Procrastinate

Today is a work day, but I have worked too many extra not-work days, so I am taking the morning off. Of course I am working this afternoon, and tomorrow briefly and then Friday as an extra.  

Now you would think that having a morning to myself would encourage me to be productive and ‘get things done’, things that need to be done like laundry, or gift buying for the upcoming round of birthday parties or preparing dinner but no.  Instead I am sitting in the construction zone that is currently our courtyard, enjoying the winter sunshine and trying to encourage my geriatric cat to sit somewhere other than on me.  

I have spent the entire morning pottering about online, reading blogs and relaxing to the soundtrack of Junior working away, creating masterpieces.  Today the the roof space is being floored for even more storage and the electrician is here wiring for new downlights, switches and power points, perhaps even the  plaster sheeting will go on the frame of the walk-in robe.   

Junior just dropped out to say he was off the the hardware store for a bit and that he would grab something to eat on the way, ‘Did I want anything?’   He also mentioned that the reason that our heating and cooling is so crappy could be because that not all of the ducts are actually taped up or lead anywhere. Shoddy workmanship?  How surprising, about the aircon guys and ductwork that is, and again I say, ‘I LOVE JUNIOR!’

So now it is lunch time, perhaps I should prepare some dinner for the family before I head out to work for a few hours and then the mad rush of after-school activities.  I think pasta will be on the menu, but not for me, I am heading out for dinner with the kinder mums.

It Starts

There is a whole world of crazy happening at work right now, most great but some only so-so.  Despite my desire to vent today isn’t the day.  Today is the day to celebrate the start of Renovate 08.

Now to set the scene, our house is only 10 years old, it is functional but just not quite right.  The layout has the master bedroom and an ensuite on the top floor, 2 bedrooms a study and a bathroom on the middle floor and the ground floor is open plan kitchen and family areas opening onto a small courtyard and then through to the garage that is just a storage repository and toy explosion zone.  

For the past 3 years the kids have decided to share a bedroom, but they are starting to want their own space and want to move back to the middle floor.  I want a study/craft/sewing area that is or can be kid-free so the solution is to build a walk in robe in the master bedroom that will also make a space for my extra stuff.  

This is the master bedroom as used by the kids.  OK, so the photo is a few years old and the fort has been relocated to a cousins yard, but the blue wall is the same.

I also want a new wall to block part of the kitchen from view when you walk in the front door.  I really don’t need to be reminded of the explosion that is the kitchen.  Instead of cleaning the mess, it is just easier to hide it all.  Oh and while we are at it, we may as well move a few cabinets too.  When we are done inside, we will start on the courtyard and garage.  I can’t wait.

Today Junior has knocked up the frame for the walk-in robe in the master bedroom and removed the cabinets in the kitchen area.  He had finished before I got home this evening but he had cleaned up all the mess he made.  Can you believe it – HE CLEANED UP!  I think I am almost in heaven.  

This is the master bedroom today!  The walk-in robe is going to be huge.  The area to the right of the wall will be my ’stuff’ area and it will have book cases along the entire wall, a sofa bed and a desk.

Junior

I was planning on posting today about the weekends frantic activities (other than forgetting birthday parties) of getting ready for the renovations, but work is getting in the way and I will have to do it later.   I do however have to post my love for my Tradie, let’s call him Junior.  Junior called yesterday afternoon – that’s right, on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon – to confirm that we were all set to begin today, and to let us know he would arrive between 7.30 and 8am as he had outlined in the documentation he promptly sent through with the quotes.  

Minutes after 7.30 this morning and there is a knock at the door, it is Junior and a colleage with timber to unload.  Prior to me leaving for work at 8.30, Junior had marked out the walls he would be building today,exactly to my specifications.  He also stated that he could move them tomorrow if we weren’t entirely happy!  He went out the back to get the wood and noticed that the french doors to the yard were sticking and difficult to open.  Unprompted, he got out a plane and fixed the door and then said he would pick up new locks for us to put in next time he is at the store.

OMG – a tradie that is prompt, reliable, intuitive, friendly and as affordable as a tradie can be.  Did I wake up in an alternative reality?  I have really good vibes about these renovations, I can’t wait!

Bad Mother

After a day of fluffing around as a family; having fun and doing exciting things like the fruit and vege shopping at the market, checking out shops we haven’t been to in a while, including fulfilling a request of girl-child.  The rest of the family have wandered off the the park and I am tidying up procrastinating and making some soup.  

