Tattered Dreams

Now I am no Domestic Goddess. only recently I, mistakenly, used my husband's toothbrush, to clean the green goo out of the guinea pigs water bottles (this only came to light when I later saw him using the thus same toothbrush.....a toothbrush that I thought was an old one to be used for light domestic cleaning purposes.....) but at least I've never used a domestic appliance to shred a child's dreams.

Oh yes.

My husband was Hoovering (I know, I know, give him a medal) and doing this (rather irritating) 'joke' thing where he pretends to Hoover up the children, getting the Hoover to suck their trousers and chase them round. This kind of 'fun' is irritating because it is the second fastest way of sending small boys into a frenzy not unlike poking a sharp stick in a hornets' nest... (the fastest way being to turn the Christmas Tree lights on - as I've discovered to my cost).

Anyway while he was pretending to Hoover up the toddler he, unfortunately, strayed slightly too close to the toddler's beloved 'blue rag'.

The blue rag is an irreplaceable tatty bit of pale blue muslin which is, to be frank, more loved than I am. His blue rag is actually part of his very being. It is his soul mate. The cry of 'blue rag BLUE RAG!' goes out about 200 times a day. It is blue rag that is there for him at 3am when he cries out, it is blue rag that dries his tears, it is blue rag that smells of love and home (and, unfortunately, humus), it blue rag that he falls asleep stroking and muttering sweet nothings to........

... it is blue rag who shot down the Hoover pipe at 90 miles per hour.

Oh. Dear. God.

My OH froze.

I froze.

The eldest son froze.

The toddler (surprisingly) froze.

We all looked each other.

The toddler looked at his (now very empty) hand and back at me and then at his hand again.

He furrowed his brow.

A hush fell over the room.

I collapsed into hysterical laughter. The look of horror on my OH's face was beyond priceless. The image of a million tears, a hundred sleepless nights and a never ending tantrum of sorrow followed by years of therapy was clearly flashing before his eyes.

My OH frantically took the Hoover apart.

He found - NOTHING.

I told him to fetch some scissors - we were going to have to dissect the hoover pipe and chop it up in order to get some part of the blue rag back (I may have been slightly too keen to do this - I had my eyes on a new Hoover). We could stop at NOTHING. Without the blue rag our lives were, to all effects and purposes, going to be hell.

To cut a long story short the blue rag was retrieved without amputating any Hoover parts and it's dusty, even more shredded, slightly smaller self was returned to it's rightful owner.

All in all it has made me feel slightly better about the toothbrush incident so every cloud and all that.....

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