Parenting: That time Santa made me a rubbish parent (and a Christmas Wishlist for me, you, everybody)

Santa owes me one. Big time.

We went to a Christmas Light Show last week to get in to the spirits of things. It was lovely, and also strange, with flashing Christmas trees set to the rhythm of ACDC songs and foam snow pouring from the sky. And there were Santas everywhere you looked. Small battery powered ones dancing Gangham Styles and big blow up ones floating eerily in the sky. But in the gleeful madness Ramona and I lost each other. It was only about 18 minutes of sprinting around trying to beat the advancing dark, my stomach clenched and my heart in my throat, but it was the most frightening 18 minutes of 2015 hands down. How we clung to each other when a kind elderly elf hefted a sobbing Ramona into my arms. One of my most wrenching parenting moments so far.

So yeah, Santa and his distracting Santanic minions get the blame for that one.

Which makes me feel compelled to write a Christmas wish list, like both of us fulfilling the traditional roles of human and, um, legendary fairy-man will help us get on good terms again. No one wants an ongoing beef with the bearded one. And if Santa makes my wishes come true we’ll be even stevens.

So.

If Santa is really real I know that when I wake up tomorrow I’ll have a gift-wrapped repeat perscription for de-worming tablets and a robotic vacuum cleaner.

(These actually exist! The robotic hoover, not the repeat perscription for worming tablets, they don’t exist, I know that as a result of a very embarrassing conversation with the Doctor. Robotic hoovers are all real though. I just heard about them on the internet and I was like “Oh my word a better life for me is out there!!!” But apparently we can’t have one because they are too inefficient to make sense on solar power and also because most of the stuff on our floor is lego and those tiny goggly eyes you craft with and robot hoovers are indiscriminate. Ha. As if I don’t hoover up lego all the time. I’ll fish it out of the filter one day promise. Anyway hopefully Santa doesn’t apply this reasoning and soon I will be able to push a button and have a tidy home… In fact, I know he doesn’t because who got the kids all the lego in the first place HEY)

I’d also have a local library that didn’t worry about the DVD’s making it back with their covers on…. We never lose the DVDs but somewhere there is a stash of plastic covers and the librarians simply have no flexibility on these things! We probably lose an hour a week hunting around for DVD covers. Also, just quickly on that subject, if you are out there Santa, I’d wish that only good books made it on to the NY Times Bestselling list, please? And that it was against the law for famous authors to give other author’s rubbish books misleading, supportive phrases for their covers. *glares at Jodie Picoult in particular* And that I would stop accidently getting out books from the library that I’ve already read because I like the cover/ it comes recommended from a famous author. And that I’d therefore never again be lying awake wrestling with the insomnia that has tracked me my whole life with Nothing To Read.

In fact, just help me be better at getting to sleep and not lying awake worrying about all the things I’ve lost or forgotten to do or losing my children or just worrying about my children in general.

Also, I wish for a dog that doesn’t fart. WOAH THERE. No one mentions the dog farts when you are excitedly mentioning that you are gonna get a cute little puppy. We needed no other farting thing in our lives. We really didn’t. Sometimes late at night I am reading an amazing novel and am zoned in to this fantastical story of wild adventure and then all of a sudden I am engulfed in this putrid cloud of terror as if someone just scratched a Scratch and Sniff card the size of the planet with a picture of a Rotten Egg Turd on it right in front of my face. UGH. Please will my dog stop farting.

This might sound like a frivolous list. But its only because I know if I had all these things I would be a more generally patient and lovely person, unstressed by the mundane and rank annoyances of daily life.

Thanks, in hope of avoiding conflict resolution,

Lucy

***

MY REAL CHRISTMAS MESSAGE:

Okay, I know, you know, we all know that often the rank and mundane are the things that make us better people. Not the avoidance of these things.

So to you lovely readers, ones that have stuck with me since those cheapskate days in South London when we used to wait ‘til schools broke up to get their enormous slightly withered Christmas Tree and then get it stuck in our front door, to new ones, who joined me more recently in the heady days of being the Internet’s Number One Dirty Hippy, I want to thank you so, so, SO MUCH for reading the things I want to write about, for your insightful comments and your encouraging tweets, and for being a part of an incredible tribe of parents/ general good people, that helps all of us live these intentional lives as best we can (Golly, so wordy, but I really mean it!)

I wish for you:

peace amongst mess

deep connection in your relationships

happiness in the chaos

hardy soles that can withstand the treading on of lego

repeat prescriptions for any antiparasitic medication you feel your family needs, be it nits, threadworm, scabies, I mean it, ANY or ALL of them

courage to live a life that matches what is in your heart

and may a tiny Gangham Styles Santa never make you lose your children.