Come on baby, you can come out now!

I was going to do a proper post today, but you know what?  I can’t really be bothered.  I’m 40 weeks pregnant, extremely uncomfortable (probably because my posterior  baby has the giant back of his head pressing on all my insides instead of towards the outside world), tired, and want to spend my blogging time attempting to induce labour instead.

So, instead of doing my planned post, which would have been rather funny and included a drawing (that I haven’t done yet…), I’m going to sit on my couch, put the blinds down, and drink raspberry leaf tea whilst stimulating my nipples, and if I can find some in the fridge or cupboard, eat some pineapple as well.

We’ll see if it works!

 

Don’t forget to vote once per day! Thanks you guys ROCK!

The smoking bathroom

We LOVE our new place.  Sure, we went from a 4 bedroom house with a yard to a 2 bedroom apartment.  But it’s ours.  Well, we don’t own it, but you know, only our little family lives in it.  It’s cozy.  I can prepare dinner on the large kitchen bench that overlooks the living/play/dining room while Hannah happily plays.  I got to organise everything in the kitchen just the way I like it.  If I have to pee in the middle of the night (who am I kidding, I’m 39 weeks pregnant, it’s more like when I have to pee in the middle of the night), I can roll out of bed and walk to the bathroom naked.  No clothes needed, I’m not going to run into anyone except for Aaron, and he likes it when I’m naked anyway (I’m sure he’s blushing as he reads this…).  There is a big bathtub and a modern spacious kitchen.  The list goes on and on.

Even Hannah loves it here.  Whenever we go elsewhere, she looks at me all serious-like and says “Hannah go home now to new house.”  Never in a million years did I think she’d take to a new place so well, especially since it meant leaving Grandma and YaYa behind.  I guess she thought it was too crowded too.  Plus now the big screen TV is in the same room she plays in, so she gets to watch Mickey and Dora on it; something she never got to do before.  She even said she wants to share her room with Baby Brother.

The move probably would have been a lot smoother if Hannah didn’t get sick soon after and end up in the hospital, but that’s a whole ‘nother story….

The only problem with the new place is the smoking.  We don’t smoke.  Yuck.  I’ve never even tried one.  Ick.  Just the thought makes me cringe!  But our neighbours all seem to smoke.  Except maybe the other new tenant across the way who also has a 2 year old girl.  And smoke travels.  There is no smoking allowed inside the building, so everyone goes just outside their doors and smokes there instead.  I can smell smoke like no ones business.  Sigh.  It comes under our door and assaults my nostrils.  Smoke that has been in someone else’s body comes in my door and enters my body.  Ew. Just because you want lung cancer doesn’t mean I do…. I think I need to buy a door snake.  Maybe that will help.

Fair enough, I can see why the smoke comes in under the front door.  That makes sense.  But a some of the time, there is a strong smell of cigarette smoke in the bathroom.  Yeah, the bathroom.  The bathroom that has a closed window, is on the second story of the apartment building (with the rest of our apartment of course), has no common walls with any other unit, and has a bunch of trees right out side it (so no one can stand under it smoking).  I can’t for the life of me, figure out why the bathroom smells like smoke.  How did the smell get there?  It’s not like Aaron or I am hiding out in the bathroom chain smoking.  It’s certainly not Hannah. Are all the vents connected and someone is cheekily smoking in their bathroom?  But then wouldn’t I see smoke coming out of them? Maybe it’s like Toy Story and our bathroom fixtures all get together and party while we’re out. Hmmm…..

Flash-way-back Friday. A post from my Mom

So it’s not Friday…. Oh well.  I don’t really have time to write a blog post because we just got the internet up and running.  I have a billion emails to answer.  But in my inbox, I found a ready made blog post written for me by my mom, knowing that I’d need something to post.  Go Mom!!  P.S. No baby yet.  Sigh.  Hopefully soon…  And thank you everyone for continuing to vote for me while I didn’t have the internet.  You guys rock, I’m number 2 now!!!!!  Please continue voting 🙂

A post from my Mom:

People don’t tend to remember much from very early childhood.  If something traumatic happens though, memories tend to stick from a very early age.  My first memory comes from an ill-fated boat ride about age two.

Since Sheri has no internet for a bit due to her recent move, I thought I might help out a bit and give her something to post.  She has her flashback Fridays, so this is a flash way, way back Friday post.  Long before Sheri ever existed, her mother was once a little girl.  And since I now have a cruise blog it does seem fitting that my earliest memory involves a boat.

One day we set out for a ride in my father’s boat.  He had a fairly small one, about 16 feet long or so.  We had quite a few people in that little boat.  In addition to my parents and I, we had my sisters, one a couple years older than me, and the other just a baby.  Also an aunt with baby cousin came along on that trip.

Apparently, this boat previously had a hole in it, which had been patched.  My mother envisioned a tiny hole, my father later said it had actually been about the size of a dinner plate.  Had my mother known that in advance, probably none of us would have set out in that boat that day.

Somewhere along the line the patch broke free.  The boat flipped over and dumped everyone into the water.  My mother lost her purse.  It sank to the bottom of the lake.  A tragedy we heard about many times throughout childhood.  As a child I did not see a lost purse as that awful, but as an adult, I realize a woman’s purse is pretty much her lifeline.  Everything is in that purse, her identity, keys to everything she ever needs to open, her money and credit cards.  It contains stuff of everyday life which one cannot do without.

