The day the doorknob broke and we couldn't fix it so we chopped the door down with a mattock

Or, the blog post title with the biggest spoiler of all time.

Last week's blog post was sparked by Jessie having tonsillitis, Buzz having asymptomatosis and me having asymptomatata.  ONE of those people kissed Rex and passed it on.  It was the only person who was truly infectious and by the end of the week, tiny Rex had a husky voice, pain on sneezing, a roasting fever and diarrhoea.  Diagnosis: Tonsillitis.

On Sunday after church, we all tried for a rest.  Poor Rex was feverish but still up for a good sleep, and I tried for one too.  Woody interrupted me right up until five minutes before Rex woke up, so my sleep was poor.  But when I finally heard my baby boy crying his husky, pained cry, Woody had fallen asleep to enjoy the rest he'd robbed from me, and I graciously allowed him to live.

Jessie came to me and whispered, "Rex is crying."  I knew this.  I asked her to ask Daddy kindly if he might get Rex but Daddy was very busy killing bad guys with Buzz (I'm still working out if I should be worried when my moral-policeman-seven-year-old-son gleefully shouts things like, "I've lost the cops!!") so Rex continued to cry.

I staggered down the hallway to rescue him, turned the handle of his door and barrelled in.  Specifically, I barrelled into the door.  I smashed my head into it, and momentarily worried about my sanity.  I turned the knob properly the next time, and again smacked my face into the still-closed door.

Certain about my sanity now (Diagnosis: Stupid) I tried the knob the other way.  And the first way.  And the other way.  At some point, I realised the door wasn't opening and I yelled to Mr de Elba mid-slaughter, "Can you come and tell me if I'm not properly awake or if Rex's door won't open?"

He came, and tried the doorknob many times.  In the words of a tradesman who once did work for us:  "Diagnosis: Buggered."

So while Rex cried his poor little lungs out, we grabbed my screwdriver set and took off the screws holding the knob onto the door.  We fiddled with the mechanism.  We turned the square sticky-outy thing that works the openy-closey mechanism: no luck.  We tried to access parts further down the workings to retract the little tongue-thing from the hole-in-the-other-side thing: no luck.  We kicked the door: no luck.

Now at this point, if time hadn't been an issue, we could have called my Mum, who is Tinkerbell Incarnate.  She tinkers with stuff and it falls into place.  We could have called Justadad, the husband of my friend Justamum, who knows how things work.  We could have researched doorknob problems, we could have gone out and bought some magical tools, we could have asked the tradesman who is coming soon to work on some other doors around the house.

But it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and poor feverish Rex had screamed hard for 20 minutes so he was about to burst into flames.  We'd exhausted all the options at our disposal so there was only one option left.  It was drastic, it was destructive, and it was a whole heap of fun.

Mr de Elba chopped the door down with a mattock.

The door was cheap and the knob was rubbish, and recently Mr de Elba has been so busy at work that a bit of door-chopping was a rather welcome and therapeutic distraction.  Also, he'd just been killing bad guys so he was in the mood.

I wasn't joking.

Buzz LOVED it.  Jessie cried loudly and shouted, "Will the police have to come and see what we've done to the door?  Will we get in trouble from The Police?!?" and generally lost her head.  Woody slept through the whole thing in the next room, and Rex cried and cried.

Finally, the hole was big enough for me to crawl through and I went in to rescue my baby who had wriggled himself into a painful position all smashed up against the bars of the cot.  I handed him out to his Daddy who had lovingly chopped his door down with a mattock.

I did this for you, my son.

The cleanup was extensive.  The picture above shows only half of the final destruction, and only a quarter of the final mess.  A wheelie bin was actually brought into the house for the cleanup, the whole area was vacuumed twice with a Dyson (using both the Contact Head and the Turbo-brush) during which one of Woody's socks was sucked up (I can recommend the Dyson's suction ability, by the way) and now there is only one more thing to be done.

Buy a new door.

And a really good quality doorknob.

And get it from the shop to our house.

Somehow.

And install it.

Somehow.

-------------
Addendum: Although the Dyson is very good, the door was spread far and wide.  We are still finding bits of door in unlikely places.

2012 Camp Bus Story

"Rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr!"

That's the sound a bus makes when it's got a flat battery.

When a bus goes "rurr-rurr-rurr" in an unfamiliar place at 9:00pm in the cold, wet weather and the bus is filled with tired, frightened children, the "rurr-rurr-rurr" sounds a little more sinister than I can make it look on the screen.

Mr de Elba, Justamum and I had taken seven children to have a fabulous night ice-skating and tobogganing, and we'd stopped at McDonalds to get 30c cones for the children on the way home.  We clambered back on the bus to make the 20-minute drive back home when the "rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr" changed our night from Fabulous to Potentially-Very-Bad-Indeed.

Mr de Elba kept his cool as he turned the ignition key again and again, but the bus didn't give any hope of spluttering to life.  One by one the children sobered as they realised what Justamum and I had realised in the darkness of the bus: we were stuck.  Justamum and I said little prayers while the girls cried and the boys prophesied doom.

Baby Rex decided he was hungry but he didn't want my milk, an impossible scenario he sometimes presents me with.  He alternated crying with screaming and I took him up the back seat of the bus, as if that would somehow minimise the noise for the other passengers.

