Hellooooo, is there anybody in there?

OMG, it’s been forever. 

I had actually forgotten I possessed a blog….I know, it takes a special kind of stupid to forget (and yes I am qualified, I am  amongst that very special breed of women who forget to eat….so tar me with the special-stupid brush and let us move on)

What have I been doing? Ugh, I wish I had something other to say than the post-teenage wangst/ possible midlife crisis crap that is about to spew out into the intarwebs like aunt Flossies dirty washing, so please, if you are not given to the dramatics every once in awhile, now would be the time to avert your eyes, and go clip your toenails or pour yourself a glass of wine and sort through the overstuffed filing cabinet in the study.

The boy is still experiencing issues with his bowels. Three weeks of persistant diarreah (or diarick as my six year old calls it) has seen us back at the Doctors surgery and another round of testing under way. Should have results by tuesday.  But boy, that’s one thing they don’t put in the job description for “Mummy”.  It took me 13 hours to get a stool sample from my ten year old. He would forget and flush after he was done….motherhood….so very G L A M O R O U S….(thankyou Fergie, I will never forget how to spell glamorous as long as I live.)

I have a girl-child in the throws of puberty. If I find the hormone fairy, I swear I will snap her fucking hormone activating wand and shove it up her glittery ass. Sideways. 

My husband has been away much of the past few months with work. He’s home now for a few months. Thankfully.  We celebrated our 14 th anniversary seperately. He at work fending off advances from men on Oxford street (I did warn him he was too pretty to wander the streets alone after dark)  me fending off advances from an ex boyfriend who simply cannot live with out me.  WTF? Dude. it’s been 15years. No I will not run away with you to Rome. (As tempting as that may be)

When the hell did I become THAT woman?  he is persistant and stubborn and not thinking clearly. And because I care about him I am probably a little more gentle with his heart than I should be.

I am down a dog, since the female dog took to biting the ten year old. I am not sure why. I never wanted the second dog to begin with, but the husband will look at me with those pretty blue eyes and pouting his kissable lips and say pretty please in a way that I simply cannot say no to. I mean our cat thinks he’s a dog anyway. Seriously. The bloody thing comes when you whistle.  ( I love my cat)

On top of it all, I believe I have gone temporarily insane. As the husband and I seriously consider and persue homeschooling our children for the next two years. We have an interstate move…again. Which sees the switching of grades, curriculum and the fifth school in the last five years that my daughter will have to be the new kid at yet again. The upside, I can indulge my inner snob and teach them cool subjects like Latin, I just wish I could find a secular latin programme I was comfortable with. 

so there you have it.

Let the madness begin…..

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.

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.

The girl is the mist…

The sun that streams through the window is blinding. Glaring even. It hurts my eyes. And yet it fails to heat, there is no warmth. Today I only have one child who feels out of sorts and he sits curled on the lounge in the other room, a blanket wrapped round him like a coccoon, his favourite stuffed Rat beside him, watching old cartoons and reading Franklin Books.  Last week, all three were down. One with fever, vomitting and a cough that would seem more at home coming from an 80 year old man rather than my small nine year old son.

The book still comes in dribs and drabs, but the words have been dulled and seem harder to hear through the haze of cold and flu preparations.

Mugs of hot tea are my constant companions, I sip them slowly, warming my hands. I know it’s not really cold outside, but in here, there is a chill that sinks it’s teeth deep in my bones.

Maybe tomorrow, when the fog clears and the glare dims I will have something a little more engaging to say…..

Maybe.  

1000 a day or die

I’m still sick. I have been oozing seven shades of mucos and hacking up my left lung for what feels like days now, with no end in sight. And somehow yesterday whilst curled in on myself on the lounge with a hot mug of tea and a book, I was actually inspired. 

I dragged out the laptop and my fingers flew at the speed of a fast snail (which is break neck speed when your head is full of sinus congestion and a thousand tiny red hot hammers pounding away)

But I did it. I wrote 1100 words and the best part is I like them all. I don’t know what they are a part of, or where exactly they fit in, but it’s there, finally, bubbling just beneath the surface breaking free in mini spurts between body wracking spasms.

 I only hope I can finish before I am well, or at least hold onto the cloudiness in my head so the words can free fall until I am done.  If not, I’ll get my small boy to breathe all over me. “Come make mummy sick so she can write…” Now there’s a writing method that warrants some examination.

Stuffy sinus stutterings (todays post brought to you by alliteration)

There is nothing like a hot pot of tea, flannel jammies, big socks and a blankie when you feel like death warmed up.  With the better part of the night spent tossing and turning in pain and the feeling that your nose was going to explode spraying mucos in seven different shades from it all over the bed, when I was awoken by the radio this morning I couldn’t even muster the strength to hit snooze.

Today I thank my stars I am merely a stay at home suburban Mum. After waving from the confines of the couch to my two oldest as they charged off to the bus stop, and a quick snuggle from my youngest (who thankfully can make his own breakfast and can use a remote in that deft manner in which only those with a y chromosone can) I poured myself a cup of tea and curled up with Mr.Love, my favourite bear purchased for me by my favourite man.

So, I am off to drown myself in Pay Tv and tea while a hack up a lung.