Without jinxing things, I would like to say that we are reasonably organised.

There are teetering towers of boxes lined up against every available wall, shoved under tables and behind doors.

We have ebayed and organised and made a large pile to go to the tip and some for charity.

I have been cleaning. I clean a bit, some muscle group or other spasms, I rest for a bit and then try again.

We are our own worst enemies. We have confidently assured our landlord that he can have the keys back on Friday night. This means the house must be cleaned before we actually move the furniture out of it so that it requires only a cursory sweep and mop here and there once it is empty.

Now our house is not completely filthy, despite what certain dishwasher repairmen* might think. Messy sometimes, yes, but reasonably cleanish usually**,  nevertheless I am sure Friday will be hellish. I have plans within plans. I have it all neatly aligned in my mind. How each phase of the move will go. It will all go to shit on the day but what matters is that I feel serene and organised about the move now.

We drove past the new house today and it looks as though the current owners are nearly moved out. The “for sale” sign has come down. I am so extremely happy with this house. It felt like home from the moment we walked in at the first viewing. To be honest, we had discussed how much to offer before we even saw it in the flesh (should that be brick?). It was always meant to be ours.

The last of the money we had to put towards the purchase came out of our account today. It seems unlikely that it will go wrong now. We both keep grinning and elbowing one another in the ribs. It is a hilarious joke that we have been able to pull this off. We both feel that together we have a rare kind of luck.

Maybe our aspirations are more modest than some but we feel pretty extraordinarily lucky to have our wonderful family and now to have been able to buy a home that we just adore. I feel more calm and settled and right than I have in years.

I didn’t know that I was lacking that but it feels very nice to have found it.

* Dishwasher is completely shafted by the way. Apparently there is some sort of unfixable leak that shorts the machine out every time it runs and then dries out, hence his being able to get it to run yesterday. I almost forgave him his ‘tude, only making gestures and faces behind his back  once or twice (alright, possibly three five times).

**Could I possibly be more non-comittal about the cleanliness of my house than that – “reasonably cleanish usually”- go me!

Thank you for your visit today. I know it was not your fault that when you arrived this morning I was still in my pyjamas. I assumed we would be waiting for you for hours and was not rushing to get dressed. It did enhance what was to be an unbelievably tedious encounter though, didn’t it?

I would just like to say that I was especially impressed by all of your eye rolling and muttering at our description of the dishwasher’s problems. It is sometimes hard for us moronic plebs to avoid irritating the highly talented and gifted, such as yourself. We do try though and to this end, believe it or not, we had checked for a kinked hose ourselves.

It was very sweet that you pulled out the dishwasher filter and scrubbed away at it. I have never felt so festy as I did when you pronounced that it was merely a blocked filter that was preventing our dishwasher from running AT ALL. You managed to get the blasted thing to run, I was forced to concede that it did appear to now be working. You explained, as if speaking to a very small child, that we must clean the dishwasher filter every time we use it and repeatedly told us that you could not stress that enough. We get it, we’re filthy. Oh the shame.

I suggested that you could wait and see if it stopped part way through the cycle, just as it has been when we have managed to get it to run. I felt cowed by your insistence that it was our lazy, periodic filter cleaning that was to blame. No one would behave like that much of a smartarse unless they were sure about it, right?

That’s why, Little Wankywank Wankerson, I was particularly livid when, about six minutes after you left our house, the dishwasher stopped mid-cycle, repeating it’s performance of the last four days. I was thrilled.

The filter is now clean and surprise, the dishwasher still does not work. Let’s hope tomorrow’s visit is more productive, shall we?

From

Stupid Housewife

P.S. I will be ready, the dishwasher is now so shiny you can not look at it directly.

P.P.S. I forgot to thank you for you phone call this afternoon. I loved that you were able to question what I meant by “the dishwasher is not working”. You can’t make it untrue just by refusing to believe me. I have not sabotaged your work, wilfully clogging up the filter just so I could see you again. Trust me, you were just wrong.

So it was playgroup again today.  Pudding and I took Beefcake and Grub with us as the cuteness known as Grub was feeling better.

