Let the Custard Burn

I never knew I was a ninja, until I realised I had mastered the art of the Stealthy Silent Bed Slide. This is the ability to slip out of bed from beside a sleeping child, without waking them. It's a technique that can take months if not years of practice, and often is only mastered by default, when the child has finally outgrown the need to have mumsey lying beside him/her in a state of feigned sleep, night after night.

For me, I have the Stealthy Silent Bed Slide down pat, now that my third-born is two and a half. Now I just have to master the art of Staying Awake While Feigning Sleep. Then I'll be a fully fledged Ninja Master of the 9th Order; able to levitate and start fires with my mind. Of course, pigs will fly before this ever comes to pass.

It's this tendency to Fall Asleep While Feigning Sleep that causes me to still be on the computer at 1am. (2am... 3am...) Which in some ways is a good thing. I'm still getting an okay amount of sleep... Well, except for those days when I'm so caught up in a design project that I exceed my stay awake limit and spend the next day doing the zombie shuffle, while the kids take advantage of my limited brain activity by getting up to as much mischief as they possibly can, in as short a time frame.

Take the Lily Bug's recent hair cut for example.

The pic of Bree's self-inflicted mullet was the last 6 photos my Samsung took before dying a gristly soda stream syrup-induced death. The other 5 were the same shot but blurry - the focus having died after dropping it in mud previously...

I'd like to say the reason she cut her own hair with paper scissors is because I was so diligently stirring the custard that I couldn't tear myself myself away from the stove for fear of lumps

That is true, in part. I was stirring custard in constant clockwise motion without pause. I was, in part, trying to avoid lumps. It's such a common occurrence in this house, the kids eat it regardless and think it's perfectly normal. That's right folks, those poor saps are growing up with the belief that custard is supposed to have the consistency and texture of stew.

But for the most part, I was stirring the custard so diligently because I had hit a mid-afternoon energy funk, and at that point stirring custard was the only function my brain was allowing me to do. That repetitive clockwise stirring motion had flipped the autopilot switch in my brain and I was caught in a continuous loop. Meanwhile, my darling daughter was going all Jack the Ripper on her blonde locks.

And boy, did she make a good (aka really quite bad) job of hair butchery! It wasn't a lock of hair or two that she lopped off - it was everything bar a couple of locks at the back she couldn't quite reach (or hadn't yet got to). And much of it was chopped well above her ears.  Joe Dirt would be jealous.

How do you salvage that? 

That was what the hairdresser asked, though she phrased the question a little more diplomatically.

A pixie-bob. Though still somewhat uneven looking, as the hairdresser had tried to push to one side the hair which refuses to grow any direction except straight across her forehead.  Still, it's an improvement.

Two weeks on, and I'm getting used to her new 'do' now. Her hair had taken four and a half years just to get to the length it was in the pic on the left, so she's probably going to be 7 before it touches her shoulders again. And there's far bigger things in the world to be upset about...

Note to self: Let the custard burn.