Am I hard to live with?

Aaron, Hannah and I live with Aaron’s Grandma.  It’s mutually beneficial; she can’t afford to pay the bills by herself, so we pay all the bills, and we don’t have to pay any rent. Hannah gets her own playroom and bedroom, big backyard and plenty of Grandma cuddles.  Grandma gets her bills paid, doesn’t have to worry about falling in the shower and no one finding her for many days (an actual concern she had before we moved in), doesn’t have to do the vacuuming and cleaning, lawn mowing and if she’s not being ridiculously stubborn, has someone to do all of the other chores as well.

It took all of us a while to adjust to living together, but in the end, we got there (mostly).  Sure, we fight and annoy each other immensely sometimes, but that’s to be expected.

But now YaYa (Grandma’s daughter, Aaron’s mum, Hannah’s YaYa) is here too.  We’re all butting heads and driving one another crazy.  I don’t think any three women with families of their own can actually live together.  It doesn’t work.  Everyone thinks they are  the Mum, everyone has their own way of doing things which of course doesn’t correspond to anyone else’s way and drives each other nuts, and everyone thinks that their way is best.  Or maybe that’s just me….

I started thinking (yes, I do do that sometimes).  Maybe I’m the annoying one?

The other day, I went grocery shopping with Grandma (we always go together, but buy groceries separately, as she doesn’t eat any of the same things as us).  I bought an avocado.  Grandma got one for YaYa.  My avocado was picked out specifically to go in a salad the very next night.  I picked it out knowing that it would be plenty ripe (but not too ripe) and super delicious in that awesome salad.  YaYa’s avocado wasn’t as ripe.  I didn’t know if it would be ripe enough to eat by the next day.  Looking at them, I knew that if someone were to come along and eat an avocado, they’d choose mine.  The ripe and ready one.  Of course.  But YaYa’s avocado wasn’t bought lovingly with a specific fate in mind.  It could have been eaten at any time during the week.  I didn’t know when it would be eaten.  So I wrote my name on my avocado.  I, of course, thought this was a genius, logical and easy plan to make sure that my avocado didn’t get eaten and got to grace us with it’s presence in my delicious salad.

No one noticed my name on the avocado.  Humph. I suppose it’s hard to see when a) you’re not looking for it, and b) avocados are rather dark.  At least when they are ripe.  Naturally, I whinged about my avocado being eaten.  I had to open the other avocado and hope for the best.  If it wasn’t ripe, it would be wasted and my salad would suck.

It was fine.  Just ripe.

Then I found out later that not only did people not think my name writing on the avocado was a great stroke of genius, but they actually found it obnoxious, annoying, and childish.

One day, YaYa asked what she could do to help.  I told her she could do all the big dishes because our dishwasher is a bit special and doesn’t actually fit normal sized plates (the arm is on the bottom of the top rack, and it won’t spin if they are on the bottom, but they don’t physically fit on the top) and other big things like pots and frying pans.  “But don’t wash Hannah’s cups.  They have to go in the dishwasher.”

I used to be ok with washing her sippy cups in the sink with the rest of the dishes, but then one day I was washing up when Grandma came in and grabbed the little bottle washer thing that I use to get in all the nooks and crannies of the sippy cup lid.  That is the only thing I have ever used it for, and that is the only thing I ever wanted it to be used for.

The First Years Take & Toss Spill-Proof Cups – 7 oz Pack

Thing I use to clean Hannah’s sippy cup lids

“What are you doing with that?”  I asked Grandma possessively.  “That is only for Hannah’s cups.”

“Oh, I was just going to clean around the taps in the bathroom with it.”

Excuse me?  Just clean around the taps in the BATHROOM??!?!?!?!?!?!!! You’re going to use it to scrub away all that disgusting black stuff that builds up around the taps????????

I was mortified.  How many other times has Grandma used Hannah’s bottle brush to clean the bathroom? What else has she used it for?  After that, Hannah’s things were strictly dishwasher only, and if I find them in the dish drainer when Grandma decides that she needs to do the dishes, I take them out and put them in the dishwasher anyway.

