Trivia and Photos, in a Dog's Breakfast

Allow me to regale you with trivia, and attempt to accompany it with photos.

This has been no mean feat, as the move from PC to Mac has been nothing short of disastrous. I can now no longer get photos onto my computer without them getting lost and automatically renamed and duplicated and twisted up horribly in a ghastly photo black hole called iPhoto.

Uploading photos to my blog in the arrangement I want is absolutely impossible.   I used to be able to fiddle with the HTML code and put things exactly how I wanted them, but now everything is a complete nonsense on the Macbook, which has turned me from a blogger into a non-blogger. Observe the dog's breakfast which is this post, if you will. Follow along, if you can. (Postscript: I have un-dogs-breakfasted it as much as possible in between a large number of interruptions.)

I have emailed myself some dodgy photos from my phone, tried to save them in some sort of compressed format somewhere in my Documents folder and uploaded them here, then I've had to put a load of line break commands between my photos so they don't appear as a huge pile interspersed with snatches of text.  Whee, Macs are SO! EASY! TO! USE!


Little Rex at nine months.  I remember how full-on this age is, with the little person clutching my legs as I work in the kitchen, the constant crawling through dirt and mess, and the squishy expectorated food down the sides of the high chair. Oh, there he is, awake and crying.  See?  Blogging?  Huh.

My good friend Justamum has to put up with me texting these pictures from time to time.  Everytime I can make a rude, or snigger-worthy word on Scrabble, I share it with her.  I'm sure she really enjoys this.  This is true friendship, indeed.

Jessie started ballet this year - I wasn't sure we were a ballet type of family, but she's really enjoying it. Here she is, striking a pose.

So much help.  Which is great, because there is so much laundry.  Once the baby gets old enough to be unhappy with everything except being in his mother's arms, all chores become difficult.  Sometimes you just sit him in the washing trolley and get on with it.

This nasty weed has been growing in my front garden for a few weeks.  I let it go long enough to work out what it WAS, then I got rid of it.  I know this one from my grandparents' farm - those seed pods will burst and scatter seeds far and wide, so it had to go.  But before I got rid of it, I named it.  I bet you can guess what I named it.  Obvious really, isn't it?

I had a brainwave one night as I dropped off to sleep - this little Phonics Lunchbox.  I'm doing half a day of work a week, and I have collected enough little speech kids to explode my brain.  A few of them are really struggling with the task of learning the classroom spelling words given each week at school, and I was wondering about the best way to give them some phonics tasks to help them learn their list words.  This is what I came up with - a little snap-lock lunchbox with a strip of velcro on the top, with their weekly list of words inside, along with all the velcro letters they need to make all those words.  I have used the Spelfabet Movable Alphabet to make this little Phonics Box.

I tried to take a cute pic of Rex and his sick mother, but he kept grabbing the phone and this was the best I got.  It occurred to me that before I had children, there were times with a head cold called for a "Doona Day," but now the best I can hope for is a "Doona Hour" and a cup of tea uninterrupted.

Mr de Elba is away for a few days, so here is my challenge: have all children fed, clothed, homework done, extra phonics done, school readers done, lunches packed, cello, swimming and chess remembered on cello, swimming and chess days, dinner-bath-stories-bedtime negotiated with a minimum of hassle, while pondering on my current list of concerns which seems weighty at the moment.

Well this has been a joy, battling the HTML while a sad baby wonders why his mother won't let him type too.  I have missed all you lovely people, and I'd love to write more often.  Oh no!  School Pickup!  Baby crying! Afternoon Tea! Homework!  Darn you, real life, darn you.