The To Do List

With all To Do Lists there are always a few items that you put on that even as you scribble them down you know full well they will never, ever get done. And so while it’s highly likely that you’ll phone your auntie Margie, pay the gas bill or even take that jog/power walk that you’ve been talking about for ages it’s highly unlikely that you’ll cure cancer, fill in that on-line application to become a spy that you started filling in after watching the series finale of Spooks or for that matter fill in the one hundred and sixty demands from Facebook asking you to confirm how you know all these people. I tell you all this as a preamble to explaining why despite it being on my January To Do List that there is NO WAY AT ALL that I’m going bother trying to tackle item 20: “Wean youngest daughter off her dummy.”

When Claire and I handed her our youngest daughter her first dummy we knew we both knew that we were opening a can of worms that would one day end up being thrown back at us at high velocity no doubt hitting us on the bridge of our noses and leaving us with a mild concussion. We knew all this because we’d had it the first time round with our eldest daughter who sadly loved her dummy considerably more than she loved us. Had our home ever been on fire resulting in her having to make a decision about which three things she might save I had no doubt that the list would go (in order of importance) like this:
1. Dummy.
2. Mummy.
3. Milky.

Were she to have been offered a fourth choice I have no doubt that I would have been it but with just the three places on offer I have no choice but to accept that I would have been bested (and therefore condemned to a severe crispening) by a two litre bottle of full-fat milk. But anyway, I digress, my point, and I do have one, is that it was murder, absolute murder getting child number one to give up her dummy. We tried coaxing (“Oh, go on give it to us, pretty please!”), we tried bribery (“Give it to us and I’ll by you a sweet shop,”) and we even tried shame (“Look, just give it up okay or you’ll end up with teeth like Bugs Bunny,” but she was completely indifferent to both us and our suggestions and so one night we thought ‘This is stupid,’ and just took it off her. Biggest. Mistake. Ever. I have never heard screaming like it. It was like she was a superhero whose secret ability was to be able to rattle small life forms to death by use of her vocal chords. We handed the dummy back and cowered waiting for the noise to stop. It didn’t. It just carried on. All night. Like a wailing siren of misery whose single aim was to punish us for messing with dummy. We never did it again. Ever. So all we could do was wait until she gave dummy up of her own volition. Thankfully it was only another couple of months and she never looked back even once. But the thing is as much as child number one loved her dummy, child number two loves hers even more.