As I sat there offering milk that was somehow offensive to a person smaller than my arm, I considered our options.

How to start the bus? No idea.

How to evacuate the children while someone cleverer than I worked out how to start the bus? Ah, there were several options there, each more unsatisfactory than the last.

I could call my Dad to drive our car (complete with baby seat for Rex and boosters for the others) to pick us up and take us home ... but he didn't have our house or car keys.

I could call Crazy Sister's husband who had the benefit of living close to where we broke down.  But he would have had to make several 40-minute round trips to take us all, and didn't have the requisite child restraints in his car.

Also, when I invited Crazy Sister ice-skating, she said with her characteristic charm that it sounded "damn nasty" and that she "just spent what feels like most of this year waiting for winter to finish."  Dragging a Crazy Family member out into "damn nasty" weather that felt a little like the winter that had finally just finished seemed defeatist at best and humiliating at worst, so I abandoned that idea.

The third option was "Panic Now."  But by that stage, we were too tired. Instead, we and the children said, "Dear God, we pray the bus can start, amen."

I hadn't noticed that a kind bloke with a really nice new ute had asked if he could give us a tow, so we could try a rolling start.  Mr de Elba had to back the bus up by allowing it to roll backwards down a slight incline.  My job, since Rex and I were sitting in the back row, was to tell him when to stop so that he didn't smash the car parked 10 metres behind us.  That was when I started to sweat a little.  "Panic Now" seemed a good option.

We rolled backwards without incident, the tow cable was attached, and we were slowly towed out of the carpark.  Then we started going faster to get up a fair speed before trying a rolling start.

"Rurr-rurr-rurr!"  No luck.

They tried again in a different gear.  Rolling slowly, rolling faster, rurr-rurr-rurr, no luck again.

A third try - much the same.

Fourth try, and they went much faster.  It was then I realised how difficult it must be to concentrate on getting up enough speed to start the bus while watching the ute's brake lights so that you could stop the bus quickly enough on the wet road so that you didn't smash into the back of the Good Samaritan who was trying to help you.

Then all of a sudden: BRAKELIGHTS-EMERGENCYSTOP-SKIIIIIIIIIID-stopjustintime!

We'd just avoided rear-ending a really nice, new, expensive ute with a really old, unreliable, shuddery bus.  "Panic Now" was instigated.

My choice would have been to pull out then.  No more tries, no more potential rear-ending of the Good Samaritan for his kindness.  However Mr de Elba decided to give it one more shot.

Rolling slowly, rolling faster, rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr-rurr, splutter, cough, START!  It had worked!  We were running again, and as often happens in these situations, the Good Samaritan congratulated us, we thanked him profusely, he said goodbye and then he disappeared into the night.

"Thankyou God, the bus has started!" we said together.  Girls stopped crying, boys were perhaps a little sad that the eventual doom didn't transpire because it seemed to have been quite an adventurous possibility, baby Rex had cried himself out and fell asleep slumped across my arms, and Justamum and I laughed silently in the darkness.  Because what else could you do, really?

And as we drove home in the dark wet night, we wondered what the ending of this story would be - the story whose beginning involved being stranded with a flat battery outside McDonalds late at night and whose middle involved driving that very bus packed with 20 excited teenagers three hours to the beach for a week-long camp.

Woody had no such qualms.  He sat happily beside me saying over and over again, "Fank God da bus has start."

Wee Map

I've been madly whizzing through the housework hoping I don't forget what I had to blog about among everything else this morning.  I've typed the title of this blog post first so that by the time I tell you the other stuff, I haven't forgotten what I was actually going to blog about.

I've transfigured the bathroom, laundry and kids' loo while Little Rex slept, and in the process I rediscovered some paint palettes I put in the laundry tub to soak the day before yesterday.  This time, there was a little too much paint in the palettes and so instead of dissolving and washing away, it remained hard and lumpy.  When I thought I had finished the cleanup, I was in fact left with this in the bottom of my laundry tub:

It struck me that it looks like a clown has thrown up in my laundry tub.  Pity the poor clown who horked up the paintbrush too.  It must have been one heck of a trick, though.

Then I did a quick check of Little Rex (still sleeping peacefully - what is with this baby?  Last feed at 8:30pm, breakfast milk at 7:00am and only one feed in between?  What was I doing wrong with poor Buzz 7 years ago?) and while I was there I looked in at what Woody was doing.

He had got one of our nativity sets out.  He likes playing with the Joseph, of course.  He calls the Father of Christ "Joey" and calls his crook his "wucky tick," as Woody is a bit partial to carrying lucky sticks around himself.  I was just about to come and blog when I noticed an apocryphal inclusion to the nativity set here - Ka-Chow!

I'm glad I wrote the title first, or I would have forgotten what I was going to tell you.

Toilet Training. It's said that girls get it faster than boys, but what that really means is that the average of girls will be ahead of the average of boys.  In real life though, sometimes you come across boys who say, "Okay, if you say wee goes in the toilet, then I'll put it there," and you'll find girls who think that accidents are a perfect opportunity to laugh and giggle with the poor schmuck whose job it is to clean it up.

I remember when Jessie was quite young how she would stand still while a puddle widened at her feet, laughing uproariously about wee on the floor and how funny it all was.  She didn't see it as an opportunity to berate herself but as an opportunity to have a Jolly Good Laugh.  Ha ha, says Mummy, wiping up the puddle at her feet.  But okay, laugh.  Better than berating herself.

Jessie wasn't all that late to be toilet-trained - I'd say by 3¼ she was finished, and I have a pretty narrow definition of "finished" involving Practically No Accidents Ever - but the accidents still come occasionally.

For the last year and a half, the only accidents she has had have been around dawn, just before she wakes up.  It's pretty rare, but when it happens she usually comes to tell us, and we tell her not to worry and calmly wash the bedding.

This morning was one of those mornings.  I am pretty sure I know why it happened - she has been excitedly counting down the days to her first school swimming lesson and she, for certain, would have been thinking, dreaming, cogitating and looking forward to it even while she slept.  Little wonder that by dawn, she was wetting the bed.

Mr de Elba heard her chattering to herself as she always does early in the morning and went in and sat beside her.  She was lying on her back paddling her arms and kicking her legs to practice her swimming in bed, joyfully babbling about anything and everything associated with her upcoming school swimming lesson.  Mr de Elba chatted happily to her until she said, "Dad, you're sitting in my wee."

And so he was.  She then gleefully showed him the following piece of paper.  In the half-light while waiting for someone else to be up to share her joy at the upcoming swimming lesson, she had drawn an intricate Wee Map.  If you can believe that.  She had detailed her bed with its pillows, covers and bedposts, she drew herself, and then outlined the wet patch.  It was a fantastic map, one which would have been good to show her father before he sat.

Mr de Elba stood up, sighed, stripped the bed and put the bedding, her clothes and his own pants in the wash, then showered them both.

Awesome!

After my exhilarating conversation with the scammer yesterday, I sat down to blog about it.  I am surprised I got the post done however, because my internet seemed to be half broken / half impossibly slow.

"Brilliant!" I thought.  "The scammer has caught up with me and remotely broken my internet!"  Logic sometimes escapes me in cases of technological failure.

Later last night I was able to ask Mr de Elba to have a look at the problem.  Initially he was stumped, but he eventually managed to solve the problem by -erm- restarting the modem.  A thing I'd tried myself, but had become confused and reset the router instead.  I am so clever.

To test the connection, he typed in a few random search engines and news sites.  He ran out of ideas and started thinking of other sites he could type in for testing purposes.

Now once a man solves a problem, he feels quite awesome.  And once a man feels awesome, what does he do?  He thinks to himself, "I am awesome," and for the heck of it, he types in iamawesome.com

We burst out laughing.  Try it!  Go to http://iamawesome.com/ and see for yourself!

Holidays, iPads and weird looking hats

The first week of school holidays has been and gone, leaving me gasping for air.  Three highly-assertive young children and a husband still at work is quite a joyride.  With a little less "joy" and a whole lot more "ride."  In addition to that, I feel like I deserve a holiday myself.  If only my maid was a little more productive when I step down from my daily tasks ... oh wait, she's imaginary.  That explains it.

When I decide to treat myself to some time off and have a little rest in my comfy chair in my sunny corner, it looks a little different to how I imagine it.  The way I imagine it is pretty much the way you imagined it when you read that, and to be honest, it does start out well.  I get comfortable in my chair in the sun with a warm blanket over me and a Samurai Sudoku on my iPad.  Soon, things take a turn for the worse.  Woody clambers up to sit to the left of me and takes my iPad, insisting he needs to play Monkey Preschool Lunchbox.  Jessie clambers up to sit on the right of me and makes Woody mad by "helping" him play Monkey Preschool Lunchbox.  Buzz then sits on the left arm of the chair, making Woody scream loudly at having his personal space invaded.  Buzz takes the iPad off the other two and while they are both screaming, he sets up a game of Tic Tac Toe.  The three of them attempt to play a two-player game of Tic Tac Toe across my lap, but three children don't play two-player games very well.  Woody's technique is to stab repeatedly at the screen, randomly assigning nought-cross-nought-cross-nought-cross until he has lost the game for one of his siblings, who gets very angry at Woody, who gets so angry in return that he is unable to play for a little while.  This allows Buzz and Jessie to play a two-player game together.  Jessie doesn't understand the turn-taking nature of the game, and once Buzz has assigned his first cross and she has done her first nought, she decides to do a second one quickly to get the edge on Buzz.  What she doesn't realise is that the game is now going to place a cross in her second square, making her mad because she wanted two noughts in a row, and making Buzz mad because that's not where he wanted to put his cross.  At this point I then decide to get up out of the armchair, because I'm having The Worst Rest Ever.  And I find that I am firmly pinned under the blanket by the bodies of three small and angry children, and I cannot leave.


There are many things I should have done this week but didn't, one of which was write down the funny things I've heard my little guys saying so I can blog them later.  Sometimes it's been hilarious but mostly it's just odd everyday conversations that, if I remember to write them down, will always remind me of what it was like living with Buzz (6), Jessie (4) and Woody (nearly 2).  Conversations like:

Jessie, shouting from the other end of the house: "BUZZ!  THE WOT-WOTS ARE ON!!!"
- no reply -
Jessie: "BUZZ!  THE WOT-WOTS!"
Me: "Hey Buddy, it sounds like Jessie is telling you that the Wot-Wots are on."
Buzz: "Wot?"

