Protected: And then she cried.

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Brief Missives From The Land Of The Long Green Snot.

I must sincerely apologise in advance for the wretchedness of this post.

I’m simply far to fully occupied feeling horridly sorry for myself on grounds that I am insanely full of mucus in a very nasal and green way, my upper respiratory tract in now in the throes of doing that fun thing where all the lining jumps off in general protest at the whole virus farce I’d much rather forget to experience next time and what’s left of it feels like you could use it to take the shine of a diamond.

Also, could the bastard who pinched my voice please give it back to me? Husky whispering sounds sexy, until you realise it also bloody hurts. Additionally, I have to work today and I don’t want any of the health-care-consuming fraternity (I believe it is no longer cool to dub what is indisputably a bum-exposing-gown-wearing-wristband-waving patient a ‘patient’, but rather one must all cleverly re-title them a ‘client’ or some such rubbish. I refuse, on general principles that I don’t call my local garbage collectors ‘waste management technicians’ either, but I digress) to make the disastrous error that I am in any way attractive and that they should stare at my surname on my badge for just a little too long while making bad cracks about how it probably wouldn’t cost too much to call all the locals with my name in the phonebook in order to hunt me down.

Actually that one happened once, admiteddly a long time ago now. Ever so briefly, I had the golden opportunity to be the loving partner of a rather disinhibited smack addict with a broken foot.

I declined, needless to say, and piqued by rejection he doth steah all the adrenaline ampoules off of the resus trolly when he left in a huff. He was hoping they were something rather more fun I expect.

I do occasionally idly wonder how all of that worked out for him.

Regardless, I feel sick and sorry for myself and so does poor Naan because she also has to contend with a lump of enamel coated bone inconveniently eroding it’s way through her gums. Oh, and she has some of the most vile butt rash this side of a pruritis ani convention.

Just say no to scratching, Internet. Or perhaps also clicking on that link with a full stomach.

I shall conclude by merely observing that, yes, all the smug types who advocate ‘air it’ for Infantile Rashy Ass are correct in that it does help. But they also never really explain just how one stops a mobile infant from pissing all over your carpets, or that you’re really got to watch the little buggers like a hawk or they will inevitably take a healthy (raisin filled, no less) dump on the ground while you’re playing Bouncy Standing and proceed to dance merrily in their own excrement.

Until you look down, that is.

Also, um, dingleberries must be studiously examined for or one shall have a late bloomer drop on the carpet during that inevitable mad dash to the safety of the change table.

It’s hard to pick sh!t out of the toes of an eight month old, although the blocked nose does come in handy.

Now having revolted us all I must get back to some serious self pity.

A pox most vile.

Dear Internet,

It is probably a good thing that you can’t catch human viruses off of your computers from reading this site. Because if you could, well, there’d be green snot oozing out of your keyboard, your monitor would cough up a lung on you and your mouse would do something unpleasant and mucoid with the back of your throat just for good measure.

We are Infested, capitalisation intentional, Chez MII.

Infected, and infectious are we. Come play in our disease, will you?

A green plague is upon this house. I simply bid a red-nosed biohazard and hazmat aplenty to all who dare enter these parts before I blow it on their sleeve.

I’m kidding on that last part, but only just.

After nearly running out of bog roll late yesterday after the shops had shut, I (in desperation at rapidly dwindling supplies) resorted to doing that insanely disgusting thing where you put two toilet paper sausages up each nostril to stem the tide at night and avoid sleeping in a pool of your own snot, even if it means you do have to breathe through your mouth exclusively and thusly wake up feeling like some incontinent creature of the night scored a direct hit and widdled in it.

Consequently at Bugger All Sleep Sparrow’s Fart today I had to make a rather rushed dash to shops avec Snotty Wailing Spawn, in the pissing rain no less, because Mother Nature has a sense of humour about these things (You’ll catch a cold running about in the rain! Too bloody late! HA. I’ve got it already. Then have a free pneumonia….on the house!) for tissues.

So, to end my disgusting implication that I would snot on your clothing in a reassuring fashion, I probably won’t wipe my nose on your sleeve should you visit, but it was a close-run thing for a while there.

Anyway, visions of my nasal passages stuffed with Kleen.ex’s finest aside, I expect by now you get the general drift that three (and I hold little hope that the fourth has any chance whatsoever of escaping) of the Household Geohde have a particularly nasty cold.

No, in case this too is not already crystal clear, I am not the member of the household still with a tiny glimmer of hope that they shall escape merrily shedding virions and upper respiratory tract epithelium on the unwary. Neither is it Saag and Naan. It’s Long Suffering, the lucky prick.

Remind me to give him a big kiss when he comes home this evening, won’t you? He’s got annual leave coming up. Okay, so I won’t really commit biological warfare unless he does something to deserve it like leaving the loo seat up again in the middle of the bleeping night so that I nearly fall arse first into the bowl when having a blocked-schnozz self-pitying in-the-dark late night insomniac pee.

I have snot.

I have a cold. I’m too old for this kind of malarkey.

I am possibly, next to LS who shall take the prize if he catches this beauty, the whiniest person in creation about a little minor experimentation with airborne virus.

You should hear me complain. Actually, I guess you just did, now that I come to think of it.

