Stormy

You might have gathered from my last post that Ella and I had a few altercations yesterday. She was delightful all morning, we even did some sorting of pasta shapes and playing with dry rice, an activity I wouldn't normally enter into due to my low tolerance threshold for mess. And after that we cooked the rice and she ate it for her lunch which left me feeling smug in a yummy-mummy kind of way, even when I had to sweep all the rice up off the floor with a dustpan and brush.

Then something happened in the afternoon and she morphed into one of the bad gremlins and started chucking stuff around the flat. I suggested we go out to Cold Rock ice creamery and yes, she was keen on that but refused to wear anything on her feet, at which point she had a hissy fit, jumping up and down so I removed her for two minutes time out in her bedroom. When I opened the door and asked whether she was ready to put on her shoes, in a school-teacher kind of voice, she said "no" and slammed the door in my face. She's a two year old teenager.

Anyway, we did eventually go to Cold Rock, which probably sends out all the wrong sorts of messages about rewarding bad behaviour, but two hours after she morphed into the gremlin (and by the time she'd dirtied five nappies), I needed the ice cream even more than she did. Darren wasn't coming home; he was working through. Make mine a cookie dough special with crushed Cadbury's Crunchie.

This morning we woke to an enormous stormy black sky reminiscent of, well, Warrington and also to a terrible stormy head, reminiscent of a night on the tiles, though I hadn't had one. As Darren had worked the nightshift I was doing the morning run alone, trying to jolly Ella along while waiting for the special tablets to kick in. She did a great job of making me feel better, trying several tactics including kissing me on the forehead, and when that didn't work, repeatedly slamming her dolls' pushchair into my leg. Still, she brushes her own teeth now, and she almost managed to put her own mittens on. Give me six months and I'll have her trained to brew an espresso.

The tablets eventually took the edge off it, just enough for me to entertain going looking for a pair of boots again and stopping for breakfast at Gloria Jean's coffee house, where I am a frequent sipper and have the loyalty card to prove it. I love sitting in coffee houses and catching other people's conversations because I'm exceedingly nosey and interested in other people and their business. I grew up on a council estate where the local women went to the co-op in their slippers and hung about their front gates smoking fags and discussing whether Carol next door was having it off with the bloke who was fitting her new kitchen. She was, by the way. Even I knew that.