well, this is a little gift!

Oliver Jeffers, How to Draw A Penguin

He's one of my favourites.

get thee behind me, mommyblog

I just deleted a blog I put on the blog roll the other week. It was by a funny mom who has a high maintenance, hard to please, fun-ruining 4 year old who reminds me very much of my oldest child.

The writer is by turns self deprecating and rueful, and defensive, or at least, hey, there is no perfection here, hahaha about it all and she writes well and a lot of it is familiar.

But you know me and my compulsion to give advice and opinions as if they might somehow make a difference to anyone's life, and I just read a post about a nice day out with the 4 year old son being cut short as his 2 year old sister got sick and needed to be picked up. He was angry and cranky and not appreciative of the good time they'd had, and on the way home he pinched her and made her cry. His mom lost the plot and pinched him back and he cried and berated her all the way home - she's not meant to pinch him no matter how bad he is.

And I want to say yes, you're right, he IS right, and on top of that he's a kid in the throes of some serious sibling rivalry and her being angry at him or giving him time outs away from her or hurting him won't make that better in any way.

But I am well aware that I have not resolved my own daughter's identical feelings, nor do I deal with her anger towards her brother at all well so what's the point of saying anything. And yet I feel compelled to. So I'm removing the temptation from the blogroll and cutting myself off. I'm shutting up! 

time to be quiet

I think I should probably practise not talking for a while.

All these words that don't communicate what I meant to say keep holding me ransom,

Streams and streams of them, pooling at my feet, rising, everyone is getting splashed

And the carpets are ruined.

omg people

(excluding Janine)

Where is the cake love?!

You wound me. 

My great big 4 year old

Strawberrysaurus, the process...

one cake down...

One Strawberrysaurus cake to go.

Bodhi went down the town in his sister's purple and black stripy leggings the other day - and I am about to make him a pink tyrannosaurus cake for his party tomorrow. Nom Raar Nom.

The kids got shiny bikes. No stabilisers on Olivia's - I feel so nervous. I learned to ride a bike by keeping my training wheels on til I didn't notice they no longer touched the ground. You might say this is how I like to approach life - no falls and grazes and wobbling and sense of betrayal because the person you trusted let go and you fell.

So anyway, I'm leaving that process up to Axl, and she's giving it a week to see if she progresses - it would be in her nature to give up if it was too hard/didn't come together fast enough, so we'll see. I'd just communicate too much nervousness, I think. I myself am a a very Wobbly Cyclist :) I'd rather this was  Dad-job.

I am really happy with this cake, I have to say.

Oh, I added catapult elastic and red feathers round the crashed bird afterwards. In a genius stroke, it occurred to me to put the blue birds on spaghetti. It gives them height, and they wobble. I really hope the cake is well received by the birthday boy! 

weird one

Swine flu vaccine side effect in the under twenties.

hee!

This man looks so happy.

interesting

I got four and a half hours sleep last night, thanks to my overdeveloped procrastination muscle - I'm very grateful to my cake patron for insisting on paying me more than I asked her to, because, yeah, making fondant Angry Birds seems to take five hours. Ahem three in the morning bedtime ahem.

And yet, I got up at 7.30 far less painfully than I expected to, and got through the morning of work without any trauma. Now it's seven o clock, and rather than the dull, fuzzy, spaced out weirdness of my usual baby or correcting related sleep deprivation feeling, I just feel... I don't know.

Strange. Motivated to gently fall asleep. Sitting on Bodhi's bed, I could feel some unconscious part of me already lying down and succumbing to the pillow. A powerful and deeply satisfying suggestion. I'm fantasizing about bedtime now, I think I'l be ready to go about two hours before Olivia would really want to.

Oh! Someone I know had a baby and called her Olivia, how cool is that?

In other news, my brother and sister in law had a baby boy last Monday (not this Monday) and he's staying in intensive care to be monitored and his mum has had to go home and leave him there, and come back to feed him every four hours.

It's making me so sad for them. I wish our hospitals could make provision for parents to stay with their newborns. I wish they'd let them take him home and bring him back for checks - they can't actually find anything specifically wrong with him, they're just taking precautions. Also, his dad took three weeks off to be at home with him, and two of those are gone already. Homeward bound thoughts for them, please.

project

Well... if I was someone who actually carried through projects... Alterno-Jo. But maybe you are?

Sweet handmade stamps

I used to like my music loud. I used to like it on while I worked and played and created. I used to amass information, and care, so passionately. It used to define me to such a degree.

I used to tape stuff off the radio. Dave Fanning was my sensai.

And now... too loud and I can't do anything else at the same time. I don't know anything about anything new. I can't afford it when I do want something.I can't get my head around new technology. I saw an ipod nano the other day for the first time and it was like looking at something out of a sci-fi film. I am my grandmother. Crank up the gramophone. Or maybe don't, I just can't quite take it right now. The noise, the emotion, the resonance.

I've turned into one of those people who used to seem alien to me. Someone who doesn't really feature music in their lives.

I hate it. But I don't have the energy to turn it around.

