13 posts tagged “hairy”

Friday's Child is Loving and Giving

Hairy came home last weekend, full of bounciness about his girlfriend, and his flat, and his courses, and life in general, and heavily laden down with a lot of septic dirty washing. He and Mouse actually communicated on Friday night. On Saturday I took him shopping for new boots, and he chatted to me incessantly about everything as we wandered through the shopping centre. We went to his grandparents for dinner, and he told them everything too, and showed them photos of himself and the girlfriend (for whom I am obviously going to have to come up with a decent anonymous sobriquet). When we got home, he stayed up until about 4 am in the morning (I know because he woke me up going to bed). On Sunday he snarled at Mouse, crabbed at Handsome - whose only sin was to take him to Tescos, grunged about taking his now clean washing from me and putting it in some sort of receptacle to enable him to take it back to Glasgow, and then snapped my head off just before he left. Grrrrr. I guess he needs his sleep. Next time I'll treat him like Mouse and remove the X-box controllers before I go to bed.

Thursday's Child has Far to Go

Mouse is verging on fury most of the time just now. Mostly (when his elder brother is not around) I put it down to raging hormones and the unfairness of life in general. Some of it probably has to be put down to family temperament and tendency. He is convinced he is the only fifteen-year-old in the entire universe who is not allowed to buy Call of Duty. It is entirely possible that he is the only fifteen-year-old whose mother won't let him buy eighteen-rated games, but I can be very stubborn and also very squeamish... We have screaming arguments about this, and quite honestly sometimes I wonder if it's worth it. And then I hear him shouting in an empty room at an electronic box and think, maybe I have to have some principles. He and Handsome have just had a (better controlled - Handsome doesn't shriek like a fishwife) disagreement about the hour's revision a night that he's supposed to be doing for his prelims next week. He lost again, and is now sitting in the dining room with his books and notes out. And some very very loud music, which I am ignoring. Sometimes it's better to win half the battle.
 

We went across to Glasgow today, to take Hairy some essentials (clothes, underwear mainly, and home-baked bread) and to take him shopping. We met him for lunch, and then headed for a supermarket with a shopping list written by his flat-mate. Unlike most of the males in my family, Hairy does not cook. This isn't from lack of encouragement; Handsome and myself have been most vociferous about cooking being an essential life skill, and Mouse cooks without encouragement (and sometimes without checking that we don't need the ingredients for dinner). However, Hairy does appear to have fallen on his feet - his flat mate cooks and apparently loves to cook, and is prepared to cook for him. The least we can do is provide the ingredients!

We got to meet the new girlfriend as well, as she was at the flat (with the self sacrificing cooking flat mate and boyfriend) when we got back with the shopping. They made us tea, and made conversation while we drank it (quickly, so we could take our old selves out of there before Hairy got too embarrassed). Hairy seems very happy, his friends are lovely (and polite to parents, which is definitely a good thing), the flat looks fine for a student flat, and is considerably cleaner than some I've seen. Everything's looking good.

I think I'll stop worrying for a bit.

After not having heard from him all week, Hairy finally answered my msns and texts yesterday and confirmed that he did actually, finally have somewhere to live - and that he was moving in today. He also confirmed that he has Mouse's jeans, but that's a different story... I am so relieved. I've tried very hard not to worry about him sleeping on other students' floors, and moving from flat to flat, but I have really not been happy about it. As I may have mentioned before, my worry gene is dominant. Of course we haven't seen this flat, or met the girl he's sharing with (not his girlfriend - she's in halls), I hope she's the tolerant type. But no matter what, it has to be better than him being of no fixed abode.

Thinking back, some of the student accommodation Handsome and I had all those eons some time ago when we were at university together was pretty appalling - we had a little reminiscence tonight about some of the horrible houses we lived in. One of Handsome's rooms was so cold that we used to crawl under the layers of quilts and blankets to switch on the electric fire at the bottom of the bed before we had to get up. And the one I stayed in on my own while Handsome was on his working year was so dirty that I lived in my room for a year rather than go into the filthy downstairs rooms. It wasn't cleanable - the mould in the walls had already been there for generations.

I'm fairly sure that Hairy won't actually put up with that sort of thing. His standards are higher than mine were at that age! He is also protected by quite a few laws that were not in place when we were at university. But then, he won't have all that experience to laugh about when he's older.

Hairy came home for the weekend tonight. It's lovely to see him, and he's really happy, which is always good. He's still homeless, although there is light on the horizon, apparently. He's not too sure whether to be pleased about the light on the horizon situation or not, as it involves someone else being evicted....

But his reason for coming home was more down-to-earth: he somewhat sheepishly admitted that there were head-lice going around his long-haired-hitting-people-with-swords club, and he didn't really want anyone except me to check for him.

