Bedtime

Bedtime used to be a breeze in our house. Both kids have always been solid sleepers (a fact about which I suspect I may on occasion have been somewhat smug - boy is that karma now coming to bite me in the ass), and for four blissful years after he graduated from cot to bed Small Child seemed to have a cast iron belief that once he was in that bed, there was no possibility of leaving it until the morning - almost as if convinced that the floor was electrified and would shock him if he made contact with it.

Times have changed.

Bedtime (or "%^&@#$ bedtime", as it has come to be known chez nous) has somehow, out of absolutely nowhere, become a Groundhog Day-esque horror show, an absurdist game of whack-a-mole in which you tuck one child in to find the other hanging from the banisters, or rifling through the fridge, or covered in toothpaste, or naked. And once that offending child has been rescued/cleaned/dressed and appropriately chastised, you turn round only to find the other one doing something equally transgressive. And that cycle is repeated, again and again, until a point where there really is no alternative but to lose your temper - spectacularly, volcanically lose it - and doors are slammed on crying children sitting alone in the darkness, and everybody feels like they have failed, and apologies are made, and the child, feeling wronged and forgiven, takes the opportunity to push his or her luck and begin it all again.

Take last night, for instance. Last night was a doozy.

7.30pm: I get home from work. I am tired - bonecrushingly, viscerally, physically and mentally exhausted - I've run home, totalling 20km for the day and passing 434km for the month. The kids are watching Teen Titans Go and demanding jelly beans. My refusal is met by tears (her) and bile (him). I feel loved.

7.45pm: Mr H gets home. I ask the kids to go upstairs and brush their teeth. They have to be asked (nicely, I might add) nine times before they actually do it.

8pm: Mr H gets on a conference call and exhorts the house to please moderate their volume. I wonder at the relentless optimism required for it even to have crossed his mind that any such moderation might be an option. I read Smaller Child the compulsory four stories (which have been the same four stories, every day, for the last four weeks - but that's another story of suicide ideation altogether), and ask her to get in bed, before I realise that she is inexplicably wet. A long and fraught negotiation ensues over what would be a suitable replacement for her sodden top (me: anything that fits will do; her: absolutely nothing will do). We finally, after inevitable tears, settle on an oversized Ibiza Rocks t-shirt. She's clearly not convinced.

8.10pm: The cup containing her milk is wrong. WTF? It's the Finding Dory cup with the pink lid - which is the right cup (or has been for the last five days at least). After tearful remonstration from Smaller Child, I ascertain that of the two Finding Dory cups we own, HERS is the one that has the pink lid AND the (tiny) picture of Nemo on it. THIS cup is not HER cup. It is her lid, but not her cup. She cannot drink milk from any other cup. My (I think reasonable) argument that since the light is going off anyway she won't be able to tell the difference, is met with more tears. We are on the verge of hysteria, in fact. I decide the fight isn't worth it, go downstairs, replace the cup.

8.15pm: Twenty-five minutes behind schedule ("'Schedule'!!! HA!!!!") I tuck Smaller Child in, plead with her to stay there. She looks sleepy. I am hopeful. I am stupid.

8.20pm: I am reading The BFG to Small Child. He's throwing Lego around the room, making this more of an exercise in task completion than interaction. A crash comes from upstairs. I put down the book. Smaller Child is walking down the stairs, already crying in anticipation of my displeasure. I feel somehow chastened by her expectation of anger. She's sent a bag of coat hangers skittling down a flight of steps - noisy but no harm done. What was she doing upstairs though?! Forget it, I don't want to know. I cling to the brittle straw of hope that maybe the guilt at having already broken the rules will keep her in bed this time. Yep, stupid.

8.40pm: I am still reading the BFG. How long is this sodding chapter??? "Twenty-three pages", Small Child informs me, turning from his Lego looking gleeful and victorious. "Oh," he says, looking through the half-open doorway, surprised, "She's out of her room. And she's naked". He's half right - the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt is gone but she does at least have trousers on. I call time on the BFG. I pick her up, deposit her in bed without ceremony, slam the door, go downstairs, sit on the sofa breathing heavily and thinking about wine.

8.41pm: Guiltily I am soothing Smaller Child's racking sobs. She puts the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt back on. "I won't do it again mummy". Surely, this time, she won't? (Stupid, again.) I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine. It's really the only way.

