08 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in kids
Tags
Family, kids, love, photography, Photos, Relationships, stay-at-home Dad
Here it is, my favourite shot from our recent holiday. Showing the beauty of my daughter (Oh I’m going to have fun when she’s older) and the goofy sweetness of my son. One of those photos that makes you feel blessed…
Also the sea looked lovely too.
19 Monday Mar 2018
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Tags
Family, France, French, fun, funny, Humor, Relationships, stay-at-home Dad
I have endured a spate of thefts since arriving in France and I am under no illusions, and in fact know that it is being perpetrated by a couple of ex-pats.
This happens every day, at all hours and can sometimes even happen while I am in my own house, asleep.
It’s not huge amounts – but the amount is irrelevant, it’s the fact that it continues to happen that annoys me.
I’d like to warn anyone in the 18 region of France to be on the lookout for them – one is seven and the other one is four. They will be all smiles and laughs but then later on you will realise that you are 50 Cents lighter and someone’s nicked all your Ferrero Rochers.
Their usual technique is to say ‘Daddy I love you, can I have a cuddle?’ while batting their eyelids. Then while you are cuddling them the other one will be standing on a chair and hunting for your chocolates.
I have looked into this but unfortunately it appears that there is no escape, and this scam will continue, unabated, for the next 14 – 20 years and will evolve into other, more sophisticated scams involving lifts home, radio controlled cars and ‘lending’ them a few quid ‘Just till Friday’.
03 Wednesday Jan 2018
Posted in kids
Tags
children, cinema, entertainment, Family, film, fun, funny, Humor, kids, Parenting, Relationships, stay-at-home Dad
The following is an example of my daughter’s dialogue, spoken over the first ten minutes of pretty much any film that you could think of, that is suitable for children aged four. It doesn’t matter what genre it is, it will always follow the same pattern…
‘What’s that?’
‘Why are they doing that?’
‘Is he the baddy?’
‘Why is he the baddy?’
‘Is he the baddy?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Where has she gone?’
‘Can I have some chocolate?’
‘I have not already had some’
‘No’
‘No’
‘No’
‘The baddy is a man?’
‘Why is the baddy a man?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why is he green?’
‘Are they the goodies?’
‘Why did he break that?’
‘Is it because he is bad?’
‘Is it?’
‘Can I have some more chocolate?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not?’
‘Pleasssse????’
‘Can I have some more chocolate?’
‘Where are they?’
‘What is that?’
‘Does the baddy want that?
‘Is he the baddy?’
‘I want a cuddle’
‘Are they the goodies?’
‘What is that?’
‘Is that a weapon?’
‘Why did it do that?’
‘What’s a bomb?’
‘Does the baddy want that?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Can I have some chocolate?’
‘Why not?’
‘They are the goodies aren’t they?’
‘They are strong aren’t they?’
‘Daddy you smell bad’
‘And you need a shave’
‘Can I have some chocolate?’
04 Saturday Nov 2017
Posted in kids
In case you are wondering, while they don’t say anything, I get the feeling that the staff at Intermarche ( a French chain of supermarkets) frown about this misuse of mini trolleys.
Plus points? It allows your kids to comfortably play the motion-control game that your son insists on playing (‘just for five minutes daddy’) every time you go in there. Your daughter can also sit beside him as though she’s at the cinema, and ensure that she is in ‘striking distance’ for when it inevitably kicks off.
Negative points? You try pushing two of these while carrying a pack of beer, a pizza, a loaf of bread and some milk (yes, ‘les essentials’) it’s not easy and balancing them on the kids just looks wrong.
They do make an excellent battering ram though, if you encounter any ‘dawdlers’ in the chilled meats section.
04 Saturday Nov 2017
Posted in kids
Tags
Countryside, Family, France, French, kids, photography, Photos
Here she is, my daughter, being effortlessly beautiful as always.
Oh to be young again…
The photograph was taken in the back garden** of her French granddad, or ‘papy’ as they are called in France.
She’s such a perfect specimen and yet, as I type this, she’s sat on the toilet, giving us a blow-by-blow account of what she’s doing. I won’t fill in the blanks too much, but I would really rather not have a ‘director’s commentary’ if I’m being honest.
I could also do without all the grunts.
They can be perfect.
They can be perfectly vile.
Here she just looks perfect.
Clothes from the French market.
Looks from Mummy.
Brains from Mummy.
Stick from Daddy.
*It’s early days, I’m sure we will take many more photographs, but so far this is my favourite.
**I use the term ‘back garden’ in its loosest possible sense – ‘vast field’ would be more appropriate. They have land to spare in this glorious country.
13 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in kids
My daughter is going through a phase. It’s just the age, people tell me. She’ll grow out of it. Thing is, I’m not so sure it is just a phase. I think it’s all part of a much grander, devious scheme. You’d think I’m talking about some evil, megalomaniac genius here with what I’m about to say. And to that I’d say ‘Oh, so you’ve met my daughter then?’.
So what’s the phase? Collecting small-to-medium sized stones, filling her pockets with them and then ‘redistributing’ them in useful areas such as car seats, cups, your pockets and in bed (s). What I think her actual plan is: to dig a tunnel with her fellow nursery pupils, so that they can escape from nursery whenever they want.
This occurred to me the other day, after I’d collected her from her maternelle (the French name for nursery) and picked up her coat, as she got out of the car. This is heavy, I thought to myself. I soon realised why, as stone after stone fell out, forming piles on the car park floor. You may think I’m exaggerating by describing it like this, but it looked liked someone was staging a mock-recreation of The Blair Witch’s burial mounds. And that was after a good handful had been left in her seat as well. She just grinned at me, in a slightly sinister all-I’m-lacking-is-a-white-cat-to-stroke kind of way.
Blofeld ain’t got nothing on her, you wait and see.
The neighbour saw me, said hello and looked at what I was doing. I explained the stone-fetish. ‘It’s just the age’ she said to me.
Except she didn’t say it like that – in English – because she’s French.
So a few stones, OK, I get that. But these quantities? It’s been over a week since those stones were left on our – relatively busy – car park and they’re still there, they have strength in numbers you see. Either that or people actually think if they move them the Blair Witch of the car park will get them and…I don’t know, scratch their cars? Adjust their seats? Tune their radio-stations to a channel that plays Clean Bandit’s Symphony on an endless loop?
I can just picture her though, sat in a chair while drinks are brought to her, hunched over her tunnel-plans, gaining favour amongst her peers with her scheme to tunnel to the playground. All the while hiding this in plain sight by having all the kids ‘redistribute’ the displaced stones in useful areas that they will blend in to with ease, such as baths, stairs, inside shoes and underneath car brake pedals. She’ll egg them on with promises of slides, sunshine, fun and games and no adults around.
All the while hatching her master plan.
To have the tunnel emerge in the local chocolatier’s parlour…
I’m sure I’m wrong though, it’s probably just a phase. That’s what everybody keeps telling me anyway…
13 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in kids
Tags
entertainment, Family, France, French, fun, funny, games, History, Hobbies, Humor, Learning, school
When I was a young whipper-snapper I used to play with marbles all the time. I loved them. Oilies, ball-bearings, clear ones, ones with bubbles inside – pretty much what you can see in the pic above, they really rocked my world. Because I was 7, and it was a much, much simpler world. There were no Gameboys*, no iPhones, nothing really electronic to distract you at all. We had fun and it was very, very simple fun; all you needed were a few kids (easily done) some marbles (easily won) and a grate/manhole cover (easily found). Then it was a simple case of playing the game against your opponent, whoever touched the other one, or managed to get their marble in the ‘goal’ (generally one of the small indentations in the grate) was the winner and claimed the other player’s marble as their prize.
