Jimmy Page’s Trousers

Baby Trousers turned four the other day - a baby no more.  She celebrated in fine style with much merriment and sugary treats.  She also drew a splendid picture of me.  A fine likeness (not that most of you know) and one that now holds pride of place on the fridge door.

She’s captured me, I think.  Incidentally, that huge arm is no accident.  She specifically pointed out that it was dad’s big arm.  I was under the impression that my arms were fairly similar in size but apparently not.  The reasons were explained to me:  that is the arm that she likes to cling to, arms and legs crossed around the forearm monkey-style, while I lift her in a sort of ‘biscep curl’ action.  I did it once when she was little and she still asks me to do it now and then.  It gets harder as she gets bigger and I get older.

My overtired daughter is currently upstairs, wailing that she ‘wants to be a real fairy’.

Bloody kids.

Yesterday, Baby Trousers took a cook book from the shelf in the kitchen and sat down in the sitting room to have a look. I went with her.

“What’s this?” she enquired.

“It’s a recipe book that tells you how to cook things,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. She’s still in the why-stage. Inquisitive little thing. Too damn inquisitive as I soon found out.

“Well, if you don’t know how to cook something, you can look in here.”

“Did you get it when I was a baby?”

“Before that, I think,” I said.

“Did you get it when I was in mammy’s belly?”

“Maybe even before that”

“Did you help put me in mammy’s belly?”

Oh shit. Where did that come from? “Errrrm. In a manner of speaking,” I told her.

“How did I get in mammy’s belly, dad?”

Arrrggghhh! Shit, shit, shit. Emergency, emergency. She’s three, for Christ’s sake. I thought I had another few years at least. What can you do?

“Let’s go get a chocolate biscuit,” I said. I’m not sure how much time I’ve bought.

It’s always a bad idea to allow your three year-old daughter to get into the bed with you.

Three year-old daughters are exactly the right height such that, when their heads are on the pillow, their feet are at precisely the level of your groin.

If three year-old daughters slide down the bed slightly, they will use your scrotum as a foothold to get back up.

Having three year-old daughters use your scrotum as a foothold is not conducive to a peaceful sleep.

That is all.

My daughter, Baby Trousers (who may have to be renamed soon as she’s nearly three) has been a little uneasy at night of late. She’s normally a pretty good sleepy person but for the last month she’s been a bit troublesome getting settled and shouts for us in the night if she wakes up.

The other night, Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers was putting her down. Baby Trousers was not keen on settling down and when quizzed as to why, she said “I will have sad dreams”. Dear God, if I’d been there I’d have climbed into the bed and hugged her until dawn but Mrs Jimmy Page’s Trousers is made of sterner stuff.

“No you won’t”, she said, “You will have happy dreams. You can dream that you’re on the beach with mammy and daddy and we’re throwing stones into the sea”.

With an extraordinary ability to see the cloudy side of any silver lining, my daughter replied in a sad voice, “But then the stones will be lost”.

I’m so proud.

I’m worried about music these days. For many reasons. To the casual onlooker, the most obvious reason is that today’s music is bland, insipid, homogenised tripe designed by insignificant, insincere, inadequate little men in expensive suits (I’m looking at you Louis Walsh). Bands’ images are also being put through the same machine (similar to the machine that company canteens use to remove all flavour from food). Years ago, bands were dangerous. Rock and roll was the work of the devil and all his little goblins. If a rocker didn’t like you, he might pull a knife. Or something. Anyway, the point is that there was some personality to bands and music. Possibly because they were bands and not just a collection of tone-deaf tossers that happen to conform to whatever the ‘look’ of the moment happens to be and are therefore made into a ‘band’ by those little men mentioned above.

Even bands that are trying to be ‘hard’ are pretty sad. Punk is no longer punk, it’s pop-punk. That bloke from Greenday with the mascara? My mam could beat him up. I hear when ‘Preston‘ of the Ordinary Boys walked off Buzzcocks recently because they slagged off his (made-up-celebrity) wife’s autobiography, he said “when someone bad-mouths your wife, you either leave or knock him spark-out”. What? His name is Preston for fucks sake (actually that’s his surname but he thinks it’s cool to just use that).

It’s all a pile of shite. A steaming, stinking pile at that.

But anyway, that’s not the only reason that I’m worried about music these days. It’s the marketing. Basically, won’t somebody please think of the children? Now, Baby Trousers is, so far, too young to care about much other than her nursery rhymes CD but what happens when the time comes that she looks further afield in search of musical entertainment?

What am I blathering on about? At a recent children’s party in my neighbours I observed a group of three or four girls aged, I’d guess, between six and eight all singing Shakira’s “My Hips Don’t Lie” and teaching each other the dance routines to accompany the song. Dear God. So wrong.

Maybe I’m insane on this and maybe it’s all ok. Am I overreacting in worrying about this? Is this just what my grandparents worried about when those mop-topped popsters, the Beatles burst on the scene? I realise that the first half of this post and the second seem slightly opposing but I still can’t reconcile the Shakira thing in my head.

It just don’t seem right.

Yours

Prudey McPrude

It appears that Baby Trousers has well and truly found The Terrible Twos and made them her own.

On Monday night, I came home about an hour after my darling daughter’s bedtime and opened the front door to much wailing and screaming. I popped upstairs to see what the fuss was and found Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers on the landing looking frazzled. I glanced into the room from which the awful noise emanated to see Baby Trousers standing in her cot (she’s getting a bit big for it - bed soon) having thrown everything but the mattress out. The floor was strewn with blankets, sheets and had enough fallen effigies of Pooh Bear and his mates that it looked like a massacre in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Apparently, she had been in similar mood for the last hour as she had decided that bed wasn’t quite the thing for her at that time. I utilised the negotiation skills I’d learned watching some Bruce Willis film and, over a loud hailer from the landing, I managed to talk her down. Then, I threw the Negotiators Handbook out the window and went in. Luck was on my side and I managed to defuse the situation without having to get all Jack Bauer on her.

Cut to last night. As I was busy making the dinner, Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers witnessed a ‘throwing stuff on the floor incident’. Despite a clear warning, the perpetrator did not comply and Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers was forced to apprehend her and place her in the naughty corner (on the mat out by the front door).

Displaying her new-found disrespect for authority however, Baby Trousers decided that this punishment would instead, be a fine new game. Cue much running from the corner into the kitchen and much merriment as Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers placed her firmly back each time. Next, my little miscreant decided that she’d rather sit on the stairs than stay in the Corner of Shame. Her jailer duly placed her back and told her to stay on the mat. On investigating the next scampering noise, my delinquent daughter was found to have placed the mat on the first step of the stairs and was sitting on it. Back she went.

After a couple more returns, she seemed to be getting the message and there was no movement for a while. Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers and I exchanged hopeful glances but before we could breath a sigh of relief, the door was flung open and Baby Trousers ran, completely naked, into the kitchen and proceeded to do a little dance in the middle of the floor.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to appear strict and authoritative when there’s a nudie toddler dancing in your kitchen?

Back she went though and after some more effort, she did her time. Not before telling Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers that she ‘didn’t like mammy’ during a couple of trips however.

Jesus, it’s tough going. I’m considering a ‘Naughty Box’ with some sort of locking lid for the future.