33. Top 10 Things to Look Forward to this Easter Break: A Reluctant Housedad’s POV

''An Easter bunny laid all these eggs, Dad. Hang on a BUNNY laid these eggs??.

Easter. A time for bunnies and chicks. Eggs and hot-x buns. Family-time and fun. And most of all – for those of that persuasion – a time to rejoice in the Resurrection. Cue sounds of needle scratching across vinyl! Hold your darned horses there, cowboy. The holidays may be fun for kids and fantastic for working parents to spend some long-overdue time with said children, but for us Stay-At-Homers, it’s a Busman’s You-Know-What.

A holiday, it ain’t.

I’ve been dreading Friday since I saw it etched in dripping blood on my three children’s school newsletters, written, no doubt by the teachers who have sweated said blood over the last half-term.

What on earth am I going to do with three youngsters whose three-year separations make their needs about as impossible to cater for as a vegan’s in a steakhouse? Their Successful Mother will be Working. Their classmates will be jetting off to far-and-wide. And I’ll be trapped at home…Relucting.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. I’m a Creative Bloke. In my Working Life, I’d stare at 100 blank pages of a Magazine-That-Needed-To-Be-Filled and fill it. Full of useful stuff. Full of entertaining stuff.

There were two heroes in my life. One was my Dad; the other was Ted

Putting together my list of the uncoolest albums from my youth (in my last post) got me reminiscing. There was one guitar (‘axe’ is the proper term) hero in my youth who shone above others. His name was Ted Nugent. He weilded his axe like a, er, weapon, producing the most headbanging, parent-annoying, dad-banging-on-the-ceiling-to-TURN-DOWN-THAT-BLOODY-RACKET-I-CAN’T-HEAR-MYSELF-THINK guitar solos the (tiny world I occupied) had ever heard.

I wanted to be Ted. Just look at him. You can see why, can’t you?

Not just an axe, but a flame-throwing gun-of-a-guitar

There was only one man I worshipped more than Ted, and that was my Dad. Because my Dad – as well as being a Real Man with a Proper Job which involved Getting His Hands Dirty was the law in our house. What he said went, no arguments.

Surely, the 5 uncoolest albums of all time? And they’re mine!

It took me a while to find these, but these are the albums of my youth. I was quite possibly THE uncoolest kid at school. I’d get beaten up by punks one day; by MoDs the next; by rockers the day after. And so the cycle continued, pretty much up to this present day in fact!

I know this is hard to believe from looking at my cool wife and cool children, so here – as I wait for my new dishwasher to be delivered – I present the evidence, in no particular order….

32. Wrapped in cotton wool: Why I’m so reluctant to let my kids out of my sight

'I'll be fine, Mum (cough, splutter) Just fine.'

Can you ever keep your kids safe? It worries me a lot, especially with the school holidays coming up. The youngest is always falling flat on his face when running after his brother but rather than let him learn from his mistakes, I shout after him: ‘STOP.’ And when he doesn’t stop, I grasp him by the hand and hold onto him for dear life, despite his struggle to release himself from my bony manacle.

Part of the reason for this is because he now weighs about the same as a big sack of potatoes. King Eddies. And my ageing back just can’t handle the strain of bearing his weight to or from nursery as he screams the place down after his latest Face-Meet-Pavement-Pavement-Meet face whoopsie daisy.

But the bigger reason is that I can’t bear to see him hurt. His tears drown my insides, turning them to mush. I would do anything to take the pain away, wish it onto myself. Give it to me, give it to me, I can handle it. He can’t.

Some of this paranoia stems from the pain I saw his big brother in when he was six weeks old. He had fluid on his lungs, and because he was so little, he couldn’t cough it up, clear it out. Child 2 became so breathless, so congested, that we had to call an ambulance. We took him to A&E and spent an anxious four hours as the doctors examined him, stuck things down his throat, pulled bungee ropes of snot out of his tiny frame, and then admitted him to hospital for a week.

My now-wife and I spent every waking moment by his bedside, giving hourly bulletins to his big sister’s dad. We’d avoided all eye contact with each other for fear of seeing what the other was thinking, and those thoughts were this: ‘Are we going to lose him?’

Our little boy was sending us different messages. He had tubes coming out of his nose, but despite his fragility, his eyes were always strong, always saying: ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to be fine. Honest. I promise. Swear to God. On a stack of Bibles.’

Parenthood, eh?

