How to increase your traffic by a bajillion percent.

Give or take.

Actually, this post is merely a small PSA for those positively gagging at the bit to own a piece of Apple’s latest wallet-drainer.

Yes, I may have posted an entry about three years ago in which I referenced one ‘IP.ad’. However, do bear with me. Don’t get all carried away, please.

Clearly the fact that half of the western world clicked on a site loudly proclaiming to be a blog about infertility, lady parts, work, twins, life in general (and not manually strangulating one’s spouse and stuff in the face of extreme daily provocation) means that I have been obtuse.

It should have been taken as a clue that I am not a particularly savvy technological type. Also, I am not all that funny, either.

Today I got the shock of my life when I noticed my stats now look like THIS:

Whoa, Nelly.

I had to go and read the news to work out what’s been going on on Planet Earth lately that got you all in such a swivet, because I’ve been stuck hamster-wheeling around an artificially lit concrete bunker pretending to be a healthcare professional.

But I think I’ve figured it all out. We have a minor misunderstanding going on, Internet. You’ll laugh.

Let me state the following, s-l-o-w-l-y and clearly, okay? I don’t know my motherboard from my USB slot, and I would have serious trouble differentiating both of them from a hole in the ground.

I do not have ESP and neither am I that ahead of the curve, so you can all stop molesting the post in question now. Also, I have not the foggiest where you can buy one, so do refrain from asking me.

But if you’re into random spotting, dildocams, IVF cycles, twins and angst in general, well, pull up a bouncy chair. Just wipe the snot off of it first, Naan’s a bit under the weather.

Love, Geohde.

Wor(l)ds.

Hi Internet, I’m still here, promise. Really, I am.

I’ve been trying to get your attention for some days now , but the 60 hours I have just pulled out of my arse at work recently  coupled with general busy flying by the What-The-Fuck-(If Anything)Is-Wrong-With-THIS-Person? proverbial seat of my tired pants in my professional life got in the way a bit.

Did you miss me?

Actually, don’t answer that. Just do me a small favour, instead.

If you plan to arrive at an emergency department complaining of severe pain, please have to common sense to at least try taking a pain reliever before you bowl up. Also, don’t look so damn chirpy about it all. It’s meant to be hurting, remember? This may be Your Moment with the exciting machines that go ‘beep’, but I have better things to do. Like think about how much I miss Saag and Naan and mope at the desk sitting on my padded arse, something I rarely get the chance to do.

Also, if you have had a slightly sore tummy for three months and counting, it’s probably not an emergency. Don’t turn up just because it is a public holiday and you have nothing better on, I beg of you.

My sympathy quotient for dumb things goes down markedly when I am dog tired. Quite franky, I am not at all impressed with either the pain tolerance or the common sense of the average (too damn cheap to see their GP) denizen of the warm and fuzzy world of ‘emergency’ care.

The 90 year old ladies that come in half-dead with invigorating cases of peritonitis who really ‘don’t want to cause any trouble, dear’ and keep apologising about it, on the other hand, well THEY can stay. Apart from anything else, they actually have some manners. Thank you goes a very long way.

Also, to all the poor women fobbed off by their GPs who keep turning up to find out they are in fact REALLY miscarrying in a regular steady stream of damp tissues and sad faces, I am so desperately sorry. I haven’t been in the place you are right now, but I have been somewhere similar enough and it hurts like a motherfucker even without the obligatory six hour wait to be seen.

Actually, what’s even worse is that unless you’re actively bleeding to death, you’re unlikely to score a D+C in anything less than a glacial age because the theatres are chock full on people having their gallbladders whipped out and the like. Half of you probably go home and miscarry on the bog after I finally get hold of the overworked gynaecology registrar, book you into clinic and send you home.

That thought, along with the equally merry one that my hospital has a big, fat clinic for women with dead babies in their tummies that is constantly booked solid, keeps me up at nights. Or days. Or whenever it is I’m meant to be sleeping, depending on the flavour of shift I am enduring.

Saag and Naan are my world, but now so is all of this.

If it helps, I am generous with the pain relievers. For the ones that need them, anyway.

