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.

Poss has a party to go to tomorrow. It is a Disney themed party of a younger friend of hers. If there is anything I loathe more than a themed dress-up party, which requires me to put together a clever, impressive and not at all shameful and embarassing costume for my child, it is a Disney movie. We have had to google Disney movies in order to select a character for her to impersonate. We are now in a tie between Cruella de Vil, Pocahontas and a the plate of spaghetti shared by Lady and the Tramp.

In addition to my distaste for the task of costuming my ten-year-old a la Disney, Poss has chosen today, the afternoon during which I should be planning said costume to be a right pain in my arse.

Oh and , delightful! Rhubarb has just entered and informed me that he has his frst soccer game of the season tomorrow. He has had no practice yet – oh, wait up, yes, he missed that, was yesterday. I have been nagging, he has been assuring me that he has no information to provide. It is ten past five on a friday. He has a soccer game at 9.30am tomorrow morning. He has no soccer gear. No boots or shinpads that fit. I am not best pleased.  He shall have to wear last years. They will not fit well.

I shall now be racing back from soccer to try and dress Poss in time . Sounds relaxing.

Anyway, back to Poss. She wants to be Cruela but she would like a wig if possible. Pig’s bum. I am not throwing away money on a wig that will be worn once.

She thought perhaps we could buy a can of spray-in hair colour for her so that she can have one side black and one white. Apparently brown and white would not be authentic enough and we couldn’t have that now, could we?

I am just fucked off with the whole thing. We are dead broke for the rest of the month. If I am super careful and an absolute goddess of the budget and the meal planning then we may be able to eat something other than rice and pencil shavings for the next three weeks. There is no room to buy hair paint. God only knows what we will do for a gift. I may perhaps have to fashion something pretty from  something I have in the pantry. Do nine-year-old girls like canned tomatoes and coconut cream? I’m pretty sure I have that.

Surely the other mothers are not relishing the idea of having to pull a costume together.

Surely other mothers are irritated by the party concept.

Surely other mothers do not have a gift planned and purchased.

My poor children. They are doomed.

Wish Poss luck. She may well need it.

I might just post pictures.

Beefcake woke them both at the usual time and soon Poss was out in the kitchen,  feeling very chuffed in all new school uniform, which we purchased for her on Friday.  I felt very organised and superior in my housewifely skills as I had remembered to do the children’s washing and they both had clean socks and undies. Poss quickly made her breakfast and we expected Rhubarb to follow soon after.

It took us a few minutes to realise that he must have gone back to sleep. I marched in and clapped my hands and put the light on, telling him to hurry and wake up. It was a sterling mothering moment for me as he leapt out of bed, stood swaying unsteadily and burst into tears. Poor baby. He’s not  a morning person. I felt guilty enough to insist that he sit down and wake up a bit while I laid out his clothes. I was particularly pleased to find that there were two splodges of green paint on his almost new (clean) school jumper. Apparently none of the cool kids wear a smock. He could barely contain his scorn for our suggestion that he should buck the trend. He kept repeating “It’s fine Mum” with a sigh and the tone of someone who is explaining a very simple concept to a very stupid person. I assured him that green paint staining his new school jumper was most definitely NOT FINE.

I am a bit sad that the holidays are over, I will miss the kids being around the house, I have enjoyed their company and they have bee a great help with the small children lately as my pelvis has been a bit crud. I said as much to Rhubarb as he inhaled a microwave defrosted hot cross bun. He snorted and muttered something under his breath so I assume that he feels I haven’t been appreciative enough of his presence over the holidays.He arrived home from school this afternoon in an absolutely foul mood and did not speak to me at all for nearly two hours.

Based on the above behaviour I think it is safe to assume that the TAAM is a direct reaction to contact with his school uniform (perhaps the trigger is somehow absorbed through the skin when he puts it on) and is most active during term time.

Bah.

He is fine now, cavorting about the house with the others and has even managed to have a laugh about this morning’s episode although there was some significant whingeing about homework. Ah the trials and tribulations of being a teenager.

