A Little Wobble

A jelly.  Of Sorts

Jelly.  Jelly wobbles.  I can remember looking at it as a child, shaking the bowl to see it shiver.   Great stuff altogether.   Tasty too.  

Wibbly Wobbly Wonder ice-pops.  One of my favourite ice-cream treats.   They have a great taste as well.   The taste of childhood.    I don’t eat them so much anymore though.  Maybe tomorrow.   Oh, wait.  It’s October.   Maybe next summer.  Yes.  Definitely next summer.

Lower lips.  They wobble too.   Nothing can stop me in my tracks faster than one of my boys with a lower lip wobble.   The most recent one was when he almost knocked the bowl of cereal out of my hand.   I got crossed and yelled.   His lip wobbled.  Then I almost wobbled.   We made up after a moment.  It was all good.

There was a further wobble that evening with another boy.  Crossed wires, I got cross and yelled again.  After a fashion I got another hold of myself and asked him to remind me of what I am always saying to them; “It doesn’t matter.  It’s not important.  No-one got hurt.”  That wobble wasn’t so nice.   I must remember to keep my cool in the future.  Over silly stupid things.  Things that are not important.

There were lots of wobbles when the boys were babies.  Lots of them.   The boys may have been small but the wobbles weren’t.   Second guessing myself all the time.   Wondering, waiting and wailing in between.   Wobbles at 2am in the kitchen by myself.  I had many in the shower.  Once I almost mortified myself in a shop!   I shouldn’t have been let out half the time.  

Loads of drunken wobbles.  Oh, yessir, too many to mention in this blog post.  Ones where I couldn’t get the bathroom door open.  Others where I fell asleep.  Once even standing up.  Another time on a plane.   Once I cornered a lovely friend and demanded to know why she couldn’t feed the homeless with the leftover food from her fast food outlet job.  Yes!   Drunken wobbles. Who knew there could be so many?   I’ll say goodbye to that one now.

There were a few wobbles at some of my works.   I hated those ones.   I’m not a big fan of confrontation but looking back I am so glad, proud and happy with myself for throwing those wobbles.  I was standing up for myself and shaking in my boots (Doc Martins for one of them) at the same time.  Now I tell my boys to do the same. 

I have lots of body wobbles now.   I remind myself I have been through four back to back pregnancies and I am not exactly in the first flush of youth anymore.  I also tell myself I’d have less wobbles if I could lay off the Walnut Whips, the almonds I like to munch and the chocolate I love with my coffee.   I think my wobbles are here to stay.  I will continue to fight them when instead maybe I should “love the body I’m in.”

The wheel of the car wobbled not so long ago.  For a horrible moment I thought I was going to hit the car in front but the brakes worked just in time.   On further inspection – by someone else.   You don’t want me checking out your car - it turned out the front wheel on the passenger side was a moment away from falling off.   Now that was a wobble I didn’t dwell too much on.

Wobbles are a fact of life.  Big and small.   Apparently it’s not the wobble that’s important but how you handle it.  Or maybe that’s something else.  

It’s good advice all the same.

However, there’s a new wobble in town.  It was discovered almost two weeks ago and it’s gotten worse.  And this one by all accounts, is earlier than the others.  

It’s a wobbly tooth. 

I’ve seen those before.   Lots of them.  So many in fact, I part time as the tooth fairy.

This loose tooth though is another of the first of the lasts.  

Because it’s Smallest Boy.    His first loose tooth is right on the bottom.   The one next door to it is in no great state either.     A double wobble.   They will both probably fall out in time for Halloween.

They’re only teeth. He will grow perfectly fine and beautiful adult ones. 

But this is it.   It’s another marker.   Like the first proper haircut – the one that strips the baby look off them – the onset of adult teeth puts the look of an older child on them too. 

Once upon a time he didn’t want his teeth to fall out because it would be sore and he wouldn’t be able to eat apples.

Now he can’t wait till it happens because he will get “millions of euro from the tooth fairy.”

May all his wobbles in life be so small.