The phone just rang.  It was man-child to tell me that the kids are now playing with friends at the park and ‘Why didn’t boy-child go to his friends birthday party at 10 pin bowling this afternoon?’  Shit – that was today.  I clearly don’t have my calendars synced, it is written on the one in the cupboard and the invite is stuck to the fridge, but who actually checks if it doesn’t have an annoying electronic beep?  Besides, I haven’t been home all day how was I to know!

One of girl-child’s latest requests was to go to the place that has the giant hammer to get some parsley for her garden.  That meant a trip to Bunnings was on the to-do list (great promotions Bunnings staff, one visit to a kinder 2 months ago has had a lasting impact!)  Since we had no apparent plans for the weekend, we went to Bunnings.  The kids had a blast playing in the fort structure, laughing so much that it echoed all around the gigantic warehouse, but it was still no substitute for going to a birthday party.  

The most annoying part is that Bunnings and the bowling centre share a carpark, we were right there!  The birthday boy didn’t call to see where we were as we let boy-child take a day off school yesterday because we had things to do.  

I guess good parents don’t let their kids wag school just to make their own lives easier.  Good parents also sync their calendars (or at least put important dates into their calendars).  It looks like it is remedial class for me – again.  

A Working Week

I work part time in a job that I love.  I should work 3 x 6 hour days a week and it is perfect for dropping the kids at kinder/daycare and school on my way to work.  Working these hours means I can also be there for school pick up at the end of the day.  Note that I said these are the hours that I should work.  Lately I have been working closer to 4 full days a week and dragging the kids along to various meetings and projects.  Now my bosses are great and they don’t want me to work too many hours overtime, nor do they want me coming in to work on my days off  and if I do work too much they encourage me to take days off in lieu but as I said, I love this job and if I didn’t work the hours the projects that I love wouldn’t succeed and it wouldn’t be as much fun.  

Anyway, to get to the point, after working far too many hours this month, I decided that I had nothing urgent to do on Monday so I decided to take the day off to spend with man-child, just to celebrate him finishing his old job and having a week off before starting again.  We had a great day at the movies and generally relaxing.  

So I arrived a work Tuesday ready for a productive day of projects only to find a message that my team was required to produce an urgent report documenting what we have done and what we were planning on doing for the remainder of the year, as well as outlining the internal resources required, the percentage of our time expended and all partnerships both internal and external.  Not so hard really, but as I was the only member of the team in (there are 3 of us in the office) I had to produce a report that would cover all of our movements, as well as the days work that was already booked – an hour long planning meeting and  2 hours of project development.  Oh and by the way, we need it by tomorrow, lunchtime at the latest!

Hmmm, 3 hours to do about 6 or more hours of work when I will be working offsite on the day the report was due, hooray.  I copied all the files I needed to the laptop (of course I can’t network my pc!) and took the work with me to the kids dance class.  After the kids were in bed I worked on it some more, until 11 o’clock.  OK, so I effectively worked the entire 6 hours that I had taken off the previous day.  I also worked from home for hours yesterday and a little more today.  My boss did call me today, apologising profusely for calling me on my day off, but it was to tell me that he had rearranged our meetings on Monday, so I could take the day off!  Did I mention that my bosses rock too?

So now I don’t have to officially work on Monday but I will do a few hours from home as I welcome the builders who will begin our renovations.  It should be the start of fantastic times – the renovations start again, man-child starts his new job and I am still excited about work.  

The Good and the Bad

The Good

Today Ash nominated me for a blog award.  Yay, how cool, my first ever online award, I am so excited!

 

The rules of the award are:

1. The winner can put the logo on his/her blog.
2. Link the person you received your award from.
3. Nominate 7 other blogs.
4. Put links of those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message on the blogs of the people you’ve nominated

 

The Bad

The rules of the award, specifically number 7.  Choosing my favourite 7 blogs out of the 56 on my reader, now that will be hard, they are all in my reader because I love reading them!

Oh well, here goes.

And the nominations for the I LOVE THIS BLOG award are

 

Chatabox Ash thanks for nominating me.  We started this blog thing at about the same time, if only my knowledge of how to make a blog look pretty was as comprehensive as yours.  I have to say that I love reading your all about your upcoming move and I can’t wait to welcome you to Australia.  Now if only we could convince you to move to Melbourne instead of Brisbane…

MiscMum, a great Aussie writer, that I can soon say “I knew her before she was famous, look she has commented on my blog!”  Her new children’s book is out really soon and I can’t wait.

