Vee Back.

Hello lovely ladies (and really I expect only an ever shrinking cohort of ladies of the Internet at large) who have the patience to watch me periodically dust the cobwebs off of the old blog and whinge about how lucky I am to extract out of infertility three probably robustly healthy children, armed solely with the powers of the good people of mastercard.

Yes, you. Hello.

It’s been a while again and I fully blame raising three year old twins, one who sounds like she has a particularly hard to shake pack-a-day habit and who, unfortunately for all of our reposes or lack thereof is the I-Do-Not-Do-Discomfort-No-Matter-How-Minor Naan. Naan has a cold. I’ve never been more pissed at a bunch of virions in my life because this means that in due course both Saag, LS and myself shall all fall sway and the only thing worse than two toddlers with a cold is having a verified man-cold situation while working full time. At thirty five weeks. Full time working pregnant women with three whiny patients at home don’t get colds, they just suck it up and run screaming to the safety of work. Lesser of two evils.

Regardless.

I am here and I am more or less well and I now have the perfect out for all the naysayers who think that listening to the urogynaecologists speak their evil words about prolapse and various bits of clever mesh is weak behaviour. BN is, yet again as far as we can tell within the limits of modern guesstimation etc and ad nauseum, very fat, floating way high and I seem to be measuring in the range known as ‘bloody uncomfortable term’ and thus today I got told that should I change my mind in a fit of whimsy, I’d probably just hear the words ‘we really recommend a caesarean’ and if I persisted, possibly a silent ‘you fool, you’re screwing our statistics’.

Not that I am exactly embracing the date with the scalpel since I am trying to put it off for as long as humanly possible, a minor contest of wills that happens at every antenatal visit where I come up with as many new reasons as fifteen minutes permits as to why thirty nine weeks is simply too soon to be strapped down to a table and all cathetered and scalpeled up and my Ob simply smiles serenely and moves on to another subject like turning up in labour because I am a nitwit.

I don’t think she even believed me when I said today that LS is working three hours away that day today and that one, my friends, was true.

Anyway, it is late, I have at least another vomit I need to fit in my crowded social diary before bedtime and, well, the highlight of last week was being extremely tardily referred a woman with a history of short cervix at thirty nine bleeping weeks because the endocrine resident, with breathtaking punctuality and unusual interest in the obstetric management of his patients decided to read the file rather than just fiddle with ze insulin.

I deeply admire the refreshing curiosity if only because it literally made my day to cheerily say ‘love, that’s how they get OUT of there. It’s kind of normal at thirty nine weeks to have a short cervix.’ It wasn’t so great back at twenty four weeks, but hey, we all moved on. Unless you were a trainee endocrinologist, it would seem and you lost what common sense you were born with in a sea of novomix.

Goodnight.

G

Not Helping.

Scene: Superkarkit supermarket on a busy Friday afternoon

Geohde: Avec whiny twins and a full trolley of shit groceries. The act of lifting at least one whiny twin causes recalcitrant round ligament misbehaviour i.e. some tiny midget appears out of nowhere and stabs me clean in the fanny with a red-hot poker. Cue frozen pained, non-moving wince. Cue further wails of discontent from now non-moving twin.

Crime: Sympathetic glance and a ‘How long have you got to go, dear?’ from the checkout lady.

Sentence: One Breath Holding Count to Ten ‘A Long Time’.

Sometimes it would be easier to say what I am thinking which is that most of what I am gestating is 13 weeks of bouncing baby fat because it’s either that or I have the world’s most obsetrically minute pelvis in the entire world. Actually, since when I lie on my back I seem to have a uterine friend hanging out for all to see, it’s probably the latter, but I dearly wish I could just tell people to fuck off sometimes. Don’t we all?

Hastily edited to add that, um, the US-as-she-is-spoke versus real English strikes again (or at least I think so) from the comments. Where I am a fanny is the bit in front of the bit I think YOU all think I am referring to. My bottom is just fine. Really, it is.

Agony Aunt, edition twenty one (it’s been a while).

It’s been so long since I’ve actually bothered to complain to the Internet at large about the cretins that google continues to insist that I am best positioned to help with their eternal queries with regards to very private (and often more than a little ridiculous) matters that I almost think I need to reintroduce Agony Aunt to you all.

Hi, this column is known as Agony Aunt and as a newfound twenty one-er Agony Aunt would like to point out that she can get literally AND figuratively pissed in just about any jurisdiction you care to choose.

Bring it, Google. I’m ready.

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to ‘geriatric backboarding’ and the Giant Bathing Suit with Frills On The Arse like, without remembering that those who live in cellulitic glass houses should not throw one-piece stones.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

Ahem:

am pregnant, what are beta numbers?

does rubbing breasets help my fertility?

is inserting to wrong hole cause infertility?

what happens if you put ice in your vag.ina?

I’m pregnant what the fuck do I do now?

damp fa.rt stain

Item # 1 (am pregnant, what are beta numbers?):

Beta numbers are probably something you don’t need to worry your fertile head over, sweetheart. Have a cookie.

Item # 2 (does rubbing breasets help my fertility?):

Well, it certainly gets attention on the train in the morning, but the only thing that rubbing ‘breasets’ in this case seems to have achieved is damage your spelling glands.

Item # 3  (is inserting to wrong hole cause infertility?):

In short, yes. Yes, it can.

I get so many permutations on this item it really does make asking if SEX happens in the VAG.INA an important starting point in an infertility workup, after all.

The mind boggles.

Item #4 (what happens if you put ice in your vag.ina?):

It melts.

Seriously, that’s what happens.

Item #5 (I’m pregnant what the fu*k do I do now?):

I kind of have the inverse problem but I think what you do now is get fat in a very localised way and then give birth. In the fullness of time.

Item #8 (damp fa.rt stain):

I’m sorry, I’d like to help you but my brain just exploded and I have this overpowering urge to go and take a shower.

Love,

G

Things I now know about toddlers.

…but wish I didn’t.

Alternatively entitled ‘Potty training and other Kid Tricks: The things they do not tell you, a helpful primer on how to get excreta where it rightfully belongs’.

Is now the time?

Or can you put it, and the risk to your carpets, off until later?

Children vary widely. Fear of the unknown can make even the owners of washable plastic floors hesitate, but if you wait until they’re in high-school, not only have you missed your mark, but you’re spending a veritable fortune in diapers to cover arses that big. One has to take the leap sooner or later.

Generally speaking it helps if your Infant 1.0 module is mobile and has their very own identifiable potty dance* (or word). If they’re showing awareness that they KNOW they’re about to kack their dacks (for random example by pulling of their own nappy and taking a healthy dump in the middle of your neighbour’s driveway), take the initiative.

*No, The Macarena is too complicated. So is the Bus Stop. Think simpler.

Will they sit on the damn thing?

If your infant runs off in screaming hysterics every time you try and callously whip their duds off and sit them on a bit of cold plastic, try a bit of gentle introduction.

Give it a name than you plan to use. ‘Potty’ is evergreen and rather popular, ‘Bertha’ not so much.

While it isn’t a good idea to use it as a water bowl until the fear response abates, having the thing generally hanging out with the family probably isn’t a bad idea.

Naan now talks to ours, although since I can’t understand her most of the time and I live with her, history must remain silent as to what she’s discussing.

Try often.

Post mealtimes are usually a good option, because, well, food in equals food out. Often not all that far apart in temporal terms.

Sit your spawn down, and wait as long as you can get away with. Puppets help. You don’t need a Punch and Judy show. Kids aren’t critical.

You’re looking on associating Item A with Action B, so have patience, modern sanitation was not built in a day.

Enrol cheerleaders.

If they DO produce the goods, have a small party in your bathroom. Dance. Whoop. Hip-hip-Hooray. Generally show how fecking happy you are to have one less poop on your watch and one more heading off into the sunset to float it out into retirement at your municipal sanitation facility.

LS and I conducted a very small but exceedingly enthusiastic Mexican Wave in our toilet the first time Saag got it right. She was delighted.

Reward the heck out of the little buggers.

Small children are easily bribed. I find a small square of toilet paper is more revered than a comically oversized novelty cheque for a house around these parts.

Also, it’s more repeatable and vaguely related to the task at hand.

Have a clean-up plan.

Keep a packet of baby wipes near your choice receptacle.

Toilet paper SOUNDS like a good idea until you’re tried to clean a wiggly child’s poopy bottom with half a roll of it and only succeeded on getting lumps of wet, shitty paper stuck to your calf and other undesirable anatomical locations.

Also, if they’re older, ask ‘em to show you how they can touch their toes. Not only will this reinforce just how inflexible YOU have become with age, but you’ll get a birds eye view of the target clean-up zone.

Other stuff.

For every thrilling high of hearing the sweet tinkle of urine on porcelain, you will have the crushing low of pooh in your loungeroom. It takes time and patience, and yes, in the short term it is considerably more pissing about (no pun intended) than just dealing with nappies.

Also, if like a certain child of mine, your spawn knows enough to anticipate bowel-action, quite reasonably enough doesn’t like to sit in their own productions and knows full well how nappy fasteners work, expect a lot of puppy like mistakes.

Rubbing their nose in it doesn’t work for kids, either.

But you are allowed to be sorely tempted when they take a fancy to crapping in the bath and coating their sibling in a fine coat of nature’s finest.

Wish me luck, I think I’ll need it.

Agony Aunt, edition 20.

Is it wrong to realise that a semi-regular feature column has now reached the less-wrinkled decade immediately below your own, and feel accordingly slightly jealous?

Oh, how I loved being twenty. Well, apart from all the crippling self-conciousness, drunken vomits and general lack of financial liquidity, anyway.

Bring it, Google. I’m ready.

