Harvesting of the crotch fruit.

So airskull.com aka IrishMum, had a post  a while back about how her Hubby handled the birth of their four boys. 

Bless his heart.  Having said that, women with “special” husbands really shouldn’t judge. 

Though my husband took to childbirth in a much less squeamish manner, it was no less amusing in retrospect. (at the time, I probably wasn’t as amused by his antics as I am now.) 

With our first child, our lovely daughter, it was a fairly standard delivery. Sure there were small hiccups but certainly nothing unusual. (the cord was wrapped around her little neck, which was uncomfortable for ME, and then I tore in ways we aren’t supposed to tear- the wrong direction, I had what they term a clitoral tear because I tore upwards instead of downwards. 3 shots of local and 45 min of stitching. Yeah, so not fun.) 

The whole time he was rather sweet (he apologised profusely saying he had no idea how much pain child birth could inflict-and I had it relatively easy), although he was also rather giggly on account of him sucking on the gas. He ate my meal. But he rubbed my back and fed me ice chips and helped me in and out of the bath. 

After six hours our daughter was born and I pretty much didn’t see him after that for about 2 hours as he took hold of his girl and wouldn’t let her out of his sight. 

With our second child, he was born quite fast. Although we spent the night in the hospital. I knew it was time, but I was only 4cm dilated. I was in no pain, I was having regular contractions (they just didn’t hurt very much) and I knew I was having this baby very soon. The nurse humoured me and gave me a sleeping tablet as she thought I was hours away.  The man curled up on a bean bag in the birthing suite that might have had about four beans in it and I curled up on the bed. I woke up two hours later when my water broke and our second child was born 75 minutes later. I had some minor tears this time (none requiring stitches thankfully) and you can colour me unimpressed as the man had decided to capture this one on video. (I still haven’t watched it. Mostly because we no longer own a video player) 

So far so good right. 

Then I got pregnant with Doodle Bug. 

The man decided he’d seen enough childbirth by now to believe he could deliver this child on his own. He even asked my doctor who said sure, I see no reason why not. (I could see LOTS of reason why not but who listens to a pregnant woman, we’re insane right?) 

Throughout my whole pregnancy there was a Sanitarium ad on tv where people would shout “Kick it to me” and some one would kick a ball to them…so he would say kick it to me to my growing belly and as the Bug boy got bigger he would start kicking me whenever he heard his Daddy say “Kick it to me”.  (Really frustrating when I am trying to sleep.) 

I was 42 and a half weeks pregnant  and I was hooked up to a monitor while they placed the gel to induce me. 

The monitor went crazy. Contractions galore but I didn’t feel a single one of them. Zilch. Nada. Four hours later the Doctor comes back to check my progress and I am unchanged. I am 9cm dilated. But still not feeling the contractions. (they felt more like braxton hicks, just a tightening)  So the Doctor suggests we try breaking my waters. I was a little hesitant. I think what made my prior births so simple was that they were wet births, my waters break about on hour or two before I give birth, so I was reluctant to force my waters to break in case it took hours for my body to catch up. But I ended up agreeing. 

Well, when the Doc pulled out the hook he was going to use to break my waters, apparently my eyes did a kind of cartoon bugging out thing that sent my husband into hysterics. He was laughing so hard he fell off his chair and the midwife, who had seen my eyes and my husbands reaction started kicking him and hissing at him to shut up. I stopped caring what he was doing when I felt the pop. I had never been hit by such an instantaneous wall of pain. It was the most horrendous thing I have ever felt. I may not feel my catractions before the second stage of birth but I sure as hell felt them now. 

The Doctor walked out assuming I would take a few hours now that my waters had been ruptured. So the man “takes over”.

I had a midwife holding my hand and talking to me in soft encouraging murmurs. The other midwife was down the other end trying to do her job whilst keeping a tight reign on my husband who was rubbing his hands together and screeching “Kick it to me” at my crotch. I could hear the midwife slapping him and trying not to laugh. But he was there to catch the Buglet and cut the cord and the doctor waltzed in 20 minutes after the birth. (He was gone for just over an hour and a half) So as far as the man is concerned, he delivered The Buglet. 