It was a lovely sunny day of about 20 degrees here today, which felt positively balmy compared to the freezy, frozenness we have been enduring in the last little bit. I am exaggerating of course. We have no real frozenness in Adelaide, sometimes in the hills but not actually in Adelaide. I am just a wuss. I am not a fan of the wintery coldness and do not cope well with the cooler weather over Autumn and Winter. I had to force myself not to hide inside for our entire time in the UK. I would have liked to stay inside wearing a hot water bottle suit, huddling under a doona/radiator tent arrangement. Anyway, I prefer the warmth.

Where was I? Ah yes, playgroup.

Playgroup was lovely today. I chatted to the other mothers. I would have made you all proud. Interestingly, Beefcake had an idea as to why I feel so very uncomfortable amongst other mothers. He thinks that my experiences as a very young mother to Rhubarb (I was only 18) have made me anxious around other Mums even though I am now a similar age to many of the Mums that I meet. I feel like a misfit still, despite no longer being one. I think he may be right, at least it’s an alternative theory to the one I’ve been running with -  “all other mothers are nasty moles”. Right, distracted from my point again, this is becoming a terrible habit.

Foot in mouth prompting Mummy – hmmm, FIMPM, that’s not a very good blog-name for someone, I will have to rethink that moniker. Anyway, FIMPM was there and she was very nice and we chatted and she didn’t appear to think I was horrible and boring at all. I am all chest puffy outy and air punchy that I have made a new friend. Yes, I am five.

It’s not just the making a new friend thing. I love that we have found a playgroup we love. We all love it, so much that I wish we had thought of going there earlier. I feel a bit ashamed to say that my own experiences of playgroups and things with the older children made me wary of trying this playgroup sooner. It is just nice to have a kid related activity that I won’t have to force myself to attend each week. I actually enjoy it and that’s pretty cool.

After 13 years, maybe I am beginning to get the hang of  at least this  aspect of the Mummy thing, hey? Yeah, probably not.

I would like to be able to say that today was a brownie free day.

I would, truly I would.

I can’t lie though. Today was not entirely brownie free. I had just one brownie although I am planning that tonight will not be entirely custard free if Beefcake drags himself away from his most demanding mistress (his laptop) and gets his bum into the kitchen to make it for me.

I have reasons, I have reasons.

Poor little Grub develped a fever yesterday evening. My children are very good at spiking bizarre and unexplained temparatures that appear while you have your back turned and then disappear with as much mystery.  Unfortunately poor Grub still has a fever. She has no other obvious symptoms, she is perhaps slightly snotty, her eyes are a bit swollen but there is really nothing  obviously wrong with her apart from a fever and the fact that she will not allow me to put her down. At all. Even to go to the toilet. She has suffered a cuddle from Beefcake a couple of times throughout the day but only for a few minutes. She is not a happy little possum.

In addition to poor Grub’s clinginess and constant breastfeeding (which incidentally meant that I had an eleven month old sleeping ON me all night) Pudding made a late night visit to our bed and insisted on staying. I won’t pretend this is unusual, particularly at the moment, ever since we told him that we were moving he has been making regular trips to our bed and staying. Last night was particularly nice though because he had a little accident in our bed. He hasn’t wet the bed in some time but naturally the perfect time would be in our bed when we already have a sick baby situation.

Now, if you will, imagine that there had been a leaky nappy incident the previous night and you had been too lazy rushed off your feet to wash the resulting dirty linen and what you have is a sheet load (ba doom boom) of uriney washing. The laundry was hip deep with pissy linen and p.j’s. And the nappies were already in the washing machine. Then, for good measure, just throw in the fact that Pudding did not go back to sleep immediately after the peeing incident this morning but instead lay awake in our bed muttering and singing softly to himself while I held Grub and listened to the dulcet tones of the garbage truck trawling down our street and you will see.

You will see that I have been in a shitful mood all day and have had to plaster a grin on my face and pretend to thrill in preparing lunch and caring for the preschooler with a very grumpy and sooky baby welded to my hip because Beefcake has lots of very important and urgent work to do and cannot be interrupted.