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to ‘geriatric backboarding’ and the Giant Bathing Suit with Frills On The Arse like, without remembering that those who live in cellulitic houses should not throw one-piece stones.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

Ahem:

• does a fate line mean im pregnant?
• pregnant am the a.ss to fuck
• flapoplasty
• geriatric backboarding
• Big naked nanna thighs.
• is my pea green when i’m pregnant
• safe to penetrate va.gina with bottle
• elderly vagi.na galleries pics
• can i fuck when im pregnant

Item #1 (does a fate line mean im pregnant?):

No, it means you’ve gone and asked a palm-reader or similar to basically guess if you are up the metaphorical duff.

Alternatively, you just can’t spell.

Strike out whichever option is less embarrassing.

Item # 2 (pregnant am the a.ss to fuck):

I, personally, don’t rate northbound traffic on a strictly southbound highway as highly as I do, say, ice-cream, but I also can’t see any reason why being knocked up should stop you indulging if fancy takes you in that rear-guard.

Ahem.

Unless you’re actually asking if tender loving times, bottom-style, can lead to eighteen years of child support payments. I would hope you already know that the answer to THAT particular question  is a big, fat NO.

Don’t be getting ideas, honey.

Item # 3 (flapoplasty):

Excuse me for being slightly crass, but what flap or flaps are you intending to rearrange, dear Googler?

I mean, I can understand not wanting to have a cheeky three inches of abdomen hang over the front of your  jeans, but if it’s the other kind of flap that’s chafing you, perhaps you should just buy looser trousers?

Skinny jeans only make most people look like they have carrot legs, anyway.

Item #4 and #5  (geriatric backboarding AND Big naked nanna thighs.):

Yes, you are correct oh Google-y ones. Just because one is of the blue-rinse persuasion does not mean that one can not be fully involved in the local water-sports scene.

Inviting the contents of your local nursing home to don big, black swimming costumes, complete with creaking structural reinforcement and outlying postcodes of ass-skimming fabric, probably WILL lead to seeing rather a lot of naked nanna thighs.

Enjoy.

Item #6 (is my pea green when i’m pregnant):

Peas remain green whether you are pregnant or not. They don’t really care.

Your pee, on the other hand, should never be green, brown, black, red, full of pus, have a head of foam on it,  or be possessing of lumps.

Also, on a different note, your vowels should include careful discrimination between A and E. There’s five of them these days, not four.

Item #7 (safe to penetrate va.gina with bottle):

No, not really.

In Captain Obvious mode, most especially not if it isn’t nice and smooth and absolutely not if it happens to be glass.

Item #8 (elderly vagi.na galleries pics):

Sorry, I can’t help you on this one.

Come back in about 50 years.

Item #9 (can i fuck when im pregnant):

If you still feel remotely like it, power to you, sister.

Love,

G

PS. To answer the burning question and put you all out of your dying-to-know misery, the free-range poo-layer was Saag.

Also, yes, it was huge.

Saag and Naan both do a hefty four to five of ‘em a day EACH. Not only was it a mere mathematical matter of time until I was the lucky recipient of Exhibit A in the post below (with at least ten chances a day), but I really do almost drown in baby shit around these parts.

Another open letter to the world at large.

Dear World,

It’s Geohde and I have a bone to pick with you.

Yes, again. Do try and pay attention this time, please.

I propose a small lesson in milestone attainment.

Are you ready, class? Here goes:

FORTHELOVEOFALLTHATYOUHOLDHOLYANDPOSSIBLYMANYTHINGSYOUDONOTASWELL being SMALL or, ahem ‘Tiiiiiiiinnnny!’ does not mean a child is not entitled to ambulate bipedally if the fancy takes her. Trust me, the fancy takes her many places indeed.

The little snot machine is always running off in the supermarket and getting herself almost inextricably jammed in the soft drink fridge or under a shelf. The park is a veritable treasure trove of escapism from parental supervision. Our own street is an item that has the distinct potential to prove that road safety is learned, and not instinctive after all (even if it would be more useful than an inbuilt fear of moths), any day now if I am not continually vigilant.

The kid gets the whole walking idea, trust me. She’s been at it for some time now.

Small does not automatically equal ‘four legs good, two legs bad’.

Little people can walk, too, even if the pavements are much closer to their bottoms that the average experience.

Please let Naan do so in public without so much gobsmacked attention, or at least be fair and congratulate Saag on sticking both fingers right up her nose at once while she jumps backwards.

Now THAT’S talent.

Love,

Geohde.

Family Planning.

Dear Internet,

I may possibly indulge in just a little bit of light hearted sarcasm today, or at least (to put it another way) say things that I do not really mean merely in order to make my point.

I am working on my Manners and Deportment in public situations which by definition kills my fun by precluding me from being intentionally rude.

This means it is officially out of order to splutter and holler ‘You want to know WHATTTTTT?’ almost exactly as if somebody had asked me my feelings with regards to fell.atio on a particularly crowded train (due to express the next ten stops) whenever I am quizzed about my future reproductive career. Minus the blushing, obviously. Oh, and the almost irrepressible desire to make some crack about Italian Opera not being my kind of music.

Fell.atio is just such an awfully flowery word in just that kind of cultured, snobby opera sounding way. Or at least I have always thought so. I do welcome other opinions on the matter.

So, since I have digressed enough, let me regroup.

I am trying to explain why it is I feel I need to whinge to the Internet at large about people publicly taking an almost proprietary (You’re not getting any younger, you know! Wink, wink!)  interest in my future plans for my uterus, and therefore indirectly at least, a vaguely creepy curiosity about my probable future trysts with a transvag.inal ultrasound probe.

So. Take note.

The best, the very best, time to ask a woman when she plans to spit out more children via either a natural or scalpel-generated orifice is ABSOLUTELY at that fun point in a supermarket visit where both spawn are screaming at dental drill frequency in the pusher over custody of a bag of unpaid-for grapes (which they only have succeeded only in ripping open and squashing half the contents all over themselves), precisely half of the shopping is already up on the conveyor belt, a badly timed spouse has chosen to call with a particularly urgent request to nick back inside to acquire bog roll, something essential has just turned out to be missing a barcode, andyou’ve just realised that there is no way to bend down and get the remainder of the groceries out of the pram baskets without showing an almost professional degree of Plumber’s Crack.

Really, keeping it to a look of stunned horror and the quip that I thought I got time off for good behaviour for having a two-for-one deal in the first place was quite restrained in the circumstances.

Agony Aunt, Edition 19.

Otherwise known as the ‘where has the time gone?’ edition. Nineteen already? It seems like only a couple of years ago that  a much younger Agony Aunt still had that pesky nappy-requiring double incontinence problem. It wasn’t ALL verbal diarrhoea back in the day.

Regardless, the nineteenth spin around it is. Bring on the Googlers. My snotty nose and cranky mood is more than up to the task.

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to ‘huge t.its’ and the overly optimistic like without planning the Early Sag and Backache lecture, right there and then.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

Ahem:

• beautiful girl with huge t.its.
• not that shit again.
• suppository rectal movie.
• lost scrotum photos.
• photos of vag.ina been shagged.
• dull back ache black tarry poo bloated.
• which hole shall penis can lead to pregnancy?

Item #1 (beautiful girl with huge t.its):

As a card-carrying member of the IBTC*, I stand firm in my fried-egg position that they’re over-rated, anyway.

Also, see above remarks with regards to the National Geographic Phenomenon and the like. I thought that might put you off of your stroke a bit. I know how to Talk The Dirty, oh yes I do.

Besides, sweetheart, if it’s boobs that float your proverbial boat, do you really need a pretty face too?

Perhaps I’m just jealous. Now, bugger off, okay?

Item # 2 (not that shit again):

Yes, it IS that shit again. What more is there to say? Drink less beer and eat less curry and you won’t be so troubled in the mornings.

Item # 3 (suppository rectal movie):

Okay, Googler, apart from the fact that I now feel an overwhelming urge to bathe as this query is even kinkier than an experienced reader of The Misdirected Kink is accustomed to reading, well.

Apart from that, um.

Why?

Item # 4 (lost scrotum photos):

Lamp-posts and milk cartons everywhere now hold new horrors for the unwary.

Item # 5 (photos of vag.ina been shagged):

I am going to take a flying leap of intuition and assume this is a mildly humorous search for po.rn. Again.

Here’s the thing, oh Google-y one, I admire your single-minded specificity in what gives you the maximal amount of jolly factor, really I do. But. If you are grammatically challenged, stick to typing ‘po.rn’ or ‘s.ex’ in the search box. Both are tried and true favourites.

PS. You meant ‘being’ back up there, I think. If you didn’t, I don’t want to follow that line of past-tense horizontal folk dancing enquiry any further at ALL.

Item #6 (dull back ache black tarry poo bloated):

I’m sorry to hear that, but it probably shan’t be lethal.

Speak to item #2, will you?

Item #7 (which hole shall penis can lead to pregnancy?):

Easy.

Without going overly dull and anatomical, I’ll give you a clue. It’s not the mouth and it’s also not the Bottom. In most women, that leaves only one real option.

Now, what do you plan to DO with that information?

G

PS. It’s been a disturbingly slack while, are there any lurkers or new bloggers out there potentially interested in a little blogroll addition, or being BOTW? Don’t all rush at once, now.

*Itty Bitty T-rhymes-predictably Committee.

Agony Aunt, edition 18.

Legal to shag*, drink*, smoke*, vote* and spend far too much money on sticky alcoholic drinks in trashy nightclubs before vomiting profusely in a handy bathroom stall, it’s Agony Aunt now with Added Majority.

Bring on the googlers.

It’s late in the week, piddling down a serious g-dly incontinence episode of rain from above, and it’s bloody windy to boot.

A heady combination of construction site dust and plain old mud keeps getting in around my front door, and if it keeps it up I may have to concede defeat and begin mowing the inside of my entryway.

So, since Saag and Naan (bless their snot ravaged, tear streaked, screaming, unhappy teething cotton socks!) are finally down for a nap thanks to the powers of pharmacological intervention, I figure it’s as good a time as any to break out the crank at the, well, amusingly misspelled.

