A Child's First Helium Balloon - a Mother of the Year Award moment

There was this woman at the shops this week.  She had two kids with her, the littlest, a boy, looked to be about 14 months old. The older one, also a boy, asked about his fourth birthday next week about five hundred zillion times.  This woman was already looking frazzled when she arrived at the top of the travelator trying to keep a large box on the skateboard that should have been holding her older child who, instead, was roaming free through the strangely crowded centre.  I would hazard a guess that she had already done a school run that morning in the drizzling rain.  I watched this woman go about her shopping as sanity slowly slipped from her grasp, what follows is my account of her slow descent into shopping purgatory.  It's not pretty, but may it serve as a warning to others who find themselves in the same situation.

She seemed to have a job to do, she kept listing to the (almost) 4 year old what needed to be done. Over and over she explained to the child (who randomly throughout the trip appeared to drift in and out of deafness) that they had to return the stereo, collect their book they had on order and buy steel wool.  It was as she was heading towards Target that she realised the reason for the crowded centre. "Best & Less Grand Opening Sale" read the bright red helium balloon attached to a little girls wrist.  Well that would certainly explain the 3 buses parked outside from local retirement and aged care homes... and the higher than average number of derros at this particular centre.  She giggled to herself, "good on you, Best & Less. Grand opening on the Thursday of pension week... someone knows their target demographic!" She had no idea that her giggling would be so short lived.  Glancing into Target she decided she wouldn't browse today, she returned the stereo and headed back out, she seemed to need to use the loo but I can't blame her if she thought since it was going to be a quick shopping trip she'd just wait until she got home.  She was a woman on a mission as she headed straight down to the ABC shop ducking and weaving through the crowd of fake gucci bags, snot covered kids and grey hair... well, as best she could duck and weave with a pram with a skateboard attached.  There she waited, second in line, as one of those sweet grey headed grannies discussed with the only store attendant, in great detail, the variations between the three versions of "I'm a little teapot" on the CD's she had in front of her.  Finally as the attendant glanced up at her she quickly got out that she only wanted to get her book she had ordered.  Book purchased she left the store, her (almost) 4 year old upset because she wouldn't allow him to buy an overpriced "green" bag or a CD storer in the shape of The Stig's helmet.  She looked up, shining like an oasis in the desert she saw a cafe, coffee... surely that would help.  They stopped and she ordered the big boy a babycino and herself a latte and dug out water for both the kids from under the pram and a rusk from her handbag for the baby.  While they waited for their coffee they took out the new book and had a look through it... until the baby managed to spill water on it.  She quickly realised that today would not be a good day for stopping for a coffee but it was ordered now so she might as well roll with it.  The baby didn't want to stay in his pram and didn't want to sit on her lap, he wanted to climb.  The big boy got through his babycino and got restless... real restless.  Latte chugged down they went and paid and headed back out into the centre only to hear someone say "Bonds underwear 40% off"... She wears Bonds, she's been feeling a little like a saggy baggy elephant lately, she clearly needed new underwear... she looked up at Woolworths, it was a rusk-throw away, the last place on her list... she thought about how nice some new underwear would be...

That, my dear readers, is where everything went wrong.  This mother, this woman who claims to have everyone else's interests before her own, this woman let her mind wander to her own needs, all it took was an instant.  Please, delicate reader, if you are sensitive you may want to stop reading now, if you continue into the dark depths that follow you will surely never be the same again.

She veered left, she was doing it, she was headed towards Best & Less. She was offered so many opportunities to turn back, as she approached the crowds became thicker, the dense crowd of derros and grannies closing in around her, but on she forged, she had that one selfish thought in her head, come hell or high water, she was going to get new underwear.  They were right outside the store now, there was a mass of early 20's mums wearing band t-shirts, sporting either jet black hair with blond roots or home dyed orange blond hair with dark roots and pushing prams with children of various ages strapped in.  Was the store so packed that there was a wait to get in? No, little Mr (almost) 4 knew what was going on... "Please can I have a balloon, Mum?" Wouldn't you know it, the kid does know how to use manners!  They were all out of balloons... but he used his manners on the girl handing them out and she was so impressed she gave him the one they had tied to a promotional teddy bear and gave him and his little brother a teddy each.  Into the store they went, there was a crush at the front of the store but she expertly maneuvered without running over anyone's toes or crashing into ankles.  She was through, instinctively she headed to the less-crowded back of the store to get her bearings and track down some new grundies.  Oooh, towels, "that's right" she thought "I was going to see if Grandma can use her machine to sew a picture on a towel for each boy for Christmas"... She looked around to find the best but cheapest towels.

