Nobody ever mentioned how much babies hurt. I mean seriously - Mal beats the crap out of me.

No shit, Raq.

remembers two black eyes caused by darling daughter

Nobody ever mentioned how much babies hurt. I mean seriously - Mal beats the crap out of me.

The whole late infancy in-love-with-mama, must explore her every orifice and cling like a very loud limpet thing is painful, and exhausting. All she wants is to stand in my lap clutching fistfuls of my hair and chewing on my face. I can't believe I even managed to clean the bathroom; it feels like I've spent the last seven hours wrestling with a tiny, ardent and surprisingly strong lover. I can't imagine how single parents make it through this stage.

I still remember when I somehow ended up with my baby nephew, Jack on the runaway mine ride at Knott's Berry Farm. He grabbed onto my (favorite) shirt with his tiny fists and started sucking on the knot he had made. At the time I didn't understand why his mom wasn't happy to have him back at the end of the ride. I never did get that shirt back to its original shape.

Well. That was a day.

All you need now is a cup of coffee and a blowjob.

Holy crap!

So we do After School Activities, right? And for the first two terms, I did Drama, but this term I thought I'd do something a bit different, and so I'm doing Journalism Club. I've only got a handful of kids, which is fab - I'm hoping to bring out two editions, one this week and one by the end of term. We're looking at about eight or ten pages of assorted articles and interviews and puzzles and so forth - whatever they want to do, basically.

Anyway, there's this one lass who's in Year 6 (which makes her 11) and she's been in each of my clubs. She's fab - I love her whole family, actually. Dad's an artist, or possibly a writer or something, and he's the stay at home parent. I think he's Australian? And Mum's Indian, and she's lovely too, but not in school quite as often as Dad (who's forever popping in to help with things) because she's got a sexy dynamic job of some flavour. There are 3 kids - 2 boys, aged 4 and 7, and the big sister. And they're just adorable. The oldest boy is the minciest wee thing you ever saw, bless him - camp as you like, and very polite and friendly and well balanced. And the wee one looks exactly like a mini-me version of him (and his sister told me this afternoon that, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he was quite firm on the answer being 'a pirate', so he's clearly a good egg too). And the big sister is VERY confident and polite and vivacious and all that, very natural actress and writer and entirely splendid. So there we have them - LOVE this family, want to kidnap them all and eat them with a spoon.

Anyway, oldest daughter is in my Journalism club. She's written some puzzles and some Vegetarian recipes and so forth, and this afternoon, since we had some space, she said she'd write a story. Although we don't have a lot of space, and she's not very good at brevity in her stories. (You see why I love her? But I really don't think of her as 11, I think of her as a near-peer, because she's just hugely mature and cool and reminds me of my sister and indeed me in terms of old-head-on-young-shoulders. It boggles me a bit whenever it strikes me that she's actually 11, which is very young indeed.)

What I'm rambling towards is the fact that I just looked at what she started writing there, five minutes before we had to go home:

Isabella sat by her window and looked out at the horrible scene, Mrs. Lefenry had taken out her daughter and had whipped her a few times, the ceremony wasn't for another hour, but at this rate no one else in the entire village would make it. The snow had slowed , but no one wanted to go out in this weather

...and, and I swear to God she didn't get this from me. I don't even teach her, for God's sake, and bondage has not cropped up (heh! no pun intended) in any of my drama club sessions, I swear! But I just about died when I read it.

And Matilda just caressed my face lovingly and jammed one razorlike fingernail up my nose.

So painful - I got at least one bloody nose this way.

OMG Fay - that's boggling! Let's see how the nascent editors deal with that!

Last night Mallory held my face in his hands to give me a kiss (which is another thing entirely - he kisses with a completely relaxed mouth and jaw , very disturbing and will get whatever part he makes contact with quite wet), then grabbed both my cheeks and squeezed and pulled as hard as he could, trying to pull them off.

It hurt so much I couldn't even make a sound. I really need to teach him about tapping out.

I didn't realize "causing pain" was a standard feature of children! Yikes.

Memorial day Parade at 10 am, parade route half a block from my bedroom. In the grand scheme of things, that's a reasonable time to have it, after all, everyone has Memorial day off, right? except for those of us who have to work at 2pm, and are short on sleep from having to get up at the asscrack of dawn to go in to work extra early on saturday and sunday, and need to fucking sleep this morning. When did parades start having explosions? Ok, so maybe it was rifle salute or firecrackers or something. If it were just cute little high schoolers in marching bands, I could have lain in bed enjoying the sounds of their cuteness, then drifted back to sleep. But no. explosions. Thbbbbbpt.