I will never forget those two lovely midwives and I know they will never forget us. I chose to stay my full five days in hospital with this one. He slept on my chest, was permanently attached to me in some ways from the moment his Daddy placed him in my arms until he turned 6 months old. I loved those first five days of just him and me, chest to chest . I missed that with our daughter, she was permanently chest to chest with her Daddy, and my oldest boy, he was constantly in and out of hospital due to a congenital eye abnormality that required close monitoring (and a nasty case of RSV he contracted at 2months) so I was constantly fighting for cuddles with smitten nurses! 

 

So that us. The harvesting of our crotch fruits. The mans evolution from apologetic support to comic relief. He’s just lucky he’s so darn cute and a really great Dad. 

What I wish I was doing…

Of course, what I am actually doing is a but load of work. Work work, house work, school work.
Work is rapidly becoming a four letter word around here.

(This is one of those internet appropriated images, the kind that you can never remember exactly how it came to be on your computer, only that it is and you love it. If you know who should be credited for this, let me know so I can link them. Thank you)

Where your prodigal narrator returns…

So, 

 

a lot has happened since I last verbally vomited in pixels. 

A LOT. 

We moved. We relocated 4500km. I went from being the mother of three kids to being the mother of two boys and an adult. 

I became an Aunty again. I became employed again. And we had to go through the process of registering for home school AGAIN.

 

I have heard horror story after horror story of registering in NSW. I have never understood how people can be terrified of the process. NSW does have guidelines that need to be followed, but that is exactly the same as in every other state or territory. 

I think what scares people is the term “linking it back to the NSW key learning areas.” which honestly folks, not all that hard. 

What you do is you go to the BOE website. You download the stages your children are in for each KLA. (I then print them out. Just the stages I need and just the areas I need to hit) Then I take out my trusty highlighter and I highlight the important parts. Then I look at our curriculum and check to see that it fulfils those statements. If it does, YAY, good job. If not, I think, can I make it work? How could I make it work and if not, what alternative can I use? 

And I think the biggest problem people have with the registration process is “Where’s your Australian content?” Yes, most of us source our curriculum from the US. Why? Because there is more choice and a better range of curriculum from the US than there is here in Australia. (Especially for older children)  But that’s where you need to work WITH your case worker. He or she is there to help you. He or she doesn’t want you to fail. (If there are no homeschoolers, then their positions become null and void. We keep them in a job.) 

So our home visit. I think it went very well. Even though my little guy was down sick, (curled on the floor in the lounge room watching Foxtel and hugging his stuffed rat, not a lick of school work to be seen) our representative, lets call her Gertrude, was absolutely wonderful. She spoke to the boys. She spoke to me. She looked at our resources, work we were doing and work we have done. She pointed out holes ( science and history shaped holes) and took notes on some programs I have she had never heard of. She told us how we can go about enrolling the oldest boy into TAFE. (NSW regulations are stupid. But I can make it work once we’ve been registered a few months) 

She made recommendations. I listened. I asked questions. She explained how to make sure everything we were doing could be linked back to the NSW curriculum. She enjoyed our choc chip biscuits. (The ones we made using chopped up kit kats instead of choc chips.) She shared some laughs with my oldest son and seemed to enjoy conversing with him. 

I have never understood how people can clash so badly with their BOE reps. Seriously. There is nothing scary about it. Of course, I am always nervous that maybe we wont get approval. But that’s never happened. We’ve always been approved. And we’ve been approved again.  

Oh, the parcel guy is at the door. I believe the 500 tea bags my husband ordered has just arrived. 

Where our narrator clutches her chest and tries to breathe calmly…

29. 29. oh crap 29. 

So last week was pretty crap. 

Aside from my birthday, that is.

There was a lot of vomiting. A lot of time spent in the bathroom. No packing got done. 

In fact not a single box has yet to be packed and we leave this house in 29 days. 

I’m hyperventilating just thinking about it. 

I’m also sitting here looking at my oldest son who has stuck a sticky arrow to his his forehead and is now telling me he is a very special unicorn. I’m thinking he’s special alright…

29 days. 

yikes. 

