Sarcastic Mummy

Sometimes I'm such a Bad Mummy I give ranting sarcastic responses to my kids' requests. In my defense, they tend to be requests born of sheer laziness so I don't feel too bad. Here is a lovely example from ten minutes ago:

11yo: Mu-u-um! 2yo is turning the heater on!

Bad Mummy: So turn it off at the power point.

11yo: Where's that?

Bad Mummy: Well, if it were me, I'd follow the cord from the heater and see where it leads. There are other methods I suppose, like radar, detecting it's magnetic field with a compass and iron filings, or ancient household cartography, but I think mine's the quickest.

Taking Buffy obsession to new and exciting heights.

Bad Mummies are all Buffy fans. Most of us don't suffer under the illusion that Joss Whedon is a feminist icon, but we do like to see blonde chicks kick demon butt. We also like irony done proper, a private lingo, word play, and humour that doesn't always have to be at someone's expense.

Today while sorting through my books, passing them through the keep/value/chuck filter, I came across Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. I decided to keep it if and only if it is the book referred to in the first episode of Buffy Season 4.

Which it is.

So there.

Cute way to recycle Milo tins

I must be getting housewife's brain if I'm constantly blogging about this stuff. I don't mind, I figure I need it. This is my brain holiday.

Milo is the only nestle product I buy and my son eats mountains of the stuff. We had a drought induced mouse plague last year and they got into everything that wasn't behind glass or metal. That's when I started using the tins for staples out of desperation. Now I quite like the look, it's green (well, greener than Tupperware), kind of rustic and post apocalyptic. Perfect for our Bad Mummy kitchen.

Things I do are:

1. When washing them for use I make sure ALL the water is removed. They rust at the drop of a hat (or water...).
2. I cut out the label from the bag of whatever staple it is and stick it to the tin, covering the whole label with clear sticky tape so that it doesn't get grotty. If I don't like the label, I use a strip of masking tape. This adds a bit of variety to the look.

Now I just wish my shelf was an inch wider...

Furniture Tetris

Last week our two year old daughter swallowed a staple resulting in panicked phone calls to Nurse-On-Call and forced ingestion of much fibre. She's ok now, but the event spurred a home re-organisation in the name of safety that dwarves all my previous tidying efforts.

Here be photos:

The livingroom will become a study shared by Daddy and Mummy. Eleven year old will also have a computer in here rather than in his room.


My study will become the livingroom. You can see the same poster on the wall.

The two year old, bless her, managed to find play space in the chaos.


But we did have to have our lunch outside.


We are still at it.


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What to do if you over-do the herbs in the pasta sauce.

I just had to blog this, it's typical of a Bad Mummy Deed.

I was making a family favourite (and one of the ways I get my husband to consume fish) - creamy smoked salmon pasta sauce - when I drifted off during the cooking and tipped half a jar of dried thyme into it. Not good, unless you like your pasta sauces to taste like cattle fodder and have the texture of a mouthful of pins. Here's how I solved the problem:


1. Swirl the sauce so that the thyme coats the side of the pan.


2. Wipe off the thyme that stuck to the sides with tissue. Make sure there is a thick wad of tissue between your fingers and the pan if you like your hands to be burn-free.


3. Repeat as necessary.

These photos were taken after about five wipes so it's not nearly as green as it was when I started.

The tissues will look like you've been nursing an echidna with the flu, your bin will be gross, but the pasta sauce will be back to fabulous.

It is handy on these occasions to have a professional mess-maker (toddler) around. This is so when your husband comes home, looks in the bin and cries, "For the love of god what IS this FOULNESS???" you can say, "Ask your daughter!" You are then off the hook unless he says, "No really..."

Bleah, ick and blah.

I feel bleah. Could be the heat. Could be the toasted cheese sandwich I had for breakfast. Could be that I'm rereading my thesis and finding all the horrible misplaced commas and beyond shite errors of expression. Could be that I'm supposed to be doing yet more tidying and the thought makes me want to vomit. Could be that I'm just full of nervous energy and can't settle to anything.

I need to get my heart rate up and my muscles moving but I can't decide how. I'd take the dog out but it's too hot. I'd go for a ride but for the same. Maybe I should swim. But our pool is ten metres long which means four strokes and I'm across if I swim properly, there's hardly any point to it. Though, come to think of it, I can increase that to ten strokes if I breath because I have to practically stop in the water and roll over to do it. There's really no point being able to shoot like a dart through the water (not my words) if you have to screech to a halt to take a breath....

*sigh* it's either swimming or star jumps.... which which which....

Lazy Sunday dinners in the 'vents household...

This should be read by any mother berating themselves for feeding their hungry hoard fast food. We've normalised it :-(

Tonight I'm distracted by my own activities (in this case morosely quilting, moaning that it must be over soon or I shall expire 'neath a mass of brown and yellow cotton) and vaguely thinking that I'll make pasta and salad to feed the hungry hoard, when my son (11yo) requests a "Last Hurrah" dinner because it's the last day of the holidays. This is his code for "some form of fast food". I relent (too easy in this heat) and send him off to negotiate the precise form of fast food with his step-father. I couldn't care less myself, I won't eat much of it because my appetite takes a dive when the temperature gets above 30 degrees or so. He comes back and reports that my husband wants vegetarian and he wants hawaiian. I correctly deduce that this is code for pizza and add some meatballs for myself to the order. By the time I get to the phone my husband's order has changed to vegetarian pasta - lucky I indulged in some communication before I dialed.

We eat in front of the Fraggles (they have taken up permanent residence in our living room). I'm not hungry but manage to down one meatball and some snow peas. 11yo tries my meatballs and finishes the lot, shunning the humble pizza on his plate. 2yo is feeling sick and only eats the pineapple on her slice of pizza. The only person truly happy with his choice of food is my husband - this place creates a fresh kind of vegetarian pasta for him every time we order and it's always excellent. I reconsider my omnivourusness for the nth time this week.

Now the kids are still in front of the TV, 2yo sniffing intermittently and 11yo rousing himself occasionally to say, "I can't believe it's school tomorrow!". I don't know where my husband has got to but he's about to be galvanized into dish duty while I get some drugs for the 2yo. My grand aim is to get my study cleared out so that we can turn it into a living room and the 2yo won't swallow any more staples. (Long story.)

Update: Where was my husband? Apparently he'd just saved his captain by dragging him to safety behind a ferris wheel...or maybe it was the enemy soldiers that were behind the ferris wheel... and I think there was something about a rope...either way it was high adrenalin and he was about to save the world from something. Definitely worth postponing dish duty for!