Check out the hits:

1.  Warranties.  How good are they when they work out?  I’ve got a newish car, MissXtrailia2013, and she’s developed a bit of a knocking sound somewhere down there and over to the left.  Dunno what it is.  So I took her to Nissan and they cleaned her and fussed over her, serviced her and checked her over and said she’s a bit broken due to all the hardcore four-wheel driving I do, and they: 1. knew she was under warranty, and 2. got the bits sorted and fixed her.  I didn’t even have to fill out a form.  You little bewdy.

2.  School holidays. Yippee.  Finally.  Blood transfusion today, and a sneaky flight a bit southward for a long weekend.  Ahhh, the freedom.  Can’t wait for some jammie days.  I will not be doing my hair (Hello boys).

3.  Blood donors.  Thanks for giving us a new fresh life, with a happy child.  If you’d like to join in on the best party in town, you can book a spot on  13 14 95.  Go on, you know you want to.

4.  Ryan Reynolds movies.  Yet again, there was one on late on a Wednesday night, this time with an intriguing and original story: two people, envious of each other’s lives, a freakish act of nature, followed by a body switch, whereby the duo learn to love their own lives. So yeah, not intriguing or original at all, but like all Ryan Reynolds movies, once they start I am compelled to watch them until the end.  Even if that end is midnight on a school night. Perhaps it was the thoughts that were provoked: Who would I like to swap lives with? Would I prefer my own challenges to someone else’s? Why do humans have to have something taken away before they appreciate what they have?   Or perhaps I was just compelled to watch in case Ryan got his shirt off.

You’re Welcome
(Saved you watching the shitty movie)

5.  Dirty Laundry on ABC2 on Thursday nights at 9.30pm.  Watch it.  Lawrence Mooney is a funny bugger and they say the eff word a lot.  Worth staying up for.   Unlike the above (shirt issues notwithstanding)

So there you have it.  A weird week, but ending up full of hits just the same.

Happy school holidays.  May your children sleep in and then offer to clean the skirting-boards.

…From The Ashers

Some days, when you have a kid who has a thing, and when the thing gets too much, she can cry because your extra sensory perception wasn’t working properly, and you gave her porridge instead of corn flakes, or too much honey, or not enough honey, or the wrong coloured straw to drink her smoothie (that you really want her to drink, because she needs every bit of help she can get right now), or you are helping her to get dressed because she is so damn tired, and you choose the mauve knickers instead of the pink, all before your morning shower.  These are the days that you know you have to tell her.  It’s time to tell her.  Really, it’s unfair not to tell her, that today will be the day when she gets the blood taken for a cross-match.  But still you waver.

These are the days that when all the other kids are jostling around, and straggly lining-up to go into class to start the last day of school, you will be sitting in the school car-park after dropping the big one off, applying Emla to the tender skin of the inner arm.  Looking at the those thin blue streaks and hoping one of them will be plump enough to puncture.

These are the days when all the other kids are sitting on the mat in a circle, perhaps thinking about who they will play with at little lunch.  Your kid is sitting in a hospital waiting-room that smells of chlorhexidine and the ghost of urine, hopefully also thinking of who she will play with at little lunch, but more likely thinking about nurses and tourniquets and things that pierce vulnerable flesh to get to the life blood beneath.

So these days are the some days when you think it could all go pear-shaped.

And then it doesn’t.

You tell her that it’s today, and she doesn’t lose it.  Instead she looks at you, eyes so big and blue, innocent and wise all at once, sclera so yellow it’s almost green with the funk of excess bilirubin, and says, “Yes, I think I am ready for a transfusion, I pulled my eyelids down yesterday, and looked at my conjunctiva, look, they’re really pale.  I must be low.  Even though I’m not really that tired, only when I have to stand up for too long, then my legs get all wobbly.  And what is the plural for conjunctiva anyway, do you think it’s like the word octopus?”

These days, your heart leaps and lurches all at once.  It zings with relief, at the miracle of adaptation.  That the plasticity of the brain, and the wiring of the body, can allow a human adapt to almost any situation, given time.  Given the right conditions.  And in that very same moment, your heart feels denser than element 117 and just as unstable, as you yearn for a life for her that doesn’t know anything about haemoglobin or conjunctiva or local anaesthetic creams or blood typing or even hospitals and their strange layered smells.  You wish all there was was little lunch.  And then big lunch.  And shithouse spider craft.

Okay, this could be the last in these transfusion posts for a few months. Thanks for humouring me. 

