My Giveashitness

“Thanks for giving the baby a bottle last night,” Tracey said when we woke this morning.

“You’ve welcome,” I said. “I hope I didn’t wake you when I got up. I was trying to be super stealthy.”

“Oh, I know you were,” she said sympathetically, and I got the distinct impression I was missing something highly amusing here.

I’m on holidays at the moment, which is when my giveashitness for all things domestic is at its peak. For example, I like to save up my odd jobs around the house and then get stuck into them in a fury of hopeful and unjustified optimistic activity in the first few days of my break. That gives me lots of time to call in a repairman to fix my fixing when I attempt to reattach draw handles and other parts of this old house which seem determined to fall off.

Depending on circumstances, things like changing the light bulb in fridge, which I’ve never had to do before, sometimes take longer than one holiday to achieve the right level of giveashitness.

At least, that was my plan.

But pretending to be a handy husband aside, one of my all-time great loves of time off is taking over the grocery shopping, trying new recipes and spoiling the kids (myself) with those little treats we don’t usually allow during any regular working week, like Coco Pops, original Tim Tams and the odd large bottle of chocolate milk.

But while I’m sure it’s nice to have Mr Fixit hanging about the house with his head in the pantry, I think it’s true to say Tracey’s favourite thing about my holidays is when I try to soak up as much of the kids as I can, including making a real effort, as opposed to my usual fake one, to get up to them if they wake through the night.

Assuming, of course, I hear them.

Which, I’m pleased to say, I did last night.

Of course, the best thing about getting up to the kids during the night are the brownie points I accumulate. Or, more accurately, claw back.

“It must have been hard for you,” my wife continued this morning, “sneaking around and not even turning a light on.”

It was, actually, given my non existent night vision is akin to a cold war, KGB blindfold and I didn’t even have the fridge light to guide me.

But again, I had the distinct impression I was missing something.

“How do you know I didn’t turn the light on?” I asked. “After all that, I didn’t wake you up, did I? Or were you pretending to be asleep?”

“No,” she grinned. “You left me a big clue.”

She tossed Miss2’s bottle to me and I immediately noticed the droplets clinging to the inside of it were a funny, browny colour.

“What’s wrong with the milk?” I asked her.

“It’s chocolate,” laughed my wife. “Instead of normal milk you grabbed the chocolate flavoured bottle from the fridge and gave her that!”

Which probably explains not only why Miss2 settled so down so well last night but why I’m suddenly the favourite and she was yelling for me to come get her out of her cot this morning. It’s not every night she gets a chocolate treat at 2am. I daresay she’s going to be disappointed with my offering tonight.

As a result of this, my giveashitness has been given an encouraging kick up the bum and I guess I know what I’ll be doing this week – working out how to change the light bulb in the fridge.

Or, more accurately, working out which repairman to call.

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