But I love him

What is this?

C is staring at something in his hand.

It’s the box the baby Panadol comes in, I say.

On the front of the box is a picture of a small child, a toddler in fact, dressed in an echidna costume, curled up asleep. This is just one of a number of products they make featuring pictures of children dressed as native Australian animals. Cute? You could roast them on an Aussie bbq with a couple of prawns and have them all on toast.

C looks carefully at the box again, deeply concerned.

Why I say, what do you think it is?

It’s…well it’s obviously a child, he says. But it looks like it’s been… wrapped in the body of some sort of dead animal.

Does it now? I ask, fascinated, as ever, at the inner workings of my husband's mind. What sort of animal?

Well, he says… it could be… an echidna.
Mmm…. I say.
But, also, I think it could be the body of a pig.

It’s ok, I say. It is an echidna.

We have a little laugh and then I say: I can’t believe you thought it was a pig.

Yeah, right, he says. And then, seriously: But why is a child wrapped in the body of an echidna?

Three Little Pricks

Tricky had his final two vaccinations the other day.

I'd like to say it all went smoothly and calmly, but then I'd also like to say there's peace all over the world and global warming has been reversed.

IT WAS TWO HOURS OF HELL.

Hell with extra screaming. Screaming like I have never heard before. I am talking way beyond Screaming Tomato. Screaming Tomato only applied when he couldn't actually thrash his Ridiculously Heavy Body from side to side or fling himself backwards out of my arms and certainly not when he could stiffen himself into a concrete garden gnome making it impossible to strap him into his straitjacket, I mean stroller.

AND ALL THIS HAPPENED IN THE WAITING ROOM.

We weren't even in Dr Jab's room yet. But with those high decibel shrieks and that alarming convulsive thrashing over the carpet we were hustled in very quickly. And not surprisingly the actual injections made no difference to the quality of the screaming. They continued. As did the thrashing and garden gnome impressions.

And of course the reception staff couldn't wait to throw us out onto the street.

So now there's me lugging an enormous baby bag, my handbag, a completely useless stroller and an insanely screaming toddler who's almost frothing at the mouth by this stage. I couldn't even put him down to load all the bags into the stroller.

As I stood there helplessly on the footpath, cursing C for having brought Tricky home late from the beach therefore he went down late for his nap therefore he was wrenched from his sleep early to make the doctor's appointment therefore he had transformed into evil monster baby and I had lost at least ten years off my life expectancy, a vision suddenly appeared before me.

She was thin. She was beautiful. She too had known the horrors of trying to manhandle an unwieldy toddler. Elizabeth Hurley gazed at me with her sympathetic come-hither eyes and brandished her Magnum.

Yes, I thought to myself. What else will shut him up and cool him down at the same time?

I pushed past the Liz cutout and into the seven 11, snatched up a little tub of vanilla icecream and paid with shaking hands.

Do you have a spoon? I asked the man behind the counter. He frowned a little but eventually managed to come up with a paddlepop stick.

Through all this Tricky kept screaming and thrashing and finally it was all I could do to sink to the linoleum in front of the ready made ham sandwiches and start shovelling the ice cream in. And miraculously it worked but only while the icecream was in his mouth. If I dared to stop and say, gather my bags together, or move the stroller out of the way of the English backpackers humming and ha-ing over which ham sandwich they should buy, then the screaming would start again.

At one point I thought to myself that the only other person I knew who had spent as much time on the floor as this was my friend George who went down to his local seven 11 to get some milk and ended up in an armed robbery.

The other prick of the week was yesterday when I went in to have a blood test for... well for all that shit you have to have when you're going to start IVF again.

Yes...we've got the fairy floss, we bought the Cheese On A Stick, we're clutching our tickets in our hot little hands. Back on the Great Big Fertility Ride we go.

It's not the same of course, different doctors for starters. We're going with Dr Lovely Accent who did the successful transfer that led to Tricky. And, at this point anyway, it looks like we won't be using the Chinese Fertility Goddess with her myriad of ghastly teas, because well basically we can't afford her. But I am off the coffee. And the wine. Almost.

We're starting with a frozen cycle, the last of our Famous Five who's been in the deep freeze for over two years. No drugs for this cycle just the usual dates with the dildocam and blood tests akimbo.

And if that fails, well we'll see.

Back on the floor of the seven 11, finally, the tub was empty, Tricky had gone for several minutes without shrieking and the red shine to his face had begun to subside.

Now was the part I feared, the sliding him back into the stroller. The English backpackers had stopped to watch, the man behind the counter had stopped to watch, and Tricky was sucking the last vestiges of icecream from his stick. Quickly I picked him up and threw him into the stroller, strapping him in even as he opened his mouth to roar.

Too late buddy, I said grimly as I loaded the bags on behind, you're in.

And off we strolled home, him shouting and kicking the whole way.

Number two? Bring it on.

Exciting parent/child tug of war now with recognisable word!

Domestic incident reported at House of OvaGirl, 1400 hours. Perpetrator is a small brown toddler with extremely cute nose. Incident took the form of an argument between SBT and mother. Mother’s statement follows:

"We had such a good morning, he ate biscuits, toast and avocado and he picked up handfuls of pebbles and threw them onto the courtyard where other customers were eating. And then he played with Claudia on the swings and with George on the slippery dip. And then we came home and he had a sleep and when he woke up the trouble started.

I asked if he wanted his lunch and he seemed agreeable to the idea and then I suggested he might like a sandwich and he said Beans.

I said no, not beans, we had baked beans yesterday and I think it would be best to have a sandwich, or if not possibly some scrambled eggs.

He said Beans, again, immediately, and I felt, well to be honest, threatened. It wasn’t what he said, it was the tone he used. So I just said Sandwich, you know, to call his bluff, and he said straightaway Beans! and this time there was definitely a threatening tone and I got annoyed and I said Sandwich! just that bit louder and he yelled BEANS!

And now he sort of stamped his feet and I said Sandwich!

And he shouted BEANS about three times, BEANS BEANS BEANS and then he rolled about on the floor and screamed and his face turned red and I said calmly that he better watch out because if the wind changes his face would stay like that and he just screamed BEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAANS! BEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAANNS!

No I didn’t respond to this, I don’t think it’s helpful. I mean, I'm the adult here, not him, I'm the one with the control in this situation. I just let him scream away and very calmly and firmly got his lunch ready.

And I think all that rolling and shouting really worked up an appetite because he sat properly in his chair and ate quite nicely and obviously enjoyed his baked beans very much."

Granny A and Granny P

Tricky and I have scooted up to Newcastle. We are hanging out at my parents' place for a few days while C is in Adelaide. Tricky is of course delighted with the huge doses of Aphwa ('granny' in Burmese) that he is getting each day. Poor Poppy, his grandfather, and I are but second class citizens beside her fabulousness. Honestly though, I do feel Tricky's Great Love is getting a bit out of hand when I, his mother, am in the middle of reading him a story and the sound of Aphwah's key in the door has him launch himself from my lap. He stops only to to snatch the book from my hand and carry it out like an offering, along with a huge smarmy smile, whilst calling Apwa Readdis Readdis... as if he has been starved of all entertainment and made to amuse himself all day with a chairleg and two rubber bands. (Although actually I reckon we could get a good half hour out of those rubber bands.)

But in the meantime, another Granny, the marvellous Granny P of Rockpool In My Kitchen, who is also Penelope Farmer author of Charlotte Sometimes and many other wonderful books for kids and grownups, has written a review of my book Legs Up & Laughing.
You can read it here.

Letter To A 19 Month Old Delinquent

Darling Tricky

Good God, you’re 19 months all of a sudden!

Just like one day you will be 19 years and I shall be equally amazed and horrified. When I started to write this you were arguing with me about having a nap.

Are you tired, I asked hopefully.
Nahhh, you drawled back, like the delinquent you will no doubt turn out to be.
Yes, you are, I insisted, I am the Mum and I know.
Bonta! you replied in a jubilant tone that I found inappropriate under the circumstances and then you cunningly tried to change the subject by shouting Brrrrm! and driving your little red car away.
Cah! you called back over your shoulder just to add insult to injury.

This entire scene will be no doubt replayed 18 years hence, albeit with some slight word changes. I shall watch you speeding off down the street in your clapped out 2000 Holden having shouted obscenities at me and I shall have to ease the pain by recalling you now, when you were short and cute, you enjoyed dancing to your battery operated turtle and you thought flowers were the most awesome things on this earth.

