I have now realised that there is another distinct downside to Beefcake’s working from home. I have become lazy and incompetent.

Yesterday he headed off to take Rhubarb to rowing camp, a trip that’s about 90 minutes each way. I was alone in the house with Poss, Pudding and Grub and had to feed them and keep them entertained until after dinner. When he worked in an actual office this would not have bothered me. I was used to being alone with them. Yesterday I was crapping myself. I realised I had become completely unfamiliar with how to juggle all the children on my own, as I never do for more than an hour or two at a time. After he left, I had a panic that they would overthrow me and I would be powerless to stop them. They did outnumber me, how could I ever prevail?

My paranoia is completely spaztastic as I still do all of the caring for the kids while he is working, it’s just that he’s there, as backup. I know this, I just was worried that if I had to wrangle them for an afternoon without a moments respite, I would end up hiding in my wardrobe or something to get away from them. It turns out that the children hadn’t picked up on my incompetence and terror and thought that I was my usual authoritative self. We managed just fine. There were few tantys and I hardly swore at all. It seems that mothering is much like the bicycle, only with more snot and vomit. I may have been cheating slightly this past year, by having a great big hairy helper, but I can still manage if I have to, which is reassuring.

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I’ve been gradually learning the lessons of owning a mobile phone. It’s taken some time, I first owned one a decade ago, but I think I am prepared to share some of the rules now.

1. Lock keypad so as not to call people accidentally at  inopportune moments.
2. Do not drop your phone in a glass of water. It will die. (This happened in January last year)
3. Do not buy cheap phone in Singapore. Two things will happen. You will find that you can buy the phone for a similar price in Australia and parts of the phone will begin to fall off. (March)
4. Do not give mobile phone to seven-month-old baby to play with. She will suck on it and when you go to use it, it will no longer work. (Yesterday)

Upside -I get to go and buy a new phone today. Downside – given my recent track-record it is likely to be something quite a bit cheaper than this.

I have mastitis again. It seems that I just lurch from one episode of bed rest to the next. My boob is very pretty in it’s dappled shades of pink and purple. Grub is a ferocious feeder and I feel that her particular feeding style must be responsible for all the mastitis, which I NEVER had with any of the others. Also, she has recently cut her bottom two teeth and has been experimenting with them. Very soothing.

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We bought Pudding some goggles for swimming. He now wears them in the bath and shower and “I looooove my goggles, Mummy”. They can also be used for superhero dress-ups.

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Poss is progressing nicely with her orphanage for wooden peg people, I must remember to post pictures. She worked on it all day yesterday and has built up a complex narrative surrounding the evil live-in caretakers of the orphanage, a Mr and Mrs Carton (or Mr & Mrs Sassy she can’t decide). They have lovely insect themed wallpaper though, so does it really matter?

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Tomorrow Rhubarb embarks on a four-day rowing camp with his new school. The idea is to take the new year 8’s away with the rowing team for them to meet other new kids and older students as well as begin training for the upcoming school rowing season. He has the anxieties now, which is making planning and packing difficult. I wouldn’t force him to go except that I know he will have a ball and how cool will it be if he can make some friends and not feel so lost when school starts? Anyway, he hasn’t said he doesn’t want to go, just that he is nervous and he is certainly very surly indeed.

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The g key on my laptop is intermittently not working so I have to go back through everything I type and insert the g’s.

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I just got up and went to the toilet and there were specs of dirt and twigs sprinkled all over the bathroom. It looks as though someone carried our dog in there  after she’d been for a roll in the grass and shook her. I also noted small piles of dishes in the hallway as well as a pair of Pudding’s undies.

Beefcake will have a fit if he comes home to find that I have moved these things, or tidied up in any way. He’s taken the children out for lunch. We’ve already had a little bit of bickering this morning over our very different standards when it comes to housework. Mine being that it is ideal to try and clean some things sometimes, for example, stacking the dishwasher and cleaning the loo are things I like to see done. Beefcake works on the philosophy that nothing ever needs to be done today and that people who clean regularly must have OCD.