Love,

Geohde (who is fecking tired on accounts that I got home at 1am this morning and was woken by Naan at 2am, 4 am and 6am. I was so heavily asleep that LS had to cruelly pull the bedcovers clean off of men order to wake me up enough to notice the wailing and do something about it. He’s lucky to still be alive).

Worse.

Internet,

Plain and simple, today sucked maleana-containing-rectal cavities. It was a positive bonanza of retained-tampon joy, and that was just the patients who, by the way if you are playing along at home, all still drink far too much and additionally have much more sex than I’m getting and keep turning up 20 weeks pregnant wanting an abortion, or with an invigorating case of the clap.

I do not sensationalize, I don’t need to.

I think that just about everybody that was in a position to do so gave me shit whenever possible. On general principles. Mostly probably because they, too, hate working on the weekends and nobody (quite understandably) wants to accept more work if they can possibly avoid it. Also, I am deaf and the phones are quiet and I can’t hear half of the shite they’re saying anyway.

Actually, that’s probably not such a bad thing upon reflection.

Referral tag is only fun the first five times you tell the story to the stranger down the phone. Also, I think I paged the wrong person entirely at one point which is why the refused to see my patient. I’m pretty sure I’ll have a steaming fresh quota of telling-off waiting for me when I arrive again in the morning.

Ugh.

Aside from all of that invigorating work related jazz, you know the gig I do all the bloody time now which is just chock-full of high points like  telling the daughter of a quite sweet old dear that the old dear in question was A: demented B: unsafe at home, and C: had consequently fallen over several times in recent history, with the outcome that D: she had a skull fractures, bleeding into her brain and also, just for kicks E: a chest and urine infection, I’m miserable.

I saw the Indian Takeaways for a whole thirty minutes today, twenty of which Naan spent crying and the other ten in which my well-meaning neighbours had come over to play and thus neither child wanted to come to me at all.

I knew this would probably happen, but I didn’t expect it to hurt as much as it damn well does.

Nothing kicks you in the teeth and reaches down to rip your heart to shreds like two one year olds you miss like crazy simply refusing to come to you. Their absent mother.

They’re in bed now, which is where I plan to be about thirty spellchecking seconds from this time.

LS has told me that he can’t hack all of this mood stuff and he’s gone and  fucked off to the gym and left me to it.

Oy.

I most emphatically do NOT feel well-supported in this return to work endeavour. I feel about as well-supported as a remote-tribesperons tata’s going for a quick sprint to the local watering hole.

Okay?

I’m not entirely sure about my status with regards to the title above. I guess work isn’t too much of a disaster as long as I remember to check in any pride I may possess at the door.

After all, I’m two whole years rusty and it goddamn shows. Today I fucked up a lumbar puncture on the skinniest woman with the most obliging spine I have seen short of a cat practising for a contortionist show. A pissed epileptic with dark glasses on could have performed a better job than I did. To put it another way, you could have driven a truck through her vertebral interspace and yet my needle didn’t quite hit the drippy mark.

But.

Even though I was only about three CRITICAL millimetres out from item ‘dripping CSF’ and instead prodding about hopelessly in item ‘where the fuck is it?’ and I didn’t really do all THAT badly, I am still kinda blue.

I miss ze kids and I want to get off.

The end.

Except it isn’t. I go back tomorrow. Oh, and the next day, and the day after that and so on…..

PS. There was nothing wrong with her, either. Of course. There never is.

Please stop showing up to my emergency department with three week old headaches, will you, world? Try a panadol.

W(h)ine.

Dear Internet,

Do forgive me for brevity, but it has been a very long day and quite honestly chock bleeping full of the polar opposite of warm and fuzzy moments. Some of the patients are utter arseholes, yes, but so are half the staff. To put it another way, I don’t think the consultant I was assigned to work with today and myself shall ever be in that cozy afternoon handbag shopping expedition place.

No, I don’t think we’ll be trading shoe tips, either.

Actually, I don’t think I’d sit next to them on the TRAIN even if that was the only seat available and it meant I had to stand for the next fifty or so stops.

However, don’t go all feeling sorry for poor Geohde whining on about people being un-nice and stuff. I didn’t really expect to be best friends forever and all of that jazz with the tired and jaded fraternity of emergency medicine, so I’m not exactly crying into my supper over the matter. Honestly.