The cans in the pantry are in nice organised rows.  There is a row for pasta sauce, one for canned fruit, one for canned vegetables, another for beans and spaghetti, one for soup, and one for recipe base packets.  There is a shelf for snacks, one for pasta/rice, another for cooking things (flours, sugars, etc.).  I think my system is wonderful, logical, and beneficial.  I know where everything is (and anyone else would too if they listened when I talk). I always know what I have, nothing ever gets lost amidst the chaos of an unorganised pantry, and I don’t spend ages looking for things.

I get cranky when someone messes up my rows of cans, puts a snack item on the cooking shelf, or pasta on the snack shelf.  Others don’t seem to take much notice of my system.  They throw things where ever, mis-align my can rows, think I’m pedantically organised.  Humph.

But I know what happens when you have an unorganised pantry.  Things get lost, you can’t find anything, you never know what you actually have, and then before you know it, you eat a can of something, and spend all night vomiting because it had been in there festering for years and years. Or you go to use something else only to find it’s 20 years out of date.

When I first moved here, I cleaned out the pantry to super organise it to my standards.  Everything was everywhere, you could spend an hour looking for a particular item.  I actually did find food that was 20 years out of date.  Yeah, I really did.  See, my pantry organising doesn’t sound so crazy now, does it?

I suppose I can understand why I’d be hard to live with, but you know what? I do everything for a reason, and in my mind, they are all very good reasons.

Am I hard to live with?

Don’t forget to vote once per day (pleeeaaaaasssssssseeeeeee!)

Cleaning out the cockroach nest, I mean the shed….

The other day, we cleaned out the shed.  One of the sheds.  And by we, I mean Grandma and Aaron.  Hannah and I watched while they laboured away in disgustingly hot temperatures.  I wasn’t about to get down and dirty because I didn’t know what was lurking in there, waiting to bite me and poison my growing baby.  No, count me out, thank you very much.  Plus, Grandma wouldn’t let me if I wanted to anyway.

The shed…hmmm…how to describe the shed. Well, the outside is easy: it’s a tinny sort of little shed with a door that’s not actually attached, but rather placed over the doorway and falls off when it’s windy, and there is a tree growing right behind the shed whose branches actually hold the shed down onto the foundation.  It’s not attached in any way what so ever and I’m told that one time (before the tree was there), the wind actually picked up the shed and then dropped it again, not quite in the right place.  So we like the tree, it’s not going anywhere.

Where was I…oh yeah, the inside.  Let’s just say the inside is…interesting.  The inside of the shed is (was) filled with boxes of papers and magazines.  At least they were boxes.  I didn’t actually realise they were boxes because they had been eaten so much by I don’t want to know what, that it pretty much just looked like someone had taken an entire trees worth of papers, and thrown them in a heap inside the shed.  The rain gets in the shed, the wind gets in the shed (because the door is not attached, remember?), and the papers have been in there since, well, I’m not really sure, but at least ever since I’ve been on the scene, and that was nearly 10 years ago.  You couldn’t actually walk into the shed.  No, there was too much crap in there.  If you really wanted to, you could stand in the doorway and throw something in there, but I doubt you’d ever see it again.  The shed was kind of like that awkward kid in school who rarely bathed and a funk about him/her, you acknowledge that it’s there, but you steer well clear of it.  I know, kids are mean.

Aaron and I really wanted to get the shed cleaned out (and by Aaron and me, I mostly mean me) so we can put YaYa’s (Aaron’s mum, not her real name…) stuff that is taking up most of the linen press and the top of Hannah’s closet in sealable plastic tubs and pile said tubs in the shed.  That way, we (I…) could actually put things like sheets in the linen press instead of stacked (thrown, I’m way too short to stack) on top of the freestanding wardrobes (closets) in our bedroom.  Oh my gosh, so much storage to be had!  Plus, none of us were really sure what was living out there, but it couldn’t be good, or healthy, so yeah, it really needed to be cleaned up.