A friend of mine lived with Beefcake in between houses and before I met him. It had been an all male sharehouse and she reported that it was not uncommon for him to sit down, find a box of three-day-old chicken wings on the floor next to the chair and have a little snack. Apparently the bathroom was so grime encrusted it took her an entire day to clean it, which she said she had to in order to use it without dry retching. He has improved a touch from those days, he has learned to refrigerate food at least.

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I watched eight hours of William and Mary yesterday on dvd and I plan to watch more today.

Ah, times up. Grub is awake. Count yourselves lucky that I haven’t got more time to share.

Edited to add:  Beefcake was concerned that his “having a fit” could be misconstrued. To clarify, he is concerned about me wearing myself out and wants me to rest. I am therefore banned from housework. It is only out of concern for my welfare and his having a fit would not be the loud and shouty kind but more of the carrying me back to bed kind. Just to clarify.

Better baby?

I probably shouldn’t write this as it is tactless and in poor taste but….. I am tactless and in poor taste?

It’s been in my head today and the only thing to do is post it I think.

As you will be aware, my name begins with ‘A’. Representing the first letter of the alphabet can be a touch annoying because you tend to recieve frequent accidental calls from peoples mobile phones. I usually hang up reasonably quickly when I receive one of these calls, unless there is something really interesting being said on the other end of the line.

Now, some people are worse offenders when it comes to accidental calls than others. A female relative of mine, with whom I have a reasonably close relationship, is a bad offender. I frequently get calls from her as her bag is jostled about on her shoulder as she walks to work or am treated to conversations between her and her son as she drives him to school. As I said, I roll my eyes and hang up. It’s no big deal.

A while back, Beefcake answered our home phone. He listened for a moment and then frowned saying “It sounds as though someone’s being injured”. He handed me the phone and I listened for a moment. I could hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. She was screaming as though she was being beaten or tortured. It sounded horrific. We continued to listen and were contemplating what to do when the sounds changed slightly. We could hear a man’s voice and the woman alternated between screeching and whispering to the man. We realised what we had been listening to was in fact, people having sex. Not only that but the realisation suddenly dawned that it was my relative and her partner. Wow. Loud.

We had a bit of a giggle and a shudder at the thought of it. We were seeing her the next day and needed to process it and move on as quickly as possible so as to avoid any sniggering when we saw her. I was terrified that I would catch  Beefcake’s eye and burst into fits of hysterics. We made a pact not to look at each other.

She arrived the next afternoon, neck all wrapped in a scarf, “I’ve lost my voice” she explained.

It had to turn around and pretend to be doing something with Pudding so she wouldn’t see my face. I couldn’t look at Beefcake for her entire visit.

I fell asleep at 8pm and woke up at 10.30 with a headache.

I discovered that my hair is looking really beautiful after my nap and spent twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to capture the spectacular hideousness of it only to discover that when photographed it looks as though I may have put my hair into a beehive and ventured out into a stiff breeze. Not that impressive.

Also, photography? Not my thing it seems.

As I was leaving the bathroom I noted a large black mark on my wrist. Given my recent large bruise I had a momentary panic that I may have developed some sort of clotting disorder. I touched it. It was something sticky covered in filth. Yes, I am lovely.

Beefcake is in a friggin’ meeting with someone who he doesn’t like at work. I can hear in his voice that it is not going that well and may take some time.  I won’t be able to get back to sleep until he comes to bed.

I should probably set some sort of lock on my blog preventing me from posting past a certain hour at night. Yes.

The hilarity continued late into the night last night. It took Beefcake and I several hours to find the bolts that were needed to put the cot together. In the end, they were somewhere we had already looked. We were a bit confused. It took us until around 3 am to finish putting it together. We are both night owls but lately we seem to be egging each other on to stay up later and later. Not a good idea when you have young children and there is no chance of sleeping in.