Analgesia, and not sedatives by the way, in case you had a brief flicker of ‘I wonder…?’  when reading the above sentence, although it did cross my mind. I am but human.

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to ‘sweaty balls’ and the unhygienic-sounding like without mentally wanting to take a shower. Right after I finish making fun of those running a constant risk of a serious case of jock itch due to being cursed with perpetually damp genitalia.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

Ahem:

• fucking worried im pregnant
• how i can remov my penis forskin?
• Can sweaty balls cause infertility?
• I stuck a hose up my va.gina and filled m…
• fancy dress fake pe.nis.
• A list of what not to say to an infertile.

Item #1 (fucking worried im pregnant):

Big breath in…..For-the-sweet-love-of-all-that’s-holy-probably-WOMAN….and big breath OUT.

Piddle on a stick, will you?

Then you can either be:

A: Fucking worried about the next eighteen years (conservative estimate)/ forever (worst case scenario), OR

B: Very relieved.

See?

You have a 50% chance of feeling much better than you do now.

Now, go forth and tinkle.

Item # 2 (how i can remov my penis forskin?):

It’s called circumcision. It’s a procedure where somebody hopefully possessing a very steady hand cuts it off for you. Kind of like you did to poor, defenceless ’e’ in a few words above. Vowels are not the enemy, by the way.

Oh, and I guess I better make the following point quite obvious, so pay close attention. Don’t try it at home.

Item # 3 (Can sweaty balls cause infertility?):

Only in the vaguely sporting sounding sense that nobody likes to play games with damp balls.

Plus, jock itch, much?

Item # 4 (I stuck a hose up my va.gina and filled m…):

Uh. Urgh.

Um. Gosh, even. I’m slightly lost for words for once.

Well, golly.

You did?

Would it be rude to enquire why the blue blazers you chose to attempt a very personal recreation of the local-harbour-of-your-choice?

Item # 5 (fancy dress fake pe.nis):

Personally, I always think you can never go wrong with a bow tie when it comes to fancy dress.

Just don’t ask me how to stop it falling off, because I have the feeling that ‘superglue’ is not the correct answer.

Item #6 (A list of what not to say to an infertile):

When ARE you planning to have a baby, then?

I want grandchildren!

I have this tea/concoction/pill that makes you pregnant as soon as you look at the packet.

My friend XX got pregnant by doing <insert stupid unscientific non-conceptually assistive item>

Are you sure you’re doing it right?

Why do you want kids? They’re so irritating. Here, have one of mine.

I’ll get you pregnant.

Have to tried a holiday?

Oh, and pay close attention to my final point, class, never EVER suggest relaxation. Unless you have a burning desire to die in the very near future.

G

*In some jurisdictions.

Agont Aunt, Edition 17.

Boring for her nation, it’s Agony Aunt back in the saddle.

She’s swotting up for yet another high-school maths exam and desperately trying to figure out exactly what an integer really IS when it’s at home.

As for physics, she’s leaving the vexed difficulty of defining Torque to the blokes on Top Gear. It’s a shame they seem to have no eartly idea either.

Either way, she’s busy, bored with numbers and can’t work out why you can’t divide by zero.

Bring on the googlers.

In the absence of much content of my own to blog about, mostly because I am spending quite a lot of my day rather unimaginatively running around my loungeroom in circles and flapping my wings convulsively in a vain attempt to cope with the idea that I have two so-close-you-could-spit-rather-unhygenically-on-the-date-from-here almost ONE year olds.

Because I am suicidal and am prone to making the error that if I write a detailed enough list I can accomplish anything, it follows that I have to bake not one, but TWO cakes either today or tomorrow. Interestingly, the fact that this has yet to work for any plan of mine ever mysteriously fails to dissaude me. I can often be seen surrounded by truly buggered-up Good Intentions, clutching a tatty post-it and sadly wondering where it all went pear.

My sense of horror is growing hourly.

I cannot cook. Well, at least beyond Pot Luck Tinned Stuff Stew.

I have nailed my proverbials to the mast by inviting a rather large amount of people over to witness the result and unknowingly risk life and limb by eating my efforts.

Um.

Acutally, I’m probably more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a rocking chair factory. C’est La Vie. I shall procrastinate.

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to ‘butt cloakers’ and the misspelled (and perpetually confused) like without a little more than a small sigh of resignation and mutterings about bloody  spellchecking already, PLEASE. The only thing sadder than po.rn is misspelled po.rn.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

Ahem:

• Butt cloaker.
• broken capillaries cause screaming
• forearm p.enis
• im pregnant with no sex drive.
• how to give your child suppository
• Do you poop during egg retrieval?
• anyone negative beta but was pregnant?

 Item #1 (Butt Cloaker):

Do you know what, dear Googler?

I feel for your plight. Really, I do.

Personally speaking, the current fad for wearing leggings as if they are Really Trousers and not merely Bum Cheek Shrink Wrapping has me more than a little edgy as well. I’m constantly visualising people, ahem, behind me losing retinas to a sight not unlike two pigs wrestling in a black garbage bag.

You’re right, Googley one, in your unspoken understanding that sadly wrapping a jacket around one’s waist does not hide the problem, but merely screams ‘I HAVE A LARGE ASS’.

What’s the solution?

Item # 2 (broken capillaries cause screaming):

Usually, it’s the other way around. Try not yelling.

Oh, and if you really DO have the order of events correct, just stop looking in the mirror. Ignorance is scream-free bliss.

Item # 3 (forearm pe.nis):

Yeah, I know that those kooky kids in labcoats stuck an ear on the back of a rat once, but this really IS going too far.

Item # 4 (im pregnant with no sex drive):

im not pregnant and i lost my punctuation?

Kidding. Seriously, kid, I wouldn’t look too hard for it.

Otherwise you’ll only have the joy of misplacing it again postpartum.

Item # 5 (how to give your child suppository):

Presumably up their bottoms is a good place to start, although if you find that as vaguely wrong-sounding and a tad icky as I do, well then you could give it orally and wait about a day for it to make it’s own way there?

Actually, don’t do that.

Item #6 (anyone negative beta but was pregnant?):

Inhale-exhale and do not shake the asker by the stupid neck, I’ve covered this item before.

Again, I wonder just how I became a beacon of inappropriate hopefor the definitively not pregnant who just can’t take it without asking goo.gle to prove their intuition right.

I’ve also covered this before here, and here.

Item # 7 (do you poop during egg retrieval?):

Points for honest curiosity to you, oh unusually worried one.

I can ease your mind on the matter.

You may mutter incomprehensible garbage about how much you vaguely innapropriately love your RE under the sweet, sweet influence of the Good Drugs, but actual pooping in the presence of medicos usually only happens about 38 weeks later.

That is if you (choose the option that best suits the number of missing teeth you no longer possess) get pregnant/pragnet/preggie/preggo/pragnent/preggers and you have a vag.inal delivery.

Don’t, for the love of all that is holy, Google THAT.

G

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.

Why, yes, I did.

Dear Internet,

Due to Severe Ongoing Computer Infirmary on the grounds that it is Bloody Old and Can’t Be Expected to Possibly Keep Up with anything much beyond being a mildly decorative paperweight (and I really should do the kind thing and put it out of it’s misery already, preferably with a hammer), oh and lest I forget my life, I’ve not really been able to whine to the world wide web at large (or indifferent) for some days now.

Fortunately, the gods of working motherboard have smiled upon me after an hour spent unhappily swearing ‘WORK damnit, work, the eight hour day is standard in the first world you slack sod’ at my PC and restarting innumerable times, I have the Internet.

HI, Internet, I’ve missed you.

I have but a brief tale on this occasion, pulled from the Annals of Daft Twin Stuff, mostly because I’ve just about reached yet another critical mass of ‘did they really just ask me that?’ and it helps somewhat to vent just a tiny bit.

Actually, to be brutally honest, the cerebral cortex minus questioning is gradually fading over time, and I almost miss it. Since Saag and Naan are so very different in size, temperment and most other things that strangers like to assume constitutes twin-ness, people seem to instead think that I have not spent much money on condoms in the last two years, rather than that they are actually twins.

Ok ‘twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnns’.

Fraternal twins are allowed to fish from wildly different ends of the available gene-pool, world.

If I dress them both head to toe in pink matching outfits pre-emptively, you’re meant to pick up on the not-so-subtle cue and refrain from asking ‘So are they twins?’ (duh), followed by ‘a boy and a girl, right?’ (wrong, oh-so very very wrong). Both of those items happened to me today.

Please, I implore you world, if you don’t want to be on the receiving end of a carefully blank face and measured ‘No, she’s sixty seconds older and the boy dripping in pink is a girl’, just bite your tongue. For me?

Going grocery shopping with twins really is the most wonderful never-ending source of things to write about, suffice it to say.

My case in point is as follows (real conversation):

Woman In Supermarket: After the usual obligatory clarification of twin status, I shan’t bore you (again) with THOSE questions and one mildly uncomfortable up-and-down Geohde Inspection that had me concerned I’d ventured out with fresh vomit down my jeans again. Actually, I lie, I had and I knew it. ‘Oh, TWIIIINS! (pause for laser glare of physique) Did you carry them yourself?’

Geohde:  Gobsmacked at a new and clever permutation ‘are they yours insert-brackets skinny b!tch’. ‘Yes, I did. They were quite heavy as I recall’.

WIS: ‘Oh, my! So what’s your secret?’

Geohde: ‘A special blend of custom methylated deoxyribonucleic acid’.

WIS: Furrowing forehead ‘Wow! Were can I get some, you look GREEEAT! Do they have it in the pharmacy here?’.

Geohde: ‘I got mine from my parents.’

Boom-Boom-Pow.

I’m not very nice sometimes, am I?

Does my ass look paranoid in this URL cloaker?

Dear English-reading-world with both access to a computer and the good or bad fortune (depending on how one looks at it) of discovering this merry URL,

Hi!