We are still a few months off the “Terrible Twos” and indeed my mother-in-law told me that in her day, there were no terrible twos, twos were lovely, it was the Terrible Threes that everyone was terrified about.

I wouldn’t dream of saying that you were “terrible” just as I could not honestly say you were “two” but the word tyrant has been bandied about of late.

Is it the way you firmly take the hand of your nearest willing slave and drag them over to whichever item you wish them to pick up, read, or feed to you?

Is it the way you express your displeasure by dropping to all fours, shouting lustily and then attempting to bang your teeth against the floorboards? Obviously this just makes us laugh but all the books say that would be the wrong thing to do and so we are forced to snicker into our sleeves.

Also, changeable, what? The other day you decided that you wanted to eat organic apricots. Yes the same organic apricots that previously you had scorned. In truth, the organic apricot is an ugly beast of a dried fruit, resembling a leathery, tightly wrinkled and deeply tanned, testicle.

It’s not the kind of thing you’ll see decorating a pavlova say or garnishing a crème brulee. Even so, I was bemused when you expressed interest in eating the thing but complete horror at touching it with your fingers. Instead you grasped at my wrist forcing me to pick up the loathsome yet tasty morsel and hold it in front of your mouth so that you could bite off small pieces. All attempts to drop it into your hand led to shrieking and flinging of this wretched Quasimodo Raisin across the room. When I refused to feed it to your mouth directly and offered it to you in my hand you preferred to lean over and eat it from my palm like a very very small horse.

You are still having swimming lessons with your Dadda and much excitement came from you blowing bubbles in the ocean baths the other day. You obligingly recreated the moment for me in your own little bath. This was less thrilling since you had also just done a wee in your own little bath water but frankly those ocean baths are not the cleanest either and on some of the hot days we’ve had of late it’s a little like wallowing in a crowded tureen of soup.

I should note that you have also, finally done a poo in the bath, a little milestone I was waiting for you to plop on, thankfully your father was on duty. It was a good lesson learned for Dadda too…note that prolonged farts in conjunction with a studious expression will lead to poo.

You have a slight obsession with mosquitoes and the bites they inflict upon your chubby arms and legs. It’s hideous, they often swell up into big hard lumpy welts. We have some Stop Itch to dab onto these and when I first started to put this on I would say, sympathetically, Naughty Mosquitoes. They bite. You also saw me swatting a couple of the offensive insects and so now you have a whole routine that goes like this: Baht! (point mournfully at red dot on leg) Nottee Skeeto. (Squat down and smack hard at floor in best mosquito crushing impression) Cream! (Take hand of Willing Slave and drag into bathroom where stop itch cream is kept) Repeat for each red spot as appears.

This month also, you changed our names. For months we have been Mumma and Dadda. It is lovely to be called Mumma or Dadda, unless you are like the father of Tricky’s little friend Toby, who was also called Mumma and then, whilst still lovely, it got just that wee bit confusing.

But then, for no reason I can fathom, you started calling us Mummeeee and Daddddeeee, both said in a sort of drawn out, slightly mournful manner. It’s extremely effective at 6.30 in the morning, your preferred waking time for you and us, when you call from the other side of the bookshelves Mummmeee, Daddeeeeee up! Up! Peeeease. And then, if we’re not moving quite fast enough, the stern warning Poo Poo! Poo Poo! The very thought of a leaking nappy and a bed needing a complete stripdown and disinfect has us up bright eyed and bushytailed like no alarm clock can do.

Ah, but it’s lovely. You are such a bright and beautiful child, sweet and happy, slow to cry when you have one of your innumerable bumps and tumbles and oh so quick to laugh. Even your tantrums are not so tantrummy, not just yet, and a raspberry on the tummy is often a quick way to short circuit the Screaming Tomato.

Sometimes I look into your eyes and there are no words at all to describe the feeling that wells up inside me, that peculiar blend of joy and delight and all those secret mother’s fears, those unspoken terrors and worries and general fussings, and love and love and love and love and love.

Although then again, maybe Bonta comes close.


Your Very Own
OvaGirl

xxxxx

History

On Wednesday the Prime Minister made an apology, on behalf of the parliament, to the Australian indigenous population and the Stolen Generation. His speech was screened in various places about the country including Martin Place in Sydney and so we decided to go, with Tricky, because this was, after all, History in the Making.

The night before however was a Screaming Tomato in the making, which led to a sluggish start in the morning. Then, also, it was raining. And peak time.

When the clock struck nine and the apology began we were still struggling through traffic and so, rather than waving a flag in the rain in front of the big screen in Martin Place, we were sitting in the car listening to the radio.

It seems so obvious, an acknowledgement and apology for the terrible things that were done to these Australians as part of government policy, but obviously not to everyone. Not everyone wanted to say sorry, not everyone felt that it was the decent thing to do nor necessary to help heal some of the great tears in our social fabric, the poverty, the alcoholism, the domestic violence. And these things obviously aren’t solved by a little man in spectacles saying “We’re sorry”, but it does acknowledge and regret that for a great many years in this country families were destroyed by our government, thousands of families were torn apart. If so many of these problems are linked to poor self esteem and the dysfunctional family is it any wonder?

Many Aboriginal people wore teeshirts on the day emblazoned with the word "Thanks."
It's a simple word that means so much. Like "Sorry."

As we listened to the Prime Minister talk about the half caste children who were forcibly removed from their mothers, and who, in many cases, never saw those parents again, I glanced in the rear view mirror at my own little brown baby. In one case the parents had dug holes in the riverbank so that when the men arrived in their trucks to round up the children like cattle, they could run and hide in the holes. These children were rounded up anyway, screaming, by the strange men in trucks and the Aboriginal tracker they had brought with them.

The tracker, it turned out, had already apologized to those children many years ago.

The rain had stopped so we walked the rest of the way into the city and looked at the big screen anyway and waved some flags and drank some tea.

And later we took Tricky to see a sculpture that C and I used to pass every time I went to our IVF clinic, the House Of Groovy Love, for a blood test or a date with the dildocam. The sculpture is made up of two enormous white marble pebble type things, cold, smooth and pleasing to the touch. You can slip your way between the two and run around the outside. We used to call them The Giant Ovaries and we liked to touch them for luck. This is the kind of inanely superstitious gesture that we who are desperate to conceive often revert to.

I took his hand and led him up to the sculpture showing him how to stroke the marble, how the stones seem to butt up against each other at first but how in fact you can squeeze your way through to the other side.

And he ran madly about them, shrieking with laughter, hiding between the stones and shouting Boo, making strangers smile fondly and his father and I steal secret looks of joy at each other.

And then, climbing into his parents arms, ready for home.

Two giant ovaries, one giant apology. Big day for a little boy.

Being Prepared

I was a Girl Guide which will be of no surprise to anyone who knows me.

There are photographs existing somewhere of me in my blue blouse and skirt with my beret perched between my two pigtails and a solemn expression on my face.

This was in Penang in the 70s and the air was full of frangipani, satay smoke and the scent of joss sticks but in my private universe I was all about reef knots, square lashing and the trefoil badge. I was placed in the Kookaburra patrol and quite soon (due to the transitory nature of being a RAAF kid posted to Malaysia) I climbed the ranks to become seconder and then Patrol Leader.

Why did I love the Girl Guides?

It wasn't all jolly campfires and chocolate bananas in foil. There were monkey raids on our campsite (scary), and the time I cunningly created kitchen knife holders out of some sort of usefully large unidentified leaves which turned out to be the Malaysian version of Poison Ivy (itchy).

I could bag on about the cameraderie and the community spirit and the being allowed to play with matches but the truth is, I loved the badges best of all. These delightful brightly coloured embroidered discs could be awarded for everything from arts to ...well...crafts.

Yes, things needed to be done for them, basic tasks etc but once they were ticked off the Guide Leader (Monyet or possible Kuching) would send away to Australia and lo they would arrive months later just as you had forgotten you had earned them.

I started with the Hostess Badge (cup of tea, thankyou letter, plate of pikelets) and I never looked back. I also never learned how to properly stitch them onto my uniform and so after the first wash they shrank into thick saggy misshapen blobs dangling from my sleeves by the five or so frankenstein stitches I had managed to perform.

Needless to say, no Sewing Badge for me.

Recently Maggie May (click on the award to find her) awarded me one of these sturdy looking items and I thank her and my parents and the academy and Monyet and Kuching...

