Kids & Money

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Kids are expensive.

Your own. To keep and look after, I mean.
Obviously, it’s a given that buying a child on the black market costs a bomb. There are officials to bribe, swarthy men in dark suits behind nightclubs to pay and guilty-looking nurses in squalid third world orphanages who set the whole process in motion. Or so I’m guessing anyway.

With the credit crunch well and truly upon us, I have tried many different ways to cut back on the vast expenses which our children thrust upon us. With limited success, it has to be said. But I have found some pleasure in getting the most out of the money that we are spending.
Take Alex’s playschool for example. Each morning when I drop him off, I take time out to help him paint a picture. And I don’t mean any of that minimalist crap, either. The more paint, layer upon layered layer, the better. It’s a flat monthly fee for the playschool and I reckon that we use up about 75% of the paint budget on Alex’s early morning art alone. Good value.
Obviously, the end result is usually pretty grim to look at: often dark and thick, black and grey and deep purples merging with one another. The teacher has actually suggested a visit to an educational psychologist as a result of reviewing his work, but that sort of specialist help costs money. Which defeats the object. Or objet in this case, I guess.

Today, I took the kids to Westlake Park (which is, in fact, just West of a lake) (genius). Westlake Park is not a park at all. There isn’t a blade of grass, a gang of dodgy looking youths or any dog excrement to be seen anywhere.  What there is, is a collection of restaurants and a giant jungle gym:

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Westlake Park: great for kids, heavy on the wallet

Normally, we would pop down there in the morning, have a cup of coffee or three, maybe a slice of cake; while the kids play happily on the jungle gym. And then demand ice cream. Pricey.
Or maybe dive in there early evening for a pizza and a couple of beers or a glass of wine; while the kids play happily on the jungle gym. And then demand ice cream. Pricier.

Today, I had a great idea while enjoying that coffee. Having whisked the kids off to Westlake, I was sitting and pondering on how we could save more money. And then it came to me. I quickly canceled the cake I had just ordered and chatted to my three-year-old son. You would not believe how happy he was to be asked if he wanted to spend the whole day on the jungle gym. Of course he did!
So having finished my coffee and paid the bill, I nipped off home at 11ish, watched the rugby all day and went back at 6 to pick him up.

Well, that was the plan anyway. The police actually dropped him off here at about 4 o’clock, as the restaurant was closing for their pre-evening break and had noticed he was still there. Alone. While they waited for the police to arrive, he got an ice cream. All I got was a stern ticking off and made to promise not to do it again. Oops!
But that’s a 3-year-old entertained for 5 hours, an ice cream, chaffeur-driven home and a coffee all for the price of a coffee.

Bargain? Bargain.

So guess where we’re going tomorrow? See you there, errant dads of Cape Town!

Baby Admin post

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Do these count?
Of course they do.

I have added the tweetmeme plugin to my vast range of WordPress plugins which make my life easier and make your reading enjoyment all the more… enjoyable.

If you’re active on twitter (and let’s face it, these days, who isn’t?) you can now retweet the content that you see here with just the click of a single button (that little green one under the post).
Share the wealth. You know it makes sense.
One great feature is that you still get to edit the content of your tweet before you tweet it. I suppose some people would call that a twedit.
Not me, though.

Go on – choose a post (hopefully more interesting than this one) and tell the world you were here!

Tom Henning Ovrebo

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Was it just yesterday that I complained that there wasn’t enough drama in the Arsenal v Man U UEFA Champions League semi-final to keep me interested? Well, evidently Tom Henning Øvrebø was reading while (possibly) getting instructions from various betting syndicates across the shadier parts of Europe. And he offered me some lovely Stilton to go with my previous evening’s chalk.

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Our Tom

I don’t think I have ever seen a more biased or inept refereeing performance in my life. Well, not one that didn’t involve Sheffield United or a match I was playing in, anyway. The refs always seem to be bent in those matches.
For me as a neutral to have been so disgusted at it tells you what the Chelsea fans must have thought. As does the fact that there are death threats against Mr Øvrebø all over the internet and the fact that he had to be smuggled out of the UK by police.
He must be thanking his lucky stars that the annual gathering of the Uncle Fester Lookalike Organisation was held in London this week, affording him some form of protection.
Now, I’m certainly not condoning the death threats, nor do I support the antics of Didier Drogba, who turned dramatically to the camera as he left the field at the end of the game and shouted, quite audibly:


“It’s a disgrace! It’s a [naughty word] disgrace!”

