The M Day post.

Do forgive the mild tardiness, for where I live the flowers are now all half price and the chocolates have been reduced to merely their normal price, restaurants are not full of unsuspecting elderly women half-abducted by guilty sons for lunch and the like. M day is more over than acid wash denim and a good neon fuzzy headband round these parts.

I was trying to find a way to organise the mess that is my brain and form some coherent, typeable and mildly pithy observations about the dreaded M day. I failed.

Here’s the thing, anyway.

M day is just one of those holidays that only seems to set people up to fail or feel shit in some way or another. It might be the gloating Bacefook post of a friend who got breakfast in bed, a spa trip, alcohol and chocolate about how nice her life is full well knowing that most of the rest of us didn’t.

It might be the abducted-grandmother lunch bonanza when probably most of us didn’t get that, either.

It might be the fact that it’s shoved down everybody’s damn throats and quite frankly sucks the chrome off a towbar for the infertile set.

It might be, as in my case, being offhandedly offered a box of chocolates won a week ago in a raffle as the prize of surviving reproduction thus far.

Really, just about everybody can only stuff it up or lose in some way or other and that, I do not like.

Honestly, I’m glad it’s over so I can get on with enjoying my three children I am fortunate to have without feeling let down by all the things I failed to score.

G

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.

Sssshhhh!

Internet, honestly, I really should be getting to bed since Miss Nightshift herself has gone bye-bye to the land of nod about an hour ago (with the aid of my left br.east as is customary these days at least up and until my n1pples fall off from overuse, I get jack of it enough to go cold turkey or I learn to cope with the miffed screeching better than I currently am able to when I attempt to recover bits of my own blasted anatomy from her gob. The kid sure has a thing for boobies).

But I can’t help a wee chat with you all and it isn’t to point out that Miss Naan, in a pleasingly congruent line of narration, also said to me in the shower today with some three-year old approval that she sure liked my boobies because, Internet, THAT they’re-not-what-they-used-to-be-so-taverymuch moment was rather spoiled by the predictable question as to why Daddy doesn’t have boobies and while-on-the-subject-what’s-going-on-with-Daddy’s-f@nny-anyway-and-can-I-explain-why-it’s-kind-of-all-different.

No I can’t explain just now, child, at least not without choking just a little and that is why I took that precise moment of anatomical discussions to move right along to the eternal grot behind the ears battle. Also, no, we are not the naked family, LS squeals like a squashed cat and generally sprints like he’s got a nasty case of the squits and the rumble to toilet ratio is getting uncomfortably close if the twins catch him dressing. Three year olds are just painfully observant.

Especially in the supermarket.

What I was going to tell you about is how Saag has developed this nasty habit of not being exactly bothered enough by the urge to excrete in general to go to the damn toilet already, an art she first mastered some time ago now because, Internet, I am damned about how to stop the puddles of liquid and worse appearing around the place and I think I could do with some help because my house, it is not an open latrine.

The kid seriously sometimes decides just to let nature happen and hope that nobody notices the smell until presumably the Clean Bum fairies work their magic. The FIRST time I caught her farting up a storm and them just letting rip in her pants because D.ora’s pull was just too hard to resist, it was at least kind of cute to see the cheeky grin, smiling ‘Shhhhhhhhhh!’ gesture and accompanying pronnouncement ’It’s a SECRET!’ as she continued to watch D.ora. You’d have to have your nasal passages removed to not be all in on the secret.

It’s not cute now, three days in a row is killing me. Today has also included two discovered-late puppy puddles, one under the dining table, the other in the playroom where presumably the same bathroom ennui struck.

Please tell me it’s just a phase. I’m also presuming that rubbing noses in it is off the menu.

G

Dill

I do not normally partake of drive by posting, Internet, but oh lordy please do forgive me for I have been a bloody dill.

Why?

I went and got delusions of lactational grandeur in my head. I dropped the dose of my mot.ilium and to compound the foolishness I also completely stopped pumping overnight (okay, so this second part might also be because Bhaji has been Not Herself since and during the whole Thing With The Snot and now she seems to sleep with me pretty much all of the night and I kind of figured that since I am an all night milk bar, albeit an increasingly reluctant one, that fark it I am currently dying by fatigued inches as it is and getting up an extra time to hear ‘cha’chug’ while my nipples stretch to ungodly proportions for forty minutes can go by the bleeping wayside for a bit).

You’ll never guess what happened next, Internet.

I got mastitis (yes, a-bloody-gain, I am going for some kind of gram positive invasion record here), and THEN my nipples began cringing in terror whenever Bhaji so much as whimpered in her sleep because she has been abusing them with enough suction to suck the chrome off of a towbar. Continuously. For the last three days. Around the clock.

It hasn’t been great.

See you on the flip side.

G

Figures.

M’Aidez.

Send. Help. At. Once.

Have. Mastitis.

You’ve. GOT. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

How on earth does one get mastitis when I could swear ze breast milk has an intramammary half life of about thirty seconds before a bunch of primitive reflexes in a baby suit sucks it all out?

I’m rather peeved.

Also, my areolae are at that delightful mashed from the inside stage I like to call ‘scream at first latch’. The outside looks okay, but that first suck feels kind of like Bhaji is pulling the wobbly bits on the inside clean out through the nipple. With a cheesegrater.

G

Now, where was I?

