Birthday Boy

Twenty-seven years ago today, I was given a little gift:

I loved this gift.  I played with it and dressed it and took it with me everywhere.  And then one day I lost it (I hate Lancaster University; anywhere he’s ever lived; any job he’s ever had).

But then, my gift returned one day, bearing another gift:

So I forgave my gift for having a life of its own without me, and was just glad that it had doubled in size.

Happy birthday, darling!  Did you know that you share your birthday with some illustrious people, including:

• Lucretia Borgia (alleged poisoner) (hey, there weren’t that many careers available to 15th Century women)
• Bernard Ogilvie Dodge (American botanist and pioneer researcher on heredity in fungi) (no joke required; his job says it all)
• Clara Eggink (Dutch poetess) (…?)
• George Huntington Hartford II (American heir) (seriously, who wants to be famous for being an heir – Prince William excepted, of course?  I’d rather be famous for being an alleged poisoner; at least I’d be making my own way in the world) (though I wouldn’t object to being an unfamous heir)
• Lenny Baker (rocker with Sha Na Na) (well that’s just embarrassing) (though he is saved by the fact he was in Grease) (and he is often mistaken for Kenny Baker – being mistaken for a midget android with a cute voice has to be a step up, surely?)
• Herbert Mullin (American serial killer) (some mothers do ‘ave ’em) (not this mother, of course) (right?)
• Bernadette Robi (ex-wife of football player Lynn Swann) (yes, well…almost as worthy as being born an heir)
• Thankfully, the list is saved by the great David Tennant (my child has a Doctor Who connection!!  He is now officially my favourite child)
• Kourtney Kardashian (and he’s back off the favourite child list) (happy birthday, anyway, sweetie pie xxx) (love you)

Author’s Note:

The favourite child thing is just a joke: mothers don’t have favourite children.

But grandmothers do.

We Are A Grandmother

Glory Boy, proving that children have their uses: providing us with more children; the kind we can spoil, give back, and let get away with all the things we forbade their parents to do.

The post title: I think Margaret Thatcher was misunderstood in this instance. My bet is that in her excitement, she meant to say either, ‘We are grandparents’ or, ‘I am a grandmother’ but got the two muddled up and ended up using the Royal ‘We’.

Becoming a grandparent is rather like being royal, after all: someone else does the behind the scenes work; we just have to show up and be applauded.

Here’s my beautiful new grandson: now let the applause begin.

Look What I Did!

 

Somebody went to hospital twenty-five years ago and all they brought back was this lousy mountain man.

Happy birthday, Hairy Boy.

Love you xx

Joke 924

Some Royal baby jokes from Twitter, via The Huffington Post (don’t ever complain that I’m not on the cutting edge of news…)

Little fat belly kitten baby (Photo credit: Eleventh Earl of Mar)

• Royal baby latest: Kate Middleton is 10cm dilated and the midwife can see the silver spoon.  @HylandIan
• Prince William’s heir is falling out.   @thegianttweets
• Trending in his first five minutes of life. Talk about peaking early. 
  @ariannahuff
• “More like Your Cryness.” – the royal gynecologist, using a joke he’s been sitting on for years. @

  kumailn

• In a year’s time, Kate will find some porridge on the inside of her bra & realise her son has just eaten 4 cat biscuits. I guarantee it.  Laura Mugridge
• With 1 out of every 3 kids in the UK born into poverty there must be two sets of parents feeling really unlucky right now.   @TiernanDouieb  
• If the #RoyalBaby sees its shadow there will be six more weeks of Downton Abbey.  @CollegeHumor   
• Tomorrow’s headlines GUARDIAN: It’s a boy! TELEGRAPH: It’s a boy! DAILYMAIL: Has Kate lost the baby weight yet?  @TechnicallyRon  
• If it’s a ten pound baby it’ll have the Queen’s head on it.  @mrnickharvey  
• I don’t want to speculate about the royal baby’s name, but I’m pretty sure it will start with #.   @MooseAllain

 

The Laughing Baby

Fridays are now The Friday Laugh day.  Here’s today’s:

 

Joke 844

the_dos_and_donts_with_babies_013 (Photo credit: DrJohnBullas)

One evening Jessica found her husband Mike with his head cocked looking at their baby’s cot.  Silently she watched him.

As Mike twisted and turned looking at their infant, Jessica could see on Mike’s face a mixture of emotions: disbelief, doubt, joy, surprise, enchantment and scepticism.

