Everyone shops at KMart

As soon as we arrived at our holiday house, I went to KMart to shop for swimwear for the children. Crazy huh? Who goes to the beach without swimmers? Well, apparently, it's easy to forget them if the children decide the preceding afternoon that they hafta-hafta-hafta swim in the neighbour's pool. As soon as the decision was made, I knew I would either be packing damp swimmers in the morning, or would forget them altogether.

As it was, I packed mine and Mr de Elba's (because they were dry) and forgot the kids' (because they were outside drying on the airer.) Hence the trip to KMart for swimwear shopping as soon as we got there.

Justamum's kids needed a few swimmers so she came with me. We quickly picked out what we needed for Woody, Jessie, Belle and Banana, and then I looked for a swimming shirt for Buzz. I wanted something that would be visible in the surf, as I knew I would be counting heads a lot of the time and a distinctive swimming shirt was going to facilitate matters greatly. However, there seemed to be limited choice when it came to visible colours.

Fluoro orange, they did not have. There seemed to be a large amount of black which is just not all that good when it comes to counting heads.

Red! What about red? Poor Justamum had to suffer my deliberations regarding the relative merits of the RED shirt with BLACK sleeves and the BLACK shirt with RED sleeves.

I'll spare you descriptions of my deliberating.

I finally decided that since the sleeves would be the most visible part, I'd go with RED sleeves.

Yay! Look at Buzz, happy in his new swimming shirt!

Surely he would be EASY to spot in the surf now! All I had to do was find the red sleeves!!

Shortly after, I realised that everyone shops at KMart.

Counting to Seven

Mr and Mrs de Elba, 

Justamum and Justadad, 

ARE YOU READY?  GO!

One, two ..... three, four ......., five six ....... seven!

In these pictures I have omitted the hundreds of people also in the surf.  It loses a genuine-ness, but I omit them for time reasons.  And because some of them were not pretty.  (As a general rule, wouldn't you wear BIGGER swimmers the bigger you got?  Not so in Australia.  It seems that the bigger you are, the flimsier the swimmers you wear.  Yeesh.)

Buzz often played out in the deep with Belle as they are both older (6 and 7 years old) and are very safe.  It will be a few more years before we choose not to include them in the head count, but they gave us no panicky moments this year.  They could usually be found together, Buzz in a black shirt with red sleeves, Belle in a black shirt with cute little purple swimmers.

Jessie and Banana are four and five years old, and they loved playing in the shallow water together, splashing in the waves and running up the beach squealing.  Jessie was in a purple shirt and swimmers that angered her frequently for no apparent reason, and Banana wore white and light pink (I think.)

Woody and Boris are two and three years old, and they were usually playing in the sand and fighting over beach toys.  Although they became more confident in the water towards the end of the week, they started off both unwilling to get wet, so this limited their potential for getting lost to sand, crowds, and leaving the beach rather than drowning.  This lowered our anxiety rating from 98% all the way down to 91%.  Awesome.  Woody in a red shirt with blue sleeves, light blue shorts, Boris in light and dark blue shirt and blue swimmers.

Baby Bimi is one year old and she was generally with the adult doing the head-counting.  We still counted her though.  It seemed right.  She wore white with pink like Banana.

One, two, three ....... four-five-six-seven!

At times, a swimming child would decide to come up to the beach and join the sandcastle-makers.  This was relatively easy to count like the example above, and sometimes gravitated into "One, two ....... three-four-five-six-seven," which was also easy.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven!

Perhaps the easiest configuration of all occurred when everyone decided it was time to build sandcastles and fight.  Often, two or three of the adults would go for a swim when this happened.

One, ....... um, two, ....... three, four ....... five? Yes, five ....... six .......   .......   oh crap.

This didn't often happen.  It was usually resolved by looking behind the shade tent, or a little further up the beach.

I love the beach!

Indeed, I would have attempted to blog every day of January if we hadn't left for a holiday at the beach the day after New Years Day. I may have even started more blog posts with the word "indeed" as I did with this one.

It's not as if I was offline - the house we stayed in was generous with its WiFi and we had iPads, iPods, notebooks and goodness-knows-what-else. But I just really hate editing my typing on the iPad. I have a hate-hate relationship with the little magnifying glass device I have to use to place my cursor way back THERE in the text so I spent the time reading your blogs and checking Facebook. Even though I'm not actually ON Facebook. As I will continue to do until -erm- my husband changes the password on his account.

We stayed in a house with Justamum and her family. Seven children, aged 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, and four adults, ages unspecified, made for fun times! We love hanging out with those guys and having them with us doubled the fun.

My one big regret is that we didn't take any photos at all. Taking photos is such a chore for me, I wish I was like those of you who always have a camera ready to snap away, but I worry life will pass me by uncaptured and unblogged. I am considering whipping up some pics of my own in MS Paint to recreate some of the moments for you, but I will leave that for a time when I'm not falling asleep and am on something a little more manageable than my iPad. Something with a mouse. Arrow keys. MS Paint. Whatever.