If you assume that your day is going to suck, then life is so much simpler than if you keep hoping to extract a formed nugget of joy from the fan-hitting onslaught of proverbial unhappy diarrhoea.

But I would like it oh-so-much if I could see less people on the euphemistic sharp end of my inexpert help today drinking a bit less. Most of them seemed to have the free time to fit in upwards of half a bottle of scotch EVERY day and turn up for work.

I drink write this post with a glass of wine in hand.

I can’t afford that much scotch. Troubleshooting all of this, clearly I am in the wrong line of work entirely.

Screwy

Oh wise Internet,

Forgive me for I have pillow talked. With LS. About, you know, siblings.

Okay, before you all freak out on the plural note I will disclaim that highly preferably I am seeking probably only one more FULL TERM uterine tenant and only one at a time and all of that jazz. I’m not completely mental.

It’s just that I’m getting near to that cheerful old chestnut so unkindly termed ‘advanced maternal age’ and my clucker is getting pretty damn, well, clucky. I reckon I’ve maybe got one more shot at a live birth in me and I wouldn’t mind a do over. The first two times I was pregnant each sucked deeply in their own special way, so I don’t really know why I think I would enjoy a third repetition, but just humour me here.

I’d like the P3.0 experience even if it is just to remind me how much I hated trying to GET, STAY and actually BEING pregnant. I do not like being pregnant, remember? I spent, what was it, um, something like a total of 49 weeks pregnant in a year and a half, so I am moderately well qualified on that point. So is my deflated arse.

You would think that infertility, the whole lethal birth defect thing, three IVF transfers and a complicated twin pregnancy followed by the newborn experience from refluxy-milk-vomit-stained hell would have broken my damn clucker for GOOD (Thank you Eden, I shall nick your most excellent turn of phrase there).

I must have a bleeping shatter-proof cluck-muscle or I wouldn’t have had two glasses of wine and bleated on-and-on at 9pm about the whole thing to my spouse last night. Please don’t snicker at the time. I am in bed by 9pm, sooner if I can manage it. I am farking tired all the time. It’s like death and taxes.

For all my moaning about how tired I am, I quite like my children, thank-you-very-much and I am open to the concept of finding out if I could become quite fond of a third one.

I guess where it gets complicated and all goes to shit a bit is when you recall that LS and I aren’t precisely getting along all that well these days. The thought of having you-know-what with somebody I can  barely hold a conversation with without wanting to disembowel them with a blunt spoon is a little startling.

Actually, it’s not even about the intermittent sex, because clearly that is never going to work anyway, but more about the hip-pocket hit of more IVF.

To wind this essay up (I can sense eyes glazing over in front of monitors), it turns out that LS also has an overactive clucker gland. His take on the mess is suitably male.

He tells me, and I ALMOST cannot fault his logic, that since I am probably his last fairly sure bet at offspring perhaps we should have another metaphorical crack at it. Soon.

….although he does forget that there is a whole planet of women biologically driven to find blokes with job status and maturity a bit of a panty-dropper whereas the market for older saggy multiparous women is a lot less competitive…

However.

You know something in your relationship ain’t quite right when your dear spouse then asks if we could live in separate households afterwards.

Actually, that might not be such a bad idea, I think we’d get along rather better if I didn’t know how bloody terrible he is at cleaning out the toilet bowl. Nothing says ‘marriage’ like finding sprayed up poop under the rim and all pee down the front now, does it?

Edited to add: this hardly counts as a formal back-in-the-saddle announcement since we’ve never bothered spending the money on contraception, does it? I mean TECHNICALLY (okay, don’t snigger) I could have belted out I’M PREGNANT at any time in the last year and a half right? Okay, yes, unlikely. Perhaps it’s more of a reconsideration in the direction of flashing my goods for strangers with transfer catheters again. LS wasn’t there when the twins were unceremoniously and with eye-watering speculum technique returned to sender and decided to hang around, so I guess I can be a big girl and turn up again even if I do have a terminally tactless spouse.

Tired. Whiny. Did I mention TIRED?

Unless you’re living under a non-reading rock (umm, perhaps like myself lately), then you all are fully cognizant of the fact that I have somewhat leg-clingingly-howlingly dramatically returned to full time work. It takes me about an hour and a half just to get the Indian Takeaways to daycare, even before I begin my charge onwards to legitimate employment for the day.