Enthusiastic waves of greeting and big sh!t-eating grins for all, I positively insist, as long as nobody sprains anything in the process.

Welcome, so lovely to see you all here Chez MII.

I aim to be a good host, and in that vein may I cordially invite you to do please pull up a virtual chair, pour an imaginary coffee from the ever-simmering pot and grab a zero-calorie pretend donut as you read?

We’re all friends here, and I’m sure if you think you might know me outside of the clicky box with Internet access, that you’d be kind and tactful enough to not, say, extensively peruse my archives. Because I like to flatter myself that nobody I know would do something, well, stalkerish or plain old spying. Right?

Right?

You know, dear Mystery Person, the way I’m feeling (since you’re clearly reading what I’ve felt and shared with a community I’ve come to trust over several years now) is kinda analogous to if you’d taken a fancy to peeking through my bedroom curtains at night,  examining the contents of my underwear drawer or rummaging through my trash can all in order to see what I get up to in private.

Oh, and feel free to use hidereferer to cloak your URL, because subtlety is always the key to a good lookey-loo for something positively juicy, right?

I wouldn’t want you to put a big red flashing light on your head and a foghorn that says ‘I’m Spying!’ while you do it. That might be kinda obvious even for a chronically tired dolt like my humble self.

Yes, I see you in other words.

This post, dear Black Cloaked Nosey Parker could alternatively be entitled a letter of ‘please explain?’

So, um, well?

The first time I noticed your inneresting encroachments upon this humble domain, I chalked it up to one of my more exotic po.rn searchers feeling all shy about their unquenchable appetite for gems like ‘inserting stiletto heel into urethra’ and getting here by random act of goo.gle. But, it’s happened more than once now, so unless I am considerably more titillating than I ever thought I could be, this seems an unlikely scenario.

There are a positive dearth of footwear related jollies Chez MII, I promise you.

So, dear reader of mystery, I’m giving you a chance to politely bugger off if you really shouldn’t be reading. By the way, in case you’re not sure if this means YOU, the litmus test for that one is if I haven’t told you about the URL I don’t really want you eating my pretend donuts. Also, if it comes to it there are ways and means of finding out where you’re really coming from and I feel it is probably only fair to tell you that. I have other tricks up my sleeve to cross-reference your IPof origin. Heck, I could just password the entire blog, too. Your party cannot last, dear mysteryperson.

But, before you go, I have one departing paragraph for you, so read up: 

There are no really juicy details here that if you did not know me well enough you wouldn’t already be aware of, I am not a complicated person. I deeply love my spouse and wake up ever day feeling lucky I married him, he is still the kindest, sweetest man I know who has incidentally put up with all my rubbish over the years and stood strong when we went through the hell of infertility and excruciatingly painful loss. Yes, I had an a.bortion once, but it was one of the hardest choices I had to make and in the end it really wasn’t a choice because, dear nosey parker if you don’t know me well enough to know about this in real life I’ll save you the archive peruse, my first baby had a particularly nasty unquestionably lethal birth defect. My children, now that I am lucky enough to have them, are the very centre of my universe. I am punctual to a fault, diligent with my work and always looking out for others to the best of my limited ability. I pay my bills and taxes, on time. I may be a colossal dork with an incurably tactless mouth, too, but we all have our cross to bear, so please forgive me that. I also like my privacy, and I hope you can see my desire in that regard is not unreasonable.

I wouldn’t do it to YOU.

Oh, and if this is all one big, fat mistake, wave ‘hello’, eh? So very sorry to have startled you like that. My ass apparently DOES look paranoid in this URL cloaker.

Have a coffee, on the house,

xo

G

Yet again.

Oh deary me, but it never gets old.

Public Dumb, however well intentioned, is truly evergreen. It’s like black, always in vogue somewhere. Usually my supermarket, to my eternal regret because the Terrible Twosome love nothing more than a hearty Stare At Stuff once a day.

Sadly, no matter how many times I smile (purely from the teeth outwards in a kind of never-heard-THAT-before rictus) to all those smug ‘You must have your hands full then!’ and the like, it keeps coming. For variety, I can oh-so-patiently explain the gender of two pink-swathed to within an inch of their lives girls, and if I’m feeling particularly gluttonous for punishment I may linger a little too long in the sweets aisle, thus committing my cranky self to summon up the reserves required to cheerfully answer the inevitable zygosity question of two very clearly fraternal children.

But there’s always a new person next time to ask exactly the same questions.

I’m nice to them, really I am, because it’s not their fault I get asked every fifty metres all day, every day, but oh how the novelty has worn off.

Please come up with some new questions, can you, world?

Ones that DON’T ask about what I did with my vag.ina, breas.ts, conception method or grimly predict a messy death in two years time (complete with only valuables flushed down the loo ‘to keep them safe!’ and toast ‘posted’ in my clunky old VCR), surrounded by my own personal army of small heathens running riot.

Anyway.

Perhaps I should pick a supermarket populated only by the frazzled looking parents of multiples, so I can get milk and coffee (god how I love coffee, it’s bordering on indecent and vaguely inexplicable given the Indian Takeaways sleep through perfectly well thank-you. Now don’t mention The Sleep, just in case you jinx me, okay?) unmolested by such sterling enquiries such as the following from yesterday’s excursion:

• ‘Are they twins?’, followed by an in-the-same-breath breathtakingly insulting ‘Are they YOUR babies?’

Yes, (strained grin) they are on both accounts, now just fu!k off to somewhere very far away, please.  Now.

If you linger to enquire about whether they shot out of my groin or not, I’ll have to get all impolite and I prefer not to do that now the Terrible Twosome babble half the things I say in their best tactless parrot impersonation.

We’ve already had a cheery chorus of ‘fuhfunfufuh….‘ in stereo after I spilled boiling milk over myself inadvertently. Yes, making coffee. 

I’m very pleased to report that they can’t yet do ‘kkkkk’, but it is only a matter of time. Like the next time I fail to remember that a metal container full of boiling milk is actually hot on the outside, too. I’m clever with my liberties with the Laws of Physics like that.

Additionally, the asker was a rather nice old coot (Yes, complete with tweed cap. No, I wouldn’t want to be a passenger in his car either, I can only speculate the driving skills from the Elderly Cap Wearing Fraternity remain as terrifying as ever) who wouldn’t have really deserved my forthright recounting of the fact that I have a receipt for the conception and knocking-up action involved, so yes they sodding well ARE mine in a way that few people can claim and as a bonus item if I don’t like them anymore when they’re 20, perhaps my clinic does refunds.

Honestly. Given I’m about as tactless as they come, my poor tongue is being chewed to bits in regular fits of ‘betternotsayit’.

Oh, and the guy who came to install one of our Mortgage Expanding Blinds (In a small aside, holy shit, I had no idea that several feet of fabric combined with anti-strangulation cords and non-chewable parts were so damn expensive. I’m vaguely disappointed they’re not in actual fact gold plated) did see fit to exclaim the following:

• ‘They look close in age, who’s older?’

I’ve given up caring about the reaction to a dead pan ‘Saag, by sixty seconds, but only because Naan was transverse and it took a bit of rummaging to get a hold of a reluctant leg to drag her out. She’s always been a stubborn child, and eviction from the womb was no exception. Otherwise it’s be closer.’

Cue gobsmacked ‘Are they twins, then?’

Sherlock Holmes, tell me what YOU reckon.

Sigh.

Agony Aunt, edition 15.

At a ragingly pimple-infested fifteen without a viable boyfriend in sight, she’s thinking about starting driving lessons soon, just so she can run all the asshats right OVER. Nothing wrong with a little well-directed Post Rage, is there?

….and so it begins again. I decide that I cannot let Goog.le proclaim me the font of all knowledge with regard to what to do about a badly misspelled health crisis involving a speculum in the wrong hole and the clever co-incidental acquisition of Virulent Knob Rot without mentally reaching into my monitor and slapping the asker silly. If you’re unemployed and shag all day for a living, that’s what happens sooner or later I suppose.

Perhaps I’m simply jealous since I rarely have the time or inclination to initiate, let alone complete a shag these days.

As always, click on the button for previous editions of my snark advice to the frequently illiterate. Or click on the Bad Google tab at the top to see a more comprehensive list of what can only be described as Really Dumb Stuff.

• Position to fuck an ovulating woman.
• Penis pictures from november 1 2007
• Sexually frustrated masturbate furiously
• Dildocam blog ar$e. 
• Negative beta but pregnant.

Item #1 (Position to fuck an ovulating woman):

Easy.

I’m going to go all out on a limb and presume the reference to ovulation means that you’re trying to knock her up, yes? I’m clever with my thinking like that.

So.I’ll keep this one brief.

Try her vagi.na, and not just for the sake of tradition.

Other orifices do not result in pregnancy.

No, really, they don’t.

Item # 2 (Penis pictures from november 1 2007):

You’re so ALMOST in luck. I only have pe.nis pictures from November 7 that year. Sorry about that.  

I know you’re sorely disappointed.

Leave my archives on Nov 1st unmolested, please.

(Is that a forest of clicking I hear?)

Item # 3 (Sexually frustrated masturbate furiously):

Um, good for you. Stock up on the porn and KY in advance, eh?

I hope your willy isn’t too sore afterwards.

Do you know you can rip a bit of the foreskin if you go at it too hard? You think Jack The Ripper has invaded your jocks if you do. I’ve seen the aftermath.

Take care and do wash your hands before going out in public, won’t you?

Item # 4 (Dildocam blog ar$e):

I was going to get all snappy about this one of MANY arse related items goog.le sees fit to send me but I thought I’d tell you an interesting factoid.

I HAVE seen a dildocam, more properly known as a transvaginal ultrasound probe by the way (in case terminology interests you) inserted in an arse. More than one, in fact. You do it to evaluate the prostate and take biopsies of it in suspected prostate cancer.

Did that cure your kinky curiosity enough?

