Soxy Foxy Roxy

I have often said that when Tiddles McGee turned three years old, it was like we turned a corner and found some remnants of our old “pre-children” lives waiting there. Life suddenly seemed full of possibilities again…

Now that he’s turned four, however, we seem to have turned another corner – and found a puppy waiting for us there, wagging her tail and with one of my perfect red shoes already in her mouth.

I’ve only got myself to blame. You see, I have also often said “We can’t get a puppy until Tiddles turns four.” It seemed a safe enough thing to say when he was two, for example. Or even three. But when it was a week before his fourth birthday? Not so safe. I should have set the goal posts further away – fourteen or, better still, forty-four – but I was only echoing what the experts said. Stupid experts. They really should know better.

I tried to put the kids off, saying it’d be better to wait until Christmas (and such) but then my husband started in on me, too.

“If we don’t buy the puppy today, I’ll then be away for work for two weeks and then it’ll be practically December and every man (and his dog) will want a puppy for Christmas and we’ll have missed out all together,” he whined.

The general gist was that if I didn’t let him go out and buy a puppy At That Very Moment, we’d never ever get a dog and the kids would blame me, like, FOREVER. I was in the midst of pre-party “planning” so I just agreed with him so we could go back to talking about the important stuff, such as where to hang the disco ball and why I couldn’t find any coloured stockings that weren’t “Tangerine Explosion” in the local Coles.

Of course, when he took me to see the dog he’d found, I fell in love with her.

“You fell in love with the cat, too,” my dear friend KT warned me. “And look how that turned out.”

“Well, I didn’t know that the cat was going to grow up to be homicidal!” I exclaimed. Of course, as I’ve admitted before, calling him Genghis Cat instead of, say, Fluffy Fluffkins of Fluffville Manor, may have contributed to this a little.

So here I am. With a puppy. She’s half-Staffy, half-Jack Russell and 100% Love. And her name is Roxy.

(An aside: I thought Roxy was a safe enough choice until KT started singing a song from ‘Chicago’ that reminded me that ‘Roxie’ was a fame-hungry murderer. I’m hoping the ‘y’ instead of the ‘ie’ will make all the difference, frankly.)

In the days leading up to Roxy’s arrival, people took great pleasure in telling me how having a puppy was like having a baby in the house. And when she first came home, I cried alternate tears of happiness and of grief and had to have a Little Lie-Down shortly afterwards.

But then there I was the very next day, showered, fully-dressed, drinking a hot cup of coffee and about to leave the leave the house – WITHOUT THE PUPPY – and I thought “There’s no way in fuck this is like having a baby.” And I simply stopped panicking.

As for Tiddles McGee, whose birthday was a little hijacked by Roxy’s arrival, and who had the unnerving experience of opening a big cardboard box and finding a living creature inside instead of, say, a Kung Zhu Battle Hamster Ninja Training Ground Dragon Alley U-Turn set… Well, all I can say is he’s stopped hassling me for television quite so much when his siblings are at school and I regularly hear him saying to her stuff like “Would you like cheese, Gromit?” in his best Yorkshire accent and “Let’s get on my pirate ship, puppy. You can be my pirate dog!”.

Yes, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship… for all of us. Except for my shoes and the distinctly murderous cat, that is.

Happy Birthday, Tiddles-McGee-Who-Is-No-Longer-Three

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When Third Finally Comes First

“He’s a third child who thinks he’s a first child!” a wise friend once observed of our Tiddles McGee. 

And dang it, she was right. Tiddles burst into this world, sized up the competition and realised that being the Textbook Third Child – you know, the one who’s supposed to “fit in with the rest of the family” – just wasn’t going to cut it. Nuh-uh. 

For the first year of life, he tried to make me his bitch by completely depriving me of sleep. This quickly reduced me to this haggard creature with long greasy hair and badly matching clothes that caused passersby to remark “Man, that’s one fat-arse junkie!”. And in the end, rather than making me his bitch, this strategy just turned me into a bitch and I spent most of my time shouting at The Competition rather than doting on him. 

After that, he dabbled a little in climbing things to get my attention. Why, he was a regular little mountaineer, staging regular jail breaks of his cot, scaling furniture, leaping tall bookshelves in a single bound. 

And then, once he learnt to walk, he quickly began his transformation into “Ninja-With-Jazz-Hands”. Anyone who has ever seen him wielding a weapon of any kind can attest that he is at once nimble, debonair and utterly deadly. However, after he’d delivered one too many “whackings” with the pointy end of a light saber, Mr Justice must have issued him with an Official Warning outlining the legal implications of killing off his siblings and he tried yet another tack.

