Alrighty, then.

Oh wise Internets,

This morning one of my nearly four year olds had a screaming tanty because I would not give her an easter egg for breakfast.

Apparently I’m all mean and stuff.

When the strop didn’t work, I got the diagnostic ‘I don’t LIKE you Mama, you’re a BAD, MEEEEAN Mama, I want Daddy!’.

Was it wrong to laugh?

Discuss.

G

PS. She ate her cereal.

Sour.

Okay, Internet, this is the kind of post I have to confess I am only writing here because something has left a sour taste in my mouth and I want to hear that my response is completely justified and rational BEFORE suppressing the hell out of it and pretending it happened. Do humour me on this one.

It’s my own bleeping sister, too.

In other words, while I likes me a good online sell of crap I no longer plan to keep as much as the next woman, I also make damn sure that I never sell anything that somebody gave to me on a website that tells them all about it.

To do such a thing is kind of crass, if not downright rude, mais non? Or should I also give up on anybody ever RSVPing, turning up to a lunchdate at the stated hour, or calling to explain a delay and the like? I’ve long ago accepted that men no longer wear ties but surely there has to be limits. For the sake of humanity.

So, anyway, if you can forgive me the jibe about men and convenient portable nooses, my sister is selling several items I carefully and with great effort purchased for her twin girls on Bacefook. Bacefook told me all about it. For fifteen bucks. They were worth considerably more than fifteen bucks and quite frankly I feel a little bit like I’ve been slapped in the face by somebody with alien hand syndrome or something because surely she can’t have a farking idea just how offensive that little surprise was.

Geohde who is currently biting down on the urge to return all the shit she has purchased for said children’s upcoming birthday if this is what happens when I avoid gift vouchers*.

*Sister gets Offended At Gift Vouchers.**

**Feck knows why because instead she’s turning money into water and pissing off her family in one fell tactless swoop.

Grr.

PS and addendum. I neutrally remarked ‘I recognise these’ on the post and she fucking ‘liked’ the comment. Am I really nutso for being offended that she’s selling my gift in a way publically recognisable to me for far less than it was worth or should I be calling in a favour for a well-deserved fish-slapping, table of sibling?

Here’s a small clue. I did not smiley face, and I almost always smiley face shit on Bacefook if it can be intertpreted in more than one clear manner. Don’t you?

Thousand

Yo, peeps!

For some reason I occasionally get the urge to start a blog post with a cheery and utterly demographically and geographically incorrect ‘yo, peeps!’.

Today was clearly one of those days and, to my eternal cringing shame, I am not only probably entirely the wrong kind of race but I live in a nation where ‘hey mates!’, ‘hey youse all’ and the grammatically painful like would be more appropriate.

So, yo. Peeps. Wassup? What does ‘yo‘ mean, anyway?

Internet, I was planning on doing a super beautiful detailed post chock-full of finest real estate porn but then the dog ate my wifi connection and THEN I realised my computer sucks and then I came up with some other bulldust excuses but mainly I realised that my own candids snapped without the aid of a wide angle lens, special lighting and, most importantly, liberal abuse of Photoshop to make the walls look less bleeping meringue and the tiles all sparkly and free of hideously stained grout plus the even better omission of the real estate agent to photograph any room with the horrible prolapsed brown curtains and the completely absent back garden means that you all really wouldn’t get just how much sexier my house is now than it was a year ago and, ergo, I would feel like I have been spending my maternity leave painfully giving my grout a very effective nose-job and painting the thing a pleasing neutral coffee palette for nought.

Breathe in, breathe out and try not to run on so in the next sentence.

Also, I put in over sixty blasted trees in my garden to date with the aid of a post hole digger when I was on permanent night shift and sick as a dog in the first trimester of Bhaji gestation and I can’t even show you a bramble filled ‘before’ picture for contrast.

Poop.