Item # 5 (Negative beta but pregnant):

Heavy sighs aplenty.

Just how did this site get to be the beacon of dashed hope to all those women out there who won’t take zero on a quant beta as proof positive that their ovens are comprehensively sans a bloody bun.

No, you are not pregnant. Not even a little bit. Really.

That’s enough for now,

G

Discretion.

Is the better part of valour, oh yes it is.

To put it another way, I (for once) exercised a rarely-used part of my ever-tactless brain and bit down hard on what had the potential to be an utter clanger of a reply.

Although it would have been fun.

I’ll recap, because I’m in danger of waffling.

I am describing yet another Supermarket Encounter with the gaping-mouthed Curious General Public. People, as usual, are agog at the sight of one rather frazzled looking woman hurriedly pushing twins.

Twins who are, you will be pleased to note, fully occupied alternately grabbing their sister and yelling to be put down where they can examine the deficits in cleanliness of the supermarket floor with their gobs (in minute detail). They’re just itching to follow this star turn with a hearty crawl off under the shelf right to the one bit where I can’t extract them by pulling on an errant limb. Therefore, ideally, the logical conclusion of this game is losing all power in the limbs, stopping dead, and engaging Sooky Flail Mode to be picked up and rescued from the Dark Dustball-ey place, just for kicks.

No, I don’t let them out of the pram, because I am not suicidal.

Where I live, the people that qualify for the slightly slack-jawed sounding title tend to A: be rather fecund, B: have a natural disinclination for shoes and C: also for shirts, if male. Add in item D: tattoos and E: a really overdue visit to the dentist (say five missing teeth ago, give or take) and you get the general idea. I try not to assume anything.

To come to the point of my tale, a woman, after obliging my vanity (the way to my heart IS through Saag and Naan) and simultaneously indulging her curiosity in the mode of feeding and delivery of the terrible twosome, mentioned she had two three year-olds at home.

She didn’t say ‘Three year-old twins’, if you appreciate the distinction, and where I am heading. If I were talking to the parent of twins, I would say that I had twins, too. Not two under-one. So I can only assume the alternative explanation of A: fertility and B: actual time to have a completed sex act after her first was born. Impressive on both fronts, really.

So I was tactful in the extreme, I very, very carefully bit down on the obvious and did not make any reference to her ‘twins’ in my reply, because I must assume they are of the Irish variety.

I was also even more tactful and when I encountered the response of ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Was your recovery bad?’ and ‘I wouldn’t want somebody cutting me open!’ to my admission that the babies were born via the sunroof rather than via my genitals. I carefully did not mime a breech extraction of twin two in retort (complete with arm embedded up to elbow gestures and veterinary moo-ing).

I’m feeling quite proud of myself.

Yes, they ARE. Now bugger off, please.

Gah.

It really doesn’t stop.

Case in point?

Saleswoman in optometrists making chit-chat while LS increases our mortgage by 50%buys spectacles from the Fancy Locked Case Selection, adolescent stealing deterrent thereof.

I hold no illusion that she was especially interested in Saag and Naan, other than perhaps as an entry point into their parent’s wallets because her attention to detail? Fail.

After five minutes of coo’ing and gah’ing and the usual remarks I get this clanger:

‘How far apart are they? They look fairly close in age.’

Stunned pause. My now standard dead-pan response:

‘I think it’s about sixty seconds give or take, so yes, they’re really close in age’.

She actually stopped dead, stood bolt upright and uttered:

‘Do you mean they’re TWINNNNNNSSSSS? No way!’

Maybe I will resort to saying that LS and I shagged about thirty seconds after the delivery of Saag, and whoopsie! Naan came along eight months later. People seem to find that unlikely scenario far more intrinsically believable.

I really hope she just wasn’t paying actual attention.

Well, it was what she wanted to know, right?

Another tale or two from the Annals of Really Dumb Twin Questions.

After the Moving Debacle over the silly season, which I found to be the very best time of year for a ginormously stressful cock-up house move, and blogged accordingly bitterly at length about the whole debacle, I am sure you are aware that Chez MII is a new house.

New houses don’t have curtains.

Ergo, the Lazy Lady of the house (that would be me in the title role) has spent all this time with bedsheets on her windows, studiously putting off a definitive solution.

Recently, I bit the bullet and organised a measuring-tape carrying type to come and quote for the cost of some privacy greater than our current well-washed 80 thread count.

After the obligatory vowel-mashing  ’Oooohhhhh TWIIIINS. How cuuuuute!’ was out of the way, then came the nosey sideways glance and the inevitable companion ‘Do they run in your family?’.

I’m sick of quipping that nobody in our family runs if we can possibly walk, or even better, drive, so I just said ‘No, they’re IVF’.

It’s what she was angling to find out, anyway, right?

So colour me suitably surprised when I got a startled ‘Oh, wow. You’re very upfront about that!’ in reply (yes, she really did seem to have a nasty habit of  punctuating her speech with exclamation marks on an overly regular basis).

Dear Internet-at-large, my question is this; What the feck am I meant to say? I’m out of ideas, honestly.

Sigh.

The quote came in at a little over 15 thousand dollars, too. No, our house does not have an unusual number of windows. I think it’s bedsheets for a while longer.

Additionally, because I seem to be on the subject of dumb twin stuff, a shop assistant excelled herself yesterday.

How else can you describe establishing that I have twins and then remarking (of Naan) ‘But this one was premature, right?’.

Um.

For the record, I merely said ‘yes’.

In which I rip the unwary a new one.

Well, in which I’d like to rip the unwary a new one, if I had my druthers and rather less manners. Instead I plan to do it virtually. Or, for variety, fantasise about ripping limbs off and walloping rude faces with the wet end.

Otherwise entitled ‘Twin Assvice Edition 2: A Guide For Non-parents, Geohde’s Helpful List Of Things It Is Never Appropriate to Do’.

Sigh. Because all of these just happened to me today and I’m feeling a little browned off. Can you tell?

Here we go:

1. Ask any of the following daft questions:

These have been covered before, but I shall link them for the sake of completion. Basically, if you wouldn’t ask it about a singleton because you’d be being rather impolitely nosey, it’s not really fair game for a twin either.

2. Poke my babies or lift the pram covers to check they are in fact twins in there.

There are. Now go away.

3. Have a blind and enthusiastic pre-emptive stab at the genders.

Trust me, I know what I have. (‘I am not a boy!’ onesie notwithstanding, thanks for the help Jen). Try asking me, instead.

4. Point out and real or imagined similarities or differences between the babies as evidence of your personal analysis of the zygosity of my children.

Saag is a lot bigger. 

They have quite different hair colours and amounts thereof.

These facts are indisputable.

For reasons I thought were bleedingly obvious, this means they are not identical. 

But in slightly horrified curiosity, may I inquire why you asked when you thought Naan was a boy anyway? Identical twins usually come with matching genitals. If one has a peni.s, then so does the other. That’s just the way it is.

Oh, and feel free to talk to the nimrods who are equally as insistent that they look gasp identical. Come up with a consensus, will you?

5. Feed my child.

Yes, only today, a complete stranger without any bidding on my part and completely without permission walked up, took the bottle out of my hand and continued feeding Naan. My tiny mind boggled as to what culture this may not be horridly rude in but as yet I have drawn a blank.

6. Ask any permutation out of the blue in the godsdamn street on the naturalness of delivery, conception or feeding.

It’s not your business.

To turn the tables, I didn’t ask you if you’d taken a particularly satisfying dump lately or what colour your underwear is. I don’t ask if you scrunch or fold. I don’t want to know if you read the paper while doing your business.

Some stuff is personal, you know?

Wait until you at least know my, and my children’s bloody names before you start asking about my vagina and what I’ve squeezed out of it (or not).

7. Tell me how full my hands must be. Especially with that knowing smirk I just itch to rearrange.

They’d be a lot less full if I wasn’t spending significant amounts of time dealing with The Stupid I encounter every single time I go out in public. Think on how it feels to be a travelling freak show that everybody is mysteriously automatically entitled to make knowing quips at (when you really have no idea at all).

8. Tell me I look ‘so natural’ with them.

They’re my bloody babies, I’d be worried if I didn’t quite frankly. Besides, what constitutes ‘unnatural’ and what would you say then?

9. Stare.

Stare hard and also point enthusiastically and loudly draw your surrounding friends attention to the poor freak with two babies. Just don’t.

Need I elaborate further? Okay, I will.

Try and be subtle about it. Just because I don’t speak your language doesn’t mean I’m an utter cretin and can’t work out what you’re gibbering on about. I think I’ve picked up how to garble ’LOOK! Twiiiiiinnnnssss!’ in about fifty dialects by now.

Finally all nosey parkers at-large, should you find yourself really, really struggling not to poke, prod, feed or otherwise touch my children AND you’re burning up to know all about my vagina and breasts and what I may or may not do with them, remember my final piece of advice: Just don’t. Sit on your hands and think of single babies until the urge goes away or I’ve left the building, whichever comes first. Many thanks in advance for your understanding.

Thank you for listening, Internet. I think what I most needed was to say ‘nimrod’ until the urge to violence receded. Nimrod, nimrod, nimrod.

Schmothers’ Group

Or on how I must be a social retard and just don’t quite get the concept of instant friendship based solely upon having produced spawn via natural or artifically created orifices at around the same point in time.

Or in my case, not the same point in time. You see, I carefully neglected two previous invitations to join my local Mothers’ group on the basis that:

A) The first time my twins were still in hospital and I could hardly relate to the tales of sleepless nights, poo issues and colic, instead being fully conversant with the world of jaundice, gavage feeds, septic workups and planning my day around visits to see the fruits of my IVF. Besides, I didn’t think it was all that traditional to turn up at a group designed to house rugrats en masse without any actual babies.

b) The second time I have to admit I was so snowed under by bodily excreta and sleep deprivation that I simply forgot to go. Kind of accidentally on purpose, if you will. I deliberately stuck the notice on the fridge and ignored it until the date had safely passed and I could ring, be all ‘Oh, I’m so sorry I forgot. I was really looking forward to it’ and heavily blame the twins for omitting to go in the first place.

