Month: January 2012

About 56 hours to go. 56 long arduous hours…

Oh dudes, school holidays are finally biting me on the arse. I believe this is because my father and stepmother actually performed the outrageously charitable act of taking ALL of them from last Sunday to this Wednesday.

Yeah, absence doesn’t make the heart fonder so much as it highlights how fucking hard re-entry is.

The moments before we were getting into the car had me in one of those maternal meldowns – the one where you can’t even blame PMT.

The one where you yell so loud and long and at such a pitch your throat goes scratchy.

The one where once you’re in it your internal auto-pilot is yelling, ‘abort abort ABORT,’ but it’s too late. The eject button has failed and everyone is heading for a big fiery crash of emotional annihilation.

Needless to say, on the way to the drop-off there was a lot of remorse on my part.

Lots of reassurance that yes, I would most definitely be picking them up.

That of course I don’t regret having had children and that my daydreams of a life without children are rare and never as fulfilling as my life with them.

I used my own poor poor behaviour to show just.how.awful.it.is when someone says they hate you, when really they just hate what you’re doing, or saying, or not doing. Or saying.

Cough.

God knows if they heard any of it.

Because I then swallowed some of my own advice and showed them I was sorry and loved them.

Yeah yeah, I bought them McDonald’s.

 

ONWARD!

 

 

 

I felt bad about how little we’d done these holidays and then the neighbours built a skate ramp

Wasting as many minutes as possible – Also known as why I am not famous published author and never will be

The boys are away. Three nights of no ‘no, you’re sleeping in your bed’ or ‘have you done a wee yet’. Three mornings of no ‘MUUUUUUM Oscar’s playing XBox’ or ‘hello mumma, mumma up now’.

 

So naturally I’m panicked about how not to waste a MINUTE of it. Child-free time particularly that involving overnight stays are PREESHUSS. My plan was is to use the time to write some 500 worders to go with a concept I’m begging pleading pitching to a newspaper. And maybe go to a movie. And sleep. Or simply just eat as much junk food as humanly possible. Because nothing says ‘the kids are away’ more than a diet of toast, cereal and junk food.

OMG I can sleep in
Don’t sleep in, that time could be spent on Twitter writing
Which movie should I see
Why is there no chocolate in this house
Oooh, chips, excellent
Tweet tweet tweet
Blogs blogs blogs
Come on Kim, get your arse into gear, WRITE something
Start writ_oh that fish looks a bit dodgy, better feed them
I think I’m hungry
No, you can’t be hungry, you just ate that whole packet of chips
Why is there no chocolate in this house
Water, I need water
My lips are so dry
Is that a pimple on my neck? I better go look
*hold music*
Right, get writing
*2 minutes later*
Is that rain? Better bring the washing in
Oh, it’s not raining but look at that mess over there, better clean that up
I think I’m thirsty
Those chips made me thirsty (Snigger at *almost* Seinfeld quote) (chastise self for being so lame)
So, what’s happening on Twitter
Oh man, @benpobjie is sooo funny
Why can’t I come up with some wicked little pithy tweet like @jothornley
Oooh Facebook!
Snore
RIGHT, back to it.
*25 words later*
That’s it, I can’t stand looking at this filthy kitchen anymore
An HOUR later
Better give the cupboards a wipe down
write
Twitter
wonder what the boys are doing? Hope Grovey’s OK.
Water. Must drink more water.
Why is there no chocolate in this house.
Write
Stare at fish tank
Wonder why one sucking cat fish is so much bigger than the other
Hey! Big sucking catfish, leave the little catfish alone
I wonder if the smaller one is the female
Or maybe the bigger one is the female
No that doesn’t make sense
Because when they have sexWHAT THE FUCK Kim, CONCENTRATE
*20 minutes*
Twitter
Facebook
Anyone updated their blog
Better see if anything’s going on in the world
SMH online
OH, it’s The World Today. I love that.
Listen.
Write.
I think I’m hungry. Is that hunger?
You can’t be hungry, you ate all that peanut butter turkish toast AND a massive packet of chips
There’s no way you’re going to lose 15kgs by the end of the year at this rate
Maybe I should go for a run
NO it’s too hot now but do go later. Yes later. Great idea.
*Later*
Well, those lawns aren’t going to trim themselves, best see how that new whipper snipper works
Well why the hell did I do that? THAT was a HUGE waste of my child free time.

Headdesk
headdesk
headdesk
headdesk
headdesk

ONWARD!

 

 

 

In a house of wild things…

Somewhere between Christmas, my MIL’s 70th, Oscar’s hospital stay, New Years, my back breakage and being BACK at hospital with Oscar and huge weeping blisters on his legs (sorry, had I mentioned that?) but before yesterday, we watched Where the Wild Things Are and well, quite frankly, it seems to have done something to my brain.