But honestly there’s few things worse than getting up at 6am to screaming (also snotty) infants, throat freshly sandpapered from the inside out, dead tired because it’s hard to sleep with toilet paper up both nostrils and because it also hurts suspiciously like razorblades have joined the party when one attempts to swallow one’s especially disgusting post nasal drip, attractively puffy necked from the glands that have duly elevated like self-raising flour filled with a veritable squadron of infuriated lymphocytes, generally red in the bits that aren’t blotchy, feeling febrile, crummy and oh the whole like week old laundry left to fester under a bed, only to find at precisely 7.30 am that the builders picked TODAY to go over things that still need doing on the house and discover this particularly delightful fact in one’s dressing gown.

I thought my immune system had seen all this rubbish before, but apparently viruses like to change with the times too. I’m only good for 70′s versions of Kid Snot, and Saag and Naan tell me that’s positively quaint.

Sigh.

Now THIS is a knife.

Alternately entitled the post in which I relate just how disturbing waking at night to an empty bed, only to discover my spouse stalking around in the dark armed with the biggest assed knife our kitchen contains, actually is.

Many apologies for the unintentionally titillating start to my tale. It’s perfectly safe to exhale and continue drinking your coffee without fear that I shall, several paragraphs down, relate ‘and THAT’S how I ended up with one hundred stitches and a punctured lung’.

Don’t worry, I’m fine, he’s fine and you won’t be reading about a Nasty Domestic Incident in the newspaper anytime soon.

To begin again, two nights ago I was briefly awoken by what can only be described as a godawful cacophony of clashing, followed by clanging, and culminating in that classic ‘ringringringring’ noise that can only herald gravity gradually winning against a round object circling aimlessly on a hard floor until entropy halts it.

Then it all went quiet.

LS and I, roused to semi-wakefulness by the din doth utter to one another ‘what the merry hell was THAT?’, and there I thought the matter rested.

I went back to the land of nod, perversely reassured that no burglar or night time assassin would be daft enough to continue their mission after making more noise than a heard of elephants conga dancing through our front room.

Additionally I was fairly certain the noise could be explained by something falling off the shelving in the garage, in which case good luck to it and it could spend the night on the concrete and I’d take pity on it in the morning but not before. Or, more likely, one of those clever sticky-on (heavily overloaded it must be admitted, we like to ablute with variety Chez MII) shower caddy’s we possess, because our shiny new house actually has those annoying glass boxes without a single sensible place to put your bloody shampoo and all the other crap one requires to bathe in the modern world, had given up it’s suction cups in despair.

Gravity being what it is, this resulted in the predictable already-described veritable cacophony that only several bottles of shampoo, body wash, razors, soap and other Bathing Miscellanea hurtling to the ground (at, as I recall,  around nine point eight metres per second per second) can make.

LS obviously did not share my sleepy conviction, a fact I discovered when I next rolled over, reached across to pat him aimlessly in Dark Room Affection (most often in the nose or eyeball it must be admitted) and found a distinct absence of body where I expected to find Spousal Unit 1.0.

Then he appeared in the bedroom saying nothing and on tip-toe, giant bloody big carving knife in hand, feinted around the corner to the en-suite like the world’s best pyjama-clad paratrooper, sharp end first (of course) and doth stab forcefully and disturbingly silently around all the dark parts until he was quite sure that A: there was nobody there and B: if they were, well, they were probably quite thoroughly air-conditioned and unlikely to pose a threat.

I, naturally enough, began with a loud, startled rendition of ‘what the fuck is going on?’, only to be silenced with an impatient ‘shhhhhh!’. He then completed his sweep of the house before explaining that he was checking for intruders.

I did ask if next time he could warn me before charging about in the dark with the contents of the knife-y kitchen drawer and also that while I understood his them-or-me philosophy, I thought perhaps a smaller weapon would have sufficed.

The one he had would have gone right through and still had length on the blade. Unless the non-existent intruder was very fat indeed.

I think even a few of my short hairs are now grey.

I don’t.

Dear Internet,

I hope I do not cause undue offence to those of you who enjoy attending Big Weddings when I entreat you to join me in a small cry of protest at being subjected to Wedding Interminabley Longus yet again.

You see, I must confess I write this missive from my rather smug glass house of ten minute no-guest ceremony followed by beer garden hijinks, a barely recalled (and rather predictable) pissed-as-a-parrot take-away dinner, almost certainly followed by amnestic drunken shag at some point. Although memory fails me on that last item, it was probably good, right?

Regardless, may I object to my nearest and dearest insisting on all getting hitched with Big Poofy Dress, complete with around one hundred interchangeable bridesmaids, interminably long vows and standing time (enough to necessitate a mid-ceremony water gulp and energetic bobbing up and down on tired feet to avoid either dying of dehydration or making an utter ass of oneself by fainting from all that blood now residing in the calves), and the obligatory Big Ass reception in some venue where:

