Sometimes, I get ugly

Usually we go away with I and M (who do not approve of being named on the interwebs, so I will just use letters) for Australia Day.  Of course, usually we get a long weekend for Australia day.  Not this year.  This year, Australia day was on a Wednesday.  So instead, we went to I and M’s  house with Hannah for dinner, games, sleep (for some of us) and then breakfast, lunch, and more games.

Being a mom, I can now no longer stay up past 10.  Fine, I’ve never been good at that, but whatever, that is not the point.  9pm rolled around (I put Hannah to bed at 7:30, FYI), and I was already struggling to stay awake.

It probably didn’t help that I don’t really like the game we were playing.  Games with lore checks, this check, that check, and what have you (where you roll a dice to see if you can or can’t do something), bore the pants off me (not literally, don’t get too excited).  Sigh, they are so slow!  And when you have 8 people playing, it seems like 5 hours of people rolling dice before they can actually do something before it finally gets back to your turn, where you roll some dice, inevitably roll a 1, can’t do anything (or die), and then it’s someone else’s turn again.  Ugh, no thanks.  And I like board games. Most anyway.

No one could remember whose turn it was to bring drinks, so 2 whole cases of beer ended up coming, in addition to the home brewed spirits that Johno and Adrian brought.  Oh goodness, recipe for disaster.  Not for me of course, I know that drinking with a bun in the oven is linked to F.A.S., which I definitely don’t want my future child to suffer with it’s entire life.

Alcohol, and being quiet, don’t mix.  A lot of the people there that night are loud anyway, but add spirits, and bang, it’s like being next to a bunch of hyena’s who’ve had way too much catnip.  Eventually, I was so tired that I fell asleep anyway. Not a good sleep, a fitful, restless sleep that ended abrubtly at 1:30am when loud banging woke me up.  Not just me, but Hannah too.  Adrian was so drunk that he was banging his head on the table in attempt to be able think more clearly for game playing.

Hannah didn’t seem to mind being awake, she just laid in her port-a-cot next to the bed, rolling around, singing to herself and reciting her name.  I, on the other hand, laid in bed tossing and turning, fantasising about what I would yell at these loud obnoxious people if it were my house they were being loud and obnoxious in.

I don't mean for Hannah to shut up, I mean the loud people

Of course, I couldn’t tell them to shut their loud annoying mouths if I and M were there because that’s just rude.  I, wouldn’t like it if they came over to my house, and told me how to behave.  No, instead, I stewed in bed.  And I went to the bathroom because I have nanna pregnancy bladder and have to go at least once per night.  I did attempt to glare at them on my way out, but I’m not sure if they actually noticed since I wasn’t wearing my glasses and can’t see my own hand in front of my face unless I do.  Maybe they were doing an obnoxious ha-ha-we’re-going-to-keep-being-loud-and-obnoxious-all-night dance, I don’t know, to me they resembled blobs of fuzz, all meshed together.  I couldn’t even slam the door in passive aggressive annoyance on my way back in because I didn’t want to upset Hannah.

At 4am, they were really giggly and loud.  I wanted scream, yell, kick, bite, and scream at them some more.  How could they keep me up all night??  I listened in bed.  Hmmm….it seems I and M weren’t there anymore.  They must have gone to bed.  In the other house.  They would be sleeping soundly, with no interruptions from loud drunken people.  I could tell they were playing Telestrations (oh how I love that game.  So so funny).  Telestrations is always funny, but it sounded so much more funny when drunk (judging by the loud obnoxiousness anyway).  That was it, I’d had enough.  I put on my towel (it was 45 degrees celsius that day, there was no way I was going to sleep in clothes), went to the bathroom (nanna pregnancy bladder again), then I couldn’t contain myself anymore.

I marched up to the table (so I could see them a little bit) and let loose.  “Do you know what time it is?!”  I didn’t let them answer, I kept going.  “It’s 4am! FOUR AM!!! Do you have any idea how loud you people are?  Do you know how hard it is to sleep?  I went to bed at 10, and I have hardly slept all night!”  They all looked at me, like I was a lion and they were tiny little baby zebras, about to be devoured by me.

