butting heads

Well, I would have hoped that after such a long break I would have some truly wonderful things to post however I am sitting in the living-room singularly uninspired since my sinuses are full of gloop and my hair, folks, my hair is full of cat sick. Yes, you heard it right, the cat has just thrown up in my hair. OK, yes, so I have washed it out but not really to what I’d call my own satisfaction and so there is a nice steaming bath waiting for me, after I wash it out a third time in the sink.

The reason the cat has just thrown up into my hair is that the frog had a craving for fast food and picked up a carton of chicken on the way home. The fact that this chicken smelled mainly of vinegar didn’t deter our dust-bin of a cat from clambering onto the frog’s chest and getting between him and his own plate so that he could steal what he felt to be rightfully his share, which he then threw up quietly into my hair about ten minutes later. This without even having the grace to make any of those gulping noises that polite cats make to warn one they are about to lose their K-Fry into one’s newly washed locks.

He is now lying peacefully beside me, unlike the spud who has been up twice already demanding a bottle and then demanding to fall asleep curled up in my lap, no mean feat given the size of this child. While he was falling asleep the first time he mumbled a few little things (duguyduguy…ehhhh) and reach sweetly up to run his fingers across my cheek and then through my hair, which, as it was soaking wet and cold from the last washing, woke him up sufficiently to require another 5 minutes to settle him down.

He had a good day today, the spud, starting off with a play-date in the house of a much better-off little boy who has a vertiginous pile of toys that go ‘beep’ and do things and cars one can ride on and numerous other items which can distract 4 little boys for sufficient time for their mothers to drink an entire cup of tea each and eat a cake. Following this triumph he ran wild in Homebase followed around by his tired mother and then had a sound nap followed by a brick-by-brick deconstruction of his abode.

He’s entered what his childminder delicately termed his ‘wrecker’ phase, which basically means that he is deconstructing pretty much everything. He has, for example, a book with a little beeper in it that you press at strategic points in the story and yesterday I entered the nursery to find the book in shreds and the beeper neatly extracted. I’m not sure what’s more annoying, that he tore the book to shreds or that he is now to be found wandering around the flat pressing the damn beeper over and over and over again. He’s getting much more difficult to please and significantly more difficult to placate in times of strife, which are also becoming more frequent.

Where-as a few scant months ago all I had to do was to put on the big ‘no’ face to make him stop doing something awful, now I have to not only make the face, the sound and the gesture but I have to make it several times. When I have finally counted to ‘3’ and gone to remove him bodily from whatever he was doing, he no longer just comes with me and moves on to something else – no, now we have an argument about it which starts with him shouting at me and trying to keep doing whatever it was; continues with him digging in his feet and becoming all elbows and shoulders trying to get rid of me and finishes with him running on the spot with his eyes shut, his fists clenched and his bottom lip out like a plate, all the while grizzling and complaining and, sometimes, shouting. Finally, he sits down and cries and has to be lifted bodily away from whatever it was and then distracted by something new and non-problematic.

Luckily this is not as frequent an occurrence as my head-aches would lead me to believe and we do spend more time laughing then otherwise. Today we discovered that if I butt my head into his tummy and growl, it is an hilarious jape, worthy of falling over helpless with laughter. Oh yes. Even more hilarious when said head is covered in cat sick. And on that note, I leave you for my bath.