8.50pm: Noise from upstairs. I sit on the sofa with my ears pricked, wondering whether it's at a level where I need to deal with it (other than by drinking more wine, of course). Feet on the landing. Shit. One of them's out of their room. Climb the stairs. It's him. He's in her room. I tell him to get back in his room, close the door. She's wailing again. He's stolen her favourite toy. I retrieve it, repatriate it. The crying eventually subsides.

9.20pm: I've finally managed to eat dinner. Mr H has finished his call. More noise from upstairs - rustling, a dull thumping, the sound of feet again. Resigned, I climb the stairs for what feels like the thousandth time, as if going to the scaffold. Smaller Child is standing on the landing. She is wearing butterfly wings. From the waist down, she is stark naked. She looks at me, my mouth hanging open, my expression caught somewhere between rage, disbelief, and an almost irrepressible desire to burst out laughing. "I need a wee," she says. I have by this point made a clear choice to travel the path of least resistance this evening. I pick her up, plonk her on a toilet. She looks at me. We stay there together, silent, eyes locked, for maybe five minutes. She doesn't need a wee at all. Stupid, see? I take her back to her room, tuck her in for the fifth time. The entire contents of her wardrobe are on the floor. I pretend I haven't seen it.

9.40pm: Mr H has gone out. Small Child is downstairs. "I'm hungry". I tell him there's nothing I can do about that at this stage in the day, that he should have eaten his dinner, that he should go to bed. He ignores me, goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, complains about the broccoli to chocolate ratio it contains. I shepherd him back upstairs, shut his door, rest my forehead against it, count to ten.

10.30pm: Small Child is downstairs. Again. "I want the cat in my room". Why is he still awake?! Despairing, I think about going to bed myself, the only surefire way to end the cycle of bedtime hell other than leaving the house, which may or may not end it but, from the perspective of the absent parent, is a merely philosophical question akin to that of the tree falling in the wood. Instead, I try to explain to him, as I have done so many times before, that it is late, that it is grown-up time, that I have had a long day and I'm tired and I just want some peace and quiet, and can he please just go back to bed and stay there. "But mummy," he says, "I'm basically a grown-up already. And anyway, don't you want to spend time with me?" There's nothing like an emotionally manipulative sleep-averse six-year-old to make you feel like utter crap.

11pm: I hear Small Child's door open upstairs. "Mummy..." he says. I give up and go to bed.

What feels like five minutes later, it is morning. Smaller Child is up first. She is wearing an entirely different outfit to the one I last saw her in. Not for the first time in the last 12 hours, I pretend I haven't seen it. Downstairs, she demands bacon. He, of course, is still asleep, having been awake until probably gone midnight, doing god knows what. I leave to run into the office, the cycle starting again.

Writing this now, I wonder whether this recurring bedtime nightmare is some kind of twisted rite of passage imposed on me by the cosmos, trapping me, like Bill Murray and Punxutawney Phil, inside an inescapable vortex of mundanity and ridiculousness on repeat, day in day out, until such time as I get it right.  Lord knows I have tried. I've tried starting the bedtime process earlier, tried starting it later. I've tried discipline, I've tried leniency. I have read Rainbow Fish thirty times in a row and not complained about it (much). I have substituted fun bubble baths for functional showers. I have weathered the seemingly endless nightwear-selection debate with a smile glued to my face, over and over again. I have found the Nemo cup, washed it, replenished it, handed it over cheerfully while cursing inside. I have climbed the stairs so many times I am seriously contemplating moving into an apartment. I have in the darkness trodden on Lego, got Shopkins wedged between my bare toes, so often I've lost count. I've cajoled, pleaded, negotiated, bribed, threatened, yelled, cried. Nothing works. Give her an inch and she'll take a mile, but say no and you are faced immediately with tears; and as for him, well, the problem with him is that, when all's said and done, he basically just doesn't give a shit.

So, bad mummy/good mummy, present mummy/absent mummy, happy mummy/sad mummy... I've worn all the hats, and none of them had a rabbit inside. And thinking about it now, thinking about where that leaves me, I realise that although I may have no choice in or control over my feral offspring's nocturnal hijinks, I do have a choice as to how I let it affect me. So, as of now, I choose to enjoy it. I choose to interpret their egregious bedtime behaviour as a demonstration of love - to believe not that they want to torture me (which is what it mostly feels like) but that they want to spend time with me (which, in fairness, is probably much closer to the truth, no matter how questionable their methods). After all, who knows how long that will be the case? For sure it won't last for ever, even though, at 10 o'clock at night when you're wiping baby lotion off the traumatised cat, fishing books out of the toilet bowl, or trying to find the right goddam Finding Dory cup for the hundredth time, it may feel like it will never end.