I pointed my finger straight at Aaron, “and don’t think that I’m going to watch Hannah all day tomorrow just because you stayed up all night!”

“Are you mad?”  He asked me.

“YES I’m MAD, I haven’t slept all night!  How can I sleep when you people are so loud and someone is banging his head on the table?!?!?!”  Everyone continued to stare at me like I was some sort of nutcase escaped from the asylum.

Then I huffed off back to bed.  And they packed up the games and went to bed too.

Sure, it seems really mean of me to point my finger at Aaron and yell at him like that in front of his friends, but at 4am after hardly any sleep and no good sleep?  No, it didn’t seem mean at all.

The sneaky meat

I’m sure you’re all aware that Hannah refuses to eat anything that remotely resembles meat.  Or fish.  Or eggs.  Anything protein really.  I’ve tried different tactics, some of which have worked for a little bit, some that have failed miserably.

Yesterday, I had a brainwave (what, someone with baby brain can have brainwaves?).  Hannah LOVES those little kids yogurts that come in squeezey packs.  But what if I gave her a squeezey pack that contained not yogurt, but meat.  Of course there are other things in there too, like vegetables, but what ever, there’s meat in there!  Usually when I slave over the stove, making her healthy wonderful home made food, she takes one look at it, turns her nose up and says “Done!”  Or, to add more insult to injury, she looks at it, refuses to sit in her chair, flaps her arms and legs, makes like a wiggle worm, and starts yelling “NO!!” as if I’m about to put her in a pool full of sharks.

I couldn't find a photo of the meat ones, but this is a squeezey pack. Photo courtesy of Rafferty's Garden

So what if she can’t see the meaty goop she is about to ingest?  Sure those wonderful, foul smelling squeezey packs of baby food are for babies from 6 months old (due to being pureed…), and not really for toddlers, but who cares, they contain MEAT!  She could actually get some protein into her diet.

As I arrived in the baby aisle at Coles, I found that the meaty squeezey packs were on sale.  Score!  I grabbed 4 different packs (beef and something, chicken and apricot, chicken and something else, and tuna and something.  Seriously, you can’t expect me to remember all of them, I have baby brain).  Hannah, cheeky monkey that she is, saw me put her beloved squeezey packs in the trolley (cart) and yelled “yogurt, yogurt!”

Ok, what the heck, I gave her one then and there.  She seemed to want it more than anything else in the entire world at that moment in time, so why not go for it?  When I handed her the opened squeezey pack of wonder, she started making her over-excited giggle noise that pretty much sounds like a nanny goat and is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

She went at that squeezey pack with vigor, squeezing and sucking its guts out.  She didn’t take a sip and then pull that this-is-the-most-disgusting-thing-i’ve-ever-had face and say done, or no.  Quite the contrary, she had some, made the nanny goat noise, then had some more.  She ate nearly the entire pack.  She probably would have eaten all of it if she hadn’t had breakfast (with seconds, she loves breakfast.  This morning, she had Special K for breakfast) only 2 hours earlier.

When we got home and she found the other squeezey packs of wonder in the shopping bags, she wanted more.  Hopefully this trend will continue, and she will eat whatever I give her out of a squeezey pack.  In a week or so, when she is used to the taste of the meat, I will try putting the contents of a squeezey pack on some pasta, or some rice.  If she eats that, I will put some little chunks of meat on it too.  If she eats that, I will make everything from scratch again, in hope that she will be used to the taste, smell, texture, and whatnot of the meat, and actually devour it happily.

This is the plan.  Wish me luck.

How many bubbas?

I must have drawn about 50 bubbas yesterday.  Every day Hannah wants me to draw her bubbas.  And by bubba, she means herself.  We’ve been calling her Bubba since she was born.  She comes up to me carrying her magnetic draw (that’s the knock off version of a Magna-doodle) and tells me “Bubba. Bubba.”  Recently she has been more specific “Bubba Hannah. Peeeaaaasssss.”  Of course I draw one for her.  When she says please, it’s the most adorable thing ever.

As soon as I’m finished, she promptly gets one of the magnet shapes and colours over the bubba.  Then she erases it and asks me to draw her a bubba again.

It’s not just the knock off Magna-doodle, she asks me to draw bubbas on pieces of paper.

When we’re outside, she asks me to draw bubba with her sidewalk chalk on the cement under the awning.

Only while we’re out there, she branches out and asks me to draw Daddy, Mommy, Grandma, Jess, Jim, and/or YaYa.

Once, she asked me to draw her a deer.  Actually, I’m pretty sure she said ‘Oh dear’ (Grandma’s influence), but in my mind, she totally wanted me to draw her a deer.

On a couple of occasions, Hannah asked me to draw her a car.  But then she said Bubba, so I drew her in the car.

Sometimes I draw her a chicken just to shake it up a bit, but then she gets upset and asks me to draw her a bubba.

When we get the duplo out, she asks me to make her a bubba.

“Hannah, if you’re Bubba, what are we going to call the new bubba when it’s born?”  I asked her (after drawing the 50th bubba for the day).

“Gone. Be gone.” Yeah, she actually said that.  Oh snap.

A book about muumuu’s?

I was driving home with Grandma and Hannah in the backseat (Grandma is scared to sit in the front because she thinks I may just kill her with my driving, and she doesn’t want to actually witness it.  She says she sits in the back because it’s more supportive to her neck).

“There’s a little girl.”  I heard Grandma say to Hannah.  I glanced in the mirror.  Grandma was pointing things out in one of Hannah’s story books.

“There’s a little muumuu.”  What?  Visions of a little girl wearing an awful might-as-well-wear-a-burlap-sack-for-a-dress muumuu filled my head.  What the heck kind of book was this?

MuuMuu House Dress – Modern Flowers Petal Sleeves Caftan Kaftan Hawaiian Aloha Pullover Cotton Lounger – Regular and Plus Size

I’m embarrassed just looking at this picture

“There’s a big muumuu.”  Why does Hannah have a story book filled with people wearing muumuu’s?  Yuck.

“There’s a baa baa.”

Oh, now I get it.

“Cow!” I tell Hannah from the front seat.  Not that she could hear me since my mouth was facing the windshield, and not her.

Sure, it may be cute if she calls cows moo moo’s now.  Not so much when she is like 5 and thinks that is actually what they are called.  I don’t want her to be that kid at school that no one talks to because she goes over to all the books and starts making animal noises and doesn’t know what people are talking about when they ask her if she has a dog at home (what’s a dog?  Oh, you mean a woof woof?).

No, a cow is called a cow, and it says Moo.  Now how do I tell Grandma that I don’t want my child thinking animals are called the noise they make?  I don’t want to insult her, or make her get cranky and hide in her room for an hour sulking.  How do I nicely let her know that a cow is not in fact called a moo moo?  Sigh, being non-confrontational is hard.

Your reasoning is flawed

Today was a really hot day.  One of those disgustingly hot and humid days that make you wanna lay on your couch with an airconditioner in your face, ice cream in hand (and mouth).

Bang, crash! I heard the sound of something breaking in the kitchen.

Grandma with the fireman calendar I got her as a joke for Christmas. Except she actually liked this guy.

“It’s all the shaking.”  Grandma said, looking at the broken bowl on the floor.  Grandma wishes she could stop, but she is constantly shaking.  She has t0 have her cups of tea in those insulted cups with lids so she doesn’t spill it all over herself and the floor on the way to her room. “Luckily it was only the one.”

“Why are you doing the dishes Grandma, I’ll do them later.”  I always do them at 5:30 or 5:45pm.  Yeah, I’m an organisational/scheduled freak show.  I know that, you don’t need to tell me.  I even bought a dishwasher so Grandma wouldn’t feel bad about me doing the dishes.  Well, that and I told Grandma that when we moved in I would do the dishes but there were always far too many and I’m used to having a dishwasher.

“I’m just putting away the dishes in the dish drainer.”

“Ok.”

