Making The T-Shirt Fit The Crime

It all started so innocently. A bit of afternoon painting to fill up the time in between coming home from preschool and eating dinner. Sounds great right? Whatever could go wrong.

Allow me to present a photo essay of what could go wrong:

Declan likes to consider himself a post-modern impressionist.

He decided he needed a different application method.

I should probably make a crappy joke about being caught red handed here.

Right about this point I made the silly mistake of turning around to get Connor some milk. I turned back to see my eldest has moved on from paper and is now turning himself into an installation piece, smearing paint over his face and arms. Cue a quick dash to the bath with strict instructions not to touch anything.

Despite his protests I eventually convinced him it was going to take a little more than washing his hands to get rid of all the paint.

I’m not sure what’s worse about this photo, the state of his face or just how shaggy his hair is getting. The kid looks like he’s waiting for Fagin to contact him about an opening in the petty crime career path.

Lesson learned – never turn your back on a three year old when he’s armed with poster paint.

Little Conman was less that impressed with all the chaos.

Welcoming The Early Stages Of Insanity

Yesterday I sat down and sorted a pack of sprinkles into colours. It didn’t occur to me until Dan asked what the hell I was doing that this might be a little strange, I just didn’t want the decorations on my cupcakes to clash.

The day that I’d planned to make Declan’s cupcakes for his preschool birthday celebration was the same day my waters broke and I went into hospital, and then when I had Robyn on his actual birthday it obviously put something of a spanner in the works. As such Declan’s third birthday has managed to be dragged out over a month with the various celebrations and trips out.

Fortunately this is the last one, his birthday tea at preschool. Ten minutes where he is the focus of everyone in the room followed by the consumption of cupcakes, the only way it could get any better would be a personal appearance from Spiderman – we’re saving that one for his fourth birthday though.

Best Laid Plans

Dan and I decided to have a business meeting (as much as you can call us scribbling away at notepads and drinking coffee a business meeting) at an indoor playground yesterday.

In hindsight, I do not recommend it.

One grumpy one year old, and one hyperactive three year old (that has no concept of fear whatsoever) combined with the rainy weather of the last week causing everyone and their dog to have the same idea to bring the kids to play and get the sillies out of them. Lets just say none of it did much to help productivity.

But Declan playedran around like a headless chook and Connor got to eat a cupcake, so I’m fairly certain they considered it a raving sucess.

Inspiration

One thing I keep on hearing over and over again since Robyn’s birth is how “inspirational” I am.

I feel like a fraud.

I certainly don’t feel inspirational, in fact I think I feel pretty much everything but that.

Today I felt jealous. The green eyed monster planted himself firmly on my shoulder in the early hours of the morning and has resided there for most of the day. I’m jealous that suddenly everyone seems to have a baby but me. I crave a little newborn to hold and cuddle, I long to feel movement in my belly again.

I wake at 3am most mornings and lay there staring at the ceiling willing myself to fall back to sleep. I’m shattered most of the day but can’t bring myself to nap. I shouldn’t be suffering from sleepless nights because of the thoughts that run through my head, I should be suffering from them because I’ve been awake all night with a baby attached to my breast. The spot in front of the window where the cradle was meant to be haunts me.

I have so much hidden bitterness to the world around me right now, that I’m trying so hard to contain, that I feel anything but inspirational.

Looking Lovely In Lilac

This is me “turning my son gay” if my husband is to be believed. He doesn’t approve of the lilac nappy, the dark purple one is okay, it’s “like Shaft” apparently, but the lilac is just one step away from transforming Connor into Carson Kressley.

Coping Mechanisms

One of the main triggers of me going a little loopy is when there is too much inside my head. Brain dumps are my best friend, I need to hold my head over a sheet of paper and let everything that’s inside it fall out of my ear and allow itself to become more organised somewhere other than my skull. The house is always liberally scattered with sheets of paper with random scrawlings, doodles and numbers that at one point made sense to me, but now out of context, and usually with the same thought spread over different scraps of paper, they may as well be written in another language.

Inspired by this beautiful diary on Kikki.K I have resolved to empty my brain on a daily basis and give those currently wandering thoughts a home where I can make a little more sense of them. Unfortunately, I know that if I drop $30 on a book with nothing but numbers and a pretty cover I’m going to freak out about using it, the perfectionist in me will rise up and it will sit untouched forever more.

Instead I’ve gone for the McValue meal version: one $3 Derwent sketchbook and a sharpie, no new notebook=neat writing guilt, no beating myself up if I miss a day, just focusing on making my mental state a little more stable and clearing up the debris that is currently fighting for attention within my cranium.

I do hope that 2010 will be 365 days of awesome for me and for our little family. Although in comparison to the mental clusterfuck that has been 2009, even a mediocre year will look like peaches and cream. I know that nothing will magically become wonderful in three days time when the clock ticks over, but  I can’t help but feel excited about the fresh start, and hopefully this little book will be part of it.

