Fail Blog and Rachmaninov had big hands

Some funnies for today:

http://failblog.org/

My favourite is still the ship of fail. You have to go right back to the beginning to get it though...

and this:

Rachmaninov had big hands

Is it because I'm a Mum that I can't stand to watch?

People I know find videos like this one FUNNY.

Maybe it's the mother in me but all I can think about are the horrific injuries, the hospitalisations, and the general emotional trauma. How can people laugh at other people hurting themselves? I will never get it.

How to wreck your Sunday - shower in rat droppings.

Today was looking to be gloriously productive. Toddler napping, 11yo about to go to his friend's for a swim, me about to sit down and fill out my PhD application in the peace and quiet.

Only, when I reached up to the tippety-top of our one cupboard to retrieve the swimming gear that had been lying dormant since last season I was treated to an avalanche of something I thought were little black beads. In my face, in my hair, down my shirt. I vaguely wondered why I'd stored craft stuff up there instead of with the crafty stuff and took a closer look. Rat droppings. There must have been thousands. There are no words for how ill I felt. I'd literally been dumped on. 11yo thought it was hilarious of course. As usual Mummy is glad to be of comic service - not. *grump*

I've known that we've had vermin for a while. They sneak into the kitchen and eat left over dog food, provide snuffly chasey entertainment for the dog at night and we hear them chasing each other in the roof and walls. But since they were not actually interfering with anything of ours, e.g. food. I have left them alone. (My husband sees this as 100% my problem just in case any of you were wondering...) But now that they are nesting in the linen cupboard and have chosen the crib cover I made for 2yo for a nest, chewing up the cot sheet that both 11yo and 2yo used as babies to line said nest, they have got to go. Nice Mummy has just been replaced by a rattucidal killing machine. Only...

I have a problem with killing rats. Not mice, or cockroaches, or venomous spiders, just rats. When we had our mouse invasion during the drought and they were eating anything not sealed in metal or glass I was happy to kill the little fuckers. It was a them or us thing. They contaminated our food supply, catching and relocating was not an option, therefore they had to die. It was during my mouse killing spree I found that poison was not a viable solution for us as they crawl away to die where you can't find them, produce unsavoury smells, and breed flies. So, I used traps, and when the traps didn't kill them I drowned them.

The trouble with using this method for rats, is that traps don't always kill them first go and then you are responsible for hours of suffering until you come along and finish the job. And rats, in the degrees of sentience scale, are way more sentient than mice. Rats can count to five, they are social creatures who pass on knowledge inter-generationally. They have been known to demonstrate emotional attachment. Leaving a creature like that in a trap for hours might just be beyond me :-(

But then again, maybe I should just remember how it felt to be dumped on by several generations of ratties before I get too sentimental. That and the fact that I now have to wash the entire contents of my linen cupboard and line the thing with steel wool wherever they are getting in.

So much for PhD application! Grrrr! Ah! Now I've found the anger. Off to Traps-R-Us for a little retail therapy....

From the 11yo yesterday:

About toy weapons that are not sharp enough to be dangerous:

"Mum, if I'm going to have to use my imagination with these things I need a bit of realism."

Nostalgia:

"Do you remember back when we could have water pistols?"

That last one made me a bit sad. Highlights of my childhood include running under the sprinkler on hot days. On especially good days there'd be a big gang of kids with water pistols and water bombs. My children of the drought have been denied the simple pleasure of blasting away at each other with drinking water. Last year, we experienced the equivalent of a Brisbane summer storm during a BBQ with family friends at our house. You should have seen the kiddies, they were so excited! We laughed at them and teased them: "You'd think you'd never seen rain before!" It turns out they hadn't. Not like that anyway.

Then again, when I was a kid computer games were pixelated bleeps and CGI wasn't. You can't have everything.

Things to be thankful for today:

Husbands who give you shoulder rubs.

Mother-in-laws who manage to cook you up some risotto for dinner while baby-sitting a two year old all day.

Radio stations that play "My Sherona" at exactly the right moment in peak hour traffic.