Hannah and I took our front row seats under the shade of the awning in the sand pit (ahem, Hannah was in the sand pit, I, was sitting next to it).  As soon as they moved that useless door and started moving boxes of papers, with the boxes crumbling as they picked them up, their contents falling about, I knew I needed to document it.  I ran straight inside to get my super-special, malfunctioning digital SLR camera.  It thinks it’s on automatic mode no matter what I do, changing it’s f-stop and shutter speed like yesterdays socks. Humph.

I put my feet inside the shed for the very first time.  I was amazed at what I saw.  Mounds of papers, filth, tiny poo of some description, and chewed bits of paper laying about.  I put the camera to my eye.

“What are you doing!!!  Don’t take photos of this!  Stop!”  Grandma, apparently, doesn’t share my love of documenting.

“Who are you going to show this to, no one wants to see this!  No one needs to remember this!”  She was getting really cranky now.

“Don’t you want to see before and after photos?  It will be such an accomplishment!”  Um…yes, that’s why I was taking them….

“Yeah, it’ll be good to see before and after photos.”  Aaron stuck up for me.  He’s great.

“Fine,” Grandma huffed, clearly not in agreement, “but don’t show anyone!  And they are NOT going on your blog!”  If anyone ever saw the photos, Grandma might die of embarrassment….  Yeah, I’ve been strictly forbidden to put them on my blog.  Instead, I’ve drawn you picture:

Humph, that was the only reason I was taking photos.  Nope, couldn’t be bothered if I’m not allowed to post them here.  I didn’t take anymore.  Except for these two, which I was allowed to take, keep, and display.   This little gift tag somehow managed to survive the chaos of the shed while everything else was rendered unreadable, pooped on, stuck together, and discoloured.

The papers in dodgy boxes kept piling up on the lawn.  There was one pile that had a hole about the circumference of a golf ball chewed straight through it.  Like a tunnel.  I don’t think I want to know what lived in that tunnel.  Luckily it wasn’t there at the time.  Not that we saw anyway.  After most of the stuff was cleared out, Aaron made a surprise discovery.  There in the corner was a chest of drawers.  I use that term loosely.  I mean what was left of it after being used as dinner for a whole lot of years.

“I’ve found the coackroach den!”  Aaron exclaimed.  Cockroaches were running around in those drawers by the hundreds.  There was a layer of poop (cockroach poop) an inch thick inside the drawer.  Oh. My. Gosh. Ew!

When they were done moving all the stuff out, they found a thick layer of cockroach poop covering the floor.  Aaron hosed the floor, getting some of it to go out the sides of the shed and onto the grass behind (where no one goes, there is a tree and then a fence there).  It was so caked on that he had to get a shovel and manually remove all the poop.  He removed so much poop that it filled an entire garbage bag.  YUCK!

We were kind of afraid there were be an influx of roaches with nowhere to go entering the house, feasting on tidbits of food we didn’t know were there, running over our feet unexpectedly, and falling onto our heads from the ceiling, completely freaking me out (yeah, that’s happened before), but we have hardly seen any since that fateful day.  I think they must have burned up in the hot sun or something when trying to make a break for it when their beloved roachy lair was empty.  Or maybe one of the neighbours now has an unexpected roach problem.  Hmmm…I hope they don’t read my blog.

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.”

The towel apocalypse

Aaron’s mum  (YaYa as she is now known when Hannah is present.  Hannah has a lot of grandparents, so we have to differentiate somehow) is coming tomorrow to visit for Christmas.  Sounds exciting right?  Well, it is, until Grandma turns into a shaking little ball of stressed out craziness.  Grandma has this overwhelming urge to make everything perfect for anyone and everyone who comes to visit.  She has this need to feed people until they almost explode.  I suppose that comes from being married to a greek for so many years.  Or maybe that’s just Grandma.  I’m not too sure.  She made “salmon” patties and some eggplant and tomato thing just so YaYa can “open the fridge and have a snack whenever she wants.”  It’s like  she is expecting the queen to come and grace our presence while tasting Grandma’s abundance of food. Stress is oozing out of Grandma, in the form of yelling and short-temperedness.  You can feel the stress from about 10 feet away.

