on George Wadsworth. Daniel doesn’t seem to get much say in this, but then I don’t think he can tell them apart anyway, so he seems happy either way.
Since then, the girls have been round to their friend Emily’s to play, on which occasion Lauren was spotted creeping into Emily’s big brother Chris’s room and kissing him. The following day it was announced over breakfast that Hannah (yes, Hannah) is now going to marry Chris and Lauren is back to Plan A: marrying Daniel.
Understandably, we’re having a lot of trouble keeping up with all this. However, the subconscious mind is a great window into the heart’s desires, and on two occasions now we’ve gone to tuck the girls in late at night, to be informed by a sleeping Lauren that she’s “dreaming about Daniel Lally”.
Whoever said the course of true love ran smooth?