Suddenly her non-derro instincts kicked in, the sale tickets were all different.  It only took her a second to realise that very little was a genuine grand opening special price.  Most of their stock was regular price with the normal sale tickets scattered through that and there was the occasional tag advertising a "grand opening sale price".  The baby keeps looking up at his brother balloon and getting upset.  There are plenty of balloons floating around on the ceiling but they are way out of her reach, maybe if they have more as she's leaving the baby can have one.  Okay, she moved on from the towels, they would be the same price next week.  Where were the women's undies... ooooh, kids clothes, she'd just have a quick check there because her oldest finds Bonds undies most comfortable for his skinny little shape.  She turns away, even at 40% off, if they don't sell them in packs she can get the cheaper elsewhere... but that shirt is cute... and there are the plain red shirts that she'll need for their Christmas shirts... "Oops"... she sees the orb of happiness go floating up to the ceiling.  The baby sees it too and his gaze follows it up there and he sees hundreds of balloons floating around the store ceiling and he has a little freak out.  She gives him a cuddle and assures him if she can she'll get a new balloon for Mr (almost) 4 and one for him too but right now she needs to keep shopping.  Undies, she needs to find the women's undies.  Forging her way through the mass of prams and walking sticks she finds the underwear section.... apparently she wears a very popular size.  Searching and searching she manages to track down 4 pairs in her size and hangs them on the pram with the shirts she's already picked up.  She tries to head towards the checkout but is pushed in the other direction... she escapes before she sucked under the current and never seen again.  But wait, she's lost, where is she now? Men's underwear... oooh, those might be the sort of boxers her husband likes, and they are a genuine sale item, she grabs a pair and turns to head back to the checkout.  She does a quick inventory of what's on her pram, she spies the shirts for the older boys Christmas shirts, she really should go and get one for the baby from the little boys section.  Jumping back into the seething mass of pension spending revelers she lets herself be carried to the baby section.  She searches and searches and finds that plain shirts are not fashionable for the pensioner crowd, she'd have to find one for him another time.  She can see the checkout from here, there is a temporary set of registers set up to cope with the crowd and she has her sights set on it... She makes it, silently berating herself for this silliness, surely it would have been better to just say no to new knickers.  She has a chat with the checkout chick, the sweet girl notices her sons watching the balloons on the ceiling, the older one looking wistful and the younger getting increasingly upset.  She directs the woman to a male employee with a ladder retrieving stray balloons from the ceiling.

They finish the transaction and set chase... how he moves through the crowd so quickly while carrying a set up 8ft ladder is amazing, he goes up and down it in three different locations before they finally catch up to him to ask for a balloon for each child.  She ties the older boys balloon to his wrist and for the younger one she ties it to the front bar of the pram so it's right there for him.  Nice and close so he can play with the string and make it bob and swerve.  He's not happy, he pulls at the string and cries, he gets the balloon down and grabs it, it slips from his grasp and he cries again, he's pushing at the string, pulling at the string, fighting with the balloon and crying all the time.  He's tired by now, she grabs the balloon and pulls it down so he can get it and assures him as she wipes his tears they'll just get steel wool and go home.  She weaves her way through the centre and is relived to make it unscathed to the comparatively empty aisles of the grocery store.  Her baby is getting quite upset now, she passes him the balloon again and he holds it in his lap, hitting it and crying.  They grab three different sorts of scourers discussing with (almost) 4 how each one might be better for cleaning the coffee machine that the others.  The baby is still upset so she throws them all into the pram and they head for a checkout.