 

A few of my other favourite blogs are the blogs of real world friends, friends who don’t actually know that I blog here about the real me, so I can’t actually link to them but I still have to nominate my other favourite blogs and this is the really hard part.  

Most of the blogs I read are ‘famous’ bloggers or are bloggers who have like a gazillion comments on every single post or are on everyone’s blogroll.  Linking to these blogs is like going up to the cool kids at school and saying in an ever-so-squeaky timid voice, “will you be my friend?” and hoping that they will not laugh in my face and walk away joking about the “freaky chick who wants to play with the big kids”.

For most of the blogs that I read, I do nothing but lurk and you don’t even know that I exist.  If nothing else, this post celebrates a de-lurking day!  So wish me luck…

The first blog that became a must read for me is none other than Zoot.  This is the blog that makes me feel all stalkerish.  I really love the way Zoot can make a any topic come to life, the way she can laugh at the insanity that must be a life with 3 kids, even if the 3 kids in question are totally adorable!

RudeCactus Mr Cactus can write an amazing post about absolutely anything.  He can even write a post about nothing and it is still interesting. Something else that is amazing is the way he can make me feel good about commenting on his blog.  

FreckleFaceGirl Around the time I was feeling the need to start a blog of my very own, I found your blog.  I can’t remember how, it was quite by accident but I loved the name so I started reading and I kept on reading.

ToddlerPlanet  I found this blog around the time a friend was diagnosed.  You write beautifully and illustrate the difficulties of life with cancer and help us to see that you are more than just the abnormal cells hiding in your body.  Your blog was my link to how to help my friend through her treatments (final treatment was a week ago – HOORAY).  Thank you for helping me and many others.  

RantingRadish I have been reading about Carter and his life from before he was born, when he was known only as Turkey.  It is kind of stalkerish knowing about someone who is so far away but Amy is a beautiful writer with a great story to tell

 

There it is done.  Here are the 7 blogs I love the most!  That was a much harder task than I expected.

Crazy Numbers

OK, so I am sitting here procrastinating.  I should be doing and not just thinking about getting dinner ready for when the kids get home from drama class in an hour.  I know they will be starving, but I did pack them a reasonably huge snack bag for in the car so they should survive.  Anyway, in my procrastination I was clicking through different tabs on the wordpress site and opened my dashboard.  I found a tab for blog stats and thought I would check it out.  It maps how many visits you get to the site each day/week/month and presents it on a pretty little graph.   Those of you who blog are probably thinking ‘Well der, of course we check our stats…’  but I never knew it was there.  I mean I check out the comments that are sporadically left but that is about the extent of my behind the scenes knowledge of wordpress.

So back to the stats… Well my graph was pretty flat, ranging from no visits to around 50 or so a day with no visits being much more prevalent.  Then just by coincidence yesterday the visits went through the roof.  It went from 48 views the previous day to 1,255 visits yesterday.  WTF?  I started thinking that perhaps it was in direct proportion to the amount of swearing that takes place (specifically about the shit that I dealt with Saturday night – BTW, boy-child is fit and well).  Apparently most of my visits came fromr google and a few from flickr.  Most interesting though was the search terms that people used to get here.  Again I was thinking rude words, but no most were related to Hannah Montana.  Go figure! 

So what is happening in the world of Hannah Montana to make me so interesting?

Drugs?

A conversation between girl-child and man-child.  She is sitting on his lap, staring into his face with all the love of a 4 year old and her dad…

 

“Dadda, look there are lines on your face, lots of lines.”  said with loving concern.

“Dadda, you’re a crack head!”

Crap

About an hour ago, I was sitting here on the couch thinking I may as well go to bed.  Man-child is out at a party (I didn’t feel like getting a baby sitter so I stayed in for an early night) and the kids have been in bed for hours.  Other than clean the house or spend endless more hours online it made sense to go to bed.  I was slowly peeling myself from the couch, looking around for the TV remote and though I heard a voice yelling.  I wasn’t sure but I kept listening.  I thought I heard it again but I wasn’t sure.  I found the remote and turned off the TV.  Yep, I did hear a voice, the voice of boy-child calling out for me or for dad.