In the meantime, I will cling to the hope that it's a phase, that we will emerge from this storm just as unexpectedly as we found that we had sailed into it... probably straight into another one, but one step at a time, hey?

And if, on occasion, that hope falters too... well, there's always wine.

Pre-July jitters

It's the eve of the 500km challenge and I am feeling more than slightly nervous, but at the same time very eager indeed to get going and start chipping away at that daunting target.

I've spent the last week weighing up the relative benefits of Strava and Nike+ and, being fundamentally technologically illiterate, I have not been able to reach any kind of decision so I'm gonna use both (yeah, dumb, but forgive me my option paralysis, it's been a stressful few weeks). I've signed up to the July distance and climb challenges on Strava so if you are going to join me (please do!!) then if you join the distance challenge too I can see how many kilometers everyone has done in aggregate, which I hope should be fun! So far I have friends here in Singapore, in Oxford, in Germany, and even my lovely mum in Somerset pitching in, so it is a global effort!

I'm also going to wear a pedometer, more than anything really just to see whether I can hit a million steps in a month - kind of a scary prospect when you think how damn hard it is to hit even the 10k recommended daily target, let alone more than three times that target (*panics*).

The idea is going to be to run about 16km a day, probably to and from work, on weekdays, and longer distances at the weekend. I'm going to split those longer distances up into an early morning (7am-ish) and a late afternoon (5pm-ish) run on each day of the weekend, both around the 10km distance. I will post on my Facebook page (D4D: 500/31 - please like it!) every Friday where and when I will be starting each of those weekend runs, so anyone who wants to join me can come along. Hopefully this will also have the side benefit of forcing me out of bed on weekend mornings, which I anticipate will be problematic even in the absence of standard overenthusiastic Friday night wine consumption. Those who know me will be (in some cases painfully) aware that I am not a morning person. In fact, as my alarm went off today and it dawned on me that it will be 6am starts every single day for the next 31 days, I could have cried. I think in fact the early mornings are going to be more of a challenge than the distance!

That said, a lot of people have asked me how I have trained for this. My answer to them has always been "well, I only decided to do it last week, so I've not really had a chance to train, but it will be fine, I run a lot". It only very recently (i.e. yesterday) occurred to me that this is not actually currently true. It is not true at all. In fact, according to my running app, I ran 27.5km in the whole of June, and - gulp - 8.52km in May. So, this should be... um... interesting.

Bearing in mind my fundamental lack of preparedness I guess the best I can do for myself is an early bed, rather than spending five hours making an explorer costume for a six year old who will in no way appreciate it. Sadly that ship has already sailed, but at least before I set off tomorrow morning I will get to see Small Child in a pith helmet covered in butterflies, which should hopefully keep me giggling to at least the halfway point.

0 down, 500 to go...

Dollars for Dave: a new challenge

Recently I posted an update on my Generosity page about Dave's long road to recovery from his osteosarcoma. I imagine everyone reading this will know that in January of this year I shaved my head to raise funds to help pay for state-of-the-art medical treatment for Dave, involving removing the cancerous bone in his leg and replacing it with an electromagnetic telescopic implant that will grow with him as he gets older, both enabling him to walk and removing the need for any further invasive surgeries.

But as with all surgeries, state-of-the-art or not, there is risk, and following a minor corrective procedure to realign the implant, Dave contracted an infection in his leg. That infection proved to be resistant to most antibiotics, and so Dave has spent the last week in hospital on IV antibiotics in order to save his leg from this infection. He will need to take these drugs for at least six weeks. Those antibiotics cost $200 a day. Two hundred dollars, every single day, for another five weeks, is a lot of money, even before you factor in the doctors' bills, the hospital stay...

We were hugely blessed to have been able to raise a very substantial amount of money through the enormous generosity shown by people during the original fundraiser. Those funds covered the cost of the implant, the surgery, Dave's second series of chemotherapy, and part of the cost of the corrective procedure. But that cash is long gone, and we are struggling to be able to meet the financial demands of Dave's treatment regime.

Which brings me to the new challenge.

Originally when I realised I was going to need to try and raise money somehow, I had contemplated the idea of seeking sponsorship to do a run - specifically, the Angkor Wat half marathon last December, which I had registered for a couple of months previously. But when I thought about it, this seemed rather like asking people to sponsor me to go on holiday - nobody was going to pony up to see me run a distance that I could do on a Sunday before brunch. I needed something more, something shocking, something challenging, so I wrote off the idea of running, and I shaved my head instead.

