Yesterday I was lucky enough to view part of a television program purporting to catalogue the top 400 Aussie songs. As you can imagine, there was a fair bit of AccaDacca, INXS, Midnight Oil, Barnesy and *shudder* Icehouse. I think I heard some Kyles and some Noiseworks as well. A nice broad selection, representing our nations choicest musical offerings from the past two decades or so.

Now, I’m not knocking Aussie music. I like to listen to Australian music, I own plenty of it, in fact I probably have a slight bent towards liking Aussie music over that foreign nonsense.

The thing that struck me though about this countdown, is that it all seemed to be stuff that I would consider scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’m not saying that those bands/artists are at the bottom of the barrel, just that the songs that were chosen for the show seemed to be the B side off the limited edition EP that they only made a hundred of or something.

Seriously, if I wasn’t familiar with our strong musical offerings this show put forward a pretty decent case for never, ever listening to Australian music.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Vanessa Amerosi, Shine. I have a few problems with this. I’m not normally such a bitch but it really, really bothered me when I saw it. First of all, the song is dreadful. No point in denying it, it just is. Second, she seems to have a continual gale blowing directly in her face and not only does this not bother her she seems quite satisfied, no thrilled even, with that.

Finally, and most heinously of all. Her outfit. An ill-fitting black turtle neck and camel coloured pants that are two sizes too wide and made for a woman twice her height. You can get a very clear shot of this from about 2:36 onwards. I am baffled. I mean, fine, if you’re going to the supermarket to grab some milk but who wakes up in the morning and thinks “Hmmm, what do I have on today, oh yes, shooting a music video, oh I’ll just bung on the trousers I stole from the goodwill bin and my comfy old jumper, that’ll do!”

I know you’re gonna say she had a stylist or something but they had to be taking the day off that day because there’s no way anyone will convince me that someone put her in that outfit on purpose. I mean even if she’s supposed to be a hobo or something (which could very well be the case, I can’t say I was paying a lot of attention to the “storyline”) surely they could have done better, some feathers? Glitter? I think a dress of old Twisties packets and Mars bar wrappers would have been more chic.

Next I give you:

“Jackie” by B-Z featuring Joanne. I have to confess to feeling the urge to do a bit of a dance to this one. It makes you want to bop and sing along, I’ll admit but the woeful dancing and odd facial expressions had me really wondering. This is really the creme de la creme of Aussie music? Seriously?

Finally, just to bang the final nail in the coffin of Australian music as presented by this show, the threw this one at me:

Peter Andre, Mysterious Girl.

Oh.

My.

God.

I wanted to take to my eyes with a scourer and some bleach after his oiled torso had gyrated in front of me for the length of the video clip. Uuuurrggh. I feel so dirty.

So, Happy Australia Day!

This is the best we have to offer.

I haven’t had a chance to talk much about Grub and what she’s been doing lately. Actually, let’s be honest, I haven’t been talking about the kiddies at all. I’m not very good at this Mummy-type blogging gig am I?

Nevermind.

I sense there will be several child-related update posts in the near future.

Today though, I’d like to talk about Grub.

It’s amazing. She is really getting so big and so mature.

She’s almost nineteen months old.

You would not believe how much this child talks. Seriously, she’s my fourth, it’s not like I’m the doe-eyed first time Mummy who thinks her precious baby is a prodigy. Trust me, I know how speech and language development go. BUT. Oh. My. God. I’ve never heard anything like her.  She copies (and understands- then incorporates into her vocabulary) pretty much everything she hears (*ahem*, literally everything she hears…). It’s so sweet, I often hear her practising words so that she can get them just right (of course she doesn’t get them all quite right but she’s 19 months!). I know, I’m bragging but she just blows all of our minds, I can’t get over her.

I guess the obvious benefit of her being able to communicate is that she can, well, communicate. Her ability to tell us what she’s thinking, what she wants etc has lead to her asking us, in recent weeks, to take her nappy off so that she can use the toilet. For months, actually, she has done the odd wee or poo on the toilet but all kids like to give it a try. We sat her there and let her as a novelty really.

Last week though, as it’s been so warm here (read hotter than the Satan’s ring) I thought it would be the ideal time to let her go pant free a fair bit and see how she goes using the potty full time.

I know she’s young – Pudding didn’t toilet train until he was just gone 3 but she just seemed ready, somehow. So, off with the pants, cue asking her every 3.5 seconds if she would like to do a wee. It may seem like a hassle and I’ll admit that we are running slightly low on mopping up towels – mostly from her starting to go somewhere, realising and then leaving a trail between wherever she was and the potty/toilet. The aroma of our house has some distinctive top notes of pine-o-cleen and pee these days and still I am thrilled to bits.

