One thing that children seem to be able to do without any assistance from their parents is grow up. It’s the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. Perhaps you’re vaguely aware of it happening on the background, but then the reality hits home when you check your statement after your credit card is unexpectedly declined at the gas station and discover that the reason you have no money is because you’ve given it all to a variety of children’s apparel merchants. Maybe your awareness is focused when you go to sneak a cookie from the jar on a heretofore unreachable shelf in the pantry, only to find it empty bar a few miserable crumbs when you could have sworn it was full to overflowing the previous day. Or perhaps their increase in size is brought to your attention one day when you decide to step outside for a walk in the garden but can’t see your shoes on the porch where you left them last, so you spend ten minutes searching the house for them in vain, only to return to the porch, frustrated and puzzled, to discover that the reason you can’t find them is because they’re bouncing around on the lawn, attached to your child’s feet. Yes, those same feet that only yesterday could be contained in the palm of your hand.

Whatever the evidence, the conclusion is undeniable – children grow.

Houses, on the other hand, don’t. The house we have lived in for the last eight years is diminutive (relatively speaking – I’m constantly aware that there’s plenty of people in the world living in caravans and cars and cardboard boxes under bridges – our house is certainly and thankfully larger than that) but what might have been a cosy space with three small children is rapidly becoming claustrophobic with three large ones. It’s only natural. You can’t bypass the laws of physics, so problems will always arise when there’s only one toilet to accommodate the desires of five bladders wishing to be emptied at the same time. As a consequence, my wife and I have been considering our options.

We’ve thought of moving somewhere with a bigger house, or perhaps buying a section and building, but house-prices in NZ have run rampant in recent years, moving beyond ridiculous into the realm of the nonsensical. We could buy a middling piece of dirt for an exorbitant amount of money but we’re wondering why we would when we already own a piece of dirt, and a very nice one at that, four times as large and with a house already on it.

So our current thinking for a solution to our child growth issues is to build an extension. To that end, we had a chat to the owner of a local building company that specialises in them. I’d drawn a rough plan of what I had in mind, so he took a picture of it on his phone and told me to go home and take some photos of the existing house and email them through to him. Which I duly did, and he replied with an email to say he’d got them.

A week or so later, I received another message from him asking when I was going to send the pictures through. Confused, I told him that I already had and that he’d confirmed he’d received them. His next message was apologetic, reconfirming that yes, I’d sent him some pictures, and yes, he had indeed received them, but had then promptly forgotten all about it. I didn’t think too much about this at the time, being well aware of the symptoms of senility myself. Why, only last week, one of my teaching colleagues was discussing a certain student in the staffroom.

“Who’s that then?” I asked. “I haven’t come across her yet.”

“Sure you have,” she said, “you were her English teacher last year.”

“I was?” I asked, suddenly panicked, aware that the name was familiar but unable to put any kind of face to it. “Are you certain?”

“Of course. That was my daughter’s class.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You do remember teaching her?”

Fortunately, my colleague’s daughter is blessed with the kind of personality one doesn’t forget. But I was still drawing a mental blank on the friend. Until about thirty minutes later, when I saw her walking past me in a corridor and it all came rushing back. What makes it worse is that not only was I her English teacher last year, but I’m also related to her — distantly — but still. As far as mental blanks go, this was a worrisomely enormous one.

Anyway, I was prepared to forgive the builder’s absent-mindedness until I got another message, another week or so later, asking what we wanted out of the extension. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it as I thought I’d made this pretty clear in our initial conversation. So I sent him a message saying we wanted more room — a place to store our growing children. A couple of days later I got a reply saying, Oh right, so you need a new chest freezer then?

Now, I’m partial to a bit of dark and dubious humour myself, but when someone suggests that I might want to put my children in a deep freeze, well, it rankles. There are some lines it’s best not to cross. Alarm bells sounded, and they only got louder as the message went on, asking if we wanted more bedrooms or a bigger kitchen and dining area. It was then that I realised that since that was exactly what I’d indicated on the plan he took a picture of, then he’d forgotten about that as well.

While this was all going on we’d contacted another local building firm that also specialises in extensions. A few days after my initial enquiry, the owner came out to our house for a look and a chat, made some suggestions, asked a couple of questions that we need to find out the answers to, gave a rough, top-of-the-head estimate of costs, explained how he’d go about the job if we decided to go ahead and utterly failed to say anything insulting. We did discuss the purchase of a new refrigerator, but that was purely in the context of storing food, not children.

Now the first builder wants to come out to our house for a look and a chat. We’re not sure we want him to.

FREE BOOK!

A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.

GET YOUR FREE BOOK >>