Mike did not usually show his emotions and his unusual display brought tears to her eyes.  Jessica put her arm around her husband and gently asked, “A penny for your thoughts.”

“It’s amazing!” Mike replied. “I just can’t work out how Mothercare are able to make a cot like that for only £49.99.”

Joke 672

Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who went into labour and began to yell, “Couldn’t! Wouldn’t! Shouldn’t! Didn’t! Can’t!”?

She was having contractions.

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From writersjokes.  

 

Joke 665

Being a parent changes everything. But being a parent also changes with each baby. Here are some of the ways having a second and third child is different from having your first.

English: A sleeping male baby with his arm extended (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your Clothes

1st baby: You begin wearing maternity clothes as soon as your pregnancy is confirmed.

2nd baby: You wear your regular clothes for as long as possible.

3rd baby: Your maternity clothes ARE your regular clothes.

Preparing for the Birth

1st baby: You practice your breathing religiously.

2nd baby: You don’t bother practising because you remember that last time, breathing didn’t do a thing.

3rd baby: You ask for an epidural in your 8th month.

The Layette

1st baby: You pre-wash your newborn’s clothes, colour-coordinate them, and fold them neatly in the baby’s little bureau.

2nd baby: You check to make sure that the clothes are clean and discard only the ones with the darkest stains.

3rd baby: Boys can wear pink, can’t they?

Worries

1st baby: At the first sign of distress – a whimper, a frown – you pick up the baby.

2nd baby: You pick the baby up when her wails threaten to wake your firstborn.

3rd baby: You teach your 3-year-old how to rewind the mechanical swing.

Dummy/Pacifier

1st baby: If the dummy falls on the floor, you put it away until you can go home and wash and boil it.

2nd baby: When the dummy falls on the floor, you squirt it off with some juice from the baby’s bottle.

3rd baby: You wipe it off on your shirt and pop it back in.

Nappies/Diapers

1st baby: You change your baby’s nappies every hour, whether they need it or not.

2nd baby: You change their nappy every 2 to 3 hours, if needed.

3rd baby: You try to change their nappy before others start to complain about the smell or you see it sagging to their knees.

Activities

1st baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics, BabySwing, and Baby Story Hour.

2nd baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics.

3rd baby: You take your infant to the supermarket and the dry cleaner.

Going Out

1st baby: The first time you leave your baby with a sitter, you call home 5 times.

2nd baby: Just before you walk out the door, you remember to leave a number where you can be reached.

3rd baby: You leave instructions for the sitter to call only if she sees blood.

At Home

1st baby: You spend a good bit of every day just gazing at the baby.

2nd baby: You spend a bit of everyday watching to be sure your older child isn’t squeezing, poking, or hitting the baby.

3rd baby: You spend a little bit of every day hiding from the children.

From 101jokes.com

Tip-Sliding Away

Think of a time you let something slide, only for it to eat away at you later. Tell us how you’d fix it today. 

It wasn’t so much a sliding as a tipping.

It was 1991.  Tory Boy was about ten months old.

My younger brother was staying with us in our Johannesburg flat.  The Hub, Little Brother, Tory Boy and I decided to walk to the nearby SPAR to pick up a few bits.

The Hub pushed his beautiful baby boy in his beautiful bright-blue-for-a-boy pram.  We got about twenty yards from the building’s entrance when a wheel of the pram caught on the gravel and Tory Boy tipped right out, face first into the ground.

I swear it was nervous laughter on my part.

My brother laughed because I laughed (I’m very infectious).  The Hub wrestled with the pram, swooped up Baby and yelled at me the terrible mother who laughed when her baby fell face-first into gravel, all at the same time.

My response (I swear it was nervous laughter on my part) has always eaten away at me.  Mostly because every time Tory Boy brings it up the Hub glares at me and refuses to believe that it was nervous laughter on my part.  Tory Boy doesn’t actually remember the incident but the story impressed him first time he heard it and he likes to remind me of it.  Often.  At least once every time he comes home, as if I don’t have enough guilt just bearing the title, ‘Mother’.  I wouldn’t mind, but he doesn’t even have any scarring from the facial gravel indents.

To fix it, I’d have to have a do-over.  Next time, they can go shopping without me.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

 

I’m late with this one because the summer holiday weeks all merged into one.  

Rather like my children.

Take this photo:

I’m almost certain it is Spud because it’s taken from the left – my hospital bed was on the left wall when I had him and on the right when I had Tory Boy.