But I can't shave my head again (or at least it wouldn't have the same impact second time around!), and the more I thought about it the more I realised that I had approached the problem in the wrong way. The problem was not running per se - the problem was that me running a half marathon was not a challenge. So I needed to find a running target that was actually difficult.

Which is why I will be running 500km over the month of July. Yep, five hundred kilometers in 31 days. Does that sound like enough of a challenge? It's nearly 12 marathons, 23.5 half marathons, almost 17 kilometers a day for 31 days, and I will be doing it while also doing a full time job. I will have to give up red wine, seriously compromise the servicing of my West Wing addiction, and get up at 6am every day. It will be horrible. But if it enables me to help pay for Dave to get better, it will be worth it - as going bald was worth it, five months ago.

So, how can you help? Well, there is an obvious way: please sponsor me! Lump sum, an amount per kilometer completed, whatever - everything helps, however small the amount may be. You can do this through the Generosity site or if you'd like to send money by another method just drop me a message through Google+ and we can figure it out. One thing I would say though is that if you do want to donate, then the sooner the better - we are facing an urgent cash crunch as the medicine is needed right now and we can't allow a gap in treatment.

I am aware, though, that I am asking the same people who were so generous the first time round to sponsor me again. So if you can't give cash, there is another way you can help: lace up your own running shoes, think about what distance YOU can do in July, and ask your friends to sponsor you. Not a runner? Even better! Everyone has to start somewhere, so commit to 10k, or 20. If you can't run, jog, and if you can't jog, walk. Can you get a team together, from your work, from your gym, from your kid's school, from anywhere? Join up, get off the sofa, and run with me, wherever you are in the world: let's create a global community of people running together to help this kid beat the crappy hand he has been dealt. And if you're in Singapore, come keep me company and run with me - it's gonna be pretty boring spending fifty hours over next month pounding the streets on my own. Every Friday I will post on here and on the page I will be setting up on Facebook where and when I will be running over the weekend, so please come along and cheer me up!

If there's one thing I learned from January's experience, it's the amazing power of human beings acting collectively for a cause. One person contributing ten dollars may not seem like a lot; a hundred people doing that begins to become a big deal, a game-changing deal; for Dave (and, to be completely honest, for me), a life-changing deal. So, can you give me ten dollars? Can you give me ten kilometers? Can you get your friends to sponsor you a hundred, two hundred dollars, for those ten kilometers, for twenty? Whatever you can give, and whatever you can get people to give, will make a difference to our effort to help Dave recover and to rebuild his life. And the more people we can involve in this effort, the bigger the difference we will make.

With heartfelt thanks from all of us for your generosity to date, and hopefully to come.

Isabelle xx

The big night: less than a week to go!

As announced on my Generosity site, the termination date for my barnet has been set. Next Wednesday, January 13, at 10pm upstairs at Harry's Boat Quay, my hair and I will part company. Adam's and my combined fundraising efforts are now approaching the $25k mark but I am hoping to see that grow substantially before Wednesday. Come on people, what price vanity?! I've even allowed my brother-in-law to call me Kojak without physically assaulting him (though to be fair, he lives 7,000 miles away. If he was in the same postcode I doubt he would be so lucky. Keep running James!).

Harry's have very generously provided a fantastic venue free of charge and will be giving us a percentage of their total takings from the night as a direct cash donation to our fundraiser - so please do come down and eat and drink as much as possible!

The evening will kick off with a quiz starting at 7.30pm. The tables (teams of six) are filling up fast so please do contact me through Google+ or on iclaisse@yahoo.com if you would like to book one. If you haven't booked a table for the quiz, you can of course eat and drink downstairs at Harry's before the doors open upstairs - but please let them know that you are there for the fundraiser so that they can give you a wristband and your bar spend will count! Mr Hooker will be acting as MC; if his last performance as quiz host is anything to go by, it should be pretty entertaining and involve impromptu singing while standing on chairs followed by an apocalyptic hangover for poor Mr H the morning after.

We will then have a charity auction starting at around 9.30pm. We have been given a variety of awesome auction items including a fantastic Specialized racing bike, hotel packages from Unlisted Collection and Lantern Sri Lanka, dinners in restaurants including Bistecca, Donna Carmela, Stellar, and The Line, yoga memberships at Sweatbox, bootcamp packages from ooberfit, vouchers from Simone Irani and Hannah Lee, massage packages at Footworks, booze provided by Urban Remedy, Drinks & Co, and of course Harry's, some beautiful interiors items from Singapore Trading Post, and hopefully a variety of other lots that I will put together over the course of the next week by shamelessly whoring myself and my extreme new haircut across the island. Please bring your chequebook and get as drunk as possible while still remaining able to (a) raise your hand; and (b) sign your name.

And finally... *drum roll*... the main event. Adam, Mariza and I will be losing our locks immediately after the auction, at around 10pm. I'm still trying to find someone to wield the clippers so if anyone knows a hairdresser with a sadistic streak and a portable barber's chair please let me know.

And after that I plan to drown my sorrows sufficiently comprehensively to make my reflection in the mirror the next day blurry - although I guess the tears will probably do that too (*plays sad tune on world's tiniest violin shamelessly to extract sympathy and cash from potential donors*).

So I hope it will be a fun evening and that we will raise a lot of money. And that brings me back to the serious side of this, which is why we are doing it all. Dave has now had his third and final round of chemotherapy before the surgery, which is currently scheduled for the end of January. The impact of the chemo drugs on his little body is just heartbreaking, as you can see. But the end of his treatment is in sight and I am so grateful to every one of you who has reached out, for helping us to make that treatment a possibility - and I look forward to the day when I can write a post on here attaching a photo of Dave looking like he looked twelve months ago when he was here in Singapore: healthy, happy, and living the active life that in an ideal world every child, wherever they are, should be able to expect as a birthright.

So thanks for your support, whether through the Generosity site or in person next Wednesday. I have been immensely touched by the kindness and humanity of people's responses to our campaign. In what has been a very dark and difficult time, a light has been shone on our lives by the generosity - both the financial generosity and the generosity of spirit - of friends and strangers alike.

Postscript: I am having some issues with my Generosity site. If you can't make the payment system work, please try Adam's site instead! And if you want to donate but would prefer to use a lower-tech method (or trying to make Generosity work is making you want to defenestrate your IT hardware), you can send a cheque made payable to Robert Driver marked for my attention at 9 Kreta Ayer Road, Singapore 088985. 

Thank you!

Dave, or Why I am Shaving my Head for Charity

This is Dave.

Dave is ten years old, and the son of my helper Mariza. Mariza has lived with us since Small Child was four months old, so almost six years now. Her three kids live with family in the Philippines while she works, hundreds of miles away, to support them.

This is Dave posing with my kids when he and his brother and sister came to Singapore and stayed with us for three weeks over Christmas last year.

This is an x-ray that Mariza showed me one fateful Friday evening three months ago, unsure of what it meant.

This is Dave six weeks ago, under anaesthesia after going in for a bone biopsy to confirm whether the malformation in the bone shown by the x-ray was, as suspected, cancer.

This is Dave last week, having had two rounds of chemotherapy. He has lost all of his hair. He has a catheter in his chest. He is in and out of hospital for blood transfusions and vitamin injections as the chemo medication has lowered his white and red blood cell counts and made him even more ill.

The bone biopsy on his leg showed that Dave has an aggressive osteosarcoma in his left tibia. Not only does he have cancer, but Dave has also lost the global healthcare postcode lottery by being in the Philippines. He has no insurance, and the state does not pay for his treatment. The cost of that treatment has so far run to tens of thousands of dollars, and he hasn't even had surgery yet. That surgery - a surgery which, if it goes to plan, would leave him cancer free, with total mobility in his leg, and without the need for further operations - is expected to cost over fifty thousand dollars, including the purchase of a smart implant which will replace part of the bone in his leg and grow with him as he gets taller. Factoring in the scans, the appointments, the chemo, the other drugs, the transfusions, the hospital stays, the operation itself, and all the many many other costs I am privileged enough never even to have had to think about because my totally-taken-for-granted health insurance policy covers all of it without question, in all likelihood it is going to cost around a hundred thousand dollars to make Dave whole again.

I need hardly say that this is a significant sum of money. Indeed, for many people, Dave included, it is a life-changing sum of money. It would take Mariza years to earn that amount, which is why so far we have been paying for Dave's treatment ourselves. But with the surgery in the calendar for the end of January, the time has come to accept that we also need help.