I used to check both the boys for head lice every Sunday night at bath-time, but that was when they were still small enough to allow me into the bathroom with them. It was an entirely different matter to be combing conditioner through the waist-length hair of a large broad-shouldered nineteen-year-old - I couldn't even reach around him to get the shower head to rinse the conditioner out!

He is, luckily, head-lice free, and he now has very nicely conditioned hair as well.

Mouse and Hairy are driving me mad. They're both at home during the day just now, Mouse goes back to school on Thursday, but Hairy's new term doesn't start for eons... And they are messy and untidy - interestingly more so together than individually - and incapable of even picking up their breakfast dishes and putting them in the wash-disher. I asked Hairy tonight why he hadn't cleared up the kitchen, and he said 'You didn't ask me to today' with the emphasis on the today because he knew damn well he was guilty, and needed to make excuses. Mouse just went 'Huh, you always pick on me'. Even although I had actually had a go at Hairy first anyway. And even although at least half the dishes were his.

No-win situation for me any way around.

Hairy has had his bike, his main means of transport, pinched from his university hall. He phoned me up this morning because he didn't know how he went about reporting it to the police. He's never had to do that before. Annoyingly the bike was locked up and inside the padlocked (combination, so not that secure unfortunately) bike store.

However on the plus side, it is insured, the front forks were knackered and were going to have to be replaced shortly anyway, it wasn't a hugely expensive bike in the first place, and it might teach him to lug the thing up four flights of stairs and store it in his room from now on... although that's probably not allowed.

It was a bit of a shock to read Hairy's blog and find out that someone had attempted to mug him a couple of days ago. He was lucky, a passer-by intervened (with a threat to call the police). Of course, my worry gene has become dominant again (it never goes very far beneath the surface anyway), but he seems to be very casual about the whole thing. Actually, that worries me even more...

Last night was the night Hairy took Mouse to his first real grown up concert - they bought each other the tickets for Christmas. It was a really good big-brother little-brother occasion - Hairy was very grown up about being responsible for him and Mouse was delighted to be out with only his big brother. They came out several hours later hot, sweaty, deaf and having had a really good time.

And Mouse got the t-shirt (although he still has to pay me back for it) so he's really chuffed.

It was lovely to see them getting on so well; brotherly for my boys normally means bickering, and sometimes I get worried about just how much arguing is healthy. When they walked towards the car last night they were actually talking to each other. They looked like friends.

Perhaps sometimes they can be friends?

Blogging for the sake of blogging - well, I need something to do in the ad breaks between bits of CSI Miami... to which I am shamelessly addicted.

Hairy has finally been pinned down into coming home on Thursday; I'm desperate to see him again, it's been ages, and the last time I did see him he was looking really thin and tired. I haven't even got a Christmas present for him yet, because he keeps on telling me he doesn't need anything, and he'll have a look when he gets home. I don't care even if it means I have to take him shopping on Christmas Eve, I'm just looking forward to having him home for the holidays.

Mouse may struggle with becoming a younger brother again, he's got very used to being the only child at home. Hopefully it'll be enough of a novelty to have his elder brother home, and to have someone to talk to and play games with. Perhaps. I'm not holding my breath. He still needs to tidy up all his horrible little orcs Warhammer models out of Hairy's room, which he has been using as a painting space, largely because it's the tidiest room in the house as no-one is living in it. Also, it airs well - important with the combination of glue, paint and a houseful of asthmatics.

Mouse did well at his concert last week - he was on stage an almost embarrassing number of times. And, as he is really quite distinctive, and taller than a lot of other kids, it's quite obvious that he is. However, I decided quite early on not to be embarrassed, but just to be very proud instead.

He sang, almost danced, swayed a bit... sang some more, played in the senior wind band and did a very jazzy version of 'Satin Doll' with the saxophone ensemble. It's a bit of a sore point with him that he's been playing with the saxophone quartet all through first and second year, and there have never, ever been four of them. In fact, the numbers have varied from three to seven. This year, there are four of them - and the school have stopped calling it a quartet and started calling it an ensemble...

Two and a half days to go... I'm taking unpaid leave this year, so that I can have the same amount of holidays as Handsome and the kids, I don't think I could bear to be working when they're at home this time.

Hairy Maclairy isn't very happy tonight (despite having joined some sort of club today where they hit each other with medieval swords), and I really want to go over and hug him. But, it probably wouldn't be very good for his street cred, and it probably wouldn't be particularly clever of me to drive through Central Scotland for a couple of hours in the dark, just so I can hug him!

His dad's gone instead, with his bike and some bits and pieces he's left behind.

I'm sure he'll be hyper and cheerful again tomorrow, but tonight I'm worried about him.