Little Nutter is merrily running around the garden as I type, having smeared banana into his face.

This is considerably more sensible than it first appears - for several reasons:

1. Bananas are freely and readily available in the fruit bowl. There is no restriction of access to the fruit bowl, and it can easily be reached by creatures less than four feet tall.

2. A pleasant, fruity smell.

3. Fingers taste much nicer when you have been using them to daub bananas onto little faces. (N.B. This is only applicable to little creatures who suck their fingers or thumbs.)

4. As the day wears on, the banana becomes steadily darker in colour, matching the ambient light and making Little Nutter harder to detect in the twilight and full darkness.

Darling Wifey’s return was a great relief. Little Nutter has stopped standing next to her favourite seat, pining silently and refusing to let me sit in it. Little Madam has stopped trying to put ribbons in my hair, and started on her mother again. And Tiny Flirt is all grown up now. All in just ten days!

Little Nutter is currently sitting on a rocking elephant in the playroom, wearing Darling Wifey’s boots and a cowboy hat and shouting “Howdy-doody!”

Last night, after posting on this blog, I took Little Madam and Little Nutter with me on a couple of errands. We ended up in the supermarket buying something for our dinner - and I bought them both a gingerbread man.

At the checkout, I unwrapped these treats and handed them over. Little Madam chirped happily, “Thank you Daddy!” but Little Nutter, as usual, said nothing. I did, however, get a bright smile with full eye-contact . Delightful.

Cue Perfect Parent at the next checkout, “You really should make your son say ‘thankyou’ as well.”
My reply, “We will work on the ‘thankyous’ when he can talk properly” didn’t satisfy her.
“Typical useless dad.”

Red rag to bull time.

What can be done about these people?

Bless me, father, for I have sinned.

Last night, Mother-in-Law’s-Tongue threw a birthday tea for Little Nutter - which was very nice of her. And afterwards, Little Madam had a sleepover. So I had an evening with just Little Nutter, who by 6pm was so overstimulated that he didn’t fall asleep - he just passed out in the car. He didn’t even stir as I changed him into a clean nappy and PJs and deposited him into his bed. Yes, I said “into” his bed - for the first night in eighteen months, he didn’t sleep on the floor.

Whilst he was asleep, I phoned Mother-in-Law’s-Tongue to arrange for her to have Little Nutter as well for a while this morning. “I need to mow the lawns and clear up the flower beds. It’s a job that I can’t do with children around, and I can’t leave it too late. If you could just look after the children for four or five hours…?”

She swallowed it - hook, line, sinker, rod and copy of Angling Times.

The jobs took about ninety minutes. Then I drank some coffee, ate some toast, and read the newspaper from cover to cover without interruption. Bliss.

Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Happy Birthday Little Nutter, Happy Birthday to you!

So many of our friends have a sense of humour - oh, how I have laughed at the presents! A toy chainsaw, noisemakers, a toolkit. By the end of the weekend I predict that every last stick of furniture will be destroyed, and my ears will have imploded.

Oh, and the person who sent the chainsaw - I bet you went to university! You forgot to write any indication of who you are anywhere on the parcel. All we have is a London postmark.

Deary deary me.

First, a word to all those parents who are keen on their child’s education…

I had appointments for 90 parent conferences after school on Monday. Every last one of them turned up. If the last parents I saw said that I spoke to them in Arabic, I wouldn’t be the least surprised (although if they said it was fluent Arabic, I don’t think my language tutor would believe them!)

Please have pity for the teacher!

Anyway, when I left for school in the morning, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue took charge of Little Madam and Little Nutter, but did ask me for a small favour. (My heart sank!) “Can I borrow another key, please? I have lost the set you lent me.”

I only had one key left for the entire house - mine. But what else could be done? I handed it over in the same way that the condemned man hands over the cigarette butt.

So, at 8pm, head spinning, throbbing and melting out of my ears after a full day of classroom combat and 90 parent-teacher interviews, I parked the car in the flowerbed and staggered to the front door, absent mindedly fumbling for a key. None. Bugger. Ring the bell.

Fifteen minutes. 8:03 to 8:18 pm, non-stop bell-ringing. The doorbell battery went flat.

“Were you ringing long? I was cleaning your cupboards. Why do you have French fly spray?”

Because we don’t like French flies!

I am going insane.

We went shopping for Little Nutter’s birthday presents today. He will be three on Friday.

First, this involved bathtime - the usual affair of naked children running riot around the house for fifteen minutes shouting “SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH” whilst the water goes cold, then jumping in and displacing as much water down daddy’s shirt as possible. Shampooing is fun, as Little Madam is allergic to it and Little Nutter likes to eat it. And bathtime always finishes when Little Nutter stands up to pee in the water, and Little Madam launches herself vertically out of the water, screaming “Ewwwwwwww!”

Then we had a round of musical chairs in the car as the pair of them argued about who got to sit in the middle seat in the back. Well, I say argued - I mean wrestled.

