Bandaid Perbole

bandaid perbole (n) The request for a bandaid to cover a minor injury that doesn't need one.

It came about through a conversation where we were learning the meaning of 'hyperbole' - don't ask me why my children needed to know the meaning of 'hyperbole' - something to do with overstating the case in terms of injury, or screaming unnecessarily in the face of minor inconvenience - and when Jessie finally requested a bandaid to cover an invisible injury, I (perhaps slightly inaccurately) described it as another example of hyperbole.

"No, it's not," she chirped.  "It's Bandaid Perbole."

Well, call the guys at the dictionary.

I remember

I remember when it was just this little guy.  He used to play by himself a lot except for when he would stand, hanging on to my legs, crying up into my face.  That's the way it often goes with a firstborn.

Then this little scrap of pink was born.  He had a little buddy!  They were best of friends for the first few months - she would lie on her playmat and he would lie beside her.  Her big brown eyes would be wide and interested as she studied everything he did.  She loved him so much, and he was so gentle with her.

Then she got about this big:

...and I noticed that while they lay together communicating, she would often cry or scream in anger.

I cringe when I remember how often I would call, "Leave her alone!  What are you doing to her?  Why is she crying?"

That is, I used to say that until one day, I watched.  On my honour, that dear old boy wasn't doing anything to her.  If anything, she was only responding to an invasion of her personal space by a big brother coming in to give her a little kiss, or something.

That poor big boy.  He loved her so much, and still does.

To this day, her strong, offended voice is often heard multiple times a day, accusing him of dastardly acts.  To be fair, he has sometimes relied on my faith in his innocence and has used that cover to sock her a good one, but often it's just the voice of the disenfranchised girl learning how to live with brothers.

 I think it's good for her.  (But it means that school holidays can be really difficult for the rest of us.)

Division of Labour

Buzz: Mum, can you get shoes?

Mum: I've already got shoes on.

Buzz: No, I meant you can get my shoes?

Mum: What?!? Nope, you can get your own shoes, buddy! And your own socks!

Buzz: *Sigh* Alright. I'll get my shoes and socks. (Gets both.)  Now I'll do this bit ... (unwraps the pair of socks and throws both at me) ... and you can put them on me.

Kindy Pickup

Yesterday's kindy pickup was completely shambolic.  It had rained quite heavily a few times during the day and the world was very wet.  I sighed as I unclicked Buzz and Woody and led them in through the two (Two?? Two!!) child-proof gates and into Jessie's kindy.  I knew that Woody would be very difficult to detach from the joys and wonders of kindy once we were finished collecting Jessie and all her stuff.

Once we'd collected Jessie, I got busy signing her out and locating her two lost hats while holding her one unlost but dripping wet hat and her sandy shoes apart from the rest of her stuff, all while trying to insert three plastic boxes and one drink bottle into her lunch bag and zipping some newsletters into her backpack.

While I was doing this, another Mum alerted me to the fact that Woody was jumping in ankle-deep puddles and was soaked to the bone from the waist down.  Sigh.  Noted.  Cheers.

Once I'd put Jessie's backpack on her back and her lunch bag in her hand and urged her and Buzz to walk towards the first of the two child-proof gates, I grabbed Woody and held his squirming body as tightly as I could without getting too wet myself.  He threw a massive tantrum, and slipped out of my grasp.

An Unhelpful Dad tried to come to my aid.  He held the second of the two gates open for us, and to make him feel like he was helping, I opened the first gate and asked Buzz to hold it open for us.  I scooped screaming Woody up again and got through both gates, along with Jessie and all her stuff.

By this stage, Buzz was unsure if the Unhelpful Dad was COMING or GOING, so he continued to hold the first gate open for him in case the man was COMING.  The man, who was in fact GOING, only much slower than he'd planned, tried to ask Buzz to shut the first gate and walk through the second gate so the Unhelpful Dad could shut the second gate and actually GO.  Unfortunately, being both Unhelpful and a Man, the Unhelpful Dad didn't exactly use the medium of oral language to communicate this, instead grabbing poor Buzz's shirt and pulling him through the gates.

By this stage, Woody had wriggled from my grasp and had slipped back inside.

Once again he was in the ankle-deep puddle, only this time he was in Tantrum Position.  I tried to get him from Tantrum Position to Standing Position by pulling one arm upwards.  I don't like pulling or picking up kids by one or even both arms because I don't think their little shoulder joints or muscles can properly support their weight, however the Unhelpful Dad had no such qualms.  He grabbed Woody's other arm and lifted him high over the puddles.  Woody dangled like that for a few metres until I decided I could do without the Unhelpful Dad's unique style of 'help' and swooped forward to grab Woody like a barrel under my free arm.  The Unhelpful Dad let go of poor Woody's arm.

