Hello, my name is Alison and it has been six days since I have blogged.

Sorry about that RRs… We had an internet shut down for a day, which was later fixed by the nicest offshore Optus representative you ever did call.  Then all things Christmas and alcohol related took over.

My Mum is here, and she holds my blog in disdain, so being the good girl that I am, I haven’t made time to sit in the apple orchard and ruminate on the state of the nation.

I had intended to regale you all with my excellent Christmas planning and exploits (which are extensive and organised and pinteresty) but then: alcohols happened.   And the the best laid schemes o’ bloggers and men… gang aft a-gley.

As we, er, speak the Gris-ashers are packing the cars to go camping, approximately 29.1kms south of all things safe, secure and sparkling.  There will be no internet, and so, I’m sorry to say, no blog.  For a whole week.

It feels a bit weird, to be honest.  I’ve kind of gotten used to you lot, but I promise I’ll be back next week.

Enjoy your hols… May your bubbles be tiny and lively on your tongue, and your mozzie bites few.

Merry Belated Christmas, Happy New Year, and of course, Happy Birthday to me.  Seeya on the other side. xx

Today I have cleaned the house from bottom to top. (This includes sorting all the Sylvanians from the Polly Pockets)

Today I have wrapped up all the Christmas presents in order to help a Santa out.

Today I have designed the Christmas menu and printed it out.

Today I have been to the shops to take back some presents because we had too many things.

Today I taxied the kid around in a Taco Boy car with Mexmusic blaring to try and drum up business for that joint.

Today I did five loads of washing, including all the towels and all the sheets.

Today I did two comb-throughs to check for nits (all clear, whew)

Today I ate eight Roses chocolates.

Today I drank two glasses of moderately fancy Savvy.

Today I let the kids play on the computers for over an hour without a break.

Today I did absolutely no exercise.

Today I reckon I spent about ninety-four minutes on the interwebs, namely the socs.

Today I spent too much time thinking about that stuff that I read on the interwebs, where people weren’t playing nice.

Today I sat on my top deck and ignored my family for half an hour whilst I read a magazine.

Today I missed some people who have passed away, and then dwelled on that a bit.

Today I let my Mum do lots of jobs.

Today I was too tired lazy to write you a proper blog.

So I guess there’s good and bad in every single day.

Hope you have more of the good in yours today… Or maybe exactly the same of each, for the sake of balance… Happy last day before Christmas eve day, day.  It’s very exciting, isn’t it?

Did I mention I wore antlers all day?

Too many HITS to keep it to five this week so here’s a few:

• cool presents from patients- thoughtful and delicious
• fun days with the kids: at the beach, BMX track, the park, the pool, Thrill Hill, at home
• a week of top results with my people
• Christmas lights and the beautiful freaks who do them
• being complimented on my writing
• the Hastings Street transformation- just magical
• ice cold beers slaking my throat
• counting down the sleeps til Chrissy on the chalkboard
• a warming tinge of sunburn
• the best website ever- PNP for the the kids Santa videos
• visits from the elves
• Nath pressure washing my sideway- so clean
• planning the Christmas menu
• dinners with great friends
• not being asked to make a gingerbread house
• Christmas parties
• people laughing at the blog
• finding an old friend again and finding us both the same (yet different)
• getting some annoying cycles completed
• Nath repairing the roof and painting the ceiling before our hols start
• a week with no bat-shit on my white car or white rendered wall
• warm weather
• the sound of the surf at night
• not appearing in the “Christmas Jammies” video
• lots of parcels arriving in the post, including online shopping deliveries that I’d forgotten
• finding out there is a SK book that I wasn’t aware of, to read on hols
• getting a computer fixed and being able to re-install Minecraft
• watching and listening to Liam play guitar

I’m sure there’s more, so much more, but that will do for now…. I hope your week has been as much fun as mine.  I hope your kids are enjoying their holidays and you are having fun with them (in the moments that they aren’t driving you bloody crazy).

May your week be free of bickering and full of beauty.

Play nice everyone.

You know that poo baby I told you about yesterday?

Well I eventually went back for her.