I think I laid it on a bit too thick.

My child health nurse politely offered me a third go at it, and I was all out of excuses. Even bad ones, which are admittedly my staple diet of deficiency.

So today I packed my now just about four month old spawn in the pusher and went to meet my socially awkward fate, armed with babies as my only shield.

Yes, they were the oldest there.

Yes, there were the four traditional types of people that any large group of people in my ethnically diverse area seem to naturally be divided into:

• Shy.
• Sheep.
• Knowitallalready.
• Language Barrier.

In case you were wondering where I fit in, well, baa. I do try not to rock the boat excessively. It’s hard work keeping a lid on all the snark. Especially in the face of our particular Knowitallalready.

I’m quite sure that if she’s not trying to dispense unsolicited assvice to strangers I’d quite like her but honestly. This woman thought, inaccurately I might add, that she was the font of all knowledge paediatric and was spouting utter UTTER unsolicited shit left and right to all with the Voice Of Authority.

It came as a surprise to the woman next to me to learn that because she was now mildly lactose intolerant as an adult (which is flipping normal, we all lose our brush border lactase in our guts as we grow up, especially if we’re not Caucasian) that she should put her perfectly happy infant on Lactose Free formula or the kid would get the rampant squits, be horribly sick AND develop terrible allergies. Terrible! Polite reply that the baby was currently fine did not dissuade her from continuing.

We were all enthusiastically told that a particular brand of colic drops were simply The Shit (excuse the pun) when it came to colicky behaviour. The last time I did paediatrics, there was no clear evidence that colic actually has much to do with poop or gas issues and it’s probably a temperamental issue to do with sensitivity to stimuli. There is certainly no bloody evidence for efficacy of any kind of colic potion except in lightening the parental bank accounts and making one feel like one is doing something about it while the child grows out of the problem.

Then I was told I’d have twins naturally next because that’s what happens after you do IVF. Shoot me now. Please. I’ll even provide the bullets.

Of course her daughter was also a Wonder Baby Who Sleeps Fifty Hours and had since birth, and was so motor precocious that I’m sure she’ll be in the next Olympics in the bloody pentathlon. 
 
It was all I could do to keep my mouth tactfully shut and not mention my background. I never go spouting advice at strangers in that way, or at least I hope I don’t. I don’t, do I?

Additionally, although the other mothers were not bad people I can go to Partridge In A Pear Tree Town on the questions. Yes, the inner autistic in me who knows all her bank account numbers, her drivers’ number, her tax numbers her anything numbers kept count. It was easy.

• Six asked if my twins were twins (which I thought was fairly obvious to work out, one woman TWO babies the same age),
• Seven asked if my delivery was natural or not,
• Eight if I breastfed, and
• All of them asked if multiples ran in the family before I stomped that line of questioning firmly to death with a brief ‘no, they’re IVF’.  See above for why I kind of regret sharing that information.

I don’t recall asking anybody else about the manner of conception of their children, or the mode of delivery, or their feeding preferences with regard to Breast Lobbing. Or if singletons run in their family. I certainly never abused the word ‘natural’ in all of those contexts.
 
I may be bitter. The wheel fell off my pram in the supermarket afterwards while I was trying to buy my Precious Coffee, the Fat Ass Pram Aisle was closed, the Other Mothers all looked so effing young and Naan screamed her noisy head off all the way home and for a good hour afterwards. She was simply so totally and comprehensively spazzed out on all the new (whee!) faces that she went over the edge into Feral Viletown.

I don’t like Feral Viletown. Even her precious dum-dum doesn’t work once we get there.
 
I still get surprised by the degree of curiosity twins arouse in people.

Why only three days ago yet another very smelly cigarette-y type pulled up the pram covers in the street and went ‘TWWWWWWWWWWWWINNNNNNNNNNNNNNSSSSS!’. Then she didn’t really know what to do with herself and mumbled something and wandered off. Perhaps that’s just Geohde-ville at work, my neighbourhood is a bit dodgy.

Think I’ll have a glass of wine now. Dear god, re-reading this reminds me that I am indeed a bitch.

Growl. Snarl. What was it you wanted to know?

Otherwise entitled ‘Things To Say If You Truly HAVE Grown Tired of You Head’s Current Cozy Relationship with Your Shoulders, Because I Shall Bite The Next One Off.’

1. ‘Do you, uhm…’ sideways look at my tits ‘(pause, followed by urgent emphasis) feed them. The babies?’

You mean these old things? I’d nearly forgotten I had them. The babies? Oh, no. Of course not. I prefer to keep them tiny, it saves on clothing dont’cher know. Not to mention how much cleaner their nappies are that way.

(Notices the look of horror on the face of the asker.)

Oh, you mean do I breast feed my babies? No neither child slurps on bits of my anatomy for sustenance any more, except perhaps the side of my arm if they’re particularly peckish and I’m a bit slow making with the b.o.t.t.l.e.

(Forestalls the next nosy question.)

No, you may not ask why I don’t lob my boobs out in public any more. It’s a sore point and, quite frankly more than a little Not Your Business.

P.S. It’s okay to say ‘breast’, really it is.The awkward pauses and desperate eye movements knocker-ward aren’t required that way. You can do it, trust me. It’s just six letters.

2. ANY permutation on the ‘natural’ aspect of their conception or delivery. As in ‘Are they natural?’, or the evergreen ‘Was your delivery natural?’

Thoroughly unnatural my dear rude stranger. They are both constructed with finest astroturf and did not shoot out of my groin.

Incidentally, why on earth do you care whether they exited my body via my privates? They’re PRIVATE for a reason, and asking about such matters means I now know that you’ve thought about my genitals.

It’s a tad creepy.

3. ‘Are they twins?’

(Cue stunned pause on my part)

Um, yes. Yes they are. Well done on the powers of observation you. They are not, as you have so cleverly worked out, nine months or greater apart but in fact both babies occupied my abdomen at once.

Nifty, huh?

4. ‘If it’s not a boy why did you put a blue dummy in it’s mouth?’

This one really leaves me stuck for words, dear nosy parker.

Firstly, my daughter is a girl, not an ‘it’.

Secondly, I do believe that as far as she is concerned, blue dummies taste just the same as pink ones. Yummy.

Thirdly, you can jam your exclusive pink requirement where the sun doesn’t shine, love, and rotate on the end result. I’ll shout you the Anusol.

4. ‘Are they your babies?’

No, I’m renting them until I decide if I like how they turn out.

I think that just about covers the most frequent tactless questions of late. I feel ever so much better now.

 

Agony Aunt, Edition 9

Darling Google, it’s been far too long. Yet again.

I must apologise for my tardiness in shedding light on the confusion of those whose searches you choose to direct here.

Can you ever forgive me?

For those of you who think I’ve finally actually flipped and headed out into batsh!t crazy cat collecting territory, be not alarmed. Click HERE for the story of the list of inappropriate Google searches I collect, and HERE for back editions of agony aunt.

Oh, sweet Google, I have learned not to observe that your aim is often more than a little off in choice of search terms. Perhaps rather than giving people what they think they want, you given them what they need? I’m very good at handing out virtual Thick Ears, after all.

Anyway, without further ado, I shall present some of your more recent offerings for judgement:

1. When I eat, my stomach feels too full?
2. Normal women pissing in the street.
3. Post your boobs.
4. Is the ovulation stick (is) dark pink.
5. Counting to ten in Indonesia.
6. A comprehensive list of how to know if I am pregnant.

Item #1 (When I eat, my stomach feels too full?)

Dear question-mark afflicted searcher,

Firstly, I’m sure there’s some sort of cream available for the treatment of inappropriately querying punctuation these days (well if there isn’t, then the Ponds Institute better get cracking).

Secondly, um, well, is it? Yes, I can really only answer a question that YOU and not I have the answer to with another question. Sorry about that.

But, on the off-chance that you didn’t intend the errant question mark, let me offer some concrete help…EAT LESS.

You’ll be amazed at the difference.

Item #2 (Normal women pissing in the street.)

Oh curious one,

I worked hard to figure this one out on your behalf, and after an extensive twenty second survey of one (presumed normal) woman, I can tell you the following:

Normal women do not make water in the street.

(With reasonable exemptions for extreme lack of clean public facilities combined with burstingly full bladder and no other options within a continental plate or so. Actually, probably not even then.)

I’d be seeing yellow before I made pee-pee in the street, okay?

Sheesh.

Item #3 (Post your boobs.)

Sorry, can’t.

I didn’t have any difficulty at all in affixing the stamps, but the damn things just won’t fit through the slot on the postbox.

Besides, you never left an address to post them to and I’m actually kind of planning to use them at some point soon.

Better luck next time.

Item #4 (Is the ovulation stick (is) dark pink. )

Firstly, may I introduce you to the searcher of item one? I believe they have your missing question mark in their possession. You really should be more careful where you leave punctuation…..

But on to the burning (presumed question) at hand:

I don’t know, is it, IS IT?

I firmly recommend backing away from google and showing your actual pee-stick to the owner of a working pair of eyes who speaks your language.

How about the bloke you should be shagging right now, if indeed you are using the ovulation stick for the usual reason?

You can thank me in 38 weeks.

Item #5 (Counting to ten in Indonesia. )

One……two……three….surely you know how this goes??

Or did you mean in Indonesia-N?

In that case, let me break out the residual skill of six years of learning Bahasa, just for you:

Satu, Dua, Tiga, Empat, Lima, Enam, Tujuh, Delapan, Sembilan, Sepuluh.

Yeah, I’m a regular Babelfish.

Item #6 (A comprehensive list of how to know if I am pregnant.)

