• We sold the high chair and the pram on Ebay. We didn’t get enough for the pram for me to feel that it was worth giving up what seems to be the essential symbol of babyhood*. I sobbed all day on Tuesday when it was being collected. Mostly because there will be no more babies. Partly because this means Grub really is a big girl now. A toddler and not a baby. I asked Beefcake if I could buy it back. It was a bit pathetic.
• I am having a little problem with chocolate licorice bullets at the moment. I always like them but at the moment I am unable to stop at just a few. I eat the whole bag, I have left them in the kitchen in the hope that having to get up to get more will reduce my intake. It is not working. I am a hopeless, hopeless addict.
• My sister Patchouli! has admitted to me that she has started her own blog. This is fine except that since she has known about my blog she has mocked me mercilessly and relentlessly. She has never read this blog, she just knows about it. She expects similar restraint from me, which of course I will provide. I really wish I didn’t have to though. I am dying to look. I have almost considered telling someone else about it so that they can look for me and tell me about it. Naturally I won’t but still, tempting.
• Beefcake reads this blog,which is sometimes handy if I am looking to send him some sort of coded message. So here it is: Go and get a vasectomy (In case you were wondering that’s code for “Go and get a vasectomy”).
• Beefcake has brought me the bag of bullets now. They are not long for this world.
• It is sooooo hot here I think I might melt. We have no air conditioner. We have borrowed a small portable one but our current finances do not extend to buying a new one. We’ll have to organise something in the next few days though because it’s getting dire.
• It’s pageant on Saturday. You may remember my posts from last year. I am sure that this year’s pageant will provide just as much fabulous blog fodder. Last year though it was drizzling and chilly enough that Grub had to wear a beanie. The predicted top for Saturday is 39°C. It will be quite a different day. I shall have to find a vantage point in the shade so that I am not overwhelmed by the heat. Also we are walking there as we can’t really justify taking the car and parking. It’s maybe a twenty minute walk across the parklands at most. Heat makes me lazy. I don’t really want to.
• I am addicted to scrabble on my iphone. I have at least ten games going at any one time. It is a deadly time waster as there is a chat function too so I play and chat to Patchouli! all the time.
• My coriander plant died because I forgot to cover it with some shade. It was less mature than my other herbs which are still hanging in there. Bum.
• Rhubarb has a frightening Fbook habit. I have had to get on there once already to remove some chat that offended his Aunt and Uncle. He couldn’t see the problem. The thing is, he gets 90 minutes a day total computer time. He has been sneaking time at school. Not pleased. He is becoming such a teenager. It’s scary.
• I’m thinking of doing my requalification and going back to work a couple of days a week. I have to jump through a few hoops to be able to practise again as it has been four-and-a-half years since I worked but the money is needed. Beefcake would be able to look after the kids because he works from home. On those days he would just mostly work in the evening, which is fine. He is not overly keen, worrying that I will not manage with the pelvis and things but I think it will be fine. Worth thinking about, I guess.

*This is strange because all of my children but particularly Grub were carried in a sling all the time until near their first birthday.
Grub only used that pram about two dozen times really. Still. *sniff*

Nothing.

Some minor things like my vitamin D levels are quite low (spend much time inside immobilised by pain do you?) and my cholesterol levels are marginally high but not actually high apparently.

So nothing.

Nothing at all.

Doctor is convinced there is something the matter with me. As she put it “There’s just too many joints and things that are problematic”. I agree. There must be something.

I have a referral to a rheumatologist. The doctor assures me that there are many more in-depth tests that the rheumatologist will do.

I am not surprised really. I had a feeling that nothing would turn up. I also feel that there is a good chance that the specialist will not find anything and I will be back to square one, in pain and told to “just deal with it”.

I know these are useless, rubbish thoughts. I must pick myself up and go forth to be prodded and drained of my vital fluids with great enthusiasm and an optimistic twinkle in my eye.

Truthfully I am hoping that in the months that it will take to get a specialist appointment I will improve greatly. Beefcake has now decided that I should wean Grub. He is convinced her continued feeding is taking an unreasonable toll on my body. I won’t even consider it until she gets to eighteen, no twenty, months. I would prefer weaning to occur more naturally but if we get to twenty months I will consider it if I am no better. Of course I expect I will all better by then.

I have the flu. I have had a fever for three days. I feel leaden and snot-filled, My throat feels as though I have swallowed a cheese grater. It is making me feel decidedly up-beat. Can you tell?

Beefcake has a job interview tomorrow. Wish him luck.

I’ve written a few posts this week but when it came time to take the big leap and press the publish button I just, well, couldn’t.

It feels as though I should have something monumental to say.

This was the week that saw me finally tell my mother that I would not be around for her anymore. I just reached the end of my tether.

It should have been a big drama. It should have created big emotional turmoil for me. Or something.

I do feel a quiet kind of sadness that comes from knowing what our relationship has come to but I know. I know that it is what needs to be right now. Maybe not forever but for now.

So I haven’t been able to blog anything this week. Just because.

—————-

Yesterday was blood test/x-ray day. They took two bajillion viles of blood (they were fasting bloods I might add so I was already dizzy prior to the event) and tried to peer under my skin from all sorts of angles. The x-rays were just of my hands and wrists for the moment. They hurt very badly these days – meaning I literally can’t scratch myself. My hands being as they are was the deciding factor in getting a doctor to pay attention, I think. There are days when it is extremely painful to type.

It is great knowing that we might finally get some answers to what the heck is actually going on with my stupid bod. On the other hand I am terrified that they will not find anything. If they don’t find anything I don’t know what I will do.

—————-

We were waiting in the car today, Grub, Pudding and I. Beefcake had to just whiz into the bank for a minute. Pudding spied a shaft of light  refracted through some glass. The rainbow it created on my car seat excited him, as rainbows always do.

Pudding: “It’s a rainbow Mummy, look, look!”

Me: “Ooh yes that’s lovely”

Pudding: “Muuuum, you’re not looking at it, look at it now, it’s changing, look, LOOOOOk!!!”

Me: “Yes Pudding, it’s a lovely rainbow.”

Pudding: “Mummy, is there a unicorn buried in your chair?”

Me: “????, ummmm, is there a unicorn buried in my chair?”

Pudding: “Yes, they bury gold in there, is he in there burying the gold under the rainbow in your chair?”

Beefcake now back: “You mean a leprachaun?”

Pudding: “Yeeeess (much eye rolling), a lepacon. Mummy is he IN YOUR CHAIR??!”

Me: “Ah yes, there’s a leprachaun buried in my chair, Pudding.”

——————

Both kids have had a slight temp again the last couple of days. Grub’s temp was 40 degrees when I got her out of bed after her nap.

I’m really hoping that’s all over tomorrow.

Now it’s time for a glass of wine. Oh yes indeed.

————

Ooh perhaps you can help- female 40th birthday presents. I have a friend’s party to go to on Saturday and I am a terrible gift buyer. Any suggestions?

• Grub has had a fever for the past 24 hours. It was over 39 degrees last night. She hasn’t been as hot today but she is still quite warm and out of sorts, no particular symptoms just off colour and hot. Poor little possum. I have been convinced that we picked up something deadly during our recent outing to the ER. Probably not though.
• We had a scrap metal dealer come this morning and take away the sheets of corrugated iron from the laundry/shed. I decided it would be a wasted opportunity to have someone come and not get rid of the old Hills Hoist. It’s probably been in the backyard for about fifty years and I believe that it didn’t want to relinquish it’s position in the garden without a fight. There was concrete a metre deep around the pole. It was installed properly, that’s for sure! We have removed one of these from each of the houses we have owned. It’s a bit sad because it has been part of the house for so long but they take up soooooooo much room and they are always slap bang in the middle of the yard. Next week we will get one that goes up against the fence. The yard looks much more open and large.
• I have been teary and stressed for the last few days. A cousin of mine (who is a very close friend) is over from London. I won’t go into the boring details but it hasn’t been very fun. Despite making plans a few times she seems unable to make the time to spend with me. There have also been a number of other extended family events that I have been excluded from. It always hurts a bit to be excluded from things but what makes this worse is that my abusive, alcoholic father has been invited to these events. My cousin cancelled dinner with me tonight to have dinner with my parents. Despite claiming that they are separated (for more than 18 months, but living in the same house) my mother is parading him around to all these events thereby ensuring that I am excluded. I would never have thought that my extended family would behave this way, that they would choose to have him around over me. In my self-pitying wallow I feel  very insignificant. I am trying not to be hurt but I just am. I am angry and I am hurt. Why would my mother do this? She is blind to the needs of everyone except her husband. She won’t attend my children’s birthdays or spend time at my house for fear of “hurting his feelings”. I am ashamed to say that I have tolerated this behaviour a fair bit so that I had her in my life in some way. I know I have said this before but I am really done.
• Beefcake is looking for a new job. It has been so wonderful to have him working at home with us for – ooh, nearly two years now but it can’t go on forever. He is paid in pounds which means we are at the mercy of the exchange rate. Up until now this hasn’t been a problem but at the moment the Aussie dollar is very strong and it is just killing us. Things are very tight and we just have to do something about it. Here’s hoping he finds something soon.
• The pelvis is not too bad. I still have not had all of my xrays etc done (see re exchange rate above) but everything is going ok. I even managed to walk the Poss to school this morning, which I was quite pleased with.
• Eeegads, having just read through this it’s a good thing that nobody comes here to be entertained. That is one boring post. I shall do better tomorrow but since this is written I’m going to press publish, ok?

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?

Something has gone very wrong with the pelvis.

It has been on a steady decline for a few months but today I have attained a whole new level of shitfulness*.

The GP was consulted last week when things began getting out of control, when I could no longer manage the pain without some prescription drugs.

The ridiculous thing is that it seems to have just continued to worsen since then. If it weren’t obscene to do so I would love to post some pics of the swelling. My lower back and …… lower front?? Anyway, the front of my pelvis, are both ridiculously swollen. Swollen as in makes your body look distorted. Freakishly swollen.

I cannot sit up. Every muscle from the middle of my back to my knees seems to spasm if I do.

I can’t really find the words to express the negativity in my thoughts at the moment. I have avoided this blog because what should I say?

I don’t know where this is heading. I am not getting better.

No one has any ideas. There is nothing that can be done to help me apparently. This is just fact. It has been over four years and I have investigated every quack, poking and prodding specialist and witch doctor there is.

What do you do if the doctor just says, “Oh, it should just be better by now. I would have thought it would be better”. That is not helpful.

What if this just continues? Continues to get worse, with no reason for it?

The pain is such a  strident factor in my life. It is like a loud hum that is the background noise for everything that I do. So loud is this white noise of pain that recently when we were out shopping I got a real shock. The pain stopped. I was standing next to Beefcake waiting for a lift and I turned to him and told him that all of a sudden there was no pain. It was indescribable. I could breath, I could hear, I could feel. It only lasted a few minutes but it made me realise how much this is affecting me.

I am not prepared to live like this for the rest of my life.

What is the alternative though?

Sorry people. You don’t need to say anything. I just needed to vent this. I am a tangled bundle of dark emotions. Decent pain relief was supposed to fix that but alas, this pain is a tough nut to crack.

*Now I wouldn’t have thought that was a real word but WP says that indeed it is so who am I to disagree.