Sunday Wondering

Every now and then I persuade My Loved Ones to fuck off and leave me with the house to myself for a few hours, and now that I'm pregnant I have the perfect excuse.

So here I am. Alone on a Sunday morning. Still in my dressing gown. Luxury.

I could drink tea and eat cake.

I could watch telly.

I could read a book.

I could listen to music.

I could eat chocolate.

I could surf the internet.

I could do some yoga.

I could eat biscuits.

I could do some relaxation exercises.

Or I could do all the jobs that need doing that I was planning to do as soon as I got a moment to myself.

And as I sit here pondering all the possibilities, a familiar kind of panic sets in. Oh no! I can't decide! There are too many options! And all the time I sit here trying to decide what to do, the time is dripping away and I know what'll happen cos it always happens, and I won't manage to settle down to do anything productive OR anything enjoyable, and just at the point when I'm finally relaxing and feeling like I'm getting something out of this delicious spare time, the front door will go and Felix will be tickling me again, and...

Felix is getting really into tickles again. This is great, when I get to do the tickling. The kind of belly-chuckle you can get out of a 4-yr-old if you tickle his armpits is the best sound in the world. And the fact that you can extract it so easily - like pressing a button - is immensely satisfying.

But he's not as good at tickles as I am. He just sort of wiggles his fingers in my general direction, and I pretend to laugh. And it stops being cute after the first couple of times, and is just slightly annoying. And I wonder whether I should help him learn how to really tickle someone, by only laughing if I am genuinely tickled. Except then he'd learn how to actually tickle me, and that would be even more annoying.

My mum looks on in horror when we play these tickling games. She has vivid memories - and so do I - of being a child and laughing that helpless being-tickled laugh while simultaneously thinking "oh please stop, this is horrible. I know I'm laughing, but that's just some kind of weird instinct. I'm not enjoying myself. Stop it!"

I have a theory that it's an uncle thing. I had many uncles when I was a child, and they were all boisterous and rambunctious and rough-and-tumble and lots of fun, but they sometimes went TOO FAR, and tickling was one example. They didn't notice when the laughing became slightly desperate and the ticklee really had HAD ENOUGH. They also tended to break things, when they got drunk and larked about a little too enthusiastically and started chasing each other around people's gardens and breaking people's ponds and stuff. Racketing, my grandma used to call it. "Boys!" she would shout. "Stop racketing!"

My uncles were great. I loved my uncles. Until they had children of their own. One by one, they became dads, and the same thing happened to every single one of them. They stopped being boisterous and started being Sensible. They suddenly decided that children are Fragile and they started pussy-footing around and being a lot less fun. Pah.

I still love 'em though. [waves at blog-reading uncles]

So maybe it's because I'm not an uncle that I can time it just right. My tickles come in very short bursts. A couple of seconds, just enough to have the child screaming with glee, but stopping short of the point where they start to feel helpless and trapped by involuntary laughter.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes. Sunday. Argh! See how much time I just wasted writing this post? Must eat chocolate! No, watch telly! No, read a book! No, sort iPod out! Argh!