Florida Revisited

The good news:  We are in Florida.  The bad:  “We” does not (yet) include the Man.  I am solo-parenting. I solo-parent (is that a verb? Everything is a verb these days) most of the time back home anyway, so it shouldn’t be such a shock – it should barely be noteworthy - but good God, it’s hard. I have the au pair and the in-laws so I’m far from alone, but the parenting – the hands-on non-stop nitty-gritty of responsibility and worry and refereeing and feeding and cleaning, from the Girl’s 6am pre-dawn chorus until the Boy’s sulky 8pm swansong (and then beyond, as we are sharing a bed) - is mine alone.

Being up-close and personal – like a bedraggled visitor to a particularly bizarre (and particularly crap) zoo – has afforded me the opportunity to get acquainted with the minutiae of my children’s personalities (such as they are).  The Baby is going through some sort of mental growth spurt; in the past couple of days she’s learned two new tricks, bringing her sum total of tricks to... two. She can now blow raspberries – which amuses all of us (particularly herself) no end; and even better, she can grab. Watching her do it is like watching one of our many scratched dvds play their staccato contents: she sees something, her eyes focus, her jittering hands move towards it, she stares intently, moves her hand slowly, touches it, looks unsure, bangs against it, opens her fingers, looks as if she’s about to pass out from the sheer exertion, and then suddenly the dvd speeds up and she GRABS whatever it is and STUFFS it into her mouth, in triple-speed.  The whole performance reminds me of myself doing Pilates (not the grabbing and stuffing into mouth bit (so much), rather the brain and the body not quite connecting. And the howling from exhaustion afterwards).

The Girl meanwhile is currently reading two books:  How to be a Total Pain (volumes I, II and III),  and How to be as Cute as Pie (abridged version). She’s unsure which one to take instruction from, so dips between the two.  For example, she occasionally affects a lisp, with every other word starting with “f”.  “I’m a fweeth fwintheth” she announces, as she rips the Boy’s hair from his skull.  And last (latht) night at bedtime:  “Nighth nighth Mummy.  Can I have a fith?” I double over into her cot to kiss (assuming, of course, that it is a kiss she wants, and not a fish).  “ON MY FLIPS!”  I double back into the cot to kiss her on the lips, only to get bitten on my own lips, and leave the room looking like I’ve had a very bad date indeed. (Little fitch.)

The Boy, by contrast, is adorable.  I know this to be the case, because complete strangers keep saying it to me.  “Oh, he’s ADORRRRRRRRRABLE!” they shriek, as soon as they see his golden mop and hear his plummy Brit accent.  They are clearly so blind-sided by the accent that they aren’t paying attention to what he’s actually saying.  The woman in the ice-cream parlour, to whom he excitedly announced that the blue iceream makes his poo turn green?  “He’s ADORABLE!”;  the owner of the overweight pug, at whom the Boy shrieked with laughter, announcing that he was “fat and ridiculous”?  “SO ADORABLE!”;  the woman with the frozen-looking face in Starbucks, who he just could NOT take his eyes off, and then felt compelled to tell that she looked scary (which isn’t to say he was incorrect, but still...)?  TOTALLY adorable.  He now thinks he’s invincible, has developed a quite-annoying swagger, and a new habit of putting his hand up to silence me when I talk to him.  Which is not so adorable at all really.

However, I refuse to complain.  (Too much).  We are in Florida, the sun is shining, the sky (and the ice-cream) is blue, we are away from the rain and snow which is battling Blighty, I am wearing flip-flops (and my cashmere scarf!) and soon – 58 short hours – I will have a co-parent to share all the above-joys with.  Fank Frithst.