Gotta Catch Them All

C has nice healthy bowels at the moment. Good and regular. Reliable sign of good health, that. You'd always ask after it when taking patient histories. Official WHO guidelines state that nobody who can poop normally can be worse than 50% ill overall,

She's pretty regular generally, in fact. At four o' clock every morning for the last week or so, she's padded relentlessly through to our bedroom and nested on the pillows by my head. Which is where she then takes her nice regular shit, grunting softly into my ear before twisting round, thrusting her stinking nappy in my face and proudly saying "Daddy! Daddy! Poop!"

Official WHO guidelines state that parents who have to clean up poop in the middle of their normal sleep patterns cannot be more than 50% well overall.

-

Pokemon is the flavour of the month with us right now. Mormor started this by letting F play Pokemon Go on her phone. I made it worse by finding Pokemon the Series: XY on Netflix. The hardback encyclopedia was probably not a good idea either.

It's not all bad, I tell myself as F and C squabble over the rights to V's phone, or as V comes back thirty minutes late from work because she found a new Pokemon up on top of Skansen Kronan at 2230 in the rain.

F colours in Pokemon, plays at being Pokemon, trains her soft toys in gym battles (Bunbun, who is an electric and water Rabbit-type Pokemon, I'm told, has just learnt Quick Attack) and is already ordering a Pokeball-shaped cake for her 5th birthday. I know more about the evolutionary trees and vulnerabilities of various regional specimens (specimon?) than can be entirely useful. Useful other than being my daughter's living Pokedex, I mean.

C is similarly intrigued. She can name a good twenty or thirty of the little monsters, from her favourite Dedenne to more obscure things like Starmie or Dugtrio. V laughs at me for knowing what these mean, although she's the one doing all their Pokemon Go legwork. You won't catch me trekking up hills in the dark for an Onyx. I'm a nerd and that's physical exercise, the traditional enemy of my people.

It feels like they're filling their brains up with a lot of confusing nonsense, sometimes. Dunno which parent they get that from. Yes, I can still remember the stats line for a 2nd Ed 40K Lascannon unaided, (Short range 20", Long 60", S9, -5 to armour saves, d6 damage), but that's neither here nor there. Perhaps this mental kibble could be better replaced by, I don't know, drilling economics or a working knowledge of Mandarin into them.

But then Pokemon the Series: XY is actually pretty well written, with its cheerful message of teamwork, caring for your friends and not giving up even when you lose. And F is reading her encyclopedia most days. "That says evolution," she told me accurately, looking through one of my acting lesson handouts the other day. Darwin would be proud, right before he used his Darwinite to become Mega-Darwin X.

Seeing F walk to dagis, hypnotised by mummy's phone screen to the extent that she occasionally walks into things is rather less encouraging. As is C's furious scream when you take the iPad away from her after a thirty minute stint. But then they go and dance together, or play dens on the sofa, or have an equally fierce tantrum over something entirely non-computer-game related, and I try to calm down and remind myself that my failings (computer game addiction, specifically) are not theirs. Not yet, anyway, and at least I know what to watch for.

-

It's been almost two years since I changed jobs or re-educated myself in any way. Lazy! Time to get a new batch of applications sorted out.

Nocturnes

It's the middle of the night. In accordance with well-established tradition, our bed is full of restless children and bewildered, grumpy adults.

I am roused from what passes these days for sleep by a round of solid and insistent punches on my shoulder. As all the questions I'd initially like to ask have the word 'fuck' in them, it takes me a moment to marshal my thoughts.

"What the, what are you doing, F?"

"Hitting you. You were snoring." I probably look outraged enough that she feels a need to further justify this. "That's what mummy does."

Good to know that she spends so much time observing our midnight behaviour.

-

It's the middle of the night. In accordance with well-established tradition, C has decided she needs breakfast at 0415.

"Yoghurt," she tells me, bouncing up and down on my midriff. "Yoghurt, yoghurt yoghurt, yoghurt yoghurt yoghurt. Yoghurt!"

"It's not oof breakfast time oof yet oof," I say.

"Please," she says confidently, not to be polite but because she believes this to be how you close the deal.

"No, back to bed," I say, and start the ten minute process of hauling myself upright to carry her back to her room.