Is it terrible that I can recall the position of my beds after childbirth but not what my new children looked like?

The problem is that both boys looked like their father at birth which means they also looked like each other.  It’s been sixteen/twenty-two years and my memory isn’t what it once was, and that wasn’t much.  

I say Spud looked like his father and brother, but he also looked like someone else.  I had him by Caesarian and the anaesthetist (why does childbirth have so many aes?  Coincidentally, A+E stands for Accident and Emergency in the UK – the equivalent of the American ER – and accidents often result in emergencies that include childbirth nine months on.  Well it does in my family), a lovely man, held me up as the gynaecologist (see!) yanked him out.

What emerged was a fat, blue and crinkly Spud.  My first thought – I swear this is true – was, ‘Oh, he looks like the alien baby from V.’

Tell me I’m wrong:

 

Joke 527

Thanks to Cliff for this one.

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Happy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A little boy asked his Dad, “Dad, I know babies come from mummies’ tummies, but how do they get there in the first place?”

Dad hummed and hawed and couldn’t think of what to say.

Finally, his son said, “You don’t have to make something up, Dad.  It’s okay if you don’t know the answer.”

Joke 410

Gulf Coast League Twins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Four men met at a hospital where their wives were giving birth.  A nurse approached Adam and said, “Congratulations, it’s twins.”

Adam said, “That’s a coincidence, I work for the Minnesota Twins.”

Soon after, a nurse told Brian, “Congratulations, you’ve got triplets.”

Brian said, “Another coincidence: I’m a director for 3 Musketeers.”

Another nurse arrived to tell Chad, “Congratulations!  It’s quads!” Chad laughed and said, “And I work at a Four Seasons hotel.”

Suddenly, Dave fainted.  When he came to, Adam, Brian and Chad asked what happened.

Dave gulped, “I work for 7-Eleven…”

Joke 399

Newborn son Magyar: Újszölött fiú (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thanks to Sidey for this one.  It might lose a little something in the translation if English is not your first language, so apologies for that.

I went to visit my friend today.  His wife was sat there with their newborn baby.  She asked if I’d like to wind it.

I thought that was a bit harsh so I gave it a dead leg instead.

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UPDATE:

They say a joke’s not funny if you have to explain it, but here goes:

• Winding the baby: rubbing its back/tummy to make it vomit all over your best top.
• Winding a person: hitting them in the stomach so they can’t breathe and are in a lot of pain…kind of like when I give the Hub an affectionate pat on the belly.
• Dead leg: get a friend to hit your thigh, hard, with the side of a fist.  Try to walk.  Pick yourself up off the floor and groan in pain.

Easter Basket

Gobetween offered a basket of Easter treats.  I liked the idea so much, I have copied it.

Spud in his Easter Bonnet.  It was so heavy, he needed a pole (in his right hand) to support it and a cord (in his left hand) to balance it.  The Hub has a habit of going overboard.  His enthusiasm tends to carry him to places he would never normally go, like into marriage with me.

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An Easter story:

At an Easter service in Bangladesh the congregation wept at the crucifixion scene in the Jesus film.

Suddenly a little boy at the back jumped up and shouted, ‘Don’t worry, He gets up again.  I saw it before!’

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Spud the Vicar: one old tablecloth; some black card; white card; a material scrap and gold stickyback plastic.  Must be a Church of England vicar.

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This happened last year:

I attended the early service in my Anglican church.  We combined with two other churches in the parish last Easter.  The church where we are now based is high church, as opposed to us low church, or enjoy-it-enough-to-almost-be-called-’happy-clappy’-if-we-weren’t-all-too-frightfully-British-to-actually-clap-in church.

The early service is extremely formal: the Gospel reading requires everyone to stand, and is made in the middle of the congregation.  I suppose the thinking is that it’s at the centre of everything.  People in long, white robes hold crosses on sticks and surround the vicar, who reads the scripture from the biggest Bible I’ve ever seen in real life.  It is all rather solemn and old-fashioned.

The reading was from Matthew; the parable of the sower.  The vicar read, And he told them many things in parables, saying, at which point he drew breath, just as the only baby in the room said, Dada!

I’ll tell you what is definitely not old-fashioned – a giggling vicar.

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Happy Easter! 

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Trading Funny For Adorable

I have been dying to share this photo of my great-nephew but I’ve had no excuse.  Here it is anyway: