1. Your 10-year-old does not know who Ange and Brad are (or Posh and Becks for that matter) and cannot come up with a celebrity couple when asked to do so for HOMEWORK!!
2. Your 13-year-old walks around singing an inappropriate (and unembedable*) song.
3. You have tormented your children by inventing imaginary boyfriend/girlfriend for them. Rhubarb’s is named Ashlee-Lee, she is a redhead, she likes lip-gloss. Poss is dating an imaginary boy named Bevan. He is shy and has a passion for the dramatic arts.
4. Your 3-year-old has taken to calling people ‘a fucking’, whenever he deems their behaviour to be less than ideal. For example, “Mummy, Rhubarb’s a fucking, he won’t play outside with me.” He also may or may not have used the term ‘arsehat’ in recent days. Nice.
5. You let your 8-month-old play with a bottle of soft drink with a straw in it and she figured out how to use the straw and guzzled some sweet and fizzy before you realised. Awesome.

* Okay, this might be a word. Shut up.

In an attempt to wear me out, with the hopes of fabulous sleep tonight, we decided to venture out on a spontaneous family outing today. We hit an initial snag as we had *ahem* accidentally forgotten to pay our car registration. The website for paying the rego was broken and we waited and waited until around 1.30pm it was finally up and running. We headed north to St Kilda, just outside of Adelaide.

‘Let’s get back to nature’ thought we, eager as could be to walk the mangrove boardwalk trail and expose the children to the wonders of the swampy mangrove. It was quite a warm day but we all donned our sunglasses and hats and headed in. Initially it was quite pleasant. There were oohs and aahs and questions about the mud and the mangrove roots.

We stopped to read the information signs along the way and were having a lovely happy family time, snapping photos and walking together. At one such photo stop, I noticed a stocky fat mangrove mosquito was attempting to feast on my arm, I brushed it away and suggested we keep moving to keep them at bay. Deeper and deeper into the mangroves we trekked. The trees were surrounding us and it felt as though we had entered a dense and dark, if rather hot and humid forest, it was quite magical really although Pudding was getting jumpy. As we kept going, we noticed the mosquitoes were coming more and more frequently. We tried to outrun them but to no avail. We were all being eaten alive! We could press on and risk being sucked dry by the resident tiny bities or we could turn back.

Grumpy children not smiling for pictures amongst the ‘nature’.

It is at this point that I must confess that I am not the outdoor type. I can admire the beauty of nature as much as the next person, but bitey insects and screamy children and sulphurous mud smells in combination do not inspire my love of the natural world. We freaked out and ran. I swear our walk back to the car took us about a quarter of the time that it took to head into the mangroves. Pudding shrieked the whole way back. ‘I don’t like the forest, Daddy, I DON’T LIKE IT!!!’ Rhubarb abandoned us completely in his panic to get away from the biting bastards and we didn’t see him again until we were well clear of the mangroves.

In an attempt to redeem our outing, we headed to the  St Kilda playground. This is a very famous adventure playground. There is a wooden fort high on a hill with large slides, there is a wooden pirate ship at the edge of the beach, there are flying foxes, there are tunnels. We coated the children liberally in organic sunscreen and went to play. We had a nice time, although Pudding, traumatised by his mangrove adventure was quite clingy and whiney. We all managed to have some fun and we left only when coated thickly in the sandy dust from the playground. This was actually quite unpleasant as it mixed with the sticky sunscreen to form a sludgy coating, which meant we all needed an immediate shower on returning home.

In retrospect, I would offer these pieces of advice to  remind me next time I attempt  to brave the mangrove/adventure playground on such a day:

1. Pack aeroguard – tiny bities suck arse
2. Three bottles of drinking water – plus sippy for Pudding – is not sufficient, pack more
3. Do not allow children (OF ANY AGE) to apply their own sunscreen. Poss got more in her hair than anywhere else and smeared it all over her sunglasses
4. The outdoors are not all they’re cracked up to be, you don’t like them, really
5. Taking children to the park is never fun, you hate it

I’m sure that our mistakes were those of amateurs. Thank goodness we were able to salvage it all with a round of service station ice-creams on the way home. We have planned to visit the museum and art gallery next Sunday. I am thrilled, much less in the way of tiny bities at the museum.

