"My Husband, The Poet"

Partners in Grime...

This morning I was privy to yet another shameful parenting moment..of our own design it has to be said.

The husband and I were sprawled in bed glued to our respective Apple devices (me to my iphone and he to his beloved laptop - which he subsequently managed to drop on the floor when answering the daily a.m. clarion call/scream from Fat Baby downstairs begging to be let out of his cot to join his brothers in the front room to watch some horrendous thing or another on Cartoon Network...(mental note to self: MUST check what monsters are watching on telly one of these mornings...)

Anyway, he was no sooner back in bed then we were debating the pros and cons of booking tickets to yet another festival this summer ("Latitude Festival" in Suffolk, near some water...) but this time WITH les trois monsters, in an effort to make up for our supreme selfishness/wisdom in 'Glasto-ing' it alone this year.

Our deliberations were interrupted by a blood-curdling yell from Egg, who though mostly unintelligible, was screaming something about a driver needing to see us?!  As is always the case, me being a girl and having way more necessary bits and pieces to assemble before being presentable (I've done the dash-downstairs-with-no-bra-on-to-greet-delivery-driver enough times to know it always ends in embarrassment - for both of us - let alone during breastfeeding years when I may as well have been caught inflagrante on a porn set for all that was concealed...but again I digress...)

The husband can jump out of bed, leap into a pair of his trusty cargo shorts (a pair of which he always, inexplicably, seems to have lying beside his bed no matter the season) and be out the bedroom door in seven seconds flat, I kid you not.  It's a serious talent and one I truly admire.

So that he did, and minutes later I stumbled downstairs to find our weekly Ocado shop scattered about the kitchen, and the husband muttering disgustedly under his breath.

"What was that?"

"It's a disgrace.  Egg let in the driver, then went back to watch cartoons and forgot about it, and apparently the driver wouldn't leave until he knew an adult was around.  Oh, and he needed someone to lock him out."

I smiled.  Not for any other reason than I found the scenario amusing (though to be fair, most of my life is viewed from a writer or director's point of view...once removed...and therefore usually at odds with the husband's 'in-your-face-this-can't-be-my-life' hellish viewpoint.  A difference which combined with my shall we say 'laid back approach to parenting,' often leads to occasional marital discord.)

This pissed the husband off.  He wasn't done yet.

"Oh, and do you realise that the driver had to step several times over that awful bag of Poo at the top of the stairs?"

He glared at me.  I glanced down at the offending bright orange Sainsbury's shopping bag, containing last night's putrid fecal emission from our youngest, which indeed had in fact apparently failed to walk itself out the door and into the outside bin last night as requested. Fancy that.

"I put it there because it was too stinky to stay in our house.  And you were supposed to drop it in the bin outside when you went to pick up Egg last night."  (I spoke to him calmly and slowly, like one might speak to someone with learning disabilities.)

"How was I supposed to know?!  You didn't tell me!"

"Yeah well, when you see a smelly parcel atop the stairs, and you hear me talking to you but blank me out because you're watching the game or because you simply blank out 80% of what I say anyway, surely you can put two and two together and just grab it on your way out as a matter of parental instinct, non?"

He glared again (he's good at that), then left to shuffle Dumpie out the door to school.

As he walked back upstairs he began muttering to himself again, not unlike 'Grumpy' from "The Seven Dwarves".

"A bag of Poo at the top of the stairs is NEVER an acceptable state of affairs...A bag of Poo at the top of the stairs is NEVER an acceptable state of affairs...A bag of Poo at the top of the stairs is NEVER an acceptable state of affairs!"  He was positively spitting out the words.

At this point Fat Baby ran up to him, thinking Daddy was singing a new nursery rhyme or some such, and began to hop up and down excitedly in what has recently morphed from his former trademark 'Happy Dance' into more of a 'Happy Hop'.

We ended up in a three person hug in the kitchen. ME because I was still seeing from the POV of a writer/director and was subsequently still amused...HE because I could tell he was secretly pleased with himself that his day job hadn't yet extinguished his innate ability to fashion witty on-the-spot rhyming couplets...and the Fat Baby because HE was in the centre of a game he didn't quite understand, and probably wouldn't for about another thirty odd years :)