They left the store and were moving fast, they made it to the travelator and were out into the carpark in no time. She left the baby in the pram flailing and fighting with his balloon as she loaded the car and got the older one and his balloon safely into the car, next into the car was the baby and then his balloon.  She wanted to keep it close to him, he had, after all, been batting at it this whole time.  An idea struck, she grabbed his giraffe, and appeared beside the baby as she tied the balloon string around the giraffes neck, the baby watching all the time, she put the toy on the baby's lap and bobbed the balloon inside and closed the door.  More crying, louder crying, the baby was getting hysterical!  She got in the car, and flicked the balloon back into the baby's reach and he cried again, this time she saw behind his tears what she had been missing all morning, this fair readers is the turning point.  She saw terror, absolute fear behind his tears.  This baby had never had a helium balloon before, his love for balloons had been for the ones he could carry around, hold onto, they were unpredictable in a predictable way.  If he let go they fell to the ground and he could grab them again.  This monstrosity was forever doing it's own thing.  He had no control over it.  In his short life he had figured out one important law in science... that if you let things go they should fall to the ground.  This didn't, it was tearing his world apart each time it bobbed back up pulling it's little string taught and making his toy giraffe jiggle as it tugged at it's stuffing filled neck.  With one swift bat she jams the balloon down in the foot well and out of the baby's sight.  He looks at her, this time with a broken heart hiding behind his red puffy eyes, distraught that his own mother would put him through that suffering.  She whispers comforting words of love to him, apologising for not realising what he was crying about all those times she had been talking with him in the shops.  He gives her a slight smile and as if to say she's forgiven he gives a sleepy yawn and rests his head on the side of his seat.  Ahhh.  She heads for home.

Kind reader, this story has a happy ending.  Although he had an initial fear of helium balloons, that baby has now had the chance to slowly get to know the fun of a helium balloon.  He is no longer afraid and has completely forgiven his mother for her terrible parenting.  But please remember, all this could have been avoided.  If only that woman had never let thoughts of her own backside's comfort creep into her sleep deprived brain. And please my friends, when you give your child their first helium balloon....

Don't tie it around the neck of their precious giraffe.

But I'm a Princess too!

You can imagine we don't see a lot of Disney Princess stuff making it's way through this house.  In fact we see so little that the boys seem to know that it either has come from Little Bear or is on it's way to Little Bear.  I'm not exactly up with all the princess stuff (case in point Little Bear's Cinderella birthday cake) and I don't really have princessy tastes either.  I'm kinda well balanced, I think.  I have some girly stuff and I can appreciate a pedicure for sure, if only I had a rich pedicure providing benefactor, although it's not my favourite colour I do like pink and my apron is pink but... I can name the different diggers, I stalk cement mixers with the boys in the car (only once without them... and only until I realise I was driving alone and was probably freaking out a perfectly nice cement mixer driver), I can mix it with the boys in the 0-6 age group without a problem.  See, well balanced.

Anyway, I do my fortnightly groceries online now that Coles Online is happening here.  I have fallen in love with them.  I pick what I want, while wearing my PJ's, after the kids are in bed, with a block of chocolate next to me and without someone else's 7 year old running over my ankles with a shopping trolley.  It's almost perfect, if the groceries could just magically appear in my fridge and pantry so I didn't feel like I needed to clean  up for the lovely delivery lady to see my house, it would be perfect.  So can you work on that one Mr Coles? Thanks.

Sorry, I got a little distracted... So, last week I ordered 8 boxes of tissues that were on special.  The picture online was some beach scene or something, it didn't worry me what was on them, they were on special... okay, had it been baby harp seals being slaughtered I may have passed on the special but you know what I mean.  So I got 8 boxes and at my painstakingly selected convenient delivery time (which always ends up not as convenient as I thought it would be when I selected it at 11pm) they arrived and were unpacked by my ever so helpful little men... who wanted to use the mass of tissue boxes to build a wall... and a fort... and a barricade... and a tower... and... and... and... sorry, where was I? Oh yes... they were so excited to see that our picker had selected 4 boxes of Toy Story tissues! Oh look, there is a Winnie The Pooh box as well... "Wow, Mummy bought Little Bear some tissues too"... hang on... No I Did Not.

"Yeah Mum, these ones have princesses on them,  you got them for Little Bear".

"No, I got them for us"

"But Little Bear has princesses"

"Yes, but I didn't get to pick which tissue boxes I got, they just picked some out for me"

"But these ones have princesses on them so we should give them to Little Bear"

"I'm sure her mum will buy her some princess tissues if she really wants some"

"But we can just give her these ones"

"No, I need those for when my nose is running"

Speaking slowly and clearly for the obviously dense mummy "BUT THEY HAVE PRINCESSES ON THEM"

"Well I can be a Princess too!"

"Ugh, I'll just open these ones and put them next to your chair".