You’ll have to forgive the dribs and drabs of what is now a full one week old regurgitation of experience despite the fact that 2011 model newborns don’t seem to do very much different to the 2008 models back in the day, i.e. eat, sh!t and sleep sometimes all at once and without any reference to table manners whatsoever.

I guess I technically and on paper have reams of free time but in reality I am mostly stuck on the couch in my dressing gown smelling sweetly of post partum night sweat until about three pm with what is politely referred to as a ‘cluster feeder’.

I prefer to think of BN as more of a direct hit on the areolae.

Anyway, small spoiler there was quite a lot of regurgitation in the upcoming tale, of course, so the turn of phrase is truly fitting and I am keeping it.

Double anyway, although the 2008 models have moved on a bit in complexity, I think I’ve hit upon the solution to my utter lack of time to scratch own arse blog. It’s called ‘Diego’. When the cluster bomb gives my tits a break- and on THAT note I shall one day soon attempt to write a post on the whole nursing thing and the precarious nature of same because my gad but I am still scarred to infinity from the whole sobbing hormonal disaster that was the spectacular failure of lactation in any form with Saag and Naan and it’s hard to talk about the boobie thing, even now.

Perhaps I should leave it at today I am breastfeeding and I have no idea what tomorrow brings. Hopefully that’s enough. If I get enough ‘today’s’ tomorrow never comes, right?

Regardless.

I didn’t go into labour in the end, despite predictions to the contrary and that is how I came to turn up to the hospital not-promptly at 8am for intended 7am arrival slightly decadently decked out in actual makeup, with brushed hair and fasted to grumpy oblivion, only to be bumped all damn day for actual emergencies.

After about one pm I started telling each bearer of bump news that the next bastard that came in and told me that would be supplying the meals because lack of food tends to focus my mind on, um, food.

I think I was probably a little obsessional upon reflection, because when somebody tells you that you’re being bumped for a genuine emergency and your only comeback is a half-snarled ‘McChicken’, it’s time to grow some empathy.

When the entire labour ward had finally had their emergency c-section one after the other for a net rate of about one hundred percent that day, it was finally my go to be wheeled down in one of those breezy backless gowns, expose my bum to a theatre full of people I know and have the anaesthetist confidently and without difficulty do the spinal.

And not go numb in any useful fashion unless they were planning to extract the baby from my left foot.

And demonstrate how I could still walk.

And make the poor anaesthetist, a colleague of LS’s, frown and start muttering about how ‘most unusual’ it all was and ‘never happened to me before’  and ‘something VERY strange about one Geohde subarachnoid space since this happened with Saag and Naan’ etc.

And that’s when they set up for the GA and that’s the bit where I cried like an overtired toddler in front of my colleagues because having an unexpected general anaesthetic for an elective well-planned much awaited babyectomy was all to bloody much and being last to the birthday party for my own child suckethed more than I could take at that point without at least a Happy Meal and a scotch to warm me up to the possibility.

So that’s how everybody in theatre XX and hospital YY came to go home about two hours late that day because it’s amazing what having a husband who is a direct colleague of the poor beleaguered anaesthetist will do for about an hour’s epidural placement and farting around topping-up time  if the patient inconveniently bursts into tears.

Somehow I think there are several people who would like to kill me in that theatre, upon reflection, but I got my awake babyectomy and the bit where Bhaji shrieked her bloody head off  before even being completely ex-utero was something I appreciate all the more, because I so nearly didn’t get to hear it.

She could have shut up a bit sooner, though.

Next time I’ll explain the vomit.

G

PS…most humiliating point of the day was not the kleenex moment over the spinal. It was having somebody I work with every day learn where my urethra lies in intimate detail placing the catheter. I think we’re both going to pretend it never happened and I hope she isn’t prone to genital flashbacks.

Break.

Hi, I’m Geohde.

I think last wrote something around these parts some time in the Jurassic era but then I swear a Brontosaurus ate my keyboard and a Tyrannosaurus decided I looked exactly like the right kind of sympathetic ear to unload a lengthy diatribe about all that Nasty Predator bad press and how difficult it is to find a good knitting circle when everybody thinks you’ll probably use their ribs for needles and so on.

Yes, I’m making things up and, no, I have no earthly idea when I last posted, either of content full stop let alone content of quality, I’m honestly too plain old tired to check the date. Perhaps we should stick with ‘a dinosaur ate my homework’ and THAT my friends is a shame because I work in a positive pent-up stew of human experience and the inability to share in a timely fashion clearly crimps the old style somewhat.

There was the amusing time I worked two weeks straight with the exception of my birthday at thirty six weeks pregnant, pissing off my boss with the request in the process and still sadly being denied an actual full weekend as such to whinge about my sausage legs while laying sprawled on the couch watching reruns of something or other on TV.

There was also the almost as funny time that LS decided the Internet connection didn’t seem quite ship-shape and in a fit of ‘fixing’ or ‘improving’ things managed to break it rather impressively. That took three days to fix, all done in bits and cranky pieces at the end of my cover shifts. At thirty seven weeks pregnant.

I can’t say I handed out overmuch sympathy to the whimpers of Internet withdrawal.

Lest I forget there have also been the slightly droll times LS has been interstate on Matters Professional, leaving my heavily gravid self to do it all solo. There’s been quite a bit of that, actually, and really he’s just bloody lucky I haven’t gone into labour when he’s four hours away by plane just to spite him.