Leslie, at My Mommy’s Place is having a contest. It’s her Haiku Buckaroo Contest. I have been trying to think of a topic suitable to write a haiku about. I have tried and tried but nothing funny, nothing entertaining, nothing lighthearted, has been coming to mind.

Then I realised, I have the perfect subject matter. My lack of sleep.  I am tired, so it may not make much sense, but it will be haiku. I’ll just keep muttering, 5, 7, 5…5, 7, 5.

Golden light streams in
Kids are stirring already
Crap, I need more sleep

But then I thought, that seems a bit depressing. Life is not that bad, just because you’re a bit tired. 5, 7, 5. I can rustle up something a bit more cheery than that:

Lying here awake
Her soft breathing makes me smile
Oh crud I’m so tired

Okay, so maybe not that much more cheerful, a little bit though, yes?

I think I’m gonna have to admit defeat on this one. Haiku, it seems, is not my greatest strength. You should all go and check out the contest and enter though because Leslie is cool and her blog is ace keen.

I can’t really put anything about me or my life up today. As all of these stories swirl around in my head, it still just seems to horrible to be real.

I did not sleep well last night, I headed to bed at around one and tried to watch The Breakfast Club on my laptop until I felt as though I might have some success at getting to sleep. I then alternated between light sleep, with an awareness of Beefcakes tractor-like snoring and a tiny baby body pressed up against me, and being jerked awake every time I drifted into deep sleep by Grub’s insistence that I boob her. NOW! It was a pile of arse.

In my tired and grumpy state, this morning, I decided that it would be ideal to give the house a thorough cleaning. I have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed lately with the task of maintaining any semblance of cleanliness in a house with four kids and a Beefcake. The consequence of not quite keeping up over a period of weeks it the build-up of crap on every available surface in our house. There are little drifts of child detritus heaped against the skirting boards, small stacks of books, papers and bottle tops. There is a stick and a rock on my sideboard, towels and clothing are heaped on the hall table. Mess like this brings out the crazy in me. I insisted that we had to do a swift clean-up in order to prevent some sort of  dirt-induced psychosis on my part. Beefcake took my need to clean as a personal affront to his manhood, which resulted in him throwing a whiny baby man-tanty. As a consequence we didn’t achieve too much and I will have to try again tomorrow but it did ease the pressure in my brain a  bit, so that was a boon.

After my little frenzy we had to ready ourselves quickly and head to Pudding’s first playgroup. It was really, surprisingly fun. Pudding was beautifully calm and cooperative. He tried almost all of the activities and cleaned up after he had finished with each one. He was particularly taken with an hourglass-type arrangement filled with coloured water. He spent a good ten minutes tunring it upside down and watching the water shift. He mad a paper doll. His doll was dressed in a green bodysuit and had odd sized googly eyes. He even drew a stylish blue moptop hairstyle on his creation. He was very proud. This lasted approximately ten minutes, at which point he removed the smaller of the eyes and declared it an alien. The poor cardboard man lost his outfit on the way to the supermarket after playgroup and was delivered to the waiting jaws of Grub for entertainment as we trawled the aisles. We arrived home with nothing more to show of our time at playgroup than a soggy ball of cardboard and yet I declare it a success! I think we’ll try and get there every week from now on and there is a good chance that we may send him to school there.

At this point I need to confess that I have just had to rewrite this entire post as my laptop swallowed it first time around. I am shitty now, all of the joy has been sapped out of it and I will not be checking for errors of spelling or grammar.

I am sure every blogger in Australia will be blogging about this today. The bushfires in Victoria. I can’t  fathom why someone would deliberately light fires like these. Over 100 people have died. It’s the most distressing and tragic thing. So many people’s lives have been affected. It’s just so awful, there’s nothing else to say.

So, please send positive thoughts to the people who are fighting the fires and to the people who have lost their homes or family members or better still, donate to the Red Cross, all of these people are going to need so much help rebuilding their lives.

Yesterday a friend’s child turned three. I got really overexcited and pumped so that I could have a drink or two and Grub would have some milk. I wish now that I hadn’t. Let’s just say I overdid it a bit. I can not  handle my alcohol.

I fail.

Beefcake assures me I didn’t embarrass myself too much  but I’m sure I must have. To top it off, I was drunk enough that I told two of my friends about this blog, which up until now only Patchouli! had known about. I was hoping they had forgotten about it but, of course, they haven’t. I gather they will be popping in to make annoying comments in the future, which is nice.

So, hi to you.