Meltdown

There are some things in life that are high on my list of “Stuff I Must Do More Often.” Standing in a shop trying to keep a lid on my daughter as her mounting panic threatens to spill over into hysteria is not one of them.

The shopping trip started so well. After some heavy Googling she had announced that we could buy her Hello Kitty-branded messenger-style school bag for next term from Argos, just down the road from us. I reserved it online and we headed into the store, while her dad and her brother went to look at the fish in the pet shop next door. I didn’t want him getting overexcited and begging me to buy toys for him. And my little boy’s got quite a bad track record, too (boom tish).

So the system worked. After paying, we collected the bag and I handed it to her in its cellophane wrapper, making the fatal mistake of feeling smug that I’d sorted this out so close to the beginning of the holidays, thus fending off nuclear-grade nagging.

Her face fell. She examined the package closely, and announced it was the wrong colour. My heart sank. I knew this wouldn’t end well.

“It’s got pink trim, sweetheart, just like in the catalogue.”

“It’s the wrong pink.”

“But there’s only one colour.”

“It’s baby pink in the catalogue. That’s dark pink.”

“Well, sometimes things look different in the photograph.”

“It’s the wrong one. There was another one.”

“There was only one bag, darling. There wasn’t a choice of colour.”

“This one is wrong.”

Her jaw was set. Her heels were cemented in. Her voice was getting louder and louder. Other customers turned round and began giving us looks; one woman in particular began to audibly tut. There’s nothing like strangers judging you to really help calm you down in a situation like this, but I ignored her. My daughter was now in danger of becoming hysterical, and I needed to find a solution.

I managed to keep my voice calm and even.

“Let’s talk to the lady in Customer Service. She can tell us if there are any other colours.”

“There are. I can’t have this pink, I can’t.”

This continued for what felt like hours, but was probably around ten minutes. Three members of staff, the Argos computer ordering system, and their bloody uselessly laid-out catalogue were brought into play. My daughter's voice, which when she gets panicky is like an armour piercing missile for the lugholes, reached hitherto unimagined volume levels. Heads continued to turn, but I resisted the urge to give them all a collective "JUST PISS OFF!". The boys returned from the pet store wide-eyed at the sight of our girl standing in the middle of the shop, about to reach meltdown level.

We finally managed to convince her that there was only one bag, and it only came in one colour. I gave her the choice. To be accurate I had to repeat the choice ten times before it finally registered through the maelstrom of her whirling thoughts. “You know we couldn’t find this bag anywhere else online. It’s either this one or you’ll have to have a completely different one from another shop.”

She agreed. Her lip was quivering, her hair was flopping over her face, where it had come loose from her hair slides, her eyes were wild and teary. But she agreed. We went home, feeling like we'd returned from a battle, not a retail experience. 

All is quiet on the Western Front since. I get the feeling I’ve not heard the last of this, and somehow, somewhere along the line, this Company Quartermaster is going to have a mutiny on her hands over the wrong supplies for the troops.

Video is The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Part 1)

Choices

My daughter tied herself in knots today, struggling with choices.

She was red-eyed and wild-headed when she got home from school.

Her teachers are trying to gently wean her off her current obsession with Hello Kitty by trying to get her to occasionally choose something else when she has the option. 

She’s so single-minded about her inexplicable love for the Japanese animated cat character that she’s announced she doesn’t like anything apart from Hello Kitty.

So the innocent suggestion that maybe she could pick a different picture to be used on her reward tokens went down like a cat in a sack in a well.

The tokens are little laminated pictures that the teachers stick on the wall of the classroom under the pupils’ names when they complete good work, or behave well. Unsuprisingly, my daughter’s icons have a feline theme. And she really didn’t want to change them.

We had a good hour of discussion on the matter. I say discussion, it was like looping the loop on a verbal rollercoaster and ending up back where we started, slightly out of breath and with a headache.

After some further contemplation, however, she suddenly voiced a new mantra.

“I am going to try and be good with choices, Mum,” she informed me. “You have to learn to make choices, don’t you? That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try and choose different things. Because you need to choose, don’t you?”

I agreed. The first time she said it, and then the second, third, fourth and fifth. By the 50th, despite my ability to filter out the repetition (a skill I’ve developed over the years to cope with the perseveration element of her syndrome, although my Mum would say I’ve always had ‘selective hearing’) I’d lost interest and much of the will to live.

I patiently explained to her that perhaps she’d talked about this whole thing for a little bit too long and that it might possibly have started to become annoying.

She tipped her head to one side, raised her eyebrow, and gave me a withering look.

“It’s because I’ve got Prader-Willi Syndrome, mum. You should know that by now.”

Video is Fat Boy Slim - Weapon Of Choice

"You can go with this,
Or you can go with that".

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