• All the tables will inevitably be round, decked out in flowers and not-so-delicately covered in a million bedsheets worth of mildly stained fabric and with bows on the seats despite the average chair not really requiring haberdashery to perform what I regard as it’s critical function.
• There will be photos of the main protagonists at each and every place setting in case one is crass enough to briefly forget who the Big Day is in honour of. With heart shaped frames, provided for the attendee to take home as permanent reminders of Undying Love and presumably also how to make twenty thousand dollars vanish in one sitting.
• I will not know anybody I am seated within a timezone of, most especially not my dinner companions and will therefore actually look forward to the inevitable indulgent slideshow rehashing of the ceremony I’ve just spent all afternoon at (presumably for those who nodded off the first time and were fortunate enough to actually miss the bit where the bride gushed about the sweetness of her groom and the beautiful pools that light makes in his eyes in the morning and generally how the sun doth shine gentle beams out of his ass and so on. He, in return, did honestly call her hair the finest golden strands of something stupid and utterly love-struck) because it means I don’t have to make painful conversation with people I shall never see again and also know nothing about other than the obvious detail that they know either the bride or groom in passing.
• LS and I will wish our Morse Code Skills were rather better so that we could blink S.O.S to each other from across the vast hall as the drunken best man makes the usual drunken indiscreet speech. Actually, I fib. I quite liked that part.
• The food will be a scintillating choice of lamb or chicken, neither properly cooked, coated in gravy to within an inch of their lives and delivered half cold. Unfortunately there will be a plethora of cheap booze and as a direct result of this abundance rather bored drunken guests won’t stop pawing at Saag and Naan when they’re sleeping in their pram.
• About twenty people will ask how old Saag is and then immediately ask how old Naan is after I have already mentioned that they’re twins because they’re clearly not actually listening to a damn thing I say on account of being more plastered than a house wall.
• Oh, the band will be entrenched firmly in the early nineties and when they finish their mediocre set ‘Return of the Mack’ will set the theme that the DJ wishes to explore. Acoustic-nerve-destroyingly loudly.
• People will dance to that sh!t. I will have to watch. They will also do the dance to that song from ‘Grease’.
• LS and I will go home tired, feeling  older than ever and relieved it’s all over.

Dear Internet, I don’t. Please don’t take it personally.

For the sweet love of size advantage.

The post in which I am forced to write a letter to Saag in the vain hope that scolding her, via the Internet no less, in adult-speak that she will not fully understand for many years will somehow, mysteriously, stop picking on her sister already.

Dear Saag (firstborn spawn, a.k.a the much larger serving of Indian Takeaway),

Stop picking on Naan forthwith.

I mean it.

Quit it, kid.

You are not the smallest WWWhatevertheycallthemselvesthesedays wrestler. Additionally while I’m on the subject, if I ever catch you beating your chest and generally flailing about like those pansies do, I shall be sorely disappointed in you. Especially if you also follow their dubious sense in fashion and all things hairdressical. Friends don’t let friends go for Stringy and Unwashed as a lifestyle choice, okay?

But I digress.

Coming back to my point, Naan does not actually appreciate being held in an inescapable crush.

She is not going to tap out in an admission of defeat in order to signal you’ve won the non-existent wrestling match. Besides, it’s not like that would actually stop you from using her as a rather unhappy chair.

Saag, oh dubious-in-the-extreme-endearment fruit of my loins, poor titchy Naan is red in the face and hollering blue bloody murder because you’ve jammed the poor kid face down on the tiles (for the thirtieth time today I note) in order to climb a bit higher up the front door.

Surely you didn’t miss that part, even if you were in the middle of a Very Important Mission to see out that appealing glass panel halfway up?

I’m pretty sure that three postcodes over are still sweeping up the shattered remains of their best wine glasses as I type. Your smaller companion can hit notes that will clean any lingering plaque off your teeth for you (if you had any that is) completely sans dental bill when Very Upset.

I’d be similarly peeved if you pinned me down flat on my back, crawled up MY belly and went fishing in my open yelling gob in search of something interesting too. It’s not Naan’s fault that she doesn’t like that sort of treatment, nobody does, Saag.

Also, in case of any lingering confusion as to where we stand (or plonk ourselves down as the case may be), your sister is not an (admittedly fairly bony) landing spot designed solely to minimally cushion your landing when you have been unwise enough to climb up onto something you shouldn’t and you also simply can’t be bothered expending the muscular effort in climbing the hell down.

So, finally and in conclusion, dear bully child of mine, stop forthwith using your sister as a handy mountaineering aid, an entertaining speedbump designed to briefly slow your forward progress, an inferior wrestling companion, an oral Aladdin’s Cave of entertainment, and most of all stop pinching all her sodding toys already.

I’m sick to the back teeth of rescuing the poor infant and I think my eardrums are beginning to bleed.

Love,

Mater.

P.S. It doesn’t help your cause that you giggle inanely while you’re at it, either.

P.P.S. Also, don’t grin disarmingly at me when I catch you like you’ve just done something particularly clever in helping render Naan flatter than she started out. She’s plenty narrow enough already.

Beige.

I think I may be in serious danger of becoming completely, stuporously, coma-inducing boring.

No, don’t bother politely laughing at your monitor in a charade of disbelief. I mean it. Dishwater dull, to my orange-tinted roots, I am.

I posted an ode to Mom Jeans, ferchrissakes. Not precisely my most thrilling material, even I must admit, and you all duly punished me most deservingly by not bothering to click through and comment.

I am clearly beige and very apologetic about it.

I’ve been sitting here wondering how to improve upon my situation which in itself is odd because, well, writer’s block has never really been an issue for me. Just look at my back archives for evidence that if it has run through my stream of consciousness, it probably has been written down at some point. No matter how embarrassing.

So. Humour me while I twiddle my cleverly opposable thumbs together, will you?

Lessee….

I could assault your retinas with fresh descriptions of how I came to learn that too much fibre can be a bad thing and the discovery that raisins appear to pass through the average eight month old digestive tract largely unaltered.

I could continue on to heavily scorch your mental imagery with retelling of how the hardiness of the average raisin prompted Long Suffering to ask if he could rinse some off a bit and offer them to his very poo-phobic best mate for a snack. You know, because it would be funny to see if he noticed.