And this, as I imagine you may have guessed, is why I am here, talking to you about this, sharing these distressing images, this distressing story. There is a big tradition of fundraising through sponsorship in the UK - though much less so here in Asia - where people do crazy things and others contribute money to charity to do it. When it became apparent that the money we would need to get this surgery was beyond what we could afford ourselves, I thought long and hard about what on earth I could do to raise funds which was sufficiently insane to encourage people to donate, while not being actually either life-threatening or so time-consuming that I couldn't fit it in around work. Whatever I chose needed to be extreme enough to make people sit up and take notice, and to believe me when I say that this is something that I am passionate about, that I feel I really need to push the boundaries to achieve. Identifying options for this was not easy, largely because a lot of the stuff that people generally consider to be ridiculously hardcore and worth sponsoring, I would do on a weekend for fun.

Which is why, after lengthy consideration, and much dissent from those around me, I have decided that I will shave my head. I have about a foot and a half of hair that I reckon would take at least two years to grow back, and I am willing to whip the whole lot off and be a skinhead if it means this kid can not only live, but have the surgery he requires to live the life he would have had if cancer hadn't come and run him over.

So, it would mean the world to me (and obviously also to Mariza and to Dave) if you would please please please sponsor me. Even if you can only afford a token amount, every contribution will take us nearer the target of being able to pay for this surgery. I have set up a page on Indiegogo through which it is quick and easy to contribute, and recognising that this is a charitable fundraising drive, the platform does not take a commission on donations, so every cent you give will go straight towards the cost of Dave's treatment.

If you are in Singapore in January, you will be able to bear witness to the shaving - not only of my own head, but also those of Mariza herself and of my friend Adam, who are both taking the challenge too. We will be having an evening of drinks and a pub quiz in a central location at the end of which, hopefully emboldened/anaesthetised by a few glasses of wine, the three of us will all go under the clippers. We haven't set the date yet but I will post on here once we have made the arrangements.

I need to add some fine print here as I want to be completely transparent and upfront about the mechanics of this. This is not a donation to a registered charity. Apart from anything else, I don't have the time to set up a charity before the money will be needed to pay for the surgery. What I have set up through Indiegogo is a charitable crowdfunding site, which effectively acts as a temporary bank account for donations before the funds are transferred to me personally. I will then be transferring that money from my personal bank account to the hospital and to Dave's doctors to pay for his various treatments. Mr Hooker has offered (ahem, been enlisted) to be accountant for this, as it is way beyond my financial capabilities (which are unfortunately zero, maybe even slightly below zero). If you want to donate but you have questions about this process (or indeed about Dave's medical condition or the treatments he is having - we are in direct contact with his surgeon), please feel free to message me directly and I will be able to answer any questions you have. Finally, it is possible, though certainly not probable, that we may raise more cash than we need, and in that scenario I will donate all the surplus to a children's cancer charity here in Singapore.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for donating. As I am sure you can tell, this is a cause very close to my heart and I hope it has touched you too, that you can see that this could happen to any of us, at any time, and that you can find it within you to help - even a small donation will help us get closer to our goal.

Merry Christmas everyone xxx

Jingle Hell

Today is Friday 18 December, and I am beginning to panic.

I have a tree. That alone seems like a huge achievement this year. I also even managed to dig out last year's IKEA wreath, hang it up, find fresh batteries for it, and turn a blind eye to the appropriacy (or otherwise) of festooning my front door with red lights.

I say "I have a tree", but actually, I have two trees. One large one that I decorated ("because it's so big that you won't be able to reach the high branches darlings!" and "No, this decoration - this handblown glass ball filled with peacock feathers and lovingly transported all the way back from Cape Town - is for the big tree, but here's a lovely decoration you made in nursery when you were two, and look! It's got your face on it!") and another small one that the kids decorated/the ghosts of day-glo Christmases pasts barfed over, opinion regarding said tree being polarised between those who are under the age of seven ("IT'S JUST SO BEAUTIFOOOOOOL MUMMY") and those who are not ("MY EYES, MY EYES!!!" *withdraws self to lie down in the dark for a while*).

This not particularly heartwarming tale of two trees and the crappy selfish parenting involved in their decoration represents pretty much the extent of my Christmas preparedness, which at this stage in proceedings is alarming. So I figured, in the time-honoured spirit of festive procrastination, that I would make a list of all that I had achieved thus far, and try to spur myself into action that way - by scaring myself shitless.