Consequently time is an asset I no longer possess, along with things I hold dear to my heart like SLEEP and PATIENCE. My proverbial fuse can now be measured in microns, just ask LS.

I’m hanging out my washing at 11pm because I am in danger of running out of clean underwear. I KNOW that it will be sunny tomorrow and I simply won’t be at home long enough to do anything about it. Oh, and to anthropomorphize my laundry load, it’s been ‘drying’ in the machine to the best of it’s soggy ability for a day already and is beginning to leer at me most menacingly and mutter nasty things about mould formation when I guiltily dash past the machine on my way to the car.

Unfortunately, if this was not already enough, I am also being woken up by a particularly intensely-sad-morning-maternal-leg-cling-screams-of-abandonment daycare-novice infant at 1am and 5am. She is simply not sleeping at all well because the poor mite is seriously unsettled by the sudden change in her world.

I can’t blame her, really.

As far as Naan is concerned, her mother simply abandons her to the care of strangers all day now, and a budding attachment to one particular staff member has not as yet replaced my absence enough for the poor kid to manage not to howl unless held. Constantly.

Between them, my children are a bit of a disaster for the centre’s productivity, as well as representing a direct hit on their staffing ratios.

Anyway, coming back to the lack of repose, at about 5am when I can see light and hear sparrows passing gas, I give up on the idea on unconsciousness and just get up and get on with the day.

On the plus side at least I am never late.

On the minus side, because silver linings are so not my style, I think about four hours sleep a night blows harder than a prostitute sans teeth. That, too, shall only get worse once I start night shift because THEN I have to drop spawn off to daycare on the way home from the previous night spent dealing with angry drunks just to attain my four hours of daylight sleep. Then I must collect them before the centre closes and they call the cops.

Ack. Are you jealous yet?

Unsurprisingly enough, I am tired, cranky and pretty damn fed up.

It’s not doing much for the Geohde-LS ongoing drama, either.

Right now LS and I are mostly sleeping in separate bedrooms because we’re BOTH so farking tired. Additionally, the verbal interactions are pure, finest squabble.

In the interests of fairness, I’m an utter witch to live with and (reasonably enough, really) LS has paraded the big ‘this cannot last’ speech out again. Quite frankly I don’t need a crystal ball to see that this lifestyle is not sustainable but somehow it going to have to damn well become so. I am contracted for a year and I simply HAVE to slog it out this time around.

Nobody said I had to pretend to like it.

Having the Indian Takeaways in all their 16-weeks-couch-arrest-threatened-prem-labour excitement was one of the very best things that has ever happened to me personally, but it was tantamount to career suicide. Also, it has clearly just about killed my relationship.

I told you I’m not good at silver linings, but at least if he does follow through on all this cannot-last talk I don’t know if we’ll go through all the bother of officially separating, if only because he will be too lazy to contact a lawyer and I shall be too busy to have TIME to do the same. However, I don’t really think that keeping my name by convenience and saving all the bother of changing it back is what I planned on when I got married.

You know what, world?

Stuff it. Live in sin. It’s easier when it goes pear-shaped.

Love,

Geohde (who SERIOUSLY needs more sleep and is clinging on to life in general by fingernails in the hope that this shall get better in the fullness of Big Adjustments For All time. Also, I should remember to eat something more often since I was forty nine pathetic kilograms this morning).

You know you have a glamorous job when you earn a whole forty-two cents a minute for the privilege of never having the opportunity to urinate OR eat all damn day.

I feel like I’m ‘hanging in there’ over a canyon, but I’m gripping pretty damn hard.

PS. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but I also possess a public blog and a Takeaway blog. If you want more pictures and stuff. Only rule of url provision is no comments be made that could be linky-followed back here, for obvious period-and-ivf-discussing reasons. Amongst other ones.

Anticlimax?

Well, I did it. I cruelly and heartlessly abandoned a pitifully wailing (OH, the wailing!) trouser-leg-clingy Saag and Naan to the nappy-changing whims of complete strangers and took off to work today.

You know, to go and pretend I realled how to properly fill in a drug chart and whether risedronate is meant to be given before, with, or after food like all the shiny new real doctors ten years my junior around me.

