Kerinthian's

(To save on Day Care, as well as not actually wanting our children to be full time Day Care Casualties, I have changed my weekend to be on Thursdays and Fridays. Here’s how this “weekend” went… oh, and due to sleep deprivation, this may or may not be entirely accurate.) Its two o’clock in the morning and I have been abducted from my sleep by the horrific screams of my three year old in the room next door. It’s as though at that moment the kid’s room has become the tangible imagination of Stephen King and I am lying in my bed, half in shock and the rest of me in delirious denial. The screams continue unabated. I’m trying to gather together my fractured consciousness, wondering at the terrible torment obviously taking place in the other room, thinking, hoping, maybe she’ll just go back to sleep? “DADDY! DADDY!” She cries from a throat that has become the very trumpet of fear in its most concentrated form. I try to go back to sleep. Am I a bad parent? Only if this was the first tim...

My daughter turns 3 on the day we celebrate the Queen's Birthday this year. Ok, so I know that it's not the Queen's actual birthday but it does seem somewhat significant that on the day my country celebrates 60 years of ignoring that we actually do have a Queen, I will be celebrating 3 incredible years of adoring this little girl who has been worth more than a thousand monarchs to me. She is definitely of unattainable value. I can't imagine what life was life without her, or her sister come to think of it. Only last week I put on my Wedding DVD and the predominate feeling wasn't nostalgia but the weirdness that non of my kids were there! I asked myself the question even, "Where's my children" before realising I was an idiot. I am greatful to God for entrusting me with these Human lives that have taught me so much about life, about me, about God. There is something complete about being a parent. Something that makes life make more sense. May...

I was some where else, doing something else, in such a complete sense. My mind was firing signals like a fireworks display whilst I watched the whatever it was in my dreams as I lay like a mucus like paste in my cocoon of a bed. In case the metaphor is lost on you I was soundlessly asleep, snug, escaped, resisting consciousness like a running criminal resists arrest, when suddenly the screams from the room next door woke me up. Those blood churning, echoing cries of my almost three year old in the throws of a nightmare... Naturally I'm usually the one transported from sleep into the realm of semi-consciousness. My wife was built with ear muffs permanently attached to her inner ear it would seem. So like a broken slinky I sort of rise and fall our of my bed and then crumple along the floor to my destination, the kid's room with all its horrors. By the sound of the screams I'm half expecting to discover a kidnapping in progress but thankfully the only felony taking pla...

I feel as if I have just woken up from some kind of cryogenic sleep, like in the opening scene of Alien, I’ve stepped out of my foggy sleep-pod and am now doing the “this steel floor is cold” dance in my space undies. That best describes what coming back to blogging is like after so long of not doing it, the foggy sleepy parts at least, don’t let the metaphor lead you into thinking I’m typing in my undies or doing any sort of dance! Although I would like to own a pair of space knickers, that would be cool I think. The things that threw my spaceship of life off course and away from the blogger-system were pretty straight forward. I became a Dad and then became a Dad again and somewhere in the jumble of all the priorities that went with early fatherhood, my desire to blog got buried under a mountain of soiled nappies, work, and otherwise more important goals. The only time available for me to write found itself the battle ground on which fought my desire to sleep and the often st...

As most of my subscribers are aware I am the proud father of two wonderful children. Now recently a friend suggested to me that having pets was somehow synonymous with having offspring! I realized that I've actually heard people say this before, and it also dawned on me that most of these people actually believe what their tongue is suggesting, unaware that if ones tongue could cross its fingers when telling a fib, it would certainly be doing so at the mere suggestion that a Human Child is even remotely anything like a four legged subservient creature that can double up as a mega-city for fleas and would prefer to use it's mouth when washing it's.... well, you get the point.  Nevertheless I still feel compelled to now take you on a journey to explain the spleen bursting absurdity of that belief. Please note these comparisons are for "normal" otherwise responsible pet owners and parents.  T...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the home of some friends of ours. They have two kids with a 3 year head start on our young family. The smaller is just over a year old and every time I go round she hops up on her little trunks and waddles across the floor in a mammoth effort to make it to my legs and then tries to launch herself upward by tugging on my knee caps. They’re really cool kids. The three year old boy is already first in line to be my daughter’s husband (so far as I’m concerned) and every time I see him I make a point of asking him, “Are you going to marry H when you grow up?” He nods his head yes but sometimes gets confused and tells me who else he plans to marry. Actually he sometimes even tries to claim my wife as already being his! But it’s still early days and the brain washing process that I’ve started may take a few years, but at least the seed has been sown. He certainly enjoys kissing her good-bye at the end of each visit (In a perfectly innocent Anne Geddes sense). ...

I have a new state of the art alarm clock with arms and legs and a mouth that chimes “Wa wa waaaaa” every morning at about 6.30 in the a.m. The difficulty is I can’t set it to any other time and neither can I return it to the manufacturer to ask for a replacement or a refund. So I have no choice but to adjust my nightly routine of staying up with the Xbox until 3 a.m. to actually going to bed when the rest of the world does to minimize the effect when dawn comes and I don’t feel like a sledge hammer just tried to blow a raspberry on my forehead. Some alarm clocks you just want to punch with a closed fist so that the springs fly in all directions and you’re forced to buy a new one, but this one has a smile so it’s harder to negotiate with. I wake up in the morning to its wines; transfer it to the feeding station – the mother of the alarm clock, usually half awake and dreaming of the days when she was something other than a milk processing place. When the winging turns into smoochy fee...

Recently I found myself locked in a dark room with a 21 year old university student and before your mind wanders in the wrong direction I should point out he was a new employee I was training at work. In between threading up movies and watching the clock we began discussing more topics than your average chimpanzee might over a bright yellow banana from religion, political philosophy (whatever that is) to the life and death hypothetical’s they throw at students these days, like “If you were in a life boat with five other people and one of you had to be thrown overboard to save the other 4 then what would you do?” He couldn’t get over how my Christian beliefs would throw me overboard as the one most likely to live forever while giving the other 4 a chance to live long enough to meet their creator this side of the grave. What does this have to do with anything? Well, as most such discussions go it came to the age old questions about the ethical demise of abortion and people like me ...