Ugh.  It was so hot.  I wanted to make sure Hannah got enough fluids, so I put some V8 juice in a sippy cup and went to the sink to dilute it with water.

“What are you doing Grandma? I’ll do the dishes later.”

“I’m only doing them because the water is cool.  I’ll get cooler doing the dishes.”

“You’ll get cool if you sit in the playroom with us, in the air conditioning.”

No comment from Grandma.

I put the juice cup under the tap that was filling the sink to do the dishes.  “That’s not cool water Grandma!”  It was HOT!

“Well…”  Grandma didn’t finish her sentence.

“Your reasoning is flawed Grandma.”

Everything happens (or doesn’t happen) for a reason

A while back, The Jess and I, and my exchange sister Lauren and I, applied to be on the Amazing Race Australia (here is one of my audition videos in case you’re interested).  Sigh, we didn’t get on.  I wanted to get on SO SO SO badly!  I was still kinda holding my breath when I heard that the race had already started.  I looked it up on wikipedia (as any tv show stalker would).  Yeah, it started the the day before.  Humph.  Why didn’t they want us?  Poo.

Oh well.  Better luck next time (if there is a next time… that depends on how well they produce the show I suppose.  If it’s anything like the Aussie version of Survivor, HA, there will be no next time.)

“Boo (that’s code for Aaron), the race already started (sad face).  I didn’t get in.   So… you wanna start trying for another baby?”  I didn’t want to try before I knew if we got on the race or not.  No point in going to all the trouble of applying if I were to get pregnant and then not be able to go on anyway.  That would just be silly.

9 months to the day after the race started (5 November 2010), our second baby is due (5 August 2011).  If I did get on the race, sure, I may be pregnant now, but not as far along, and not with this particular baby.  I’m sure I’ll look back, after getting to know our beautiful little one and be so so happy that I didn’t get on the race, but instead got to have him/her.

It just goes to show, everything happens (or doesn’t happen) for a reason.

 

The smell in the living room

*Sniff, sniff* I could smell something in the living room, something bad.  It smelled like fish.  Off fish, fermenting in the living room.  The smell was atrocious, like a slimy wet dead fish crawled over to my nose and started smacking me with its rotting tail.

“It smells like off fish in here.  Can you smell it?  It’s disgusting!  Why does it smell like that?!?!”  I babbled to Aaron.

*Sniff, sniff* “I don’t smell anything.”

“Are you serious??????  How can you not smell that?”  Well, I do have an incredibly good sense of smell.   I can tell if a neighbour is smoking a cigarette even when I’m inside the house with the windows shut.

We ate dinner.  I could still smell the fish.

“Seriously, you don’t smell that?”

“I guess I can now, a little bit”  Aaron said.

“Ok, tomorrow when Hannah is asleep, I’m going to use my hound-dog nose and find the source of that smell.”

“Why wait, let’s do it now.”

Aaron moved the lounge.  He laughed.

“What?  You found the remote didn’t you?”  We’ve been looking for the remote for months.  We did look behind the couch, but it wasn’t there.  It must have been caught in the hide-a-bed and then fallen out the back later.  I knew we should have opened up the couch to look for it (but we were being lazy).

I vacuumed behind the couch while it was out.  No smell causing source there.

I got down on my hands and knees again, sniffing the ground as I went.  The smell seemed to be coming from near the couch, but not the couch itself.  I touched the carpet as I sniffed, maybe there was some sticky hard to see thing causing the ruckus.  Plus the brown carpet seems to camouflage anything and everything.  Then I vacuumed.

Something little caught my eye.  “I think this is it,” I said after taking a whiff.  It appeared to be a tiny piece of salmon that was now hard, that had fallen off someones dinner plate (probably Aaron’s, it was on his side of the couch.  That’s surprising though, considering I’m the sloppy one who is always spilling things).

I threw it away and vacuumed the area.

Ugh, the smell was still there!

The next day (yesterday), I vacuumed the whole house, taking extra care in the living room, moving anything and everything to vacuum underneath.  The room still smelled. Yuck.