I am attempting to rest up big as I have an outing to the hairdresser’s tomorrow. Whoopee! Well, strictly speaking it is my friends house, where we will luncheon and a mutual friend will do both of our new do’s. I’m just having a trim really but if I am to be functional and able to sit in a chair, stand up AND walk then I must rest like a good girl now.  The house is falling down around my ears, there is crapulence at every turn but I must lie here and wallow in it.

Double bah.

To take out tiny little minds off of the worries we face, the Easter Bunny decided to run a special treasure hunt this morning instead of the usual “race about the garden frantically trying to gather the most eggs” type of hunt. Each child had their own set of clues to follow, which eventually led them to their basket of easter sugar (except for Grub who received a small toy and did not have to follow clues because she’s a baby and, despite being somewhat of a prodigy in the gross motor skills department, she cannot read). It was a raging success and I think we will employ this tactic again. All of the children were in delightful moods after the fun start to their day and we had a great day spending time together.

I decided to indulge in the chocolate today as well because there were mocha hot cross buns and dark chocolate bunnies for fuck’s sake. This, it turns out, constitutes a significant error of judgement on my part. The resulting sugar rush saw me engaged in several very energetic wii games, which involved dancing and other complicated moves of a physical and exercisey type nature. I was so hyped up I even challenged Rhubarb to a “cool moves” competition on the trampoline. I don’t really do cool moves on the trampoline as a rule (read – I don’t jump on the trampoline) so I should have known it was the sugar talking. I blame Beefcake, he stood by and judged the whole thing, he must have known how I would feel later (I won by the way but Rhubarb feels that the judging was not all above board).

To cap it off, we all went for a long walk and I borrowed Rhubarb’s bike and RODE for quite some distance. I did some chin-ups on some of the play equipment at the park and helped Rhubarb carry his bike home (he burst the inner tube doing something silly and was worried about damaging his rims on a completely flat tyre). Now, I don’t do chin-ups and this was only the second time I have ridden a bike in the last eight years or so.

I’ll bet you can imagine how I feel now.

I will be even worse tomorrow, which is not convenient as we are having a large family lunch. I will be cooking and cleaning all morning tomorrow feeling like an arthritic old lady.

It’s evil stuff that sugar. I don’t usually touch it that much. I don’t even like bloody milk chocolate and I have consumed enough of it today to put a whale into a diabetic coma.

I’m not too bright.  I am not a grown up. I shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on my own.

Seriously.

Oh and Happy Easter!!

Which is ridiculous because that is all I can think about all of the time.

So.

They turned down our offer. They have decided to be as uncooperative as possible and simply counter-signed the contract at their original asking price, some $25k over our offer. We do not have that money.The house is not worth that even if we did.

We have made a second offer of a few thousand more. They are now taking the long weekend to consider it. I am not sure why they need to keep dragging this out. They have no other offers on the table. We know this now. They can either take our offer or keep their house basically. I think that they must believe we have a stack of cash up our sleeves and if they keep us waiting we will become desperate.

We have pretty much decided to walk away if they continue to be so unbending following this offer. If they attempt to negotiate properly we have a small amount of room to negotiate with them but we are pretty much at our limit now anyway.

The thing is, as soon as we saw this house, I knew it was ours. We both did. We went to the inspection knowing how much we were willing to offer. We already knew we loved it. IT IS OURS.

I will still be devastated if we do not get it but I am having to face the reality that these people do not seem to want to sell their house at any sort of reasonable price. In the end, we may be thwarted by their unrealistic expectations.

It also may not be the right time for us to buy.There seems to be obstacles erected at every turn. Now the mortgage people are saying their may be some problems securing a loan against Beefcake’s income as he earns in a foreign currency.

So, so stressful.The strain has caused me to be an emotional idiot. I do not cry well at the best of times. Give me an emotional movie or book plot and I’m away but my own real life crises do not lead me to shed tears easily. I am irritable and nasty. I had a good sob over something I read on the internet last night though. Sometimes a good cathartic weep is what’s needed.

