37 posts tagged “mouse”

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.
 

I have to wonder whose bright idea it was to give a fifteen-year-old with an x-box addiction exam leave for his prelims. I nearly didn't sign the consent form that came home today. However, Mouse pointed out that the only people who are not being allowed exam leave are the neds those who perhaps have not behaved as well as they should, and therefore if I denied it to him, he would have to sit in a study class with the aforementioned neds people who have not behaved as well as they should.

And then he wouldn't be able to get any studying done.

I was not born yesterday. I have my doubts about how much studying will be done when he is in the house on his own, with no-one here to nag vocally care. But I can remove the x-box controllers (I think making them cordless was a wonderful idea) and therefore make it easier for him to resist temptation.

Mouse and I went for our six-monthly (or whenever I've had two reminders) asthma clinic appointments yesterday, with a same-old, same-old attitude (Mouse as well as me), to discover that we were both below our appropriate peak-flow readings and therefore we both had to up our medication.... It's understandable for Mouse, because he's grown again, so presumably he's outgrown his dosage, but I've only grown sideways. I blame it on a duff peak flow meter myself.

The GP also performed the usual moral blackmail to persuade us both to have flu jabs, and then informed us that we were on the call list for the swine flu jab, and that we'd hear in the next two weeks. I'm still not that sure about it, particularly for Mouse. Then again, I'd feel dreadful if I didn't take him for the jab and he got swine flu.

I wish that there was more information about that wasn't either hysterical or government based, everything seems to be at one extreme or the other. I have the official information leaflet as handed out by the medical practice, but it actually gives no information at all, in several languages. And against my worry about giving him (and me) a not-tested-over-many-years vaccine, I have to balance the fact that he is not only at risk because of his asthma, but at the moment he is also vulnerable until his medication dosage is properly balanced again. And he's in a school, where there are many, many germs.

Decisions, decisions...

Mouse actually managed to get from where we live to the moderately large town where BF lives today, by bus, all on his own. Actually this is more of an achievement than it sounds. The bus service (which rejoices in the name of the Blue Bus, even although it's white) only runs three times a day - morning, middayish and evening - and takes approximately an hour and a half to do a journey that takes Handsome and myself slightly less than twenty minutes by car. But it does stop absolutely everywhere in the process. Mouse and I tried to find the timetable online last night (so we could be sure what time the middayish bus came) and it was really, really difficult to find. To be honest, 'Blue Bus' is not really a unique search term, and even when we added in extra words like timetable and a few place-names it still took a while to narrow it down - and it hadn't been updated since 2007...

But he made it, and went to see a film about zombies with BF, which he thoroughly enjoyed. And luckily for him we were there to pick him up so he didn't have to brave the Blue Bus again.

Mouse is on work experience this week. He had the choice of selecting something from the official school database, or arranging something himself (which then had to be health and safety checked and approved by the school). His school actually encourages kids to sort out their own if at all possible, because there just aren't enough jobs on the database for the whole year group.

Mouse and I did look through the official list (back in May when he had to choose) of jobs in nurseries, shops and farms... and he decided that there was no way he was going to do any of those. In fact, I'm not sure that I could bear the responsibility of him working either with small children or the unsuspecting public; and he's allergic to almost everything on farms!

So after several failed attempts, I found him an IT work placement, in a school I happen to know well, and got all the forms filled in and the checks done, and he's as happy as a lamb. He is being worked quite hard, but thankfully not being condescended to. Today he has been installing software, setting up printers and correcting email address books - oh and checking software licenses in his father's department. He's being treated like an adult, and he is really enjoying the experience.

Apparently he's allowed to update his Facebook during his lunch break - that sounds like a perk too far if you ask me.

Mouse and I spent far too much time at the orthodontist this morning. In fact, between both my boys I have spent way too much of my life at the orthodontist. And so has Mama, who deals with as many appointments as she can so that I don't usually have to take as much time off work as I had to this morning. Mouse was in there for hours!

However, the orthodontist called me in (eventually) and said that he was nearly done, in fact she promised him that he will have his braces off totally by his sixteenth birthday - just the right timing, as that's how old he has to be before I let him kiss girls.

If his mouth wasn't quite so sore, he'd be very happy.

Mouse and BF got to go and see Neil Gaiman at the Edinburgh Book Festival tonight, courtesy of BF's Mama. I am so jealous, which is of course entirely wrong. I should be happy that Mouse is old enough to read and appreciate one of my favourite authors, I should be ecstatic that he came home bursting to tell me all about it with the full expectation that I and I alone would understand why it was so good.

And yes, that can all be taken as read. But I'm still jealous.

And he didn't even manage to get my extremely battered, had-it-a-long-time-before-the-film copy of Stardust signed, because the queues were too big, and his lift was waiting.

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.

I am very jealous.

Mouse had a school geography field trip today, and he and his class spent the day at Drumlanrig in the Scottish Borders. It was primarily a river-measuring trip, so they got to stand in the River Nith while they measured it's width, depth and velocity (they had to do sums for that bit). They all seem to have got very much wetter than I would think river-measuring merited... as in waist-deep wet... but they definitely had a lot of fun in the process, and the sun shone on them, so they were partially dry by the time they got back.

I'm not at all jealous about standing around in freezing cold Scottish rivers.

But, whilst Mouse was standing in the river holding the end of a bit of string, an otter swam past him, and that I am jealous about, because I have never, ever seen an otter in the wild (apart from a dead one, which does not count).

It's been a somewhat frenzied week - Mouse has been rehearsing his socks off (no actually, his father's socks because he doesn't have any white ones, and he needed white socks for an Abba number... ) including a full evening rehearsal (until past his usual bedtime) on Wednesday, prior to the actual show on Thursday and Friday. It seems a little strange to think that it's the last time we'll go to a school show in that hall. After the summer the school will have moved to the new building, where they will not have a permanent stage, although apparently there will be a temporary one. I hope it doesn't change the school enthusiasm for music evenings, shows and musicals.

Mouse's Best Friend has been staying with us over the weekend, so that his parents could have a child-free wedding anniversary break. I had a plan that involved the boys sleeping in different rooms - BF in Mouse's room, and Mouse in Hairy's room - so that Mouse didn't wake up BF too early in the morning. I can't put visitors in Hairy's bed, because he chose a very high platform bed for his room. Even though we pointed out at the time that there was only going to be about two feet of clearance to the ceiling, he insisted. It's impossible to get in and out of Hairy's bed without performing contortions, or hitting your head off the ceiling, so I can only sleep family in it. The plan, however, didn't come to fruition, because Hairy announced on Thursday that he was coming home for the weekend, to pick up his bike.

I offered Mouse the choice of the fold-down settee bed in the playroom, or a sleeping bag on his bedroom floor. He chose the floor, and appeared to be happy about it. Teenagers are strange.

Poor BF may have suffered a little this weekend, although I did my best to let him and Mouse play the X-box as much as humanly possible. But he did have to come to Mouse's show (because I wasn't prepared to leave him at home alone, and Hairy wasn't back yet) and he did have to come to the dentist with us, although I didn't make him have his teeth checked! And he did have to come climbing with us on Sunday, because, well because I wanted to go, and I thought it would be good for all the boys to have some exercise that didn't involve thumbs.

This week is going to be spent not sympathising with Mouse, who has exams all this week and all next week, and who has done absolutely no work whatsover, despite large amounts of hinting, reminding and nagging vocal caring. If he does well, he'll think that it's ok not to work, and if he does badly, it'll be my fault.