But I won’t for two reasons:

1. Even I thought that offering Recycled Raisins to an immature boy-man, still living with his mother (the poor sainted soul) at the grand old age of never-washed-his-own-socks nearly forty who has yet to learn that his income is NOT for entirely spending on late nights out, flash cars, the latest gadgets and expensive holidays overseas was a bridge too far. Just. Even if the paunching playboy-wannabe does owe us six hundred dollars because he ran out of money after said recent fancy vacation (taken just for kicks, in the name of spontaneity, don’tcherknow) and decided to not let a little detail like legality get in the way of mobility and  just drove his car completely unregistered. Unregistered, I note, until LS nearly lost a testicle to Act Of War Wife by paying the bill off for him without prior warning to The Fiscally Jaded (and decidedly unsympathetic to the plight of fools) Better  Half.
2. Rabbits eat their own poo, with every sign of satisfaction I am told, because apparently it takes several goes to extract all the nutrition out of the kind of stuff they eat to fuel all that shagging and senseless reproduction. Not forgetting all that mindless hopping about, either. 

I think Best Mate Who Will No Longer Visit when I am home out of entirely justified fear that I shall in actuality drive a rather hot poker up his bottom if he does, bears too much resemblance to the second point for the joke to be funny. Remind me to stock up on pokers, incidentally, for all those asses who still seem a little vague on the concept of twins and biological realities and constraints involved.

But I did think on it heavily, that red hot poker action. I am but human.

Probably the only thing stopping me is the fact that I have enough exposure to rummaging around in cabooses at work and I don’t really want to indulge off the clock, so to speak. You have to pay me to do that. I hope that represents a relief, even if I must disclose that the pay is not handsome.

Regardless, I won’t go into more detail because I’ve also done poo jokes to a painful, messy death.

I’d discuss my recent period for light relief, because hey it’s always funny to leak blood from your nether regions unexpectedly when you’re hoping to be pregnant even if that IS rather vanishingly unlikely because you’re not sure the last time you actually had s.e.x, let alone all that messy infertility stuff, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done that to death before too. With paint swatches, if memory serves.

Like this:

and this:

For the more recent readers, ‘sizzle’ is not precisely how I would describe the act of discovering one’s lack of planning in the tampon department in public, and ‘sweet talk’ is more like ‘roll on menopause’.

Alternatively, there is always the merry joke about a baby (take your pick out of a field of two, both have done this to me recently) that is so full of snot that it streams freely from both nostrils into a perpetually open gob. A predictable top lip licking veritable auto-feast of snot lollies in the tasty form of dead cold virus, nasal epithelium and pus (yes, that’s what snot is) ensures until Vomitus Inevitabilus.

Turns out a belly (not unreasonably) protests heavily at being filled with the stuff.

But that’s plain revolting. Plus, I might save it for my next post, if I’m desperate.

For non bodily excretion related humour, I guess I could mention that the poor man that maxed out our credit card installed our blinds recently allowing me to remove seriously vintage bedsheets from my windows (many stained in that Motel Bed Indeterminate Way that has you just itching to break out a packet of bleach and soak the suckers for a decade) had one of the worst toupees I’ve had the pleasure of giggling at when he wasn’t looking my way.

Except he caught me staring in startled wonder at his nylon creation on arrival and I’m also pretty sure he may have spotted the tell tale coughing as the poor disguise of a peal of laughter that it was.

Also, I couldn’t stop talking to the damn thing.

I half thought it was going to grow legs, go ‘woof’ ,and run around for a bit of light exercise while he did his work. I’m pretty sure he noticed that my eyes rarely left the top of his head, and I hated to be so rude, but apologising for staring at somebody’s bad hair piece hardly makes the sin of laughing at it any better, does it?

To come full circle, move along please folks, nothing to see here. I’m boring myself to tears.

But do tell me, because I am indeed both terminally nosey AND desperate, why do you read? Wave hello, will you? Also, what the merry hell should I talk about?

PS. Just to really make my day, spellchecker has gone tits-up in protest at reading my waffle and merrily highlighted every instance of ‘ing’ in this post as a mistake and additionally glued half the words together, just for kicks.

It’s not the first time, either.

Therefore I hereby decree that any genuine spelling errors that remain are because I was so overwhelmed by a forest of ‘ing’ that I did not see them. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

An Ode To Mom Jeans.

Dear Mom Jeans,

Oh, how I love thee- let me count the ways:

One:

Your pockets are generous, permitting at any time my hands-free transportation of Emergency Dummy, teething rusk (only partly chewed and therefore deemed Still Good), car keys, mobile phone, tissues and (as a bonus item) loose change for coffee purchases.

I’ll accept generating more lint than a giant’s bellybutton as a small price to pay for the convenience of saving my poor purse’s positively heaving seams and zips any more strain than they have already encountered under the Onslaught Of Crap Miscellanea.

Two:

You waist is both generously high and secure, kindly sparing the surrounding population from the double visual assault of Gut and Ass. 

No-one, unless possessing of x-ray vision, shall be subjected to either a cheeky viewing of saggy, stretch-marked stomach (which if it were to happen would have some concerned that I had in actuality been freshly mauled by a tiger who had not see fit to file their claws lately and dialing for an ambulance/the local TV station. All the while keeping a lookout for a handy ranger equipped with tranquiliser darts, or failing that a shotgun. Just in case.) or my personal quite pasty version of the golden arches and bum-cleavage (yes, also heavily stretch-marked now that you mention it).