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The big kids are with their father and stepmother for a couple of days. We get them back tomorrow morning before we head to the in-laws for an Easter gathering. I have had two distressed phonecalls from Rhubarb because his quite highly strung stepmother had a fit and locked herself in her room. The reason? Her thirteen-year-old stepson wasn’t making polite enough conversation and she was angered, feeling that he didn’t like her. They were on their way somewhere and they turned the car around and went home for her to have her fit. Rhubarb hid behind the garden shed and called me. He told me she had also yelled at Poss.

It is quite comical really. Their father overheard Rhubarb talking to me and was concerned that he was talking to himself. He called Beefcake to ask if R had been in touch with us. They have interpreted Rhubarb’s monosyllabic grunting as depression and I think they felt he may be having some sort of episode. This is how in touch with Rhubarb they are.

They know him, not at all. He is a happy NORMAL teenager. He has heaps of friends and got a good report from school the other day. His stepmum had a big talk to Beefcake and we learned she has all sorts of bizarre ideas about the kids. It is such a strain for me not to march right around there and bring the kids home. Rhubarb insisted that he would like to stay but also said he doesn’t think he’ll be going back in a hurry.

We go round and round like this. He sees them. They are awful to him. He takes a break from seeing them and then gradually eases himself back into it and we are back where we started. They have no idea how to parent him and are not in touch with who he is AT ALL.

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It is not all gloom and doom. We were gifted with zoo membership for Christmas last year and had not had a chance to use it. Today we decided to take the small ones so we packed a spur of the moment picnic and headed off for a few hours. It was thoroughly enjoyable. The four of us had a lovely time and because it was free we didn’t have to try to fit in seeing everything, squeezing every last cent out of the exorbitant entry fee. I think we will try and use it a lot from now on, we had a ball.

I will post some photos tomorrow, or not, you know how it is.

On the one hand I have Rhubarb. He is the very essence of thirteen. He is moody and sensitive and temperamental. He is sweet and loving in moments but the TAAM never seems to be far below the surface. I teased him this evening that every single utterance he makes seems to be a cliché of teengageness, his response was “Whatever, Mum”. I couldn’t stop laughing. We all know all of the stereotypical teenage moody and sullen behaviours. I knew what to expect except yet I am shocked daily by the sudden, awful reality of it.

I have a distinct feeling of helplessness. I want to knock on his skull and ask if he is actually in there. There is just no logic to it, I could say something teasingly to him in the morning and incite a stream of moans and muttering and yet find the same thing would be a fun joke to share in the afternoon. I don’t know whether I am coming or going. It requires supreme patience and I can see so clearly how we could lose our grip, how he could become a complete stranger to us if we are not careful to keep some lines of communication open.  I think in this I have to have some faith that he is the boy I know, that he will remain so at his core as long as we can keep things in his life reasonably even.

I am decidedly paranoid that I will do something horrifically wrong at some crucial age and send him spiraling off into an abyss of delinquency. We will just try and do the right thing and hope that we make it out the other end of this teenage thing intact.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have a nine-month-old baby who has decided that she is ready to walk. She is most definitely not ready to walk, in my opinion. She is not psychologically ready for the reality of being that far from the ground and the physical aspect should be beyond her as well. Her balance is horrific. This does not deter her. She cruises the furniture at lightening speed now, she has taken up to two steps independently. Today she is nine months and two weeks old. This is far from reasonable. She is too short for one thing.

I have had two other children walk prior to ten months of age. It is not funny. I may have to fashion a baby helmet and padding for her because as it stands she is a danger to herself and others. The kind of danger she can get into while standing doesn’t bear thinking about. She tried to climb a large bookshelf the other day. She has also developed a passion for trying the various taste sensations that are to be found around the floor of our immaculately kept home. She seems to like things ’seasoned’ with dust and lint. She tried to take a large bite of the dog this evening, repeatedly. The dog likes to roll around in all manner of crap in the back yard. She is not a culinary delight.

Poss has been claiming illness all week. We believed her on Monday, thinking that she was coming down with our cold. This failed to happen. We sent her to school on Tuesday. Today she managed to pull out a temperature at breakfast time and Beefcake was forced to send her back to bed with her ‘tummy ache’. She has seemed fine all day. I suspect that she is fine but I have been wrong before and I do not wish to again retrieve a vomiting child from school under the accusing glare of the receptionist, who already knows we are bad parents.