It is an E for Excellent award which is tops but even more tops is that I get to pass it on to TEN other blogs in much the same way that I passed on blisteringly itchy palms during that fateful camp.

Here, in no particular order, are my ten. Some are well known, some are not, all are excellent in their own way, for their own reasons.

Some are authors, some are playwrights, some are parents, some are trying to be parents, some are photographers, all are writers and interesting people with interesting points of view.

I hope you enjoy it and please, remember, careful tiny stitches to avoid disappointment.

Triplets or Oh My God We're Outnumbered

Mima at Mima's World

Lin at Dotty Nana

Granny P at Rockpool In The Kitchen

Ms Prufrock

sbs at O, Poor Robinson Crusoe!

Gwen at Gwen's Petty, Judgemental, Evil Thoughts

Caliope at Creating Motherhood

Thalia at Thalia's Fertility Journey

Spanglish at Welcome To The Cysterhood

Peas and Cues

For a few weeks now we have been trying to teach Tricky to say please and thankyou. We feel it helps give his customary barked orders (Wattah! Crackah! Cheeeeese!) a slightly softer feel.

I can now report that our patience was finally rewarded this morning at 5.45 am when we were suddenly woken by the following loud and plaintive wail: Daddeee! Up! Peeeeeeeease....

Shiny Shiny

Tonight my toddler could have drowned in his bath while I was standing not two feet away. I say ‘could’ and then hasten to add ‘but did not’ because I don’t want to incite alarm. Not at this point.

I don’t for one minute believe that I am the only person in the world to take advantage of those blissful times when the non-screaming tomato is happily engaged in drinking out of the tap or sucking the fetid soup from the blowholes of his bath toys. In these moments I have been known to perch daintily on the toilet beside the bath and read, or perhaps, in a spasm of usefulness, sort out the laundry. But I do these things in the bathroom and, as I gently remind my husband when it’s his turn to do the bathing and I catch him in another room sitting at the computer: DROWNING IS A SILENT DEATH.

Tonight however, I realised that despite the close proximity, there was a definite heightening of the risk of Silent Death because while Tricky was splashing about I was cleaning the bathroom sink. I will rephrase that, I was Swish and Swiping, a loathsomely cheerful phrase that really means ‘very quick lazy way of cleaning without proper cleaning’.

Swish and Swiping involves taking 15 minutes to do things like pouring shampoo down the toilet and using your dirty towels to mop the floor and most of all it involves using loads of Windex to clean your glass, mirrors and surfaces, buckets and buckets of the blue stuff. I love it. In just 15 minutes my bathroom appears a model of wholesome cleanliness and I am filled with the joy of domestic smuggery and must fight the urge to lick my own reflection in my crystalline mirrors.

I give credit for all this to the Fly Lady, she of the wacky cleanliness website, she who exhorts us to ‘polish your sink’ and ‘get dressed to shoes’ (FlyLady is not above Swish and Swiping the English language to suit her needs).

I first stumbled onto this site because I was sleep deprived and mush brained and coated in the deitrius of my own filth but too tired to do anything more than gaze sadly about the floor. I needed professional assistance and so I googled something like “MY HOUSE IS FILTHY, HELP” and “I AM TOO TIRED TO NOT LIVE LIKE A PIG.” I was thus led to FlyLady and her crisis cleaning pages. Every now and then I click back when I want more cleanliness inspiration or just to scare myself reading testimonials of how women have turned their homes into the equivalent of a B&B, just for them and their husband, or how much they looove wearing shoes and shining sinks.

The FlyLady site illustration suggests a slightly larger built woman with an unfashionable haircut wearing wings. She may actually be a large swarthy man with a hairy back and a winning way with exclamation marks but her dainty ways and humorous acronyms suggest a fifties housewife with a noughties sympathy for all the poor dirty sluts like myself who need to be reminded of the joys of a sweet smelling toilet and this is why I secretly love her.

Either that or I have become addicted to the smell of Windex.

Mmmm

Something is happening in the Big House right now, something sly, something nasty, something creeping and insidious, something that I expect will eventually leave its foul mark upon us all, all four children and three adults (one having briefly escaped to Europe). And though I choose not to name all those in the Big House that have been currently smitten with this thing I do choose to name this thing and it shall be named Liquid Poo.

Sounds like...

The second most horrible sound in the world is Tricky, post yum cha (or dim sum), shrieking from his cot as he refuses to take his nap. He is the Screaming Tomato but with added dumpling hysteria.

The first most horrible sound in the world is the screaming, as noted above, followed by a sudden thump and then silence.

Somewhere further down the list is the sound of his mother racing up a flight of stairs muttering ‘oh my god’, closely followed by sound of same mother blubbering on the floor as she hugs her slightly surprised but undamaged toddler.

And somewhere near there is the sound of his father who was on the computer in the next room saying pathetically “Oh I thought he was downstairs with you…”

The Crying Room

We go to a funeral.

A father. A grandfather. A husband. A friend.

It rains as we cross the street and enter the church, drizzly and damp but not soaking, and I think maybe I should have watered the garden last night after all.

Tricky squirms and is released early from his stroller but then he starts his vocabulary practice in the middle of the first speech and so C and I take turns holding him in the Crying Room. When it is my turn I think how odd it is that I am watching the flow of all those tears from this side of the glass, the familiar waves of grief washing over the faces of this man’s family and friends.

It is a beautiful service, warm and celebratory, a monument to their love. Photographs flash up on the screen, him as a little curly headed moppet, big eyes and peach face, as a dashing young man with a mischievous gleam in his eye, as a husband with his young pretty wife encircled in his arms, as a father, a grandfather…

...we see him on boats and by water and hear stories of early married life in a boatshed and living on a Chinese junk and stories before that of his father and grandfather and stories of risks and reaching and inspired ideas and beautiful failures. I have only ever known him as an old man in a wheel chair but there he is, dashing and handsome.

A few years ago his wife and I talked about his sickness and its most recent destructive rampage, and I was sorry and said so and she took my hand.

But when I look at him, she said, I still see the man I married.

And we both cried at that, because even love can’t stop this. And now I see him too.

This is not a completely unexpected event, he was eighty years old and had MS for the last twenty years, gradually losing all the strength and mobility we see flashing up on the screen (but never his mind) until in those final days it is his eyebrows that are singled out for their expressive ways.

But he is such a strong presence, a giant on whose shoulders so many people are standing, and such a loved presence, and such a loss, and so when his curly headed moppet of a grandson reads a letter to thank his grandfather for bringing sailing into their family and to tell him he will always think of him when he sails I hug my baby too hard and we both cry.

And because we are human, and funerals are strange reflective events where we can’t help but mirror our own experiences, our own fears of death and loss and our own memories of grief, I think of my mother and her last days.

For outside the world keeps turning and life keeps spinning and the rain keeps falling and time ticks on but in that chair by the bed a whole life can play out in your head from one minute to the next. Hours of silence except for the unsteady rise and fall of their breath are noisy with past conversations, remembered words hashed and squeezed for significance and meaning.

And comfort.

And clear moments, lucid moments, small gestures and statements become polished stones lovingly passed from hand to hand…he said that thing about…she told me about this… she asked Dad if she could just have a tiny smell of his Easter egg and then she bit it!

And we sit in the dark, waiting our turn to say goodbye. The dark of grief and fear and death impending.

But also anger and resentment, not always aimed solely at the disease.
How can you leave us like this? You’re ready but we’re not.

Nursing a loved one to their death is a hard painful journey and I see this reflected on the faces of his family but as prolonged and difficult and heartrending as it is, it is also a bestowal of grace.

And this too shines around them.

A dying person bestows this last precious gift on all those who love him or her. All those who tend, who clean and caress, who lovingly brush their hair or massage their feet or hold their sparrow thin hand in theirs and breathe their air and sigh their name and say over and over in a thousand different ways: I love you.

It is still raining when we leave and C has to get the car for us.

Tricky and I huddle by the steps and I kiss his chubby cheeks and he brushes his eyelashes against mine.

Rain is splashing against the walls and tiny droplets gather on our faces.

Letter To An Eighteen Month Old Fairy Tale

Darling Tricky

Every day more words fall from your mouth. More names, more words for foods you enjoy, activities you prefer, animals and their languges - some of which you have never actually seen except in picture books. The animal noises actually started just a few days ago. I asked you what the Cow said and you told me Moo! and I asked you what the Duck said and you informed me Quack! and I asked you what the Dinosaur says and you revealed it was Rah! and also showed me your teeth.