Presents bought: probably about 30% of what I need
Presents bought which have actually arrived: 0
Presents I have bought for myself: 2 5 oh ok fine... about 7
Presents I have bought for myself which have arrived: all 7 8
Festive food purchased: nil

Cards sent: zero, which is neither an improvement or a decline over last year (or the year before, or the year before that)
Daydreams about mulled wine indulged in: 9,376,210 (having one right now in fact)
Desire to go shopping: literally a negative value, which is amazing bearing in mind that I've always thought that if I was an X-Man, shopping would be my superpower (not that useful, I know, when you have to save the world, but I can only work with what I've got)
Minutes spent on Pinterest drooling over home made wreaths, imaginatively sculpted mince pies, and caring handcrafted Christmas gifts: 576
Minutes spent making wreaths, caring handcrafted Christmas gifts, and/or mince pies of any description, imaginative or otherwise: 0
Minutes spent daydreaming about eating mince pies: 1 (right now)

I could go on, but I imagine you've already got my drift.

This happens pretty much every year. I start to get excited about the festive season in July (when, if Facebook is to be believed, other, frighteningly organised, people begin their preparations). This is followed almost immediately by forgetting altogether that Christmas even exists, and then waking up with a dry mouth and sweating palms on 1 December and becoming almost immediately so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ubiquitous Christmas overplanning porn peddled by the likes of Pinterest that I end up stuck, hyperventilating, in a stalemate of decision-making failure. So no, I have not crocheted a sky full of sparkly snowflakes. I have not put on wellington boots and yomped the woods foraging for dead stuff to arrange artistically into an alternative, eco-friendly wreath. I have omitted to order personalised Christmas pyjamas/Santa sacks for the small people (actually I do feel a bit bad about this one, since they're cute and I do generally love an excuse to internet shop), nor have I made my own Christmas pudding, complete with hand-picked organic fruit which I put in a mason jar with a bottle of cask-aged calvados three months ago to infuse. I've done bugger all, in fact.

Oh Christmas. I love you, I hate you. You warm me with all the fuzzy family feeling of togetherness only for me to remember that many of those people are thousands of miles away. You fill my head with impossibly pristine images of a picture-perfect Christmas morning, all shining-eyed, rosy-cheeked children, novelty knitwear, and chinking crystal flutes of Bollinger, when in my heart of hearts I know it will be fights, protracted explanations of the meaning of fairness, and a frantic search for AAA batteries followed by a tsunami of discarded gift wrap and several hours spent picking fossilized play-doh out of the furniture, most likely all viewed squinty-eyed through the fug of a Christmas Eve-induced hangover. But I love you anyway. I am a big-time sucker for you, Christmas. I just wish you weren't so much bloody effort.

Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and it's now the evening of Saturday 19th December. Three hours (which felt more like three years) spent on Singapore's main shopping drag this afternoon, and the Hooker Christmas is in better shape (though in fairness it couldn't have been much worse than it was this time yesterday).

Presents purchased: approximately five hundred

Presents wrapped: all of those that have arrived (*high fives self and does small smug happy dance*)

I am physically and mentally spent. My feet ache, my head aches, I've got a weird little twitch going in my eye muscle, and a slight blurring of vision which a small part of me is concerned may indicate a brain haemmorhage brought on by the noise, darkness, and strobe lights of Abercrombie and Fitch but could of course just be because it's Saturday night and I've not had a glass of wine yet. But I'm done, and Christmas will happen after all. I even have mince pies. Yes, they came from Marks & Spencer, in a box, and there's nothing imaginative about them. But nobody likes mince pies anyway. I'll just throw them away in February, like I always do, with the mixed nuts and the mini Christmas pudding.

So, I'm finished, in every single conceivable sense of the word. Finished physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. But also, thank the Christmas gods, finished with planning, shopping, wrapping, fretting, failing. So, Merry Christmas everyone. May your puddings be full of silver, your glasses charged with your favourite festive tipple, and your children better behaved than mine (which will almost inevitably be the case, more's the pity). You'll find me slumped under the tree (the big one, naturally), clutching an empty bottle of Hendricks in one hand and a roll of sellotape in the other, lying on Lego bricks, play-doh in my hair, while the Minions movie plays on repeat in the background. 

And it will be perfect - not Pinterest's vision of perfect, for sure, but perfect nevertheless.

Trophy Parent

This week, I've been engaged in something of a power struggle with Small Child.  This is not unusual, as Machiavelli himself could have learnt a few things about manipulation and emotional blackmail from my firstborn. But normally these things are short-lived: either I give in, in order to put a stop to the incessant whining before my ears start bleeding, or he forgets about it and moves on to something equally annoying.