The rather less wrinkly ones than I am, and I am not referring to my abdomen in this instance even though you now all know THAT has jowls, too.

Besides, THOSE freshly happy-to-be-qualifed (and still prepared to feel all big and call themselves DOCTOR in public to get leverage because they haven’t yet worked out what an utter argument-magnet being a wanker about it truly is) shiny young bastards probably got more than three hours sleep last night.

Additionally, I bet none of them were up until midnight sobbing into their pillows about going to WORK tomorrow.

Okay, I’m being all melodramatic on that last point.

Some of them probably DID sob in terror at least about going to work, but I bet none of them got up at 11pm, 2am and 5am to lovingly shed tears over their spawn and stroke their faces.

Or write long, emotional, tear-streaked 4am angry notes-to-self all about how divorce and single motherhood is better than the monstrosity of full time work, any day, because I cannot bear the thought of abandoning said leg-pullers in the morning. Yes, even if a day at home with them would give me the shits in about thirty pico-seconds from the first ‘Nah! Nope! NOOOOOOOOOO!’  and dummy spit over something or other stupid.

I am not rational after midnight and I make no claims about the hours BEFORE either.

Also, bet none of the Shiny Unwrinkled Set spent forty 3 am minutes ripping all the aforementioned positively unintelligible notes right up, just in case.

On the plus side, when I finished being bored solid hearing about the organisational structure of a network I have been working in for the best part of the last decade already and rolled up at Casa Child Abandonment to pick the little buggers up, Saag SQUEALED and gave me the most delicious kisses of glee. Poor Naan simply clung to me like a wrung-out barnacle, strangely silent and all subdued. Naan normally doesn’t do quiet.

I might have clung to both of them like my life depended on it and wept a pathetic bit into their soft, clean hair in return, but don’t tell teacher on me, will you? I think having emotions could get me fired or something.

It was probably the most ridiculous display of limpet-like back-stroking mutual affectation seen at Casa Abandonment in some time, I think.

In their own ways both Takeaways simultaneously broke my heart and filled me with almost unbearable joy.

The little shits MISSED me about as much as I (yes, I will admit to tears in the car on the freeway this morning) missed them.

It wasn’t so bad today, but I am farking emotionally exhausti-pated. I am positively blocked up with exhausted emotion.

Now to do it all again tomorrow and jump up-and-down on some poor plastic person’s chest. It doesn’t seem fair to either of us if you ask me.

A little honest journalism.

THIS is what your belly looks like after two babies have kicked the shit out of it from the inside for 36 weeks.

Also, bless Saag and Naan for being reasonably bright children, but they had the discourtesy to have not heard of Tetris in utero. They never did pack themselves in there in the most space efficient manner although Naan did get the satisfaction of spending about a third of the pregnancy with her arse to Saag’s face. Then she plumped for ‘sideways’.  Oh, and trust my exploding waters on this one, they had lots and lots of amniotic fluid, too.

It’s no wonder, really, that I look the way I do. I ain’t Elasta-girl and at one point I looked like THIS:

Coming back to the first picture above in case you haven’t quite got the perspective right, that dark buried thing in the middle is my belly button. It has it’s very own hoodie of skin these days. The wrinkles below are a heady combination of stretch-marked to heck-and back skin with the texture of crêpe paper AND about four inches of bonus abdomen I didn’t use to own.

THOSE are still tucked into my jeans in this shot. I wanted to spare your retinas. Nobody needs to see what looks for all the world like a wrinkly old-person bottom crease on the front of somebody’s guts now, do they?

I may be thin, random people in the supermarket, but trust me on this one, I didn’t get away with it as scot-free as you all seem to think.

Work tomorrow. Urgh.

PS. I adore Saag and Naan, and they were utterly worth it, if you’re wondering. I know I’ve whined on about it before, but I don’t think I’ve been brave enough to post proof.

T-3/7, and counting.

I guess I better clarify the title, although those of you unfortunate enough to be familiar with medical slang probably get my drift already.

Basically when you see numbers looking a bit like fractions, the gist of it is that the ‘denominator’ helps you work out the time frame the first number is referring to.

Clear as mud?

So, if the ‘denominator’ is something like 24, this implies that the ‘numerator’ refers to an amount of hours. Because there’s (with rare exceptions involving the start and end of daylight savings) 24 hours in a day. Geddit?