I went to the shops and bought one of those oil things in a bottle with the sticks coming out to freshen up the room, vanilla scented.  Ok, to cover up the still un-found fish smell.  I tried to smell it in the shops, but it was all sealed up.

When I opened it, I took a whiff.  Ugh.  It certainly didn’t smell like vanilla.  It was more like cheap, imitation, sickly sweet cinnamon.  Not even a hint of vanilla.  Oh well, I put it out anyway.  couldn’t  be worse than the fish smell.

Except now the room smells like off fish and cheap, imitation, sickly sweet cinnamon.  And I still can’t find the source of the smell.  Humph.  Maybe if we wait long enough, it will go away on its own.  That or it will get worse and take over the house.  I’m hoping for the former.

The art of stealth

Now a days it seems everyone is in such a rush, being stealthy has nearly died.  “But why would I need to be stealthy?”  you ask.  There are plenty of scenarios that demand a person brings on the  stealthiness.  For example, if it’s 5:30 in the morning and your spouse and child are sleeping and you want to use the door to the outside that is only separated from your spouse’s head by a thin wall.  Oh, and did I mention this door in particular is extremely, annoyingly, obnoxiously loud?

The Jess used to be the worst person ever in the art of stealth (maybe she still is, but she no longer lives in the same house as us, so I don’t really know).  She’d come home at all hours, open the front door and traipse inside.  Problem was it pretty much sounded like a herd of elephants had just rammed the door down and somehow managed to fit themselves inside.  And she thought she was being quiet.

I know, my friends and I were naughty

I learned the art of stealth when Hannah was a baby and any tiny little noise would wake her up.  There was no washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, or sweeping the floor when Hannah was asleep for me.  No, no, no, that would be disastrous.  When she napped, I would have a nap, read a book, or, if I were feeling really daring, watch TV extremely quietly.  No, that’s not true, I learned the art of stealth in my naughty teenage days when I used to sneak out with my friends and change those moveable letter signs to say rude things instead of their normal advertising (at least I didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, or steal things…).  There was one sign that was

Even got my initials on this one

particularly fun to change since it belonged to a girl at works dad.  I didn’t know that the first time we changed it, but the next day she came to work and told us all about it.  So of course we did it the next night too.  It was so much more amusing to change it, then hear about how annoying it was.  Plus my dad used to work the graveyard shift (overnight) and sleep during the day.  He’s a pretty light sleeper and would wake if we so much as farted, so I guess I learned to be stealthy then too.

My husband, and his side of the family on the other hand, are not so stealthy.  I guess they didn’t sneak out when they were younger, or have any other reason to be quiet.  I tried to teach them how to open and shut a door in a way that doesn’t make noise, but they just got offended (I thought I was being helpful) and told me that they are not 5.  So, doors are still loudly opened, I still wake up every time, and sometimes Hannah wakes up as well.

Being stealthy is easy.  All you have to do is turn the door handle all the way until the little thing that holds it in place in the door frame (whatever that is called) is all the way inside the door, then push or pull the door open (while still holding the knob, keeping the thing inside the door).  Viola, silent door opening.  Closing is just the same only opposite, turn the handle all the way, push or pull the door shut, then turn the handle so the thing is in the door frame.  Turning and pulling/pushing at the same time, on the other hand, makes lots of noise as the thing hits the edge of the slot it lives in when the door is shut.  Oh, and you have to do it slowly, with care, not hastily, with reckless abandon.

Now if I hear you’re using the stealth strategy for not so good purposes, I will sick ninjas on you, so do yourself a favour and don’t.

Daddy, I’ll help mow the lawn

The weather has been particularly obnoxious recently.  One day it’s 40 degrees celsius (104 F), the next it’s torrential rain, thunder, and 19 celsius (66 F).  Not good weather to mow the lawn.  Incidentally, the lawn has decided to take over, embarrassing Grandma to no end and making the front yard resemble an unkempt jungle.

Today, it was hot yes, but not disgustingly, lay-on-the-couch-in-misery hot, it wasn’t raining (although it looks like it may later), and no thunder has clapped as yet.  So, Aaron mowed the lawn.

