Mancub

For the first time since 1996 the adults in the Tinhouse outnumber the children. The number of children has dropped from three to two, while the adults have increased from two to three.

Tinson1 is eighteen today (Tinson18, I could now call him, but won’t). He is legally an adult, allowed to drink, vote, buy over-18 video games and watch X-rated movies. A whole new world is therefore opening up to him, since he has never voted before.

One year and a day ago I wrote this post about the day before he was born, and about how our life changed forever. How quickly the 18 years since that day has passed, and how wonderful it all has been. He’s been a ridiculously happy baby, a winning though occasionally scarily angry toddler, a successful and popular schoolboy, and then, although he’s referred to in our house as GT (Grumpy Teenager), he’s been a very personable teenager.

I know I sound laughably blinkered and rose-spectacled in this post, but it honestly is true. He’s a super kid, and will make a super adult.

Today we’re celebrating. It’s half past two in the afternoon, and already we’ve drunk Buck’s Fizz (thanks to his Godmother) and are heading out for a meal soon.

He is young, clever and charming. I envy him, I admire him, I’m proud of him.

We love him.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Baby

In a frantic bid to rid myself of Bloggers Block, I am posting this photo of three photos:

We found them over the weekend by the method by which most things are found in the Tinhouse, i.e., we were looking for something else. The three pictures were together because we had intended putting them into a frame years ago, but never got round to it.

The pictures, in order, are Tinson1, Tinson2 and Tingirl, and each picture was taken, in the same pose on the same armchair, on the day on which each baby was six months old. When Jo asks why I don’t show my kids my blog, it’s because I occasionally do things like this to them.

(Brief digression: just as I was typing that sentence, the guy on Sky Sports News was announcing that Everton’s striker Jo has been dropped to the bench for tonight’s match).

And that’s really all there is to say about the photo.  The really eagle-eyed among you might notice that Tinson2 has a photo of Tinson1 on the table beside him, and experienced parents among you will know that our babies did not always look that happy.

Any of you in the mood to be critical of our parenting might look at the size of Tinson2 and conclude that we fed him on a diet of Big Macs and lard. All I can say in our defence is that he didn’t stay that shape, and indeed now is so thin that I think he’s about the same weight as he was in that picture.   

So,that’s it. Nothing else to say today.

If I don’t think of something soon, I’m going to post pictures of their fridge drawings.

And you don’t want to see a six-month old’s drawing of a fridge, do you?

Other Lives

The problem with having a secret internet life, with alternative names and activities, is remembering that not everyone knows it.

Recently in our house Tingirl and I were looking through the massive book mountain that has grown in the hall outside my bedroom door for a particular book. One of the books in the pile was Philip Pullman’s book The Tin Princess.

”Look, Honey, that’s you,” I said, and exactly as I said it I thought ‘’she has no idea she’s called Tingirl.”

She looked at me as if I was an idiot which, in fairness, at that moment I was.

Then last night Tinson1 arrived home from college, and I asked him how was Archery Class. Again, I realised one millisecond too late that it was Bardson1 in my Shakespeare post who is actually learning archery.

I wonder do superheroes have this problem?

”Bruce, did you watch The Apprentice last night?”

”Of course not, Mother, you know I was saving Gotham from Catwoman.”

”What did you say?”

”Er, I said I was waving my bottom at a fat woman.”

”Really, Bruce, it’s time you got a girlfriend.”

Touché

It was great to hear that Rio has been awarded the 2016 Olympics, since Mrs Tin and I are hoping to go.

This is because Tinson1 has expanded his disturbing love of weaponry by joining the Fencing Club at college.

You never hear tell of famous Irish fencers, so I reckon that just by joining the club he has already put himself about 25th in line for the Olympic team.

I have dreams of him being outrageously successful in Rio, and of his proud parents appearing on the Late Late Show telling Gerry Ryan (his turn to host it has to come eventually) that we supported him in every way.

We will not tell Gerry that, because we are from the Tom and Jerry generation, every time Tinson1 mentions fencing we say “En garde, monsieur pussycat”, in high-pitched faux-French accents.

Because that would make us look childish.

College Dude

Tinson1 is in his first week at Trinity, and this is a picture of outside our front door this morning:

Our family just loves a good stereotype.

In fairness to Tinson1, I have to confess that the cone was actually put there by Eircom, who had to dig up part of our driveway to fix our phone line. The co-incidence of a traffic cone appearing at our door on the very week that Tinson1 became a student, however, was just too delicious to ignore.

So how is his study going? Well, not at all, really. His lectures don’t actually start till next week. This was Freshers Week, and all he’s done so far is register, pick his subjects, meet his mentor and join a load of Societies.