Plus I keep improving further things at the kind of warp speed rate only a woman who is seriously avoiding studying for important upcoming exams can do and thus half of them would come with the ‘but I changed this bit’ proviso anyway.

Do you still want to see them all, or would you rather live with the Real Estate dream avec photoshop, posh furniture and careful omission of the bits that really sucked when I moved in?

Don’t all rush at once.

Anyway, I hope you all had a fabulous Chocolate Season, Saag and Naan personally went to one of those multiple birth group easter egg hunts where all of us had a positively jolly time trying to enforce a five egg per child limit on the identical twins and I found that even though I own a set of twins, I can’t stop staring slightly longer than is polite at a sodding field full of them in Hunt For Crap mode.

We backed this up with a lunch of the kind of epic proportions that removes the requirement for a dinner in the same day (thanks to kind friends) where happily enough Saag did not shit her pants under the onslaught, thanks be, although as I come to think of it, I don’t think she’s done the business in two full days now and THAT isn’t the best solution to the brown problem we’ve developed Chez MII, either.

Did I ever mention the Brown Problem, or do I need to backtrack to hosing off a dripping with sh!t Saag several times in the last week for goodness knows what regressing cause?

I also found out that aforementioned kind friends have been all a swivet about affording their next IVF because of the thousand dollars a month they are spending on Chinese herbs and, feck me, I know I was probably meant to be a little more politely biopsychosocial about the expensive abuse of the placebo effect less I antagonise all potential patients and be dubbed yet another pillar of the Evil Science Based Medical Conspiracy, but I wasn’t.

I mean, when your happy pills are making your wallet sad and they haven’t worked in five full years and you can’t do IVF due to the cost, it’s time to take stock.

Happy easter,

G

At your age.

I do apologise for the prolonged radio silence after my totally gratuitous use of a sympathetic audience to convict LS of being a hard-assed insurance judgment passer in his utterly unaware absence.

By the way, if you were wondering, I think I’ve hit upon the very best way to have an argument with your spouse with that last post. In blissful absentia is the way to go. Not only do I get the smug satisfaction of being right, right, RIGHT (Ha!), but there was much less shouting and no tiresome interjections when WE all wanted to speak.

I should do it more often.

Anyway, I do apologise for the lapse in communications but it turns out that, unlike having newborn preemie twins who were bottle-fed and slept like tops in between on accounts of small and prem-ness, having boisterous three year old twins belting around the house singing the poo-bum song combined with a rather less inclined to nap full-term singleton with a vaguely indecent relationship with my breasts at all times means that I have very little time to blog.

Who knew?

Also, I broke the ice and nursed in public in a cafe yesterday because there was no bloody way I was going to be able to drag Saag and Naan away from toast and babychinos without bloodshed and I was amazed to discover that the earth did not cave in, after all. Yes, I think about five dozen men carefully looked at my breasts and then just as hurriedly didn’t look at my breasts and generally spent quite a lot of time NOT looking at my breasts while sipping lattes a bit faster than planned but that’s okay because I think we all plan to pretend it never happened. Particularly the men sitting with, say, their wives.  

I think looking at female tits is just hard wired and it’s like trying to ask people not to slow down and stare at a car accident on the other side of the freeway, they can’t help it and you’re late even though there is technically nothing wrong with the bit of road you’re driving on at all.

Pet peeve that.

Regardless, on top of the three children and public boob shenanigans, my other mother in law (the nice one who I adore because she always brings FOOD when she visits and that is my kind of houseguest made in greedy heaven right there and yes I really do have two mothers in law thanks to the wonders of remarriage. Lucky me) was visiting recently and thus it’s been even harder than usual to blog.

I truly do utterly adore her and she’s great to talk to but I note that (ignoring the less fun aspects like baby sh!t and sleepless nights and crying and stuff) when I voiced a bit of sadness that I would never have a squidgy newborn to snuggle with again on accounts of career et cetera, the response was a surprised sounding ‘Well of course not, there’s your age, anyway.’

