where oh where have I been? Not london, and not one queen.

Remeber my smelly son? The one that had his teacher bring to my attention the disturbing fact that yes, he really does fart way outside the parameters of anythign even remotely resembling normal?

He has coeliac disease.

This is why I have been absent from the blog. This is why I have spent the last four weeks trawling shops for gluten free products so that we may have a semblance of normalcy  to our new found diets.

This is why, the rest of my time not trawling shops, has been spent in the kitchen, modifying and tweaking and trying desperately to cling fast to familiar and comfrtable food we love and are loathe to give up.

This is why Sue Sheperd and her cookbooks have become my new best friends. The kind I have coffee with everyday and relax with at night.  This is why I am secretly slamming the incompetant (now dead) doctor who misdiagnosed my coeliac disease when I was 5.  because all of this could have been avoided. 

This is why my husband is discovering cullinary delights he otherwise would never have tried in a million years. And why he looks at me with a look of bemusement when we are in SumoSalad and I politely inquire what ingredients are in their salad dressings.  (regular soy sauce is out for coeliacs.)

SumoSalad where only too happy to bring me bottle after bottle of dressings to check the labels. (Which is why they have my loyal patronage)  The pesto chicken is GF, the spicy prawns are GF. My favourite salad, alas, is not. (Thai beef)

But the great thing about sumo salad is that they offer rice paper wraps. Which is GF. And they are moer than happy to bend over backwards to accomodate anyone who asks nicely.

My new favourite thing? the fact that I finally feel better than I have in years. And my boy is finally thriving. AND  is butt funk free.

Channeling Erma Bombeck

I’ve hit critical slump moment. I sit here, trying to pretend there aren’t cocopops on the floor that require vaccuming, that the washing needs to be hung out and the garden needs watering.  I need to make a dash to the store to get some Lemsip for the spouse who is losing his voice via a combination of being ill and shouting at recruits from sparrow fart to just left of midnight.

I am distracting myself from the fact that I still need to get in at least 30 minutes of vigorous excercise and think up something for dinner whilst trying to convine my children that the sao’s they ate at 11am where lunch so that I don’t have to make them something now….(now that it’s 3pm this afternoon)

Couple that with an exhausting week ahead,  and I am tired and hurt just thinking about it. Not to mention I haven’t written a single word today….as I wasted my writing hours on facebook writing smutty insults on my sisters wall. (Way to use my talents)

At least last nights quiche worked and tasted pretty darn good.

I curse the catholic church and it’s sacraments today, as the daughter’s confirmation nears (which is why my in-laws are coming, I am not confirmed so I cannot act as sponsor and the spouse is busy with work and my daughter feels a need to be confirmed, insists on it really so she asked her Nanna to be her sponsor, and I need to contemplate discussing the baptism of a five year old boy with Father Peter which I am sure when they pour the holy water on his little blonde head that he will melt like the devil spawn he is and I will need to prepare myself for that very likely event.. ) It’s my fault for marrying a catholic. (And that my mother concieved me with one hence the baptism and holy communioin but lack of confirmation…my mother is a pagan she left that choice to me and I had two names already that I didn’t like and couldn’t figure out why on earth I would want to add a third)

So concludes my weekly whine. I promise, well not sunshine and lollipops, but  no more needless whining about things not really worth whining about.

I better put my shoes on and go to the shops….I think I’ll buy the $15 roast chicken dinner at the takeout. It may not be figure friendly, but it’s badmum friendly.

the pitfalls of parenting

This afternoon I had an interesting talk with my sons teacher. It was parent/ teacher interview time again. Now I have a pretty odd sense of humour, I like toilet humour, I like dark humour, I like dry, droll and pithy. I am sarcasm, I love puns.  We laugh a lot in this family.  Trying to have a serious conversation with any of us is a painful experience. We have a tendency to get all humourific on your ass.

My kids go to a  Catholic School. My sons teacher is fabulous. She has a pretty good sense of humour, (thank the stars) which is just as well since she’s teaching my kid.

My son is visually impaired. He has monocular vision and the sight he does have in his seeing eye is starting to deteriorate…thank fully at a slow pace so far…touch wood.

So her first concern was his hand writing. Which has always been an issue. Plus the kid is lazy, he is capable of writing legibly, he chooses not to.  His math is coming along well, he still has a few problems with long division but over the next few weekends we can fix that. (My kids are geeks, they ask me to do maths with them on weekends. I can’t think where they get it from)

but this is pretty good given the kid skipped a grade.