Before we moved in with Grandma, we stopped telling her we were coming for a visit and started just showing up instead.  If we let Grandma know we were coming first, she’d spend all day cleaning and then greet us with a roast chicken, roast potatoes, sweet potatoes, bread rolls, pasta salad, regular salad, gravy, boiled vegetables, and of course, pavlova for desert.  We don’t care if the house is dusty, some dishes are in the sink, and mess is on the floor.  We’re family.  We just want to have a nice time together.  Same goes for when YaYa visits.

Grandma keeps bags and bags of “bedclothes” (as she calls them, aka sheets etc.) in the top of the linen press (linen closet) just for when YaYa comes to visit.  Aaron climbed up the ladder to reach them, pulling out bag after bag of, well, I’m not sure really.

“What’s in this bag Grandma?”  Aaron asked.

“Towels.  Good ones, brand new ones.”  Grandma said.

“So why don’t you use them?”

“I already have plenty of towels.”

“Umm…So why don’t we give them away to the needy?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll need them sometime.”

“What if I have to go in a home?  I’ll need to bring my own linen and towels!”  Oh Grandma….

(Laughing) “Grandma!” Aaron exclaimed.

 

Some of the bags at the top of the linen press

“But I’m poor, and I have enough towels to last me the rest of my life!”  She was starting to get really cranky now.  It’s like she thinks there will be a towel apocalypse and she must keep every towel she comes in contact with or else she will be wet and cold and may not survive.

 

“You’re not poor anymore Grandma, we’re here!”

“You never know what can happen, you never know what things you’ll need.  If you keep something long enough, you’ll find a use for it.”  Sigh. This is a prime reason for Grandma’s hoarding.

We didn’t persuade Grandma into getting rid of anything in the linen press,

Bring it on, we're ready

even though she has an entire shelf full of towels, another full of sheets, and of course, the top section full of plastic bags which are full of new all of the above.  Aaron, Hannah and I have one half of one shelf.  Total.  Bring on the towel apocalypse, we’re ready.

 

The Stubborn Grandma

Grandma: “Look at this stinging nettle I got out of the back yard.”

Me: “That’s a thistle.”

Grandma (grumpily): “No, it’s a stinging nettle.  I’m just trying to help you so Hannah doesn’t get stung.”

Me: “Regardless of what it’s called, I know Hannah shouldn’t touch it.”

Grandma (getting increasingly annoyed): “It’s a stinging nettle. I’ve lived my whole life in the bush, I know what a stinging nettle is!”

Me: “Well growing up, my Mom told me that those were thistles.  Stinging nettles are the ones that don’t look like they’d hurt you, they don’t have spikes on them, but then  you touch them and they sting.”

Grandma: “They both sting.  Touch this.  Come on, touch it, I promise it will sting you.”

Me: “I know it would hurt if I touch it, it’s spiky! That doesn’t mean it’s a stinging nettle.  It’s a thistle.  Maybe I’m wrong, maybe my Mom was wrong, I’m just going on what my Mom told me.  Maybe you’re wrong.”

Grandma: “It’s a stinging nettle.”

Grandma went outside and then came back, bearing non prickly, leafy, harmless plant.

Grandma: “This is a thistle.”

Me: “That’s not a thistle.  I don’t know what that is, but it’s not a thistle.”

Grandma: “How do all the rabbits eat thistle then?”

Me: “They don’t.”  I don’t know if they do or not, but I can’t imagine that they’d want to eat something that would likely poke their eyes out while giving them a lip piercing.

Me: “I’m going to look it up.”

Grandma (thoroughly annoyed): “Fine, but this is a thistle”

A few hours later (I hadn’t told Grandma that I looked it up hours ago):

Grandma, bearing a large spiky plant: “Look at this big…we’ll just call it Thing…that I found in the side yard.”

Me: “It’s a thistle.  We looked it up.”

Grandma (stubbornly): “Whatever.”

Then there was silence.  I wonder if Grandma will ever speak of said plants to me ever again, if she will still call them stinging nettles, or if she will now call them thistles???????????  Only time will tell….

UPADATE: Over a year later and she still refuses to call them thistles. She gets all flustered and says “You know, those stinging things…” HA!

This is a stinging nettle

This is a thistle