The Rock Star and I have a penchant for rocket lollies. The entire top drawer of the freezer is full of them. When we run low, the Rock Star instructs me to go and gather new materials for our space program. luckily, they are only 1/2 a point according to Weight Watchers, so you can stuff yourself with them and still feel okay about it.

The Prawn has also developed a worrying fondness for them. It started when she was terribly grumpy about things that were occuring in her gum region and thought we’d give her a little cold treat. But I believe we have now created a small sugar shark and are going to be forced to get a bigger boat.

I am now forced to share my rockety bounty with my daughter.

After some thought, we decided to try her out on a yoghurt lolly instead. The resulting scowl and Colonel Sanders goatee were too good not to document.

Oh.

My.

God.

I have to admit, I almost peed a little when I saw this baby costume. It’s like the gods themselves had answered my Halloween prayers. Literally, within seconds of seeing this on one of the threads on the BabyCenter boards, I had purchased one. It’ll have to be shipped from the States at a cost of nearly $20.00, but DAMMIT, MY CHILD WILL BE DRESSED AS A GIANT PRAWN FOR HER FIRST HALLOWEEN.

Before this development, was there any chance of us going anywhere on October 31st? No, but now I will drive her to every neighboring town and village to show her off. Is there really any point in HAVING this costume if you’re not going trick or treating? Hell yes. And that point is the 25,000 pictures that we’re going to take, cause it’s not every day that you get to dress your baby up like a lobster.

So.

Excited.

-People on home buying shows are never skint. They are never looking for a flat or a starter home, even if they are only 19. They always have a budget of over half a million quid and will inevitably dismiss a house out of hand because of the color of the master on-suite. Never mind the 12 bedrooms all immaculately finished, the brand new kitchen and the 24 acres- one just can’t be expected to wield a paintbrush to cover up the hideous salmon color in the bathroom.

-Tim Wonnacott needs to be locked in a cargo container full of car boot sale bric-a-brac and mailed to Outer Mongolia.

-You know the redhead in Girls Aloud? I mean, I kind of figured that all of them hail from somewhere adjacent to the shores of Lake Cocytus in the Third Circle of Hades, but that chick just isn’t right. Maybe she’s just pissed that she doesn’t get as much airtime as her blonde and brunette compatriots, but I’m entertaining the possibility that she actually might be undead.

-Does anyone really care about what celebrities eat? And plus, you know that the really skinny ones are lying when they say their favourite food is fried chicken.

-While I utterly detest mindless morning shows like GM TV and This Morning, I must admire the ability of the presenters to look and behave like they didn’t get up at 3am. Wake me up at that hour and ask me to talk to whichever hot soap star is getting bumped off this week in Eastenders and I guarantee you I will not be quite so perky.

-If television is to be believed, vets spend all of their time saving lambs and arthritic cockatiels. And they also wear immaculately clean shirts.

Could someone please explain to me why this piece of human sputum, this canker on the face of an already ugly music industry, this waste of perfectly good skin, this oxygen thief, this “scrawny no-cock junkie” IS STILL NOT IN PRISON BEING RITUALLY SODOMISED BY HIS FELLOW INMATES?

So, here’s the latest edition to my little collection of body art.  Just inked this morning by a very talented woman who looks and talks more like a hair dresser than a tattoo artist. (No visible tats whatsoever- slightly unusual. Most inkers I’ve met have large and extensive collections of sometimes very disturbing tattoos.) At any rate, it only took about 15 minutes and I’m pleased to say that there was no screaming on anyone’s part.

The tattoo parlour I frequent is probably much like every inkery in the known universe. Giggling teenagers anxious for belly rings that will inevitably piss off their parents, staff with enough facial jewelry to set off airport metal detectors and walls covered in flash. The woman who did my tat had, in her portfolio, a picture of a design that she once did on the sole of someone’s foot, which, I have to admit, made me feel slightly queasy.

Some of the things that people have immortalized into their flesh absolutely astound me. One begins to see the reason for the rule that most reputable parlours abide by in respects to not inking the inebriated, because the sober often have bad enough taste just on their own. Once, while perusing a coffee table book on unusual tats, I came across a jaw droppingly awful piece of ink (which I had a quick troll on the internet to see if I could find, but I abandoned the search after coming up with too many disturbing results) that consisted of a number of stylized and brightly colored penises strung in a necklace around a woman’s neck. One of them even said “Mom” which brings up all kinds of Freudian questions that don’t bear thinking about. It was obviously a labor of love for the artist, and one would hope, for the poor, cracked cow who now has to live with this chamber of horrors permanently etched into her flesh for all time. Apparently, this particular tat is well known in the ink slinging trade and was done by an artist called Dave Lum. There are actually forums where tattoo enthusiasts debate the ethics involved in doing such a piece of work. Mr. Lum, if you’re out there, more power to you, but you are a twisted, twisted man.