Just pretending

I can't believe that so far this year, I have managed to blog every single day.  Amazing, for me, but it will just be a little quote from Jessie.

Me, faffing around the kitchen trying to get many things for many people, making mistakes and admonishing self:  No, don't put the hot kettle in the fridge, that's not where it goes!
Jessie:  Mum!  Are you just pretending to be an idiot?
Me:  Ah yeah, that's it.  Just pretending.

To finish off 2011 ...

The Many Days of Christmas

Whew!  Christmas this year was a mammoth effort, with many different celebrations with different groups of people on different days.  The saving grace was that all the days were low-key and we didn't go overboard with presents, food or anything else.  It was just the absence of Nanna Naps each day that made me so exhausted.

The weather in our part of Australia has been much nicer than it was this time last year.  We've had some showers at night but the days have been warm and sunny, and the children have wanted nothing more than to be outside enjoying it.

Apart from that, there's not much to report.  Just trivia like:

• Mr de Elba shaved the dog again.  She's remained tick-free since September, and she looks nice with her sleek Number One hairdo.
• If you choose to move Christmas festivities to a park, you're likely to get your photo in the local paper.
• If you stand lop-sided in the photo for the paper, you may end up looking like you're an A-cup on one side and a DD-cup on the other.  Most people wouldn't notice this though: it would serve you well not to mention it to anyone and you may just get away with it.
• Kids are nice to have around.  The six-week Christmas holiday is really an endurance event, but it is nice to have the little guys around.
• Soon they will all be fighting and I may retract that.
• Afternoon naps for everyone are great ... until bedtime blows out and everyone is up late.
• I keep thinking I should get on Facebook but I'm just not making the leap.  It does look like fun though.
• My desk here would be a whole lot tidier if I didn't go to bed so early.
• Waking up early doesn't translate into a clean desk.
• I need to watch more TV so that I actually get the folding done.  I just hate watching TV, that's all.
• Jessie may be the perfect nativity "Mary" in all the practices but end up crying and pouting through the performance due to a wardrobe malfunction involving her headpiece.
• Your blogs are all interesting and wonderful, and I may not have anything interesting to blog ever again until things start going wrong or falling apart again.  Not that I'm complaining ...

Nice to chat with you again.  We should do this more often.

Legs Eleven! Knees Zero-Zero!

I was playing keys at church yesterday.  There would have been 700-800 people there, and when I play I try not do anything that would make a spectacle of myself.

After much joking among the band regarding how bad/good/fantastic it would be if one day, someone would fall in the baptismal tank while negotiating their entry or exit from the stage, and also after choosing some extremely unwise wedges that hurt my legs and feet, made my toes numb and made walking difficult, I managed NOT to disgrace myself in this manner.

I curbed the worst effects of my Bad Hair Day, I wore a red shirt and I chose a straight denim skirt that came to just above the knee.  I was certain that up on stage there was no danger of flashing anyone, even when the skirt rode up a little as I perched on my stool (I can't stand and pedal because of this.)

I thought I was safe until the pastor, having delivered his message from the stage, moved down onto the steps at the front to say something very serious and important just before the final song.

Hang on, I thought.  I am always quite aware of the line of sight from the video recorder, through the spot where the pastor is standing, to the band behind.  It seemed that after he moved, I was in the danger zone.

I turned and looked at the screen (the brand-new WI-I-IDE screen!) behind me.  There was the pastor, saying his final thing and beside him, like a bright shining number 11, were MY LEGS with their knobbly knees and white nearly-35-year-old skin.  And they were HUGE on the big screen!

To me, they were more noticeable than the pastor in the middle of the shot.  If you were there, leave a comment to say they were NOT.  If you don't leave a comment, I will assume they WERE.

(I know they were.  Long black trousers next time.)

Red Cards all round

Jessie has a little writing desk in the corner of her room.  She often sits there creating lovely drawings for us, gifts of love for a family she adores ...

... on her good days.

However, she has recently started drawing us "punishment pictures" for when "people are mean to her."  This can mean when her brothers fight with her or when her parents discipline her, and now that we're one week into our six-week school holidays, that means ALL of us, ALL the time.

She gives these pictures out the way a soccer referee gives out red cards.  They involve a violently-orange, angrily-scribbled portrait of the offender designed to insult and humiliate us.  Gone are the intricate drawings of smiling family members with careful hands and feet and nice hair.  Here are some examples (I blurred out Mr de Elba's name in the top left):

We've all been red-carded.

Call me "Fat G."

These days, Jessie is presenting me with lots of pieces of paper with little writings and drawings on them. She addresses them all to me, and she is now calling me "Fat G."

The "F" is actually a "K" and the "g" is really an "e." But in my mind, I call myself, "Fat G." You are permitted to do the same.

Ur doin it rong

If your kids take communion in a church like ours, you want them to be suitably reverent.

It's great when they learn to quietly say "Thankyou God for Jesus," and "Sorry for the wrong things that I do," before they quietly eat their bread and drink their teensy bit of juice.

But if after drinking the juice, your six year old boy lets out a burp and says, "C'n I 'ave some more?" it may be time to retire him from communion for a bit.