At First I Was Afraid

... I was petrified. But actually, it turned out to be not so bad as I thought. Last week I happened to be listening to our local independent radio station, Town 102, when they had a phone-in competition for some tickets; all you had to do was name the other half of a comedy duo, and then have your name picked out of a hat.



Naming Large as the other half of Little wasn't a problem for someone my age; and it was my lucky day to be picked out of a hat.
The tickets turned out to be for this:



For the uninitiated, the Chuckle Brothers (Paul and Barry) are a comedy duo whose target audience is children the age of mine; of course, I'd won two tickets, so needed to buy one so that they could both go. Absolutely fizzing with excitement - well, the two of them at least - we trickled down to the Regent Theatre (that many still refer to as The Gaumont) last night to catch the show. At £15 per ticket, still the theatre was almost full.

The very thin story revolved around Jack Frost being Santa's wicked brother, who stole all the presents, which were only retrieved with the help of the Chuckle Brothers. There were magic tricks, there were odd fluorescent puppet things doing random skits, there were parents from the audience getting custard-pied, there was ''it's behind you'' for George the Abominable Snowman, there was lots of '' 'ulloooo'' and ''to me, to you, to me'', there were toilet rolls being flung into the audience along with sweets and crisps, there were songs to shout along to, and - perhaps best of all - there was a pantomime reindeer named Nuts that peed on the audience anytime anyone said 'pea'. Or 'pee'. Or 'p'. You get the idea.


My kids had a ball, saucer-eyed and open-mouthed at the magic tricks, hoarse with shouting at wicked Jack Frost, and trying to drown each other out on the Christmas songs, nearly wetting themselves with laughter when Nuts the reindeer peed on the front rows - so much so that Destructo Boy cried when it ended. I had a ball watching them.

Half-term Slobbery

The kids and I have had the most lovely, relaxed half-term: they've had friends round to play most days, yet the house only got trashed once - note to self: of Destructo Boy's friends, only ever have ONE at a time to play.

We stayed up late at night, and got up late in the morning. We averted the crisis (but not the drama - she isn't named Mini-Diva for no reason) of unexpected glue-lessness by an emergency trip to the pound shop. We ate junk food (I can only eat hotdogs if I don't think about what's in them). We left our hair unbrushed.

We sloughed around in our scufty clothes. We had a magical film marathon: every DVD we watched involved magic of some sort, although Destructo Boy doesn't understand why (a) not all witches are bad (b) I don't have purple eyes.


Anne Lambton in 'The Witches'


Juice was spilt all over the floor only once - and, for a wonder, not by Destructo Boy - and nothing is broken except for me: but the amitriptyline should take care of that.

And right now I am feeling very positive about the Sweater of Doom Mark II: I made a start almost as soon as the yarn was delivered, and after 1 ball, I have this to show for it:



It takes nearly an hour, I think, to complete the 8 rows of the pattern repeat. I don't know whether I might have bitten off more than I can chew, in terms of size .... I'm so much more used to baby and children's knitting, that this seems a giant, mehusive project, even if we don't factor in that I'm knitting the 48'' size - the largest. I just need a place to hide it, and something else to knit that will be convincingly slow so that he won't comment on the lack of progress on it during the week.

It's just over 6 weeks until the Xmas school holidays ...

Family Time

Mini Diva having fallen out with her best friend, and it being the 1st weekend of half-term, she didn't go to dancing on Saturday. Instead we all had a lazy morning, not getting up until around 8am - and even that was because we could no longer deny the pangs of hunger.

A quick tootle into town for fresh fruit and a visit to the library was our only outing this weekend; as the weather has been sunny (cold, of course, but sunny) the kids were out on their bicycles playing with the other kids in the neighborhood: this, to me, is what it's supposed to be like when you're a kid.

On Sunday, once the chores were done, we spent the rest of the day playing on the Playstation 2; I had only seen one of Destructo Boy's 4 birthday games in action, and I wanted to see a different one ... preferably that did not involve cars.

So we ended up playing this:



It was great fun, and DH displayed a hitherto unsuspected gift for being able to achieve the really difficult bits - spinning Melman round his enclosure cleaning up rubbish and tranking the psycho-guard/hunter and sailors whilst simultaneously cooking superb omelettes for dinner; the kids were particularly good at King Julian's dancing mini-game. I was especially fond of attaining Gloria's Double Butt-Bounce ....