It was funny at the time.

This morning Mr de Elba pointed to a scruffy filthy old nylon hat on the kitchen table.  

Mr de E, in all innocence: "Does that hat belong to one of your parents?"
Me, looking at it: "No, I think it's actually an old one from the dress-ups box."
- pause -
Me: "But it's a fair question."
Both roll about laughing.  Sorry Mum and Dad.

Roll on Week Two of holidays.  I'm going to put my iPad away until it's over.

What Nana doesn't know ...

When Mr de Elba and I were in college, we didn't yet own a car.  We rarely needed a car, and so this was okay.  But once, Mr de Elba's Nana was in a hospital in the middle of Brisbane City and didn't need her car so she lent it to Mr de Elba for a few weeks because he had some events he needed to get to during that time.

The car was a little white Hyundai Excel: perfect for running around town.  Mr de Elba found it tremendously useful  for getting to and from his events and in the meantime it sat quite happily in the carpark out the front of his residential college.

Not the actual Excel, but it gives you the idea.

One day, I walked over to his college to visit and we whiled away some hours reading, wasting time on his computer and talking about this and that.  Possibly this.  We had fallen into a state of inertia and were sprawled out on the bed and floor, wondering how long it was until dinner (not unlike the minions in my care in the present day.)

We gradually became aware of a very annoying noise.  It had been going on for some time but we hadn't noticed exactly when it began.  It was the sound of a car horn being continually deployed in one very long beeeeep.  "I wish someone would stop that," said Mr de Elba.

"It's driving me mad," I replied.

Some time passed, and then he said, "It sounds like it's coming from the carpark.  I'm going to have a look."  We both went out onto the balcony to look over at the carpark which contained a few groups of disgruntled college men standing around presumably to see what could be done about the car emitting the noise.  We remembered our current good fortune in being lent the Excel by Nana, and swelled with pride.  We scanned the carpark to check it was still there, and it was.  Good.

It was around about this point in proceedings that we realised that the continuous car horn sounded not unlike the horn on the Excel.  And it then took us a few seconds longer than it took you, dear reader,  to grasp the inevitable truth that they were, indeed, one and the same.

We raced downstairs and into the carpark.

"We dunno whose it is," one bloke said with a shrug.  "Probably gone out," another assumed.

"Um, actually..." Mr de Elba started.

"What?  Is it yours?" somebody asked.

"Well it's my Nana's..." he replied weakly.  And we all trooped over to the offending Excel to see what could be done.  We gazed in through the window.

These were the days of those old steering wheel locks. 

Nana's lock had conveniently adjusted its position during the day, and had fallen down onto the steering wheel.  It fell to where it could easily depress the centre panel, which of course was the car horn.  Problem solved. 

Mr de Elba said, "Right, the car's locked so I'll grab the keys."  It was about then that those of us still gazing in through the window saw the keys hanging in the ignition.  Problem not solved, in fact.

Which do you think would take longer - for the RACQ to answer a callout to a residential college at 4pm on a lazy Sunday, or for a kind friend to drive Mr de Elba from St Lucia into the inner city of Brisbane to the hospital where Nana was to retrieve the spare keys?  Mr de Elba made the quick decision to do a mercy dash into the city, find Nana's hospital room, gratefully accept the keys, remain to engage in polite conversation for a decent period of time, all the while being mindful that the horn was still blaring in a carpark 30 minutes away, and dash back. 

He unlocked the door, removed the steering wheel lock and horn fell silent.

My whole body felt a physical WHUMP of relief as the noise ceased and the men went back to their rooms.  In the past hour, I'd built up a fair amount of stress because of the ongoing giant-mosquito-like noise ate away at my brain.  More stress had been piled on to me from being the centre of embarrassing attention, but perhaps the most stress had seeped through my bones as I witnessed what the college men were doing to Nana's Excel while Mr de Elba was away.

They had whiled away the hour by trying to halt the faltering, stuttering horn which was ever-decreasing in pitch as the battery drained away.

Men being men (and Excels being small and light,) they had busied themselves by getting three or four of them on each side of the car and rocking it violently on its suspension, trying to dislodge the steering lock.

I'm sure Nana never did that to her Excel, for any reason.

And so I judiciously chose never to tell her.

A new family photo

It's been 17 months since the last one!

Viral

 If you are planning to be in the right place at the right time during an unprecedented wide-scale natural disaster, to film on your iPhone what you expect to be arguably the most horrifying and riveting footage taken of the disaster in your area, to upload it to youtube and then arrange for it to go viral in an extremely short space of time, here are a few handy points to keep in mind as you prepare. 

I shall compile them in the form of a script for appropriate dialogue that you and your work colleague should rehearse meticulously before the natural disaster hits.  This dialogue should be performed during the filming of the disaster, and should deflect most of the potential criticism that could be leveled at you by trolls in the comments section.

- - - - - - - -

A: Oh, look, it's really coming now!  There is no way anyone would have predicted the water would have come up this high, or this quickly!  This is a one-in-100-years flood!  Unfortunately these cars are going to be engulfed in the water.

B: Why yes.  I should point out that many of the car owners have been warned and taken their cars and gone home now.  The rest of the people standing around watching aren't moving to rescue any cars, so I wonder who belongs to the rest of them?