When she cleared her throat and said to me, “Now I’m not sure how to put this delicately….” I will admit to a moment of panic….a  moment of What the hell did he do? Did he call someone a Smeg head again? AND then tell them what smegma meant? (He did this in play school- he only ever attended the one term)  I was literally ready to sink through the floor and listen to a sermon on age appropriate veiwing for my kid.

but then she said, “….seems to have a flatulence problem.”

Well, I couldn’t help it, I broke up laughing. The issue is my kid farts too much. And it’s no surprise. The kid can’t go more than 10 minutes without cutting the cheese. And he really stinks. The air in his bedroom is CHUM. So chunky you can carve it. We literally take a deep breath before opening the door, run in, tuck him in and run out again before taking another breath. The kid has the most toxic ass known to man kind. I thought he was storing it all up at school and letting it go at home.

His teacher brought it up because she was worried about it interferring with his social development. (Apparently the girls won’t go near him) I have been wondering more and more recently over his prolific rear emissions, I’m betting his carbon footprint is enormous just on gases alone, so I am taking him to the doctor next week. I think my boy may have a food intolerance.  (And I think I will get his little brother checked out while I am at it, his bum is pretty funky too)

I never ever thought I’d see the day where the point of order at a P/T interview was over how often a child breaks wind. Poor kid, and being the wonderful parents that we are he has had to endure nothing but fart jokes and name calling since.

And no, I don’t feed the kid beans. But I am worried that some day his claim to fame will be that he can fart the alphabet, in six langauges.

My weekly opinion- Abdicating Parents. The private vs. public debacle.

I was taken aback recently when reading Hugh Mackay’s scathing article against the upper-middle socioeconomic stratum and their demands for expensive private schooling, in August 10’s article in The Age.  What begins as an assault on these parents “abdicating their parental duties”  to the social policies incorporated and  employed by private schools, becomes an outright attack on private schools being the new tool by which parents (these abdicating, absent and apathetic parents) are buying social status, grades and future jobs.

 

There’s a small piece of me that wants to poke out my tongue and give a resounding “well D’Uh”.  Without a good education jobs are harder to come by. Year 12 is about getting good grades, you ARE competing against every other year 12 student for a place at University. This is why we have a UAI. A ranking system by which we are all graded and subjected to in order to be found worthy of tertiary education.  And it doesn’t matter which school you go to, whether it be private or public, you are still ranked, still graded and still judged on your academic performance.

 

The days of school being for expanding and broadening, developing a lust for and nurturing that pursuit of one’s knowledge went the way of the Dodo decades ago. Indeed, when I was in high school more than a decade ago, the emphasis was placed on getting good grades to earn the good TER and therefore better your chances of getting into University, nothing about nurturing and developing a curious hunger for knowledge for its own sake.

 

And what is so wrong about wanting the best for our children? The old adage that you get what you pay for is as true in education as it is in every other facet of life. To illustrate this point, my daughter is a keen musician and not completely without talent. In choosing a school for her, (which when you are a military family tends to  happen every two years) I must take this passion into consideration. She is a much happier child, performs better academically and socially when she is able to express herself musically. 

 

Where I currently live, our local public schools are a mixed bag. The two primary schools we are zoned for are woefully under funded and don’t  have a music program.  (FTR neither does the school she does attend which is private, but it does have a good choir and a wonderful staff that go above and beyond and (shock horror) I chose the school because of the family values and discipline it reinforces, there were two private schools in the area that have excellent music programs but they had no availability for her for enrolment, however, one of the schools allows her to attend their band practise every Tuesday morning and actually arranged transport for her to the practise and then to school, something that honestly, would not happen in a public school.)   

 

The point is that many private schools have better programs, resources and curriculum than their public school counterparts. If you can afford the best for your children, of course you are going to give them the best that you can.  

 

And whilst the claims in  Mackay’s article that private school is the tool of the class making devil, I am just as disturbed by his disdain for parents who want their children to be taught in an environment that teaches not only academics but common courtesy, manners, values and discipline.  Why are these value systems so maligned?  It’s not about having schools teach these fundamental basics of common politeness, it’s about having these values reinforced in their schooling life.  Yes, my children are privately schooled. Yes, I chose my children’s school  because it reinforced those basic social niceties that I have spent teaching them every day of their lives. And yes I resent being labelled as a parent who is abdicating my parental duties and choosing a school based on how well they can baby sit my children. 

 

My children spend the bulk of their waking hours at school five days a week. It’s only natural to want them to be in an environment that reinforces the values they learn at home.  Reinforces. There is no abdication there.  As for the push for private education being a sign of institutionalised class structuring, until the pressure for children to do well in school is lessened, then parents are going to continue to seek out the best educational opportunities for their children, which until public education reforms are made, will remain the dominion of the private school sector.