Okay, here we go (order is important here, searcher):

1. (prerequisite step) You either:
   1. Have normal fertility, and a partner of the opposite gender to you who also has normal fertility and have then had actual s.e.x in the fertile window (By which I mean the Right Time For Ovulation, and not a particular type of curtain arrangement) without using contraceptive methods and in the correct orifice. OR
   2. If lacking playmate of Opposite Gender, have redeemed said deficiency of swimmy gametes by acquiring and placing some in the aforementioned correct orifice at the (aforementioned) correct time. OR
   3.  Do not have normal fertility, but have undertaken an IUI, or IVF or other ART treatment
2. Wait two weeks, and leave to simmer.
   1. You cannot skip this step. Many have tried, and failed. You may be able to shorten it by a few days, but that’s about it.
3. Have a positive quantitative beta HCG after step 2.
   1. Then you’re pregnant. With the following qualification:
      1. A positive beta, sadly, does not always equal a Take Home Baby.

Want to know about how to know if you’ll have a take home baby? Simple. Be lucky enough to avoid all the Bad Things that can happen between positive beta and delivery and have a live, healthy child shoot out of your hoo-ha (or otherwise be surgically extracted) at the customary time.

I’m still waiting to see if I get mine.

Not what you think.

Whilst I have endured several public semi-stranger uninvited belly rubs with more equanimity that I thought I would, given that not only did I not spill any blood, and I do believe that I actually smiled, I can’t say I enjoyed my first belly poke.

Yes, a poke, right in my protuberant midsection. Not even a particularly gentle one, either.

As for the individual with the temerity to do such a thing, no it wasn’t family, or a friend, or even an acquaintance.

It was the adult (and therefore presumably capable of actually behaving like an adult and resisting the impulse to just reach out and touch whatever grabs his temporary attention) son of a rather elderly patient. I was trying to discuss details around his mother’s discharge home the next day, but clearly he found his proximity to a gestating abdomen too distracting to concentrate on the matter to hand and poked me in the guts.

With an accompanying  ’So what have you been doing, then?’.

My reply?

‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’

Two can play at the game of the emphasised ‘you’, buster. Although, admittedly the answer to his question would have been better phrased as ‘Almost certainly NOT what you think I’ve been doing’.

Agony Aunt, edition 8

Yes, dear Google, I know it’s been some time.

Please forgive my delay in answering the queries of the Eternally Confused who you, for reasons best known only to your mysterious self, direct here.

But in a small aside, must you send so very many arrangements and permutations on ‘Pregnant’  + ‘Orifice-of-your-choice’ + ‘expletive (usually the f-bomb)’ + ‘verb’? Thank you. I’m not THAT kinda girl, Google.

Ha-hem. Before I really  get going I must make an unrelated observation. Why is is that my darling spouse always thinks that when I get up to pee in the night, that’s his cue to sprint past my waddling self, shut the bathroom door and take a ten minute slash? I mean, I’m very grateful that he doesn’t miss the bowl and I’m spared standing in puddles of wee, but how is his need more urgent than mine? I’ve got two goddamn babies sitting on top of my bladder, ferchrissakes. At least I hope I still have, since after several days of frenetic movement I now feel squat for two days running. Children, if you can hear me, it’s Not Funny, alright?

Anyway, without further ado, may I present to you a hand picked selection of the items that Google feels I am best qualified to answer on this blog?

1. Rubber Vagin@
2. Ginormous a$$.
3. How far to shove progesterone pessaries in?
4. Infertile + whiny.
5. CD 15 and still no ovulation.
6. Anencephaly miracle healings.

Addressing item # 1 (Rubber Vagin@)

Well, dear searcher. If it is a query you have, I’m not quite sure what precisely it is, since you’ve elected to phrase your search term a little poorly.

Most women, if I am a representative example, do not have rubbery vayjayjay’s no matter how flexible the rest of their body happens to be. There is a limit to how much can fit, ya know?

In summary, be careful what you shove up the delicate bits of your ladyfriends and if it was some kind of blow-up self-entertainment device you were actually looking for, I suggest you work on your keywords a little harder next time.

Item # 2 (Ginormous a$$)

Thanks a bunch, Google.

I’m aware that I’m getting there, one gestational week’s induced ravenous hunger at a time, but must you constantly remind me?

Besides it’s kind of like ballast, balances the belly right out and allows me to walk with an even keel, okay?

Item # 3, my favourite thus far (How far to shove progesterone pessaries in?)

Um, well, in the absence of a more delicate way to put it, until you run out of ‘in’ to ‘shove’ will generally suffice.

Don’t worry, unless you have a vagin@ like item #1 above you will manage to achieve your goal without losing half an arm up there.

Item # 4 (Infertile + whiny)

Fair cop, Google. You got me. I won’t attempt to argue. How could I? I’ve built an entire blog around the premise, after all.

Item # 5 (CD 15 and still no ovulation).

Yeah, well. Excuse me while I snarl.

Patience is a bloody virtue, alright?

What’s with the presumptive, entitled, downright whiny (oops!) use of ‘still’??

Some of us would be Very Happy with an ovulation like that, I’ll have you know.

Sorry. Can I blame hormones?

Item # 6 (Anencephaly miracle healings).

Putting all humour aside, dear sad searcher.

I am so very beyond sorry for what you are going through, and what still must lie ahead for you. But I must be honest with you. There are no, and will never be any, miracle healings for anencephaly.

I’ve been there.

It really makes me ache to type this, but your baby will die the only variable is when. I am so, so sorry.

Are you pregnant?

….were the words out of a workmate who sidled into my office five measly minutes before I was due to go home today. I should have left early.

Cue thoughtful pause on my part. Do I say ‘yes’, or lie and say ‘no’? Much depends on how I handle this loaded query. After all, if all goes well and I say ‘no’, I’m branded a rather obvious bad liar but if I say ‘yes’……Oh fuck what if something happens to the babies and everybody knows? At WORK?

She continued ‘Because we’ve all been wondering for a couple of weeks and we think you are so I said I’d ask you.’

More likely that they’re ALL terminally nosy and she drew the short straw. I guess she figured that if she was wrong and had just mortally offended me about my current abdominal roundness, I’d have the whole weekend to get over it.

Unable to delay the inevitable any further I respond in the affirmative. What else can I say, really? If my occupied uterus is obvious enough that people are summoning the courage to ask point blank, I’m stuffed anyway.

She asks how far along I am. I reply in the order of about twelve weeks.

Cue long thoughtful look up and down my midsection (yes, I know I’m huge, please don’t remind me)….

The next disturbingly razor sharp observation follows ‘Is it two babies?’

Fuck. I think my cover is well and truly blown. All I want to know is how the hell did J.Lo did it for so long. The next scan is next Tuesday and I can add fear of public pregnancy loss to my already full schedule of miscarriage and lethal birth defects.

Morning, redux.

Somehow, I don’t think the smarty-pants addition of the ‘redux’ renders the post title any less unimaginative but it’s the best I can do when I’ve literally spent the entire night dreaming of dunking an endless conga-line of wee sticks.

Let me tell you a story.

I believe I’ve told a similar one in the past, but I’m never a woman to pass up an opportunity to anonymously embarrass my darling spouse on-line.

Winding back to around ten thirty last night, i.e. the time several hours after dark has fallen at which a premature Nanna such as myself likes not to be out raging, but tucked snugly in bed (furiously counting sheep if needs be).

From the bedroom I hear a noise…clink, clink….pause…..clink….snuffle, giggle….clink.

My suspicions raised, I call out the following ‘Oy, you daft prick …Oh love of my life, light of my day and apple of my eye, have you taken a stil.nox again?’

The answer is in the affirmative. I get up and investigate. He’s stacking all the small change he can rustle up from around the apartment (including a thorough fishing expedition down the back of the couch) in random arrangements on the floor tiles. Those damn sleeping tablets have a lot to answer for.

‘I’m making a mirage….erm frieze…..um, compendium. You know‘,  he helpfully explains. Muttering ‘That’s nice, dear’ under my breath I take him by the hand and lead him to Bedfordshire.

But it’s never that easy under the influence of stil.nox.

Once horizontal, he won’t shut up. Gentle shusshings and absence of verbal encouragement to continue notwithstanding. Cue eleven thirty. Clearly I’m going to need to do something.

So I ask him to zip it and be a good boy and go to sleep. Please.

He sulks, promptly forgets what I just asked him to do, and starts up, again.

I respond with the ever-charming ‘You’re doing it again……talking‘, and roll over. The one bonus to stil.nox is the amnesia, so I doubt he’ll remember just how rude I was. Sleep is important, after all.

Moments later I feel air flutter against my skin, but no sound. I open my eyes. He’s performing what I assume is sign language. It’s a pity the closest the man’s ever gotten to actually knowing how to sign  is watching the video clip for Y.M.C.A. I have no idea what he’s getting at, and even less curiosity as it is now midnight. I close my eyes again.

I sense him gesticulating away to the epithelium of my closed eyelids for a while and then, lo, he went to sleep.

Thank goodness for that.

Agony Aunt, edition 7

Darling Google, after you’ve again gone to extensive trouble fishing some of these searches from the lonely backwaters of the Internet (and sending them to my site in my hour-of-need-of-distraction), I think I love you. Will you marry me? We’ll be very happy together, what with your eye for the unusual and my love of derisive commentary.

Ha-hem.

My current favourite weird comments gently guided to this site for my wise counsel are as follows:

1. Catch scabies from a rabbit.
2. Pregnancy diarrhoea blog.
3. Speculum fun.
4. Pregnant from toilet, impossible?
5. Is burping a symptom of pregnancy?
6. ‘Incontinence emergency’ symptoms.

Again, Google, thank you. Clearly you think that my assvice range knows no bounds, given you’ve seen fit to direct anything from scabies to incontinence my way. I’m deeply flattered.

Item #1 (Catch scabies from a rabbit)

Dear searcher with itchy finger web-spaces, I must ask if this is:

• A: An order for me to follow,
• B: A request for me to give it a good burl, or
• C: Are you asking if it’s even technically possible?