A: I have no idea.  They could be working in any of the buildings in the city, and we have no way of tracking them down.

B: What a shame.  It is also the commuter carpark for the bus station adjacent to this building, meaning that it is probable that a few of the car owners have parked here and taken a bus to other rural towns for any number of days.

A: That's true.  We've done all we can, now we just have to stay put.  We can't go down and move the other cars ourselves.

B: This carpark has been used for many years without any sort of flooding like this.  The car owners could never have foreseen this happening when they parked this morning.  Nobody in their right mind could say they were foolish to park there.

A: You are so right.  We've never seen this sort of flooding here, ever! 

B: You can say that again.  Oh, look!  The water is so brown!  That's because these are flood waters, and they have come from heavy rains picking up dirt as they travel.

A: I heard that when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the water was clearer.  Is that because it was sea water?

B: Why yes it was, and therefore it was bound to appear clearer than these flash flood waters inland.

A: Oh, look at that guy.  He is brave to try to save his 4x4, but he's judged that he will get it away safely.  He's a big boy and can make his own decisions.

B: Look what he is doing now.  He is locking his hubs to engage 4WD.

A: Yes he is.  How clever of you to know that, despite the fact you are not familiar with 4 wheel drive vehicles.

B:  Thankyou.

A: This is flooding on a massive scale.  There is no way that you could fake this.  I mean, imagine how impossible it would be to arrange a deluge of megalitres of brown water to cascade down here and to find some cars to float down in it, film it, 'photoshop' it, and upload it to youtube while simultaneously arranging for the world's media to report on it immediately.

B: You could always use chocolate milk instead of brown water.

A: True.  That would make it easier.

B: You would have to be sure when you distributed it that people knew it happened in Australia.  You know how confused people get between Australia and Austria.

A: There is a chance that mentioning that we are in Australia might spark a heated and highly irrational argument regarding the relative disadvantages of the USA and Australia, and offer an opportunity for a minority of Canadians to say that both countries pale behind the brilliance of Canada.  But I will take that risk.  Oh, look, a floating industrial waste bin.  It would be so natural for me to chuckle a bit at this point, but I will be very careful not to do so, for fear of watchers assuming I was taking this lightly.

B: Oh no.  At this point, we already know of the devastation in other parts of the city and surrounding areas, and are fully aware of the loss of homes, material possessions and human life.  Chuckling in amazement at this immense flood would obviously be indicating a callous disdain for the suffering of others.

A: And while we're speaking about not showing disdain, I should ask you - while we've been filming this, have any of the cars floating by had people inside them who subsequently went on to perish in the waters?

B: Obviously not.  Clearly all these cars but one were from this carpark, unable to be saved because they were empty - vacant of people, people who could have driven them away had they been in them.  I also can confirm that the future will show that none of these cars will be found to have bodies in them.  I should point that out for any concerned youtube watchers, after this video is uploaded and goes viral.

A: Alright, now the flood waters have subsided I will clean up what has happened here.  It's only fair, after I have filmed this.  It will demonstrate that I am a decent human being.

B: Wonderful.  I shall film you.  Stand over there and throw his piece of wet paper into the bin that has been washed up here.

('A' goes on to clean up 75% of the state.)

- - - - - - - -

Following these points may deflect the worst of the irrational and hateful criticism directed at you from internet trolls.  Then again, it may not.

Flood Video

Here is Mr de Elba's flood video, filmed from his window at work.

It's terrifying to see people's cars washed away, but people lost their lives in this, which is infinitely worse.  There was not much for Mr de Elba and his colleague to do here except stay put and keep their spirits up.  People were watching their cars but unable to save them.

UPDATED:  And all this happened on a day which was light green - low (25% to 50%) chance of rainfall!  This is the long-range forecast that plunged me into the depths of gloom when I posted it on Boxing Day.

For better or worse

It's that time of year again when Mr de Elba goes away on a super-amazing camp of a lifetime and I am at home holding things together at this end.  This particular camp is not one that I have a great hankering to join as a leader, but it still is such a fun time for those who do go that I sometimes have to work hard at seeing the higher purpose in holding the family together back here at home.

I do this by mentally re-writing my marriage vows.  I do this not to remove clauses and renege on previously-declared promises, but to give greater clarity to the selfless sacrifice that sometimes one makes so the other's ministry can have greater effectiveness and so that one doesn't run the risk of losing a small child off the edge of a boat.  Here is how it has turned out this year:

I, Mrs, take You, Mister, to be my husband.
To have and to hold, for better or for worse,
For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,
To love and to cherish; from this day forward.
All that I have I will give to you:
While you are relaxing with school-leavers in a resort on Long Island*, I will continue with school dropoffs and pickups,
As you while away hours in a lagoon at Airlie Beach**, I will attempt to reason with small children bent on my emotional destruction,
While you sail a tall ship around the Whitsunday Islands***, I will suffer abject humiliation at the shops.
I will accept demands for early dinners and subsequent aggressive refusal of those early dinners
At the hands of small tyrannical children bearing your physical likeness.
This is my solemn vow.

* Random picture of a Long Island resort from here

 ** Random picture of a lagoon at Airlie Beach from here

 *** Random picture of the Solway Lass cruising around islands from here but don't click on it if you don't want a million crazy pop-ups ruining your day.

