The Gray Monk

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March 07, 2006

Ah, memories ....

Surfing the blogosphere is often fun, sometimes sad, and sometimes very entertaining. Recently I visited the blog of One Happy Dog Speaks and was amused by her stories of her youngest child - who obviously has an adventurous streak and a very enquiring mind. It put me in mind of the fun my own children gave us as they grew through the crawling stages to toddlers, then the Terrible Two phase and on to the Fearsome Fours and so on.

At risk of embarrassing them all, I decided to share a couple of amusing incidents from their early years ....

One of the funniest (and there were certainly many to choose from!) involved our youngest, aged around 18 months. An active child with a very enquiring mind, if any of the three was going to poke a stick into something disasterous it would be her. The piece d'resistance was an evening when I had been on duty for a long weekend (Working in the Emergency Services as a senior officer I had to be "On Call" at the HQ two nights in each week and one weekend in three - starting at 0830 on a Friday and coming off duty at 1730 on the Monday) and was just settling, glass of welcome beer in hand with my wife and the two older kids in the living room so we could catch up. The older pair were engrossed in whatever was on the telly and my wife was filling me in on the weekends events ( I usually had to be selective about some of my weekend as quite a lot wasn't very pleasant!).

Eventually we noticed that our youngest was missing from the group - and so were the two dogs and the cat! One dog was a Kaffrarian Hound - a term used in the family for a mixed breed - with a thick pelt, curly tail and jaws like a crocodile hidden behind magnificent mustacheos and goatee beard, the other a pure bred Golden Spaniel with, as far as we could work out, only enough brains to get her from one meal to the next. The cat, a silver tabby, actually ruled both dogs even though she was a quarter their size. We knew they had to be somewhere in the house since the front door was closed and the rear door was a stable type with the lower half closed - in fact I could see this from where I sat in the living room. Apart from the telly the silence in the rest of the house told us there was something afoot!

My wife went to check the playroom upstairs, and I walked to the kitchen. Mystery solved, there was our daughter sat in front of the grocery cupboard, the cat and two dogs sat, crouched or lying in radial positions around her. The entire kitchen floor, daughter, dogs and cat were now all snow white - just eyes and mouths showing through a complete dusting of cake flour - around 10 pounds of it! All I could think of was how funny it looked - and laughed.

On seeing me, the dogs shot straight into their beds under the table, the cat gave me a basilisk stare and daughter shot from seated, to crawl to fast toddle - straight past me depositing a fine dusting of flour on my dark uniform trousers as she headed for her mother, through the dining room and into the living room - a fast moving cloud of flour trailing behind her and depositing on floor and furniture with equal impunity. She collided with my wife returning from the hallway and covered her in the fine white mess in an instant. The dogs added their share as they rushed to join this interesting little body - you never know when toddlers might shed something in the way of "edibles" do you? - and our dark brown furniture and the deep pile of the carpet in the dining room also absorbed the deposits.

It took weeks to clean up the remnants, the vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost shortly after. Part of the problem was that we both collapsed in laughter every time we thought of it for some time afterwards.

All three kids learned fairly early that the dogs made good waste disposal units - but they also learned fairly swiftly that if you held the ice cream cone still at dog level for more than 5 seconds - you lost the ice cream! It was constant battle of wits between my wife and I trying to get the kids to eat a balanced meal and the kids feeding what they didn't like to the dog conveniently parked in the "fall out" zone beneath the high chair. My son was the most adept at that one!

All three were - and still are - individual and inventive. They provided us with huge pleasure and fun as they grew each finding their own ways to make sure that the saying "Insanity is hereditary - you get it from your kids" was proved true!

Watch out kids - its my turn!

Posted by The Gray Monk at March 7, 2006 12:26 PM

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Comments

Posted by: vw bug at March 8, 2006 01:33 AM

Posted by: Audrey at March 21, 2006 01:10 AM