…From The Ashers xx

I had a bit of a big day in the office today.  Lots of people in a bit of bother, lots more hoping to get in this week.  I’ve been a bit busy.   I got upstairs just in time to see the final reveals of the House Rules gardens.  Phew.

I was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, inhaling my dinner, when I happened upon an egg carton cut-off.  You know the bit where the eggs sits?  That bit.  It appeared to have some kind of pink glittery crap smeared haphazardly over it, so I knew from experience that, in this house, it would be known as “craft”.  In addition there were eight green bendy straws roughly taped to the cardboard.  I say roughly because only half of them were really securely attached.  I counted the straws again, yes, definitely eight.  Which led me to believe that this craft was indeed something specific.  I think it may be known as “spider”, or possibly “octopus”.  Hard to tell which.

I held it up gingerly between my thumb and forefinger. Not ginger because there was any realism- I was not afraid of being bitten by the thing that I shall refer to as spiderpus, as it was in fact the shittest piece of craft I have beheld in quite some time.  “What, in the name of all that is holy, is this crap?”  I asked Nath, who had been present at the time of presentation.

He looked at me deadpan, “It is in fact Coco’s spider.  She has been constructing it at school for quite some time.  Today there was a gallery of all of the mini-beasts, where the parents could view such monstrosities.  It is an egg carton with eight straws un-securely attached.  I suspect she will not get an A.  I also suspect we will not be accused of providing assistance, or craft hot-housing our child.”

At which point we started pissing ourselves.  Perhaps I was delirious from overwork and hypoglycaemia.  That could be part of it, but I shit you not, this spider is truly the worst piece of craft I have seen thus far, surpassing even the Liam designed tuna-box, cotton-wool-ball and pipe-cleaner scorpion of 2012.  We laughed until we had tears.  Tears of joy at being such crap parents, that not only have we not provided sufficient craft-nurturing for our children, but also that we would find their ineptitude so hilarious.  We laughed until I might have almost done a little bit of wee.  Wee of relief that our kids obviously hold craft in such low regard that it is unlikely that we will be requested to create crafterpieces over the looming school holidays.

I can’t help but think of all the other parents, filing past the gallery of mini-beasts, fake smiles plastered on their faces, saying things like, “Wow, another octopus-like creature.”  And,  “Ooh, look, a snake(?), bat(?), centipede(?), ummm, thing”.  And then they would have arrived at Coco’s.  There would have been no.words.

I know what you are thinking: that I’m a bit mean.  That the kid tried as hard as she could.  That spiders can be difficult to create.

Okay then, get a load of this:

It has NO EYES. Or fangs. (Among other deficiencies)

I rest my case.

…From The Ashers xx

Post Script: Liam just saw the creation and said, “What the hell is that?”  Coco looked up from her breakfast and said with a half-smile, “Spider.”  Liam scoffed.  I braced myself for tears of outrage, or some such.  Coco replied with a shrug, “Beauty is where you find it Liam.”

And for a kid who is mostly yellow-ish and has limited enamel on her teeth, that’s not a bad personal rule.

Touche kiddo, tou-bloody-che.

Sometimes life is just about perspective: how you look at it.  Something you dread, can become something to covet, if you just look at it from another direction.  Perhaps.

This week our youngest kid will be getting a transfusion.  If you are a RR here, you will know all about it- that she has a rare type of anaemia that requires a few transfusions per year.  When she was younger I would approach this week firstly with denial or anger, then fear and vulnerability.

These days we have a better handle on the whole thing.  We are accustomed to the process, and we feel we have a lot more input over how it all goes.  We get to choose the transfusion day, so we can plan our lives a little better.  We have a home test kit so we can keep an eye on her, and we don’t have to be too worried about plummeting haemoglobin.  I can’t yet say we can’t wait for transfusion day, not really, but in some strange and wonderful way, we sort of look forward to it.

We have already been shopping for a new outfit for her to wear on the day (because shopping heals most things that ail you), we have chosen what books and craft we will take in with us for the long day, and we have something special planned for the days that follow, where she will be in the very pink of health, and back to her normal self.

And then, for me, there is the lure of relief.

The moment that the car parking ticket gets fed into the machine is probably the best moment of my year, every time it happens.  I know as I push that little white slip onto the lurid yellow slot and the barrier comes up, I won’t have to think about red blood cells and jaundice and liver function and bilirubin and haemoglobin and erythropoiesis and fevers and immune system compromise and all of that for another two and a half months.  And that is something to savour.

It’s kind of like we get a New Year every three months.  There is a sense of relief and relaxation of a job completed, as well as a feeling of rejuvenation.

It’s like we get to start over.