Bus-ted, yet again

Every year on camp, there is some major disaster with the buses.  I'm not sure why bus companies and churches still voluntarily lend us their buses for the week of camp.

On the first year that Mr de Elba was leading these camps, one of his Chaplaincy buddies drove a bus full of kids under a bridge for which he didn't have the clearance.  He gave the bus a haircut.  They had major delays as they unloaded the kids and their luggage, located another bus, loaded the kids and their luggage and took off for camp.

The next year, two minutes after leaving the pickup zone, the same Chaplain was driving when the bus broke down.  It completely lost its clutch and stopped, right on a very busy roundabout in the middle of a very busy suburb during peak hour on a Monday morning.  Again, there were major delays for unloading, locating a new bus and re-loading.

A few years after that, a huge lockable covered trailer was behind one of the buses - big enough for all the campers' luggage with some room left over.  It was only when the bus and trailer had been driven the 90 minutes from the campsite to Brisbane to pick up the campers that the driver realised he had left the key to the trailer back at the campsite.

Strange things seem to happen to buses on these camps.  So it came as no surprise that there was yet another bus drama this year, albeit a more substantial one than usual.

One of the leaders (who I will call AT because that's what we really call him) had the job of picking up a bus in a very small country town (VSC Town) and bringing it to the Bigger Smoke.  The plan was to park it outside our house overnight, load it with thirty excited teenagers in the morning, and drive it to the Even Bigger Smoke for a week of fun.

The bus was one of a few that were lent to us by a man who owns a small bus company.  He had told AT that the bus would be outside an address in VSC Town, unlocked and with the keys inside, all ready to drive away.  That's the way they roll in VSC Town - there's not much need to lock houses and vehicles in friendly little country towns like that one.

So AT went to the address as directed, found the bus, started it up and after trying to call the owner with no success, drove it to our house.  He parked it out the front and slept at our place that night, ready for camp the next day.

In the morning, Mr de Elba, Buzz and AT drove to a local highschool to pick up the campers.  Once they were all packed, the owner of the bus drove up in one of the other buses he was lending the camp.

He walked towards AT's bus, wide-eyed open-mouthed.  Mr de Elba told him that he didn't need to worry, everything was in order and that both buses could now roll off together with all the campers, but the guy just kept staring.

"That's not my bus!" he laughed.

It then dawned on Mr de Elba and AT that their camp had, in fact, stolen a bus from the streets of darkest VSC Town, they realised that they would be late getting to camp yet again.

After an hour and a half was wasted while driving the stolen bus back to VSC Town and driving the correct bus back again, it transpired that the wrong street number was given to AT in the initial text message informing him of the time and place of the bus pickup.  The correct bus had been parked only a few houses away.

And although you'd think the chances would be slim-to-none of having a second unlocked bus with the keys in it directly outside that incorrect address in the backstreets of darkest VSC Town, you'd be wrong.

When Box Room turns into Play Room

I consider myself a pretty good tidier.  I have ways and means of making a messy area tidy.  But I knew I'd met my match with our "Box Room".  It is an awesome extra room tacked onto our house that would one day become a fantastic Play Room but after our move remained a dumping ground for boxes of Things We Don't Need and Things That Don't Have A Place.

Now THERE are some boxes deserving of a "Junk" label on each and every one.  That photo was taken late last April when I knew that no tidying would be done in that room until LONG after the baby was born and I was ready to attack the area.

Last November, Mr de Elba and I felt ready to attack the room.  Grandma and Grandpa took our two eldest children for a sleepover and Mr de E and I did a lot of work on the room.  Below is a picture of our garage (filled with Things That Don't Have A Place,) looking through to our would-be playroom containing many boxes of Things We Don't Need and a very awesome husband who has certainly done the lion's share of the clearing-out, without actually being a lion himself.

This same awesome husband has recently finished off the job by creating THIS:

Now the only job is to deal with the Things That Don't Have A Place that are still taking up half the garage.  Still, here is our functional playroom complete with toy-boxes, drums, an old-school X-Box, some beanbags, a few nice rugs on the floor, a bed and a playpen for trapping small children inside.

All ready for a blogging friend to come and stay.  She'd better bring her drumsticks.

Get your screen resolution right

Last Sunday, Mr de Elba gave the message at a church in the Lockyer Valley.  His slideshow was preceded by a professional-looking title page bearing the title of his topic: "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit."

Unfortunately, the tech people had the screen resolution wrong and the right-hand side and the bottom of the slide were chopped off.

As his title displayed on the screen, it read, "Blessed are the Poo."

Which just goes to show, you must always pay attention to your screen resolution.

Smiles, Encouragement and the Garden

1. Smiles  It's funny, isn't it?  For the first few weeks of your baby's life, you can't wait until they smile.  Then they get to that age when they start giving the first little smirks and you hold out for every single one.  And then your days are full of this:

2. A Special Type of Encouragement  I am messing around with my blog template, trying for a fresher, cleaner look.  And I know from when I was pregnant with Joseph that the orange-yellow-green theme can make a gestating woman terribly nauseous. 

The other night I spent hours playing around in Photoshop and then inside the HTML code of my blog and I did some exciting new things, surprising even myself!  Mr de Elba looked at it, paused for too long, and slowly said, "I would have made it this tall," indicating about a third of the height of my new header. 