You like to throw in a few phrases now and then, the Here It Is! And the What Is That? and the Here We Are, possibly just to throw us and make us say..what?! did you hear that? He just said three words together, I heard him!

Meanwhile, your command of the imperative just gets better and better. Up! More! Water! Poo Poo! (actually more a report than a command).

You are like that girl in the Grimms fairy story whose reward for goodness and kindness is to be enchanted so that she drops flowers and precious jewels from her mouth every time she speaks and your father and I follow you around adoringly nudging each other when you Rah and Moo, pushing each other out of the way to lift you Up! or fetch you Water!

We read to you every day and now you also like to “read” to yourself, you turn the pages, point to the pictures, mimic our inflections, repeat the words. I may be deep in some email adventure or half way through writing a scene but I can’t help but eavesdrop whenever you sit down with a book and chatter to yourself. Amongst the burble are words that we recognise, words you have heard again and again as you describe what you can see…fish, hug, Bobo, mumma, Maisy, mix, tickle, grasshopper… and we smile secretively at each other and pretend to be looking at our computers when you look up at us and then as you turn back to your page we lift our hands in the air to try and catch every precious jewel.

Sometimes I cunningly try to combine it all; the words, the story, the computer, the cuddles. A couple of times now you have sat quietly on my lap (an alien sensation) and watched Hooray For Fish on my computer. I actually think I read it a bit better than Emilia Fox but she has background music and the fish move and you get to listen to her on headphones which is a difficult act to follow in anyone’s picture book.

This month you are also enjoying the talents of the musical turtle you were given by your Aunty R and the many many books you received from everyone. There are also many toys that you have been putting through their paces of late, (they really deserve their own post) but your all time favourite toy is my mobile phone which you sometimes find in an opportune place and sometimes are given because you are being a pain in the butt at say a cafe and no one actually thought to bring a toy with them, or a warm jacket, or a bib, so what's the point in having a change bag with us at all, no actually it was your turn to pack it, call yourself a father? Ahem.

Of course I hasten to add my phone is not actually a toy at all it is an expensive piece of telecommunication equipment with probable cancer causing deathrays emerging from it so give it back to Mumma now, give it back, thank god the banana bread’s arrived.

I love the way you insist upon saying goodbye to your bath water, long passionate heart rending goodbyes, all sighs and sad eyes and blowing kisses and slumped shoulders as the last of the water slurps down the plughole, yet you often can’t be bothered to even look at me, frantically calling goodbye, when Dadda is taking you out for a ride in the car (Cah!) let alone wave.

I love the way you run, suddenly, illogically but then as if you have suddenly heard the opening strains of Swan Lake you fling yourself up on your tippeetoes. Sometimes you will also throw yourself down on the floor, again, no reason, just because, and then you might roll, if you feel like it, or perhaps fart or laugh or reach up for a kiss and a cuddle.



I can’t count the number of ways I love you in the same way I can’t count your teeth anymore. Are there more since last month? Perhaps, perhaps not. You do like to show your teeth off, baring then when anyone asks to look , or asks what the dinosaur says, yet clamping them together when I attempt to peer in still further. I have seen molars though, molars have been spotted, bottom gums, one each side, perched alone, proud, small islands of tooth in the ocean of your pink gums.

For Christmas you and the Naughty Nephews were given a trampoline by Santa via e-bay and a good pal of K and N’s who is Handy With His Tools. Result? Enormous, enclosed, hours of fun for adults and children and babies alike. The trampoline has proved very popular with the under tens but often they get sidetracked by cricket practice or cricket on the tv or a discussion about cricket and then we can sneak onto what I like to call “the trampo”. Most mornings we get to hang out here, you and I and your father and various combinations thereof.

I generally lie on my back with a book in my hand (currently and inexplicably; Death On The Nile by Agatha Christie) because I am forever optimistic that you might choose to “play quietly” beside me for twenty minutes or so. I am also forever wrong. Some may say, rightly so, what do you expect, this is not a banana lounge alongside a kidney shaped pool at a Balinese resort with a strapping young man named Edwardo to serve you cocktails, it is a trampoline and you are meant to be entertaining your eighteen month old and also it’s only 9.30 in the morning, stop daydreaming, he’s about to unzip the net wall and bounce straight out onto the paving stones. At those moments I sigh and put down my whodunit and my caprioska and position myself between you and the net flap of doom and exhort you to “run round and round”. You see, you don’t actually jump on the trampoline, such things are beneath you, but you do run round and round pumping your little legs up and down in an entertaining fashion. At some point in the round and round you usually fling yourself into the net wall and breathlessly fall back beside me, gurgling with laughter, eyes shining, shovel feet flailing, and I look at you and wonder at how lucky I am, how blessed we have been and then when you roll yourself towards me, still laughing, for a cuddle, I nearly self combust with pure joy.

This month I have been struck by your growing separateness from me, your movement away from babyness towards real-person-ness. You have your own logic and agenda and it all makes sense under that curly dark hair, all the running (but not the jumping) and the shouting and food throwing, the toddler tantrums and the daily grieving of bathwater.

It’s very hard for me to bid farewell to that baby image of you, that soft, snuggly, weeny bundle (“oh, he didn’t even make 50 cm,” said the midwife when you were born) but month by month he moves further and further away from us.

All I can do is sigh and wave and blow kisses as he swirls further down, into our past. I wrap my little boy in his bath towel and hug him tight as he calls bye bye to the bathwater and then I search for his pyjamas as the scent of bruised flowers fills the air.

With love from your very own
OvaGirl
xxxxxx

Things Are So Much Better Since I Wrote This Six Months Ago

because i have mushbrain i can write without punctuation

(Recently discovered manuscript fragment by Janice-Maree Joyce, little known Australian descendant of the more famous James. Suffered infertility but through application of various sharp and pointy devices and nasty tasting herbs experienced the miracle of birth. Now experiencing the miracle of one year without proper sleep… )

yes it’s the life yes isn’t it look at him lying there with a foot in the air of his stroller yes staring out at everyone i wouldn’t mind that lie back on comfy toweling mat with stuffed clown dangling in my face and just be pushed up to the shops and back wave my foot in the air too here kiss this and look at my toes yes fuck it where is his sock now i put it on just before we left the shop and now its gone again he likes to pull it off and put his toes in his mouth they were nice socks too not like those blue ones that stretched out longer and longer everytime he pulled at them i had that dream again last night yes between feeds yes it was the one where im with that spunky young guy we met not long ago god the very fact that i find myself saying young guy instead of just guy makes me feel old and flabby yes he was holding my hand and saying i was beautiful this handle’s not properly adjusted must get my husband onto it and i was very virtuous thinking of baby and husband and so on and also we had tickets to the theatre so i said no no our lives are too complicated and also the shows about to start even though i wanted nothing more than to shag him senseless and then last nights dream it was the same guy but now we were in his flat and it would have been brilliant yes i just know it yes except that for some reason one of my friends was in the flat too doing the washing up and saying don’t mind me love i just have to get these dishes done which tended to ruin things aha i see that sock now i stuck it in the pocket of the baby bag yes when i told my husband the dream he was working on his computer and he didn’t even look up he just said mmm i bet i know what you need and i said well yes actually yes why does the footpath run out here as if they decided they would have footpaths in front of the shops but not the houses i see an old man on his what is those things the gopher electronic sit on thing driving along the road yes not safe surely poor old man comfy though i bet thats the life might be nice sitting on a gopher thing and tootling up to the shops get to like it pretty quickly yes listen to him clapping his hands the darling having a sing now he says ay ay ay yesterday i said ay ee eye oh you i thought well at least he could start with vowels yes then we can build up to consonants people ask me what is it you are writing now or are you just being a mother and i want to punch them except i don’t have the energy why are some women back to full energy and more all super organised and boxes ticked and writing their third novel since they went into labour yes whereas i have mushbrain sleepless still one year has it been that long all i can do to write out a shopping list some days but look the darling starting to fall asleep the motion of the stroller thats the life will i have that dream again tonight all symbolic that stuff yes the dreaming pretty obvious though no time to do all the things you want anymore although we could have time for sex if we forgo dinner that could work yes then could eat later when i get up to nurse him wait lost his other bloody sock yes and now i should look back and retrace our steps yes or sod it yes and just buy new socks yes he has feet like his fathers tiny shovels yes i love him so much yes and his father too yes though we are both so tired yes and fuck it did i leave the chicken back at the butcher yes oh bugger bugger yes.

