This Christmas, we told the children that there would be a present for the whole family on the fourth hook above the fireplace. It took them a while to understand exactly WHAT the present was.
Woody is doing pretty well MINUS nappies, PLUS Batman Undies. I am pretty proud of him. Today was the first day without any accidents at all - he has a policy of having one accident a day, so today was an achievement.
However some of the successful toilet trips involved some inaccuracies. The poor little guy, despite trying his best to "point it down in" as he usually does, managed to wet his Batman undies, his shorts, his shirt, the mat on the floor, my capris, my shirt, and worst of all, his fringe (bangs).
Later in the day as I was reflecting on the wet hair, I realised that perhaps I should have washed his face at the time. Poor little guy.
School is wonderful and my children love it!
For the first two days.
Then the honeymoon is over.
One morning recently, I was dealing with three children who were all doing their own thing to make the school drop-off as difficult as possible for me. They try this every day but on this particular day, they actually succeeded in nearly making me cry.
Buzz insisted on riding his bike to school, even though I had to drive the others. I could tell he was going to be impossible about it, and what was I going to say anyway? "No, you can't ride, it's too ... exercisey?" "You are going to sit in the car and be driven to school, it's for your own good?" So although he's not 100% road-safe and makes scary decisions with regard to crossing at times, I let him ride. I followed him closely in the car so I could stop, get out and help with the crossings when needed.
Woody wanted to meet up with Buzz as soon as we got into the school carpark. His mistake was choosing to walk towards Buzz riding up the hill via the extremely busy traffic-filled road. I wasn't able to catch him until he had walked a scary distance away from the car, because I was too busy dealing with Jessie at that moment.
Jessie is the biggest offender with regard to The Honeymoon Period. Two days of wonderful fun at school has been followed by a week or more of the most ridiculous displays of over-emotional suffering I have ever witnessed, despite ending each day with a huge smile and reports on how wonderful school is.
Each morning she tries a different ploy to be allowed to stay home. This particular morning, it was feigning narcolepsy.
She pretended to fall asleep in her carseat and by the time we arrived in the school carpark, the only way I could get her from the car to the footpath was to lead her Weekend-At-Bernies-style by the hand from one to the other.
Help.
Reading and following blogs tends to result in making friends. Even if you never meet in real life, even if you remain largely a 'lurker' on someone's blog you follow their joys and struggles, and feel like you've made a friend.
Sometime you walk beside people going through unimaginably difficult times, and you feel enriched by the emotional journey you walk as you pray with them and for them.
Then one day the title of a post in your Reader or Blogroll is simply "Goodbye." It's hard to see that.
I along with those who 'knew' Susan Niebur am today asking God to receive her strong fighting spirit and give comfort to WhyDaddy, Widget and Little Bear as they grieve her death.
Susan, you are the strongest, most inspirational four-time-cancer-survivor/astrophysicist/mother I've ever known. You enriched my life as you allowed me to follow your journey. Thankyou, and Goodbye.
The most noteworthy thing to happen today was that I both vacuumed and mopped my floors. I also did many other things, but this vacuuming-and-mopping thing? It was amazing! Usually, once I've vacuumed the large area of hard floor at my place, it all requires vacuuming again. I rarely get to the mopping stage, although the whole floor area does get done regularly because of the number of spills and gross things to happen on the floors. I spend a lot of time on hands and knees scrubbing small areas of floor which are bound to meet up. So in effect, the whole floor should get done regularly, just never all at the same time.
The second most noteworthy thing to have happened today was the rapidity with which crumbs were dropped onto the clean floor. I took a photo to prove that while patches of the floor were not yet dry, lamington crumbs were dropped under Woody's bar stool.
Tonight we had a barbecue dinner at the house of some friends to celebrate Australia Day.
But Mr de Elba went to a concert in the big smoke, I did only an 82% good-enough job wrangling my Little Guys, in a fit of disorganisation I brought takeaway noodles instead of sausages or steak to put on the barbecue and claimed it was "a nod to Australia's multi-cultural heritage," and in my disconnectedness after playing with then serving dessert to the children I failed to realise the adults were all waiting before eating their own dessert and bogged into a lamington without using a plate and created a winter wonderland with the coconut. Then as the behaviour was getting ratty among the children we made a hasty getaway as soon as we finished dessert.
Now I am wondering - was that Unaustralian?
The first of January is a bit of an anti-climax. New Year? There's nothing much new about going from one holiday-day into another. Things are very much the same.
The first day of school, however, is something else! New beginnings, the end of the oh-so-long aimless days of summer holidays, time to get back into routine! Happy New Year at last!
Remember last January? Floods. It was terrible.
The bio on Brendon Walmsley's webpage describes him as "one of our country's finest singer songwriters and multi Golden Guitar winners" and it's easy to see why in his recent song, "Remember January" which he wrote to commemorate the floods and the spirit of Australians in the cleanup.
Check it out:
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!