But I can quite understand why he felt that way. Because it was a [naughty word] disgrace. I mentioned this whole thing in February, when Peter Walton made mistakes in the Blades cup tie at Hull City. Once again, a referee has not done the job he is paid to do. And it’s cost Chelsea millions of pounds. Sod the fact that Roman Abramovich can afford it – that’s beside the point.

Drogba and teammate Michael Ballack will surely face disciplinary hearings over their actions last night. I would guess that Bosingwa and Lampard, who have also spoken out will be in trouble too. But what of the overweight baldy from Norway, smuggled back to Oslo by police overnight? What action will he face?

Well, if Euro 2008 is anything to go by – not much. Øvrebø refereed one match there and made so many errors that he was removed from the referees list for the rest of the competition. But UEFA still obviously trust him to have another go at making costly errors in big games. Surely that’s got to be it now, though?

Til next time, right?

EDIT: I was on John Maytham’s show on Cape Talk last night discussing this point.

EDIT 2: Drogba has issued a formal apology.

EDIT 3: 5fm reporting that Chelsea will dump Drogba at the end of the season and not renew his contract.
Really?

Inappropriate photo 101

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I settled down to watch the ding-dong battle between Arsenal and Manchester United last night, only to have my wish for an exciting game ruined in the first 12 minutes by some dodgy defending, some dodgy refereeing and some dodgy goalkeeping, all of which left Arsenal needing to score 4 times to win the tie and left the game as good as dead.

I was irritated. But at least it wasn’t my team that lost. Heavily.

It was Suleiman Alphonso Omondi’s team though and he could apparently take no more, as Sport24 reports:

Nairobi – An Arsenal fan in football-mad Kenya hung himself following his team’s 4-1 aggregate drubbing by arch-rivals Manchester United in the Champions League semi-final, police said on Wednesday.
Suleiman Alphonso Omondi, a 29-year-old Kenyan living in the capital Nairobi’s Embakasi neighbourhood, hung himself in his Arsenal shirt late Tuesday after the match, police said.

“We were watching the match at Bamba 70 pub, and when Arsenal was defeated, Suleiman just walked out in protest and he was crying,” Calvin Otieno, one of his friends, said.
“We didn’t know he was going to hang himself until Wednesday morning when we received the reports and came here to find his body at the balcony,” Otieno said outside the deceased’s home.

Tragic tale – and one which, if nothing else, demonstrates Suleiman’s passonate support for his team.

But having reported the story, which staff reporter looked through the files for an appropriate photo to use and came up with this?

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Arsenal players training

Was there really no other shot available? Cesc Fabregas in full flight? An upset or angry Arsenal fan at the Emirates, maybe? Perhaps a pic of the scoreboard or one of the Bamba70 pub? Even one of ugly Ronaldo. Ugh.
In fact, anything  that doesn’t feature an apparently slumped black man being dragged away, really.

Is it just me or was the choice of this particular photograph mildly inappropriate?

EDIT: Sky News gets the story and uses Arsenal badge as graphic. Better.

3D Changes in domestic paste

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One of the gifts which Alex got for his third birthday was a packet of Ben 10 stickers. Ben 10 is, apparently, a kiddie superhero  cartoon character who can be found on Cartoon Network, pajamas, backpacks, t-shirts and indeed, stickers. I have no other knowledge of this Ben 10 character, because Alex is still too young for Cartoon Network.
That, however, has not stopped him from becoming a big fan of Ben 10.

The other thing you should know about these Ben 10 stickers is that they are those cool ones that move (ever so slightly) when you tilt them from side to side a bit. If your hands are fast enough, you can make Ben 10 look like he is having a fit. And anyone watching you will probably think you’re having a fit as well. But that kind of thing is funny if you’re three.
And stickers are great if you are three years old, because you can stick them anywhere you can reach: in your sticker album, on your wardrobe, on your window, the inside of the en-suite toilet bowl, your little sister’s head – anywhere.

Anyway, I am glad that I could identify who and what the stickers were, because being completely honest, the packet they came in wasn’t overly helpful:

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3D Changes in domestic paste – the perfect gift for any child’s third birthday

And, as if to explain exactly what 3D changes in domestic paste is, there are some fishes swimming around some conservatory furniture. Maybe they were thinking fish paste. I don’t know.
To me it looks like there was an incident in the printing department and random words and graphics dropped into the Ben 10 sticker packet machine.

Either way, the stickers are a hit and have mainly gone into his sticker album, where they are making explosions and shooting lasers at the Winnie the Pooh Flat shine on bedroom glue.