I could have referred to 72/24, but that would involve writing two whole extra digits and nobody in health care, bar the social workers who like to write novels about the average complicated situation they are requested to somehow simplify, writes so much as a punctuation mark more than they absolutely have to.

Trust me on this one.

Nobody reads most of it, anyway, for a start.

I’m assuming by now you’ve twigged that the 3/7 above refers to three DAYS.

Yes, there’s seven of them in a week although I often hope for a bonus one in order to get stuff that needed doing half a century ago DONE already.

Three days until I go back to work full time. Yippee.

Then I can call people ‘SOB’ (short of breath, really) in their file and get away with it. That one’s a genuine legit acronym, however I should warn you that all the ones in the link below are rather less kind.

 I have never actually used the abbreviation ‘PAFO’ (pissed and fell over) to explain an invigorating alcohol related piece of stupidity although I have often wanted to do so. Oh, and while I’m on a theme here, alcohol is better known as ‘ETOH’ to us cool types in the know. We like to pretend this means our patients won’t understand that we’re calling them flagrant boozers right in front of their faces in the middle of the ward round.

Many of the boozers in question have done enough high-school chemistry to work that one out, by the way, but usually they don’t bother denying it. The more experienced frequent flyers hate getting the shakes and know we give them free beer with dinner in order to stop them having fits on the ward.

Oh and some tasty benzodiazepines. Fitting patients are untidy buggers, really, and it’s bad PR (Okay, ‘publicity’ and not ‘per rectum’ in this instance). Lots of sheet changing and all that. Annoys the nurses no end.

Oddly enough, I had absolutely no intention of writing so many vaguely revolting things about work today and yet I seem to have done so quite effortlessly.

Perhaps it is time to go hang out the washing, or something. That only downside of that plan is it does mean I’d have to get IN the lot that’s been ‘drying’ for about half a week already.

In the countdown-mode meantime if I can get through today without my very nice but overly enthusiastic and a bit terminally misdirected neighbours ‘borrowing’ my spawn in order to use the multiple birth freak show as a conversation piece for their visiting friends, or as the sole entertainment on a video call to family back home, that would be nice.

They’re not circus animals, you know.

Apart from anything else, I am becoming heartily sick of the incredible amount of shit the poor kids are doing after being fed a non-stop diet of bananas and chocolate all day. They’re literally burning their poor little arses off and our nappy budget is feeling the fecal strain.

Also, since half of the plants and decorations in MY house and garden now seem to be staring right back at me when I go over to their house to retrieve said chocolate-covered-shit-machines, it’s starting to get a little creepy. I keep worrying that one of them will don a bad blonde wig and go for LS’s eyeball with a stiletto heel at this rate.

Actually, lest I sound like a raging bitch, I shall add a small disclaimer. They ARE quite nice people, and I have thought of doing similar things to LS before myself.

Except I don’t own any stilettos because I walk like a newborn giraffe when I try.

I’ll bite #2.

No, I won’t eat poo, delightful as that sounds and as abundant at my dozen-child-generated-shits-a-day household as it IS.

However I’ve been doing the maths, so I can’t help but wonder.

If 150-ish people read me in the all-powerful google reader, and I get 300 plus or minus (depending on how dull I am, childbirth was a 900 hit high and half of my lesser eloquent musings about, um, was it cheese? were decidedly cricket-chirpingly NOT) a bit hits a day on the site itself, well…

Where are the rest of you all coming from?

I deeply appreciate the twenty-three brave, BRAVE people who commented AND also mostly fessed up to something daft they’d done at some point or other, but where’s everybody else?

Maths isn’t my strong point, but um?

Do I really get that many frustrated blokes in search of porn mistakenly finding my plastic-p.enis catheter inserting abode a day?

Okay, yes, so I AM low on content now that you mention it. How did you know?

Honestly, I’ve never nagged people to delurk before to the best of my knowledge, I’m just genuinely curious.

Okay, I’ll bite.

….but I’m not going as far as ‘borrowing’ somebody else’s code for the button.

Delurk, will you?

I can say please if it helps.

Also, why not REALLY screw with the concept and delurk anonymously (if I have not myself already screwed with that possibility in the appropriate settings window, it has been some time since I dusted off the ‘settings’ page and had a look-see)?