I know, I know, I’m crazy, but I’d kind of gotten used to having her around.  Plus, curiosity got the better of me, and I started to wonder just how much poo a baby could pump out.  Turns out, it’s A LOT.  Turns out that when your baby dissolves all her internal organs and ejects the liquefied remnants out of her habitus and into her holder, it is enough to fill one third of a baby capsule.  This is a precise measurement and a scientific fact.  Which means if you are the baby still residing in that capsule,  you won’t drown, but you will have poo in all the creases of your umbilicus.  You will have poo in between your toes, and you will have poo in your ears (this last one is only true if your mother has been vigorously swinging you to and fro in an effort to look nonchalant and groovy in a cafe she really should have left twenty minutes ago).

So how did we clean her up?

We went to the baby change room in the public toilets.  We went there because there was no way that THAT chocolate milkshake was getting into my car.  We considered our options carefully, weighed up our choices, and we simply tipped out the poo.  We left the kid in the capsule (What?  She was strapped in remember?  I told you that yesterday) and just tipped.  I even sang the tune “I’m a little teapot”, tipping at just the right moment.  It was like Play School Halloween or something.  Luckily most of the poo-brew tipped out.

Kind of.

Then we put the job lot, child and contraption, in the REALLY BIG SINK that they always have in baby change rooms- now I know why- and turned on the waterworks.  We rinsed through the equivalent of the Wivenhoe Dam until the water coming through was almost clear*.  And then we went home.

Eventually that baby capsule got clean.

Eventually that baby got clean.

And eventually that baby grew up, stopped crying quite so much, learned to walk, talk and operate an iPad, got addicted to Sylvanians, started fights with her brother, got transfusions, left fairy costumes strewn around the house, ate Ben and Jerry’s and carrots as often as she could, made cubbies out of towels and blankets, wiped boogers on her clothes, learned to swim, read The Wishing Chair and sang herself to sleep most nights.

Tonight we could hear her singing Joy to the World followed by Say Hey- I Love You until she drifted off to sleep.

I like her style.  From some of the stuff I’ve seen and heard today, the world could use a bit more Joy and a bit more I Love You. And maybe a few less shit-splosions.

.

*This is a craftily inserted lie so you’ll think I’m a good Mum

In the interests of not divulging too much personal information about my children, lest they become famous and my blog becomes famous and we are all so famous dah-ling, I have been thinking I really shouldn’t, you know, overshare.  About them.  At least not until they are old enough to understand the implications of, and consent to putting information out there on the interwebby, that they may later become entangled in.  But its almost 8.30pm, I’ve been at a Christmas party and consumed some cheer, and The Agony of Christmas is about to start.  It’s on the ABC and therefore has no ads to type within.

So “stiff shit” as they say in the classics.  Although this is a tale of shit that was anything but stiff.

*****

When our second child, who for the purposes of this story we shall call Coco, was a baby, she was a little tricky.  Some days she would cry.  A lot.  And some days she just needed to be held, or she would scream.  A lot.  If you are a RR you will know she has a weird-arse condition that means she requires regular blood transfusions, and so I guess that’s why she was tricky.  Either that or she was a little shit.

But this is not a story about that, this is a story about bodily functions.

We were out doing the food shopping, back in the days before Coles online was available in our sleepy Sunrise town.  The shopping was done, and it was time for Coco to have a nap.  Instead of rushing home, we thought it would be awfully chic to have a coffee at a cute little cafe, and have her drift off to sleep in her baby capsule.  We were intent on not letting the fact that we were now mulitparous ruin our life, despite volumes of evidence to the contrary.

I gave her a little kiss, smiled at her beatifically, pulled the shroudy/blankety thing over the capsule, and began gently rocking her.  She gurgled and snuffled and grunted a little, as babies often do, and I sighed in the contented way that only a mother of a pigeon-pair of perfect children can.  I’m pretty sure the sun was slowly setting behind me, illuminating me in my glow, bathing me in soft warm light.  I suspect I have never looked or felt so smug serene as I sipped my decaf-skinny-chai-soy-latte.  (Yeah right, kids weren’t ruining our life- who drinks that?)

Coco started to grizzle a little, so I rocked her with more vigour.  She could be a bit challenging to settle sometimes, so I rocked a little more.  She started to ramp it up a bit more, so I rocked a bit more. Ramp. Rock. Ramp. Rock.  Until eventually I was standing up, legs apart, holding those handles and swinging her side to side like The Pirate Ship Ride at the Melbourne Show in 1986.  UpUpUp one way, almost to inversion, then DownDownDown.  UpUpUp the other way, then DownDownDown.  I almost wanted to go all the way like that water-in-the-bucket trick we did when we were kids, but I didn’t (What’s wrong with that?  She was strapped in).