I thought I was having a good wrinkle day but apparently I have now entered the phase of life better known as ‘dried up ovaries’ even to people I see twice a year.

If I wasn’t being vaguely silly about the whole episode I could observe that I kind of want to cry when I think about that statement. At my age. Am I that old already?

G

Maybe next time I’ll tell you about my adventures in the land of cup-of-tea-making electric pump because I finally caved and got a real big girl pump having finally given myself w@nkers wrist with my trusty arthritic wheezy old hand pump. Have exchanged bed-spring sounding creaking for chu-chug, chu-chug.

The final countdown.

Firstly, apologies, I know that song sucked even back when it was current.

 

Have a random photo of anonymous bits of Naan as consolation.

 

..and if that hasn’t stopped the ringing in your ears, here’s some carefully bloody useless for recognition bits of Saag, instead.

I figured it’s not twins this time, so why not be daft and double up the pictures of my guts about two weeks ago (because I am ever speedy on the turn-around)?

The stomach-boob ratio is clearly not in my cleavage’s favour and am in D cups right now. Am not used to having actual breasts, either, so finding the whole proper bra thing a bit of a pain, really. 

If it helps, my fundal height is currently a mere 41 cm, so I look about half as ridiculous as I did with the twins. Astonishingly, this doesn’t mean I feel exactly half as shit. I’ll go with seventy five percent as shit. The three weeks thus far of extra gestation earns bonus points.

Also, I was up from two till six am inclusively deciding whether I should risk shame turning up to work because of Contractions, or wait the blasted things out on the grounds that they probably weren’t the real deal and if the price of some pethidine was having an immediate colleague crack out a speculum plus about a million points of instant humiliation, then I’d rather not pay. 

The bastard things did stop but am worried about tonight. Why is it always the middle of the fecking night, just when you haven’t slept properly in months?

Past form suggests it will be in about four night’s time, at 3am, because turning up in labour looking like shit the day before the party that is the most annoying time to trump your own date with a scalpel.

Especially when option A: turning up dressed in something other than a nightgown with actual makeup on sounds ever so much more civilised.

..and here’s S+N showing how close they are in height. Just because.

Summary? 

Babyectomy next Wednesday if I make it and rampant eating of everything in sight followed by vomiting half of same to cease closely thereafter. Hopefully followed by nearly twenty kilograms of extra arse. 

The abdomen’s a lost cause. 

G 

PS. If manage not to give birth in the next few days promise to actually do a pwp photo post. If short on content on grounds of feeling utter rubbish, divert to photojournalism.

Cash.

Dear Internet,

May I diverge from rambling on about my gonads and instead gibber in fear at the state of my finances?

Thank you.

I’d like to write something interesting and fertility related, but then again that would involve not spending my holidays at work purely for the love of the dirty, dirty money. Also, it would involve something happening other than my ovaries just sucking up exorbitant amounts of FSH and not even bothering to leave a tip.

So I’ll talk about work.

Trust me, it’s not because I enjoy sewing up the busted lips of unlucky teenagers who lose fights with gravity, most especially when their disinhibited (read pissed as a parrot) mother decides to hover over their poor baby clad only in pink frilly pyjamas. At 3pm.

I certainly don’t turn up to watch a twenty year old junkie pick his impressive boils in the corridor, either, and to be brutally honest I could do rather less with seeing the ones on his ass. I didn’t ask to see them but within thirty seconds of meeting the guy I was new best friends with both cheeks.

It’s absolutely for the money and up and until somebody buys a spare house I happen to have carelessly left lying around, my entire damn salary is going just to meet the interest repayments.

The interest.

Fuckityfuckityfuck.

G

..and then my brain exploded.