Stick this

Tricky is almost 18 months old which in my schedule meant he was due for his 12 month vaccination. Extenuating circumstances (living in Country Town, various colds and viruses, mother’s general fear of needles and dislike of seeing sharp things poked into baby flesh) had prevented these happening at an earlier time (like say, 12 months) and now, with his pre Christmas weirdness seemingly gone, it was time to visit Dr Jab.

Dr Jab explained that the 12 month vaccination consisted of not two but three needles. “Some people…” he said blithely, “only have two at this point and come back for the third but I say well, the baby’s already screaming so...”

“Mmmm,” I said. “actually I think I will be one of those people. I would prefer for him to have only two needles for this visit. Not because of the screaming,” I hastened to add, “I can handle that perfectly well, but because three seems an awful lot of vaccine in one day.”

Last time Tricky was vaccinated he was glued to my breast at the time which seemed to comfort him quite effectively but since the milkbar had its glorious farewell tour some weeks ago (albeit with a couple of surprise comeback appearances) he was instead seated on my lap, my hands holding his, one chubby thigh at a time gripped between my own.

And so, since the Magical Breasts Of Comfort were no longer available, I had him facing his father instead of me because I didn’t want to see that look of hurt betrayal in those big brown eyes and also so that I wasn’t in his firing line when he began his kicking screaming tiny fingernail clawfest.

I expected the furious shrieks, I expected the tears and the sobs.
What I didn’t expect was that he would stop almost immediately after the second injection and then seem perfectly calm from then on.

I was so surprised I almost told Dr Jab to go ahead and whack that third one in.

I guess that means it really was about the screaming after all.

That's Mrs Slattern to you

For how long is it acceptable to wear maternity clothes after the birth of your child?

I've managed to wean myself from the elastic waisted pants and the long stretchy tops but today I realised I'm still wearing my maternity bras, even though it's been at least three months since I unclipped the little window things and required them to function in a "maternity" sense. It's not because they're that comfortable or even particularly attractive, it's just that I'm too lazy to actually remove them from my undies drawer.

My life has recently been considerably enhanced and it’s not because we’re getting more sleep nor because I have almost managed to reclaim my breasts.

I haven’t wanted to talk too much about this, but over the past year I have found it increasingly difficult to hear what people were saying to me, especially in crowded theatre foyers.

All that background burble - the tinkling laughs, the earnest discussion, the rhubarb rhubarb, melded into one throbbing, pulsating mess. It was as if my head was encased in a large plastic bubble big enough to admit only one person at a time and only if they were standing uncomfortably close.

At the time I simply put this down to boredom due to the high levels of crap that are usually spouted in such places (I, myself, guilty of similar spouting) and now and then I would scare myself by assuming it was an imminent MS relapse.

More recently it got worse, especially in my right ear, and over the holiday break I spent several days squinting at my friends and relatives, trying to read their lips, and shouting ‘what?’ at them. I was even accused of shouting unnecessarily which meant I had sunk to Grumpy Grandad’s EVERYTHING MUST BE SAID IN CAPITALS status. I tried eardrops which was the proper way and bobby pins and cotton ear buds which are the Totally Wrong And Improper Way To Unblock Your Ears.

A couple of nights ago C and I met up with our housemates (and inlaws) K and N for jolliness at the opening of the Sydney Festival. A whole lot of streets had been closed off and stages set up on various corners with bands, cabaret acts and dj’s akimbo. It was fun to be roaming the streets but a lot of the live music sounded pretty shit through my plastic bubble and that just made me feel old and cranky.

Yesterday I could stand it no longer and I went to see my doctor. She brought out an enormous shining metal syringe full of warm water and balanced a bowl on my right shoulder.

“Have you had this done before?” she asked.

I had not. I smiled nervously and asked her if she thought ear candling had much to recommend it. She snorted into her metal bowl. Then she let loose with the syringe. The sensation was not unlike that of an enormous hot wet slug rushing at the speed of light through my ear canal singing Wagner at the top of its tiny lungs. It sounded quite shocking actually but not as shocking as the sound of my ear feeling OPEN at last.

“Oh my God”, I gasped. “That is incredible! That’s the most fantastic…”

I stopped. I had just caught a glimpse of what was now floating in the water of the shoulder bowl. “OH MY GOD WAS THAT IN MY EAR?”

“Yup,” said the doctor. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen worse.”
“That is possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her. “But would you mind checking the other ear?”

She peered into my left ear and hoisted her monster syringe back into action.
“Ok," she said. "We’re going again.”

The difference has been extraordinary. Clean ears make me feel brighter, more energetic, more intelligent. I feel like running up to complete strangers, people who look sad or irritable or unhealthy or ugly or just anybody really, and exhorting them to HAVE YOUR EARS SYRINGED!!

I even feel excited about loitering in theatre foyers again. I can’t wait to see if all that crap I could hear really was just the stuff between my ears.

Cheeky

Tricky and I had lunch together. We both ate ravioli except I used a fork and his was cut up and presented as “finger food.” This makes it sound almost dainty, like something you might serve with champagne on the chamomile lawn.

I was reading a book at the same time so it wasn’t till I heard the sound of gagging that I looked up to see his mouth was completely stuffed. His cheeks bulged, his eyes watered and yet, like a cross between Augustus Gloop and some mad foraging rodent, he was determinedly grabbing still more chunks, in both hands, and trying to wedge them in his mouth - even as he made little sicky noises in the back of his throat and gobs of partially chewed spinach and ricotta ravioli rolled down the front of his pirate bib.

Lunching with Tricky is like having a meal with one of those savage children of past centuries. You know, the ones presented to civilisation that were lost as a babe in the woods and given up for dead but then, miraculously, rescued and raised by wild chipmunks.

Letter to a Seventeen Month Old Landscape Gardener

My darling Tricky

You are past 17 months now of course, but what with Christmas and New Year and Mumma’s not so secret drinking habit, this letter comes a wee tad later than usual. No need of course for apologies and groveling, we’ve got plenty of time for guilt in the future. (And indeed the past, boiled baby foot anyone?)

17 months means that you are big enough to sing to yourself during car trips or just generally song-worthy moments, strange foreign words from the Land of Tricky which you punctuate with arms flung high into the air and knitting of brows. As the ultrasound indicated so many months ago, you are indeed a keen dancer, and during the festive season it took little more than a burst of Hark The Herald Angels Sing or Deck The Halls or Night Flight To Venus to cause immediate swaying of your body and stamping of your feet - much to the delight of my dad who was permanently disabled in the 70’s with Saturday Night Fever and keeps not one but two mini disco balls in his computer room.

Of the words I can recognise, it’s still all about the BUTTONS. CRACKER and WATER are also high on the playlist but just lately CHEESE has become your new best edible friend. Also a word that is unspellable but recognizable as a signifier for watermelon, which you will almost certainly eat off a BOWL with your SPOON in your CHAIR, as well as a similarly unspellable but consistent word for MILK. In the mornings you call loudly for your breakfast which sounds like you want BUTTER and believe me I’d be tempted to get it out of the fridge and taunt you with it except that I know you’d think it was CHEESE and just the sight of something yellow and cold is enough to set off your excited shrieking. Outdoors, your interests include playing with the BALL, riding in the CAR and spotting various aircrafts including COPTER and something that means AEROPLANE.

When you wake at night you call for MUMMA, DADDA and WATER but you’ve also been heard to shout loudly for your aunty N as well as your grandmother (Aphwa). For some reason you often sprinkle an OH DEAR amongst the names which makes me laugh but also you’ve got this really mournful, depressed tone of voice that you’ve managed to perfect. It makes you sound like some long forgotten prisoner shut up in a dungeon on a deserted island and if I actually get up out of bed and answer your calls I’ll trip over your long grey unkempt beard and then be bitten to death by your specially trained pet rats.

Your studies in Toddler (Beginners) are coming along nicely, you’ve managed to perfect Throwing Objects Down Stairs despite our blundering attempts to hinder you and I note that you have been refining these basic movements and applying them to mealtimes too. First you demand SPOON, then you demand a second SPOON, then you fling the first spoon quickly to one side (and I quite like the way you don’t even bother to watch its trajectory, instead watching my face for the slightest twitch of response) then you load up the second spoon with food and fling that swiftly to one side and then while I’m groveling on the floor trying to scoop up wet lumps you drop your BOWL over the opposite side and then scream loudly for WATER.