No such luck this time, though, and in the absence of any sign of either side capitulating or even conceding ground, Small Child and I have taken to the trenches over... a trophy.  The trophy in question is a trophy only in name and shape: it's a worthless piece of crap that caught his eye at the checkout in Giant, the World's Worst Supermarket (TM), where everything rejected by Poundland goes to die. Piece of crap this trophy may be, but the plinth on which the plastic cup rests is emblazoned with the worlds 'WORLD'S GREATEST' and as a consequence Small Child, who seems genuinely (and sometimes quite touchingly) to believe that he is in fact the world's greatest everything, could want absolutely nothing more in the entire universe. And so this fucking trophy has been the beginning, middle, and end of Every. Single. Conversation that I have had with Small Child in five long days. And I should probably mention here that Small Child talks a LOT. In fact, he never stops talking. So I have heard a lot about the trophy. Enough about the trophy. Far too bloody much, in fact, about the damn trophy.

Obviously he talked non-stop about it after he first spied it on Saturday, but I opened my eyes on Sunday morning to find his little face literally inches away from mine, willing me with every fibre of his being to wake up. "Mimi", he said. "Mi. MI. When are we getting the trophy?", while I speculated (not for the first time, nor, I am quite sure, the last) whether it is ever appropriate to tell your six-year-old to bugger off. On Monday I got home from work and he ran to greet me. "What a lovely moment", I thought. He looked up at me through narrowed eyes. "Go to Giant and get me the trophy", he said, "and THEN I'll give you a hug". *Oh*.  In a voicemail I received from him yesterday, he informed he that he would tell me about his day when, and only when, he was presented with the trophy. By this point it was evident that the trophy issue would not be going away any time soon.

It's not about the money (a whoppingly overpriced $4.90, which would however be a paltry amount to fork out for even a moment's peace). It's the principle of the thing. I will willingly admit (see above) that I do on occasion (ahem) give in to the war of attrition that he puts up when he wants something. Usually, though, it's ice cream, or biscuits, an in-app purchase, or something on the TV - something transient, that calms the waters and then is gone, out of sight down the shitty parenting drain where it will never be seen or spoken of again. But if I give in on this one, this trophy will sit there, screaming 'WORLD'S WORST MOTHER' to me and 'YOU CAN ALWAYS WIN IF YOU'RE IRRITATING ENOUGH FOR LONG ENOUGH' to him, like a toxic horcrux of bad parenting, for all eternity. And clearly I cannot have that.

So I have reached a deal with Small Child, who is, after all, the offspring of two lawyers and whose irrepressible impulse to negotiate is doubtless buried somewhere deep in his genetic coding. The trophy will be awarded on a daily basis, in return for him telling me each day five new things, none of which can be how many points has has managed to score on the latest level of Candy Crush. I had hoped that this way, perhaps I might get even a fleeting insight into how he spends his days, which (for once in all seriousness) as a full time working mother I really do feel like I miss out on - particularly since Small Child has a severe case of that almost universal form of infant amnesia which every day wipes their mental slates spotlessly clean on the bus home from school.

On the basis of this agreement, yesterday the trophy was finally purchased and I got home to a beaming Small Child. To say he was thrilled with his new four inch high made in China piece of plastic (FOUR DOLLARS NINETY!!! Jesus.) would be an understatement of epic proportions. He could barely stand still he was so excited. He looked like I did the first time I walked into the shoe department of Bergdorf Goodman. "Come on then," I said. "Tell me five new things." He cocked his head, looked at me in a considered way for a moment, then trotted off to the table before returning with a slim volume. "I got a book out of the library today, and it's full of new things I can tell you." He showed me the cover. It had a cow on the front. It was a book about... milk. Twenty pages filled with fascinating facts about milk.

I didn't really have much of a response to that (other than what six year old takes a book about MILK out of the library?!?!  In fact, why is there a book about milk in the infant library?! And, while we're at it, who the fuck WRITES a book about MILK for infant age children?!?! The mind boggles) so we read the milk book. We read the milk book twice, in fact. And then we played a game where everybody had to name as many things as they can that are made from milk... all of which actually wasn't as bad as it sounds (particularly since I won, ha! Take that Mr. H and your inferior knowledge of dairy products). And which may not have been exactly what I had in mind (quelle surprise - when does that ever come to pass?!) but which I guess, after all, was better than being slumped mindlessly in front of Paw Patrol for the five thousandth time with Smaller Child concernedly inquiring "Mummy sleep? Mummy dead? Mummy sleep?" over and over in my ear.

Still, it's hard to surpress the feeling that once, just once, it would be nice if Small Child didn't win.