So, Mr Coles Online, you are very lucky we got that sorted out, you just about cost me $7 in tissues handed straight over to my niece.  It's a good thing I am so in love with doing my groceries in my pyjamas or I might let this hurt our relationship... Although with the clientele of our local Coles I could probably rock up there in my PJ's and no one would look twice... but it's those trolley driving 7 year olds that really get me.  See you next week Mr Coles Online.

Does this blog make my butt look big?

The post in which I dribble a little bit about my cute kids and then share way too much about a traumatic event I recently experienced.

2 1/2 hours after the boys went to bed last night Lion emerged seemingly for the sole purpose of telling me that he doesn't want me to go to bed yet... ugh, I was JUST about to.  We tuck him back in, remove the long sleeved shirt that Dragon had put over the top of his flanny pj's when it's really not cool enough for flannys even (until about 3 or 4am), shoo away the gecko that I thought was about to crawl into Dragon's open, snoring mouth, I'm about to leave the room when I hear... "ahdoyudoo" "what was that, sweetie?" "thinsthayudooo"... okay, Lion has fallen straight back to sleep and is sleep-singing along with the Roxette CD that is their bedtime music for tonight.

Monkey, I thought, has been pretty used to getting something different for dinner to what the rest of us are eating.  Two nights ago he had some of our pizza crust, which as far as pizza crusts go, are awesome.  Everything goes right to the edges so they are pizza but the crusts just hold together better.  Last night we were having left overs, there wasn't really enough so giving some crust to him was going to have a big impact on the over all amount of pizza available.  I also thought that he should perhaps have something a little more nutritious (while he still eats whatever I give him).  I cooked up some yummy butternut pumpkin for him and mixed in a little formula to make it creamy (hey, we're going for a weigh in, in about a week, and he needs to have put on everything he lost while vomiting last month and lots more).  We sat down for dinner and we all had pizza and he didn't.  He noticed.  He was not happy.  It's a good thing he likes creamy pumpkin and thought it was an okay substitute.

I had to buy new jeans last week.  It's been years since I bought new jeans.  I bought a pair for $9 at Target once and then I turned them into maternity jeans.  I had a pair of hand-me-downs for the winter between Lion and Dragon's pregnancies.  After I had Dragon I bought a pair of Rivers jeans that were perfect.  Just the right amount of stretch, a modest waist, not clingy but not like a potato sack strapped around each leg.  But as it goes, after you have a baby if you are lucky you may get back close to your previous weight but even if you do, it's all moved around and nothing fits anymore... not that I have got back to what I was, but even if I made it back, I don't think I could squish myself into these jeans anymore.  So, I needed new jeans.  I went back to Rivers expecting that surely they can't have changed their design that much in the last few years... Jeans are jeans are jeans, right?

Wrong.  Their jeans were all skinny, almost legging kinda jeans, even if they had my size there is no way on earth they would EVER look any good on me.  Sad and dejected I resigned myself to having to find a new pair somewhere else.  Target was slim pickings.  My friend suggested trying Jeans West because all their jeans were on special... that's a trendy shop... I don't do trendy shops.  I kinda liked having someone help me pick a style and explain what the difference between each of them was.  So I tried on the butt-lifter ones because that seemed to make sense when I have a boy bum... I thought I might actually have a butt if I put these ones on.  Okay, apparently you have to have a butt to be lifted... and the waist came nowhere near my waist and I was apparently wearing a size too big... you need to be at "I can't breathe and I'm about to pass out" stage in the shop to be sure they will fit you after they are at home and washed.  So I turned them down and asked if there was something with a higher waist (I soooo did not belong in this shop) so she offered me the granny panties of the jeans world... the waist control jeans.  They have an extra stretchy bit across the waist to hold everything in... but the waist still doesn't come up to my waist.  Have you seen those rolled pork roasts that are all strung up with pink flesh spewing out over each string? Yeah, well I looked like that and to top it off I couldn't feel the lower half of my body.  Eventually we found their plain old bootleg jeans.  Ahhh, these were the ones, so I let the lovely sales girl know.

"Would you like to look at them with our butt-cam?  You can see how your backside looks in them with our butt-cam just outside here." At which point she gestures to the common area of the change rooms... "HOLY SMOKES are you kidding me? You expect me to parade around in front of other people and waggle my cheeks at a VIDEO CAMERA that for all I know is recording my boy-bum parading around ready to upload to www.mumswithoutbums.com..." actually, what I said was more of a mumbled "uh, no, that might release my kids on all the other poor shoppers, I think these are fine, thanks."