Heck, while you’re at it, tell me something really silly you’ve done.

It’ll make me feel all better about getting the name of the year completely wrong, IN MARCH. Oh, and that time I walked out of a plane loo with wet toilet paper all over my foot. And that time a gust of wind flashed my rather second-best knickers and burned the retinas of anybody unlucky enough to be in a certain major intersection at the time I had my hands comprehensively full.

You know I just kept walking and pretending like I meant to have a skirt up around my ears, right?

Humour me

Okay, I shall begin this boast post with the disclaimer that it involves not only pregnancy, but multiple pregnancy, in heavy amounts. I understand if that fact alone is enough for many of you to justifiably to click the ‘no thanks’ button. Repeatedly.

So, for those of you who do want to hear what I’ve been abusing my keyboard with lately, just read on, MacDuff.

Internet, do humor a slightly mad rapidly ageing lady with little enough time as it is to scratch her bottom (and a rapidly approaching deadline with NO LIFE ever again, I SWEAR it which I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge right now) who insists on finding new ways to make sure the laundry pile never does get sorted.

I’ve gone and written another piece and somebody very nice indeed has very kindly (again) taken pity on my spits and spurts and gone and published it on their own snazzy website. All proper-like.

Perhaps it was just a ruse to make me go away and shut up already with the inbox harassment , but nevertheless, here ’tis:

Am I Having Twins? A brief guide to ultrasound twin-spotting.

Apparently rather a LOT of women out there really want to find out if their ultrasound of almost always ONE baby could be two, even if all and sundry present at the scan said NO in capital letters. I was only too delighted to write some words on the matter.

I would quip that I like smashing dreams, but that sounds mean and is probably (unless your dream is of endless free no-questions emergency department supplied smack) not true.

I simply like exercising my inner science nerd. Over a dozen years at university will do that to a girl.

Anyway, along with all of these, care to read?

You can help expand my head (or put me in my silly place) in the comments section. Don’t get all drunk with power now, will you?

Love,

G

PS. Always happy to take solicitations for very slowly naptime-powered pieces on this and that. Don’t all rush at once.

Sniff.

The post more properly entitled ‘Yet again I don’t see the bleeding obvious coming and embarrass myself in public because of it’.

I’ll get it out of the way at the beginning by disclaiming that this is a post about daycare. Please don’t hit me. Also, if daycare is not your cup of tea, please don’t tell me off. I feel badly enough about things already without any extra guilt.

Until I was fortunate enough to become a parent (and even on the worst screaming-banshee days I do remember that I not only asked for this, I REALLY asked for this and accordingly do my best to be grateful my eardrums are bleeding) I did not realise just how controversial some words were.

Repeat after me: CIO. Formula. Daycare.

Okay, those of you who have vegetables or shoes about your person for throwing purposes thereof can get it out of the way now.

Anyway.

Suffice it to say that after seventeen months in which LS and I have been on the never-ending tag-team from hell that is working, um is it seven different places, AND raising young twins with precisely zero babysitters, the time has come.

I return to what is euphemistically called ‘full time’, otherwise known as cry-in-the-toilets-once-per-shift (or more simply ’what’s daylight?’) mid next week.

To do this, we need to use daycare.

Believe me I don’t really want to, not only is the financial gain NEGATIVE but I really shall miss my little buggers and their snotty noses enormously when drug addicts in search of pethidine are seriously in danger of getting on my tits enough to sprain them or somebody is yelling at me, again.

However, like generations of working parents, I have a career I need to resurrect from the ashes. I simply cannot in any way do that while working my current arrangements.

I do this NOW so that I can provide a better future for my children LATER.

But that doesn’t mean that when I take my Indian Takeaways to a daycare centre for orientation my heart doesn’t break all over the floor when both of them cling to my legs and howl at the betrayal of abandonment. Or that what is left of it doesn’t go through a blender at the sight of red-faced Naan screaming and hiccupping in distress with Saag sitting quietly hunched in the corner, clutching her favourite Blankie to her chest and sucking her fingers to bits for comfort, when I am summoned back after peeling myself away for a whole five minutes of time.

I ended up needing a tissue, too.

This is going to be hard for all of us, this new normal.

An open letter to Google.