This is the downside of having him here all of the time, I fear. I feel like he should be at my beck and call and similarly, his employers feel that he should complete some of the tasks they have allotted to him. Quite the dillemna. Given that we have just bought a new mortgage it seems that the worky things will have to win for the time being. Nevermind, he goes on leave for more than a week as of next Wednesday so I will be sure to get my money’s worth during that period.

Where was I?

Oh yes, brownies and custard. I am deserving, yes?

I’m not sure what keeps happening to me at the moment. I mean to blog but I end up not being able to find the time. Last night I just lay down for a brief nap when I put Grub to bed and when I woke up it was after midnight. I had a cup of tea and went back to sleep. Pitiful. Although I am not going to poopoo actually being able to sleep with ease. I am in one of my rare insomnia-free phases and I must try to make the most of it.

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Thanks to all who reassured me that my social ineptitude was not as dire as I may have believed. I will take heart and hope that the next playgroup is less stressful.

Speaking of stress, organising this move is beginning to leave me a bit frazzled around the edges. I have successfully pushed my obsessive organising and planning to the back of mind, soothing myself and muttering that I will be allowed to think about that next week, it won’t help to plan it all in minute detail now.

I fear we have come to the end of that phase of my obsessive planning. Now comes the laying awake at night, rehearsing how we will organise it all until I have a minute by minute plan for every person involved.

I am not inflexable, I will happily revise my plan as need arises but it makes me feel oh so virtuous and infinitely more calm if I have lists and lists of lists and a set of jobs for everyone and perhaps a colour coded wall chart. Who knows. I have thought of writing a flow chart so that Beefcake and the children and our one or two helpers will know where they must be and when. Just to streamline things. I can’t rule it out.

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I haven’t written about my Mother’s Day. Mostly because I wouldn’t want any of you to think badly of my mean and ungrateful husband and children. Let me just briefly say that I was underwhelmed by the love that was shown to me. In the end, I did recieve a cookbook, which was purchased by my family at lunchtime on Mother’s Day while I was in the bookshop. Although I was a touch displeased about their lack of appreciation the recipe book is rather nice. This past weekend I made a brownie recipe from the book. I had never made brownies before. They are extremely rich and I would like to curl up in bed with a whole pan of them all to myself. In an attempt to avoid this, I cut the brownies into individual serves and froze them so that we could get them out one at a time and zap them in the microwave. This was a mistake. It may have prevented an initial binge on the weekend but it has not prevented me from returning to the freezer at least once each day so that could have a brownie. I am going to be brave and try to go brownie free tomorrow. Writing it here is meant to harden my resolve. I shall let you know.

I have enrolled Pudding in the local kindergarten where he is due to start pre-entry in term four of this year, so October or something. Pre-entry involves just one half day per week of kindy time but the following term (in January) he will start  going to full-time (four half days) kindy.  As I mentioned before, we had been going to the playgroup at the nice Montessoriish school but to be honest I find that kind of boring. It is very small and there are not a lot of other kids for him to play with or parents for me to talk to.

So.

Today we attended a playgroup at the kindy hoping that time there now will make the transition to kindy later in the year easier. I left Grub with Beefcake so that Pudding and I could have time together alone, something we rarely get.

First of all. The kindy playgroup was fantastic. Heaps of fun activities, lots of space to play, lots of kids of different ages from babies right up to Pudding’s age, lots of parents. It was nice. We played and painted and stenciled and made pies from playdough. He LOVED it, even more than the other playgroup, so I am sure we will be going every week from now on. It will be fine to take Grub as there were other children her age and even some we knew from other places. I think it will be great for all of us.

Particularly as it seems I am in dire need of some assistance with my social skills. I think playgroup, where I may be able to learn to hold normal conversations (ones where my foot resists the urge to lodge itself in my mouth) and make friends with other mothers who I like and who are normal, would be good.

From a me socialising perspective, playgroup did not go that well, can you tell?

First off, there was a Dad there who I knew (well I knew his kids, they are usually with their mum but I had seen him once or twice) from Pudding’s swimming class and I said hello and explained how I knew the children. That was fine. I felt all grown-up having grown-up conversations with grown-ups.  I think it gave me unwarranted confidence.

