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"We Don't Talk About Barbara"

If there is one thing that kids are really good at it is being embarrassing. I know for a fact when I was growing up I did plenty of things that embarrassed my parents. I am pretty sure that the time my friend and I took the money his Mam had left for the window cleaner and spent it on fake blood and Monster Munch was pretty embarrassing. And I am sure my Dad will never forget the time our neighbour told him he had just caught me posting snowballs through the post box at the bottom of the street. I even know that the day I got Christened was embarrassing as I wouldn't stop screaming and crying to the point where my Great Aunt Ina walked out of the service. And that is just three things that I know of and that I can think of off the top of my head...I am sure if I asked my parents to write this they would have loads more stories. The Twiglets are currently 6 years old and they have embarrassed me loads of time but there are two instances in particular which I am going to share with you. Here goes...



Sharting

I am sure most people know what a "shart" is...if you don't it is basically when you fart and a little bit of poop comes out. I will admit that I have sharted on a few occasions including one time in a nightclub which was just amazing...Anyway, one day I was off work and I was at home pottering on with stuff when I let out an almighty pump. Now, I once remember being told once you hit 30 that you "should never trust a pump" and this was definitely one of those occasions where I shouldn't have trusted it. So, yeah, I did a big pump and I followed through a little bit and shit ran down my leg. I had to run upstairs to the bathroom and clean myself up. So far, pretty straight forward. I told Kate, as she loves a sharting story, and she thought it was hilarious and later that evening she told the twins about it...as you do. I didn't think anything of it and assumed they wouldn't remember...oh how wrong was I. A few weeks later we were going to the cinema to see "Zootropolis". I had invited my friend Richard to come with us as I had a spare ticket so we went and picked him up. He sat in the back of the car between the twins and they did what they always do and grilled him. They asked him questions about his hair and about his parents and about his job and whatever else they could think of. Then...just out of the blue...they decided to tell him the story about how I sharted. But they went in to so much detail and they pretended to be me and did impressions with sound effects and everything. I was mortified.

Barbara

Our house is kinda creaky. The stairs are very creaky to the point that nobody will ever be able to sneak up or down the stairs as everybody within a 2 mile radius would hear it. Because of this we quite often have strange noises coming from upstairs but Kate and I are so used to it. As the twins grew up they started to hear the noises and they would ask questions about what it was. We used to tell them the truth and that it was just the house creaking. This slowly evolved in to a little joke where we would say that it was "Barbara". Then whenever anything would go wrong in the house and nobody wanted to take responsibility we would blame "Barbara". If a cup broke and nobody wanted to admit it...we'd blame "Barbara". If someone forgot to flush the toilet but didn't want to own up...we'd blame "Barbara". You get the picture. It became a thing that we said and was our own little joke. Then one day "Hurricane Barbara" hit the North East of the UK and this lead to Kate posting a news link about it on Facebook, tagging me in it and saying "that bloody Barbara is a nuisance". I then replied saying "Shhhh...we don't talk about Barbara. She might get mad". This, naturally, lead to other people asking what we were talking about and soon our little family in-joke was public knowledge. The twins took to this and they would start to talk about "Barbara" more and they would even pretend that she was out with us. If we were at the cinema and the seat next to one of us was empty..."Barbara" was in it. Ruby would hold her hand out to her side and say she was "holding hands with Barbara". They would quite often tell me that "Barbara" was sitting in the middle of them in the car or they would say they were saving some of their food for "Barbara". You get the picture...it sounds pretty screwed up but it is our little family joke and makes us laugh. That was until they decided to tell everybody at school...

So, Kate and I go to pick up the twins from school one day and we were asked by Ruby's teacher if she could have a chat with us and with Poppy's teacher too. We waited and both teachers said they were concerned about something the twins had been talking about. They had told their friends, and the teaching assistant, that "in our house we have Barbara who is an old lady who lives upstairs but we aren't allowed to talk about her. She's a secret". Can you imagine what the teaching assistant must have thought? TShe probably thought that the parents of the twins, who seem so nice and so normal, are proper f***ing crazy and have an old lady held captive in their attic. I was absolutely horrified. As was Kate. We explained our little family joke and assured them that we aren't lunatics who have kidnapped an old woman. We didn't tell the twins off as, let's face it, we kinda brought this on ourselves and encouraged it. We now hardly ever mention "Barbara" but she does get brought up every now and then.

And on that note I will end there...Barbara is making strange noises like she wants fed again. I only fed her yeste...oh, hang on, I said too much...

Until next time

The Twiglet's Dad

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