Dear Google,

I know this is kind of awkward for both of us, but please don’t slam the door in my metaphorical face before I get my chance to discuss a matter which is really beginning to itch like a nasty case of an unfortunately personal fungal infection.

I request no special consideration and only ask that you read the words I write, and then do what is right, Google.

I know that we have a somewhat complicated and fraught history, you an I.

I have even come to accept with a degree of equanimity our symbiotic relationshit relationship vis-a-vis people determined to shove objects (usually of a stiletto variety) up their wee-wees purely for kicks. You send them to ME and I tell them to, ahem, piss off. No pun intended.

Okay, I can even be your go-to ‘orifice girl’ if needs be, as long as you don’t tell the searchers concerned my home address or anything like that.

Alright, I’ll even keep the moaning about all the searchers with negative betas who are  completely SURE that they ARE pregnant despite all that modern science has to offer to a dull roar.

I ask but one thing in return, darling Google……

Turning over a new leaf.

For about the billionth time.

Okay, as a person who comprehensively sucks at giving significant holidays their due respect and has been known to completely forget that the date after December 31 happens to be January one THE NEXT YEAR, well, you’re on incredibly safe ground if you guessed I didn’t do much last night in the way of celebration.

After all, it has not escaped my memory that being as it is Jan 1 now (even if I’ll in all probability get the name of the year wrong until about March or so), a deadline has been passed. I’d quote Douglas Adams at this point, but the whooshing sound was actually kind of distressing in light of events I shall outline further below.

To be blunt, I’m not especially sure what marital status I shall have to go with my mind like a leaky colander when it comes to orientation in time by the point I work out what year it is and write it down all reliably properly like on forms.

I may be terminally vague, but I am damn sure that recently enough a certain threat was made with regards to a certain relationship if certain things did not improve by ‘next year’.

Guess what? Next year, nice to meet you. No discernible improvement THIS end.

We seemed to be getting on fairly well yesterday, although I have to confess that these days ‘fairly well’ means that I haven’t mentally wanted to disembowel a certain somebody with contents of the knife drawer after I’ve rearranged their oral anatomy such that they’re brushing teeth trans-rectally by necessity.

It’s not great round these parts but when you have two children together and a lot of debt it’s not like upping and leaving your high-school boyfriend for someone hotter that you met at the bus stop. It’s a much bigger call than that. Besides, there’s no one, hot or otherwise and I don’t think the dating market is precisely flooded with men looking for saggy-gutted bony-assed women with multiple kids, a masculine haircut and ever-present debt.

Anyway, I spent last night happily wrapped up in my duvet by an earth-shatteringly dull 9pm. Okay, I might have been a bit piddled, but ’tis the season.

LS, on the other hand, set todays events in motion with some truly unnerving aim. He managed to knock a full glass of red wine right down a white painted wall, and in typical domestically clueless fashion just rubbed at the surface of the stain a bit with a tea-towel and then toddled off to bed, leaving it to marinade overnight.

Accordingly THIS morning, I woke up to my new future in loungeroom decor- a big, fat, ruby coloured mess soaked indelibly into the paint smack-bang on the only vacant wall in the room.

To say the mood has been tense since that clanger of an introduction to 2010 would be missing the opportunity to ask if I can gain employment as a bomb disarmament specialist just for the chance to relax a bit.

The words ‘separate’ and ‘divorce’ have been getting a bit of an airing again.

Is it just me that is finding all of this exhausting more than anything else?

Happy new year.

PS. At the good Shannon’s polite prompting, I have updated my blogroll after an inexcusably long hiatus. If your name isn’t on it and you would like me to rectify the matter, do nag me in the comments section. Just don’t threaten divorce, because the way I’m feeling right now I might just say ‘what the heck’ to that one.

Also, if you lurk, say ‘hi’?

Just for me? I could really bloody do with the positive news I still have readers and all that ‘ooh, stuff in my INBOX!’ jazz.

Why DO you read, anyways? Should I be whining more or less about the following items A: infertility B: no sex, C: marriage status updates (suck it facebook), D: twins, E: crazy thoughts of child number three in this untidy situation, F: even crazier thoughts of an FET since intermittent shagging has now failed for 17 months (okay, only about six periods) and counting?

Just wondering.