It may seem like there’s some sort of predictable routine here but in fact sometimes the water is flung first and the spoons treasured until the very end. Every meal is an adventure. Yet, also, sometime in the last month or so, I saw you brandish your spoon, capture a couple of baked beans and deliver them triumphantly to your mouth and your beaming smile of satisfaction as you chewed at your hard won tomato flavoured captives was simply delicious. It made me a little sad this obvious sign of Growing Up-ness but also relieved that if something happened to us, your Willing Slaves, you would at least be able to eat your beans nicely.

I love your laugh, your gleeful, rolling laugh, and the way that so many things delight or entrance you. Mumma doing her Riverdance impression when a certain Irish ditty appears on your Very Clever baby Music cd, for instance. This both delights and entrances.

Also eyebrows: hilarious. And bellybuttons: hysterical. This Christmas, the last word in funny you decided, were the tiny white pebbles in one of Aphwa’s potplants. Pebbles! Tiny! Many of them! The sight of them nestled around the half dead wisteria had you shrieking. Nothing could be funnier, or so you thought. On a whim you suddenly started grabbing fistfuls of the tiny white funny pebbles and throwing them to the ground. Shrieks of laughter! And then you scattered a few over the top of Poppy’s lawnmower. Thighslapping goodness! Sweeping them up with a broom though, that wasn’t funny at all. But then, you suddenly discovered, in another potplant, bark chips. Bark chips! The very idea of it! Brown, irregularly shaped, imminently throwable! You howled with glee as an adult sprinted over the paving to try and halt the inevitable tsunami of mulch and I’m pretty sure you crapped yourself you found the whole thing so funny.

Last year was your first ever Christmas and to celebrate you held it together until your first ever Christmas present was placed in your wee little five month old hands and then you suddenly became the Screaming Tomato and had to be put to bed for a nap and that was Christmas 2006.

This year there was less screaming and hence many more presents to open but also less adoring public since all your aunties were having Christmas elsewhere. Once again there was a pre-Christmas Christmas with the Naughty Nephews and with Gramma, Papa and K and N because they would be south and we would be north with Poppy, Aphwa, Uncle P and Grumpy Grandad. Among other things you were given a ball covered with small knobbly protuberances which you immediately latched onto. Given that we are slowly but definitely weaning now, it was a slightly wistful sight. And then of course you flung it down the stairs.

You have become a small solid beautiful little man with crazy hair that curls or straightens according to the weather.

You still think your parents are fantastic people and amazing adults, you think we’re as clever as all get out and funnier than a pot of mixed pebbles and bark chips. We bask in your admiration and adoration and in return we worship the ground you tip toe upon.

Because of course the truth is we’re actually not that fantastic or amazing, nor particularly clever, nor are we unusually funny (certainly not in comparison with potting materials).

But we are your parents, your mumma and dadda, and every night we lie in bed and listen to your loud protests and practice chats and general warbling and mournful prisoner requests and we thank God and the Goddesses, and baby Jesus, and Santa and Aslan and all the elves and armoured bears and saints for you, our greatest gift of all.

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year our blessed boy.

Your very own

OvaGirlxxxxxx

Second verse...

But then see the clouds lift and the grumpiness goes and he is his gorgeous self again.

It started with the eating, yesterday he ate all his weetbix and then started harrassing me for some of my porridge and then he ate all his lunch and dinner instead of dumping it over the top of his highchair and flinging his spoon across the room. Last night he slept till 5.30 and then slept again until 7.20. And today we went Christmas shopping and he was hilarious, dancing about to the xmas musack, admiring his reflection in the giant shiny baubles.

The thing about having tests is that they rarely say anything except "have more tests". Unsurprisingly, the 2nd urine test was the same as the first...a tiny trace of blood.
Also unsurprisingly, Dr Toddler says we will leave it for a bit and then we can test again in the new year.

So, I've decided to do something novel and NOT WORRY about it.

More sicky Tricky

So, yay because Tricky's fever nicked off after a couple of days (huzzah baby panadol) but then boo, because his little body became plagued with tiny red spots.
But then yay, because after a panicked rush into the clinic with me berating myself for being late with the immunisations, Dr Toddler said that it was not the measles but instead a spotty rash presenting itself as proof that Tricky did have a virus and that virus was now dead.
But then boo again, because the results of the urine test indicated a tiny trace of blood in the urine.
Then follows yay of less enthusiastic proportions as previous because at this point Dr Toddler thinks the only action necessary is to have another urine test to check again and while I'm thrilled that the test doesn't involve poking and prodding, what I really wanted to hear him say was that my baby was ALL BETTER NOW.
So now we wait to hear about the next test and in the meantime Tricky is all wussy and Not Himself and clinging like a koala to a gumtree and his once fabulous appetite has gone to the dogs and his fully loaded nappies are like tiny toxic waste dumps.
And then, just today, his cousin, aka Naughty Nephew the 3rd, has also come down with a nasty fever...

Home and Away...

So since that last post (and thankyou, kind commenters with your lovely words) things have been a little wayward here. Well not wayward, things have simply been unfolding in their proper manner as per the universe as my Byron Bay Naturopath sister would say. (Except she probably wouldn't say 'as per'. That was me.)


C has been away filming Things On Farms (Ey oop Mr 'Erriot) and so Tricky and I have spent a jolly week in Newcastle, my former stomping grounds, hanging out with my dad and stepmum and also with Nanny Annie who is famous among many other things for having taught Tricky his first word.

Oddly, although Nanny Annie is sometimes known to myself and to her other old theatre-luvvie pals as "Annie-Pig", the word she actually taught Tricky was "Moo".


By coincidence (in that I had babysitting on tap), on Friday night was the City Of Newcastle Drama Awards. I so wanted to include a picture of one of these gold-look, glass winged beauties but my digital camera is stuffed and apparently in the entire world of Google Image search, no such picture exists. So I'll just put one of these things in.

Frankly, the CONDAs are exactly like the Oscars. Maybe less people in the audience. And smaller queues for the loo-lahs. Also no goodie bags. But we're talking speeches, we're talking high kicking musical numbers, we're talking sequins.

No sequins with me though, I decided not to wear my party dress ten minutes before leaving home because yet another storm was threatening to descend and six months ago to the day, Newcastle and surrounding suburbs, looked like this.
Instead, like some lily-livered, light-weight, girl's blouse, I decided to wear jeans and, well, a girl's blouse. Also sensible shoes for when my car would be suddenly surrounded in floodwaters and I would have to kick out my windscreen and swim for my life. However, luckily as it transpired, I did wear lipstick. Glamour? I am all about YOU my friend.

As if getting to go out with old theatre-luvvy friends (who all wore sequins and high shoes and looked gorgeous and no one had to raise an umbrella let alone kick out a windscreen)and drink champagne and wear lipstick was not honour enough, I also received one of these Uncannily-Oscar-Like Awards for "Match" a play I had written for a Newcastle theatre company. Nanny Annie herself received the Special Gold Brilliance Award For A Year Of Being Fabulous.

Afterwards I attended an exclusive after party which was held in Nanny Annie's (sadly soon to be ex)rehearsal space in an old radio station in once thriving Hunter Street. More champagne (which I cunningly blended with ginger beer to give me all the fizz but a fraction of the alcohol) more jolliness, and special trumpet fanfares by that little known Brechtian heroine Mother "Dutch" Courage as people came and went.


It was great fun indeed and marred only slightly when at the end of the night one of my (male) friends tried to one-up me in the "God I'm So Tired" stakes.

At least, he said confidentally, you won't be woken like me by my neighbour's incredibly loud snoring.
Well no, I said, I shall be woken by my screaming toddler. Is that better?

It was a ridiculous statement anyway. Although he may well have been woken by his noisy neighbour, he certainly wouldn't have to march in and breast feed him.

While we were in Newcastle, Tricky and I also continued our search for Playgroup utopia. This one had excellent sandpit facilities and several dolly strollers as well as a generally well equipped indoor area. This allowed it to score quite highly, but it was slightly let down by the instant coffee provided for carers and also the Slide of Death.

This last item was a plastic slippery slide that ended on a crashmat. Frankly no crashmat on this earth could halt the speed at which a small child sitting on their butt would barrel down this evil appliance. It was something to do with angles I expect, and also static electricity, what with the entire Newcastle region being one big lightning rod for the entire week.

Naturally, Tricky loved it.

