When Becoming a Blanket is the Only Answer

 It all started with the electricity bill. Which was everybody and nobodies fault all at once. 

This was bad. We didn't turn on each other though. We all shuffled off to our various rooms and sulked. But then the really horrendous thing happened. The heating died. Ours is not the sort of house that retains heat. It sort of eats it and spits it out the windows. As each of us realised our rooms were becoming slowly more refrigerated we emerged in our various cold-proofing outfits.

It got to the point where I looked like a walking thrift store. 

It then escalated to the point where I could not actually move my arms.

I was insistent that despite all this we should remain positive. That running and being proactive was the answer to this Frankenstein-type January that was trying to bring us down. 

I was spending most of my time curled up in bed writing. This was quite cosy until my hot-water bottle started leaking.

Any normal person would have checked to make sure they weren't just imagining the bed was wet. But I kept typing, sure I was just being dramatic as my bed got soggier and soggier. When I finally realised that I was indeed sitting in a rather warm and soggy puddle of water, I of course had words with the deflated excuse for a hot-water bottle. 

I then spent the night huddled in one corner of my bed feeling more than sorry for myself. With no hot-water bottle and no heating it felt like the cold was settling in my lungs.

But I was still determined to make sure January wouldn't get me down. So I decided to go for a long, long, long run. This would a) dispel all bad feelings towards the month and b) ensure warmth for the duration of the run. But then this happened...

By the time I got home I was soaked to the skin and colder than when I'd started out. 

I then spent a couple of hours clutching the kettle in search of warmth. 

Shortly after this I decided to retire to my blanket and stay there until the cold has passed.

Grand Theft Tricycle by a Three Year Old

When my brother was three he realised that he could get whatever he wanted by sitting on his bottom and screaming very loudly in public spaces. He would refuse to move from wherever he was sitting until he was bought whatever his heart desired. My parents often gave in just to stop people staring at them like they hit their baby. But then my mother had enough.

My father was not impressed by this suggestion.

With that he decided to take us all toy shopping. Rather than have to deal with us all in the shop, he left my sisters and I sulking in the car. 

He then marched into the toy store with my brother trailing behind him.

It wasn't long before my brother spotted something he liked the look of. A small tricycle. 

He threw his usual tantrum.

My father probably thought he'd solved the mystery of child-rearing when my brother stopped crying immediately. 

But my brother was quite a conniving child. He took a different tact. 

He hopped straight on the tricycle and started cycling towards the exit. 

My father didn't even notice as my brother pedaled furiously towards escape. He made his way under the till barriers and out through the automatic doors. 

From the car we could see him emerging. 

We glowered as he made his way towards the car his arms outstretched in glory. 

We were more than a little annoyed. 

Then we noticed the giant man sprinting after our brother trying to catch him. It was the toy store's security man. 

My father was following sheepishly behind and looked mortified when he was presented with my brother. 

Needless to say we excitedly recounted the tale to my mother. 

The next time we went to the toy store they had implemented some new security measures. 

The Beginning and End of my Musical Career

As a child I was convinced I was destined for greatness. Watching music videos on Sunday mornings I was positive that I could be the next big thing. I sang everywhere, I made up ditties and I played the saucepans with gusto. Then one day in school we had a music class. I was only about eight at the time. I was incredibly excited about the whole thing, my talent would be spotted. Fame was only a few notes away.

I waited patiently for our teacher to hand out the instruments. But all she gave us were some wooden sticks and so we began a basic rhythm exercise where we had to clap the sticks together in time. 

I soon became bored and decided to treat the class to my musical genius.

Needless to say my teacher did not appreciate my impromptu solo. 

She relegated me to the back of the class where I was given a triangle and strict instructions to ding it twice at the end. I waited sullenly for my moment. 

The minutes ticked by and as a rather hyper-active child I lost control of my will to simply ding the triangle twice. I broke into my second solo of the class.

It was all too much for the music teacher and I was sent to sit in a corner with a book. But I was not deterred. I glowered from behind the covers knowing that someday, someone would appreciate my musical abilities. 

The Day we Formed our First Girl Band

 When we were small our parents used to bring us to visit my cousins at our granny's farm. Once or twice a year there would be a big gathering where all the first cousins got together and were forced to play. We didn't mind. It was a huge farm and there was tons to do. I remember one day in particular when we had gotten a bit bored of the usual games of tag and hide and seek. We decided instead that we were going to form a girl band. We started to assign roles.

It soon became clear that all of us wanted to be the lead singer except my little sister.

So we got her to decide which one of us was the best singer.

She couldn't decide so we all became the lead singer. We decided to move onto the next important step in becoming a legitimate girl band. The dance routine. We all knew our starting position without hesitation.

Then the singing started. We whipped out hairbrushes and belted out random lyrics to songs without tunes. We were dancing around and screaming at the top of our lungs in the chicken shed fully convinced we were the next big thing.

It wasn't till all the chickens had fled in fear that we stopped our performance.

We began squabbling over who had been the most out of tune. By the time our parents arrived the band had broken up, we'd all sworn never to sing together again and were sulking.

Later that evening my dad decided to share a bit of news he's heard on the radio with us.

He was of course making fun of us. But at the time we were so convinced of our own brilliance that we spent years thinking we'd have been famous if only the band had stayed together. 

My Brother's First Words

My mother had three girls before she had a boy. So when my brother came along we all thought he was going to be some sort of magical creature. We watched him with intent waiting to see what this new kind of baby would bring to the table. At first he was sort of cute.

He did silly things and made us all giggle. 

But as time moved along it became clear he was a little special. At the age of two-and-a-half the only words anyone had ever heard him speak were "baa, baa" while pointing at whatever he wanted.

We were beginning to get bored. Even his most ridiculous floor-dance routines failed to make us smile. 

We began to reconsider this whole having a little brother thing.

My mother became irate. She watched my brother intently and tried to get him to speak. It wasn't long before she was calling everyone she knew and looking for any advice she could find. God help her if her son was going to be a little bit of a dimwit.

Soon we started to ignore even his cutest "baa, baa's". We didn't even notice anymore when he emptied his cup of milk over his head (one of his more subtle attempts at grabbing our attention).

Then it happened. We were having a perfectly ordinary family dinner. My brother had poured milk over his head and the rest of this were making enough noise that the neighbours, who lived a good half mile away, could probably hear everything.

From the baby chair there was a thump and the sound, clear and loud, of my brothers voice. 

We were shocked into silence for the first time in the history of our family dinners. My mother, about five minutes later, was the first to react.

She started bouncing up and down with excitement. Her son was not a dimwit. She treated us all to a long list of possible professions he might pursue now that he was a child-prodigy. She gabbed on the phone to everyone about how: "Well, I mean he just waited until he could form perfect sentences, he's just not going to waste his time doing anything by half-measures." We, on the other hand, were a little disappointed. There had been a certain comfort in thinking he was stupid and there was certainly no comfort in the fact that he was now being considered some sort of child genius.