Pudding is being his usual boisterous and vibrant self. This evening, whilst he demonstrated some new ‘moves’ atop Grub’s cot, we shared this:

P: “Mummy, you and Daddy are my parents”

Me: “Yes darling we are”

P: “I am very clever”

Me: “Yes you are”

P: “I am also funny”

Me: “You are funny”

P: “A poo comes out of a bum, ha!”

Me: Laughing more at his uproarious laughter than the actual ‘joke’ because really, poo has been done – “Oh you are hilarious”

Beefcake: “And you are very strong”

Pudding: “Yes, I know, and I have power.”

Things tick along with all of us. I wonder sometimes how I can do them all justice, they all pull me in such different directions. The volume and variety of children in our house leaves me a  bit torn sometimes.

In what directions are you being pulled?

I meant to blog and I meant to blog and I got on my laptop and found I couldn’t focus my eyes. I tried to comment on a couple of peoples’ blogs and had trouble concentrating enough to put together a sentence. I have had a cold. We have all had colds. I have spent the day today still lying about moaning.

I am pathetic. It’s just a cold.

We went to Rhubarb’s qualifying regatta on Saturday. The team he is coxman for qualified for the Head of the River regatta that is on Saturday. Yay. I was soooooooo excited. I nearly embarrassed myself (and Rhubarb) by running up and kissing him as he removed the oar thingies and helped carry the boat out of the water. I managed to maintain  my composure and he is still speaking to me.  I thought I was just a little tired after all the excitement until, on the card ride home, I developed a sore throat. I have been lying about and whimpering ever since. It didn’t help that we had to tidy and garden for a house inspection that took place on Monday and the blasted children seem to constantly require taking care of. It is not restful at all.

It’s amazing how, when you take a little break from blogging, it seems inconceivable that you could find anything to write about. What on Earth could I possibly have to say? Why in the name of all that is purple would I write about nothing and then ponce about the internet letting people know where they can find it? Seems quite odd if you ask me.

I had to actually force myself to open up an “add new post” window and type something. Kind of getting back on the wagon, if you will. I still have the feeling that I have swallowed razor blades and every movement that I make has all the speed  it would possess if I were submerged in wet concrete. I don’t really want to blog but I am scared. What if I stop and then I just put it off for one more day and then another and before you know it I have no blog, no bloggy friends, then where would I be?

I am delirious and feverish – can you tell?

Not content to leave me harassment free (because they are the minions of Beelzebub) Rhubarb has passed the torch to Pudding. The difference is that Pudding can be as annoying as you please and he still has the cuteness to temper it. You can never be truly annoyed by Pudding because he is three. While he is still three (in fact I believe the official cut-off age for overarching cuteness is seven), most of the things that he does are funny or  endearing in some way. You may have to cover your face when you laugh so that he doesn’t know he was being funny and takes your stern rebuke seriously but he is still amusing. Pudding has reached some sort of developmental turning point and has enter the “questions phase”. Consider the following examples of Pudding’s questioning prowess:

• “Mummy, how does my body move?” – he is insistent that, as your brain has no mouth, your brain can not be telling your legs and arms what to do. His answer : “Your bones have magic”, um, yes, far more plausible.
• “Mummy, what’s inside my tummy?” – after explaining basic anatomy and physiology of digestive tract I was thoroughly overruled. It is preposterous to suggest that your food makes it’s way through your digestive tract and ends up as poo, it somehow becomes invisible and makes it’s escape via the mouth, perhaps while you are sleeping.
• “Mummy where do boogers come from?” – I tried to be vague but he would not be fobbed off with anything less than a full description of  glandular epithelial cells. He nodded sagely and seemed well satisfied with this.
• “Daddy, why do my pants fall down?” – Beefcake* tried explaining the concept of objects being attracted to one another – gravity. I argued that it may not be appropriate for a three-year-old.

There are more but I won’t bore you.

As a side note, the handbag arrived this morning. I am overjoyed. I haven’t taken it on an outing yet but I will tomorrow and I will post pictures of handbag’s first trip out. I know, you’re excited!