We sat down at the playdough table and were soon joined by a Mum and her daughter. We made small talk. It turns out they have only been in Australia four or five weeks. They have moved from the UK. She wanted to know all about how kindy works and I was happy to share.

This my friends, was my time to shine. I was rockin’ the small talk. I was asking about her family, normal things, how many kids? How old? Why did they move to Australia, was it for her work or her husband’s work? She explained that they had always wanted to move to Australia and just happened to find a job that was perfect for her “partner”. It was during this part of the conversation as she made gratuitous use of the word “partner” that I was thinking, oh, okay, they’re not married, that was a bit wrong of me to say “husband” as though everyone is married and…

Yeah, I am slow on the uptake.

It was about that time that she told me that actually, my partner,  she’s a woman.

Gee, I’m great. I mean, how much of the stereotypical middle-class housewife would you like me to be. I should have said partner. I am an ass and ask her about her “husband”. What a twat.

Through the course of the conversation it also comes out that she is a doctor.

I mutter something about once having had a career in something or other and she says “Oh your a ..” and I say “Uh, no, used to be but not since I was quite pregnant with Pudding.”

Oh.

Yes.

I am the boring, middle class, boring, assume everyonehasahusband moron.

I should not be allowed out in public.

Now, I know they have just signed a lease on a house in the area. The chances are that the kids will be going to playgroup and then to  kindy together. I will probably have to see this Mum quite a bit and she will have to see me. It’s dumb, I rarely meet Mums who I like. I only have one or two friendships formed because of the children.  I liked this Mum and then I act like a bumbling idiot. I am a social moron. She probably went home and told her partner about the moron housewife she met at playgroup. I suck. Beefcake says he’s pretty sure it’s a common assumption seeing as she is at a playgroup with her child. It’s not just the assumption that I made though. The conversation just left me feeling like a stupid, boring loser. It wasn’t her fault, she was very nice about it but now I think she’ll probably avoid me like the plague.

Alternatively, it is possible that I have blown the whole incident out of proportion in my anxiety-ridden mind and am just a touch hormonal and mental.

What say you?

Dearest, sweetest Grub,

The other Mummies do monthly posts about what their baby is doing, the things that have changed, the new cool things bubba can do this month. I am a bad Mummy. You have not had your monthly posts. Even your real-life paper diary sits, sadly neglected, only a few long, long catch-up entries about the most delicious joy that is my Grub. I am sorry, my darling, this four kids thing, what can I say – busy.

Each day we wonder at the incredible person you are.There is not a wishy-washy bone in your body, you are so utterly you, your personality is stamped on everything you do.

You are not yet eleven months old and yet you seem so self possessed, so certain of what you want from moment to moment. It is a new joy for me, watching a child like you grow. I have done placid babies. I have done fractious babies. You are neither. You are sweet and loving and affectionate. You can turn in a moment and become enraged. Angry and fierce in your determination to have your way. So forthright that we cannot help but laugh at the way you make your position known.

You are convinced that you are not a baby. You have been walking for about six weeks now. People laugh when they see you. So small and yet there you are, walking over to the window to bang on it until we let you outside.

If I had to choose a phrase to describe you, “easy going” would not be it. You are wiley like a fox. People outside of our immediate family rarely see anything other than our sweet-faced and cheeky poppet. You are this, it’s true but you can’t stand the thought that you may miss out on something because of your junior status. You scream and slap and kick if we will not give you what you desire. People think we are making it up, I think you know to charm the outsiders.

You are so very clever, you have begun talking. Repeating peoples names, telling me when you want to get up or have a drink. Naturally, your words are pretty interesting approximations of what you are really trying to say but you make your intent so clear that we understand you easily. You understand us too. That’s the scary bit. You are so aware of what is happening around you. Watching, learning. I am amazed by all of the things you already know.

So, I’m sorry, precious sweetheart, that I have not been writing all of this down. You have been keeping me on my toes…

But in large parts I have just been busy spending my time holding you, nuzzling your soft neck, taking note of the cankles and rubber-band wrists, that will disappear all too soon; cuddling you close and breathing in your sweet baby smell because, as your Daddy is only too happy to remind me, you are a toddler now.

Mummy

xx