I can’t believe it’s been ten days since I last blogged. I am a bad, bad blogger.

I have been spending waaaaaaaaaaay too much time hunting for tiny purple nappy icons. A slightly pointless but addicitve endeavour. I am pretty much done now so can resume my normal life again.

The worst part is that not only have I been a bad blogger but I have been a bad Mum as well.

It was Poss’ birthday on Saturday. I did NOT create a birthday post for her like I have the other children. I am a bad and heartless mother.

She had a lovely day and was showered with many a gift and sugar-laden treat.

*******************************************

I’m sorry that I did not get to write your birthday post darling Poss.

Now you are eleven.

At eleven you stand on the very cusp of adolescence, the beginning of womanhood…. Almost.

You are still my girl child – loving and open and filled with a unique creativity. Gentle and easy-going, with an imagination that amazes me.

More and more now though, you are showing us new facets -tempestuous, strong-willed, dancing to the beat that only you can hear. You and I have begun to come at each other from odd angles. Never quite seeing eye to eye.

I take a good deal of cheer from the fact that nobody will be able to tell you what to do. I take somewhat less pleasure in the fact that this includes me!

I have faith, darling, sweet girl, that we will find a harmony between us again, that we will find a rhythm that allows both of us to dance with abandon. Until we find that together again, I think I will just have to be content to allow you to dance alone….

But I will be watching.

Love you Poss.

xxxxxxxxx

Mastitis.

Just to really stick it to me, my right breast is red and swollen and burning hot thanks to a bite I recieved as a parting gift from Grub at bedtime last night.

Because, you know, the universe was worried it hadn’t fucked with me enough.

I feel like death but actually surprisingly cheerful for someone whose right tit looks like exploding.

It’s the sunshine. I can’t stay mad at the universe when the sun is shining.

Also, the Grub, despite feeding like a rabid piranha, is soooooooo cute at the moment.

She came out with a new word today which illustrates just beautifully that she is a [insert surname here].

“Bum”. Clear as a bell, perfectly articulated, on demand.

She’s one of us. Only just 15  months old today and she’s saying “bum”. That’s my girl.

Also, operation sleep-in-own-bed is going well, really well.

So, despite the mastitis, and the pelvis and my thumb and other assorted maladies, fuck you right back universe!

I win.

Yesterday, I peeled a chunk of nail and flesh from my thumb with a vegetable peeler.

It hurt.

Rather a lot actually.

Also, and I should point out here that you are lucky that I am not providing a picture for your pleasure, there was a nice piece of my thumb sitting in the kitchen sink. We all had a good look at it. It was a bit yuck.

It bled and bled and bled.

Being without even one opposable thumb is actually a real pain in the bum.

This morning, as it was still bleeding and my blood soaked bandaid* needed changing, I yelled for my manservant** to attend me.

Whilst I was waiting for him to attend me, I removed the blood encrusted bandaid and this my friends, is where Pudding shared his wisdom:

Pudding: What happened to your thumb? (ah the temperamental memory of a four-year-old)

Me: I peeled it with a vegetable peeler.

Pudding: Well, I haded a bruise. It’s gone now.

Me: Yes, yes you did.

Pudding: Well, you should of goted a man to help you. (Accompanied by look of superior wisdom and paternal care)

Me: I beg your pardon?

Pudding: (shakes head and smiles condescendingly) A man! You needed a man to help you.

Me: (quite pissy by this stage) Ah, no. No darling, girls can do anything that boys can do.

Pudding: (laughs in my face) No! Boys are best at using tools and fixing Mummy. You should have gotted a MAN to help you!

Grrrr. The manservant insists he has not said anything that would have given rise to that sort of thought. He then went on to spout some insolent nonsense about Pudding observing the natural order of things, which earned him a sound beating stern talking to.

I can’t quite believe that came out of Pudding’s mouth. The child knows that I built most of the kitchen cupboards for frag’s sake. He obviously is too young to know what’s good for him!