Instead, he became Tragi-Comic Man – you know, those contrasting theatre masks that surely must only ever be donned by lazy actors or ones who have had too much botox and can’t move their face anyway. Anyway, as Tragi-Comic man, McGee was either A) the life of the party, telling jokes, cheeky and charming; OR B) wailing inconsolably, gnashing his teeth and beating his breast (and sometimes mine) over the very slightest of injuries, physical or emotional. 

Whatever he was doing, it was unmissable.

And then suddenly, the day came when I bundled both Mr Justice and The Pixie off to school and it was just him and me. And Mr Tiddles McGee put down his weapons and his masks and came and sat next to me on the couch.

I asked him if he missed his sister.

“Nooooooo!” he replied, as if that was the silliest question I’d ever asked. 

And your brother?

“No!” he replied. Second silliest question. 

What about your dad? Do you miss your dad when he’s at work?

“No,” he said, simply.

Do you miss anybody?

“Mummy. I miss Mummy,” he said and hugged me tight. 

Now, some people might think he doesn’t really understand the meaning of “to miss somebody” or, perhaps, he doesn’t actually know that I am his mother.  Or even, as I later went on to muse on twitter, I am not the mother he wishes me to be and it’s that idea of “Mummy” that he misses. Yes, perhaps.

Or maybe he’s remembering the little baby boy he used to be who would cry like the world had ended every time I left the room. 

Yes, Tiddles McGee is finally happy. He’s waited three long years and now he’s got me all to himself.

Moreover, he’s got the TV all to himself. Which I actually, now that I think about it, has possibly been his real objective all along…

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Three

I think I understand the real reason why Samson never cut his hair. It’s because his mother wouldn’t let him. No, really. There’s something about a little boy’s first hair cut that jettisons him away from his mother’s arms towards adulthood and Samson’s mum knew that. 

It is not surprising, then, that I did some top-class procrastinating when it came to the cutting of Tiddles McGee’s baby hair. I’m really very extremely adept at avoiding things that I don’t want to do. Unfortunately, those very same procrastination skills were also applied to the brushing of said hair and it was rumoured there were many small birds in the neighbourhood who were seriously considering making it their summer residence. I even contemplated using the back of his hair as a cup-holder a number of times. Yes, it really was getting that bad. 

And so, last week, my husband manfully took charge of the situation and cut away McGee’s somewhat dread-locked mane with his clippers. And there, underneath all that hair, we found ourselves a Big Boy. 

And today, that Big Boy turns three. 

It’s all been a bittersweet pill to swallow, my friends. A bittersweet pill, indeed – especially since Mr Justice has ceased to acknowledge me at all in public (see “Too Cool At School“). I mean, if he’s like this at seven, it’s entirely likely he will have changed his identity and moved continents by the age of fourteen just to get the hell away from me. 

Tiddles McGee has been my consolation through all this. 

“You still love, Mama… don’t you my iddle-widdle Tiddles?” I’ve often cooed to him, while trying to nurse him in my arms like a baby and vaguely wondering if Norman “Psycho” Bates was a youngest child. (Answer: highly likely). 

And Tiddles still does love his Mama. He still curls himself in a little ball on my lap and tries to tuck himself into me. He still cries when I leave the house without him. He still rushes at me with open-mouthed kisses, full of love and just a bit too much saliva.

And today he is three. 

Now I know you’re probably all thinking that Tiddles McGee deserves a nom de guerre more fitting a boy of his advancing years and Big Boy haircut than “Tiddles”. But sorry, folks, he ain’t gonna have one. No matter how big he gets, no matter how many degrees he receives or countries he invades or Cannonball-style roadtrip movies he ends up making, he’ll always be my Tiddles McGee. Fact. 

And now he is THREE. 

The road to three-dom has been hard for Tiddles McGee, who has had to endure a whole string of other (lesser) birthdays in the lead up to his own: his father’s, his brother’s, his sister’s and, most recently, mine. Why, just last Friday, he walked into my bedroom with the rest of the family, singing “Happy Birthday To You!” only to crumple into a heap of inconsolable sobbing at the end of the third line when he realised the song was for Mummy and not for him. The injustice of it all!

But today, Tiddles McGee, the song is all for you. Happy Birthday! Now, come give your mama a huggle and a big sloppy kiss on the lips. There’s a good boy. 

So, you’re really three now, huh?

Oh, my aching heart. 

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