Reasons not to miss your children on a weekend away

I’m discovering – the hard way, natch – that there are down-sides to having kids which I never saw on any “cons” list.  (Actually, the cons list are my own – and a grave omission from all the pregnancy books, if you ask me.)

Now I have two more to add to the list. 

1. They’re so flippin’ beautiful. 

Not just my children – all of them.  Look at their clear glowing skin, their lustrous hair (when they eventually have hair), their plump red lips. The whites of their (shiney, sparkley, clear-as-the-sky) eyes are so white they’re almost blue.  They’re so full of energy, it pours out of them, healing scrapes and scratches in nano-seconds. They wake up, leaping from sleeping to upright, at the crack of dawn and bounce around like Samantha Cameron teenagers at a rave all day long before, suddenly, falling asleep on the spot (the Girl has given up on learning to lie back down and now just sleeps sitting up, her head on her chest;  the Boy falls asleep face down on whatever toy / book / kitchen implement he has demanded join him in his bed. 7-8pm in this house is like an Under-3’s Narcolepsy meeting).

So you spend all day shrieking looking at these gorgeous creatures and their disgusting vitality, and after a while the beauty starts to seem normal, the plump glowing skin and shiny shiny eyes become a benchmark;  and then pffff! they fall asleep and you wander into the bathroom to have your first wee of the day.  Fifteen minutes later Then you make the mistake  – stupid stupid! – of glancing in the mirror... It’s like Dorian Grey when he visits his attic, only worse.  The only thick hair on your head is where your ridiculous eyebrows have started to grow, ivy-like, up your forehead;  someone seems to have transplanted skin from your heels onto the area where your lips once were; and your poor desperate eyes are the cracked weather-worn stained-glass windows into your old lady’s soul. Meanwhile your part-feline daughter scratched your (thin, withered) cheek 5 weeks ago and it’s still blistering and sore, and you’ve just noticed your front tooth is cracked.

Quite frankly, it’s all gone very bloody Pete Tong indeed. And you know what’s worse?  The more beautiful they become, the less you do.  It’s like they’re draining the life force out of you, and using it as their fuel.  Bastards.

2. They steal. (Not just your looks / energy / thunder)

No-one told me of the phase in toddlerhood when they start to lift things.  Usually bright, shiny objects, or things that beep.  Items which have walked recently include:

·         My Rolex*.  Thankfully, the crappy old swatch was left behind.  Phew. (Under relentless interrogation Boy maintains that “it’s in the bushes”.  Only thing I’ve found in the bushes – to date – has been fox shit.  Which I do NOT recommend wearing on your wrist.)

·         The Man’s house keys (found in a drawer;  we’re blaming the Boy but equally it could have been any of us)

·         My house keys (found in a welly after much searching)

·         My tweezers (possibly explaining the fore-head crawling eyebrows)

·         House phone (An easy one to find, this.  How could I have neglected to look in an old toiletries bag on an unused bathroom shelf?)

·         Mobile Phone (also in welly, tho’ not contemporaneously)

·         Corkscrew (which I didn’t realise was missing until I found it in the washing machine)

·         ALL my hairbrushes (found them 2 days later under Boy’s mattress. Also found six toy cars and half a breadstick.)

It’s like living with a three-foot magpie. Albeit a very very beautiful glowing shiney one.

No recipe today.  Sorry sorry.  Because I never quite made it to the gym to get self toned and tucked and lengthened and beautified in time for THIS WEEKEND’S Ibiza trip**, I am pre-toxing.  Never heard of pre-toxing?  It’s when you punish your Lazy Old Slag behaviour by eating only “natural” foods for five days, then going mental on a Balearic island for 4 days, before crawling home and de-toxing***.  “Natural” means no alcohol, sugar, dairy, wheat, or indeed anything fun or tasty.  I could share some of the recipes with you (Banana anyone? Brown rice? Another banana?), but I couldn’t bear for you to all be DYING FROM FOOD BOREDOM as I am, while simultaneously feeling that the chocolate buttons, reserved for successful toddler toilet habits, are eye-fucking you. (Two days, bitches, and you’re mine...) So I’m going to spare you the trauma, which is entirely self-inflicted, and will no doubt have no beneficial effect whatsoever. I promise to have a Spanish-influenced recipe next week.  In the meantime, I have to go pack.  JUST FOR ME.  Yip-flippin’-eee.   

*Since found, down the back of a trunk in the Girl’s room.  She may be responsible, but unlikely – unless her rolling-over trick has recently gained unnoticed acrobatic momentum.

**The good news is that rain is forecast, so there’ll be no lounging about on beaches in my skimpies anyway, hurrah!  I will be sitting at the beach-side bar, behind v. oversized shades, head to toe in swathes of figure-hugginghiding material.  Every cloud has a bright shiny silver lining,  Quite literally, in this case.

***The Man says this is nonsense, and it should in fact be termed “pre-de-toxing”;  I disagree (imagine).  What I’m doing now is being done before  I go and get self all toxed up.  That stage of the process – the toxing – is before the de-toxing, so in fact that is the pre-de-toxing.  This is the sort of shit we argue about conversational foundation of our marriage.