I am pleased to say that there will be no colorful cock necklaces in my immediate future. As a matter of fact, I’m not entirely sure how many more times I’ll go under the needle. Excepting a similar tat for the birth of, I hope, our second and last child, I’m not sure how many more bits of ink that I need. I have to admit to a small fantasy of the Prawn asking me to join her for mother/daughter tattoos on her 18th birthday, but it could be that she decides to be a nun or something and doesn’t really want ink ruining her chances at being Mother Superior, but who knows what the future holds.

I’m a pretty big coloring book. I’ve still got some blank pages left.

The Prawn sleeps. I make a beeline for the keyboard.

Vis a vie her continued development into a human being, I broke my “no bloody expensive toys before she’s capable of playing with them” rule in order to purchase the two obligatory baby toys without which you are not allowed to keep your Mommy Membership card- the colourful stacking rings and the little xylophone. Along with the order, I also purchase a swim nappy which won’t necessarily help her to become a well rounded human being, but will at least prevent her from taking a hellacious dump in the swimming pool.

I had both of these toys as a kid. I remember that when I was about 7, I was absently playing with one of the rings (having long outgrown it, the base of it spent a good deal of time being used as an offensive weapon against playmates) and getting it stuck on my wrist, resulting in a removal that I believe included margarine. The xylophone was also used well beyond its shelf life as an annoyance device to all adults within a 100 meter radius. Not wishing to deprive my daughter of the same opportunities to drive me up a tree in the near future, I thought it’d probably hop to it.

The xylophone was pretty much as I remembered it. In fact, the version that I bought is actually simpler than the one that I spent hours banging on tunelessly when I was a child. The Prawn’s musical device is actually made of wood rather than metal resulting in more pleasing musical “plonk” noises rather than the maddening “plink” of its metallic cousin. My only complaint is that it is somewhat out of tune. Only blessed with four “bells”, it should sound like a vocal warm up scale. However, the lowermost bell is out of tune and I fear that it might lead the Prawn to turn up at her first music lesson only to be chastised by her teacher by ear-bending pitch deficiency.

The rings, on the other hand, turned out to be slightly more high tech that my old plastic wrist entrapment device. Caveat Emptor- especially when you neglect to read the description of the items you purchase. Not that this thing isn’t cool, but it seems a little unnecessarily high tech for a stacking ring set. I liked the idea of the lovely, colourful bits hanging off the side of the rings, but discovered to my consternation, upon opening the package that it was graced with an “on” switch. After batting at it experimentally for a few minutes, I discovered that it revolved while playing midi sound clips of disturbing music and children laughing. Why is it that everything today has to move, wiggle, sing or vibrate to keep a child interested? It might go a long way toward explaining why we have a whole generation coming up with the attention span of hummingbirds.

My favourite toy as a child? A cardboard refrigerator box.

Some weeks seem to go by with an overabundance of activity but a dirth of bloggable material. While spending many hours in the bosom of my family sitting around in our apartment, chatting, snacking and reading is lovely and fulfilling for me, it does not necessarily make for riveting reading. Suffice to say there was much grandparental fussage, discovery of new and interesting things that are obviously Comedy Gold to the Prawn (taking things out of a bag and then putting them back in. We’re hoping to start her on dog farts next week.) and a great deal of agreeable weather. So, the last refuge of a desperate writer: bullet points.

-The Rock Star and I got to go on our first date in quite some time. We took advantage of visiting grandparents to make a quick escape to Milton Keynes for the afternoon to reacquaint ourselves with our snowboards. It’s been over a year since either of us strapped ourselves in to go hurtling down the hill and to our great delight, it came back pretty quickly and neither of us took any major spills. However, I have spent every day this week in a fair amount of muscle and joint pain after using bits of my anatomy that have been lying dormant for the last year, probably quietly contemplating retirement. It’s my understanding that most dates don’t require the use of Ibuprofen gel afterwards, but then again, it’s been a while since I’ve been out on one.

-My parents brought with them three books published by American Heritage Dictionaries that I bought after having a look at the 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. (I was unsure of the definitions of about a third of them) Along with the former volume, I had also requested 100 Words Every Word Lover Should Know (Pleased to see my onomatopoeic favourite, “susurration” in there.) and 100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses. It occurred to me while going through the last volume that English must be a devilishly difficult language to pick up when one word can have up to seven meanings. (Although we have the advantage of our nouns not having genders like a lot of European languages. How a table can be feminine and an orange masculine is not only beyond me, but smacks of a certain amount of big flowy-shirt wearing ponciness.)

-And last, am I crazy, or did the Rock Star and I manage to produce something so cute that it needs to be handled with protective gloves?

Blogapotamus apologises for the lapse in our usually timely service. Parental units, visiting since last Wednesday, will be departing from platform 3 the day after tomorrow after which normal service should resume. We apologise to those of our customers who have been inconvienced or bored with looking at the same post about Daniel Radcliffe’s wang for the last week.