mornings (again)

anyone who has been reading my ramblings for any length of time will know that mornings have to be handled carefully in this house. the peeps have got it down to a fine art. the problem arises from the fact that beefburger people don't like change. going from lying horizontally in a cosy warm bed to being vertical in a chilly kitchen counts as change. i think there is more than a little of the beefburger in me. my hour of rising is in inverse proportion to the temperature.

when my boy was young it was very tough. by the time he had been prised out of bed both my boy and herself would be in tears. it did not make for a good start to the day. so she started using a two stage process. he would crawl down out of his loft bed and crawl into the peeps bed to have a cuppa before making the final transition to the bathroom. this meant he could have a few minutes at a 45 degree angle before verticality hit him.

lately the routine has changed again. my boy's taxi now comes earlier. dave, the lovely taxi driver has been joined by a lady who is an escort. this sounded a little odd to me. from what i have seen on telly such ladies operate mainly at night. my boy was quick to explain.

"she's a miserable old trout!" he said, "she has to come in the car to stop the other kids jumping out when its going along. she suffers from an excess of troutage!"

it seems the escort is in the habit of making dave drive off if the young folk don't appear within 2 minutes of the taxi pulling up. this has added to the anxiety levels in the morning. herself has assured my boy that the trout-lady has picked the wrong woman to have a fight with and that is she dared to leave without my boy herself would be at the school waiting for her to arrive and that a piece of her mind would be administered.

anyway, because of this my boy has to get up quickly. unfortunately this has coincided with the onset of teenagehood, a side effect of which seems to be lethargy. i understand mrs deb has had the same problems with her youngster. anyway, herself had to find a method of extracting him from his pit. the fact that my boy has a loft bed does not help. it is too high to climb up and pull him out. a trip to the emergency department would not help. cajoling has worked in the past but stronger measures were needed. as herself is still croaky from the bad throat she could not nag for very long. she went into the kitchen and came back with a large white radish.




she proceeded to whack my boy's form under the duvet with it. this got him out very well and also in a good humour. (herself has some interesting ideas about training children. she has never been one for slapping. she cured my boy of a rather unattractive habit of making extremely sexist remarks in one fell swoop by putting a cold, wet teabag down his neck, having warned him first on account of him needing to be prepared for things beforehand).

this morning my boy laughed at her and pointed out that now the radish had been half eaten she could not use it as a weapon.



herself was not to be deterred. she used the other end of the radish to tickle him which worked a treat. and for good measure, to get him out of the shower, she played him a tune on the recorder...