And then we do a little dance for forty minutes, where I put her into bed, tuck her up, say "night night" firmly and leave as she sulks. And then she gets up, opens her door and waits silently for me to come and repeat the process.

Sometimes she takes out her nap and demands one of a different colour, as though the blue one is all used up and only the pink one will now do. Sometimes she insists on grabbing and kneading my ear for five minutes or so. Sometimes she just rolls over and feigns sleep, although she's up again almost as soon as my head hits the pillow again.

Always, she knows exactly when I'm on the verge of slumber and times her entrances with consummate skill. There is never sleep, never enough, and I am a dazed and shambolic wreck during the days.

-

It's the middle of the night. No, it's not, it's five o' clock on a weekend, it just feels like the middle of the night. I've made egg fried rice and dumplings for dinner.

"This tastes like very old roast chicken that's gone mouldy," F says, grimacing over a forkful of rice. "And this!" she says, poking a dumpling. "This is like even older milk that's also gone mouldy."

"Digustin," agrees C, sticking her tongue out.

They aren't wrong, in fairness. I mean, the rice is okay, the standard of acceptable takeaway at best, but not exactly haute cuisine. The dumplings aren't nice, some spinach and ricotta pre-made bland that's almost totally tasteless. Not that this justifies my children Gordon Ramsaying me over dinner, of course.

"Don't be so rude, you two. You know the rules, I'm sorry it's not the nicest food but even if it's not your favourite, you still need to eat it up."

"Tack för maten," C says immediately, gets down and goes off to play. I gamely try to put her back in her chair a couple of times, but the writing is on the wall. So is some of the food.

V gets home, which is a moment of great joy to both girls as it gives them someone else to interact with instead of a rather sulky daddy. V is also not particularly moved by the food, although she at least pays it lip service, but I'm soon left alone with the congealing leftovers.

God! I long for time off, for a week when neither of the girls have February fevers, for a night of uninterrupted sleep. I can't spell any more when I write, I have to look everything up. Even on days when I'm not working and everyone else is out, I have no energy, no motivation, no willpower to get things done. I shamble round the house like a teenager, poking at projects and pretending to tidy up before falling asleep uncomfortably on the sofa. The news is full of Brexit, Trump and invented Swedish crime waves, my mind is full of frustration and incompetence.

Yet I can still read to the girls, or spend half hours pretending to be Pikachu with F, or play catch with C, or drag them unwilling to playparks and insist on exercise until we all enjoy ourselves despite the midwinter blues. This is normal, this is all as it should be, this too will pass.

Februhaha

Nuts, I missed January.

Well, F has learned to whistle, and does so all the time when she isn't being Pikachu. She is Pikachu most of the time, however, so I'm not quite sure how I have the impression she's whistling non-stop. Maybe it's because it's such a, what's the word, memorable noise? Lodges in the brain, you know, like a candiru fish in a unexpecting urethra.

C still won't sleep through the night. Her current excuse is teething (last week it was a cold, next week it'll be stress linked to world affairs). She's just so angry in the night! Angry that we won't pick her up, angry that she's uncomfortable, angry that we keep trying to soothe her instead of leaving her in peace like she's clearly telling us to.

A long time ago, as a junior doctor, I mastered the monotone delivery required to answer a post-midnight request for new drug charts to be written up, or a new drip authorized, or one of the many non-crucial but still urgent tasks experienced nurses were inexplicably required to ask newly-qualified junior doctors permission to do at 0330.

In fairness, it usually just mean I or one of my colleagues had forgotten to write up a new drug chart during the day, so we only had ourselves to blame. I have flashbacks to those conversations as I pat C on the back and tell her that yes, it is the middle of the night, and yes, it's all okay, and no, she doesn't need the iPad just now and yes, Rara is right there next to her. Tired reassurance unhindered by empathy, that's the thing. You need someone to vomit on too? Okay, get on with it. I won't stop you because I'm exhausted, but jeez, you're going to want to skip the speeches at your wedding.

-

Trump.

Nothing to do with my kids or my life in Sweden. In fact, we're delightfully removed from it all in many ways. Scandinavian ivory makes for good towers. Yet I can't help but be scared and livid at his actions and his behaviour. More so when I hear UK politicians (pillockticians? is that a thing?) sort of not quite defending him because they can't, but trying quite hard to for the sake of Atlantic trade.

You fucking morons. Okay, perhaps he isn't Hitler, perhaps 'monster' is a bit too much to stick. Are we going to wait until he is very clearly a monster before condemning him? Or is more slack, enough to hang us all, really the best way to deal with him?

He's not a Nazi. That was a political movement in German last century. Let's for heaven sake's not call him that, like he did to the intelligence chiefs the other week. He is definitely a fascist, promoting authoritarian nationalism with all its anti-liberal and anti-minority trappings. He said he would build a wall. He said he'd shut America's borders to Muslims. Why is anyone surprised that he's doing it?

His bark and his bite are the same fucking thing, Boris Johnson, he does actually say what he means, something your generation of Tories have utterly forgotten about. If you don't agree or approve with someone's actions, but let them do them unchallenged anyway, why work in politics at all? You clearly don't want to make a difference to anyone.

I'd like to say 'rant over' and forget all this, move back to genial ramblings about children and acting. It's actually more tempting to go and make a placard and try and stop traffic somewhere until something gets done. At least I have a peg to hang my middle-aged fury on, which is nice.

Holiday Fever 3/3

On Vomit

Sitting at the edge of the airport food hall, in easy view of about two hundred people, C pukes up her bottle of milk on me.

I say milk, I mean velling. Velling is a Swedish powdered baby food. Various grains go into it, along with some kind of whey powder or something, I don't know. Sort of like horlicks, I guess, I've never seen it in the UK. Swedes swear by it, C loves it.

It has, when old or semi-digested, the worst smell imaginable. Somewhere between cheese and spoiled meat, with a rotting bread undertone. Hints of the smell of a brand new polythene bag, cut through with the diarrhoea of a Victorian pauper with typhus. My Room 101 is lined with flasks of the stuff, gurgling their contents drippily into a central tank in which I am immersed, head down, twenty three hours a day. For the remaining hour, I must drink it.

It is this slime that I am coated liberally with, half an hour before our flight.

C is prised off my shoulder with a sucking noise. Across my chest is a perfect imprint of her body, outlined in goo, like a suncream gag from Police Academy gone horribly wrong. There is a ring of disgusted faces turning away from me as I rise and head for the toilets. V lends me her jumper. We've got changes of clothes for the girls, but not for us. This goes on the packing list for next time.

Comprehensive though my moobs are, they are lesser beasts compared to my wife's. Her v-neck is a little loose on me, is what I'm saying. It also doesn't hide the belt of caked white slime round the top of my jeans. Or the smell. Nothing hides the smell. Five hours on the flight certainly doesn't, with C writhing round on top of me happily, kicking the back of the chair in front.

F loves flying, she gets to sit and eat sweets and watch the iPad with our blessing for hours straight. Her over-excited screams drew grumpy looks from the lady in front a couple of times. I wanted to deck her with my tray of reheated beef stew, unstained by children and spew as she was, the bitch.

We got home to the darkest day of the Swedish winter. Two days before Christmas, with all the shopping still to do and no sunlight to do it in. Nice to know we'd made it past the solstice. Uphill from here! By April, we'll be right back to three minutes of weak, watery light round midday! Glorious!

F wept when we got home. "What is a holiday anyway," she wailed, "if you have to come home afterwards?" Well, an expensive waste of time, if you look at it that way, love.

Not that it was, in any way. Change is as good as a rest, they say.

On More Vomit

Christmas goes swimmingly, the Swedish family are round for a buffet Julbord and we all eat too much and get loads of presents. Cousin A sees right through my fake Tomte beard, but at least plays obligingly along with the illusion in front of the others. F gets a Doc McStuffins playset and a remote control car. C gets her very own playdoh and forgets not to eat it in her excitement. Then she gets toy envy and follows F from room to room, playing with whatever has been discarded last.

The day after Christmas, or, well, actual Christmas Day by the English reckoning , we go and hit the sales for a bit. C buys herself a Frozen snowglobe wand that plays Let It Go slightly off key and much too loud. F invests in a toy toaster, which turns out to have a broken timer once its out of its wrapper. I can't find the receipt to take it back.

Then we all start vomiting in unison. Except Clara, she's been done it already. And except V, who doesn't believe in vomiting except in extreme circumstances. Oh, we deck the halls, we do. All night, F and I take in turns to hit the buckets. The washer is full of stuffed toys and blankets, the sofa is full of exhausted parents.

"Pook pook," says C tenderly, patting me on the head. "Awww." Then she pulls herself up on to my lap and resumes bouncing up and down merrily. Careful, daughter, I owe you one from a few days back.

The night goes on forever, but by boxing day we're all more or less okay again. Exhausted, but capable of swallowing without hurling at least.

I want to go back to Tenerife.

Holiday Fever 2/3

On Water Fights

We got the girls water pistols, obviously. F very quickly learned to yell "not in my face!", according to the rules laid out by Mummy, without having anything like the aim required to abide by that rule herself. I learned to give a particular kind of apologetic nod to swimmers-by, a kind of 'oops, sorry, but what can you do' affair, coupled with a weak grin and, all to often, a faceful of water myself. It accomplished nothing.

C couldn't quite get the hang of firing a water squirter. So she took to wading up to me, seizing my nose and ducking my head under, then laughing uproariously at the bubbles. "Hold nose!" she's still saying, a week later, and pushing me under an invisible surface. Good. Sure I won't regret that later in life. At least I know she gave herself the same treatment, lapping water up or sploshing her own face in with surprising frequency, given that she hates getting water in her eyes in the bath at home. Maybe she just likes the taste of chlorine.

On Buffets

The all-inclusive buffets were open three times a day, all days a week. And in the afternoon, you could get free bar snacks - cladgy cold chips, grainy ice cream, burger buns curling in the sun. Delicious! And thank Christ I wasn't having to rack my brains for some new twist on pasta for the next meal. That alone was worth the admission price.

Buffets are something of a weak spot for me. You could plausibly cover a table with fifteen different kinds of manure, call it a buffet and I'd feel honour bound to sample all of them whether or not they were any good. And this from a baseline of not saying no to food very often, I'd add.

After four days, I think the novelty was wearing off. Each meal had a loose theme. After American Night (make your own burger), Canarian Night (wrinkly potatoes, green mojo) and Taco Night (Tacos), International Night felt distinctly like several days of leftovers heated up, mixed together and relabelled as Fusion. Of course I ate it anyway, far more than I needed to, but I was grumbling through my mouthfuls of chocolate breakfast doughnuts and fruit salad with prawns.

C took fat handfuls of sausages for breakfast, chain eating them. F decided that being allowed to take whatever she wanted as long as she finished it was about the best rule for eating ever. Pasta with chips three times a day? Yes, okay then. Protein with that? Hell, no. Protein is for losers.

-

Obviously, it couldn't all last, all this lazy, sprawling bliss. That's holidays for you. At least the volcano didn't erupt until we were going home.

Holiday Fever 1/3

Sorry for long hiatus. Much has happened, most of it mundane and uninteresting to write about. Additional posts saying 'my children grew up a bit more, did some funny stuff, I'm tired because Jeez! Parenting!' didn't really feel worth writing. Hurray, therefore, for the following life events, ever-reliable for giving me something inspirational.

• Travel
• Christmas
• Bodily Fluids

-

On Seaside Towns

We took a little pre-Christmas break this year, nipping out to Tenerife for a week. F was very excited about this until we actually woke her on the day of the flight, at four in the morning. Then she howled and went back to bed.

Thomas Cook Sunwing hotels - nothing I'd ever been to before. And nothing, in my stuffy middle-class mindset, that I'd really considered as being relaxing. Even Tenerife had never appealed, I'd always had it pegged as a clubbing hotspot and nothing else. But a week of sitting by the pool, watching F and C get confident around water in blazing sunshine, and I'm convinced.

Bleak island, Tenerife. Craggy and dusty and deserty, scattered with little towns that look like miserable places to live. The ground doesn't look fit for human life, it's all gullies and sagebrush. No water other than the sea, which actually adds to the salt flat harshness of the place. Once you get into the towns, it's no better really, Hotel industry buildings, with everything desperate to tell you it's your home from home. Real English Food, Best Steak for Best Prices, Spectacular Sea Views, boasts each and every identikit bar. And the leathery touts hand you tickets and banter as you pass each one, until your pockets are full of business cards and your brain full of empty promises.

I still liked it! I just like moaning more. We didn't have to eat at any of the tourist traps, we'd gone all-inclusive with the hotel. Pacing the black beaches under the sun and examining knock-off bag shops at a snail's pace was surprisingly relaxing.

On Water

Neither of the girls like the sea yet. Too loud and scary for F. And C got some surf up the back of her legs unexpectedly, after which she would leg it for the dry part of the beach as fast as she could given a moment's notice.

The pools back at the hotel, though, that was different. Bath-warm water at either knee or thigh depth, depending on which of the kids' pools you chose. V and I lay next to the girls as they paddled and splashed, taking it in turns to panic when one or the other fell over or dunked her head in. By the end of the week, we were more or less lying still as they waded about, squirting each other and cackling.

Actually, a week-long bath was pretty much what I needed. Obviously, everything was mixed in with the standard tantrums and howls too. So it was tiring. But not tiring like home, where the filthy weather and darkness traps you indoors too often, and there's nothing new to see or do that doesn't cost money.

Dolphin watching was probably the most extreme distillation of the week. We sat in the bowels of a glass-bottomed catamaran watching pale flocks of strange creatures drift by, trying to convince F not to sulk by buying her squeaking, light-up keychains. At the time, it was actually exhausting and annoying, even slightly boring. But now we're home again, it's a memory of something exotic and unexpected to be treasured against the winter chills.

Scary

C igs hekl0.ping me to0 typ0e t0his0..

.

.She's 093 learnt lots of communication skills this last month. In fact, the last two (since she started dagis) have been amazing in terms of how muchg she'nhj57 ty has learned and how fast. "Ring!" she has just told me, and then explained with gestures that she meant 'take your silver celtic knot ring off, Daddy, so I can first put it on and then hurl it across the room really hard so you lose it under the sofa for a while.' 

Yeah, it's cute that she's talking, enough so that I fall into the idiot trap of doing what she tells me. a

ynn6ghyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyystop it! Daddfy is tuyping   jrusitynowhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhno, get off. 

-

It's been a busy couple of months. I've been devising and rehearsing a play with local theatre powerhouse GEST. Working full time (a rare joy for this actor) was exhausting, coupled with going straight to Dagis to fetch the girls. What should we have for dinner? Pasta with no sauce and frankfurters? But we've had that every day for the last six million years, god dammit. Why can't you let me exert my will as alpha male in the house just once, you pack of she-devils?

Alpha male, hah. Omicron is nearer the mark. 

-

Riddles with F, courtesy of the back of the breakfast milk carton. 

"What can a rat draw as easily as an Elephant?" I ask her. The riddle works better in Swedish, the verb dra is more like pull or drag, and my translation makes the answer a bit too easy. 

"Breath!" says F, happily. 

"What can cross a river without moving?" 

"A bridge!"

V comes in and is impressed, F is pretty good at these. "Who always wears his hat on his feet?" she asks.

"Mummy!" snaps F. "That is wrong! You asked the wrong number! Don't! Do! That!"

The answers are obviously harder if you ask the riddles out of order. F writes her own one by way of revenge. 

"Daddy, what is red and goes over water and can't stand still?"

I have no idea. Luckily for my reputation, neither does F. Answers on a postcard, please. 

-

Time out for me, starting tomorrow. Off to Kuala Lumpur for my brother's wedding, leaving the family at home. Mixed feelings as usual, the bubbling glee that the prospect of sixteen hours of flight/sleep brings tempered with the massive guilt complex of abandoning the family nest for a week. You can see where my head's at by the fact that I think the wedding is less exciting than sleeping on the plane right now. 

-

Halloween has been heavy on F's mind these last few weeks. Pumpkins everywhere, and much talk of spooks, In the spirit of this haunted day (see what I did there?), F has written, illustrated and performed her first ghost story, which I here reproduce for your eerie titillation. Reader, beware. 

The Blood Ghost

Once upon a time there was a ghost. She made a dress out of blood, and then she put it on a coat hanger. 

When she put the dress on, she was very scary. She scared everybody, a pumpkin and a witch and spook and some bats. Even you, Daddy. 

And then she took her dress off because she was too scary. Everyone could see she was just a ghost underneath and it was okay again. Then that was the end.