We’ve been out and about all over the place without a nappy and only had a few “accidents”. For the first couple of days she was a bit snippy about using the potty whilst we were out but we’re getting there. It turns out she waayyyyyy prefers to use the toilet, potties are so 2009, donchaknow.

She’ll be in night nappies for a while but being nappy-free during the day is so worth the very small effort we’ve had to put into it. I actually can’t believe how easily this has happened.

We’ve had our fair share of toileting nightmares with the others. Rhubarb took a full year to train, Poss took nearly as long and Beefcake spent countless hours reading stories with her perched on the loo just waiting for a poo to happen. Pudding was relatively easy, he only took two days because we waited until he was three but he did poop all over the floor (and inside of his pants) at my friend’s house just to let me know who was boss.  She already comes and tells us fairly often when she needs to go. It’s almost unbelievable.

There’s just one problem. Do you know hard it is to get undies for a child that is as small as she is. She’s kind of tall and thin and, I mean, she’s nineteen months old! I swear when I trained the big kids you could get undies in size 1-2. In fact I know that you could because when I went to train Pudding I found some old training pants that were tiny – waaayyy to small for a toilet training 3-year-old. Unfortunately the elastic had perished so I chucked them – wish I hadn’t now.

So um, bum! Kind of literally, in my face , all day, every day.  I don’t mind around the house, she likes to be nude and she’s still in the early stages of training really so that’s what’s best but when we go out she needs some sort of modesty cover. I bought her a pack of size 2-3’s but they’re soooo baggy. You could fit two of her in them. They are constantly on the verge of falling down, which I think you’ll agree defeats the purpose of her wearing them.

It’s dress/skirt weather. She has two pairs of shorts that fit her but all of the ones that I bought her for Christmas are too big – she’s really narrow around the hips – thanks to inheriting my “unique” body shape. I think there is nothing for it but to make her some pairs up myself. I have seen a pattern for very small undies somewhere on the internet, I’ll have to chase it up. I can’t think of many less inspiring and more fiddly things to be sewing but there you have it. The girl has to have pants!

So, think of me in the coming days as I try to make becoming undies for my little girl. After all she can barely be called a toddler any more.

P.S. Yes, I know that my photo is blurry but in my defence, Poss drowned the good camera and I have my Iphone and an almost as bad thing that someone gave me for free because they bought a new one. I could go on, I have more excuses. If you would like to hear them feel free to berate me for my inclusion of a blurry photo.

So, um, it occurs to me that with the Christmas/New year business I forgot to tell everyone about my appointment with the Rheumatologist, I’m sure that you’re all hanging on the edge of your seat to hear about it. No? Tough luck.

Originally I couldn’t get an appointment with the specialist until March. March, I thought in November when it was becoming clear that my hands and other joints were only getting worse (don’t even mention the pelvis, just don’t), was not good. Straight away I asked to be placed on the waiting list for cancellations and miracle of  miracles on about the 18th of December I got a call to say that they could fit me in on the 23rd if I could make it. Um, hell yes!

The rhematologist was actually really sweet. She listened to what I had to say about my falling apart body. She took what I had to say seriously. She examined me thoroughly. She wasn’t surprised or indeed horrified when I said that I was still breastfeeding my toddler (as doctors seem to love being). All in all, it went well.

Numerous outcomes of that appointment were:

• I am very, very flexible. Not quite as freakishly flexible as some people but apparently the resting position of my feet when I am lying down is not right. They flop down or something, who knew.
• Multiple other joints and bits and bobs do things that they are not meant for. Things I didn’t realise they did, or at  least that what they did was wrong, until she asked me to show her.
• That flexibility is kind of on a continuum, my level is not quite at the extreme end where connective tissue disorders reside but not really okay either and certainly contributing to some problems.
• I have some sort of non-specific inflammatory arthritis in my hands. When she first saw them she inhaled sharply and said “oooooo”, which I took to mean that it wasn’t just me who thought they look a little strange.
• She’s not sure about my pelvis. She thinks that, although she’d like to unify my problems under one diagnosis, there may be several things wrong with me that are not really related. Awesome.
• She took my pain seriously and has placed me on two new medications to be taken every day, to reduce inflammation and pain etc.
• She wants fresh pelvis x-rays and blood tests. No other doctor has ever wanted pelvis x-rays, I only had some done because a friend of mine is a doctor and she wanted to make sure I wasn’t dying of bone cancer while we were visiting her in Spain. This is a pretty big deal. She actually gives a crap about investigating my pelvis.
• The original blood test results weren’t normal. Something or other was elevated, which it would be in arthritis, hence the new blood tests to see if it is worse.

I left feeling really optimistic. She’s not 100% sure that she can do anything for my pelvis but she feels she can do something for my hands and, you know, she is trying to help me, she listened, she heard.

So, for the moment I am holding my breath and managing my pelvis pain and taking my pills until I next see her in March and even though the state of play is pretty much the same. I feel better. I do.

