Primal screaming

There is nothing more annoying (today anyway) to a bad mother than children's toys with more than five component parts that require assemblage. Consider the hell that is the lego set. Boychild received four sets for his birthday. I suspect that the source of this karmic retribution are the craft sets I gave to my nieces when I was a childless twenty-something (my sister in law still doesn't speak to me). I knew nothing about parenting then, and naively thought that glitter glue, stickers and finger-painting sets were fun. Bitter experience and sanding down the kitchen table on a regular basis during the Little Darling's toddler years taught me very quickly that arts and crafts are activities strictly for nursery and school.

These lego sets are nothing like the the small boxes of random coloured squares I played with as a child. Oh no, in my day they required no adult interventions whatsoever, and did not come with instructions that rival the Ikea (easy self-assembly ((my arse)) manuals). The kits that have been bestowed upon him this year require precision construction, eagle eyes, and the ability to stay calmer than Mother Theresa on Valium. Boychild has been hassling me to start on the 798 piece Indianna Jones kit all week, and this morning I ran out of excuses. He seemed to have sensed that it would be utterly pointless to ask Spouse - I fear he was born with the Blokeness Codes of Practice embedded deep in his consciousness and appreciates that to get his dad to consult an instruction manual would be sinful.

Mumma I'm not a patient boy, he said, menacingly, to me this morning. I took that as a threat: build my lego or your favourite plant/picture/ornament gets it. So I went peacefully to his bedroom where he had already opened all the packets from all the kits and helpfully jumbled them up all over his bed. I inhaled *in with love* exhaled *out with hate*, before embarking on the project. I don't like to be sexist, but lego could simply not have been designed by a woman. There are transparent pieces for heavens sake, and the instruction manual is helpfully in black and white so it takes an age to identify the required piece. Any woman would know that lego was not made for children's amusement, but rather to become embedded your feet when while creeping into your children's bedroom to turn off the bedside light when they've finally fallen asleep, making you shriek and wake the said children. It is also designed to block up the Dyson which Spouse cannot fix because, once again, it could involve consulting an instruction manual.

After three hours twenty-seven minutes Indianna had his truck. Four minutes later Boychild decided to send Indie flying down the stairs...