* I nearly hit publish with Beefcake’s REAL name typed into this post. I have never done that before. I am not on the ball.

“Can you just come and chat to me while Daddy and Poss are at her parent teacher interview, my pelvis is bad, it will help to have you out here with me and the small children?” I asked him.

“I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t care.”

Well, that sums it all up really doesn’t it. In the end he agreed to stay in the room as long as I didn’t try to speak to him. The Teenage Angst and Apathy Monster has definitely  taken up residence in my son’s brain. The TAAM feels the need to make a smart-arsed comment each time I speak to him or tell him something he needs to do. The TAAM is messy and a touch smelly. The TAAM has absolutely no empathy or compassion. The TAAM cares not what happens to others.

He is not yet a TAAM host all the time but he is like it more and more. We had friends over for an impromptu meal on Sunday night. Ordinarily he would hang around and play with the small children, chat to the adults, socialise. He was there and his usual pleasant, funny self during dinner but spent the rest of the time in his room or basically wherever the rest of us were not.

The TAAM is really taking over now and I don’t want it to. I have been smugly applauding my own fabulous parenting ability up to this point. Our friends and family have always commented on what great kids we have. Nice polite, funny, clever children. Even non-child friends have enjoyed spending time with our children. I have been aware that the TAAM would take over at some point but I think there was a part of me that hoped that Rhubarb would be somewhat immune to it.

I feel to my core that Poss, having traditionally been the placid, sweet-natured young girl, will be an absolute horror of a teenager. We see shades of it now and I can just feel it in my bones. I thought maybe Rhubarb would stay in this good place that we’ve finally found. He was a moody and sensitive kid early on. He took the divorce (and his subsequent neglect by FW) hard but he was five and it was only natural. The last few years he has been wonderful. We have been close. I have really liked him.

I don’t like the TAAM. He is a bastard.

Rhubarb does team rowing with the school. He trains twice a week. It is an expensive and demanding sport but I am so pleased that he is doing something. I spent my teenage years telling my PE teacher I had period cramps at every lesson, I loathed physical activity in any form (*ahem* well, not any form I guess or the whole pregnant at 17 thing might not have happened).

I am thrilled that he is sporty  but I expect him to take his responsibilities to his sport seriously. He missed a team meeting at school today. He came home, told Beefcake this and then asked if he could skip training tomorrow because he wants to visit a fast-food chain with some of his mates. My automatic response was ‘no’ because I want him to honour his commitments and I don’t think he’s old enough to go hanging around who knows where in the afternoon. He’s a baby, maybe when he’s 17 or so. Beefcake says he is old enough and it doesn’t matter if he misses one training session as the year 8’s are barely getting a look-in at the moment (they don’t compete in regattas until next year).

What do you think, dear internets? It is a bit of a moot point really because I told him he couldn’t go after the TAAM was particularly rude to me this afternoon but still, I’d like to know. 13’s too little to be out on your own. right?

Pudding was actually very cute in the kitchen.

“Toast is not for bekky” he said to me with the sweet rising intonation that means, “I am asking for toast but don’t want to ask explicitly in case there is some reason I can’t have toast because I get put out easily if things don’t go my way and it is best this way”.

Me: “Toast is perfect for brekky, would you like toast?”

P: “Yes, but you can have it at night”

Me: “Toast is lovely at any time”

P: “Yes”

He sat munching his toast on the kitchen sofa while I tidied up and I mentioned to him that his knees were lovely.

Me: “Did you buy the from the shop?”

P: “No”

Me: “You did, you bought them from the supermarket, in the knee aisle”

P: “No, they’re from Ikea”

We giggled.

Rhubarb just emerged from his cave to tell me that he vomited during the night. Now all six of us have been afflicted, the circle is complete. I sent him to bed with a bucket just in case. He wanted to know what he should do with it as it had been “fermenting in his room all night”. Why oh why would he choose now abandon his monosyllabic ways. I was eating a bowl of yoghurt with lumps of peach and mango in it. I can’t finish it now. Did I mention how thrilled I am that school goes back tomorrow?