Pants on your head!

There are times when you catch yourself doing something and think, I must be stark raving bonkers, so its no surprise that with 3 under 5s running riot around the house I find I'm doing this more and more. When you have boys you end up doing little boy stuff. Our 5 yr old has discovered lavatorial humour in the best Carry On tradition and his brother who is only 18 months is even worse when it comes to toilets. We do the hilarious lets-pretend-to-poo game, the who's-farted? game, the whats-that-smell? game, and the bodily-parts game. Oh yes its a laugh a minute! So when I found myself sitting on the floor on Saturday night surrounded by toys, dogs and boys, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find I was also wearing a pair of boys pants on my head! For this was the infamous Is-it-a-hat? game which my boys absolutely adore. Basically we find lots of odd things, plonk them on our heads and shout 'Is it a hat!?' At which point everyone splits their sides laughing and I start thinking, 'I cant believe I'm sitting here with a pair of Y fronts on my head' and 'yes I must be absolutely crackers.'

The serious side of this is its a way of engaging with my children. Generally I suspect that disabled parents have to work harder at the whole parent thing. I cant run round the house after them, I cant do as much physically as a whole and I certainly cant resort to physical punishment. The whole thing relies on verbal skills, both mine and the children, so Ive found that humorous games such as these actually allow me a lot more control over my children's behaviour usually, and of course it's taught me a huge chunk of patience. Not a bad thing for sure.