
In the last 838 days, I have discovered that I am expected to fill some pretty big shoes. 838 is the exact amount of days since Sausage was born, and in that time I have fulfilled more roles than I could ever have begun to imagine. Here are but a few:
1. Personal artist
You know how you imagine rich people like P-Diddy to have really random people on their staff, just sitting around, waiting to, you know, carve an ice-sculpture on a whim? Or perm his nose hair, should he so desire? Husband and I (mainly Husband) would be employed by Sausage as personal artists. Her latest craze is charging at us with a piece of paper and proclaiming “Mummy, YOU DRAW A PONY/DJ LANCE/NARWHAL!” and one is expected to produce a high quality rendering of which ever object has been conjured up by her boundless imagination. And it’s mainly Husbands job as I am SHIT at drawing. Here is a drawing I did of Milly from ‘Team Umizoomi’…and then what she really looks like. See. (Go ahead, click on it, make it bigger, you’ll see it in all its shitty glory. I think there is also dried gravy on the page…)
2. Personal Chef
This is one area in which I struggle. Don’t get me wrong, I have a decent repertoire of dishes which I make really well and I can turn my hand to most recipes, but it’s the imagination that I lack. On a day-to-day basis, I’ll ask Sausage what she wants for breakfast/lunch/dinner and invariably, her answer will be…wait for it…sausage. So I have to come up with inventive ways to make her think she’s getting what she wants, whilst making sure she gets an actual balanced meal. Husband is much better at this than I, which is partly why he does our weekly shop (the other reason is that I would just buy £100 worth of chocolate, crisps and sweets and no sensible stuff, like, you know, toilet paper, soap and real food)
3. Troubadour
Another thing which Sausage enjoys is singing and dancing. By which I mean she says “Mummy, you sing a song about CATS!”, and I have to come up with a song about cats, on the spot, sing it and probably do a dance, all in the space of about ten seconds, when she usually says “No, Mummy, you sing a song about SPIDERS!”, when I repeat the process all over again, only with a new muse.
4. Impressionist
One of Sausages favourite ways to pass the time lately has been to turn her Father and I into her own personal soundboards and exercise our repertoire of animal noises to its fullest. In the past month, I have Googled and YouTubed what noises are made by giraffes (which, by the way, is none after adolescence, they are generally silent in adulthood), perfected the difference between a tiger and a lion, and learned the many different noises made by cats. It doesn’t stop there though. Say, for instance, Sausage wants to hear a lion noise…she isn’t satisfied with hearing one version of each animal…she wants to hear the Mummy lion, the Daddy lion, the Baby lion and a ‘Darling’ lion, which we’ve so far ascertained to be a really camp version of the original noise.
5. Triage Nurse
On a fairly regular basis throughout the day, Sausage will approach Husband or I, usually with finger or toe outstretched, and insist that it’s broken and that she needs to be taken immediately to the doctors. This is usually remedied by a magic kiss from one or other of us, but only after she’s satisfied that we’ve given her ‘injury’ a thorough inspection. On one particularly challenging occasion, she insisted that she’d hurt her ‘hobo’, which led to around half an hour of investigation into what a ‘hobo’ was. We had money on elbow, as it sounds kind of similar, but it transpired to be the back of her wrist.
Husband and I perform each of these tasks with relish and gusto, but it really does go to show what an array of new skills you hone when you have a little one to please. In fact, I’m thinking of updating my CV to include some of them. I think the upturn in my ability to think on my feet and please a tough audience makes me at least 50% more employable in the real world!
Anyone else have any new skills, since becoming a parent?