Antics from 11yo during the hospital visit ensuring that my mother fell asleep smiling.

Nice bosses who give you a heads up before your tiny lab is inundated with strange onlookers.

Flowers on your doorstep.

Cards in your letterbox.

Toddler evening naps so that I can have a quiet cup of tea, read the latest on the Decriminalisation of Abortion debate and blog.

The Great Desk Tidy = Disaster for the rest of the house

Ok, I've cleared my desk and it is now home only to THINGS I USE.



Now can someone tell me where all the rest of this shit is supposed to go?




*sigh*

For those who don't know, I am a recovering hoarder who lives with a fellow hoarder in a house with one cupboard.

Bad Mummy is at the airport.

Today marks the blackest day of the holidays for me. It's the one where my son travels interstate as an unaccompanied minor to see his father. Not that I don't want my son to see his dad, far from it. He likes it, his dad likes it, they bond and stuff. The bit I don't like is the part where my son's welfare is suddenly out of my hands for a week.

Control freak?

Yes.

Sue me.

Being a control freak I am now a veteran when it comes to delivering unaccompanied minors unto airlines while coping with the company of fractious toddlers. These are the rules:

1. The airline will tell you to arrive two hours early. Ignore them. Arrive the usual one hour early or you'll face an hour with a bored and somewhat stressed child for company. In my case, I'd also have a bored and restless toddler who fails to see the point of sitting still in airport lounges. She has the vocal prowess of Joan Sutherland singing a high A, only with more stamina than Joan.

2. Write down all your ex partner's details before you leave or you will have to make embarrassing phone calls at check in while the airline staff eye you suspiciously. It also helps if the airline have got the name of your offspring correct, but that tends to be out of your hands.

3. On cold days you may be tempted to wear bulky jackets. Don't. You will invariably be bomb sniffed and toddlers don't like to wait around while you're checked for explosives.

4. Take a pram that can fold up umbrella style and go through the x-rays or no pram at all, otherwise you will be redirected to the wheelchair entry where you will wait for an eternity with the protesting toddler for your pram to be inadequately fondled by strangers. The only time this happened I felt slightly ill.

5. You will be tempted to take the nappy bag for the toddler. Don't. The less you have to take through airport security the better. Take ONE nappy and ONE bag of wipes wrapped in a change mat. This can fold up into the pram when it whizzes through the x-ray, and your hands will be left free to deal with the toddler who thought she was being let out of the pram to run around - when a two year old express her disappointment that her bids for freedom are being thwarted she expresses it to all and sundry, minimise the damage by traveling light and moving away fast.

6. Once you're in, buy the kids iced chocolates. This will get you at least half an hour of quiet while they eat ice cream with a straw. If other parents glare or glance disparagingly at you for giving a two year old such a rich treat I recommend a stony glare back along with wishing them a demon child for their next one. They don't know you're doing them a huge favour by keeping your little blitzkrieg distracted.

7. When it's time to say goodbye to the minor who is going, don't, whatever you do, let the guilty gibbering worrier inside you have a voice. Your child doesn't need to know that you're secretly afraid you're never going to see him again. Be cheery, tell him to spend his money on food instead of hoarding it like a miser, to have fun, and that you'll see him in a week.

Finally, the last rule:

8. After the minors have boarded and you're hanging around waiting for take off, thou shalt not look the other parents in the eye. In this case, pain shared is pain magnified, and pain magnified leads to public sobbing. Keep your haunted look to yourself. Trust me when I say the other parents have it too, you don't have to check.

Only after his little pink face has left with the gaggle of other minors (there's always a group of them) can I let myself succumb to the guilt-monger in my head. The one that scolds me for abandoning him. The one that berates me, "If you'd only been organised about your life he wouldn't have to do this!" The voice that lists a thousand things that could go wrong while I'm not there. The voice that tells me that he's your good one, your little joker, helper, entertainer, argumentative, imaginative bright spark and you've let him get on a plane alone. What were you thinking???

He must be only a few feet away really, sitting on the plane I can see through the window, but already there is a gaping hole in my side. This wound will remain raw and weeping all week. I try not to cry.