In the car on the way home we will chat about all the things that we will do,  now that she is full again.  She will have aspirations of cartwheels and tennis and holding her violin up high, just like the other kids.  She will admire herself in the mirror and see a healthy, pinkish tone, just like the other kids.  She will laugh and cry and be sweet and kind or have tantrums, just like the other kids.  She will maybe stay up a little late, or get up early, and we won’t be so nervy about it all, just like the other families.  And I will hug my girl and appreciate her for who she is, just like the other Mums.

…From The Ashers xx

Today we celebrated the Winter Solstice.  Yes, yes, I know that technically it was on Saturday, but I was working, so shhh, the kids don’t know that.  It was TODAY, okay?

As you may have guessed, we have a programme, and here it is:

1. Watch the sun rise at Sunrise Beach.  Yes, this was early.  And cloudy.  So we climbed on the seats instead, and yelled a bit, because there was a campervan that looked all tucked up right near us.  I suspect free campers at MY beach access.  Hippies.

2.  Go out for breakfast at Bistro C (which looks onto Noosa Main Beach).  This was much more my style.

3.  Wear something yellow.  I wore a hair clip of Coco’s as a brooch.  And I forced certain family members to wear fake sunflowers in their hair for a few minutes. That counts.  Never let it be said I don’t go all out for this stuff.

4.  Listen to our Solstice CD, which has contains classic songs like “You Are My Sunshine”.  We all sighed with relief when it was finished.  All thirteen tracks.  Who thought of this tradition?

5.  Bake sunflower seed biccies and decorate the house with plastic sunflowers.  Box up said biccies and give them out to unsuspecting others, because frankly, they are a bit shit.

6.  Watch the sun set.  The highlight.  Hands down.

This year we had an added bonus of sharing a lovely lunch cooked by one of my gorgeous friends who reports that she “loves cooking and entertaining”.  So clearly, she is a complete idiot, but man she can cook.  We had delish food, wine, more than a few laughs and two beautiful surprise guests.

The winter solstice has well and truly ended here.  Everyone is abed- the kids exhausted, and Nath with what could quite possibly be a terminal case of Man-flu, leaving me with some repeats of Black Adder and a Hot Toddy.  Winter, generally you suck, but today, you weren’t all bad.  The 23degrees didn’t

Roll on Summer, roll on.

Do you celebrate the solstice (because it means Summer is on its way)?

…From The Ashers xx

Here are my hits of the week:

1.  The joy all of you took in THIS post.  It feels a bit like when I was watching “What really happens in Bali” to see if that guy with the dreadlocks did his dough on that shitty old boat.  I sense you all took an unnatural joy in my misfortunes.  That may or may not be called Schadenfreude.  Either way, I’m going to assume you were all laughing along WITH me, yeah?  It was fun to hear you all laugh though.

2.  Being outsmarted by the Evil Geniuses yet again.  Next term the school hosts exchange students for a week, and the EGs want one because: Pokemon.  Apparently they think a Japanese student will know all about Pokemon, and they can pick his brain.  This is after Liam previously telling me that learning Japanese is “a waste of my time”.  Anyway, they went and told the school that we were interested, and I just hadn’t handed in the form yet.  Neither of these statements are true.  So now the head of primary has emailed and asked if that would be okay and if we could it would be great and no pressure but we really need some parents of boys to host etc.  She knows I’m a nerd.  I’m sure she can smell my nerddom from her office (which I would never visit, because: nerd).  So of course I have said yes.  For a nerd, I’m a bit stupid.  So now I have an extra kid.  Probably a smart one.  These two are already too much for my little brain.

3.   This little snippet:

Apparently someone on Twitter got it in a fortune cookie.  I like it.  I like how it makes me feel.  Because that is just it, isn’t it?  It’s not OUR fault that things we don’t like in the world are as they are, WE are just little, insignificant snowflakes, aren’t we?

4.  This:

YES, you read it right, SALT. Who thinks of these things?

Have you had it yet? If not, get some.  I usually despise dark chocolate, but this stuff? Oh my.  Goes with a cuppa, goes with beer, goes with red wine, goes all riiiight on its own.

5.  Have I shown you this fruit bowl before?

Maybe not.  It was made by my mate Ben at Infinity Eco Designs, and it looks fresh, with some citrus gifted to me from my country patients. Check out Ben’s webby, he makes some pretty cool things. I want the Arcade Game thingy, but it’s slightly out of the price-range, perhaps he’ll give me a discount if I blog about it? *

*Not a sponsored post, but you know I WOULD do one for a free game thingy. Ben? BEN?

Happy Weekend to you all, hope its a goodie.

…From The Ashers xx