So…38 years ago…

I was born.
And today, these flowers showed up on my front door. With a Happy Birthday balloon.
Later, I was given a small mountain of gifts, my favourite of which I cannot post a picture of. Why? Because it is a cushion. A cushion with my husbands image on it. (And he has this thing about having his picture on the internet. Weird huh!)

After that, the girl child received a phone call and ran out the door saying she’d be back in a minute. When she got back a strange horn sounded in the drive way. When I went downstairs, there were the NT Coffee Angels. A mobile coffee van. The man and the girl had been playing secret squirrel crap for the past six weeks and now I knew why. He had coffee delivered for me and my friends. One of whom walked down to my place with a three layered cake she had baked me for my birthday. (I have awesome friends)

So my tea cup has never been empty. (And I have a shiny new silver tardis mug from my oldest son. A brand new owl tea pot from my youngest son and some beautiful scented stuff from Mary Kay from my daughter.) Among other things.

My garage door broke yesterday and for my birthday they actually came back and fixed it!

I am really feeling blessed and incredibly loved.

Now if I could just get my little guy to stop vomiting…(and avoid getting this bug myself then I will know God is truly smiling on me this week.)

The Art of Swearing.

So after a twitter conversation with @CelticRose and @TheRealIrishMum about vices and swearing,  a conversation that has us all admitting to our horrendous habit of swearing like sailors, it got me thinking about the time my then 7year old son borrowed his mothers potty mouth.

It was a lovely mid-morning. The children were all off playing in the street. We lived on the corner of a lovely little cul-de-sac that contained two other families with children around the same ages as my children. So they would all play together, often outside but also running between each others homes. This particular day, they were at the boys house, so my house was deliciously quiet and serene and I was enjoying it with a lovely cup of tea and some marking. 

The front door bursts open and in rushes BugBoy with tears streaming down his face, sobbing his little heart out. Well, of course the mummy instinct kicks in when your child is distressed and I opened my arms and asked him what was wrong. He launched his little body at me wailing at decibels that cause eardrums to rupture that “I am going straight to Hell mum. Straight. sob. to. sob. Hell. sob.”  I had to stifle a giggle. It was really quite melodramatic and I had surmised by now he was not physically harmed. So containing that giggle fit was taking quite the effort on my part. 

“Why are you going to Hell?” I asked. 

“B b b b be because I called N a very very bad name! I am going to Hell!” 

“What did you call N? And just so you know, God doesn’t normally condemn little boys to Hell for calling their best friend a bad name okay.” 

“I called him….I called him a Doodle Fucker!” (More sobs) Followed by me trying exceptionally hard NOT to burst out laughing. 

“Well, that is a bad name. But not bad enough for you to go to Hell, unless, Did you apologise to N?”

“Yes. Twice.” 

“Okay then I am sure God is okay with that. Would you like me to go speak to K?” (K is N’s mum)

sobbing and nodding. 

“Okay then. How about you sit here on the couch and cuddle Ghee for a minute while I go make sure N is okay.”

 

I walk outside and immediately start giggling. I’m not particularly worried about K’s reaction, they are a Catholic family too and well, us Catholics, we tend to have some vices… But I knock on the door anyway and enquire about N. 

*looking puzzled* “N is fine. He’s playing the playstation. Why?”

“Oh, see, BugBoy just came home wailing about how he was going to Hell because he called N a bad name. He said he apologised, twice, but he was still upset about it, so I wanted to check that N was okay.” 

“Yes, N is really fine. What did BugBoy call him?” 

“He called him a Doodle Fucker. I am really sorry. I have never used that particular terminology before and neither has his father. I’d say he got his potty mouth from one of us but we’re both still using ours so this is all him. Again I am very sorry.”

K was too busy laughing to really take in what I said. In true Aussie style she wiped her eyes and said 

“Doodle Fucker. That’s gold! Thank you for the apology but since BugBoy already apologised to N and N didn’t say anything about it I assume all is well. Send him over to play when he feels better.” 

 

Later that day I was on the phone to a dear friend of mine (an Aussie lady who is married to a US Marine) and she thought the name was rather genius and truly Australian. 

“Only an Australian would put a fairly innocuous word (or a childish one) with a swear word to create a ridiculous yet hilarious insult. I am so using that the next time someone annoys me.” 