Eventually the grizzle>cry>scream was so loud there was nothing for it but to break the rule of the latest parenting book I was reading, and pull back the muslin.  “I won’t get eye contact,” I said to myself- there was something in it about no eye contact- something about being manipulated by a baby.

I whisked that blankie back, and like a magician revealing his trick, I saw that Coco was, well, Cocoa.  Totally brown.

Completely, utterly and absolutely covered in shit.

It was impossible not to get eye contact, for in fact her shocked blue eyes were the only things recognisable as human, in this baby capsule poo bath.

She was basted from head to hand, torso to toe, in runny, lukewarm baby diarrhoea.  I have never seen so much poo in my life, nor do I ever wish to. Nobody does. Nobody should have to. It’s not human.

I didn’t know what to do with all that shit, didn’t know how I would clean it up, just did.not.know.where.to.start.  Where can you start?  When you are in a cafe.  And you have maybe twenty baby wipes.  And you have a kind of gurlgly-screaming baby who looks like a runny Chicco.

So I just dropped that poozy Jacuzzi and ran.

That’s okay, right?

Once upon a time my girls and I decided that we would like to go to the cricket.  This is probably not true; what we decided was that we liked some boys who wanted to go to the cricket.  Except they called it criggit. Because: Aussies.  So we decided we would follow those fine fellows to watch this game of gentlemen.

But not without refreshments.

So we got prepared.

Two nights before we got about a dozen oranges and froze them: check.  The night before we got the vodka: check. I worked in a pharmacy at the time, and we sold syringes back then, so I got us a couple, for injecting.  Not us, the oranges.  With vodka.  Seemed like a sound idea at the time, as the fun police at the MCG had recently come up with some cockamamie rule that said that you could no longer take your blue and white foam esky full of VB cans into the criggit.  Some nonsense about drunkeness, or too many rounds of OzzieOzzieOzzie I suspect, either that or the newly fashionable Mexican Wave, replete with the throwing up of all manner of debris as you ‘waved’.  Like Melbourne’s version of Cyclone Tracey.

It took much longer than anticipated to fill up the oranges, as the only syringes we had in stock were tiny gauge 1ml ones suitable for diabetics and junkies.  So two shots of vodka per orange equalled 60 injections.  Per orange.  After a while our fruit resembled pithy citrus sieves, and our voddy was leaking all over the bench, and not into our mouths as planned.

So we slurped it up and turned our attention to the watermelon.  I suspect we may have been less than expert, and more than tipsy as we proceeded to bore a tiny hole into the melon, tip the fluid in with a funnel and, prepare to freeze it.  Again, a little* ended up on the bench and in our bellies.  The watermelon didn’t fit in the freezer, so we smashed it open and lapped it up like puppies at the bowl.  We were nothing if not conservationists.

The only fruit left were some scungy tomatoes at the bottom of the crisper.  Remember we were uni students, and were it not for Vodka, Lime and Sodas we all would have had scurvy long ago.  Fruit was not our thing.  Some bright spark** said, “Yay, Bloody Marys” so we valiantly went about volumising with vodka.  The bright spark had the idea of also injecting a bit of Worchestershire Sauce and Tabasco.  For authenticity.  You may suspect this plan also failed.  If so, you are a genius, and correct.  So we pashed the mangled mess of tomato, vodka and condiments off the bench top.  At some point we decided that criggit was a most excellent sport, and eagerly awaited the morn, where we would arise, fresh as daisies and smelling twice as good, dress in our finest hats and summery frocks and amble off to the match.  Graceful and genteel  we stumbled off to bed and didn’t awake until the phone rang mid-morning, with one of our beaus asking where we were, and wondering when we would be joining them.

Even with our jangling heads and husks of voices we managed to answer in the refrain known to all fans of the criggit when the man in white makes an error against your country:           “Fuuuuckkkk offfff”.

Those boys were ne’er seen, nor heard of again.  Good riddance.  We’d been burnt by The Ashes.

*whole bottle

**me