I can happily attempt to  shove gently place a too-generous purchase into insanely low and Lilliputian dimensioned pram baskets with impunity, secure in the knowedge that none behind me shall go blind. Probably. Unless I’ve inadvertantly sat in Spew lately and it hasn’t yet percolated through to skin in order to give me that nasty damp feeling that usually heralds Bad News of some sort.

Also, the cut around the hindal regions (if you get my drift and while we’re talking ass) cleverly disguises the fact that my inflated and then deflated bottom skin is making a bid for my knees these days. Or possibly the floor if I live long enough.

Because in Mom Jeans, who knows where your ass really is?

Three:

While I’m on the general subject of waist, yours darling Mom Jeans, are elasticized and oh-so damn convenient for those gotta-pee-in-twenty seconds moments a girl with two children who do not like to lose visual contact for a moment damn well needs.

I don’t have time for belts because by the time I got the bloody things undone, there’s two heads mournfully headbutting the loo door (‘doink’, ‘doink’) and a sad chorus of ‘Mamamamamama’ to contend with.

It tends to throw me off my stream a bit.

Four:

Also, sweet jeans (who have been much maligned by the fashionable), you have cuffs of an entirely sensible length that don’t require my poor beleaguered self to wear three inch heels in order to avoid looking like the victim of a nasty drive-by foot amputation OR resorting to rolling them up.

Even I have standards.

Five:

Finally, oh denim and elastane wonders of modern technology (purchased at such a reasonable price too), you forgive regular ritual abuse of your good selves with both deluges of vomit and my rather hard nosed survival-of-the-fittest approach to washing. You’re still going strong and only mildly faded, despite having done more spin cycles than a forgotten sock.

What’s wrong with Mom Jeans, anyway?

You don’t say?

Dear Nice Lady At Telco,

It was lovely to speak to you several weeks ago whilst trawling my local supermarket vainly in the hope of pre-made salads that didn’t require I first call my bank for an increase in my credit card limit, really it was.

It is none of your business and not in any way your fault that Long Suffering doth insist on a salad that requires no arranging in a bowl every day and thusly I spend the best part of forty dollars a week on lettuce (of all bloody things, made mostly of water as it is) so I decided not to bring it up and affirm that yes, now actually was a good time to discuss making arrangements to pay your bill.

I must admit with a small amount of guilt that I was waiting to see just when the proverbial penny would drop at Big Telco Co that, in fact, my phone line was now connected and as a result I should have received both a (rather exorbitant, by the way) bill for the connection AND ongoing use.

Because I hadn’t seen one as yet, and I was more than content to leave sleeping phones lie until they rang of their own accord, if you get my drift?

If you don’t quite understand the reference, just ask the seller of the astronomically expensive window blinds I now possess exactly how much I paid on credit for the privilege of not using well washed 80 thread count for privacy.

Translation? I’m already broke, so if the phone works, I wasn’t going to rush to call you up and ask to pay money.

I might have had you seen to disconnect me, but you didn’t.

So, nice lady, getting back to my point. It really was so lovely to speak to you, even if I did have to rather amateurishly feign surprise at your polite gambit as to whether I had noticed no bill had been forthcoming when one clearly should have been.

I heavily blamed the twins for my lack of running after you with my purse open, I must shamefully confess, because people seem to expect a new parent to multiples to be a bit stupid and I often get away with murder that way.

 But.

I WAS truly most entertained when you gently asked when the connection actually happened, because nobody had recorded it your end. You seemed to have in your possession solely a list of mostly (non-attended by the way because I never saw hide nor hair of any of the minions I was supposed to) appointments to, I can only presume, look contemplatively at the grey pipe sticking forlornly out of my garden bed like a much neglected plant a bit and wonder if I might like it more if it actually joined the matching one issuing from the side of my house. Eventually. In the fullness of time. So I could call people, you know?

I hope you didn’t spot my deadly subterfuge when I inquired as to the LAST appointment date and confidently proclaimed ‘It was XXXXX date I was connected!’ in reply. I think I could have been more subtle, really. Upon reflection and all that.

Regardless of all that, nice lady, the thing I find the most amusing is I still don’t have your bill.

Heh.

Yours,

Geohde (in possession of several months and counting of free phone line).

I’m guessing this won’t be the first time.

Oh my.

I think, had the savvy reader seen fit to perforate a vein and measure my cardiac enzymes about, lessee, eighteen  hours ago, they’d have got a nice troponin rise in reward for their troubles. Six hours post inciting event is about the usual time frame between delicate myocardial cells turning up their proverbial toes and going to a Better Place and it being worth digging for a vein in search of a measureable flip of the troponin switch.

To put it in non dork-speak, I think I just had a minor heart attack from Act Of Small Human.

A genuine bloody coronary, I swear it- on the grave my grandparents probably rather frequently revolve (like one of those doors that threaten to, painfully I might add, take out your heels should you be tardy in making your way through them) in when the Dearly Departed Radio Channel supernaturally conveys news of my regular antics .

Because about twenty four hours ago, I was pouring myself a stiff drink to assuage the large shock received.

Saag was temporarily sin binned in the Playpen of Constraint (so her clearly excellent mother could solve her troubles with alcohol briefly), resorting to an incredibly sooky whinge of protest to the world at large about the unfairness of being denied NighNighs and being unceremoniously dumped in her playgym, despite the Very Clever Trick she had just demonstrated.

Ungrateful bugger that I am, I didn’t let her keep the purloined toys OR shoes from the top of her dresser, either.

Oh, yes, I don’t have twins, I have mountain goats for children. Suicidal ones, as I shall relate.