I guess I could mention the time that at almost thirty eight weeks pregnant I found myself leaving work two hours late because extracting twins by c-section from somebody with a BMI in the 60s turns out to be rather hard work. The anaesthetist couldn’t hit a vein with a standard length cannula and an ultrasound machine and that was just the beginning of our collective troubles. The bit where we converted to a general anaesthetic mid-stream was kind of hairy, but I think the kicker was when she just kept on trickling blood post operatively and I had my hand to my elbow through abdominal wall and still had no earthly idea if her uterus was actually responding to enough oxytoxic agents to make cement look all soft because I couldn’t feel it.

That was today and I hope she’s okay.

Tomorrow is my last hurrah at work, I am hoping to finish in a knackered blaze of sharp with a scalpel in hand and THEN ladies of the Internet, I plan to get some bastard I work with to actually recheck my enormous fundal height and my blood pressure because I haven’t had an obstetric visit myself in nearly three weeks on accounts of the clinics being overrun with too many pissed off pregnant women as it is (without losing a staff member to the other side of Angry Wait) and my legs, they dint to about my knee and my vision has been a little starry of late and honestly saying  I feel a tad on the second hand side is missing the chance to abuse the delightful expression ‘like refried shit’.

Mostly I’m just writing to say Hello and I Haven’t Given Birth Yet. I’ve also gone and pushed back my own c-section to two weeks hence because I need a bloody break before I can face a newborn.

G

PS. Am contracting like a b!tch almost all the time these days and somehow I don’t think it agrees with me.

The Most.

The thing that makes a relative blogging drought, okay even an entirely reasonable blogging drought on accounts of working like a blue-arsed fly just weeks from term and sleeping like a dead elephant with a seriously bad nose-mucus-congestion snoring problem that contracts just painfully enough to wake right up three times a bloody hour every hour all damn night because THAT my friends is what I call a full and active social diary these days, anyway I am rambling.

I also realise dead elephants usually fail to snore in any way on accounts of general deadness. They probably also don’t contract for broadly similar reasons.

The thing is that not writing every day to bitch about things that currently piss one off, like, um, pretty much everything, makes it kind of intimidating when one does eventually throw some fuel on the sleep deprivation fire and stay up to the dizzying hour of nine pm to communicate. Be gentle, please, dear reader.

Basically, Internet, if a nebulous ‘it’ moved or passed into my field of vision in the last week, it probably annoyed me.

I think perhaps there is just a smidgeon of self righteous foot stamping thrown in for good measure, too, since LS has now on the cusp of thirty six weeks gestation unilaterally decided to throw the proposed consensus name out the proverbial window and wants to call this child something that sounds like it comes from a particularly excited Italian car dealer with a gift for exaggeration in ten syllables and fifty screaming vowels. Give or take.

Also, over my dead body or HIS if he keeps it up.

Additionally, I currently look like this(or a slightly more fed up version but attaching my camera-phone to my slow computer pisses me off too much to try at this point too. Unsurprisingly):

And feel like THIS:

Which is THIS much better than I felt at this point with the twins:

But despite that, my request for a small weekend reprieve from working twelve days straight at nearly term including three thirteen hour shifts in a four day period of those twelve with a mere ten hour ‘cover’ thrown in the mix (presumably for lifestyle and balance and stuff) on my birthday was deemed excessively decadent and thus I am now only working the three thirteen hour shifts instead of having an actual weekend off.

My cankles are whimpering, and my mood? She is not getting any better at the news.

Regardless, if I got to bed tonight and wake up into morning without exploding amniotic fluid all over the bathroom floor at 3am then I am officially the most unhappily pregnant I have ever been and if I DO, I think I know why.

Sigh.

At least THAT way I’d get the weekend to myself.

G

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Bonus.

LS is on a plane-slash-overseas doing conferenc-ey things trip and I probably should by rights be sitting on the couch on my ever expanding arse eating ice cream and watching singing competitions on the box (in my underwear no less) without fear of judgement, but instead I thought I’d say hello to you all.

Hello Internet.

It’s been thirty almost two long LONG weeks of vomiting my guts up and if one more person tells me how big or low or all baby or bleeping radiant I look it is going to end in bloodshed. Other people’s. I am good at making people bleed, I do it for a living except for the bits where I try to stop other people bleeding to death, instead.

Also, I write you this missive because I have somehow cleverly conned the twins into thinking that 7pm is the New Bedtime, despite the fact that one can still hear only slightly older children kicking about some kind of ball in the street and it is still dead bright outside. I am not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth. I said it was bedtime and I guess I should take up professional poker or something because three year olds, especially in combination, are usually remarkably canny suspicious bastards about that sort of thing, yet mine drank their milk and fell for it hook line and tuck-in-goodnight.

Lucky me I guess, at least right up and until the suspiciously canny bastards wake up at four aayy emm or something, but then again since I have to sort out all matters domestic on my tod for a week, an early run up at the get-exceedingly-whiny-twins-and-self-dressed-and-out-the-door-in-time-to-catch-peak-hour game might not be such a bad idea.

Did I mention I am working approximately fifty hours next week in the third trimester with rapidly expanding cankles with three year old whinebots all on my own? Oh, good.