And Breathe.

The festivities are over for another year and we came out of it relatively unscathed.

Once again I learned the hard lesson that the kids really couldn’t care less about whether the honeycomb set properly, whether the tags matched the wrapping paper or whether we left out oats or carrots for Rudolf. They (and my husband) care more about having a sane wife and mother instead of me stressing out because one silver ribbon is more metallic than the other.

Fortunately I got my meltdown out of the way on Christmas eve, allowing us to have a fairly calm Christmas day in the heat with Dan’s family. Christmas morning was a little overwhelming for Declan, meaning he refused to take a nap before we left for my in law’s house for lunch and more pressies. Before the seafood was even served he was crashed out on the rug and snoring.

I know officially I should probably be bothered by having Christmas lunch without my eldest, but eating an entire meal without getting up and running around to tend to his every whim was probably the greatest Christmas miracle ever, it’s amazing how much better food tastes when it’s fresh.

Now we’ve had a few days off and it’s back into the swing of things. Bring on 2010!

Not Such A Happy Christmas

Last night was Declan’s Preschool Christmas Pageant. He’s been practicing the songs for weeks, he had the actions down perfectly and spent all Friday afternoon telling me about Santa coming to visit preschool that evening. The whole family was excited about it and we’d even dragged the in laws along for the event.

I’m sure you can guess how the evening went.

I wasn’t prepared for how packed it would be, you would have thought we were attending Elvis’ comeback tour. I went into a full blown anxiety attack before we’d even got to the gates.

The PreSchool owner got up on the little stage to welcome everyone, and with a crack of thunder the heavens opened, it continued to rain for the entirety of the kids’ songs.

Not that it mattered of course, because Declan refused to get up on stage with the other kids, he wasn’t having bar of it, not even with the coaxing of his teacher. Instead he gave us our own performance under the shelter of the veranda, including some awesome Thriller-esque moves.

We were meant to wait for Santa in the individual classrooms, which Declan did great at, right up until other people came into the classroom. Seeing his room packed with the legs of people he didn’t know lead to another meltdown. No amount of promising that Father Christmas would arrive soon was enough to calm him down and we were out of there before you could say Rudolf.

No pageant, no raffle winnings, no visit with Santa.

Seriously. I made cupcakes for this and everything.

A Hot Sweaty Version Of Scrooge

…and I don’t mean hot and sweaty in a naughty way, I mean hot and sweaty in that it’s hot enough to cook steak on the pavement and I’m knocked up and dripping bucket after bucket of sweat from every available pore.

I am still adjusting to the Australian Christmas. Christmas in the UK is just such a different experience. I can’t help but feel like it’s just some big elaborate make believe that the entire country puts on just to wind up tourists. I love Australia, I am very happy to call it my home, but December always brings with it a strong longing for the motherland. Homesickness, combined with being 7 months pregnant and the ridiculous heat ends up with me becoming Scrooge.

Last year the Christmas tree went up when Declan went to bed on Christmas Eve and came down 24 hours later the following day, and even in that short space of time Declan still managed to pull the entire thing down about five times. This year we have double the trouble with a now mobile Connor to add to the mix, and there was no way I was putting that much work into a tree just for a day of the pretty. So instead the scrooge in me splashed out fifteen bucks on ebay and replaced our tree with stickers.

Best. Idea. Eva.

It took me five minutes to put up. It looks festive without being too in your face OMG CHRISTMAS!! Declan’s delighted with counting the balls and telling me what the pictures are. And best of all, come January the 6th it will take me five minutes to pull down, and there’s not even a hint of having to battle with fairy lights or vacuum up glitter until June.

Christmas decorating win!

Still Trying To Send Me To An Early Grave

Yesterday Declan had a seizure at preschool. He was full of the joys of spring when I dropped him off. Three hours later we got a phone call saying to come in immediately as he’d started having convulsions during lunch.

For some reason it shook me up a lot more than the previous ones have, of course excepting the first. The ladies at preschool did a fabulous job, and I don’t doubt their capabilities for a second, but the mama bear in me keeps on thinking about how my little boy was scared and sick and I wasn’t there for him.

This morning he was once again completely fine, we played in the garden (when I took this photo), he helped me hang up the laundry, he got told off for picking my flowers. A completely average day… right up until at dinner time when he collapsed on the chair next to him, rolled his eyes into the back of his head and once again started convulsing.

He goes from being completely fine, then comes the fever and within an hour hes having another seizure. It’s reaching a point where I’m scared to be alone with him just in case it happens, I know how to deal with it, but I don’t think there is anyway I would remain as calm as Dan does whilst he treats him.

I just want my babe to be healthy and well. Not to have me hovering over him because I’m scared of what could happen if he gets too hot. I want him to be normal.