Cuteness abounds

Well, I’ve seen some cute things in my life. I’ve seen my own newborn babies, (funny how your own are so gorgeous, whereas other peoples'...). I’ve seen baby rabbits, and ducklings. Our next door neighbour has just got a 9-week old puppy. That’s fairly darn cute. It’s a cockerpoo (cocker spaniel poodle cross). Is that just in America that they come up with these clever cross-breed names, or are they doing that in England too?

Anyway, what else have I seen that’s cute? Nativity plays - I’ve watched a few of those. Once my two boys, aged about 1 and 4, fell asleep arm in arm. Naked toddlers wearing wellies - they’re pretty cute. Small children trying to say long words: hospital, or ridiculous, for example. Small children using grown up words for body parts. Kids wearing brand-new school uniform on their first day. Baby socks. The first unbelievably small sleepsuits that my babies wore when they were born (which, yes, I’ve kept). Their early scrawly sentences, written in mixed lower and upper case letters, with illustrations of gangly people with smiley faces.

Yup. It’s fair to say that I’ve witnessed plenty of cute things in my life. I’ve even embraced the word ‘cute’, and use it instead of the word ‘sweet’. But… nothing prepared me for seeing a 7 year old girl in soccer gear. My 7 year old girl in soccer gear. Yes, 7-yo has taken up soccer, and as if soccer shorts aren’t cute enough on a 7 year old bottom, she also wears knee-high socks, diminutive shin pads, and petite cleats. ('Cleats' translates as 'soccer boots', or I’d better say 'football boots', else someone will correct me). Pink and black cleats! Heaven. Even for someone like me, who so staunchly resists the infiltration of pink into all aspects of a girl’s life.

It was that opening sentence “Well, I’ve seen some cute things in my life” that first made me see myself as a country singer. By the time I’d got to the end of that paragraph, I was imagining Iota on a high stool, legs crossed, strumming her guitar wistfully, crooning into a microphone, in a smoky bar in a small cowboy town some place. I was trying out rhyme schemes with ‘cute’ (‘my guitar is my lute’, ‘I also play the flute’, ‘I have a pet newt’, ‘I’m in my birthday suit’), and before I knew it, I’d written a ballad.

A Ballad to my Daughter Playing Soccer

Well m' neighbor’s just got hisself a small cockerpoo
His front lawn is covered with a load of doo-doo
That mutt is so adorable, half poodle half cocker,
But the puppy ain’t a patch on my li’l girl playing soccer.

I’ve been to Hardy’s birthplace, a-down there in Dorset,
I’ll think of a rhyme here, though I might have to force it,
Twee cottage with a thatched roof, twee door with cute knocker
But no, nothing near so cute as my gal playing soccer.

A thing of beauty’s a joy forever, said ol’ Johnnie Keats
He was thinking of m’ daughter, in her size 2 pink cleats.
I’ll be standing on the sidelines, ‘mongst fat moms and thin dads,
Watching her run by, in her sweet li’l shin pads.

In your soccer clothes, My Honey-pie, you look awful purty
And I’ll take out an opponent if she tackles you dirty,
If I were an Aussie, I’d sure say you were beaut
But I’m here in America, so I’ll just call you cute.

I’m off to Starbucks right now, for my tall decaf mocha*
I hope I don’t end my days in Davy Jones’s locker
Ah’m just an ol’ sentimental and somewhat agin’ rocker
Who died of a cute attack, when her daughter dressed for soccer.

* I know, I know. Mocha and soccer don't rhyme, unless you have a British accent. How about 'So please don't be a scoffer, and please don't be a mocker'? Happy now?

Top tips for a crafty Christmas

I might have been a preschool teacher in another life. Trouble is, it involves too many preschoolers in close proximity for too many hours of the day, and these days, too much filling in of forms and assessing which child has mastered which skill and when. Don’t get me started. But the little hint that gives me away is this: I love pottering about doing crafty-type things with small children. Actually, I love doing them without small children, but I didn’t know that until I had small children. Now I have small children, they are the props which make it possible for me to fiddle around with cotton wool, foam shapes and glue, without feeling silly. Of course now I’m in America, I could take up scrapbooking, which would probably fill the need, nurture the talent, help me express whatever creativity lurks behind the enjoyment of glue, shapes, googly eyes and pom-poms, but I can’t quite see the point of scrapbooking (sorry, all you dedicated scrapbookers out there), and I do have at least a few years left of small children before I have to turn my pottering about into something more credible. Maybe by then the phase will have passed.

Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.

Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.

The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.

You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).

The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.

The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.

The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?

Hurrying along

Words. They’re lovely things aren’t they?

When I lived in England, I would hurry. Or hurry up. Then I moved to Scotland and found myself scooting. “I must scoot”, I would say. I would scoot to the Co-op, which Husband and I called the Coop (we’re so amusing). Scooting to the Coop had a very pleasing feel to it. Scooting to school felt good too. It was for occasions such as these that school English lessons taught me the word alliteration.

Now in America, I hustle. I like that word. Hustle, hustled, hustling, hustle. It even sounds like what it means (there’s a word for that too, but I’m not going to use it – one word about words is enough showing off).

You’ve no idea what hustling can do for morale. Watching my son play soccer, for example, I hear another mom shout “Come on boys, half-time’s over. Let’s hustle.” She sees seven small boys in orange shirts and black shorts, who need encouraging into a second half. I see these people. For a short moment, I am aware of these facts: although I drove to the soccer ground in a Honda minivan in which the cd selection was Children’s Ultimate Party Album, Barney's It’s a Great Day for Learning, and Amy Grant’s Home for Christmas, and although the differential between my waist and hips isn’t anywhere near as large as it used to be, and although the extent of my interaction with young men these days is to yell “good jahb, CJ” at the goalie, deep down, deep down, I am oozing such ice cold urban chic that it is amazing my extremities haven’t frozen off, even though it’s in the 80's this afternoon and there’s no shade at the soccer ground. In another life, (I’m accumulating a worryingly large collection of these) I know I could be shoulder to shoulder with Marc Warren and his gang. I could be in that immaculately tailored business suit, no yogurt on the lapel. I could eat in minimalist restaurants with views over the Thames, where they don’t have a kids' menu. With my sheer craftiness and brilliance, and a few calls on a mobile phone thinner than a credit card… no… wait… thinner than a business card, I could trick business men, art dealers, tycoons, the lot of them, out of their millions. I could walk out of a lift towards a camera in slow motion, arms swinging, hips swinging, as the opening credits rolled. I could take on Marc Warren in quick-fire repartee. And win. The lovely word hustle does this for me.

I’ve had a fine old time with hustling on Youtube (who invented that thing? - as if we didn’t have enough demands on our time already). First, I found this truly marvellous clip from Hustle series 3 (sorry, it won't let me embed it here). It features the very building I once worked in, but I never saw anything even half as exciting from my window.

Next, there’s plenty of this:



I only included that out of sheer devilment, because people get cross with me when I leave them with a tune on their brain for the rest of the day, and this one is guaranteed. Doo doo doo, da doo, da doo doo doo.

Uber-suave con artists, naked bottoms flustering the tourists in Trafalgar Square, and one of the catchiest tunes of all time. As I said, hustling can do a lot for the morale. I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back to mere hurrying, or scooting (not even alliterative scooting).

In another life

I have other lives. Do other people have other lives too? This was my other life tonight.

“Dinner-time” I called. “Ooh, goody goody” chorused the children, as they gathered round the table, their eager faces aglow with anticipation. “Oh, wait a minute, Mummy”, said 10-yo. “Would you mind if I just picked up my dirty socks from the middle of the sitting room floor before I came to the dinner table? It’ll only take a second.” “Oh, that’s a good idea”, said 6-yo. “I’ll do mine too. Perhaps we could tidy the whole room while we’re at it.” “No problem,” I replied, with a chuckle. “The food will taste all the better for the wait.”

“Mashed potato and home-made vegetable stew! My favourite!” said 10-yo. “Oh mine too” joined in 6-yo and 3-yo. If I had been left with any doubts as to their enjoyment of this simple yet nutritious fare, the silence, punctuated only by the sound of expertly-manipulated cutlery on china, would have dispelled them. “Tomato ketchup anyone?” “Oh, no thank you, Mummy. It just disguises the flavor of the food. Why would we want tomato ketchup?”

“Seconds?” I asked. “Thirds and fourths too, please”, came the answer. “Certainly! But remember to leave room for the stewed fruit I’ve made for pudding” I laughingly replied. “Ooooh, stewed fruit! What a treat!” rang the little voices.

“Please may I leave the table, Mummy, and thank you for such a delicious dinner. Shall I help you stack the dishwasher and clear up the kitchen. There’s nothing I want to watch on television and the Playstation is so boring.”