Bowled over by that withering barrage of praise, I went to bed.  But I am still working on it!  ("The template or the marriage?" you ask.  Well, the template involves less negotiation, but the marriage doesn't involve HTML code.  I wonder which is easiest?  I know which is more worth the effort!)  Here's a dead fly to keep you going until I change the template for good:

3.  Gardening!  I am enjoying my little garden!  The fun of growing tomatoes...

...the promise of planted seeds (shallots here)...

...and the manic chaos of a border collie chasing a tennis ball.

It's great being outside.

I'm Proud and Thankful for 2009

1.  Firstly, I am thankful and extremely sobered by the fact that I am alive, as is my dear little boy Joseph Samuel.  But for modern medicine, we would both have certainly died.  Many women and babies died in childbirth in the past because of problems like placenta praevia, as do many women and babies in third world countries today.  Thankyou God, from the bottom of my heart, that the doctors were able to make a potentially tragic circumstance into a quiet, low-key medical miracle.  Thankyou very much.  I love him so much, and I can't stop rubbing his round fuzzy little head.

How could I not give a small donation to provide a birth attendant in a third world village?  I plan to make this donation each year on Joseph's birthday to show my gratitude.  (Want to check that link out?)

2. I am thankful for my wonderful husband, who, at the end of the year, still loves me.  I am thankful for his skills in assembling a play kitchen for Anna-Lucia. There were what seemed like hundreds of little pieces to fit together, not to mention the screws and things ...  Wow.

3. I am thankful for Nathaniel and Anna-Lucia, and proud of the fact that I have kept them alive, healthy and happy this year.  They are the dearest little delights who ever sought to kill each other routinely before 7:00am each morning.  I am proud that I made it through a year of kindy without ever forgetting to pick Nat up once, and for finally managing to give him the Kindy Birthday he's always wanted.  I am proud that when we moved away from Mr de E's Aunty's awesome Family Day Care arrangement, that with my mother's help, I was able to have Anna-Lucia at home full-time and still manage.

4. I love my extended family, and thankful that Crazy Sister and her family will live closer next year. Tune in to my Post-Christmas "I Am Thankful" post in 2010 to see if I'm still thankful! Aarrr, kidding! I really am most excited to have them closer.

5. Around the House:
(a) I am proud that after many months, I tidied my drawer of containers.  Now I have containers stacked with their lids beside them, and I also have precious little of anything round.  Children's cups now have their own spot, and are restrained from taking over the world.

(b) I am also proud of the curtains I bought for the PlayRoom, even though the PlayRoom is still a work in progress.  I will be monstrously proud of Mr de Elba and myself when it is completely finished!  Again, tune in to the Thankful Post of 2010.  It may just take that long.

(c) I am proud of my Wee Bro for starting me off on the transformation of the Overgrown Corner With Wasps into The Sandpit, and of my own work to finish the job.

I am sure that many more items for this list will come to me over the days. But for now, that will do.

So when I shout "Happy New Year" it will not be with the thought that the new year may bring nothing but sunshine and rainbows. It will be with thankfulness for 2009 in mind, remembering the things I was proud of and thankful for in the year.

For some Thankful Reading, check out the thankful lists by Scurrette, Crazy Sister and Femina.  In turn, I am thankful and  proud to call them my friends.

Briefly ...

Mr de Elba is home! All is great. Except for the mess and the laundry!

Joseph not is sleeping well. I'm thinking he has been spoiled (yeah, I once heard someone say that a baby can't be spoiled. Well they can pop over to my house every night and cuddle the baby to sleep all jolly night, just the way he likes it.)

Although he has been a great little sleeper, he sometimes falls asleep in people's arms and now he's having great difficulties sleeping by himself in cot. Especially after 2am feed. Which sometimes happens at 1am.

Therefore I now no longer have time to myself at night to blog beccause I am trying to squeeze in as many hours of uninterrupted sleep in (4 is good) before I hear Joseph cry and shout out "ging, ging" which is what he says when he's upset.

So please tell me, dear gentle reader, is this just a phase? Will I ever get six blessed hours of sleep in one night again? Will Joseph learn to sleep again by himself in his cot?

Or should I leave home right now and run into the woods and live on nuts and berries?

Sailing on the Solway Lass

Oh people, thankyou for your kind words but I really didn't make it sound the way I wanted to!

I love that Mr de Elba can go away on these amazing camps. Yeah, sure I don't get to go myself often, but I love that he can. I feel like I'm a part of what he does in his work, and so I feel a part of the fun that his work involves!

I just sometimes like to wryly point out that he is sailing around the Whitsundays while I'm worrying about the Mud Mess in the yard, or he's gone to the Global Leadership Summit while I'm doing the Mummy Thing at home.

But deep down, I'm glad that on our behalf he can go and enjoy the perks of his job. (Can I stress that in most cases leaders pay their way on SU camps? Don't want it to sound like we're freeloading or anything.)

Well again it's late and I'm aware that if in the morning I am so smashed I fail to get out of bed, Mr de Elba will not be there to save Joseph from crying so hard he will burst into flames. So off I must go.

Good night.

He loves me

Today was challenging. Especially the late afternoon, when I noticed that Anna-Lucia hadn't slept a wink all day (a first for her) and Joseph was getting very tired.

