War Reporting From the Pillow-Fort of Full-Time Parenting

Children and crows will conspire to take over the world. Don’t look at me like that. You can’t handle the truth.

For children, the whole process of growing up is about getting smarter and better at things. The Corvidae are already notoriously smart and have done a bunch of growing up. Let’s face it, you can draw a pretty unbroken line from dinosaur to nevermore and we’ve all seen what happens when the raptors get loose in the kitchen (you had one job, Phil Tippet. One job). 

They’re highly adaptive and have good memories. They are tool users and have basic senses of humour. I mean, that “uck orrrf” call always brings a smirk to the face of an Australian of a certain age and how about that collective noun?

(It’s probably time for a change with the collective noun, though. If I was a crow, I would be on to Pointy Face Black Feather Media & Publicity and be asking some hard questions about their commitment. Maybe, even making a few suggestions. How about a ‘Crows Line’ or a ‘Russel’?)

Anyway, playgrounds in the inner-city are going to be the hotbeds of the Crow-Baby conspiracy because of the food. Crows and babies are spending more and more time together as more and more of us live in ever denser, high-rise accommodation. We take our kids to the park to let them run around and the kids throw their food on the ground. The crows know this and are moving from agrarian communities to dense urban and CBD areas in a metropolitan-drift that rivals any of the so called Tiger Economies in the 90s. (It’s worth noting that the tigers couldn’t make a go of it and moved back out to the country where they’ve been applying for jobs in Queensland zoos ever since.)

So, there I am in the park, watching birds and babies of equal weight and intellectual capacity, breaking bread. I’m the one on the outer. M. Nightshade-Salami-Wanga-Ding-Dong has already approached me for a treatment on how it’s going to go down. I’m going to surprise him and not put in a twist. It's just goint to follow logical, straightforward lines.

DIY Haircuts: After you’ve given your adored child a haircut, try to cut down on the normal number of photos you tend to take of you precious pumpkin. In other words, keep the evidence limited. 

I was certain that I was going to be an absolute natural at hairdressing. I’d arrived at this conclusion because I have met many hairdressers and I would never accuse them of putting a lump in the IQ bell-curve on the right-hand side - know wha' I’m sayin'?

Considering the challenges, I’ve actually done a pretty good job. There were no serious head wounds and Darth Baby still looks like a little boy. It’s just that it could be a lot better. The issue? The kid never stops moving. Never. If we are going to be serious about finding sustainable energy resources, we should consider tapping toddlers. Fit them with a dynamo or attach them to leads that have the dynamo inside a return reel or just make them run around under balloons.

The haircut was more complicated than a 16-year-old girl and to an observer would have resembled more a joisting match than an appointment at the beauticians. I sort of took snips off him as we passed each other. I refrained from yelling “Ole!” but it did require memory and tactics to get it done.

The reason I don’t particularly want the cut recorded for posterity is it could be used as leverage at some future point. It’s the opposite of those photos that a parent saves for the ritual humiliation at the kid’s twenty first birthday party.