There’s always coffee. If no adult sees me drink it then the trendy judgement never happens, either. Take note, baristas everywhere, on that last bit because the only other thing that is liable to make me bother to move my creaking frame anywhere fast with a scalpel is in response to a spontaneous and repeated offer of decaf.

Yours,

G

PS. I think I told you about the poor, poor woman who had one monochorionic twin die at twenty weeks and then went into labour and lost the other at twenty three weeks and had a nasty case of chorioamnionitis and also managed to come about as close as it gets to bleeding to death afterwards. I should really stop whinging about my life, huh?

PSS. Edited for the grammar. The shame. It’s probably still all wonky and clearly I need more sleep.

Gastro.

Dear Internet,

In case you ever wondered, I think one of the very worst times to have virulent gastro (and I know this is gastro and not just Revenge Of The All Day Spew on accounts of rampant something that doesn’t happen with morning sickness plus the bit about three days back where I had to take Saag home from daycare on accounts of profuse vomiting. I am quick on the uptake like that) is when nineteen weeks pregnant and with a new amnio puncture mark in one’s side.

Also, I am profusely sorry to the good people of Rep.co for leaving most of last night’s dinner in their garden bed this morning. I was slow enough on the uptake to try and go to work before that bit happened.

Geohde.

PS. About seven days to karyotype but I can already tell you the normal person bit that Bhaji Nightshift appears to also be of the kotex purchasing fraternity in about twelve years, give or take.

Nope, not quite.

Hi Internet,

It’s me, the woman with the invisible tongue fur. Remember me?

Yes, I do still go to bed by eight pm but today I am determinedly staying up way late and am dutifully clip-clopping away at my keyboard because, Internet, I miss you. If I don’t make time up aforementioned way late, past when the most determined two year old reveller has packed it in and stopped singing the fifty-billionth verse of ‘This Old Man’, well, I never seem to actually turn my computer on at all.

Sigh.

Also, double well, I was THIS close to shutting the door on the arse of The Puke because I didn’t vomit for two whole days and then I puked my guts up after dinner two days straight (tonight inclusive in case you wondered). Dinner didn’t even taste very good the first time and I am thinking there may actually be a niche market for things to make vomitus more appealing. Or less generally burning, lumpy, orange and revolting.

Either will do.

Anyway, I burped and gagged up only about half of my dinner tonight and I don’t know how three sausages and some beans turned into lumpy acid-coated plastic but I swear it did.

I. Am. So. Very. Over. The. Puke.

Please make it stop?

I am actually really getting quite concerned that at the ripe old gestation of fifteen weeks I am still vomiting because, Internet, what if it doesn’t stop? I know The Puke is a lot better than it was since I only feel like I’ve just eaten a mouldy sandwich from about three pm and not all damn day but, um, I am going to lose both my sanity and my back teeth at this rate.

Yours,

Geohde The Acid Breather.

PS. Two midwives asked if I was pregnant at work last Friday. I’m not surprised since I’m kind of the size of a small gestating truck. I’m also quietly shitting myself and emailing my union for advice because the last time the powers that be heard about an oven bun situation I ended up being given the proverbial arse.

Sigh.

Bad Bhaji

Do excuse the air of haste about the blog, it’s just that I write this brief missive in those golden five seconds known as ‘Dinner in the oven then bolting off to nightshift’. Yes, again.

I have six remaining and then I have six whole glorious weeks where I only have to look at women’s business ends in daylight hours. I can’t tell you how draining this two months of nocturnal nauseated-beyond-belief have been but I maintain that the first trimester is best done in daylight hours, if possible. Vomiting at 3am is just adding insult to oesophageal injury.

Anyway, BN still appears to be in there, although the little bugger did take twenty panicky minutes (after being THIS easy every other damn time, of course) to find on my doppler yesterday. LS also still appears to be whinging intensely about his lot in life.

I think that’s about the status quo around these parts, except for the bit that now LS has come to me with the solemn pronouncement (gleaned after much solemn introspection) that all the HOUSEWORK he is doing is what is holding back his career and thusly he plans not to do any more of that sort of thing and it is now all my problem.

Hold me while I laugh hysterically, please.

Like I said, nothing has changed a jot around these parts and I shall still be scrubbing body fats and very personal hairs off of his shower when I can’t stand the filth any more.

Men.

G

PS. Bad Geohde for forgetting the patient with the third degree tear (the kind of tear sustained when one pushes a watermelon out of a Not Watermelon sized hole and rips allllmost all the way through to a rectal delivery if you know what I mean) had only had a spinal and was awake with working ear holes while humpty dumpty was painstakingly put back together in theatre. Otherwise, when the anaesthetist took an unusual interest in the surgical going’s on and popped down the caboose end for a look, I would have not replied “I had a c-section’ to his equally bad ‘I can’t even work out what I’m looking at here’. Ouch.

I think I might hunt that patient down and tell her all about my wound infection, just to even things out. Ain’t no mess free way to have a baby, really there isn’t.

3.7.End

Fuckity fuck.

It’s IVF number eight or bust, I guess, but since a full six of those cycles (with one happily notable exception, of course) have been such dismal, dismal diedintheass failures I think the genetic complement of my frozen spawn is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

Fuck.

I’m turning into the kind of IVF’er that NOBODY wants in the waiting room. The pissed off cynic with real reason to be pissed off.

Failing a couple of cycles could be seen as slightly careless, but six would take a impressive head injury to ignore in the prognostic department.