So, contributions to my counselling can be made through the link found at www.mumswithoutbums.com. Thankyou.

Why it's fun being a kid - part one

What do you do after an exhausting shopping trip and Mummy and Daddy are doing something boring?

You turn the shopping cart into a 'relaxin' couch'.

Our day - in small managable bites.

Did the world start to end at your place at about 5:30 this afternoon? Yeah, sorry, that was my fault, I went to the toilet. The boys went psycho as soon as I sat down. Screaming, yelling, hitting, punching, I have no idea what else, because after a few seconds I tuned out figuring there was nothing I could do since I have no voice today and was otherwise indisposed. The little one did present himself in front of me to dob on his brother for something or other but in the process of dobbing he disclosed some of his own behavioural misadventures and once I called him on those he went back to take care of things himself... more screaming, yelling, hitting, punching... eventually I finished and went to sort them out but I wonder if I had stayed in there longer if it really would have brought about the end of the world? Things were going down hill fast around here that's for sure!

My voice came back tonight during the bed time dramatics. Much to the disappointment of my offspring. I think they thought they had a free pass tonight to go completely feral. As my voice deteriorated throughout the day so did their behaviour. I won't tell you what I coughed up tonight that got my voice back but it was wonderful to leave the bedroom in a coughing fit barely able to breathe and not able to talk and then walk back in with my stern voice in full form and lay down the law. The looks of shock on their faces was priceless. They probably think I was faking it all day but oh well.

Doing groceries this afternoon and Dragon decided to swap body parts with me. Somehow it came up that I had a very sore throat so my sweet little boy swapped necks with me so it wouldn't hurt anymore... Awwww.

I got some weird looks this afternoon at Coles when I started my shopping with one trolley and it kept wanting to go to the left and when I already have trouble steering because I have to stand further back than normal because of my belly I decided it would be easier to swap than endure the frustration now and the back ache later. I parked the trolley I had with the boys in it, ducked out, grabbed a new trolley with no visible damage, brought it in, swapped kids, handbag and a few grocery items over and put the dodgy one back. Is this really as strange as what those around me seemed to think? I have swapped trolleys before, do other people do that or is it just me? Shopping with kids is hard enough, no need to give myself a back ache with a wayward trolley too!

Lion has Kindy tomorrow. I am really hoping that his teacher is back from her course because I didn't like the relief teacher he had last Friday. I know he struggles when there is a relief teacher, he is just a bit unsure what is going on and although he has an outgoing personality he gets thrown by big things like a teacher change and then when the teacher appears to be singling him out (although I think she just didn't know his name and didn't want to admit it in front of me but it really upset me to be watching and there are better ways she could have handled it) he really doesn't take it well. Thankfully his two other regular helpers were there though and he likes them a lot. I don't know why one of them couldn't be the teacher for the day as this relief chick is usually a helper in one of the other classrooms then they could have pulled in someone else in a helper role so the kids had a more familiar face up-front.

I also need to talk to his kindy teacher tomorrow because children's church is getting up and running again and his group is the first group to "lead" one. Over-eager parents who were concerned about the lost opportunity of outreach to the non-christian families in the kindy have been roped in volunteered to help and I am rostered on to lead with his teacher! YAY! 1st Monday in July we are starting Children's Church again!

My 4 year old is better on my iPod than me and my new book couldn't help me. He set it to repeat so one song would just play over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over... well you get the picture. He couldn't tell me how to fix it though. His suggestion was that I need to go the the Y-R place and ask them "how to stop that song from J is for Jesus to not stop playing" I asked him what the Y-R place was and he gave me a detailed description of the building "it's a big building and it's not like a skyscraper but it's got a point on the top like a skyscraper" but that didn't help me so I asked how he knew they could "fix" my iPod... "well, your iPod has a spot for a plug doesn't it?"... okay so the Y-R place is just Lion's weird pronunciation of wire. I am assuming he means Dick Smith where we bought the iPod. I eventually gave up and just looked it up online and fixed it myself. I now no longer have to listen to a 3 line children's song repeating itself until I go insane if I want some tunes.