At Burger King, Little Madam lost her stuffed Hedwig, and whilst I was searching for it Little Nutter wandered over to another table and stole some bloke’s Mushroom Double Swiss. The bloke was understandably quite angry, but thankfully his wife was in control of the situation - especially when Little Madam announced to the entire cafe at the top of her voice that her little brother couldn’t speak because he has Autism. The staff wouldn’t let me pay for another burger to replace the bloke’s lost meal, and offered Little Nutter another toy - but he was quite suspicious of them - he thought they were trying to confiscate his rightfully stolen burger.

If the Burger King bags were big enough, I’d have worn one over my head.

Then on to WH Smith, where we could spend some birthday gift vouchers, kindly donated by aunts and uncles. Walking through the DVD department towards the children’s section, Little Madam observed a young couple examining some music videos, and shouted out loud, “He’s got his hand on her bottom! That’s rude!” At least this time I wasn’t the most embarrassed person in the place…

Finally, we stopped at Toys-R-Us for a nice, big Tonka Toy
and a box of Lego.

Just look at that truck. It has levers on the side that tip up the back, and we bought the extra bulldozer attachment for the front. Lights flash and engine noises reverberate and wheels go round. It’s a big, noisy brute of a toy, and Little Nutter was ecstatic. He held it all the way round the shop. We had to lift him up with it at the check out, because he wouldn’t hand it over. The nice lady at the checkout offered to take it out of the box for him, which distressed him until he realised what she was doing - and he then became so excited he danced and fell over.

His birthday isn’t until Friday, but even I’m not mean enough to hide it from him until then. Right now he is eating his dinner out of the back of it. He didn’t want a plate.

When we sat down to eat, he picked up his sister’s Hedwig and handed it to her - saying her name. Champagne tonight - just a shame Darling Wifey wasn’t here to hear it.

Dinner with the In-Laws. Mother-in-Law’s Tongue had promised us a meal this evening, after which all I would have to do is bring Little Madam and Little Nutter home for bed. Grumpy Grandpa needed to borrow my car for a week, so that needed sorting out… just loads of annoying little bits & pieces to organise.

Every time I went near a computer I called up the flight tracker to check on Darling Wifey’s progress. The map looks pretty cool on a classroom’s wall-sized PC screen, although it did encourage a few very stupid questions from the kids.

“What’s that, sir?”
“A computer screen.”
“Should we copy it into our files, sir?”
“If you think that a radar map of the North Atlantic is relevant to your notes on the political situation in First Century Palestine, then yes you may.”

Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and Grumpy were also in a flat panic about Little Nutter’s nappy. “His poo is bright red! It must be full of blood!” Flat panic! Doctor’s surgery shut! Half an hour on the phone to the NHS Helpline talking to a nurse! “See the doctor tomorrow evening.”

When I got him home, he had filled his nappy again and, yes, it was scarlet. But there was also a piece of paper in it. I really didn’t want to read the paper, but printed very distinctly on it was the word “Crayola.”

Little Madam had been looking for the red…

Helping Darling Wifey to pack for the USA this evening, we were wondering what we should do about her aerosol bottles of stuff. Having not flown much in the past decade (honeymoon in 1993; er, that’s it!) I thought it would be easiest to search the internet to see if there were guidelines…

Search engine: Boolean search criteria, “aerosol +aeroplane”

Results: “how to make an aerosol bomb…”

Reassuring, eh…?

We definitely need to move house at some point. But I won’t force Darling Wifey to quit the job she loves; I have worked in miserable environments for far too long to force her out of a happy one. So she is jobhunting, and can afford to be very fussy indeed, and in the meantime I will be getting the train to York every day. It’s less than 40 minutes, with a cooked breakfast, fresh coffee and a free newspaper. Bliss.

Everyone keeps commenting on the amount of work I could get done on the train. Are they crazy? Why do they think I have a GameBoy Advance?

Anyway, yesterday we visited the tea room capital of England: Harrogate. Just take a look at the photos on the site… And unlike York, Harrogate house prices are sensible. We can actually afford a house there.

The housing market is insane anyway. No-one sells family homes any more. They are all trying to sell “designer modern living” and have watched too many telly programmes that tell you how to increase the value of your house with a lick of paint and decking in your garden.

So your assignment for this week is this: prepare a brief for an estate agent (I believe that the Americanism is “realtor” or something) to find a family house for two adults, three children (one with ASD) and a cat. “Open plan,” “designer living,” and all other marketing gibberish will earn them a slap: find us a pleasant house with rooms and walls and a child-friendly garden (no ponds, must have sturdy fences and childproof locks on the gates) and we will spend every penny the bank will lend us. Given the stubborn density of some of the agencies we have encountered already, you will need to use short words very forcefully.

We won’t settle on an area until Darling Wifey has found a job that is good enough for her. And I won’t let her sell herself short. But having said that, given her reaction to the place, it’ll probably be Harrogate.