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

I like us all to have new outfits on Christmas Day, or if not new, then at least Christmas themed, in that they have to be red, white or green, or a combination of all three. Silver and gold are also acceptable.  Many, many things in The Asher home are in the colours of Christmas during December.  Upstairs, the colours are red, white and gold.  I can also allow silver.  In my office it’s green and white all the way.  In Unit One’s bedroom: blue and red.  Unit Two has pink and white.  (Now I know pink and blue “are not Christmas colours”, but: boy and girl.  Plus, the ornaments for their little trees were too cute to pass by.)

But I’m meandering.

This year, as always I got my Christmas stuff done early (RRs may have noticed me gloating in a previous post or ten), except for MY outfit.  I just haven’t been able to find a thing to wear.  Not in the theme colours at least.  I have schlepped to The Plaza a couple of times, which, shockingly, involves me: 1. Leaving the compound,  2. Leaving The Shire,  3. Crossing the river.

Nothing.

I thought I was going to have to resort to one of the outfits I have worn over the last ten years or so.  First World Problems right here people.

And then there was today, when the first Christmas Magic occurred.

This morning we Ashers were well and truly out of bounds, all the way down there at the computer chop-shop in Mooloolaba.  When we saw this:

Josie Bird… So cute. Flamingos in the window too.

How’s a girl to resist?

We went in, the kids took their seat on the big hand chair, and I began.  I’m not shy to do a bit of shopping or a bit of trying on, so the kids got out their books and settled in for the long haul- they know how I roll.  I perused the area- not difficult, it’s not a huge shop, and it’s not annoyingly cluttered with so much stock you can’t see things properly, but I didn’t see too much in the good ole theme colours.

The chirpy little thing behind the counter, who I shall call Josie Bird, if only because I like the way it sounds, asked if I needed any help.  Now this is where I usually get a bit embarrassed during what I like to call The Season.  I want to ask if they have anything suitable for Christmas Day, but I have so many rules: it must be red, white or green, it must be comfortable enough to encase and erase my Chrissy Day abdominal distention, it must look cute with heels, but not so short that heels are required at all times, it must be cool enough so that I can be in the kitchen (if I can’t avoid it), but warm enough so I can sit on the Top Deck late into the evening, and it must be modest enough that I won’t be flashing my scanties once I’ve imbibed.  And this old girl must look at least vaguely hot.

So I can’t really ask.

Today, Josie Bird was so gosh-darn full of pep, I decided to ask for just one of the requirements: the colour.  Immediately she was up and passing me a filmy little thing, that had a bit of red, and felt lovely in the hand.  I rarely ask for advice in shops (it may surprise you to know I may be a little controlling and opinionated) as I know what I like, but Josie Bird was so sweet I popped out of the cubicle for her to have a squizz, already shaking my head, “No”.

Josie Bird took one look at the Old Bird in front of her and said, “Not Christmassy enough, you need some more red, here you go,” and handed me a necklace that I would never choose with my own mind, and there it was: Christmas had come to The Ashers, or at least to this fussy, grumpy, tired-from-kids-camping-and-not-sleeping-last-night,  Asher.

Thanks Josie Bird.  What a ray of sunshine you are.

And here’s the reveal:

The outfit: sorted

Close up: loving the red

Cue the soundtrack  (Clearly the old Styler doesn’t know the colour-code constraints)

Do you have a new outfit for Christmas Day?  What’s it like? 

PS Not a sponsored post… Just sharing the Christmas Magic with y’all.

So, the Evil Geniuses have me again…

Just for something fun, we set up the little old dome tent today.  Down our sideway.  The kids played around in it, had a picnic lunch, lazed around in their sleeping bags*, that kind of thing.  It takes minutes to set up and not much longer to dissemble, so I thought: “Who could it hurt?”

Me, that’s who.

They asked if they could sleep in it tonight.

“Sure, sure,” I said, knowing it would be just like last time they wanted to camp in the lounge-room, and they lasted all of seven minutes before I cracked it with them for mucking around and they were banished to their separate bedrooms.  Or just like the time before, when they wanted to sleep on the mats on the floor, and they lasted almost four minutes before they realised they had perfectly good, comfy beds in which to repose.

So, we went through the charade of settling them into the tent, pretending they would sleep there all night.

Outside.

By themselves.

Exposed to all the child-stealing bandits who roam the streets of Noosa every night, praying to happen upon children allowed to camp down their sideways, so they can whisk them away and sell them to the bikie gangs that threaten to overtake our sunny state.  Or something.

Nath asked me how long I thought they’d stay out there.  I said, and I quote “If I was a betting chick, and you well know I am, I’d give them less than nine minutes.  I’d put fifty bucks on that.  And I’d give out awesome odds.  In fact I’d probably give out…(and here I made a lewd suggestion, which I shall not repeat in polite company)….”

To his peril Nathan did not take that bet.

And also to mine, because whilst I sat on the steps, waiting for some infraction or whinging or general teasing to escalate so I could banish them to County Beddington, they fell asleep.

What?

This has never happened.  Coco has never gone to sleep in under five minutes in all her life.

And so here I sit.  Typing this, at the back door.  Waiting for one of them to wake up, so I can legitimately move them back to bed, and go to mine.  My gorgeous, spongy, lovely bed.  I think I can hear it calling me (or perhaps that’s Nath calling, thinking he did take that bet with the lewd suggestion).

It is 10.47pm.  I just went and zipped the sides up on the tent.  No one moved.

They are not waking up, are they?

So where did you sleep last night?

How comfy was your bed?  Don’t tell me.

*It should be noted here that they are not only evil, but mental. It was about 30 degrees here today. 87 in that tent. That dusty, stinky tent.  They were in sleeping bags people.