* Sticking plaster. Beefcake kept heading into Boots in the UK and asking for bandaids only to be met with blank stares. He never did learn.

**Beefcake is a most slovenly, objectionable and quite frankly next to useless man-servant. He is not efficient or organised in any way but beggars with sore pelvises can’t be choosers.

I have written three or four beginnings to this post and deleted them.

I do not have my creative flow. My blogging mojo is absent.

I shall put a brave face on it, though and bravely push on with a bullet pointy type post that requires very little of my brain to be functional.

To make it interesting, let us divide the bullet points into two categories. “Awesome things that are great and happy and light up my life or are just funny” and “Whingey things that I could spare you but will not because I am selfish like that”

Awesome things that are great and happy and light up my life or are just funny:

• Grub has decided to cut me some small slack. She has cut down her overnight breastfeeding to between 0 and 3 feeds overnight – yes you read that correctly, she had her first ever night without a feed during the night – and she has agreed to sometimes sleep for several hours in her own bed. I will admit that this is a very new trend -  she has only done it twice – but I declare it to be the new norm. I will shortly be  the proud owner of one of those modern, new-fangled sleeping-through-the-night-and-putting-themselves-to-sleep children I have heard about. I can feel it in my waters.
• Spring has sprung. There is sunshine, there are butterflies, there are flowers (unfortunately with sniffle-making pollen to make my eyes water but let us not dwell on that). I feel as though a great grey shroud has been lifted from my person. Sunshine makes me happy.
• Beefcake has been working very hard this month, doing a bunch of very long days in order to haul some projects at work towards their deadlines. This may sound like it is not such an awesome thing but what it does mean is that the slight overspend that we had with the original kitchen renovation, which has been hanging over each month and making me feel stressed and depressed, will be taken care of. We will be back in fine shape. It hasn’t really been a big deal but it would be nice to have a month where I do not have to plan our spending down to the very cent. It will be lovely to be able to purchase one or two things I have been putting off for myself because they were not 100% strictly speaking necessary. I feel much relieved.
• The few extra dollars we might have will mean that I can perhaps paint the bathroom or re-tile the shower recess or re-enamel the very old bath. A bath should not have a rough abrasive surface. It will only be a minor bathroom refresh as opposed to a proper bathroom renovation as we will one day demolish this bathroom and it would be wasteful to replace it now but I am sure I can get it looking quite nice. I should show you what it looks like now – remind me to do that.
• Beefcake and I bought a rare and much appreciated coffee to get us through playgroup on Friday morning. In the cafe where we purchased our take-away beverages, there was a family (two older parents and an adult son) eating fish and chips. It was nine thirty in the morning. We thought maybe they were tourists, they had the look of being not quite local about them. We thought perhaps they had just arrived and it was dinner time where they come from, or maybe fish and chips is a breakfast food in their country. I don’t know but I thought it was a bit odd. Would you go the deep fried seafood and chips for brekkie?
• It is Poss’ birthday in less than two weeks and she has requested a shopping spree to redecorate her room with nice things. New bedding and cushions and such. Beefcake is completely puzzled that someone would want this as a birthday gift but I am excited  because it will actually be quite a fun thing to do. She has already chosen a new quilt cover and is planning a colour scheme she wants to work on – cute! I shouldn’t say that, she’s going to be eleven, that’s practically a teenager.
• Also on the topic of Poss’ burgeoning adolescence. The other day she was excitedly telling me about a school project when, to my delight, she threw in the tweeny term “totally random”. I have been unable to resist taunting her. She hates me. What fun.