Skip forward 30-odd years and the world is vastly different, there are many, many distractions available for kids – inside and outside of the playground – and yet marbles (or billes as they are known in France) are making a massive comeback.
For us it started as a reward system, if the kids behaved we would give them treats. The kids soon got wise to this though, and so were being good and then immediately coming to collect their prize. I had started out with Kinder Eggs: big mistake – have you seen the prices of these things? If you think they are bad in the UK, come and buy some in France, if you buy more than four a week your mortgage-repayments may suffer. So I looked at other, cheaper ways of keeping them on the ‘straight and narrow’. My son had expressed an interest in marbles, but in a collector’s way, not for any kind of game-playing reason. He’s a bit of a hoarder is my son, and he likes pretty, shiny things – a bit like Gollum but with a more annoying voice (love you son xxx).
So, off daddy went to look on Amazon and eBay to price up some marbles – and back daddy swiftly came, after seeing the prices + postage and packaging, and then checking his bank balance. No that wouldn’t do, that wouldn’t do at all.
Then the answer presented itself: brocantes. Yes the people at brocantes don’t charge extortionate prices for marbles, and they can be haggled with. I can’t haggle with Amazon – he doesn’t want to know. So when you roll up and eagerly eye a big sack (or tin, sometimes they are in pretty tins which your children will immediately purloin from you) and ask them how much, they may say ’50 centimes, pour dix’ (50 cents for 10) to which you can then reply ‘Combien pour tous?’ (how much for them all?) and you will then generally be able to walk away with twice as many billes as you would get on Amazon/eBay for a tenth of the price (and that’s not an exaggeration). You see the brocanteurs haven’t cottoned on to the fact that France has gone mad for marbles yet, but when they do…well expect to see the prices start jumping up, particularly among the more savvy ones (i.e the ones who aren’t just clearing out their recently deceased granddad’s house, and actually do it for a living).
So with this stock of marbles I was able to effectively, and very economically, reward good behaviour. As well as using them as leverage if there was any bad behaviour too – a double whammy a carrot AND a stick. This went on for quite a few weeks, and the kids amassed quite a collection of marbles, so much so that repeat trips were required, more for variety than anything; but that was OK, there’s always a brocante when you need one.
Then a funny thing started happening – my son started taking his marbles to school with him. Nothing new here, he often (read: every day) takes something in to show the kids. But then he’d start showing me his collection and mentioning how cool they were, and I didn’t recognise all the billes, these were different billes. Where were these billes coming from?
‘I won them from Yohanna’ he told me one day. ‘We play them together, me Yohanna, Alice and the other kids, and I’m good at it’. He then went on to play a game of marbles with me, a bit different from when I used to play, but essentially the same game. However I think I should amend my son’s phrasing as I think he meant to say ‘I’m good at cheating at it’. Unless of course it’s only with me that he plays marbles by guiding his marble towards mine, with his hand maintaining contact with his marble at all times. I don’t mind though. I’m not bitter.
Plus I’ve still got more marbles upstairs than he has (literally, as in upstairs in the house, not metaphorically, the kids have seen to that).
It wasn’t isolated to his group of friends either, as I first thought. We started to pass harried looking parents arguing with their kids. ‘He’s moaning to his daddy’ my partner translated on one such occasion ‘Because daddy forgot to put his marbles in his school-bag’. You can see them every day as well, in the playground, huddled in their groups playing away. It’s so refreshing. Here’s a past-time, from the past, which I had long thought to be firmly in the rear-view mirror enjoying a new lease of life. I can’t comment if it’s the same the world over, I haven’t researched it intensively; but it’s great to see here. No screens, all outdoors, a communal atmosphere – just good, clean, wholesome fun.
I did worry at first when I learned that they were playing this game, as my son can get quite (read: very) attached to things. Particularly shiny, small things (again, like Gollum). But he doesn’t seem phased at all by his very, very gradually dwindling pile of marbles. He’s just happy playing. Plus he knows if he’s good daddy will restock his collection – effectively making me the backer to his gambler (well, it is a form of childish gambling if you think about it). So that’s been a weight off my mind.