Fuck.

Pass the kleenex, would you, because what the hell do I do from here?

G

Meanwhile, I have got my goods out for more people than I care to recall in the last year, but is my pap smear up to date? No, siree.

…(faint, veeery faint)…

Just keeping you updated about my urinary habits because I accidentally on purpose seem to keep pissing on sticks and sighing with dismay when a line, a tiiiiiiiiny pissy little line pops up right on the whatever-given-up border.

Then I spend a depressing forty minutes trying to even see the sucker under natural light.

Then I toss the bloody thing in the drawer, pour a glass of wine and pace frantically.

Then I swear creatively, put the wine down, go and get the bloody thing out again and compare to yesterday’s vintage.

It’s insane.

They’re getting lighter, but it’s nearly a full week post booster so I guess unless I am a real renal scrooge withe the hCG, it’s another bloody chemical.

Pah.

Now if you shall excuse me, I have to go stare at some stale urine on sticks.

G

Timing.

I think that, after having just opened letter from my clinic hoping perhaps to have real word of cycle protocol (or failing that a bleeping prescription for the DRUGS since I am a confirmed fertility junkie these days) only to discover instead an ‘oops we forgot to bill you six months ago for those frozen embryos of yours, so’s how abouts you pay us NOW, xoxo hugs and kisses Financial Henchmen’ I can safely observe that timing is critical in these sort of delicate matters.

That is if the sender doesn’t actually want aforementioned letter rolled up tight, set alight and shoved firmly up their rectum.

Personally, having just had five embryos die in vitro and the last remaining hope die in vivo rather messily, I think I plan to tell Clinic Unmentioned that I highly disapprove of their style.

Also, where the feck is my puregon?

G

Piddle me this.

I’m eight days post ovulation.

Yes, I have no restraint whatsoever and therefore I am piddling with abandon on anything that doesn’t complain and move out of the way fast enough to avoid being struck by a stream of unerringly-well-aimed warm urine.

What can I say? I’ve had a lot of practise.

Unfortunately, and this may sound perverse, they’re all positive.

Each and every one of the damn things, I SWEAR, including several mistaken icy pole sticks, one coffee mug and the sides of one unfortunate pair of socks.

A question for you.

Albeit brief, I’m on nightshit shift and a little cognitively fuzzy right now. It’s been interesting to say the least.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, what do you get when you cross a Sudanese migrant with two previous unattended stillbirths back home, exactly zero english, no formal education, no social supports and no obstetric care EVER with newfound free access to public healthcare in my country?

You get a lady brought in by ambulance at 3am moaning about the fact that her baby is moving and she’s tired and wants to rest.

Also, you get an hour of fun trying to figure out just how pregnant she actually is THIS time and why her barely twelve month old sole surviving liveborn child was taken out of her custody.

Turns out she tried to kill it after birth.

I decided not to investigate A: who she’s shagging and B: why she’s not on any contraception, mostly because I wasn’t sure if I could get the message across using only polite gestures and plus I don’t actually think she really knows how babies are made anyway.

Welcome to obstetric care, emergency medicine meets third world. It’s ugly out there.

Put it AWAY, they cried.

Argument A for why abdominoplasty should be available on the public health system here….

Yeah, I know ‘AARGH! My EYES!, MY retinas! Why did you not WARN me that shar-pei abdomen with elastagirl stretch was coming?’

At least nobody can call me boring, right?

Also, anybody expecting twins of, say, about five foot seven inches height and 110 pounds when they stay away from the Golden Arches can’t say they don’t know what’s coming.

Consider this a small PSA. Abdomen = rooted. By act of transfer catheter.

Twins = awesome, in case you wondered, but by heck I plan to rack up the plastic surgery dollars putting humpty dumty together again someday before I am too old to care. I’m not showing you my tits, but they’re orange-in-a-deflated-sock worse.

For christ’s sake, I used to be able to put my mobile phone wedged lengthwise between them for storage and still have protruding bosom, and now?

Well, NOW, I could put the damn thing right in my A cup bra and still have space. Enough said.

I’ve shown you mine, world, where’s yours?

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.

So, how has YOUR morning been?

As for me, well I’ve been kind of busy.

Feel free to speculate on originator and circumstances in the comments section.

Hint: it wasn’t me, but it was fortunately enough fibre-filled, formed and still steaming when I discovered it smack-bang in the middle of my loungeroom.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a big pile of shit to clean up, and I am not speaking figuratively this time.

Sometimes I despair.

Otherwise known as yet another random anecdote or two from the Giant Mental Filing Cabinet of Stupid Things I Keep Inside my Head.

I’ve got plenty more from whence this one comes, too. One day at the rate I am going I shall have to alphabetise the blasted thing.

Regardless, let me recount some recent verbal output Saag and Naan have effortlessly managed to extract from the mouths of others. You know, since they’re currently (touch wood, touch wood, I hear no protests as yet….heck, jump up and down and have a party) napping. For the second time today.

The first stretch was two hours, but you think I would have learned my lesson about bragging by now. Besides, lest I forget, Naan did a giant, liquid (but oddly odourless)  poo in the middle of the night. She, oddly enough for a child who is mostly content to lie in her own waste, screamed like a banshee with buttocks pasted in battery acid until her stupid maternal unit thought to inspect her nappy. Only to discover the poor kid’s  buttocks that did look rather like the aforementioned acid etched variety.