On my list of things I never want to have to do for a parent, the only parent I know:

1. Tell them it was not absolutely their fault for unceremoniously moving countries with two young babies and zero assets nearly thirty years ago as  because their twenty year old partner was off getting drunk and shagging someone else and said young babies were a bit on the severely grotty and hungry side on accounts of Pub and Shag were more appealing.

2. Make an appointment to see an independent medical practitioner because of severe reactive depression linked to whole recent sea-change far away retirement fiasco. There are some things in life I need to make sure that somebody Not Me handles and this is one of them.

Nobody likes to see somebody who has started again from nothing in a new country with two babies and done a bloody good job (if four university degree programmes and the study debt from hell are anything to go by) of it a weeping apologising mess for, well, everything from breakfast up.

Also, he loves my cooking and wants my recipes and we all know that is a flashing neon sign of serious mental unbalance because clearly I cannot cook for shite.

G

PS. Am working on my day off this week purely for the love of the dirty, dirty money because fixing this mess means I now own over a million dollars of real estate. If I don’t vomit at least once an hour, I think you better check I still have a pulse.

PSS. Um, next IVF cycle? Ah, well, why the hell not? Nothing like a nearly multi million dollar debt to sharpen the reflexes with clinic appointments.

PSS. It’s family. You don’t drop family in the turd. Just call me a property tycoon and could somebody for the love of all that you hold holy please help the real estate fairy relieve me for about 400K worth of house? Soon? Eep. Etc.

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Forefront.

After many years spent swearing at my dial up/causing swearing and rapid securing of wireless access points far and wide (I leave it to you, dear reader, to choose which option is the more probable of the two presented), I have made the leap.

Don’t worry, I’m a prototypical slow converter to new technology, and it’s only ADSL but after a lifetime of horse and cart make a cup of tea while the page loads access, I am thoroughly enjoying the heady freeway cruising speed of a virtual toyota corrola. Complete with lack of beverage breaks.

Chez MII now comes even faster and whinier at you with bonus ADSL, and I’d just about vomit with excitement except that I’m too busy illegally downloading five movies, fifty songs and updating my online photo albums with fifty bazillion megagagawhatsis of photos.

At once.

Kidding, clearly. After all, I listen to AM radio these days.

Regardless, due to a certain cancellation appointment becoming available for a certain near and dear’s RE, I can however tell you at lightning fast access speed that, well, urgh.

There’s bossy and there’s ‘I’m not going to tell you anything about why I think your near and dear must use donor egg and now you shall make THIS appointment and THIS appointment and leave fifty litres of blood for THESE specialised tests and I shall see you in eight weeks for the start of your cycle’.

Um, can I suggest fuckoff, lady?

I’m not quite ready for that particular train to depart the crazy station before my sib finishes her own last ditch own ovum go-around. Or, you know, I get my own FET out of the way. Also, nothing says ‘creastfallen downing of a bottle of wine’ and ‘distinct lack of faith re:outcome’ like telling your aforementioned stimming sister that her very own RE is already booking in the donor cycle before she’s even got to egg retrieval.

I did humour the bossy woman by leaving another seven vials of blood behind. Deep down I’ve always wondered just what my karyotype was and now I shall hopefully find out that it does, after all, involve the numbers ’44′ and letters ‘XX’.

At least I hope it does. 

The total count of vials of blood I have casually and liberally shed in local pathology laboratories in recent weeks is now a heady twenty one, in case you wondered. I get about.

Also, this morning I realised that the old pack of stop-gap pill I’ve been taking while I wait an eternity for LS’s police check to emerge expired in, deary me I hate to confess this because I kept the packet since I tossed the pill back in 2004 and so I should have worked this one out before now, 2007.

I am amazed that I have not bled for my nation as yet but apparently the little buggers are still good.

Now, where the feck is that police check?

I got my pure.gon accidentally really cheap due to screw up on part of pharmacist and careful poker face on part of elated patient and I am positively itching to stab myself with 33 units a day until either A: everybody gets bored or B: I ovulate and get to (I hope because if they all cark it after this many years of storage fees I am going to demand a refund due to serious consumer dissatisfaction) transfer me some embryos.