Good day for some lawn mowin'

Hannah watched Daddy with interest and when Daddy was done, she got an idea.

an idea was brewing

Hannah ran as fast as her little legs would carry her all the way from the front yard through the side gate and to the back yard.  She went straight for her toy lawn mower, grabbed it with reckless abandon and headed back to the front yard.  Sure, Daddy was finished mowing the lawn, but one adorable look from Hannah and he followed her (with lawn mower) back to the front yard.

Come on Daddy, I'll help you!

Hannah and Daddy “mowed” the front lawn together like it was going out of fashion, while I, of course, took photos.  Hannah just loves to help.  She is a little helper bubba.

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When blueberries backfire

I have been taking the patient approach in getting Hannah to eat her dinner; putting it in front of her and if she wants it, she eats, if she says “done” and tries to get down, I put her down.  Without dinner.  She does get milk before bed time though.  I don’t want to force her to eat because, well, let’s face it, you can’t actually force someone to eat something unless you shove a tube down their throat and then throw the food in, I don’t want her to develop a bad relationship to food, or use food to gain control (or think she is in control), and I don’t want her to dread meal time.  I read a book that said toddlers will never starve themselves, usually they are eating a lot more than we realise as they are constant grazers, and they don’t need as much food as they did before because they grow a lot less.  Fair enough.

The other day, Hannah wanted me to put together the wooden train set she got for Christmas.  “Train!” she told me.  I, on the other hand, was trying to get her to put her pants on.

“Put your pants on, and then I’ll make the train for you.”  I told her.

“NO!”  “Train!”

“No train until you put your pants on.”  I calmly told her.

“No!”

This went around a few times and then something amazing happened:  She came over to me, sat in my lap and stuck her foot in the air so I could put a pant leg on it.  Just like that, she let me put her pants on.  Then I put the train track together.  Everyone was happy.

And I got an idea….

I made Hannah hokkien noodles with vegetables, egg, and a little bit of honey soy sauce for dinner (which is delicious by the way, thanks Romana for the idea).  I put it in front of her.

“Done!”  She exclaimed while trying to get out of her high chair, without so much as smelling the delicious dinner I slaved over the stove to make for her.

“Do you want a blueberry?”  I asked her.

“Blueberry!”

“Ok, I’ll give you a blueberry if you eat one bite of dinner.”

“NO!”

“Do you want a blueberry?”  I asked her again.

Photo courtesy of bewellbuzz.com

“Please.” She said with her cute little face.

“First eat one bite of food, then you can have a blueberry.”

She opened her mouth, and ate a bite of dinner.  I gave her a blueberry.  I gave her another bite of food, then a blueberry.  Soon, she had eaten her entire dinner.  I was ecstatic.  I’m pretty sure she was too, blueberries are her favourite.  That was the first time in her entire life that she has actually eaten egg.  She doesn’t like egg.  She doesn’t like chicken.  Or beef, or fish.  She pretty much doesn’t like any sort of protein unless it’s hidden in pancakes in the form of wheat germ.

We did the same thing the next night, and she ate all of her dinner.  I’m really onto something.

Or so I thought.

I tried to give her something other than the noodles the night after that.  I made her some Vietnamese rice paper rolls with a tiny bit of  teriyaki chicken, grated carrot, grated cucumber, some sort of little noodle that looks like glass, and avocado.  She took a bite, then promptly spit it out while making a face that conveyed grossness.  She wouldn’t eat it anymore.  I wouldn’t give her a blueberry.  She got really upset.  I made her some more noodles like she had eaten the previous 2 nights.  Nope, didn’t want that either.  Wouldn’t eat anything (except for blueberries, which I wasn’t going to give her if she didn’t first take a bite of dinner).  Stalemate.  She got down with no dinner.

Sigh.  Now I’ll have to think of another way to get her to eat her food.  Any ideas?  Or maybe she will go back to bribery as long as it’s something she doesn’t hate.  At least she drinks V8 juice (watered down of course).