Month: December 2005

that make me feel like my brain is oozing out my ears.

Madonna in a pink leotard and the Urinator singing about her humps to one side, Celine swinging cats to the other means smack in the middle are my own children.

Oscar is the prime offender and really, his inability to talk coupled with more chromosomes than his siblings goes a long way to giving him a whole body start and a few lengths on the others. Besides, Jasper is still way too cute to do anything to make my brain ooze anything except Hallmark card levels of gooshy sentimental love ‘n stuff.

And here’s the thing. Ever since he was a baby he sings himself to sleep. Not some melodic Brahms lullaby rendition, just a monotonous humming in some octave never charted but pitched just so that you know it’s not tinitus, a wheel falling off the car or the engine about to drop onto the road (something that almost happened in my beloved Subaru that dad bought for $100, that was beige, that had been completely submerged, that Dad ‘fixed’ with about a bazillion galons of fish oil so I channelled every tuna fisherman known to chart untamed waters and that I LOVED. When the mechanic realised the bolts holding the engine in had all but gone bar one, which was onto the last thread of the screw before an “Oh my God what was that noise and why isn’t my car going” kinda moment, probably in peak hour – and fixed it, this weird noise I’d just lived with for, oh, over a year, disappeared).

Last night as we went to Len and Sharon’s for an awesome night of fun, alcohol, crazy-arsed natural grandparents (who constantly seek spooky coincidences in things I do/have done and that they do of have done) and just, well, fun. Oscar naturally started the monotonous lullably as a) we were in the car and b) it was sort of night time. Felix said, “Mum, Oscar’s singing and it’s annoying me.”

How many times in your life can you say to someone, “Well, he’s done it since he was born so I’m afraid you’re going to have to find a happy place and just live with it.”

The other thing, is word approximated repetitions – no more no more no more no more no more no more no more – over and over and over again when a) it’s time to put on superlegs, b) anyone else except him is on the computer, said standing on top of you as you type – a bit like RIGHT NOW, c) time to get dressed, d) time to go, e) time to eat breakast, lunch, dinner that isn’t chocolate or icecream and I could literally find a reason for the entire alphabet.

My go is another example. My go my go my go mumma, my go my go my go, mumma. Mumma, My Go.
“No it’s not Oscar”
collapse, wailing on the floor.

Which brings me to the third, brain oozing out ears occasion. The wailing. Oh GOD THE WAILING. It’s relentless. At the moment, it’s coupled with a sheer delight in dress-ups and playing with action figures, so I’m guessing we’re getting some priceless three-four year old behaviours that we’ve already lived through with Felix – who now just yells that we’re unfair, he has to do everything, Oscar gets to go first all the time, all as he storms up to their room, moves all the crap out of the way and then slams the door, maybe twice if the first slam wasn’t impressive enough.

So, here we stand, Oscar home for a sum total of six days of holidays already and about half my brain has leaked out. Felix’s last day today and then f.i.v.e. long hot weeks all home together. Mmm, better get a bucket.

We are destined to be friends for ever:

– I sneeze about seven consecutive sneezes at least once a day, but more often twice. Once at around 10.30 and again around 4.30.

– My eyes sound like yours, Chef’s are as brown as can be. But one child has eyes like mine, one as eyes as blue as the sky is today and the third looks like he’ll have eyes like the first. This just confirms my theory that this family is a scientific freak show.

– Baby boomers shit me to tears too. As Bernard Salt said, ‘why won’t they just die already?’ (except the Prof of course, he must stay forever. And Sheriff is such a better term for him).

– The first guy I kissed, who I then naturally fell in love with and was going to marry, told me he had to go home (to a Central West town in NSW) and ‘sort out some personal issues’. ie – he turned gay as well. Who knew we both had powers to turn the opposite sex to their own kind?

– I would say “you are a sad, strange little man” at least once a day. Mostly under my breath.

– I married Chef who has a palindromic birthdate.

and that’s just for starters.

AND WELCOME BACK – AGAIN.

Please just post every day, even if it’s a ‘nothing to see here’. It’s so boring on my own. Save us all from my daily inanity. I don’t even think that’s a word. See.

I think I can do this if I focus on trivia:

1. I was born in Alice Springs. I’m not sure of the statistics but this is, I am confident, a relatively unusual place to be born.
2. My birthday is the 16th of August and as a result I was mildly obsessed with numbers divisible by four as a child. My 8th, 16th and 32nd birthdays were all fairly significant to me. I don’t remember my fourth.
3. I have almost no early childhood memories.
4. My very earliest memory, I think, is of listening to the Little Golden Book record and book for Alice in Wonderland, hearing the song lyrics about Wonderland being “just behind the tree” and then walking around and around and around a big palm tree in our yard, waiting to fall into the rabbit hole.
5. My next earliest memory, I think, is looking down at my legs while lying on my bed and my legs are covered in calamine lotion. My blood is mosquito nectar.
6. The year I turned seven my parents travelled with my brother and I in a caravan around the eastern states of Australia.
7. I still have my shell collection.
8. I know A LOT about cowrie shells.
9. To this day, I bring home more shells from the beach than my kids do…
10. Crikey, is this only 10? Um. Trivial item number 10 – I prefer bulleted lists to numbered ones.
11. The year I turned eight, my parents settled in a small country town populated by people with two left thumbs and one set of grandparents.
12. It’s pretty enough as small towns go, but I still haven’t completely forgiven them.
13. This is largely why I am raising three children in a small inner city house smack bang in the middle of the biggest city this nation has to offer.
14. I hope my kids will forgive me for it.
15. My first husband decided he was gay after seven years together.
16. It is a source of great delight to me that I can now consider this a very trivial fact. It was not always thus.
17. My second husband is almost 20 years older than me: linking these two items could, I know, be construed as me deciding to play it safe this time.
18. There is nothing safe about marrying someone from another generation.
19. Husband #2, The Prof, was nicknamed “The Prof” after he hosted a Chinese delegation who called him Professor because he was a senior education official.
20. He has no academic tenure of any kind, but there’s still time.
21. I still remember exactly how I looked, sat, spoke and felt the first time the Prof flirted with me.
22. We were talking about touch football.
23. He wanted me to play in the work comp at lunchtime, I said I thought it would be too rough, he said “I’d look after you”. You had to be there, but his voice in my head? still makes me shiver.
24. While many of our friends call him the Prof, he’s really more of a Sherriff.
25. What with him being the Sherriff and me being a School Captain, you Do Not Want To Be Our Neighbours.
26. I really was a school captain.
27. No really, I was. I didn’t run for it or anything, they just voted for me. It was the first, but not the last time I experienced retrospective ambition.
28. One of the interesting things about my 30s has been understanding ambition. That, and shoes, I really get shoes now. If only my disposable income weren’t tied up in feet that are so much smaller than mine…
29. My feet are one and a half sizes larger now than before I became pregnant with the Pea Princess.
30. The same thing happened to my mother and aunt, rule of thumb for our genes = about half a size expansion for each child.
31. I’m officially a Generation X. Baby Boomers frequently shit me to tears. See #18.
32. I have abnormally long thighs and arms. Sadly, you won’t really notice the length of my thigh bones unless you are sitting in the seat in front of me in the bus, because I will be the person who is constantly and helplessly shoving you forwards.
33. I can’t vouch for the thighs but the arms run in my family. It makes it very easy to show off by touching your toes.
34. My children also have the Monkey Arms. This is really noticeable in winter when they grow out of jumpers and jackets cuff-first.
35. I cannot sneeze more than twice in a row. This is an inherited trait. I must have got it from my dad because my mother was totally a serial sneezer.
36. My elder daughter is also a serial sneezer; she gets this from her dad.
37. The fact that there are two kinds of sneezers in the world (those who can sneeze three or many more times in a row, and those who cannot sneeze more than twice) is one of only three things I can remember from Year 10 Science.
38. My eyes vary from blue to green, depending on what I am wearing. They’re getting greener as I get older.
39. Only one of my three children has blue eyes. The other two are brown like their father. The fact that this forms a perfectly typical dominant/recessive genetic pattern is the second thing I remember from Year 10 Science.
40. I have no patience for literary victims, real or fictional: I think Sylvia Plath is over-rated, Tess of the D’Urbervilles deserved everything she got and that Frodo is the least pleasant of all Tolkien’s hobbits. I also believe Anna Karenina could have saved us all a lot of trouble by just throwing herself under a train in Chapter 1.
41. Sam Gamgee is my favourite hobbit, but Merry is a close second. This applies both to the books and films.
42. I read The Hobbit when I was eight and The Lord of The Rings when I was 11. I spent much of my teens pretending to be interested in rugby.
43. I once went to a Brownies party dressed as the Big Bad Banksia Man. I had never read May Gibbs. I’ll let you imagine how confusing that was to a nine year old.
44. When I was seven I wrote to the Queen and asked what she ate for breakfast. Her secretary wrote back that the Queen loved to receive letters from Australia and sometimes ate boiled eggs.
45. When I was 10 I shook hands with the Queen on her Silver Jubilee tour at Armidale airport. I forgot to ask her what she had for lunch.
46. I was an exchange student to South Africa in 1986.
47. The town I lived in there, Port Shepstone, was almost exactly on the same latitude as the town I had come from in Australia. Freaky, huh?
48. I first watched the film Out of Africa in a cinema in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I can find a quote from that film to suit pretty much any situation life might throw my way. “Why is your freedom more important than mine?” is a good example.
49. These days, I am just as likely to quote from that other great film for all occasions: Toy Story.
50. Best Toy Story quote:”You are a sad, strange little man and you have my pity.” I use this one ALL the time.
51. My wedding ring has the diamonds; my engagement ring is an engraved band that was my husband’s mother’s wedding ring. I wear them the normal way around.
52. Despite spending an amazing amount of time choosing it, I didn’t eat any of our wedding cake: the Prof got up for a midnight (4am) snack and ate the piece our hostess had stored in the B & B fridge for me because I’d been too busy talking to eat
53. No, I haven’t quite forgiven him.
54. But I don’t much like cake, anyway.
55. My first wedding was on a palindromic date (19/1/91) but only if you aren’t American.

Vote for us in the 2006 Australian Blog Awards

We’d be a shoo in for best collaborative blog IF BEC WOULD COME BACK!!!!!

Postscript:
Ok, I got ahead of myself. I’ll keep you posted if we get shortlisted etc, and then VOTE FOR US! It’s as close as I’ll get to politics due to my pathological need for people to like me. Even Liberal voters.

I denied the boys all things electronic. Afterall, it was a glorious day and they are young and boys. They should be outside more hours of a day than in. It took them about two hours to find their old groove, the one when I was religious about television consumption and they hadn’t discovered the computer or cartoonnetwork.com. It was joyous watching them and listening to their play in the backyard.

It meant this afternoon they watched a little tele on Felix’s return home from school, but then took a big box outside and painted it, turning it into Jet86.

Now that’s a childhood memory.

that and this house filled with the smell of a Christmas Pudding being boiled… mmmm