The real concern is when his sister starts playing…
…because she loves shiny, precious things even more than her brother – like Gollum, but more aggressively protective – (love you daughter xxx) there may well be blood on the playground floor if she loses her marbles…
*Yes, yes, it’s a dated reference but you get what I mean
23 Saturday Sep 2017
Posted in kids
Tags
children, Construction, Creativity, Design, Family, fun, kids, Learning, lego, Parenting, Proud, toys
My son is very, very creative. He’s seldom seen without a colouring pencil in his hand, drawing up a storm. He’s got a great unique style too, something I don’t have, but can recognise. I like to think I’m OK at writing, but he blows me out of the water when it comes to drawing. Lately he has been turning his attention to his large collection of Lego, and the results have been fantastic. I should add that he didn’t use any pictures, guides or anything like that, they all came from memory and imagination…
His Optimus Prime robot, the body is the weak part – because I built it! – the face is amazing, he’s watched a couple of the films but that’s it, which makes this all the more incredible to me as he doesn’t own one single Transformer toy.
Batman Bobble head with a, in his own words, ‘tapered back’. I was so surprised that he knew the word ‘tapered’ that I didn’t immediately appreciate the craft that had gone into this.
A Hospital waiting-room for his figures.
They went through a phase of really liking all things Emoji, after watching that terrible, terrible film several times. This is ‘Laughy Tongue’ Emoji.
A great little vehicle, if there’s a sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, and they need some tips on car designs, they know where to come.
I think this is probably my favourite, we started working on this together, as he wanted to make a Lego version of Midna, a character from the Zelda series of games (Twilight Princess to be specific). I gave up as I just couldn’t figure out how to do it, and went for a coffee. I returned and he’d created this – a fantastic interpretation by anyone’s standards. I love the hat, the eye, the colours…everything just works. And he’s only 6-and-a-half years old.
Hard at work on his next marvellous creation…
19 Tuesday Sep 2017
Posted in kids
Tags
animals, Cats, children, Family, funny, Humor, kids, Parenting, Relationships, stay-at-home Dad, toys, Trainspotting
The two babies came downstairs one day to discover a very big surprise was waiting for them – their very own bath!
They were very, very happy about this and got in straight away!
They were pleased to be in the bath as they had been wearing the same clothes for over a year, and so they absolutely reeked.
They also wore those clothes in the bath, because that’s what you do in a bath isn’t it.
‘This is nice’ said Winky-Eye Baby, as he pretend-sploshed water all over his (her?) clothes.
‘Yes it is’ replied Onesie Baby ‘It’s about bloody time too. I thought my clothes were going to be classed as a biohazard if I let them get any dirtier’.
‘You do know there isn’t actually any water?’ said Winky-Eye Baby, with a worried frown on his (her?) face ‘It’s all just pretend. Don’t tell me you’ve been at the bleach again?!’.
‘It’s real if you wish hard enough’ said Onesie Baby.
‘Well, why don’t you shit in one hand and wish in the other, and see which one fills up first’ replied Winky-Eye Baby.
After their bath the two babies had a lovely game of ‘High Fly’, a fun game which involved them being hurled as fast as they could be at walls and doors, by their boisterous Mummy. She was a very loving Mummy, but she loved in a quite violent way, and so if the two babies were real she would probably be doing about 25 years-to-life in prison for infanticide.
Though if they were real it would probably raise more questions about how a three-and-a-half year-old could have babies.
After their game the two babies decided to have another bath, but were shocked to discover it had been stolen!
Who stole it?
‘It’s that fucking cat!’ said Winky-Eye Baby ‘As if it’s not bad enough that we get used as a teeth and claw sharpener by that thing, now we will have to clean out its hairs before we get back in!’
‘And we might catch toxoplasmosis’ he (she?) added.