Lest I forget Naan, although it is rather hard to forget Naan (unless you’re congenitally completely stone deaf), she was peeved at becoming even secondarily involved in all the antics, and so I had her in the Sling-Of-Please-Shutup-Shutup as I worked some critical magic with a thank-g-d not yet lost Allen Key on a rather cumbersome cot.

To further elaborate, do you want to know precisely how my saintly eldest spawn got those Fun Toys (and, hence, the underlying reason for my poor ticker’s trauma and a few new grey hairs that Clairol may have to help me hide, when I’ve recovered from the utter mess of turning myself orange, that is)?

Well.

Perhaps I should have seen this one coming on the general principle that Saag has no fear whatsoever and being left for bedtime when (as it turns out) she was not entirely fatigued meant that she serendipitously had a lot of quiet, unsupervised time on her grubby paws. You know, to try new things out.

Like mountaineering.

Yes, dear Internet at large, as far as I can surmise by the number of toys and shoes that she managed to scoop from the top of the dresser  in triumph (over halfway across the bloody thing, and it’s not small), before presumably losing the critical detail of traction in a veritable orgy of Forbidden Stuff, and sliding back into her cot with a thump, Saag somehow turned one Baby Prison into a climbing tool.

By this I mean she climbed up the side of the cot, got up over the rail, stretched across a one foot gap to the aforementioned dresser top and began climbing across that, too, happily stuffing purloined shoes in her gob as she went.

Is your blood also turning cold at the thought of an eight month old five feet up from the floor?

Personally, biased as I am against inadvertent suicidal gestures by infants containing my own genetic code, those more-money-than-sense cryogenically frozen dead people (hoping against all scientific reality that they shall somehow someday miraculously be A: thawed and B: no longer dead and that the future will be worth all the effort), had NOTHING on the zero kelvin that MY blood was when I walked in, trying to identify the cause of that puzzling ‘thump’. 

It was not at all hard to fathom the chain of events involved when I found my eldest spawn surrounded by goodies that more normally belong several feet away horizontally and vertically and busy doing her level best to win the competition for Baby Most Likely To Get a Bit-part in The Exorcist, Vegetable Edition.

Oy.

It may be hard to credit, but it turns out that a retching infant with a rather fetching pink sparkly shoe wedged in her gob CAN look supremely satisfied with herself for scoring the very fluffiest of fluffy teddy bears, both politically incorrect (and therefore prominently featured) golliwogs, all of the combined shoes of both children as well as some other odds and sods in her cot under her very own steam.

Even if it was all liberally splattered with Pumpkin Spew.

No, really. To top it off, I had to clean pumpkin, marinated in the stomach for several hours and not in the least improved by the experience, off of everywhere.

You know the rest. Playgym, Wine, Naan in sling, Allen Key.Oh, and lots of swear.

I’m guessing that this will most definitely, positively be the first of many times I nearly have a child induced coronary, right?

If it helps any, my shoulders are slumped, my ears ringing and my back is sore from the weight of all the pointing, talking and ‘Bad! Mother!’ judgement I probably deserve for not, you know, anticipating.

But.

The little bugger wan’t even showing any interest in pulling up to stand before her star turn that  nearly had me in my local ER trying to explain exactly why I had been so negligent as to allow her to land on her cranium In Pursuit Of Shoe.

I swear it. On that revolving grave.

Thirty.

In case anybody was idly eating their breakfast without the aid a frizzy-haired vice-gripped clutching of a coffee cup, for regular determined swigging thereof, this update is for you. 

You lucky sods.

To begin again, with a slightly less bitter tone, if anybody was actually wondering (between bites of still-warm toast and desperate glugs of not-ice cold dregs of aforementioned legal stimulant) how I was getting on, well.

Help! 

If the Bloody Early was not bad enough, I’ve been resorting to drinking some nasty cold dregs to get my kicks, on the basis that it is very hard to make another cup one-handed and Naan will Not Shut Up if I put her down for a picosecond.

She Is Irritable, capitalisation intended, and I hope to g-d it’s teeth, because the jokes about a receipt are getting less funny and more contemplative as time passes in Banshee Phase.

The moppett also knows if I attempt to get away more comfortably with rocking her while sitting and doth yell accordingly in disapproval. Don’t ask me how rocking her with my butt perched is different to doing it on the move, it just seems to be one of those Mysterious Things. I have not consumed a meal in the seated position in several days now.

Coming back to the un-sleep, because I have been churlishly refusing the obvious solution of going to bed at eight pm on the basis that not even my long deceased grandparents ever did that, let’s just leave it at the observation that it turns out that thirty-ish pounds (I am too tired to work it out properly but I’m reasonably sure my margin of error comes in at somewhere between twenty and forty. Okay ‘ish’. That’s close enough) of combined infant can very easily drag hundreds of pounds of adults out of bed at Ungodly am, even with their room carefully darkened to nuclear winter levels.

With one set of shutters, two blankets and a healthy slathering of plastic sheeting thrown in for good measure.

The little buggers just know, deep down in their overly efficient pineal glands, that it’s light outside and campaign accordingly with rapidly escalating enthusiasm. I swear they actually egg each other on to see who can actually scream the loudest:

N: (warming up her voice) ‘waaaaaaah’.

S: (from between her cot bars across the pitch dark room) That all you got?

‘WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’ 

I fart on your whimpy yodell!

N: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH. Oh, and scrEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHH.

Naan, for the record, usually wins. Just ask my neighbours, in the next timezone.

