Tagged! Seven random facts

The estimable Ruth, whose Ruth the Mom delivers jolts of humour as regularly as an expresso machine produces good java, has linked us into an entertaining round of tagging.

The rules, as reproduced on the left, require that we offer seven titillating - oh, all right, just random - facts about ourselves (we're counting Mum, Pa and Sonny as one virtual person). Then we'll tag seven other bloggers - who may or may not wish to keep the ball rolling.

So here are the facts:

1) Sonny has been perfecting the art of dry-eyed crying. When he wants attention, he sits there looking crafty (you need to work on an expression of injured innocence, youngster), and sends out exploratory howls that increase in volume the longer he is ignored. He did that for 45 minutes straight last night, until Mum caved in.

2) Mum does a good interpretation of a zombie. That's because she is very tired these days and will call Pa on the way to work to moan, in tones that invoke the living dead: "I'm sooo sleeepy". Why? See item (1) above. Our efforts to steel ourselves and not rush immediately to Sonny's aid have robbed Mum of much shut-eye.

3) Pa comes from a line of heavy sleepers. His father before him napped so incessantly that Pa's brother once wrote in a primary school essay: " My father's hobby is sleeping". Now Pa is carrying on the tradition - aided by drowsiness-inducing medication that he regularly takes. The upshot is that he can sleep through anything: Ringing telephones, traffic noise and even the phenomenon addressed in item (1).

4) Pa has ten toes. To be more exact, he is presently wondering why it is that nature has given humans ten, as opposed to six or four. He can understand that an even number makes better evolutionary sense, since it presumably allowed primitive humans better balance as they fled sabre-toothed tigers or whatever menaced them thousands of years ago. But why 10? In fact, why does this tag game stipulate seven, rather than eight, or nine, random facts? Such inane thoughts are fairly typical of frustrated philosophers, or possibly people who - despite claims to the contrary - are sleep-deprived due to the phenomenon addressed in item (1).

5) Mum is an inveterate dreamer. That is to say, hardly a night goes by without her embarking on remarkable adventures or braving terrors in her sleep. Of course, this was before the advent of the phenomenon addressed in item (1) and a subsequent loss of sleep.

6) Sonny has sealed an unholy alliance of some sort with the infant care centre. Maybe they're bribing him with an extra-soft blanket. It's the only explanation for why, going by the logs kept by his caregivers, he snoozes for hours and hours over there, depriving them of a chance to earn their salary. Instead, Sonny chooses to stay awake at home, preferably when his parents are trying to get some shut-eye. Should they be impertinent enough to deposit him in his cot, he will immediately commence the activity described in item (1).

7) The economy may be in danger of going to hell in a handbasket, but Mum and Pa are doing some cautious househunting. There are a number of reasons for this: The hope of settling in a district with better schools and taking advantage of market trends. With a slightly larger pad, too, we could deposit Sonny in his own little room at some distance from ours, and let him indulge in the activity described in item (1) while we snooze happily away.

Well, there's the lot. Now for the folks being invited to join the tag party. All have blogs that we enjoy visiting:


I) Enchanted by Scraps
II) Mumsgather
III) Nona Nita
IV) Sheena and Greg
V) Sturgent
VI) Jane
VII) Penny

Righto, it's time for a nap.