Now it isn’t common that either kid wakes during the night these days, and if they do it is usually because of a bad dream.  As I ran up the stairs I was cursing myself for reading Roald Dahl’s The BFG to the kids before bed.  I had forgotten just how scary a story it is and had spent time talking to the kids before they went to sleep about how much fun it would be to have our very own Giant to have an adventure with.  I was thinking that I obviously hadn’t stressed that giants aren’t real, that even Hagrid isn’t real.

As I neared the top of the stair I could hear boy-child crying and I noticed a strange smell, a really bad smell.  (Any reader who is squeemish or has a delicate stomach, turn away now!)

Boy-child was standing on his bed, naked.  He had, to put it politely, had an explosive bowel motion in his sleep.  

Prior to going to bed he had made a few successfully smelly trips to the bathroom but was still complaining of a sore tummy.  In my world of digestive issues, stomach cramps are par for the course and rarely lead to anything but an uncomfortable night of sleep.  Being my son, I figured it would be the same for him.  I wish that were the case.

He had tried, very unsuccessfully, to clean up the mess by taking off his clothes and throwing them to the floor before trying to take of he bed covers too.As I helped him from his bed, he noticed that he still had socks on and somehow they were coated too.  He freaked out and managed to spread shit even further to the far end of his bed.  I managed to carry him into his bathroom and straight into the shower where he washed the mess off himself (including out of his hair).

How could so much mess possibly come from one tiny little body?  I had the pleasurable task of cleaning ALL the mess and changing the entire bed.  Did I mention that boy-child sleeps on top bunk?  That means that when he threw his clothes to the floor, they splattered.  There were shit splatters metres away from the bed!  I also had to attempt to clean the carpet as well as the bed rails, the dolls house and the chair besides the bed.

Eventually the bed was remade and I dragged boy-child from the shower (my apologies to other Aussies in water restrictions – some times a long shower is really necessary). He jumped back into bed wondering what the smell was!  

And all through the smelly dramas, girl-child remained asleep, blissfully unaware of the shit around her.

After bidding boy-child goodnight again, he calls to me, ‘Are planes symmetrical, mama?’  before rolling over and going back to sleep.  Good night my beautiful boy, I hope you are feeling better in the morning.  

Me, I had to go downstairs and hose off shitty bedding (again, sorry about the water wastage) and throw it in to wash before the entire house stinks!  I don’t think my early night is quite going to plan, the smell still lingers and I still need to have a shower to remove any possibility of residual mess.  

Reading

As usual, the school letter came home on Thursday.  As usual it took me until today to get around to reading it.  My excuse is that I like a little light reading to do of a Saturday morning, realistically it is because I can’t really be bothered getting rid of the mess that covers the kitchen bench.  Anyway, that is besides the point, the point being that there was a reminder for all students involved in the Premiers Reading Challenge to get their lists signed off as soon as possible, the Challenge finishes at the end of the month.  

Now I had a vague recollection of seeing something with Reading Challenge floating around a while ago, but I didn’t sign boy-child up for it so I didn’t take any notice of it and I am sure that it was subsequently ‘filed’ appropriately.  For some reason I mentioned the Reading Challenge to man-child and he said that he signed boy-child up months ago, ‘What did he have to do?’  Hmmm, let’s see.  Read 30 books by the end of the month.  OK, so that is only 2 extra books a day, on top of the home reader, home writing and the everyday books before bed.  Man-child is all, ‘So that’s no problem then?’  Well it really shouldn’t be a problem, boy-child is loving reading and often takes 3 or  extra books to bed with him every night, but they are books of his choice.  The books for the Challenge have to be from a specified list and boy-child has always been very selective about what he reads and when he reads it.  

So along with sorting pencils, my exciting afternoon consisted of seeing how many books from the list we owned. I did manage to find 45 books that we own that are on the Challenge book list.  Surely of those 45 books he should be able to find 2 a day to read without it becoming a chore.  We got off to a good start, with 2 selected to read before going up to bed tonight, as an excuse to stay up a few minutes later, whatever works!

On another unrelated but reading related topic, I found this clip via Adventures of a Miscellaneous Aussie Mum and thought we should all take part in this.  

For me, reading when I am waiting is a part of everyday life.  In fact I miss having to catch the train to work – I loved having time dedicated to reading every day.  I still manage to find time to read, but it does take a long time to walk to work if I read as I walk.  Nevertheless, it should be fun to encourage others to join in the Reading While Waiting Project.

My boy could be the next Sean Connery, learning to read at 5 and at some stage receiving an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award!  OK, so maybe not, but at least he can read and will hopefully continue to enjoy reading, and writing too.