It is a book I, when I remember to can be bothered to  read to the boys before they go to bed, return to time and time again. It got shelved for a while because it freaked the hell out of Grover, a situation I found deeply ironic for the kid who calls everyone IDIOT! or poobumheadidiotbaby and will quite happily give a stranger smiling at him the dirtiest stink-eye while raising fists at anyone who so much as mutters ‘no’ in his general vicinity and WOE BETIDE if you threaten to remove the mouse from the computer.

Still we return to it.

And then there is the movie. I’m tempted to call it a masterpiece, for how it encapsulates so purely the extreme black and white confusion of childhood emotion. Of how complicated and endearing and flawed every single one of the characters is. Of their purity in what they represent. And of this boy, this boy trying to find his way and his place in the world.

It is innocent, funny, bone-crushingly sad, dangerous, foreboding, joyous and full of life.

It has left me with something, an ache is what it is. And that, to me, is how this movie feels, it feels like it’s aching.

Douglas: Will you keep out all the sadness?
Max: I have a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness, and it’s big enough for all of us.

Being a person is so complicated.

Onward.

 

Have you seen it? What did you think of it? Is there a movie that has stuck with you as this one has me?

 

 

 

CARNAGE

Felix and Harriet, circa 2009

It was warm here yesterday and the day was a bit topsy-turvy with little boys out and big boys here and me almost forgetting my shrink appointment and mum taking my niece to the movies.

Long story short.

RIP Cocoa Taco Powder and Harriet. Two of the greatest guinea pigs a family could ever neglect/showerwithloveandaffectionoutofguilt/neglect/love!/neglect/ADORE! had died from heat-stroke.

Cocoa was already in GP Heaven by the time my niece found her. Harriet was clearly almost touching the light but we brought her back with a (very) cold bath.

What ensured was me trying to cool her down but not shock her, trying to re-hydrate her but not too much as water would get into her lungs and cause pneumonia and so on and so forth. It was so tenuous we were all holding our breath for hours, willing her to live.

We had her wrapped in a damp towel resting on a bed of straw in a box and took her with us as we went to my in-laws for dinner.

Felix and I remarked that she had picked up! just as we were turning onto the Wakehurst Parkway but barely two kilometres later I looked at her, looked at Felix and said, ‘is she OK?’ and no, she was not. He couldn’t feel her heart beating. We pulled over just near Oxford Falls and checked. Harriet had succumbed.

At my in-laws I prised the two little fellas away from Wii and explained to them what had happened. As I did Jasper’s arm around me got tighter and tighter. And as I quietly told them that Harriet had died in the car on the way there, Jasper said, ‘we’ll have to go to the shops and buy two new ones and call them the same names now.’

That’s right son, because nothing overcomes grief quicker than some retail therapy seeking immediate replacements.

Jasper and Harriet c 2009*

Grover’s initial concern was more about ‘his’ one, Matilda, the runty little guinea pig which was Harriet’s sister, replete with mutant extra toes and a wily nature that always sees her as the one who escapes. ‘But what about my one? what about my one? is it dead? Did it die?’ No, she’s fine. ‘Oh, phew,’ he said, ‘that’s lucky. But that’s sad isn’t it. That Harriet and Cocoa are dead.’

Yes son, yes it is.

Two graves dug. Two burial ceremonies held.

Now the eternal vigil that the chickens don’t dig – or scratch as the case may be – them up.

 

*sadly there seem to be NO pictures of Cocoa, despite her being with the family for a year. Or more recent shots of Harriet. #telling

*****

PRIOR to the guinea pig massacre of 2012 I had commented to my MIL that one of the fish was on the out. It had been coming – I’d noticed a ‘sore’ for want of a better word on one of its sides a few weeks back and thrown in some outrageously priced special stress-relief fluid that does actually seem to perform miracles on our marine pets.

She (he?) had put in a good innings for a gold fish, ableit she was white with orange spots on her head. What? My boys have a penchant for choosing the ugliest fish in the pet shop. It’s a gift. But I think she was at least three years old, maybe even older. Pretty good huh.

Then yesterday she was gawping at the bottom of the tank rather than frantically waving at me from the top corner desperate to catch my attention to feed her again (seriously, fish can turn a ‘look’ at you more heart-melting than a dog pleading with you for some of your dinner rather than the chicken beaks and arses in a roll you normally serve them.

It prompted me to *finally* clean the tank, all the while reminding myself that this process would undoubtedly have the equivalent effect as Neil’s punching a fish to death in The Inbetweeners it was long overdue.

Sure enough, post cleaning there she was, gawping at the bottom of the tank but now upside-down.

Yeah, you were a good fish. See ya.

*****

Between the fish death and the guinea pig disaster Felix went off for a bike-ride. Some of the first physical activity he’s done since school broke up WEEKS ago. He was back sooner than expected and just as I went to give him a hard time I saw the red face, the sweat, the tears and then the blood.

Poor kid had GONE OVER THE HANDLEBARS on his bike going down a hill near our place.

Bad grazing on elbow, shoulder and hip, sore wrist and a MASSIVE chunk out of his helmet.

It *could* have been so.much.worse.

*****

So excuse me while today I do very little and achieve absolutely nothing.