Scattered.

Quite honestly, I’m not sure what to post. I probably intended to write something or other witty about my experiences with the things that people shove up their bottoms, but even a good vegetable-in-arse joke no longer has the power to make me smile. It’s That Bad right now.

I’m just too scattered to think, mostly because I am just plain tired.

I’m tired and miserable and I would like a refund on certain significant parts of my life on accounts of serious consumer dissatisfaction.

There’s nothing like being paid for 70 hours in the last seven days and working over eighty for a cranky old man in a bow tie who professes (ha, do note my attempt at humour there) to be a Professor of Surgery, but is really more like a giant non-wage paying arsehole from the land of anal paperwork repetition, to make you want to slit your wrists.

Over white carpet. His.

Sigh. I doubt he cleans it, anyway. He’d have another miserable lackey for that sort of thing.

Put simply, this job truly BLOWS. Especially the truly mental half-the-hospital cover shift roster that has me leaping in terror every time my pager goes off.

My record is twelve individual pages in a minute and yet they wonder why I can’t call all of them back.

Half of the time several patients are all inconveniently actively doing their level best to die at once while I am stuck in what I shall for the sake of politeness term a ‘meeting’ with a side order of furious relatives wants to hang, draw and quarter me for the operation that Bow Tie performed on their elderly matriarch’s abdomen.

Trust me, I always keep a clear line between myself and the EXIT in that sort of situation. Also, I do my best to dodge the bits of enraged spittle that seem to fly about in accompany to the Angry Gesticulating. They could be carrying goodness knows how many communicable diseases what with all the combined tattoos and missing teeth.

Oh, and then there’s the admissions. They keep on pile-ing (ha!) in via the Emergency Department despite my helpful suggestion that we should refuse to take any more until we know what’s going on with all of the ones we currently have housed in our house of ill health.

THAT could take some time.

Especially for the chap who keeps on shoving needles into bits of himself and then claiming that he ‘fell’ on them because HE keeps sodding off before psychiatry can get to him and he’s not mental enough to section on the grounds that all of his injuries are always carefully non-serious.

He’s just bloody irritating and I can say that because yesterday I spent an hour of precious time admitting him and then he went and fecked off precisely five minutes after I finished discussing his case with psychiatry.

Finally, there’s nothing like clerking a whiny 17 year old with emo hair and native ear piercings who’s been shoved into a paediatric room with bloody fluffy lions on the wall to complete your day. Especially when he’s got yet another bum-related problem related to owning an exceedingly hairy arse (a pilonidal abscess) and I have to go and look at his tailpipe.

I don’t know whether I should truly feel more sorry for him, or save it all for myself.

Waxing should be on the public health budget for some people.

Now if you excuse me, I am about to spend the rest of my joyful day off doing about fifty loads of washing, the grocery shopping and reminding Saag and Naan who I am. They’re getting a bit sketchy on the fine print vis-a-vis our relationship. 

Also, I need to think up a good reason not to take up alcoholism as a career, instead.

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.

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.

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My last will and testament.

Well, kind of. Inspiration for this particular missive comes courtesy of a far-flung relative who (I think) intended well, even if they were surprisingly forthright and passionate about their cause.

Imagine my surprise when I opened what I though was a lovely letter thanking us for our attempts at hospitality in a recent visit and instead found enclosed a long missive about how I really Should Think About The Future with a rather more long term view than most thirty-somethings are accustomed to having. Complete with a blank will form, premarked with my name, address and ‘sign here’s’ in lead pencil. Nice thing, the personal touch.

Ooh-err.

I didn’t know I looked that bad.

Thanks to Uncle GrimReaper, I now have one more piece of paperwork just begging me not to stack my many many early morning coffee cups on it’s pristine surface and bloody well fill it in already.

Except I’m stumped.