Children, you win. I am a broken woman who will be stumbling to bed when the sun goes down. I concede, you hear me?

Sigh.

I never was any good at politically correct.

If you do happen to be humouring me by politely pretending to blink in surprise at your monitor when confronted by such a ghastly admission, don’t.

There is also no need to emphasise just what a veritable model of deportment I am, always beautifully appropriate and Never (in the least bit) Tactless At Inopportune moments by shaking your head in disbelief or denial.

While I am on the subject, I certainly shan’t judge any reader adversely for failing to issue a full-page denial in their local paper, at their own expense, stat.

There is also no reason to go running town the street naked in shock at the mere thought that I might be a little on the, to be blunt, crass side at times. Unless your climate is warm right now in ways mine decidedly is not, and you like to do that sort of thing.

I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any frostbite, and what do you mean you weren’t about to do any of the above items regardless of the ambient conditions? Have a heart, please.

In summary, because I am in danger of rambling, I am good at wrong.

It just seems to be a natural gift I have, along with the uncanny ability to turn myself into something more commonly used to scare away crows upon encountering a pack of hair dye and also embarrass myself out of repetitions of dinner parties everywhere, except perhaps the more robust types where Vomit Talk is welcomed.

Virtually speaking my brain and mouth live at #1 Tactless Street, Wrongtown, Bigmouth State, Oops Nation, Planet Can’t-Take-It-Back.

Oh, but for those of you curious about Hairgate 2009, you will be relieved to note that three packets of poop-brown heavily applied on successive days mean I am now merely a (if I do say so myself) rather fetching redhead and I can venture out in public without a hat and five-year-olds do not point and laugh merrily.

I can even pretend to those who do not know the tale already that I intended this all along.

Don’t look at me like that, please, Internet. I think going from Finest Scarecrow to what is impolitely referred to as ‘Ranga’ in these parts for reasons I hope are clear, or you shall force me to elaborate at the bottom of the post (oh, heck, I’ll do it anyway*, go on, twist my arm a bit more) is a good result. You know, in the circumstances.

Regardless of that, may I recount the similarities between eight-month olds and a dog? I may?

Unfortunate similarities between two little presumed at times (it must be admitted) Homo Sapiens and the Canine Fraternity:

• They are as bloody inconveniently fast as two whippets doped up on speed in the hopes of winning a race. Except the race is usually to see who can be first to get to the loo door in order to mournfully headbutt it when I have the cheek to go and urinate in private.
• They are as distractable as a beagle who’s just Smelled Interesting Wee three postcodes away.
• They are as supremely destructive to all things valuable (short-sightedly left below about waist height) as a Labrador pup who’s just been shut indoors in error and had the hot tip that nobody shall be home all day.
• They have an unholy yearning for chewing on shoe leather, the more expensive the better.
• They both have a suicidal desire to test the surge protectors by attempting, for preference, to teeth on power cords.
• They will poop anywhere, at will. Ditto for pee. Especially if you’ve just spent a merry hour getting a fresh batch of stains out of your unfortunate carpet.
• ‘No’ is always a particularly entertaining game to play.
• Both will eat their own vomit, with every sign of satisfaction.
• Both seem to be quite content to lick your floors clean.

The major point of difference that I can discern thus far is that babies regrettably do not fetch your slippers, no matter how much you cheerfully point and say ‘fetch’. Additionally, they are more verbal than the average dog but disappointingly non-specific, unless the fridge door is your ‘Mamamamamama’.

Oh, and you could wait for them to grow up, enter puberty, take up arboreal studies 101 and lean how to safely wield a chainsaw in order to lop down the bloody tree before they’d successfully fetch a stick for you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to stick some black plastic all over their window so I do not have to get up at five am again tomorrow.

I live in hope, so don’t tell me if it doesn’t work, I may just have to cry.

A Memo.

Attention:

The Indian Takeaways,
A.k.a all household residents currently under one metre tall, or
The nappy-wearing fraternity with that minor incontinence problem that I shall speak no more of, or
The cheapest family members to take to the dentist for a tooth cleaning,

From:

Your Mother,
The alleged adult in this situation,
Currently well over one metre tall, at least in the mornings,
Not incontinent, thank-you-very-much.
Overdue to go to the dentist now I think of it.

Dear Babies,

It has come to my recent attention that there may have been a small error at the factory in the manufacturing process, affecting infants generated with the batch numbers IVFICSI1.0Tx3.0(single embryo ID’s 4and5).

You appear not to be automatically uplaoded with the 2.0 beta upgrade of the Baby Software (first year version).

I am sorry to be so tardy sending you back to the point of purchase for repairs, but due to the recent (last night) adjustment of all clocks back one hour, the problem has only now come to light. Literally.

You see, because of daylight savings/spendings/whatever you call that clever thing where the clocks merrily wind one way for a few months and then carefully retrieve that precious hour later on that I never quite get myself (to be honest), it is now light precisely one hour earlier than usual.

This, please note, is where your programming error has come to my attention, because it should not mean that I have to now stumble from my repose at a slightly ungodly 5.30 am.

Even if it is light outside, babies.

I think I shall have to join the backward parts of this continent that carefully eschew such clock-jiggering habits out of fear that the cows will end up with sour milk in their udders and their curtains will fade with all the extra light and pretend that it is still 6.30 am, as my neglected as yet un-adjusted clocks tell me.

That feels much better all round.

