the Great Escape

I know it's been a while, but I managed to get out! Went to North Wales for half term. Terribly exciting - I could almost hear the theme from the Great Escape playing as we headed out of camp on our big adventure to the outside world (luckily as I was only visiting my sister I didn't have to paralell park/lock doors/talk coherently, so it all went v. well).
And talking of the Great Escape, it was one of the theme tunes played by the military band at our Valentine's dinner night last night. Along with the Corps marching thingy (which, wierdly, half the people there hummed along to).
Now I'm not one for big romantic gestures, but even so, I don't think spending the evening tapping my feet along to some oompah music would really get me in the mood for hot lurving.
(I may have married a military man, but in many ways their psyche remains a mystery.) Not that this was an issue as Hubby is still in Afghanistan, of course. I did take along a tall, dark, mysterious and invisible man called Tarquin as my chaperone. But he turned out to be gay (should have guessed, with a name like Tarquin). Its a bit sad when even your imaginary escort is a sexual disappointment. Still, Hubby can take comfort from the fact that I can't ever be unfaithful to him if even my fantasy men turn out to be homosexuals...
And continuing on the Great Escape theme, last week may well be my last escape for some time as the family car (or bread van, as it's known) has suddenly started making this wierd rinky dink woodpeckerish noise (yes, that is probably how I'll describe it to the mechanic tomorrow and he will sigh and roll his eyes and say something incomprehensible-yet-somehow-innuendo-ish like "Ooh, sounds like your big end's gone, luv"), so I am utterly unable to escape at the moment. I am just praying the car actually makes it to the garage without blowing up.
Haven't mentioned the rinky dink woodpeckerish noise to Hubby yet, who will no doubt make face number three at the other end of the phone (the Basil Fawlty one, not the angry seagull or Captain Mainwaring one). And I don't want to be left with the image of his deeply furrowed brow and manically bulging eyes when he takes a sharp intake of breath and tuts about how I always manage to break things.
Tarquin never does a Basil Fawlty face at me. But then again Tarquin is absolutely no good in the sack. Oh, and he's not real, either.
Guess I am stuck with a broken down people carrier and a husband with a face from a 1970s sitcom.

We are all very excited because Twin 1 has learned how to wee both on the potty and on the super-dooper family toilet seat that I spent an eternity bidding on ebay for. The deal is that every time she does a wee in the correct place, all the children get a chocolate. They will get two chocolates for a number two, although this is yet to happen. However, I am quietly confident that it will: I think that chocolate, peer pressure, and big girls' pants with sparkly fairies on are a pretty big incentive to a two-year-old girl. Twin 2 is jealous, but I can't face double potty training and furthermore she is not to be trusted, as she finds nothing more hilarious than scuttling about in the nude and wee-ing in innapropriate places.
Tragically, the whole potty thing has been both the focus and the highlight of my week so far. I have barely made it out of the house, let alone to the exotic delights that lie 'beyond the wire'.
When our posting finally ends here, and they drag me blinking and quivering back into the real world, I will have completely lost the ability to lock my front door, parallel park, or have a conversation that doesn't revolve around poo, infant cold remedies or disturbed sleep patterns.

winter wonderland

All winter so far I've been hoping for snow, imagining how much the children will love it. I've had this vision of us all out in the cold, building snowmen, throwing snowballs for Dog and generally being rosy cheeked and wholesome.
Then, on Friday night it snowed, hurrah. How exciting!
Take a look outside, I said to the children on Saturday morning at about 6am.
And that was the start of it.
Son immediately wanted to rush outside, but I said best to get dressed first and have breakfast. Nobody wanted to eat breakfast because of the big snow excitement thing, and I started to mutter darkly about waste and breakfast being the most important meal of the day, etc (my parents would have been proud of me).
Finally got a bit of toast down them, only by smothering it in chocolate spread, and threatening no snow play unless some of it got eaten.
Son and Twin 1 then managed to get themselves dressed and in wellies in about a nanosecond.
Twin 2, however, decided she really didn't want to get dressed at all, that she would rather take off her nappy, wee on Son's bedroom carpet and then scuttle away, screaming.
So Son and Twin 1 were already outside, scraping snow (and probably a few chunks of rusted bodywork) of Hubby's car. I was trying to simultaneously get myself dressed, capture Twin 2 and win an epic battle of wills to get some clothes on, meanwhile yelling at Son and Twin 1 to get off the road and leave Daddy's car alone. And for God's sake shut the front door, all the cold air is coming in (I was thinking of the look on Hubby's face when he gets back from the war zone to a trashed car and an enormous fuel bill: it will be his angry seagull expression - one of my least favourite and just above his Captain-Mainwaring-and-the-tuxedo-disaster face).
Finally I made it outside with Twin 2, ready for the wholesome winter fun thing to begin, only for Son to sidle up, saying, Mummy it's really cold in the snow so I'm going in to watch some telly.
I think that was the moment when my icy wonderland dream finally shattered.
No, I said, you bloody well wanted to be outside in the snow and that's what we are going to do. And I huffed off down the street, carrying the still-screeching Twin 2 and with Son and Twin 1 trailing along behind, sniffing and complaining self-pityingly about cold knees.
Dog did a sort of cowering shamble at a distance, not really wanting to come out with Evil Mum and whingeing kids, but knowing that it may well be his only walk of the weekend.
I think in his secret Doggy heart he wants to be adopted.
And sometimes in my secret doggy heart I do too...