In alphabetical order, I reply:

• A: Get knotted.
• B: See item ‘A’ above.
• C: See below.

All I know is that I prefer to catch my scabies from interaction with human wildlife, not that I’ve ever actually had scabies, I hasten to add. But only because I have scrubbed my hands rather furiously after consultations (and imprudent handshakes) with patients who do have scabies.

After they’ve left the room, of course, I’m tactful. I can get to a sink so fast I’m a whirling blur with sufficient motivation (usually before the door has finished closing).

Anyway, coming back to your question, they have ointment for it at the chemist I do believe. I don’t have any reason to think that it would work any less on rabbit derived scabies than the human kind.

Do not suffer in silence! You can be cured.

Item #2 (Pregnancy diarrhoea blog)

Sorry, but this is an infertile diarrhoea blog. I’ll keep you posted if that status ever changes, don’t worry.

Item #3 (Speculum fun):

I certainly hope that you Googled this particular query with SafeSearch firmly ON, dear inquisitive one. Unless you’d rather have porn, of course, in which case sod off forthwith.

Here’s my best efforts to entertain you:

 

 How’d I do?

Item #4 (pregnant from toilet, impossible?)

Unless you happened to actually shag in the loo, yes it’s probably impossible. I suggest you count your dates, and sexual partners, more closely.

Besides, and you may consider this unfair, no toilet has ever been ordered by a court to pay for paternity.

Item #5 (Is burping a symptom of pregnancy?)

Only for the uncouth.

Item #6 (‘incontinence emergency’ symptoms):

Well, dear reader, I’m so glad you asked me that question.

Generally speaking, if one is having an incontinence emergency, the main symptom is the wee running right down your leg.

I suggest that you focus your efforts on looking for suspiciously damp trouser legs, seats, or carpets in your immediate vicinity and you’ll be sure to spot when the emergency happens. By the time you detect the smell, you’ve probably well and truly missed the big event.

As an interested aside, because I truly am curious, when is an episode of incontinence not an emergent situation on some level?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Agony aunt, edition 6

It’s about that time again.

The time when the urge to respond with heavily veiled sarcasm at the confused searchers that Google continues to send my way rises enough for me to devote a whole post to the things That I Mutter To My Computer Screen when I read the following search terms:

1. Fu*k, I’m pregnant
2. Shag your aunt.
3. Spotty pill head.
4. Fu*k childbearing hips.
5. Artblog and IF.
6. What is it called when a zygote stays in?
7. +ve OPK 12 DPO.

Addressing item #1 (Fu*k, I’m pregnant):

Yes, it usually happens in that order if you’re not infertile.

From the tone of the search, however, I’m guessing that congratulations are not precisely in order? Um, how awkward because well, you see, I’M NOT PREGNANT.

Addressing item #2 (Shag your aunt):

May I decline?

Thanks awfully for the offer, though.

Nice of you to think of me, AND my aunt for that matter.

Now go away, please.

Addressing item #3 (Spotty pill head):

There’s no need to go calling me names. 

That’s just downright mean.

It’s not my fault that I have PCOS and like to inhale fertility drugs in large amounts, who gave you the right to poke fun at a poor infertile, spotty, pill consuming woman?

Addressing item #4 (Fu*k childbearing hips):

Rolling up my sleeves and trying to look more imposing than my usual small white nerdy physique allows…. 

Listen, buster.

Cece happens to be a friend of mine, and if you’re not her bloody husband, you better keep your hands to yourself, okay?

Anyhow, I won’t have you abusing her blog name with the f bomb on THIS site.

Begone with you, oh foul mouthed one.

Addressing item #5 (Artblog + Infertility):

Artblog, this one’s for you, I believe.

Addressing item #6 (What is it called when a zygote stays in?):

Well. 

That’s the longest winded way I’ve encountered to say ‘Pregnancy’ in some time. 

When they fall out (to anticipate your next question), dear searcher, it’s a miscarriage.

Is this a trick question?

In = pregnancy, out = miscarriage, mmm-kay?

Addressing item #7 (+ve OPK 12 DPO):

I’ve kinda addressed your search before, oh pee-sticky one. Let me save you the click on the hyperlink.

First of all, could you take a seat? Thank you.

You’re sure it’s 12 dpo?

Yes?

Quite sure?

Oh, well, then you’re just pregnant.

Congratulations etc etc.

Glad we cleared that one up for you.

That’s all folks,

 Mz G

I thought so.

It’s been a busy day. I’m sorry that I didn’t write earlier, but I was horizontal with extra pessaries oozing their greasy goodness up my never-you-mind.

Let me fill you in on the last 24 hours of my life.

After finally recieving a callback from the nurse at my clinic yesterday morning, do you know what I did?

Apart from thinking ‘Oh my g-d, oh my g-d please, please, please tell me that this blood emerging from my cervix is not a Bad Thing in a believable way’.

I politely listened to what she had to say, thanked her for calling, then promptly hung up and dialled (from memory, sadly) my RE’s number as fast as my stubby fingers would allow, searching for an answer that actually made sense.

By ‘sense’ I mean an answer that I agreed with (of course) and the nurse didn’t win that particular prize with her version.

Now I’m going to have to explain just why (apart from the small matter of the unscheduled BLEEDING) I’m being such a rabid b!tch about a perfectly nice nurse.

If it helps any, I wasn’t rude to her face. I just had some rather uncharitable thoughts in-between my ears where I would hope that they will not cause offence. Unless she can mindread, of course, OR happens to be the mysterious visitor from my clinic who stops by to check up on me every now-and-again.

Ahem.

Let me recreate the conversation I had:

Nurse OOM: ‘Hello this is Nurse One-Of-Many from Big Clinic, what seems to be the problem you’re having?’

Geohde: Gibbering down the phone. ‘Um, well you see I’m in an artificial HRT cycle after transfer and yet my vagina appears to be leaking blood. I’ve heard a rumor that THAT’s not meant to happen until after I stop taking the drugs’.

Nurse OOM: Mentally patting Geohde on the head. ‘Well sometimes in an IVF cycle, the embryos aren’t right and they just don’t implant and you bleed. It can happen before your pregnancy test. It’s not that uncommon’.

Geohde: Confused. ‘Let me try this again. HRT cycle, not spontaneous.  Bucketloads of progesterone yet unexplainedly unstable endometrium. FIVE FREAKING DAYS post transfer. Embryos probably only considering the prospect of implanting now, really. Bit early to menstruate all things considered. 7 days = sucky luteal phase, even in a natural cycle.’

Nurse OOM: Who-the-hell-knows-what-she-was-getting-at. ‘It can still happen if they don’t implant’.

Geohde: Still confused. ‘Sigh. Is this thing working? HRT cycle. Embryos could be wrong as hell but I shouldn’t bleed until I stop the meds. I’m kind of dependant on the drugs, here, sans corpus luteum. Worried. The pessaries are intended to stabilise my endometrium for a freaking trimester, if required. They sure as hell shouldn’t fail now.’

Nurse OOM: Out of further commentary. ‘Well you could put in an extra pessary today, I suppose, and see how it goes. If you bleed heavily, you should probably stop using them.’

Geohde: Gives up. ‘Error. Error. Does not compute. Thank you anyway.’

And that’s how the grumpy lady came to hassle her RE, yet again.

She, bless her fancy nylons, agreed with my version. I shouldn’t be bleeding.

The plan is to have me increase my insertions of my 200mg-progesterone-pessary-delivering fingers south of the border to a total of six times a day (three lots of two, up from the normally entirely adequate TWO lots of two) in the hope that it might do the trick in stopping the bleeding.

I think I’ll l have to ’insert-at-work’ to get the extra doses to their destination. It certainly puts a whole new spin on questions as to what I did with my lunch hour.

I don’t precisely hold out much hope for pregnancy, but I’d like to know if I can control my recalcitrant womb.

At least I’ve learnt a valuable lesson for next time.

HRT cycles and my uterus do not play nice. I may consider resorting to ovulation induction for future FET’s, although that has it’s own problems, to say the least. The last few times I tried the OI road, I was the  proud owner of a wonky luteal phase and took forever to ovulate.

My choice seems to be either A: bleed randomly on HRT, or B: bleed randomly on my own.

Happy days.

They’re out to get me.

Pregnant women.

Really. I’m beginning to think that they all get together once a week to scheme on how to best really get under my skin. It’s war.

Apparently it isn’t enough to have my retinas periodically scorched with the painful image of random content-looking pregnant women on the train each morning, OR be blindsided by unexpected pregnancies at work.

No.

I have developed resistance to these tricks, and so in response my local pregnant-eurs have adapted their line of attack.

One did venture trialling the added effect of mentioning just how pregnant she was repeatedly, but by now my powers of selective deafness and diversionary rudeness are legend.

Just watch me deflect their hands-on-swollen-abdomen impertinent queries as to when I plan to procreate with ‘Sorry, what did you say? I was distracted thinking about how truly impressive your varicose veins are right now. Tell me, do you have hemorrhoids?’.

Works every time….

Those scheming fertile have sunk to new lows, presumably in retaliation. Like I said, it’s war, and the fighting is getting pretty damn dirty.

Their chosen representative, clearly a woman just pulsing with desire to really shit me as she’s been the most painfully guilty member of the ‘Oh, I’m sooooooo preeeeeeggggggnannnnnnt right now’ club, really crossed the line the other day.

How, you ask?

Walking past me, she turned rapidly (for no apparent external reason) and belted me with her belly. Then she stopped dead still and laughed, still in physical contact. It seems that they’re now literally bashing me with their gestatory capabilities. I had, quite literally, a gut-full of pregnant abdomen sandwiched against mine. Her explanation for using her foetal-containing torso as a weapon?

‘Oh, that keeps on happening, I forget just how preeeeegggnnannnnt I am right now’.

Fu@k you, lady. You don’t win that easily.

My eyelid? It always twitches like this….