Question:

If you find a man NAKED wandering around in the bush after having spent the night out there and you are a police oficer, what should you do?

Answer:

The man seems perfectly “fine” just a bit disoriented. There is no need to do anything. Just call his estranged wife and seat him in the public waiting area while she drives the long distance to far away country town to get him.

Yes, because that makes perfect sense.

Oh and if you are the man’s psychiatrist? You hope that the police will section the man and when they don’t you ask the estranged wife to try and talk to him into going into hospital, I mean, it’s not as though the man is at the very brink of a massive psychotic episode. Let’s just wait for him to hurt someone before we do anything drastic.

Anyway, the private hospital has no beds until tomorrow so we should just hang on until then. That’s only sensible.

So, as of this moment, he is at home, by himself, not going to hospital, not being helped. Because, my friends, the system is fucked.

The end.

Sometimes when I sit down to write I have trouble. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to say. I do, mostly, but some things are hard to put into words. Sometimes I feel that a brainstorming style word cloud would better convey the disarray that exists in my tiny, tiny head.

Where to begin?

My mother. Those of you who read regularly will know that I recently severed ties with her. Well, to be honest, my exact words to her were “I can’t see you for a while”. I just couldn’t bring myself to make a more final statement than that. Not with her. For my father it’s easy. I know that I will never want to see him again. It is pure relief to have him out of my life and I would not go back to what was. Not for anything.

My mother though. It is so much more complex. While she was living with him, I told myself, I had to separate myself. For my sanity, for my heart. It had to be done. I feel guilty at how brilliantly easy and peaceful this last little while has been without her around. I have found more serenity than I have felt in a long time.

Around Christmas she reappeared in subtle ways. At first asking to buy gifts for the children. I thought about denying her that but then decided that I couldn’t do that. Either to her or the children.

When I saw her on Christmas day she seemed so fragile and small and….. on the edge. Just at the edge of tolerance for what life could throw at her. I couldn’t bear to tell her that she had to continue to stay away. Instead I told her that we would see her again. I held the little woman and said that it would be okay. That she could see her grandkids and us and we would be there for her again. I felt very ashamed at the gratitude she showed me then. She has done some things that were not okay, I don’t always respect her actions but I hadn’t meant to cause her the kind of pain that I saw.

She was still living with him though. Telling us that she was making plans to leave, that things had progressed and that they were moving towards the sale of the house and separation. This, to my mind, is far too sane a path to take in this situation but we just haven’t been able to get through to her.

Thursday.

Thursday night I get a call from Patchouli! (my sister). Have you had Mum’s message? She sounded very shaken, not okay. My first thoughts are always what has he done?, what has happened?, is she hurt?

The message says that nothing has happened. Nothing dramatic. She has left though, is staying with my aunt. Nothing dramatic but she just feels that he has drifted so much closer to that edge. He is not really there at all, he is becoming psychotic, he is warning her to get out, leave the house. He has done strange things. She knows she just can’t go there again.

I tell her he is dangerous. She doesn’t want to believe this but agrees that it could be true. She has left.

He has gone around the house and smashed things while she has been out and then hidden the evidence. Mostly inconsequential things but also a beautiful statuette that was his grandmothers. I have always loved it. I know that he did too.

He stands in the yard and stares at the sky, muttering to himself for hours.

Realistically he is barely holding it together. He is already psychotic.

And people? Do you know why? The antipsychotic drug was causing some (quite bad) long term physical side effects and so the fucking arsehole psych took him off of them. Sent this man who, without anti-psychotic drugs is, well, psychotic, home to live with my mother. Knowing they are in the midst of separating. Knowing he has planned, let’s just say violent things before in a state of psychosis.

No extra monitoring or plan in place for his care.

If it weren’t so exhaustingly predictable it would be laughable. Does he think that my father will recognise his own psychosis and trot himself off to Glenside? Yeah, realistic.

There is nothing that anyone can do. The last time that we tried to have him sectioned under very similar circumstances it was a farce. They had “lost” all record of his two previous sections. His doctor would not recommend section as it was a breach of trust with his patient (no, not joking). We just had to wait until he attended a psych appointment and the psych was able to talk him into voluntary hospitilisation.

It makes me feel so…. tired.

I wish that I cared to intervene but I don’t. I will not write here what I wish to happen.

I am not letting myself hope too much. We have been here before and she has returned to live with him. If we can just get her to make a decent break this time though….

Maybe.

I’ve tried to write this birthday post several times and here we are at the eleventh hour and it is still not up.

It’s hard to put into words all of the things I want to say.

There are mixed emotions for me, you see.

Fourteen is going to be an interesting year, I can tell.

Maybe not easy but amazing nonetheless as I watch you grow from boy into man.

Try and go easy on me.

Please.

Happy birthday sweet boy.

Fourteen.

Oh dear.