His little brother had no such issues with his health. He was born on the living room carpet as a David Attenborough documentary was playing in the background. He was strong and robust, emerged with a full head of flowing locks and a glint in his eye that said: ‘I’m going to be trouble.’ But he never has been. Except for the falls when he runs, and the occasional bout of Youngest Child Tyranny, which he exercises sparingly – thank God – to get his own way with his older siblings.

What better way to start the day than with a picture of a happy elephant!

This is Anne the elephant. You’ve probably read about her in the news. She was kept ina circus and abused by her trainer. What a lovely world we live in, eh?

Fortunately, her plight was exposed so rescuers packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus with trump, trump, trumpety trump, trump, trump trump!

Now Anne has a 13-acre enclosure all to herself at Longleat Safari Park.

And as you can see, she’s as happy as a sandgirl!

'My keys are in here somewhere'

After a hard day at the nursery coal face. Made me smile, anyway!

'Oooh, this cusion smells of ice cream!'

Child 3. If you can’t hack it, son, pack it in.

Movie legend Dustin Hoffman declares his love for the Scottish delicacy Stovies

Cross-dressing movie legend Dustin Hoffman has swapped Tootsie for tatties in this very funny spoof of a cheesy ad he made for an Amercian TV channel. In the original ad, Hoffman’s first words are: ‘Stories – we all spend out lives telling them, about this, about that, about people.’

But here, he declares his love for that Scottish meat and potato delicacy: Stovies.

31. A Working Wife on the trials and tribulations of having a House Husband

Working Wife Helen, a marketing exec with Regards Rainbow

Over the last couple of months I’ve been banging on about how tough life is being stuck at home, cleaning and ironing and looking after three kids since my wife and I swapped roles following my redundancy last June.

Other housedads have shared their experience, but so far we haven’t heard from a Breadwinning Wife who slaves away in the office while her husband irons the paper doillies.

Step forward Helen Davis, 45, a marketing and PR executive at Regards Rainbow (www.regardsrainbow.wordpress.com) who for the last two years has been making ends meet after her 44-year-old fella lost his job in the construction industry.

Their situation is different to that of me and my wife’s in that they don’t have kids around the house all the time, but it’s still an interesting insight into the dynamics between a couple when the man becomes the homemaker through no fault of his own.

For the purpose of this interview, a ‘housedad’ is a man who doesn’t have a full-time paid job. Regardless of whether his wife works or not, his domain is the home, not the workplace.

To read the interview click Continue Reading tag….

30. A poignant but (almost) perfect Mother’s Day

The way they were: Dad and Mum on their wedding day

Love never dies. Dad with Mum. She passed away the next day.

Mother’s Day was especially poignant yesterday. It was the first time my three brothers and I didn’t have a Mum. No cards to send, no flowers. No visit. That was the hardest part. We had no-one to visit. She died on December 21st last year after her struggle with Alzheimer’s finally ended. I wrote about it in earlier posts.

Betty – our mother – will never be forgotten, of course. She was loved by far more people than her sons. But her absence hit home especially hard yesterday. It was (or would have been) her birthday in mid-March and we still sent cards – to my dad – so he knew that we were thinking about him as much as her.

29. What does my dream mean?

I slept in late today. Yes, today of all days. I got up at 10.50am after a terrible night of tossing and turning. My mind was racing with all kinds of stuff until in the end, I settled. The last time I looked at the clock was 5am. Not good after a 3am lights-out the night before.

When I staggered down to the kitchen, my Successful Other Half was there, nursing a cup of tea. She offered me one and I gratefully accepted. Then I wished her a happy Mother’s Day and she smiled a half-smile. And then I apologised for over-sleeping.

‘Fine,’ she said.

Which means: ‘You’ve got some broken glass to crawl over.’

And then I remembered the dream I was having just before I woke up.

In this dream, my wife was a physiotherapists whose clients included many of the mothers at school. They all complained of aching backs and tried feet caused by the efforts of their labour bringing up their kids.
They used to rely on my wife before she got the job which resulted in us swapping roles and me becoming a full-time housedad four months ago. She’d massage any their worries, with expert fingers and wise counselling.
But with my wife at work, I now had to step into the fray. I had to become the physio she once was. So a succession of women lined up with their shoes and socks, baring their feet for me to soothe.
I was hopeless at it. Each one left hobbling in pain and uttering under their breaths.

‘Weird dream, eh?’  I said to my wife.

‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘It’s obvious what it means. You’re walking in my shoes and you think you’re failing at it.’

The fact that I had the lie-in this morning while she attended to the kids breakfast needs  may well mean she has a point!