petite anglaise

I lurch around the apartment impatiently, attempting to locate Tadpole’s striped woolly hat, one arm inside a coatsleeve, the other engaged in hastily ramming a piece of buttered toast into my mouth. The hat, a present from Tadpole’s aunt, is nowhere to be found.

“Do you remember where you put your noddy hat?” I enquire, in desperation. Just occasionally this tactic does work, and Tadpole will reply “in my bedroom” in a tone which somehow manages to convey both incredulity (at the fact I have managed to overlook something so patently obvious) and a world weary tone of resignation (can mummy really be that dim?) Not so this time. She looks at me blankly, then turns back to her jigsaw.

I try to picture the previous day’s homecoming, rewinding the images in my head until I arrive at the relevant chapter. Come to think of it, I distinctly remember standing in front of the lift holding two bags and a Christmas tree, yelling “No, I can’t hold your hat. If you want to take it off, you hold it! Mummy has all these things to carry already!”

And now it’s missing. So clearly it was dropped on the entrance hall floor in a fit of Tadpole pique, left inside the lift, or abandoned on the carpeted landing outside our front door. Which means that either some well-meaning soul has found it and stuffed it in our letterbox, or someone a little less charitable has thrown it in the communal dustbin. Being a pessimist by nature, I assume it has gone for good and act accordingly.

An alternative hat is sourced, which is was once white, and has built in ear flaps and a strip which fastens under the chin with velcro. Now rather a tight fit, it was Tadpole’s preferred garment of winter 2004.

I decide to use this opportunity to teach Tadpole Something Important. Even if the article I read on toddler taming yesterday did say that there is little or no point in chastising children of that age about events which happened more than ten minutes ago.

Adopting my most earnest tone, I begin my lecture. “Mummy doesn’t have your noddy hat any more, because you dropped it outside when we came home yesterday. You’ll have to wear this one instead. It’s a pity, because that hat was lovely, and it was a present from Auntie S.”

My daughter eyes me gravely and nods her head. “Yes, I did drop it mummy. Is gone now.” Disturbingly, however, she shows not a shred of remorse.

“Mummy’s a bit sad,” I continue, labouring my point in the hope of getting some sort of emotional response, “because mummy asked you to carry it and you were naughty. You left it on the floor.”

Tadpole nods again, unperturbed.

Taking the ersatz-hat from my hands, my daughter says calmly “never mind mummy. I wear this one. This one very nice.” She puts it on her head and giggles as I move to fasten the velcro under her chin. “Look mummy, the hat has a beard, just like Father Christmas!”

A smile twitches at the corner of my mouth, threatening to take over, but I manage to quell it and soldier on, regardless. “It’s still a shame about that stripey hat. Mummy liked the stripey hat.”

I am starting to sound like a broken record. As repetitive as a toddler.

“Not be sad mummy. It doesn’t matter. We can buy another one, in the shop,” Tadpole explains, patiently.

If I had a white flag, I’d be waving it right about now.

We take the lift down to the ground floor, where we are greeted by the sight of a striped hat, which someone has thoughfully stowed above the battery of letterboxes.

Saying nothing, I stuff it into my letterbox when Tadpole isn’t looking, and we set off for the childminder’s.

When we were about halfway home, pushing the Christmas tree in front of us in Tadpole’s Maclaren buggy, I realised that the girl at the florist’s hadn’t actually given me the type I’d asked for. Mine had fat, luxurious, bottle brush type foliage, whereas this one, admittedly partially hidden by a net body stocking, was thin and sparse looking. Yet again, my attention had been diverted by a toddler at a crucial juncture in the transaction. Shopkeepers must see me and Tadpole coming and rub their hands together in gleeful anticipation. There is more than one way to shortchange a distracted mother.

I sighed, genuinely disappointed, but it was too late now, we had already covered 500 m at a snail’s Tadpole’s pace, and it was too late, too cold and too dark to contemplate retracing our steps and argue about branch girth and foliage in French.

Once we had got ourselves and our needle-shedding friend up to the fifth floor apartment we call home, I clambered up the stepladder to retrieve the decorations from their lofty place of hibernation. Luckily they were still there, intact, aside from the fairy lights, of which, predictably, only half still worked. I have not so fond memories of that fateful Christmas when the bag of decorations could not be found, no matter where Mr Frog and I hunted. I had to concede, bashfully, that the bag must have been an accidental casualty of my passion for “decluttering”. Not a mistake you would want to make more than once. Christmas decorations are supposed to be amassed over a long period of time, not purchased all at once for a price equivalent to the GDP of a third world country.

The tree positioned on the wicker chest I use for the storage of spirits (of the alcoholic variety), after careful removal of a few choice bottles which I suspect I will be needing in the interim, I opened up the decoration bag and showed Tadpole the glittering bounty within.

I had imagined this scene in my head, ever since Tadpole’s first breathless exclamation of appreciation as we passed the mairie with its curtain of white lights and mammoth twin sapins. Tadpole and mummy, bathed in the soft light of a non-malfunctioning garland of Habitat lights, in fuzzy soft focus, with a soundtrack of carol singers warbling on the stereo. A candidate for Tadpole’s First Memory, perhaps?

What my shiny, feel good fantasy hadn’t quite accounted for were the hazards of the safety pins and bent paperclips I use to hang the various baubles and stars up. Nor had I actually thought through the implications of Tadpole using eggshell thin baubles as juggling balls, or squeezing them tightly in her little palms.

My best laid plans flew swiftly out of the window, as I shrieked anxiously “No! Not like that, careful!” and “Don’t touch that! It’s really sharp! You’ll get a bobo!”

Upon which Tadpole rapidly lost interest in the whole enterprise and started colouring her teletubbies’ magazine instead, tongue protruding in concentration.

I have to say that as I decorated the tree, alone, I wasn’t exactly assailed by a feeling of déjà vu.