Oh.

In my defence, it was 2am, a time at which I am not precisely my fastest mentally, and the jet-engine shrieking was rather off-putting.

So.

Recently-ish, Saag, Naan and myself as the transporting parental unit went to a children’s party. Fascinating thus far, I know. Do humour me as I add a little background, without which the punchline may fall a little flat.

When we go to such events I generally pre-emptively dress the Indian Takeaways in the same outfit, albeit with a minor tweak or two between spawn. This is so that I can airily wave my arm to those who keep on insisting they cannot possibly tell a small blonde and a giant brunette apart and mutter something about Saag being the one in silver shoes. You know, as I drink wine, or at least wish there was wine.

I do this because I figure that it should fulfil the unwritten Second Law Of Twin Identification (the first law is that two children must belong to one woman and look the same age), i.e. Thou Shall Not Dress Your Spawn Matching Unless They Are Twins.

It’s a heavy hint.

It also means that if I need to rapidly locate my flock, I only have to remember one outfit, and my memory is not all that flash these days.

Anyway.

I usually also dress them to within an inch of their life in pink, on the basis that this is the almost universal code for owning a vag.ina and being a girl.

This way, most of the inevitable ’Are they twins?’ and the erroneously chirpy  ’A boy and a girl, how lovely!’ is avoided.

On this occasion, I even went one step further and dressed them in a particularly well loved shirt. Shrts that, ever to the point, read ‘I Am Not A Boy’. Written on a pink background smack bang across the middle of the chest.

You can imagine my confused look when almost the very first thing that happened after I unleashed Saag and Naan was that somebody walked up to Naan, looked down jovially at the pink jean clad self-proclaimed ’I am NOT a boy’, patted her on the head and uttered the following immortal words:

‘Why, HELLO young man! Is that your older sister over there?’

Sometimes I despair.

I had another story about a comment in the park that Naan could not possibly be the same age as Saag because she is, and I quote, ‘tiiiiiiiny!’, but I really cannot be bothered anymore.

You get the idea. At least there was champagne.

New things that annoy me.

Actually, they simply skip merrily over point ‘annoy’ and downright piss me right off.

In other words, I was at work today running around a mostly unfamiliar hospital like a slightly useless blue bottomed fly trying to do my level best to decrease the general illness quotient floating around. Please note that this was in the face of some impressively determined effort on the parts of the patients to really, really, screw up their health, usable veins, pawn-able items, pinch the Un Fun drugs off the resus trolley, and nick off with half the clean linen as well.

If you’re going to pinch something, people, try the morphine. Adrenaline probably isn’t quite the buzz you’re looking for.

Regardless.

If I get one more flipping bleep-and-run page asking me to ‘review the patient in bed 5A’ without the helpful addition of the following items as a minimum, namely:  the bleeping ward, nurse name, extension number, patient NAME, diagnosis and the eternal optimistic query of why they need to be seen now (and not more happily, for me at least, tomorrow, when I am not working), well, I shall simply have to hunt down the cretin responsible and drown them in iodised salt.

Or possibly I may strangle them with my voluminous handover sheet while calmly repeating the mantra ‘ESP is Not Scientifically Validated as a Means of Communication’.

That is all. I’m not even asking anybody to say ‘please’, or ‘thank you’ for that matter.

It’s been a very long day of investigating multiple 5A false alarms.

Piece of a.ss

Dear Internet,

Do excuse the big, black raincoat. Oh, and the shadows. We wouldn’t want to get caught doing something naughty, now, would we?

So, psst. Wanna see something interesting? Is arse your thing at all, because if so, Internet, it’s your lucky day. I’ve got not one, but TWO arses on offer today for your viewing pleasure. So, want to see?

You do? Okay.

Ah, well, sorry about that, I didn’t mean to get your hopes up only to dash your vision of some truly impressive arse. It’s just the good people at Photo.bucket tell me that I would be dispensing po.rn to the world at large if they let me keep a photo including Golden Arches on their site.

The fact that it is the arses of two one year olds taken by their maternal unit at context-appropriate bathtime notwithstanding.

Shame, really. It’s actually a pretty darn cute shot.

Honestly, I think the world may have gone a tiny bit mad when a mother cannot store future embarrassment for her spawn online by keeping a picture of such squeezable dimply cheeks in her own very obscure URL.

It’s not like I even went to the trouble of tagging the bleeping thing with children! nude! arse!, or any other slightly unsavoury combination of terms for easy discovery. I’m not nuts, and that may attract the wrong kind of Indian Takeaway fanclub entirely.

Shoot, since clearly taking a photo of an infant’s bottom means one is behind the subject (so to speak) you can’t even see their faces. It’s anonymous infant arse. So thank-you, Photo.bucket, for the above message and the heads up that I shall be in Big Trouble if I continue to use my account to post po.rnographic items.

But tell me, would one cheek only per infant get past your filter?

What precisely is the maximum level of ass allowed? Curious minds and their cameras now badly want to know, just on general principles.

Finally, good puritans of Photo.bucket, while I have your attention and before I depart, can I enquire as to your views with regards to, say, folded elbows shot up really close?

In the trenches.

Still.

The first world war was terrible, and I do not mean to be facile when I say this, but at least you got trenchfoot, rather than Spewfoot, Spewfront, Snotshirt and, my personal favourite thus far, the dreaded Sh!tnails.