I made 6 litres of pea and ham soup today... YUM! The kids don't like it so they had the super nutritious option of spag-a-saurus and bread roll for dinner. It was their first foray into tinned spaghetti as far as I can remember and they think I'm a super fine chef and should make that for them again :(

I can't make pea and ham soup without thinking about shark attacks though... Uni prac will forever remain with me for that one thing... every winter as I make my soup I will remember prac.

If you see a faded sign at the side of the road...

It occurred to me the other day that the closest any of us will come to living in High School Musical is when Love Shack comes on the PA system in the supermarket.




It was amazing to hear EVERYONE in the store start singing along and all the trolleys started moving a little faster because everyone was doing that "I'm dancing but I don't want you to know it" move... You know you've done it. They were all singing softly so no one else could hear (except the guy in the next aisle buying toilet paper and fish fingers which he was also loud about(and I have no idea why they are in the same aisle) he was REALLY getting into it) but the combined singing was loud enough to be heard across the shop. CLASSIC.



It has made me think that perhaps I need to post something I wrote a while ago out of boredom and avoiding a conversation with Mr-stinky-arm-rest-hog on my flight to Brisbane for the Tupperware thing. I have made no secret of my dislike for all things HSM, well, actually I don't go around sharing it willy-nilly but should the topic come up I will share openly that I find those movies disturbing and downright weird. All that breaking into perfectly composed song (how do they all know the words???) and those perfectly choreographed dances where the frenemies are all doing the same thing when at my school if you didn't like someone you wouldn't be joining in their dance about how they didn't like you!!! This weird little interlude shouldn't come as a surprise to those close to me. But if the uninitiated wish to stop reading this blog after you read all this then so be it. So anyway this is what my up before dawn brain strung together...




Do you ever wonder what the world would be like living in HSM? I have "Manic Monday" going in my ears and I'm secretly wishing the whole plane would jump up and burst into song around me. Then on comes "Here I Go Again" and I can see the old bald guy behind me jumping into the aisle and rocking out! Agh the ways I amuse myself flying without kids. "And We Danced" would see all the hosties whipping out instruments up the front and doing a little number with the passengers grooving along from their seats. The worrying thing is when I start to see the pilots come out as a backing dancers for the business class chicks singing "Roam". So who's flying the plane in this hallucination brought about by a severe lack of sleep? And am I starting to groove a little to much siting here in my seat? I must keep myself in check so I don't jump onto the aisle and start singing along to the music that is only in my head.



That was the flight down, the flight back was equally sleep deprived and full of weirdos (it's up to you if you think I am including the Tupperware folk as part of that "weirdos" group or not)


Okay my world got just a bit weirder when we were sitting at the conference and they were doing another lot of recognition and they were calling excited Tupperware ladies out to the stage to give them more gifts and they were playing "All In This Together"! Seriously, that was a turn I didn't expect in a room full of grown ups. Next thing I was expecting Zac Effron to groove out on stage and start serenading the number 1 tupper-chick. Now I don't scream and I don't surround myself with screaming chicks all that often so between hysterically excited Tupperware ladies and thumping loud music and not enough sleep I got a headache pretty quick. I also got gas. That was nothing to do with the Tupperware ladies, music or sleeplessness that was more to do with flying. I had a rather uncomfortable morning session with those combined but I was determined to do something about it when I got to check into my room at lunch time. Problem was I got to my room and found I didn't have any panadol on my bag! I had so many delays getting into my room that by the time I had eaten my lunch I didn't have time to duck back to the chemist I had seen down the street to grab some. As I was walking out the door a familiar package caught my eye, panadol in the minibar...
$3 for two tablets! No way I'll keep the headache thanks. I got back to the ex-centre and the music was thumping again. I figured someone would have a spare panadol, it was a room full of (mostly) women, someone had to have one. Thankfully my manager did, I got her last one... now I could get back to my own little HSM hallucination.



So, now you know what is on my iPod, if you still like me then that's just great. You also know a little more about the inner workings of my brain, if you still like me after that then you are probably about as strange as I am.

My big boy...

Lion goes back to kindy this week. We asked for a place for two days preferably Thursday-Friday but they weren't able to do that. He got a Friday same as last year but we had to take a Wednesday instead so it's a bit frustrating that we have a day in between but it was our second preference and better than one at the start of the week and one at the end. I was disappointed that he would be missing playgroup on Wednesdays but playgroup changed to a Tuesday so it will make things frantic to get to bible study which is now on a Wednesday but I decided to step back from being a leader this year so I think we'll be alright. (confused yet? I am)

I "lost" the offer letter so I had to ring kindy today to double check. I thought I had thrown out Wolf's jury duty letter off the fridge but it's still there so I am assuming I threw out the kindy offer letter accidentally instead.