I can't seem to really read books anymore either.

I miss my teenage brain, sometimes.

what Irish drama is made of

They write plays about this sort of thing.

Playboy of the Western World was funnier though, I suppose.

sometimes I wish

that someone better than me would adopt my children, and I could just leave them to it and not listen to the fighting and bitching and bickering and shouting and whinging and screaming and crying and fussing and whining anymore.

I hate this, sometimes.

I'm tired, we've just returned home from a weekend away and an expensive and not very successful trip into town to see some arty kids films. We're home half an hour and I'm sitting here listening to them again and I feel defeated.

So. Suck it up and get on with the job and stop whining. I think I'll only take one with me when I have to go out shopping though.

We did see this, which made me weep quite a lot - if you can get your hands on it, do.

Trailer:


Clip:

if I'm being honest

Um, no. It's not. The bike's still there. The time I did it, I came back out and my blue bike was gone, gone :(

making small efforts

This week, I have been attending to myself somewhat. I hope that doesn't sound terrifyingly euphemistic, we don't discuss that sort of thing here.

No, I've been:

attending the osteopath - well, once so far, and again on Wednesday. Need another trip to notice any improvement, she doesn't do crunches (violent physical realignments) so I don't know if it will be enough for me at the moment. Fingers crossed. Gently...

I booked a smear test. After only a year or two of meaning to. Sadly the wonderful doctor I raved about last time I went has gone, so we will see what her replacement is like. I'm sad though.

Skin brushing - trying to remember to actually do it, a few days in and my arse is noticeably silky. Woo!

Jaw excercises - I fixed my Neckline jaw exerciser thingy and will try and stick to that too - reviews suggest it fixes tmj, so here's hoping. And it might stop me getting jowls and any more double-chinnier.

**Wait!! I forgot to include my attempts to meditate! Mwa kindly send me a mindfulness in times of stress book that I am absorbing slooowwly, but have started making the effort to practise a bit of meditation again. It's hard because I think of bad things and the children scream and mess it up (I think not minding the screaming children while meditating successfully is a pretty high level skill and don't wish to hear about it if it's not) but I know it's just practice. So, that's in there too.

I'm debating spending money I probably shouldn't on an exercise bike/cross trainer combo - it's tempting - but is it foolhardy madness? It's just one of the things I can do without stopping for a while, and I don't seem to be able to get myself out of the house at the moment. Or in the last 6 months, or whatever. Hmm.

I also have moany bored kids, a work thing to finish NOW (why the hell have I not finished it yet!!) and two stories to complete for friday. It's hard to find time to skin brush and still get things done, people.

The other thing I lust after is one of these - I have been dying for one of these since the onset of adolescence, but I only just found out it's been invented. Please, Jesus and Santa, send me one?

flaming human

Today we walked down the town to the craft show, and I couldn't hold Bodhi's hand the whole way because it was just too hot and made me feel like my hand was combusting. I embroidered that image so he wouldn't feel bad about it.

He just walked into the room, naked and talking, and I realised he was saying, in a somewhat self satisfied voice, '... and my head is flaming and my hands are flaming and my legs are flaming and my arms and feet, they're flaming, this is my flaming wand and I am a flaming human.'

PS - by 'flaming wand' he meant the red plastic spanner he was holding, that's all.

ohhhhh

http://fyeahtattoos.com/post/7308794403

1000 Orphan Drawer Project is where they refurbish collected random drawers and build wooden cases for them.


I am looking at this, and I have no idea if I love it or dislike it. I actually can't tell. It's a strange feeling. The lack of symmetry makes me feel odd, I think. 

sneezefright

It's hard to sneeze in front of a classrroom full of teenagers.

You feel one building, and you excuse yourself, say, 'sorry, I'm going to sneeze.'

Then you realise 15 teenagers are gazing at you expectantly and your sneeze gets performance anxiety and retreats to tingle stingingly somewhere deep in your sinuses, leaving behind a vengeful I'll be back! 


That was at 10.45, and it just got me at 5.30.



**Google image has some GREAT sneeze images, but I found this post about stopping a sneeze that was informative and somehow entertaining.

A few weeks ago I drove through the T junction at the top of my mother in law's road - it seems I just looked right, or the other car was in stealth mode and/or pms or something, but I drove out into the road straight into the side of this other woman's car as she was passing.

We weren't going very fast, but a dent and a bash will always amount to enough to put my insurance premium up next year.

Now my car makes two different kinds of squuueeeeeeeeeee noise as I drive around. The piercing, high pitched noise delivered the sudden realisation to me that I need to change virtually everything about myself.

It's an exhausting revelation, I can tell you that much.

a warning to all

On Sunday morning I was driving around in the sunshine on an errand for J-cloths and croissants and I was writing a ballad that came to me suddenly as I was driving round the round about and down the leafy beach road and thinking of rhymes and rhythms and story endings.

Then I got back to where people were and stopped thinking about it, and now I can't remember it, of course.

Always, always write it down...

and just think of all the blinded bunnies too...