Although he’s doing Science he’s joined the Law Society (who seemingly throw the best parties) and the Philosophical Society (who presumably don’t much mind whether people like their parties or not).

Ironically, just as he’s found ways of filling both his days and evenings for the four years to come, he has received a text from the Army Reserves who had to reject him because of cutbacks last spring. It seems there is a chance he may be allowed to join after all.

That ship has sailed, however,and I would be relieved if it were not for two things.

He has joined both the Paintballing Society and the Rifle Society at TCD.

Hopefully his forthcoming acquintance with people from Law and Philosophy will teach him what it’s legal to shoot at, and whether it’s the right thing to do.

One of His Five a Day

When I said yesterday that caring for the Tinsons was going to be a doddle, I wasn’t kidding.

When I got up this morning Tinson1 had gone running, and this was on the kitchen table:

Of course, I know it can be spread on bread, but the loaf  of bread I so lovingly baked bought for them them is still unopened. The inescapable conclusion therefore, Watson, is that Tinson1’s breakfast consisted of a couple of spoons of that chocolatey stodge, straight from the jar.

The jar claims that it’s packed with over 50 hazelnuts, which is at least something. Its other ingredients are: sugar, veg oil, fat-reduced cocoa (?), skimmed milk powder (what’s the point of all the fat-reducing and skimming, when the first ingredient is “sugar”?), emulsifier (to paint your insides nutella-colour), vanillin (nah, me neither, perhaps it’s a mixture of vanilla and penicillin – just think, an ice-cream that kills bacteria, the ultimate comfort food), and, finally, whey powder, in the only occurence in history where the word ‘whey’ is not accompanied by the words ‘little’, ‘miss’ and ‘muffet’.

He ate all that, and then went running.

Truly, the young have stomachs of iron.

Boy Zone

We’ve been minding our two nieces, aged 12 and 9, for the last two weeks while Mrs Tin’s sister was in Oz (no, I mean Australia, I’m not suggesting that she’s the Wicked Witch of the West. Honestly). Anyway, she’s coming home this weekend, so Mrs Tin has taken the nieces down home to Sligo (which, now I come to think of it, is the West). Tingirl has gone with them, and they’re going to stay for a few days, so, like the attendance at a Star Trek convention, the Tinhouse is currently one-hundred-percent male.

So I’m back house-husbanding again. Again I’m discovering that objects that we think are inanimate are actually mischievious bastards with a vicious sense of humour. When I approach the sitting room to collect crockery for the dishwasher one cup will be delegated the task of hiding behind a chair, and when I go to the kitchen it will then climb back onto the centre of the coffee-table to stare accusingly at me when I come back in. (And even as I’m typing this I’ve just noticed a knife on the kitchen table that I’m typing at, though I collected everything up about ten minutes ago). Sometimes I swear I can hear giggling from the dishwasher.

Clouds too play hide and seek, rushing to glower blackly overhead whenever they hear me open the back door with a pile of washing, and then vanishing again as soon as I decide not to leave the clothes out.

In general I’ve a more laid-back approach than last April, when Mrs Tin went to her cousin’s wedding in Barcelona. Then the kids were at school, & I’d to make sure they got up in time, had the right books and clean uniforms, and were fed a comforting and nutritious meal when they came home. In other words, every appliance in the kitchen (washing machine, cooker, fire extinguisher) was on at the same time, all the time.

Now it’s the summer, the Tinsons get up ridiculously late, and then vanish either to their friends’ houses or their rooms. And since there are no girls in the house, there’s no real point in making a big effort with the cooking, since the Tinsons would eat lino if I put it in front of them, as long as it came with chips.

In other words, the pizza shop is going to make a fortune.

About A Boy

Yesterday was Leaving Cert results day, so my post should have been about Tinson1 and how he got on, but hey, I had mental issues to write about, and I don’t have a whole category called “It’s All About Me” for nothing.

Anyway, he did fine, he got 470 points. I got 26, which gives the impression that he’s 18 times cleverer than I was, but of course the system has changed.  Back when I did it (in quill and ink, on parchment) there were simple A’s, B’s and C’s, and you got 5 points for an A, 4 for a B, etc. Now there is A1, A2, A3, etc, and the whole thing is much more complicated. Funnily, if you use the simplified version then he got exactly the same number of each grade as I did all those years ago, though in very different subjects.

Anyway, he has enough points for Trinity (just down the road from my office. “Hey, we’ll be able to do lunch”, I said yesterday, just to see his attempts at hiding the flash of horror that shot across his face), though not for the Theoretical Physics course he was thinking of. This means that my recurring nightmare, where the world explodes in a fiery molten ball while he stands in his lab going “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!” (he’s not laughing specifically at you there, Mwa), will not now take place.