Bugboy hasn’t called any one a Doodle Fucker since. However, he does have a habit of calling his brother a Dickbutt on a regular basis. 

Should never have told him God doesn’t send little boys to Hell for calling people names. 

*insert title here*

Remember the goofball boy from the previous post?
He took a screen shot of a conversation we had once and posted it to Facebook.

I think he inherited my Dad’s sense of humour.

SoTW vI.

So, these two nut bags here are my two oldest children. See the look on the boys face? That should tell you a little something about the kind of kid he is.

Now imagine we are reading Story of The World. We’re talking and reading and we’re talking and reading specifically about Ancient Egypt.

Here’s the part where I admit what a horrible parent I am. My children not only watch television, they watch wildly inappropriate television. There’s a reason my then 9 year old (he’s now 11) named his pet fish Stewie. So lets just get the finger pointy judgement rage out of the way now and move on.

So anyway. We’re reading and talking and we’re talking about the word hippopotamus means river-horse. See the big goofball up there, he starts laughing in that “my voice is breaking” way that only teenaged boys whose voices are breaking can laugh and says “So Majestic” and all I can see is Peter Griffin with Fabio hair astride a hippopotamus with his locks blowing in the breeze… and we spend the next 10 minutes rolling with laughter.

So now I am going to hear “So Majestic” every couple of hours or so following by giggles (probably mine) as he amuses himself and tries his utmost to get a less than giggly reaction from me.

Can’t imagine where he gets that from.
It’s amazing my kids learn anything at all.

Speaking of Spiders…

Here’s the Saint Andrews Cross spider that lives amongst my dying tomato plants. (I have another three beds with tomatoes in it that aren’t sick like this one)

She’s actually quite large. Not sure the picture shows just how big she actually is. (I think it’s a she as one of her babies seems to have set up home in a smaller web next to hers. Which keeps getting broken as I pick last fruits and tend to the broccoli that also lives in that bed.)

We lived in Sydney once. It feels like a lifetime ago. Actually it was. We only had two children then. Not three. We had a massive backyard that was so big the Man actually mowed a cricket pitch into it and would have me playing cricket with him every night until dark. (Our kids weren’t big enough to play cricket yet)

Well I managed to bowl the husband out and as he went to push the stump back in, he found a funnel webs hole. Of course, he being who he is, decided it would be in our best interests to make sure it was an EMPTY funnel web hole. (read, excuse to poke deadly spiders with sticks.)

The Hole wasn’t empty people. And the funnel web that exploded from it was huge! I wish I’d had a camera. (Funnel webs aren’t massive spiders, but this was massive for a funnel web) And she was angry.

I had all sorts of images in my head of my husband dying from a spider bite. To my relief he stopped tormenting it and just killed it. He made sure there were no more in the hole by digging the hole out. But yeah, testosterone. Seriously. was so glad none of the children witnessed that behaviour. Although, all my kids are pretty terrified of spiders. (Well the littlest one not so much. He’s way too much like his Dad that one.)

My Saint Andrews Cross spider can stay until I pull my vegetable gardens down for the move. He helps with pest control.

So this is my Twitter background…

I love spiders. Okay. Maybe love is a little strong. I don’t hate spiders. Except white tail spiders. White tail spiders are beyond spiders. They are icky and small and tricksy and we hates them we do.

Any way.

My oldest son is terrified of spiders. One Saturday when he was four, yes I can remember this was a Saturday, because The Spousal Overlord was home and was trying to fumigate a huntsman that had taken up residence in our walk in robe; so any way, the boy child was 4.

He and I were standing in the doorway while TSO dumped an entire can of spray on a huntsman the size of the boy child’s face. (He had/has a fat head too, so, pretty sizeable)

The Hunstman ran down the wall and straight at the boy child and proceeded to run up his leg. (I flicked the spider off. I’m a good mum like that) The boy child was, by now, taking hysterics to newer and more intensive levels than ever before.

Ever since that day. He has been terrified of spiders. So when he came up behind me while I was immersed in the twitterverse and he saw my wallpaper he was physically taken aback and shouted at me “What the hell Mum? Why would you?”

*Cue maniacal laugh*