Failing that, infants, because I have this nasty feeling the rest of the world will insist on labelling me an overly enthusiastic and excessively punctual one hour early for every engagement andthe shops shall churlishly refuse to operate on Geohde-time, I do have a receipt for you.

You know, if you need a brief corrective stint in a petri dish somewhere while your software upgrades.

Alternatively, perhaps the local computer shop knows how to get a WiFi Baby 2.0 adaptor so you can upgrade while all on the move and stuff. G-d only knows you like to move. I don’t think a USB cable would suffice any longer, except perhaps as teething material.

My only dilemma, children, is what hole does the plug go in?

Yours,

Grumpy Mother 1.0

Orange you glad to see me?

Dear Internet, oh-most-wise Computer residents,

Why did I not ask you before attempting to colour my hair?

Why did I not seek guidance that any attempts conducted on impulse by an inexperienced operator (to put it politely rather than calling myself an utter idiot), armed solely with the deadly combination of Dutch Courage and three glasses of wine and limited to the entirely ignorance-based inappropriate use of a de-colourant, for streaky bit insertion thereof, was going to go horridly pear.

Internet, dear, sweet, Internet, I actually had no issue with my hair the way it was.

I liked my hair, really I did.

I just thought some streaky bits sounded all, you know, fun and a bit daring and trendy. Like the young folk do, Internet.

But I couldn’t be bothered with all that cap applying and strand pulling and I just massaged the lot in. Yes, all at once. I do not do many things by half measures. I then proceded to spend a merry twenty minutes chasing Saag and Naan around my bathroom before stopping to carefully uncover a strand (as the packet said to, Internet, I note with some indignation) only to find to my horror that the texture had gone to that scary place where the next step is unequivocally ‘dissove’. Even I could spot that one coming, Internet.

Oh, and I was orange.

Yes, I’m not beating about the bush with such niceties as ‘strawberry blonde’ or ‘redhead’ because I currently look like Ronald McDonald’s slightly unfortunate long-lost cousin. I could easily double as an extra for the Straw Man in the Wizard of Oz. Or the lion, for that matter.

I’m really, very, hat-wearing-ly, next-stop-is-a-shaved-head orange.

LS, bless his heart, got home from work, took one look at me (in the darkened-in-disgrace house, so I wouldn’t have to witness the effects of my ill-thought through experimentation with pigment stripper), exclaimed ‘You’re blonde!’, then quizzically repeated ‘You’re blonde?’.

Then he flipped on the light and just about widdled himself laughing at my predicament, Internet.

Between gasps for air he snorted ‘You’re ORANGE! Ha!’. Then he doth skip a merry jig of amusement around the room, Internet, despite the increasing risk to life and limb posed by such unfettered merriment at the woes of another.

When I pointed out that this was hardly a sympathetic way to console me, he took me lovingly by the shoulders and uttered thusly:

‘Don’t worry, plenty of people with a disability live full and active lives in the community these days. We WILL get through this, I promise.’

Then he laughed some more, the prick.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Clariol and I have a hot date to try and repair the damage. I do not hold out overmuch hope.

I LIKED my hair the way it was.

Help! Any suggestions?

BOTW, edition 9.

Once again, with a small amount of guilt related to tardiness, I commence another un or semi solicited blogaview. Blog of the week, the ninth spin of the carousel….

Ta-Daa!

And so it begins again, the ninth edition of BOTW. Not sure what I’m talking about? Click on the logo to be taken to the reasoning behind my unsolicited blogaviews and previous BOTW’s.

BOTW. An unsolicited admiration of blog-ness. An acknowledgement of the road travelled. Putting my excessive Google Reader activity to good use. On some level, we all write to be read, don’t we?

This week (ish. Far Far worse than ‘ish’, actually. So very, painfully, far out the other side of ‘ish’ that the joke is no longer remotely amusing. ‘Ish’ went quietly over the horizon and out of the metaphorical rear-view mirror some weeks ago) I choose to review:

Coming2Terms, by Pamela Jeanne.

Firstly, the quickfire version:

In a nutshell?

PJ is a blogger who uses writing and blogging to reconcile her loss of what many take for granted- the ability to bear children- despite many years of fertility treatment. Life when involuntarily childless and the under-publicised perspective that brings.

The clever search terms version? Geepers, I always feel like I’m highlighting the bad points of each blogger’s reproductive careers in this section:

Living child-free after infertility, childlessness not by choice, reflections, infertility tales, infertility advocates, as an infertile, memos to the fertile community, (also pre-blog IVF, ICSI, Clomid, IUI, alternative therapies), endometriosis.

In more detail:

Again, I shall not over-revise Pamela Jeanne’s history (In case I stuff it up. Check out her blog for the story in their own words rather than my clumsy paraphrasing), but…

PJ, in her own words pinched from her sidebar, …

“At 29 I learned I might have some infertility issues.

On and off for the next 11 years I tried both conventional and unconventional methods to conceive. Clomid, IUI, ICSI IVF (several times), acupuncture, yoga for fertility, raspberry tea, chiropractic adjustments, Chinese herbs, fertility herbal blends. Diet changes. Lighting candles. You name it, I tried it.

When it became evident that no amount of effort would produce a baby, my husband and I reluctantly got off the infertility treatment roller coaster. This blog — and the book I’m writing called Silent Sorority — give voice to what it’s like to live with infertility in a fertile world.”

Care to reflect with her?

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Want to see YOUR blog featured? Like to be in my blogroll? Let me know in the comments section below and I’ll gleefully add you, after all a girl can never have too many hyperlinks in her sidebar.