What on earth does one write on a will other than a vicious ’I told you I was sick, you pricks!’, closely followed by, ‘To dear Sister Molly I bequeath my 300k mortgage because she needs the motivation to Get A Sodding Job Already’? Oh, and ‘Aunt Bertha can have the leftover pizza in the fridge (the mould scrapes off a treat, you should have checked on me sooner, you know, or it’d still be fresh). Cousin Adam can have my half-full rubbish bin. It’s the big green thing with the flappy lid, in case he’s forgotten what they look like. He must have lost his a very long time ago because he lives in a bloody dump’.

It has always seemed to me that the very best time to be as passive aggressive as possible is after you’re dead because it’s the only time you’ll ever be able to get all your jibes in and leave your opponent with zero capability of arguing back.

So, now what do I do?

After all, whilst I’m not quite as young as I used to be and I’m sure there are some decidedly grey-ish hairs in amongst Clairol’s best do-it-your-one-handed-with-a-mirror self haircolouring efforts these days, I’ve yet to really ever sit down and have a good think about my worldly possessions. Or, importantly, whether I care enough about what happens to them should I ever come a messy second in a contest with the front grill of a local bus to write a will.

To be honest, the way I see it, my family can fight it out all they like for my old tennis shoes, broken stethoscope and staggering collection of really really bad techno music from the days when I thought being cool meant going out all night and dancing to music like you’re having a seizure. It’s not like I’ll be around to care about it anymore.

Or perhaps I’ll leave all my left shoes to my sister, and the right ones to the dog.

Honestly. Now I have to go and write a bloody will, for cryingoutloud. Suggestions gratefully accepted.

PS. I did some real write-y stuff. For a real website. Am feeling very chuffed with myself and dead pleased that the site owner was kind enough to let me disgrace their URL with my scrawlings about IVF. So, importantly, do tell me: did I suck, or can I continue having difficulty getting through doors due to massively swelled cranium?

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What’s in a name?

For several weeks now, I’ve been increasingly anxiously pointing out to my spouse that The Foetii really should have at least one of those new-fangled NAME things each. Two if we’re feeling fancy.

I’ve, in turn, received the kind of lukewarm reception more usually reserved for attempted auditors of a somewhat suspicious tax return. Not precisely direct refusal to participate as such, just determinedly non-offensive passive goddamn avoidance at every possible opportunity. Despite threats on my part to take matters into my own hands and name them myself.

Half hearted observations that if Malena* is an acceptable female name in some cultures, why don’t we go the whole hog and call her sister Chlamydia** (since it has such a flowery ring to it) have got me precisely nowhere.

Finally, last night, whimpered observationd that I couldn’t possibly bear to have The Foetii not only probably in the NICU, but also stuck with the monikers “A” and “B”  for the duration (despite nearly two trimesters worth of notice) got some sort of reaction. An ‘I don’t see the problem’ reaction admittedly, but better than a wild flail for a subject change.

After figuring out from my beady-eyed glare that, no, we shan’t be waiting until after they’re born to have this discussion again, he produced actual name suggestions.

His mother’s, his brother’s and his nephew’s.

Whilst there is nothing intrinsically wrong as such with any of those options, clearly two are male (and therefore I thought rather obviously Not Suitable) and the third is, well, currently in full use by my mother-in-law. I hasten to add that I happen to quite like my MIL, but I hadn’t really contemplated going so far as to naming my firstborn after her. Ungrateful as that sounds.

Sigh. “A” and “B” it remains for now…

 

* Malena is a medical expression to describe tarry-black seriously stinky poop that occurs as a consequence of bleeding in the upper gut. It also happens to be a real female name, presumably used by parents who are not aware of the medical meaning.

** Clearly I don’t plan to name my daughters after either a sexually transmitted infection OR offensive butt-productions.