He is planning now on taking General Science. As a scientist there are many directions in which his career might go – he might invent a small device which will make cars run on baby-sick (a never-dwindling resource), or he might become one of those No-Shit-Sherlock scientists who, after two years of research, produce a report stating that men spend more time than women thinking about boobs.

Either way, that’s all in the future. As for today, he’s delighted with himself, and we’re as proud of him as usual.

The Excitement is in Tents

Tinson1 if off to Oxygen this morning.

This is his “end of school” celebratory event. A load of the class are heading off to Majorca, and he was going to do that, but he came home one day and said “nah, it’s getting too messy” (and when a 17-year old bloke says that, you wonder WTF they were planning), so he opted for this instead.

This is his checklist, which I found on the kitchen table (sorry that’s it’s a bit hard to read, it’s not easy taking photos & uploading them at 5.30 am):

The list is apparently based on tips from the Oxygen website. The compilers, bless them, sound as innocent and naive as he does.

The second item, for example, says “something luminous to notice our tent”. Ignoring for a moment the construction of the sentence, which would lead you to believe that English is not Tinson1’s first language, a short reflection will quickly reveal the flaw in this plan. Attaching something luminous to your tent so that you can find it in the dark is a great idea, but only if you’re the only people doing it. I have a mental image of a load of half-asleep people wandering blearily around at 4 a.m. in a field eerily lit by a thousand luminous tents, the whole scene looking like a Sellafield housing estate being visited by zombies.

Item 6 – “Lock for tent” – is also touching in its innocence. It’s rumoured  that both the first and second of the three little pigs also invested in locks.

His proposed diet for the weekend is interesting. “16+ nutrigrain bars” and “canned fruit (must have opener tabs)” mean that at least he’ll be getting his five helpings a day, if in the least possible edible form. The second last item, though,  says “Jam sandwiches – keep for a few days!” (his exclamation mark). I fear he will discover that, while this may be true of the jam (there’s a reason why you find it in Tesco in an aisle marked “preserves”) it is unlikely to be true of the bread, and the only thing worse than eating mouldy bread is eating mouldy bread with strawberry jam on it.

I’m mentally blocking out the last line. It’s not just the word “vaseline” that worries me, it’s the “dot, dot, dot, question mark” that follows it.

(By the way, while I’m grateful that the list doesn’t include entries like “condoms” or “spliffs”, I have been a parent long enough to know that he might well have a second list).

I hope he has a great time, though, and I envy him. The line-up for the weekend is incredible (I’ve heard of more than half of the bands, which is saying something) and the whole thing will be a great experience, and hopefully great fun.

The weather forecast, for Saturday in particular, is absolutely shite.  It wouldn’t be a music festival if it wasn’t.

Life’s Simple, in Theory

So Tinson 1 has finished school.

He sat his final exam, Chemistry, on Tuesday and left his schooldays behind him. He got home, gave us a carefully analytic summary of the exam (“piece of piss”) and invertebrated down in front of the telly, as if already settling into his future role as one of the unemployed.

After a while he admitted that he felt a bit strange, watching TV without a hearing a nagging voice inside his head telling him he should be studying (he usually had a nagging voice outside his head telling him the same thing, and I think Mrs Tin is now as at a loss as he is).

Anyway, when some friends rang to say they were going to play football down in the leisure centre he jumped at the chance. He played the game, went back to someone’s house and then walked home, getting in at about 4 a.m.

During the football apparently he got some sand or dirt into his sock, but instead of stopping and removing it he played on, so now most of the skin has come off the sole of his foot. Therefore he spent his first day as a grown-up lying on his bed with his foot in a bandage.

As his father, it is my job to worry about him when he does silly things, and I have to thank him for giving me so much practice.  But remember, this guy has applied to college to do Theoretical Physics, so now I’m starting to worry, not just for him, but for all of us, for our planet and indeed for the populations of distant worlds in galaxies far, far away.

The Principle of Cause and Effect seems to have passed him merrily by, and the thought of him in a very few short years spilling coffee into a worm hole, getting sand in the Large Hadron Collider or sneezing violently into a bowl of Dark Matter (it comes in bowls, doesn’t it?) should strike fear throughout the entire universe.

Was Einstein that scatty? Actually, looking at his hairstyle (a generous use of the word “style” there) he was possibly worse. The Principle of Cause (using a comb) and Effect (neat hair) seems to have escaped him too.

At least Tinson1 always knows where his hair-gel is.