I thought we would go out this morning to get him one new shirt (his shirts from last year are still fine, stained but fine) and maybe some new boardies since Dragon now fits his too so we need a few more. But he doesn't want any new ones, I told him I would at least soak his old ones to try and make them look a little less trashed. He doesn't do any craft at kindy but somehow comes home covered in paint and glue.

I am thinking that tomorrow I will just go buy him a new shirt so that he can look flash for his first day photo. He needs a new hat too, his head has grown so much in the last year, and it's never been small... you can be glad I wasn't blogging when I had him, there's a birth story no first time mum needs to hear... You put the skinny little fella in swimmers so you can see how scrawny he is and he could be mistaken for a (very very cute) bobble-head.

I'd better do groceries tomorrow so I have lunch to send with him too.

Can you believe I never posted his first day of Kindy photo last year? I just went looking for it and I got the post partly done but never finished it. So 12 months late here is my Lion on his first day of Kindy EVER!

The next step is to start deciding where we want to send him to school next year. We definitely don't want him going to our zoned school (it's a bit derro) so we need to get his name down somewhere (anywhere) else so that he can get a place.

[insert suitably funny title here]

Two quick things...

I was shopping in the Christmas section at target the other day and I overheard this comment from someone looking at the wreaths and garlands...

"why can't you get real mistletoe anymore, you know, like the stuff they used to make"

Should I tell her? The mistletoe in Target isn't the real mistletoe :)

Perhaps I should have told her to climb the nearest gum tree because there is probably some native mistletoe up there. Although that wouldn't look like that "real" Target version she was after.

******

Lion: *Cough Cough*

Mummy : *concerned look*

Lion: *holding hand out* Mummy I had something stuck in my throat and I got it out.

Mummy: Oh, that's good.

Lion: Yeah, it was Huddy, I'm not sure what he was doing in my throat but I coughed him out.

So this is Christmas....

Ahhh, nothing says Christmas like the smell of....

Body Odour in a crowded shopping centre?

We had storms a few nights ago. The roof leaked and it busted the air con at one of our main shopping centres. May I just remind you northern hemisphere folk that it's summer here and we live in TROPICAL North Queensland. The stink of all those bodies hustling past each other and the stress induced sweating and the lack of air con not helping and... and... and... YUCK!

We met a lovely super wonderful friend of mine for coffee after the blood test because I needed to download and she has finished for the year so was free. We did have a lovely coffee (we picked a good cafe so that we didnt have stinkies sitting around us) and I found that the junk shop had all new stickers in and so I overloaded on stickers (and they had some removable wall ones for $3 a pack so I am going to finally do the boys room with diggers and cement mixers and road work signs) because I was almost out but didnt feel like getting the same boring ones I always seem to find.

I actually went into the junk shop to buy glitter for the boys to make our christmas cards. Many of you have Thanksgiving to let you know that christmas is getting close and you should send out cards and get all the gifts together. We here in Australia just have to deal with it when it gets to 2 weeks to christmas and you go "oops, better get crackin' on that one" So on Tuesday when I went to the shops it was rather civilised still, on Wednesday it was crazy and on Thursday it was Psycho. I have presents to buy, I have nothing! I have to go the the shops with the worst parking to pick up our portraits, and I cant sneak in early in the morning, they only allow collections after 1pm. I am going to get through this week and then I will get cracking on christmas stuff.

So what else says Christmas. Aparently dead bugs all over the house Christmas morn. My sister wants to get her house fumigated before Christmas. When you get your house sprayed from what I have heard you just wake up one morning a few days later and every bug in the neighbourhood has crawled out onto your floor to slowly die. She is having the family (her hubby's side) for christmas dinner and we are rocking around for a bit of a morning tea or something to get our present giving done before the big E.X.T.E.N.D.E.D family thing that night. I can just see us getting there finding her picking up the last of the bugs that chose christmas morning to cark in on her kitchen floor. What if something like this happens with her precious little bear? Can you imagine being that poor kid when she grows up and her mum blogs something like that about her? Hang on... that baby looks sorta familiar...

Had my vent of all thing irrelevant for tonight.