On: Happy New Year, from a hard nosed cow

NYE was the usual palaver this year, is it just me that doesn’t see the ‘magic’ of too much alcohol and crowded, expen$$ive everywhere?

The area around our (rather modest) apartment complex was a veritable wellspring of drunks in various postures of inebriation, ranging from wobbling slightly, to forced to sit, to having difficulty getting beer bottle to mouth, to discarding said beer bottle anywhere whilst spontaneously flashing rude bits, to my perennial personal favourite vomiting over the edge of the 20 somethingth floor balcony they are currently occupying. Class all the way.

I haven’t yet mentioned that drunk people have trouble reading the time yet either. Honestly we had a million scattered countdowns (all at def con 10, and slurred), some latecomers were still warbaling numbers with enthusiasm at quarter past.

So happy new year to all, and on to the next complaint/tale.

I know my posts are family heavy, which is no mean feat for a woman with two biological relatives in the country. I don’t see them an awful lot either, so I think the prominence has to do with the genetic streak of bilateral foot-in-mouth disease that we all have.

Keeping it short what happened is that upon having lunch with my sister and opening up further (and very painfully) about our fertility, or complete bloody lack thereof, she says to me the following:

‘Don’t take this the wrong way…..

(Which made my face start to tick…pet peeve…if you have to say this, then you KNOW it’s about to offend the listener. So don’t f*cking say it. Not hard. You can think it instead, or sing out ‘La La La’ until the impulse goes away)

……, but I’d never seen you as the maternal type’.

Cue open mouthed gape on my part

Apparently I eat my young.

I did, you will be relieved to note dear reader, just manage to bite down on the impulse to tell her that her miscarriage must’ve been all her fault in revenge.

A ‘sheeeeeeeesh‘ (with extra ‘e’s) is in order.

Tech Tags: tact family infertility new year

On: My father is an ass, a retractment

I would just like to say, in the spirit of fairness, that my father spoke to me today, and once he’d got some more tactless angst out he managed to do the big thing (and right thing), and offer to help if he could.

Hairy Mistmas every one!

On: My father is an ass, part deux

….and I’m starting to think that so am I, by association

Whilst I was very clear about my FATHER’s side of the conversation and my (couldn’t think of them at the time, but rather pointed) imagined responses, I neglected to mention what I did actually say to the verbal diarrhoea of insensitivity yesterday.

Do you know what I did? I’m ashamed to admit it but I NODDED my head (despite being on the phone and it therefore being wasted) and agreed with the man. Sheesh I am an ass. A weak one at that.

It went something like ‘…yes, you’re probably right, it’s easier not to bother, and why would we want to reproduce when we could have so many more lovely holidays and a nicer house this way?’

I make myself sick.

Tech Tags: family I+am+an+ass+too

On:my father is an ass. Confirmation.

I title this entry ‘an ode to my not-so-tactful father OR what not to say to an infertile woman ‘

The dear man just got all top four on my list in our 5 minute ago phone conversation. Tact clearly runs in the family. Not only did he insert his foot, but followed it with the contents of the room.

1. what? why have children anyway?

I dunno, I was bored with my life and thought the welfare cheques were what I was missing?

Because I love my husband *damnit* and he will be an excellent f*cking father. And I hope to hell I’ll not be too bad at the parenthood thing myself.

2. why would you want to go do a thing like that (IVF)

erm…because we’re infertile. And we’d like to have children. Not in a ‘in passing, if it happens’ kinda way either.

3. What about your degree?

I will be finished before an IVF child, even if we got lucky FIRST f*cking time. (well, ok, NOT f*cking, but involving a pot, petri dish and incubator) And we don’t NEED two wages, so who cares if I’m late graduating?

4. Life’s much better without ‘em anyway, you can do so much more.

All I can say is ‘way to go, Dad’. It’s lucky we’re related or I wouldn’t be speaking to your insensitive ass for a loooooong time. Geez

Tech Tags: family foot+in+mouth infertility tact