And so here we are, back in Sydney, feeling rested, relaxed and freshly showered in Drama Awards (exactly like the Oscars I tell you, exactly) and of course this means that Tricky has come down with...something. Horrible spiking temperatures, much unhappiness, and, worryingly, no other symptoms which, Dr Toddler, has told us, could be a urinary tract infection.

In which case, he muttered as he taped a special collection bag to my outraged baby's bits, there could be need for Further Investigation.

These words, of course, with their menacing promise of prodding about in bits that have no desire for prodding, takes me right back to the glory days of Infertility. Today, thankfully, there has been no further need for baby Panadol and I am hoping like mad that that will be that and the tests will be normal and it was all just a little souvenir from Newcastle.

Fingers, and legs, firmly crossed.

Letter to a 16 month old Button Pusher

Darling Tricky

You are now 16 months old which means it is almost time to learn how to prepare mumma’s coffee just the way she likes it (strong latte).

Actually, more often than not, you are able to fulfil simple tasks and directions: “Give That Fragile Ornament I Stupidly Placed Within Your Reach To Me Please” “Backwards down the stairs!” and Stop Running Away From Me And Come Back This Instant.”

This last one I just put in, in the hopes that one day soon you actually will do this but at the moment you seem to interpret it as a command to stop, look over shoulder with a coy smile, and then peg off in the opposite direction as fast as your chubby little legs can take you.

The other completely useless command is of course “Shhh Lie Down And Go To Sleep”.

I actually tried this one night and to my great shock you did which is why ever since night after night I try it around 3.30 in the morning. Memo to my brain: IT DOES NOT WORK even though night after night I try to vary my tempo, my pitch , my inflection in the hopes of hitting those magical melifluous tones that led, once, to such joyous Camelot-like success.

None of this would matter that much except we are back in the Big House and so we are all sleeping in the same bedroom (with a large Ikea bookshelf between us). Still, some nights are diamond, some nights are…not. And frankly, give or take a mosquito here, an overly hot night there, an irritating virus or a loud party next door….I have not the faintest idea why. I probably never will. One day, I'm told, you will simply sleep through the night. And the next. And the next. And that will be that.

The big change this month has been your entrance into the brave new world that is Playgroup. Up to this point your social obligations have been limited to affectionate tussles with your cousins (often involving icecream) and a playdate here and there with the child of whichever artist/artsworker we are currently working and/or meeting with.

Fun times indeed but now you have matured to the point where we feel you can handle a heavier social life. Also, you, me, your dadda: that unique combination of free spirited wacky artistic types in one room was driving us all a little crazy.

And obviously we had to bear in mind the starsign combination; you’re a Cancer, I’m a Cancer/Gemini cusp, C is a Sagittarius, and not one of us is a Morning Person.

When we arrive at Playgroup you usually gravitate towards either the mini trampoline, or the baby doll stroller which you love to push round and round the hall. If by chance someone has left a baby doll in the stroller you will swiftly remove said doll and throw it unceremoniously onto the floor. Meanwhile I sign us in and pay a couple of dollars and a piece of fruit.

Depending on which Playgroup we are attending, at 10.45am I may also be cutting up said piece of fruit (usually banana) along with all the other pieces of fruit that have appeared. At 11.00am, I and another mother will then serve the chopped up pieces of fruit to a table of small children. Then, at 11.15am some other lucky mother will pick all the squashed pieces of fruit up off the floor.

Once a week you go to the Other Playgroup with your dadda. At the other Playgroup you don’t have to do chores or provide fruit but you do have to jump for Jesus. It’s ok, the people are nice and they have baby doll strollers there too.

It is funny to see you in this mosh pit of tiny humanity, negotiating your way through the big kids in the sandpit, waiting your turn for the trampoline, stealing the baby stroller when the little girls have their backs turned. It is funny and it is lovely and it makes my heart sing to see you with your lips pressed determinedly as you roll the giant cylinder away or slide into the ball pit and then start joyously flinging the balls to the far corners of the hall.

You are deeply in love with buttons of all kinds…telephone, toy cash register, television or belly. (Coincidentally, as anyone who knows him will attest, your father is also a button pusher, from way back.) No small rounded raised surface is safe from your eager prying index finger and you will happily press said surfaces over and over saying BAH-TUN, BAH-TUN as you do.

This becomes doubly enjoyable for us if you are eating a cracker as well because then you will alternate that with CRAH-KAH, CRAH-KAH… Also, you can tell us that living in our house apart from MUMMA, DADDA and TSST is NEH, KKKK, MAH, GHHH and AHHHL. We also have some pet MAH (not to be confused with either your eldest cousin or that thing on your face that sits under your ney).

This isn’t a new thing or a 16 month thing by any means but can I just say here how glad I am to have you in my life?

How, despite the shrieking in the middle of the night, despite the wailing when you first wake, despite the…oh who am I kidding you’re actually a great toddler.

When my friends tell me about their toddler who can’t travel in the car for more than fifteen minutes at a time (you: eight hours from Country Town to Big House with brief stops for seesaw and sanity), or their toddler who won’t eat more than a grape at breakfast (you: three weetbix, plus you whinge at us to feed you porridge from our own bowls) or their toddler requiring invasive surgery and endless doctor’s appointments, I am reminded of how grateful I am for my car-loving, generally-healthy, slightly-sleepy, always-hungry boy/screaming tomato.

And when, after spending a couple of hours away from me, stealing strollers and jumping for Jesus, you walk into our house and see me and your eyes light up and you run at me laughing and calling Mumma, as if I was the best thing since sliced bread, or at least sliced fruit, well… then… you manage to push all my buttons and I just know I’m yours for life.

Your very own
OvaGirl
xxxxxx

It's Time

See that's what happens when you start blah blahing on about your fabulous new time management regime, the blogging goes to shit because let's just face it YOU'RE SLACK.

Suddenly deadlines have reappeared, deadlines that were not just DONE AND DUSTED they were also cremated and their ashes readily sprinkled upon the ocean. This is irritating fiddly non-creative deadline stuff that irks one with its presence, like grit in one's teeth or sand in one's swimsuit gusset. Anyway, enough with the crap similies, it's stuff that has demanded my attention.

In the meantime these things have happened or are about to happen and some shall be written about in the next few days:

* Tricky has turned 16 months.

* We have now entered that special magical place they call "PLAYGROUP". It is special. It is magical. It has sandpits and also tiny trampolines. Tricky has not yet learned to jump on a trampoline but he has learned that if he stands rigidly with his feet splayed and a wry expression on his face someone will obligingly bounce the trampoline with their hands. This shall be deemed "fun" and worth screaming for when it stops.

*I have written another play but shorter and funnier than the one mentioned above. I wrote this because I find I am often at my most creative when I am meant to be doing something else.

*I was part of a very interesting workshop last week for playwrights. It was about depictions of mental health and suicide in the media. We heard from carers, service providers and people with various mental illnesses. During the day these people made themselves available to us as a "living library". We writers could talk one on one to a "book", hear their experiences and ask any questions we wanted before going away and writing scenes based on what we had heard. It was pretty full on and I'm still processing some of the things we heard.

*Tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, I am signing books! That's right! Me! From 11am I shall be wielding a pen, or possibly a sharpened toothbrush which I will periodically dip into a small bowl of soy. This shall be at the Dymocks at the new fancy shmancy big shopping plaza thing in Maroubra on Anzac Parade.

If you are, say, shopping, and you feel the urge to purchase a copy of my Hilarious yet Poignant Tale of Finding and Losing Motherhood "Legs Up & Laughing", then hightail it over quick smart. We can also swap tips on Opening Weekend bargains to be had.

* Also tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, is an election. A federal election in fact, for those readers not federally located as it were. It's quite possible that after this weekend we will have a spanking new federal government.

I don't like to harp on these things too much because I'm superstitious like that.

So I simply leave you with this...

No instruction manual on that one…

Except after someone said that to me the other day, I realised that actually there is loads of stuff in various books about Looking After Yourself and Don’t Forget Your Partner even if there isn’t one specifically that says Warning Being A Parent Can Be The Straw That Crushes Your World’s Back.

It is a sign of my level of unhingeability that I gaily decided to take part in the Write A Post Every Day Of November blogfest that is NaBloPoMo . Quite quickly I realised that daily writing was physically beyond me and my cheese brain but every second day was not only achievable it was worth noting just to the right…in my profile.

Oh ho ho ho, how I guffaw at myself sometimes. Silly sausage that I am.

