1.  Biting Remarks

2.  An Audience

3.   Value

Forgot to tell you. I solved The Mystery Of The Broken Front Tooth on Saturday.  Vegetarians have great teeth.  Nothing we eat is crunchy or chewy or hard.  And we’re overloaded with calcium.  Yet I lost a fragment of front incisor.  I was more worried than I admitted to myself.  Crumbly teeth = getting old = poor Son 1 aged 4y 11m and Son 2 aged 23 with their toothless crone of a mother. The hygienist on Thursday blamed wine.  But.  On Saturday on The Boat I realised that hooray hooray, I am still young, I am not a drunk…. I just shouldn’t bite Frubes open for the boys.

We had a scrum to get Son 1 and me out of the house on time, and we were doing fine till we we encountered a massive queue of traffic. Broken down double decker. “What have they done with the children?” asked Son 1, craning his neck round. At School, we went in with X from Son 1’s class and his mother. ”X is looking forward to the party,” said Mother.  Yes.  X’s father rang me last night to say he’d be coming. Son 1 answered the phone, and brought it upstairs. He came into the bedroom just as I had my head in the cot singing Son 2’s lullaby.  I ignored him because Son 2 was drowsy and I didn’t want him fired up again.  So Son 1 thrust the phone at my mouth just as I launched into a reedy (but perfectly pitched) Summer-Tiiiimmmmeee.  ”Hello?” said a tinny voice. “This is X’s dad.  He’d love to come to the party.”

I’m still not 100% so I had a Hard Day At The Office.  I took a late lunch and did a Big Shop.  Including a  birthday cake for Friday, lots of little fairy cakes, and Tesco Value Hula Hoops.  You can’t Taste The Difference.  Two Variety Packs for Son 1.  Not 5 years old and I am bribing him with sugary food to get him to have breakfast. The worst sin is not  Son 1.  It’s “And me!” Son 2 who has to have what he’s having. I picked up Son 1 and we headed home. He went in, I unloaded the shopping. Not realising that Son 2 was howling for me upstairs.  We are thinking about toilet training Son 2, so at bathtime we give him a chocolate button every time he pees in the potty.  He has amazing control, and is currently averaging four buttons per bathtime.  I’m not breaking all the Sisterhood of Motherhood rules on sugar. This is science. His brother had nothing sweet till he was two, and is now a sugar junkie. So, in the interests of research, I am plying Son 2 with sweet things to prove that once he is two, he will choose celery sticks and cucumber instead.

1. One Year

2. The Event

3. Birthday Tea

Son 2’s first birthday.  The year has whizzed by.  The first three or four months in an up-all-hours washine-machine-non-stop blur of reflux… then two months of preparing to go back to The Office… then six months back at work.  Son 2 is a delight; determined, opinionated, joyful, adoring, and independent.  Almost mobile - he was tanking up and down the kitchen on the pushalong trolley today, solving all his falling-down problems and getting up again.   We gave him a little wooden music centre with an inbuilt drum, chimes, xylophone and other rattles, cymbals, scrapers and bells.  Son 1 aged 3 y 11m gave him a plastic ambulance.  Two books (from last night,) a crocodile castanet and a drum with clacky beads on it, and a little woooden tool kit. Son 1 could not help unwrapping the presents.  Wonder Nanny gave him a little remote control car - in the hope that his very own remote control might stop him from pinching ours all the time.

We went down to the Festival again.  Again, with Son 1 in his Captain Hook outfit.  We queued for 45 minutes for one of the attractions, and then were supposed to wait even more while they let a school party on.  I complained, and we were allowed on with the school party.  I had to bribe him to smile nicely for a picture.  Yes I know that’s the road to early death. The wind again was wild, which made everything cold and difficult.  Son 1 got quite into it, and then ran up and down the tarmac jumping in and out of puddles.  We gave Son 2 his lunch, and pushed the boys back, stopping off for balloons on the way back.

We had a birthday tea, the Wednesday friends, Nanna, Younger Sister,  Son 2’s Godmother and the Godmother’s son.  At 20 past 3 I remembered I hadn’t picked up the cake.  It was very good, little building blocks with the letters of Son 2’s name on it, icing, ribbons, writing.  Son 1 couldn’t keep his hands off it.  We had the candle moved and a little fingerprint scoop.  The Friends turned up on the dot of 4 o’clock, when Son 2 and I had barely finished making the Get Well Soon card for Nanna who’s got an angiogram tomorrow.  Which meant the carrots weren’t washed.  Which meant the only vegetable matter served was red pepper and grapes.  Son 2 had: an octopus bath toy; some Peter Rabbit books.  A singing robin.  A squirty bus. Some wooden diggers.  Six Fisher Price building blocks.  Some Nursery Rhyme finger puppets.   The Little Friends trashed the house and toys; the grown ups chatted, and occasionally wondered who was upstairs In Goal.  Champagne was drunk. Happy Birthday was sung.   The Cake was devoured.  Six building blocks, six small boys.  I put the one with Son 2’s initial and “1″  on his highchair tray and he had reduced it to its atomic components by the time I’d finished giving the other five out.  We lost the brother of the child we lost yesterday.  Only this time he’d shut himself in the loo and was just taking a very long time indeed to do his stuff.  Fathers arrived, had beer, ate cake.  It wasn’t a party of course, because there is a joint party a week on Saturday.  But it was an event.  Because Mummy wanted an event.