11:50am Thursday 4th February 2010
IT’S the first thing I hear when I wake in the morning. “Muuuuum can we get a puppy? Can we? Can we?” “I want a puppy.
I want a puppy. I want a puppy.”
“Everyone else has one. Why can’t we?” “Please can we have a puppy?
Can we have a puppy? Can we?
Pleeeease?”
They know I’m terrified of dogs. I was attacked by one when I was little.
But that doesn’t stop the boys trying.
Ten-year-old Roscoe and seven-year-old Albert started their campaign a few weeks ago. It’s like Chinese water torture. Slowly and surely, they’re trying to wear me down. But I’m an old hand at this.
Their older brothers have been working on me for years, and still I haven’t cracked.
At one point, they even tried to hypnotise me – with the aid of a Derren Brown book – into overcoming my fear of dogs. It involved a lot of lying down in a darkened room, which was very restful, so I played along with it. But it didn’t work.
I’ve told them it’s not just my fear of dogs that stops me getting one.
“Remember the stick insects you promised you would look after and forgot about after ten minutes?” I remind Roscoe.
It was me who had to clean out the cage and hunt the creepy-crawly, fast breeding creatures down all over the house every time they escaped. And then there was Max the hamster, who I couldn’t bear to touch because he reminded me of a little rat. They all promised me I wouldn’t have to do a thing with him. But I ended up being his sole carer too.
When a friend said she didn’t know whether to get one for her daughter I urged her to borrow Max for a while. And the boys didn’t even notice he’d gone. After two months, noone had said a word. “Keep him,” I told her.
I even killed most of their virtual Japanese Tamigotchi pets, which, in order to survive, needed feeding and being put to sleep at all hours of the day while the children were at school. “You’ve murdered my baby,”
one of them blubbed one day.
“It’ll be me who would have to look after it and walk it and clear up all the mess,” I tell Roscoe when he announces he’s going to buy a puppy himself with the money he gets for his birthday next week. “I don’t care if you can afford to buy one, the answer’s still no.”
They don’t give up. “But I really, really, really want one. Please, please, pleeeeease,” says Roscoe.” I’m having trouble, again, persuading Albert to practise his piano: “I’ll do it if you get me a puppy,” he says. I have the same problem later making him do his homework: “Only if we get a puppy,” he says, arms folded, his bottom lip protruding in a scowl.
Next morning, Roscoe has printed off posters with pictures of adorable looking little puppies and stuck them up all over the kitchen. I peel one off the oven. “Dear Mum and Dad,” it says. “For my birthday this year please, please, please can I have a Golden Retriever puppy? I will get up at 6.30am and walk it every morning and feed it. I swear on my life and £1m that I would look after a dog.
Thank you. Love, Roscoe XXX.”
His dad appears: “Just £1million?
If only you’d said £2million I might have considered it. What a shame,”
he laughs. I shoot him a stern look.
He has no idea how this form of torture works and it isn’t a laughing matter. I know how important it is not to give them so much as a glimmer of hope. “I don’t care how many million you offer Roscoe, we’re not getting a dog,” I state clearly and categorically.
The next day, Roscoe announces: “Since you’re not going to let me buy a dog with my birthday money, I’m going to have to buy something else.”
Yesssssss! I suppress the urge to punch my fist in the air. Once again, they have cracked before I have. I am so good at this, I think.
And then he adds: “I have decided I am going to buy a snake...”
FOR years, our kitchen table has been covered with a blue gingham oilcloth. But this time, I fancied a change: polka dots instead of gingham and pale grey instead of blue. Seven-year-old Albert was horrified.
He is adamant the blue gingham one has to stay. Every time I tried to put the new one on, he pulled it off. No matter where I hid the old one (I’m keeping it as a spare) he would find it and put it back on.
At one point, he lay on top of the table to stop me taking it off again: “I don’t want it to change,” he cried.
Exasperated, I tried to reason with him: “You know how you love getting a new jumper because it’s fresh and clean and different? Well, that’s what it’s like for the table. It’s got something new to wear.”
He thought about it for a while.
“OK,” he said. Yesssssss, I make the mistake of thinking again. Victory.
“But the new tablecloth has to be woolly, then,” he adds.
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