‘What’s toxoplasmosis?’ Onesie Baby asked.
‘Its that disease from cat shit that killed Tommy in Trainspotting’ replied Winky-Eye Baby ‘Mind you he was a junkie with AIDS, so we should be alright’
‘Plus we’ve got no central nervous system’ added Onesie Baby.
The cat did look awfully comfortable though, and the two babies worried they would never get their bath back, but just then he woke up!
‘Oh I do hope he doesn’t bite my head again’ said Winky-Eye Baby
‘That’s not the worst thing they do’ replied Onesie Baby ‘I’ve heard when they get older they hump you’
‘No I think that’s dogs’ countered Winky-Eye Baby ‘Plus he’s having his bollocks off next month so it shouldn’t be an issue’.
Just then Mummy arrived, and the two babies had beaming smiles on their faces at the prospect of getting their bath back. Or they would have done if in fact they could smile, and weren’t just moulded lumps of rubber.
‘She’ll sort that bloody ball of fur out’ said Winky-Eye Baby.
‘Yes we’ll soon be back in our nice warm bath, I can’t wait!’ squealed Onesie Baby in delight.
However the two babies were in for a shock…
‘What a bitch’ said the two babies together.
22 Thursday Jun 2017
Posted in kids
Tags
children, food, food and drink, funny, Humor, kids, Parenting, stay-at-home Dad
My daughter looks at me as I step out into the glorious sunshine, I’m eating a lemon-sorbet ice-pop, just the thing to cool me down on a day as hot as this. ‘You’ve had two of those today’ she says to me ‘Why have you had two of those today?’. It’s like this all the time at the moment, my daughter has turned into a food policeman/woman/child (delete as appropriate). You can’t put anything in your mouth – nothing edible anyway – without her noticing and commenting on it.
I was making her some food the other day, one of her favourites, sausage and chips, and I – as is customary for me – took a small piece of the second sausage, for what I refer to as ‘Daddy Tax’. This is a tax I levy on all foodstuffs (except cauliflower, bleurgh!) that I prepare for my kids, just a little off the top to keep me sweet (It is not, I repeat NOT ‘protection money’ in the form of food). She noticed straight away.
‘Why did you eat a piece of my sausage’ she said, her dark eyes fixed on me from beneath a furrowed brow. Was she in the room when I ate that piece of sausage? I don’t think she was, and as I break her sausages up into pieces, there shouldn’t really have been any way for her to notice. But notice she did.
I suspect that at night, when everyone else is asleep, she creeps downstairs and takes inventory of all the food in the house. She notes down all the different foodstuffs, the different quantities and then, if in her eyes you go over your allotted quota for the day, that’s when the interrogation, the questions, the accusations…that’s when it all starts.
Or I could just be being paranoid.
She’s always there, whenever food is being prepared, and if she isn’t, she magically will be as soon as she smells or hears it. It’s like one of those horror movie cliches, you know when you open the fridge-door, and then close it and there’s a mass murderer waiting, where previously there was nothing. Except it’s not a mass murderer, it’s a two-and-a-half foot tall munchkin who wants to know what you are doing with that pack of ham. And if you don’t respond then the consequences could be as dire as in the horror movie.
That’s if you equate being stared at for ten minutes, with the phrase ‘Can I have some’ repeated 278 times, to as bad as being stabbed to death by Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees/Freddy Krueger (delete as applicable).
She can also hear packets of crisps being opened from up to a mile away. I once opened a packet, downstairs in our house. I was alone, everybody else was off doing something else (together I should add, we don’t let our three and six year old wander the village on their own – we wouldn’t put the villagers through that). I hadn’t put one crisp in my mouth when I turned to see a pair of dark eyes staring at me through the patio windows.
They were my favourite flavour too.
I’m in the house on my own now too, and I think I might have an ice-cream. I’ll be ok though, she’s at nursery today. There’s no chance she can get me. Is there?
Hang on…I think I heard something….