Whingey things that I could spare you but will not because I am selfish like that:

• My body is an unpredictable and vile hell-monster with it’s own independent and beastly identity. I was feeling fab on Friday and went to the park with the small kids and the friend that used to come to playgroup (you remember) and her two girls. I had a spring in my step. It was great. I felt as though things were on the up and up. As some sort of cosmic punishment for feeling good (yes, I am melodramatic) I dislocated my wrist when I picked Grub up off of the slide. No odd movements or anything. Just picked her up. I couldn’t bear to tell my friend. I feel like a hyperchondriac so I grabbed my wrist and we walked home – lucky the park is around two minutes away. My wirst was very swollen and purple that night but is beginning to feel better now. My pelvis has arced up again quite badly. I am on a neverending merry-go-round of crap.
• Beefcake is working insane amounts. It will not stop this week. He will not be being paid extra for anything he does now either and he is mostly picking up the slack for other, slackarse people. Very frustating but at the same time I must remember that he is here, at home with us and we are actually extremely luck – so shut up Ali.
• I have been comfort eating. It is a pain/depression thing. I am usually pretty good but I have dropped the ball with my eating and I feel quite grumpy with myself. It is made worse by the fact that I am still carrying the vast majority of my baby weight from Grub and I can not exercise at all really. I feel really guilty about it and sometimes that seems to actually make it worse. It is a whole self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing. I need to take control of it but some days having to be really careful about what I eat seems like a step too far. Like it will just be the thing to push me over the edge. I need to get a grip.
• Also, my foot hurts.

There you have it people. You’ree lucky I don’t blog more often really, aren’t you?

Well that was a long break.

I haven’t been on my computer much in the last couple of weeks.

I have been feeling quiet and insular. Wanting to hide from everyone in the real world and on the internets, cos, you know, that helps.

I am still largely in the midst of a not good period. It is still messing with my mind. Given that no solution appears to be forthcoming, I have decided that we shall ignore it. Good? I thought so.

Much has been happening in the land of the callapipper.

Grub was getting too dangerous to stay in her cot. She almost never used it anyway but such a climby bubba is she that we were terrified she would climb out of it one day very soon as  Pudding began climbing out of it at much the same age. Luckily it is a cot that converts into a quite low to the ground bed. We have put a small side onto it so that she can’t just fall out and she is now the proud owner of  a “big girl bed”. At fourteen and a half months. It seems ridiculously young but she is honestly far safer this way. Also, she actually seems keen to sleep in this new bed so that’s a boon.

In other Grub-related news she has also been cutting her first four molars. All at once.Yes, in case you were thinking of asking, that is as fun as it sounds. She has been a delight, poor little poppet. It wierdly seems to have given her some sort of cognitive hypercharge though and she has been learning new words at a rate of knots. My favourite of her most recent batch of things to say is the word “cool”. There is nothing more hilarious than her picking up some much desired bit of fluff and labeling it “cool”.

We went to the Royal Adelaide Show on Friday. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it is like a fair with rides and money sapping treats to buy for the children as well as a large array of farm animals. Grub surprised us a all with her knowledge of baby animals, making loud moos as she neared the calves. Unfortunately, she also felt that the geese, pigs and sheep said “moo”. I’m pretty sure that the wombat had a good go at it too. Oh well, she did try.

Rhubarb invited three of his friends to join us and we left the four thirteen year old boys to wander around on their own. They spent all of their money on pointless and irritating whistles (that go inside your mouth -revoulting) and oversized novelty glasses. Sadly we kept  crossing paths with them as they giggled their way around the showgrounds annoying the other patrons.

It was a rather busy day on Friday actually as Rhubarb had the schools Spring rowing camp to go to on Friday evening. We had to drive him to Walker Flat, which is about 2 hours drive from Adelaide. We were completely shattered by the time we came home, but in a good way.

Poss has today and tomorrow off of school as it is inconceivable that anyone should have to miss out on going to the show. They give the kids two days off to enjoy it. She managed to help the small children make more mess in the house than I would have thought possible. Let it never be said that she doesn’t help out.

Finally, I had intended to blog a Happy Father’s Day to my darling husband yesterday. You are an excellent father. Our children are very lucky to have you. You so owe me on Mother’s Day.

P.S. I am so sorry I have not been visitng people and commenting. I will do my utmost to catch up but if I don’t, because I suck, just bear with me, k? I will at the very least comment on most recent happenings. How’s that?