Tag Archives: goldfish concentration camp

‘Stop boggly-bogglying, the Vicar’s coming for tea…’

I think it might be time to separate my children at bathtime. To be honest, it has never been the gentle winding-down ritual that experts bang on about in baby books; my two seem to suck up some sort of manic energy the minute they hit the lavender-scented bubbles, and before you can say ‘inappropriate behaviour’, they’re filling friendly-looking plastic whales/ducks/dolphins with water, sticking them between their legs and pretending to wee copiously, etc, etc.
I’ve looked it up online, and the received wisdom seems to be that you should be guided by your children and allow them more privacy ‘when one of them starts showing natural modesty.’ I presume they mean the kind of ‘natural modesty’ I witnessed tonight, when my son turned his back on my daughter, shoved his bottom literally three inches from her face and shouted ‘Smack my butt!’, and she then stood up in the bath and yelled, ‘Smack my fanny!’ (and for the benefit of any American visitors, she was using it the term in the British sense). Of course, they immediately sensed my disquiet – ‘That’s quite enough willies and fannies now, thank you!’ – so they started shouting, inexplicably, ‘Smackmyfanny.com! Smackmyfanny.com!’ and shrieking hysterically.
Last year they went through a stage of playing something called ‘Boggly boggly’, which basically involved one of them lying on top of the other and jiggling around, while shouting – you guessed it – ‘boggly, boggly!’ It looked most disturbing to an adult eye. My son decided to pin down my daughter at a neighbour’s barbecue and enthusiastically boggly-boggle her in front of the horrified guests. ‘Get up! For God’s sake, get up!’ I hissed. Which caused by daughter to wail, ‘But Mum, I LOVE boggly boggly!’
Please tell me I don’t need to turn myself in to Social Services.
PS I’ve just checked, and remarkably, there isn’t currently a website called http://www.smackmyfanny.com. Cyberspace porn barons are really missing a trick.
PPS Ben update: I’ve tried feeding him twice a day, against the express advice of the pet shop. And he’s like a new fish! He, like, swims and stuff! But the guilt is now magnified. According to my husband, ‘We’ve been operating some kind of fish Belsen.’

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