Also, Poss insisted that she was far too hot and couldn’t possibly sleep in her bed. To be fair she has a loft bed and being that much closer to the ceiling does mean it’s a lot hotter for her, so Beefcake moved her mattress. When I went in to talk to her this morning we had a chat about the fact that she no longer seems to play with any of the large array of girly toys (think Barbie horsedrawn carriage etc) cluttering up her bedroom. All of the things she does use have nowhere to go and lurk around the room in small piles. We agreed it was time for a cleanout.

I was quite surprised by her enthusiasm, actually. She usually likes to hoard every scrap of fluff she has ever found. She once (recently) brought home a knitted doll she found on the street and squirrelled it away in her bedroom until I stumbled across it. It was then that Rhubarb confessed he had been sworn to secrecy regarding the doll as it had initially smelled quite strongly of wee and she had secretly washed it in the bathroom basin to remove the smell. We didn’t keep it.

So, Beefcake and I took Pudding to swimming, leaving Rhubarb and Poss to their chores. When we arrived home, we were greeted by a bedroom kneedeep in toys and Poss’ excited yabbering about a new craft project. It seems that she read  about how to turn an old, torn box (when repaired with copious amounts of sticky tape) into the perfect dolls house. But no! A doll’s house would be far too cheerful. Poss has decided to create a cardboard box orphanage and could I please purchase some wooden pegs so that she may create bedraggled peg orphans to inhabit the place. You see, she has all of this extra space now!

I should have known that a clutter-free bedroom was unattainable. She has always formed particularly strong attachments to her clutter. She still sleeps with her very worn and rapidly disintegrating teddy from infancy. He recently came apart to such a point that there is actually no fabric left to sew him up. I can’t mend him. We tried suggesting a dolls hospital, where he could receive a new skin, thinking this would ease her pain. She became so hysterical, at the thought that we suffered three nights of inconsolable crying and nightmares about Jiffy having new skin. He now wears a newborn suit of Grub’s in order to keep his stuffing in. I’m afraid of what will happen if he becomes completely dismembered.

Think of me then as I trudge off to try and restore some order to the room of a burgeoning bag lady. It won’t be fun.

I have reached that point.

You know, where you feel as though you may spontaneously combust, or at the very least lay in a tantying, weeping heap on the floor, if you are forced to be civil in a parental sort of way again in the near future.

It doesn’t help that I have been typing this with one hand whilst Grub is asleep on my chest. I have been trying to get her to stay asleep since 7pm, it is now 10.18pm and she JUST went. This has not been relaxing.

Because I am terribly clever, I decided to rearrange our room so that we can fit a cot in it in temperatures of over 40 degrees. Also, pelvis. Clever. Beefcake did all of the lifting and shifting but it nevertheless appears that I have done something to sabotage the fragile truce between my muscles and my skeleton.

The real reason for my mood is the older two children who, despite being fully aware of my pelvis difficulties, whinged and moaned at every request for assistance today. Rhubarb in particular was being very trying. It seems   he really is 13 now and is determined to flaunt his teenage moods at every opportunity. Everything  I said today was met with either a sigh or an infuriating circular argument of the kind that teenagers carry out best. At one point I asked him if he could recommend a topic, which we could agree on, so that we could talk about that. I think he said something sarcastic and dismissive. I have blocked it out.

The thing is, he is ordinarily great company. I enjoy spending time with him. When he has days like this it makes me want to tear my hair out.

Poss had a similarly disagreeable day. Instead of the rude remarks, she prefers to moan and moan and moan and, well you get it. I have never been more relieved to have them all in bed.

The annoying thing about it is that, as children, they have an expectation  that you will remain civil and loving to them. Forgiving them all their little behavioural episodes and carrying on without holding a grudge. I don’t usually have a problem with this, after all, that’s kind of my job,  but just then, when Rhubarb brought his guitar out to show me some riff he just mastered. I had to fight the urge to ram it down his throat.

Today in Adelaide it is going to get to 41 degrees celsius. As I type this, it is already over 32 degrees.

It is a day for hiding indoors in darkened rooms with air conditioning on full-bore.

The piss poor air-conditioning in our rented house is not up to the task.

I don’t want to go outside.

It is our nephew, Spawn#1’s, 3rd birthday and so I must.

They’d better have ice-cream.