Try not to dwell on the last item overmuch.

I’d almost prefer to have my feet rot off in increasingly smelly and colourful ways whilst stumbling about in the cold and wet in old boots and on the bleeding stumps of remaining leg, enthusiastically trying to generally increase the Ventilation Hole quotient in the enemy by means of well-applied High Velocity Lead Therapy to my current reality of chasing down unhappy toddlers in random areas of the house because they have overwhelmed their Nappy Defences and have cheerful sh!tstreamers running down one (and sometimes BOTH) lower limbs.

Also, I do not like recognising milk out of the wrong orifice entirely.

Regardless, I am still not feeling quite well myself and the state of my nails and description of above events makes it clear that neither are Saag and Naan.

Goodnight, I’m off in desperate search of a good nail-file and possibly a vat of bleach.

Consider this a warning.

To you, and you, and you, and, yes YOU. These pretty biohazard signs aren’t just for show, you know.

Don’t come too near the blog today.

Seriously. The Terrible Twosome have, in direct challenge to the makers of the rotavirus vaccine, cleverly gone and caught an invigorating strain of gastro, and they’re not afraid to share it.

I have fallen victim, and reminded myself in the process that one should not eat cabbage before vomiting profusely. It’s a bugger to pull out of your nose afterwards, especially at 3 am when you begin to thing that dying is a real possibility.

Stay away, I beg of you!

Otherwise you may also discover the sheer unpleasantness of twelve hours of projectile vomiting, followed by the same action at the reverse end, combined with Bouncy Recovered Twins and a distinctly unsympathetic LS. I suspect he has not forgiven me my attitude to his Man Cold, given he suggested I go to work today. The mere matter that I cannot find myself more than thirty seconds from bathroom facilities notwithstanding.

Hope he catches it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I vomited all over my bed last night and I need to wash some sheets.

What about ME?

Sigh. It isn’t fair.

I write this missive as-yet unshowered and with the mental agony that comes of knowing one has a washing basket simply bursting with creatively bodily fluid coated clothing to take care of, a full load already in the machine, another one in the dryer, and a basket containing desperately required Fresh Underwear to put away.

Oh, and the dishwasher is full to the brim (fortunately with CLEAN dishes, or we would be eating off of paper plates today) but I haven’t had a chance to empty the blasted thing yet.

In case you wondered, I’m writing this one hard-won sentence at a time as the Toddling Terrors literally rip up my study with ill-concealed glee. They got bored with marauding around my loungeroom. The littered instep-lacerating corpses of torn-apart toys attest to the fickle nature of their affections and the limited attention span of one year-olds.

Hence my significant drop in Domestic Productivity and the move to a New and Fun place to shred.

Telephones? Whee!

The bookshelf? A positive treasuretrove of new things to chew.

The wastepaper basket? Especially enthralling, with a cannot-be-denied-even-with-the-magic-NO-word. The damn thing has a power of attraction more conventionally associated with black holes.

You may have spotted the error in the whole mess by now, and no, it isn’t the fact that my spawn can do to a room in five minutes in your presence what is more conventionally achieved by a good old-fashioned house-burgling in your absence. Also for free.

They do that sort of thing all day long.

It’s the fact that they’re awake. As in not sleeping. As in not the bleepingest bloodiest bit tired. Eyelids wide apart and not a hint of droop. Full of chirp, bounce, the proverbial beans, and probably a vat of red cordial purloined on the Baby Black Market when I wasn’t looking.

Help!

The Indian Takeaways may not think they need two naptimes a day, but I seriously beg to differ.

I need it. At least ONE at any rate.

Sadly, it’s considered naughty to use ph.energan, unless I can justify it by finding an itch I need to cure in both twins at once, of course. Shame they’re steadfastly not allergic to anything, really.

Next verse.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I had the dubious pleasure of shedding my more usual wardrobe of baggy jeans (the ones with the line of dried snot at Twin Heights, plural, and several shamefully unwashed stains of uncertain origin) and cracking out my clean and unblemished Grown-up Job Interview clothes.

The clothes I like to otherwise dub the ‘what babies?’ outfit, complete with heels and, for the first time in some while, make-up.

Foundation, people, and I am not talking undergarments, although the Twin Skin phenomenon does mean that I do indeed derive cosmetic benefit from the help of armpit level knickers (or alternatively tucking the fold into my trousers).

It was a big, sleep deprived day, not in the least bit helped by both Saag and Naan howling with miserable betrayal on their knees in the hallway as I left.

I guess it nice to know that the Indian Takeaways do in fact love me, at least when I’m gone, because I get an awful lot of b!tch slap action these days when I attempt a little Stealth Vegetable action. What’s wrong with alternating spoonfuls of yogurt with some sneaky carrots, anyway?

But I digress.

Even though I do need to resume what is moderately laughably known as ‘full time’ employment, rather than the more accurate ‘what’s daylight?’ lifestyle of the pallid, harried looking vitamin D deprived junior medico in order to generally Get On With It and avoid utter irretrievable career suicide, to be honest I don’t really look forward to the event with relish.

More like mild horror.

So, I was actually kind-of hoping that I wouldn’t get the job.