Things have been (ahem) difficult of late. It is a mix of travel, living in what is effectively an artists’ commune where everyone is eating, drinking and thinking Project 24/7 when we are in Country Town . Back in our City Abode, we (C and I, I mean, the rest of the family have managed to organise themselves) still have not managed to completely unpack and put things away, in fact up till a few days ago, our kitchen cupboards still contained groceries that were moved with us nearly two years ago. Some of those weevils dated back to the beginning of the Great Big Fertility Ride.

So there’s the clutter and the travel and the Stress From Work and then a few Screaming Tomato Nights and then C being too busy to look after Tricky and so no time for me to write and then NO QUALITY GROWNUP TIME and then my head exploded.

Well actually it didn’t but I did feel pretty shithouse. About me and my relationship and my writing which seemed to be suddenly not happening at all.

Anyone who writes, not necessarily for a living, but regularly, honestly, as a way of expressing and creating and illuminating, of documenting or celebrating, of reaching out through this strange dark house that is our lives, and finding someone else who reads or hears and understands, will know that when you don’t write, your life feels pretty crappy.

You don’t even realize that’s what it is at first, the non writing, because you’re too tired or busy or sad, but then it becomes a vicious circle and the less you write the less you want to write and the more crappy and cranky and evil you become.

And so it is with me.

But then, a miracle happened, the miracle of Conversation With Your Loved One. Prior to this our conversation was limited to short terse directions and snapped out questions. What happened was that we went back to Country Town but instead of flying there we drove and it took us eight hours including stops at various playgrounds along the way. And so there was talking. And weeping, which for me is par for the course, I am a Known Weeper (I made myself cry yesterday singing The little Drummer Boy to myself and getting to that bit where he sings “I played my drum for him pa rum pa rum pum, I played my best for him pa rum pa rum pum etc”. ).

And in the end some changes were decided on.

We realised we must work on properly setting up our part of the Big House, removing weevils and other clutter and organizing the space so we don’t feel like we are living in a temporary storage unit. We worked out a new fairer system of care for Tricky which allowed for me to have daily writing time. And also we emphasized how important it was to have regular fun family times as well as regular fun couple times and indeed regular QUALITY GROWNUP TIME. Then we stopped and had a cuddle because it was a red letter moment and we both felt so much better and there was no champagne to hand. But this was better.

And so, although I haven’t been doing the every second day writing the blog thing, I have been doing a lot of writing. In fact, over the last week I have actually written a new play. It took me a whole day of futzing about and googling with all my new found free time but the next day it just started coming and now I seem to have a first draft. Actually, a bit more than a first draft.

I printed it out and C read it and I read along over his shoulder and when he had finished we just laughed and clutched at each other and were amazed. I’m not saying it’s brilliant but it was written. There was time allocated for writing and writing was done.

And I feel so much better.

A toddler is staying with us at house in Country Town or Le Maison dan la Ville sur la Pays (did you know I was bimangle?) and he is not my toddler, he is the Other Toddler and not only that he is several months older and with many more teeth but oddly, both my toddler and the Other Toddler want exactly the same toy car at exactly the same time.

Or, exactly the same biscuit, or, exactly the same annoying beeping siren shrieking hell machine.

Tricky has already freaked out the Other Toddler who is a sweet and gentle soul, by forcing him to submit to a torturous round of Facial Feature Identification.

Using his inflexible pointer finger, Tricky has managed to ascertain that Other Toddler has a nay, a mahw full of tee, a nye, another nye, a neeyah and some lovely curly heyah and…ooh look another neeyah, let me just poke my pointer finger into it just to make sure. And what about down here? Is that a button? My pointer finger will make sure. Oh wow, water is welling up in your nye. Is that a tear? My pointer finger will make sure…. And now you’re running away from me. But I can run too, look, and then I can hug you and then when I’ve stopped you in your tracks I’ll just make sure you haven’t dropped an ear, eye or nose along the way.

In Ms Babylove’s excellent second book “The Mighty Toddler” she points out that actually toddlers are not known for their deep love for fellow toddlers. I am paraphrasing of course but it seems that the toddler spares his deep love for those familiar adults that surround him and give him exactly what he wants. His second deepest love is for children who are old enough to give him almost exactly what he wants (for instance the Naughty Nephews when they let him touch oh so gently their pet mice). Other Toddlers come quite a way down on the list for love, after biscuits, toy cars and annoying beeping siren shrieking hell machines.

Tricky’s deepest love of course is for Jimmy the Dog who has that hilarious flapping tail thing which is the funniest thing in the world ever but more importantly lets him poke his pointer finger into his nye and neeyah whenever he feels the urge.

Run run run as fast as you can

Sometimes I am aware that Tricky is trying to tell me something very very important. He knits his brows and looks deep into my eyes and sighs heavily and says uttttah uttah petakah bedagah.

And because I am trying to encourage his speech and communication I smile brightly and nod as if I know exactly what he is saying. Miraculously, every now and then I actually do understand what he’s saying.

“Water! You want a drink of water?”
“Biscuit! You want me to get you a biscuit?”
“Poo poo? Go to your father.”

It’s as if he has an entire language all his own, of which I know a few basic nouns, and frankly it’s like living in France again.

At that time I only knew enough of the language to apologise for not knowing more. I did try, honestly. I went to French classes and practiced as much as I could but I found a weird thing happened. The more French I started to learn, the less English I was capable of writing down on paper. And given that the reason C and I were in Paris in the first place was because I had received a 6 month writers' residency to write a play…c’est la vie.

At least that’s the main reason. The other reason was because I kept getting myself into trouble.
Very early on in the residency I bought some gingerbread at a market near Versaille and began one of my usual friendly but retarded French conversations with a very patient stall holder.

Hello! I enthused in that most romantic of languages. I am Australian! I am a writer!
Patient Stall Holder smiled gently and welcomed me to his country. I gleefully held up one of his home baked cakes.
I would like one spice cake, please! You cook your house?
Patient Stall Holder nodded and smiled. He explained that the gingerbread contains farine…
Ooh yes! Flour! I know flour!
Also it contains miel…
Honey! Good! Very good! Thankyou!
…and some epice…
Spice! Yes! It is the bread of spice! He was delicious!

Then, perhaps tiring of my enthusiastic but repetitive shouting aloud of his ingredients, the Patient Stall Holder diverted from his list of nouns and tried to explain something very important to me about this bread of spice that was cooked in his house. Something essential to my enjoyment and understanding of the gourmet treat I held in my two hands.

My smile froze and I stared at his lips, concentrating hard, as he repeated what he said, again and again. Finally, disappointed, I shook my head. No, I couldn’t understand, he was using things like grammar and also, I suspected, words that were not nouns.

I'm sorry. I am Australian. I speak only a green pea the French.

He tried again, slower this time and I recognised a couple of words. I realised he was saying that the gingerbread was made “without” something. Something... that is often contained in your regular supermarket bought, non-house made bread of spice. It was natural, so it was without…

A light went off in my head.

Sans preservatif! I shouted triumphantly.

There followed one of those rare moments of communication between two people who cannot speak the other’s language, yet have managed to connect through compassion, through humanity, and through a shared love of the bread of spice. Sadly that was also the moment that I realised I had loudly told the Patient Stall Holder and all his nearby customers that his gingerbread was made “without condoms.”

Luckily, with Tricky, we are still up to button, star, car and cracker. We're yet to discuss contraception or indeed its place in any of our baked goods.

I Blame The Water

So the other day Tricky and I were waiting in the garden bit outside the Country Town Airport and he was running about on the grass in his soft shoes, being generally cute and I noticed that all these people sitting on a nearby bench were watching him and smiling.

Then Tricky wandered even closer to them and started singing quietly to himself and turning himself round in circles and one or two of his audience chuckled.

But then, Tricky stopped and stared at the ground just in front of the bench. He had spotted a large ant meandering about on the concrete. Everyone seemed to be fascinated, watching him watching the ant and I thought Ha! You people thought the running and the singing and the circles were good? COP THIS!

So I said “Look darling, what’s that?”

Tricky paused for dramatic effect and pointed at the ground.

“Ann” he said.

Just as we were all smiling, the People On The Bench at the extreme cuteness and me out of pure smugness, he suddenly and quite horrifyingly lifted one soft shoe and deliberately crushed the ant underfoot.

And then he said in a voice that came straight from either The Simpsons or The Omen:
“HA HA!”