Families' housing meeting at the welfare centre today. Twins viewed it as a good opportunity to ask for as many chocolate biscuits as possible, in the knowledge that I was bound to capitulate simply to keep them quiet. This is a tactic they practised earlier on in the week when we went to Son's class assembly at school (the affect on them was probably quite similar to taking 10-year-old girls to a McFly concert: they screamed with pure adoration when Son recited his very important line from 'The elves and the shoemaker', spouting sprays of half-chewed chocolate jungle animals all over the yummy mummy in front).
Went along to the meeting at the welfare centre because a friend wants to get a new play park put in on camp. This is a good thing, as the current one is a soulless hole of metal frames and wierd springy things, whose main aim appears to be catching ambitious toddlers and sending them straight to casualty. I have been there once with all three children and had to have a very long lie down afterwards. So I'm fully behind the idea.
Unfortunately there were lots of other things that had to be discussed. At length.
Should we name and shame people who park with their wheels on the curb? What's to be done about the teenagers who drink alcopops in the play park in the evenings (I say leave them to it - kids that age have no concept of their own mortality, so let them down ten bottles of WKD and have a go on the killer climbing frame)? Why have married soldiers been using the skips that are only for the use of soldiers in the block? Are there enough dog poo bins? What's to be done about owners who don't clean up after their dogs?
At this point I managed to look outraged, but kept quiet. Decided it was best not to mention the time that Dog was caught short in front of the Brigadier's house and I found I was out of nappy sacks. Although to be fair, that was a long time ago. I don't think Dog has contributed that much to the current military turd crisis, mainly because I keep forgetting to feed him, so I think he rarely poos at all these days. Not quite sure how he is managing to sustain himself as I don't seem to have had to buy dog food for months. Maybe all those times when I let him out into the garden and forget to let him in, he's nipping out through a hole in the fence and skedalling in search of nourishment. Perhaps he's even got some other family leaving out titbits for him (quite likely, actually, as I know of one family on camp who leave out roast chickens for the foxes). The traitorous tart.
Eventually it was decided that a new play park was a good idea, and that one of the dog poo bins should be relocated.
So that was an hour and a half well spent.

There is something to be said for single parenthood. Don't get me wrong, I do miss my husband (in fact I had to take his dressing gown to bed with me last night as the bed really was too big without him), but certain aspects of life are way easier. Mealtimes, for instance. There's none of this slaving away making hearty, meaty man-meals, like cottage pie (which takes about twenty years to make and another thirty-five to wash up). Children are more than happy with a slice of pizza and a handful of chocolate raisins - preferably served up on a slice of kitchen roll to save any unneccessary washing up. Laundry is also easier: no green kit, no PT kit, no moaning about odd socks. There is nobody to complain about the biscuit crumbs on the car seats or the light left on in the hall. Or to get upset about not being able to find the scissors/blu tac/cheque book/car keys. And I haven't watched Top Gear for a whole two weeks now...
So although I do of course adore him with every fibre of my being, miss him like the desert misses the rain, etc. there are upsides!

mess'd up weekend

The weekend started with 'Fun Friday' - a misnomer if ever there was one.
On the last Friday of the month the officers' mess is open to families. The idea is that the parents have a quiet drink at the bar, whilst the children sit down nicely to pizza and chips and then, once they have eaten their supper, play nice calm games like scrabble or charades or something, while the adults have a bar snack.
Of course the reality is that big hordes of kids, manic from being cooped up in school all week, swiftly down a couple of cans of Coke and then swoop around en masse like a sticky red-cheeked tornado, jumping off sofas and kocking over anything in its path, be it toddlers or ornamental canons.
Meanwhile, all the adults prop up the bar, knocking back G&Ts.
Did I say all the adults? Oh no, that's right, all the adults except me. And possibly one other concerned mother. Both sat biting our lips with 999 on speed dial.
But the kids love it... and I'm willing to endure just about anything if it gets me out of having to cook and wash up.
Which is why I was back to the mess again on Saturday morning for brunch.
I let the children bring some toys along in the hope that they would play 'nicely' after our fry up whilst I enjoyed a cup of coffee, read the paper and perhaps had a bit of a chat about current affairs with a couple of other parents.
Before we even got there Twin 2 was screaming to the world because I had committed the heinous crime of asking her to walk for a bit as my arm was aching from carrying her. The meal itself was a morass of coco pops, scrambled eggs and plastic dinosaurs.
I do remember having a very brief conversation about the merits of Take That over Boyzone, and mentioning that the reason Robbie was everyone's favourite is that he looked as if he was "good in the sack", which I followed with, "I'd love to stay and chat but one of the Twins has done a poo, so we'll have to go."
I'm not sure where my wild optimism about these things comes from. There is always this gaping chasm between the idea of spending time in the officers' mess and the cold hard truth.

Twins have cottoned on to a sure-fire way of turning me from 'evil mummy' into 'nice mummy', simply by crying and saying "Need Daddy" or "Daddy cuddle". At which point I am liable to go all moist-eyed and say "Ah, are you missing Daddy?" and capitulate on whatever unreasonable demand they were having a tantrum about at the time. The result of this is that the eating chocolate vs changing nappies balance has begun to swing the wrong way. By the time Hubby gets back from Afghanistan they will have teeth like Mrs Miggins (from Mrs Miggins' pie shop) and bottoms like baboons.
Hubby will get the shock of his life when he gets home and is leapt upon my two foul-breathed ape-like creatures who insist that only he is the one they will accept to change their nappies.
I'm quite looking forward to it...