Once we reached the car, I stripped Woody down to his nappy which smelled too bad to be removed meaning stinky wetness seeped into his carseat on the trip home, lost one of his brand new socks on its first wearing, and started clicking three wet and muddy children into their carseats.

During this whole fiasco, the Unhelpful Dad (who didn't know my name) had called me "Mum."  He referred to me as "Mum" to my kids, he called me "Mum" to my face, and by the end I had one extremely confused four year old.

"Is that man your ...?" she struggled for the right relationship word, then tried a different approach.  "Are you that man's MUM?" she asked, amazed.

I knew he was listening, so I mumbled something about how the man knew I was Buzz, Jessie and Woody's Mum, so that's what he called me.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd answered, "No, I am that man's casualty."

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Over to you: Please detail your opinion on the law that precludes me from leaving Buzz and Woody safely in their carseats while I do a three-minute dash into the immediately-adjacent kindy to grab Jessie and her stuff, unencumbered.

A Case of the Mondays

I was busy today, and got nothing done.  This usually happens when I don't write a list of the things I want to do the night before.  In the late afternoon I started mentally writing a blog post detailing how I wasted a day but I realised after half an hour of mentally writing out my day that I was only up to 8:50am.  That would be a very long and very boring post for writer and readers alike.

Needless to say today I only managed a protracted school run, did one load of washing, dried it in the wet weather by doing a few loads in the dryer, did one load of dishes, bought birthday presents for Jessie's upcoming birthday, took my husband out for lunch, made it through a ridiculous and totally shambolic school run (why I ever let Woody out of the car in the wet weather is beyond me), stopped children from being killed by each other or me, and made a scrummy shepherds pie for dinner.

Once I popped the pie in the oven, I packed the kids in the car again to pick up Mr de Elba from work, feeling like the day was coming to a close but realising that the hard work never ended when the recently-woken Jessie needed to do a wee on the grass but we were parked near that creek out the back of Mr de Elba's work and what do you know, we'd had some heavy storms and it was fast-moving and making whooshy sounds but not as bad as that day, nevertheless Jessie was quite scared of it and screamed a bit while half-naked and weeing on the grassy bank, anyway my job in carrying her from car to river bank and back again was complicated by the fact that on her side of the car was some roadkill which I was eager for her to avoid seeing since it had all-too-recently been someone's fluffy kitten and as we sat in the car waiting, an elderly gentleman picked it up by its tail and hurled it into the swollen creek and then I texted Mr de Elba and said please come, dinner will be getting burnt.

I knew that sentence was ridiculous, but I kept it in because it progressed in much the same fashion as the whole day.

That may sound like I achieved a lot, but it doesn't feel like a lot when at the end of the day, the pile of folding on my bed is as high as my chest, the kitchen looks like a rats' playground (not enough 'CKMT' today, apparently) and Jessie's bedroom is so messy you can't walk on the floor without stepping on clothes, supersuits and other dressups, felt pens or screwed-up paper.  The folding, the kitchen and Jessie's room were the three things I really wanted to do today and since they weren't done by All-Children-In-Bed Time, they will patiently wait until tomorrow.

So. Does anyone ever get A Case Of The Tuesdays?

Baffling Blogroll

Is anyone else noticing weird things happen to their blogroll?  Mine seems to give random blogs a time-out for a while.  I rely on my blogroll to keep up with the blogs I follow, but now it looks like I have suddenly taken a dislike to my friends, not commenting on their blogs and omitting them from my blogroll.  Strange.

People Power!

I never forward email forwards.  I usually run the content by hoax-busting sites and find that it's all quite silly and a waste of time.

The forward I received today claimed that if we boycott buying our fuel from our largest supplier, they will reduce prices and so the smaller suppliers would follow suit to be competitive.  Industrial sabotage?  Snopes says it wouldn't even work.

At the end of the email it said that if 20 people were to forward it to 20 more people and so on, after 6 rounds of this, 12.8 billion people would be reached.  Unimaginable People Power!  It urged me to do the maths and see for myself!

No amount of permutations or combinations can make the current population of the Earth more than 6.9 billion though, and I am guessing that most of those people don't have email addresses.

Or cars.

The email finished with this inconsequential claim: "Twenty Five Point Six Billion people: Now that's people power!"

It certainly would be.

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If you receive an email forward, please remember that these sites are your friends.

http://www.google.com.au/

http://www.snopes.com/

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

http://www.truthorfiction.com/

http://www.breakthechain.org/

And this button?

You can consider that one pretty much your Humiliation Button.

Wiping the benches and running the world

Believing (as I do) that I run the world, I started wondering one day what sort of t-shirt logo could encapsulate the massive achievements I carve into each day.  I thought about my work as a speech pathologist, my work in kid's ministry and my work managing a family of five. Then I looked at what my day held for me, and I knew that my logo had to be ...

ckmt today.  

Because I not only run the world, I also wipe the benches after I've done it.