Nat and his little friend were playing so nicely, each sitting on an end of the glide swing and chatting.

I left the big boys to their playing and chatting and decided to bath the little kids. Anna-Lucia was her usual strong-willed self (did you know that if you lift her into the bath, she will protest strongly and climb out, just so that she can climb back in again by herself?) and screamed "Let go-a-me!" repeatedly as I washed her hair. I did however get her and Joseph clean, but half-way through the bathing process, I noticed it was quiet.

Too quiet.

How quickly can you bath and dress two small children? I knew something was wrong, and indeed, it was MUD. I won't go into it. But it was (and still is, out there) BAD.

After the playdate (thick brown water settling in the bath as I type) I discovered that my three children had all uncovered the secret of perpetual motion. When usually on a Wednesday, they would be falling asleep dirty and unfed before their dinner and bathtimes, today they kept going and going and going ... and going. And going.

I don't know how they kept finding their second wind and their third wind and their fourth wind. But as I felt my own energy flagging to dangerously low levels, all three of them showed no sign of slowing down.

In an attempt to attend to the crying Joseph as quickly as possible, I tried to slam down a banana muffin. I gave myself a case of hiccups so violent that once I'd got Joseph happily drinking milk, he was unable to drink or settle to sleep at all.

Suck suck suck ... eyes shut ... suck suck ... HIC! Frightened eyes open. Darn.

Again and again and again.

And then I got a text:

"Sailing into the sunset on 'Solway Lass'. Turning phone off now. I love you!"

Well. He loves me. That's all that matters.

The Solway Lass

Day Two of Mr de Elba's Schoolies' Week sailing around the Whitsundays!

What happened to day one? I forgot to blog. Sorry.

You may remember that last year, Mr de Elba was a leader on a SU Schoolies camp at the Whitsunday Islands. Well, he's doing it again! And while I'm a little lonely at home, I am so thankful that my man can have such a great job, enjoying weeks away like this (at a price!)

(Schoolies Week ~is approximately equal to~ Spring Break)

Nat said before he left, "I am so sad that Dad's going on camp!" and I had to say, "How wonderful that our Daddy enjoys his job so much and it gives him opportunities to do fabulous things like this, and come home rested and relaxed and ready to play wtih YOU!" And it's true!

In lieu of a real blog post, I will share with you a thought that came to me at the local supermarket.

Question: What does a True Lady do when she spots a gentleman from church at the shops, minus his family, and in the company of another woman and her children?
Answer: Keep watching, for otherwise there would be no opportunity to learn that he was in fact not in company with them, but merely in the same aisle browsing similar products.

We Have Sand

When I first moved in to this lovely new house, the previous owner offered to leave his sandpit for my children to play in. I thought to myself, "No way! I don't want sand through the lawn, through the house and in the beds!! Accepting this kind offer of a sandpit will only end in regret. Sand Regret." And so I politely declined the offer.

Soon I realised that a four year old boy must play, and if there is no sand, he will play in the gravel that lies on a few places in the yard. And lo, there was gravel in the lawn, gravel in the house, and gravel in the bed, if you can believe that.

And I found that afterall, I had Sand Regret. I began to want a sandpit, to stop the endless playing with gravel.

I thought long and hard about where to put a sandpit and how to do it, being a puny girl myself. I decided that rather than use some prime real estate on the lawn, I'd be better off using a corner of the yard that was already set aside, but being used for nothing at the moment.


I thought so. And if we were going to make the yard a fun place to be in, wouldn't it be good to fix up the old swings?

The problem was it was going to be a big job for a Mum whose hands were often filled (quite happily) with my little Joseph. What to do?

I decided to ask my brother how I should go about the job. I thought he'd be a good Sandpit Consultant. And he was. Last Tuesday morning there was a ring at the doorbell and there he was, having travelled 1700km to surprise me and help with the sandpit. What a champion.

I had offered him a free dinner if he'd help with the job but he was unavailable to collect on that, as he was catching up with some ladies as well (ooh la la.) I had also offered him a free dessert if he would do the job in a hard hat, but he forgot to bring a hard hat, so there goes that.

He got straight to work. First he attached the new seats to the swing set.

Then he started on the sandpit. He completed a frame, took out some little trees, did some thinking about ways I could finish off the sandpit and then he helped me do some other jobs around the garden, like re-planting one of the little trees.

My father helped me work out how much sand I'd need. I can't estimate quantity and he's a mathematician, so I get him to help with things like this. 0.6 cubic metres. Thanks Dad.

Then this morning Mr de Elba helped me finish the job. We went to a sand place, bought our 0.6 metres of sand ...

... and shovelled it into the sandpit.

A few weeks ago I bought these sand toys to help motivate me. Here they are in the finished sandpit. Okay, so there's an eggbeater in there. I didn't buy that specifically for the sandpit. My children use it to play with so often, and I don't use it to beat eggs, so it seemed like the place for it.

The final step was to add children. Very happy children.

And tonight as I walk through the house, I am feeling sand underfoot. Sand in the bath, sand on the floor, sand swept into piles waiting for me to remove it, sand, sand, sand.

And I find that despite achieving this long-term goal with help from the men in my life, when I should be 100% happy and satisfied that the job is done, instead ...

... I have a little bit of Sand Regret.

(I've done the right thing, haven't I?)