You see, under the pretty pink clouds floating above a famous Egyptian river in my head, LS and I would miraculously, despite the infertility and distinct paucity of sex, generate another Takeaway (?Bhaji) and work would be a moot point for a while.

In my defence, it was about CD 100.

However yesterday I had the double pleasure of waking to not only to the joy of rediscovering my per.iod, after I had given the damn thing up for lost, but additionally a cheery phone call from cheerleader-esque administrative minion informing me that, golly!, I had the job and gosh! would I gladly accept and generally squee! and stuff.

I think she half-expected me to reach down the phone, grab her by the hands, and have us BOTH jump up and down with excitement at the wonderfulness of it all.

I guess it wasn’t her fault. The poor thing did seem rather puzzled by the end of the phone call that I sounded so bleeping glum about it all.

This and that.

Many apologies for yet another minor interruption in transmissions from the land of the Long Green Snot a.k.a Chez MII.

Actually, the current permutation of upper respiratory virus that Naan, then Saag, then myself, and finally (and most loudly and dramatically) Long Suffering have had the pleasure of making the intimate acquaintance with isn’t all that bad. We’re revoltingly mucoid, and I wouldn’t rush to give any of us a kiss, but we’re well enough for business to pretty much continue as usual.

Oh, but I’d avoid Naan’s kisses, even if she didn’t currently have two cheerful green streamers emanating from each nasal passage, simply on the grounds that the kid has yet to figure out that kissing shouldn’t be an exercise in establishing just how far one can unhinge their mandible and aim straight for the unlucky recipients tonsils with their tongue. That’s what thirteen year olds do.

It’s vaguely Jaws-esque to be the lucky winner of a Naan pash.

Regardless, life has been particularly busy lately with all the usual dull items that go into riding the domestic catastrophe curve in a household with twins.

On the plus side, I have finally caught up on the laundry after a couple of really useful windy days without the usual combination of a significant element of pissing rain. On the minus side, I have not blogged, and additionally because I am clearly careless with my pegging action I seem to be one bib, three pairs of black Bridget Jones style underwear and a sock short.

If you find some Big Knickers caught in a local tree over the other side of the Big Drink, please don’t snicker. I think they may have in fact been blown off my washing line, picked up by some intercontinental jetstream or other and have horrified the population of several Pacific Islands from on high on their way to you.

Just post them back, please.

Oh, and I also went to Ikea.

It really is Swedish for ‘time sucking maze containing items of obscure function’, isn’t it? The golden rules of Ikea survival, as I see them now are:

1. Work out what you want to get on the website. Do not be tempted to browse the physical store. Resist.
2. Note where your intended acquisitions live in the bit at the end just by the checkouts. Screw the showroom. Remember point 1.
3. Check if the effing item you want is in stock online or by phone before you leap.
4. Avoid weekends like the plague, unless you want the item to be gone before you get there, gobbled up by ten thousand ravenous allen key owners.
5. Go in the exit and do what LS says is a vaguely kinky ‘Swedish reverse ikea’. By this I mean grab a cheap-ass and disturbingly more-ish hooves-and-rectums hot-dog with mustard, walk breezily in through the exit aisle, grab your specific item off the shelf, pay and get the hell out. Do not forget item 1.

Smug grinning optional.

Next time I’ll take my own advice.

Just fat.

Alternatively entitled ‘How LS came THIS close to having to brush his teeth per-rectum for the rest of his natural’.

I was planning to crack out a much-overdue paragraph of snark (or twenty) about the fact that Goo.gle still in the face of all the non-kinky evidence believes me to be the font of all knowledge when it comes to certain hijinks involving certain orifices. For the sake of politeness, I shall hereby term them reverse traffic on the usually one-way Yellow-Pee Road and Hershey Highway.

Urgh.

Perhaps next time. I hope you can wait, dear reader, because Goo.gle has been bumped by a particularly tactless Act Of Man.

To set the scene, last night LS and I were lying in bed, but don’t worry, it’s not that kind of tale:

LS: ‘Can I ask you a question?’

Geohde: ‘I guess you just did, so yes?’

LS: ‘Smartarse. No another question, but it might sound strange.’

Geohde: ‘Yeeeesssss?’

LS: I hope he was thinking that the following was tantamount to leaving a suicide note, tidying up the will and topping oneself  ‘Um, well. Could you be pregnant?’

Geohde: in the Special Female Thin Ice Skating Voice ‘Why do you ask, my love?’

LS: Risking the continued attachment of his left arm to his shoulder by patting a certain abdomen lovingly ’It’s just that your belly seems to be sticking out, and I wondered….’

Geohde: Heavy sigh. Nice. ‘Okay. Let’s settle this easily. I want you to concentrate for me. Leaving aside the matter that shagging has a spectacularly poor personal track record when it comes to my uterus acquiring tenants, can you recall when we last actually had sex?’

LS: ‘……..’

Geohde:‘Ker-ching! Thank you.I’m probably just fat, darling. Although, more correctly I just have this minor issue with a bleeping great saggy gap in the middle of my abdomen from bearing your children. Sweet dreams.’

In other words, it may be CD100 around here, and if this were a game of cricket I’d be positively thrilled to reach a century, but I am comprehensively not knocked up. Trust me, I’ve wasted five bucks and checked just in case the latest rage in conception is the immaculate kind.

Regardless, I think the sex drought around these parts might last just a  little bit longer after that one. Along with the Washing Male Underwear drought.