And that’s why you should never cross a mother

My first thought this morning was “Now is not a good time to murder someone”, as I pulled and pulled a fine mist of hair continuously out of my head. After growing and birthing my twins my body is taking an holiday from making hair and I am shedding it at an astonishing rate, leaving DNA scurrilously lying around my house, my bathroom, my car and, much to my toddler’s disgust, all over her dummies too.

With me shedding hair like an ailing Labrador, I don’t feel like an Amazonian Warrior Queen Mother, my locks flowing out behind me like a cape —and, really, I SHOULD feel like an Amazonian Warrior Queen Mother because I’m basically ricocheting from epic battle to epic battle with scarcely a second to scowl between Herculean tasks.

An example of a small but frequent skirmish is squirting Maya’s tiny toddler nose with saline. “Spray it as often as possible,” said the ENT casually, with little to no idea of the consequences of her unceremonious instruction. YOU try pinning down a writhing, crying, snotting toddler and accurately aiming a saline spray up a nostril the size of a 10c coin — TWICE. It’s not a task you do on the fly and it’s certainly not one you without significant mental preparation beforehand.

Then downsize that nostril a size or two so it fits a 3-month old baby and try stick a plastic tube up there so you can SUCK THE SNOT OUT. Yes, you heard me! It’s called a Nose Frida and it’s a lifesaver when you have a snotty infant but my god, no one enjoys the experience.

Using a nose frida will quickly teach you how accurate a baby’s hands are when they’re batting you away and how well they can rotate their heads, making it borderline impossible to gently put the nose frida in a tiny nostril instead of accidentally stabbing them in the cheek repeatedly with a plastic tube.

All of this makes me want to scream into the abyss I LIKE THIS EVEN LESS THAN YOU DO SO STOP FIGHTING ME AND LET ME SUCK OUT YOUR SNOT!

Then I had a REAL battle this week, one that tested my mettle and me truly pull up my Big Girl panties and chant to myself, “You’re the mom, you have to be brave, you’re the mom, you have to be brave…”

Trying to show Maya the delights of the postal system, I opened our mail box and shrieked when I found a fat, pitch-black and crimson Black Widow spider lurking in our mailbox. It looked like evil personified and I shuddered, knowing this deeply terrifying looking arachnid could make me seriously ill and easily kill any of my three children.

After some frantic Googling (safely inside my lounge, Peppa Pig distracting Maya from my visceral reaction to that black bitch) and some highly emotive, all caps Whatsapps to Richard, I decided to dig out the Doom and KILL that spider before she made babies.

That second journey to the postbox was made worse by the fact that when I opened it, IT WAS EMPTY. I sprayed the crap out of it anyway and ran away. Later I found her shriveled corpse curled up under the adverts for TREE FELLERS and that did in fact make me feel like a Mighty Warrior (albeit one covered in snot).

We’ve had some bad luck in this house with Insect Encounters. Richard just last week was walking Heather round the house, encouraging her to sleep, when he felt a sting and a shooting, burning pain in his foot. Turns out, a wasp (in the twilight nogal, when these things are supposed to be asleep and not lurking on the floor) not only found his foot, it also stung him. He was in agony and all I could think was “I’m glad the wasp stung YOU and not the baby!”, which is not a very nice thing to hear when you’re walking into the house with a wasp sting.

Then rewind to last year, when Richard and I were chatting and putting on our shoes. Suddenly my bearded man shrieked — and then I shrieked when I saw something brown scuttling in the shoes. “OW!” he yelled. “AH!” I screamed. “AH!” he replied, “AAAH!” I replied, “AAAAAH!” he replied, “IT BIT ME! IT BIT ME!” A mother-fucking jumping spider the size of a hand was hiding in his sock AND BIT HIS FOOT. Both Richard and I ran from the room, screaming, until our nanny came sprinting in with a shoe and a fierce glint in her eye. With a few powerful THUD, THUD, THUDs, she smooshed the eight-legged attacker and we all collapsed in the hallway, exhausted.

So I guess my main takeaway from this week is that though murdering people is certainly off the cards, the Insect World is Just Asking For It right now.