My mother, aunt, and the babies floated away from the boat.  I only know they were there from other people’s stories.  My personal memory involves only my father and older sister.  We stayed with the boat.  My sister climbed out of the water and sat top of what was once the bottom of the overturned boat.  My father and I clung to the side of the boat, still in the water.

My sister and I wore dresses that matched in style, but not in color.  I think mine was blue and hers lavender.  Over that we wore bright orange life jackets, the only color life jackets came in way back then.  Probably a good thing we all had them on that day.

I tried to climb up on top of the bottom of the boat.  I wanted to sit up there with my sister.  My little 2-year-old arms and legs just could not manage it though, so in the water I stayed clinging to the side of the boat with my dad.  I think I even asked him to put me up there, but he didn’t, probably afraid I would just fall off.  Later my sister said she had not felt any happier up there than I did in the water.  She was wet and cold.

Eventually a coast guard boat came to rescue us.  They wrapped me in a scratchy wool blanket and stuffed me in a dark bunk below deck, so all I remember about that boat is lying in a dark room for what seemed like a very long time, but probably really wasn’t.

My sister got to go up on deck and see everything that went on.  Once again she got to be on top of things, while I stayed down below. They scooped my mother, aunt and the babies out of the water too, probably before rescuing us.  I don’t know where they all went on the Coast Guard boat though.  Probably up on deck.  Sigh.

Flashback Friday: 1.5 years of phone camera photos

Ok, so it’s not exactly Friday, but I did start this post on Friday. It just took me a very long time to rotate and caption all the photos!

I recently got a new phone, which is good because my old phone sometimes worked, but sometimes decided to be so quiet that I couldn’t actually hear the person on the other end, making me sound like a fool with all my “what, I can’t hear you, sorry, my phone doesn’t work properly.”

This may not be a very old flashback, but here are 1.5 years of photos from my old phone. There were some from the other .5 years, but I already had those off the phone and on my computer and well, I couldn’t be bothered adding those too.

Most of these photos were taken to then message to Aaron while he was at work. I like to make him smile a little while he is slaving away at his computer desk.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Don’t forget to vote once per day 🙂

Ick, overseas call centres

I’ve been on the phone for over half an hour.  On my mobile.  Ugh.  I’m only trying to upgrade my phone since my current contract expired and my phone sucks.  I’m not even talking to a different phone company, I’m talking to my existing one.  It’s an easy request: sign me up for another 24 month contract and give me a new phone, thank you very much.  They already have our details, my phone number, my customer number, etc. Easy.

You’d think anyway.  But not when the call centre is in India.  Now I have nothing against India, or Indians, but when you’re trying to get service for an Australian product from somewhere else in the world, it just doesn’t work.

I’d been talking to someone for a while, going through all the details, repeating myself a million times: yes I want a new phone, this is the one I want.  Yes, I understand I will be on another 24 month contract, etc.  We’d gone through the whole thing.  He even checked to see if they had any of the phones I wanted in stock.  They did, but not the colour I wanted.  Oh well, black will do just fine.

“Your account is showing as overdue.  I can’t upgrade your phone if your account is overdue.”  He told me.

“Well, our account is direct debited, so if it’s overdue, it’s because you guys didn’t take it out on time.”

“It says overdue.”

“Well it’s not.”

“I’ll just check it out for you.”  He put me on hold. Again.

“I can see you’ve paid, the system just hasn’t updated it yet.  I’ll just put you on hold while I fix it up for you.” Sigh, but at least we were almost done.

“Good evening, Vodafone, this is (I can’t remember, Raj or something) _____”  Great, I was supposed to be on hold, not transferred.  ARGH!

“Um…I was speaking to someone about an upgrade, but I think he transferred me accidentally instead of putting me on hold.” Giant sigh.

“Ok, I’ll transfer you to upgrades.”

“Good evening, Vodafone, this is _____.”

I said my whole bit again, blah blah blah.

“I’ll just transfer you to upgrades.” Kill. Me. Now.

“Hello, Vodafone, this is ___.”

I told the story again. SIGH.

He didn’t know who I’d been speaking to.  I could hear other consultants on the phone to other customers in the background.  Maybe a “hey, who was speaking to Sheri??!!” to his collegues would have been a good idea.

Nope, I had to go through the entire process.  Again.  Sigh.  Give him the pin number, tell him which phone, give him our address (they had our old one), let him look it up to see if they were in stock. Yada yada yada.

“I’m sorry, I can’t upgrade you today.  Your account is overdue.”  Anger and impatience rising…

“No it’s not.  The other guy was trying to put me on hold to fix all that up when he accidentally transferred me.”

“It’s overdue.  I can’t upgrade you if your account is overdue.”

“It’s not overdue, your system just hasn’t updated the payment yet.”  Maybe because you are in India…

“Ok, hold on while I check it.”  Yeah, you could have been doing that already, instead of arguing with me about it.  I was on hold for ages.  Sigh.

“That’s all fine, I can put this through for you now.”  Really?  That’s what I’d been trying to tell him for the last 20 minutes.

He had to go through all the terms and conditions with me.  No worries.  Except that I couldn’t really understand him.  It’s ok when he’s having a conversation, but when he’s reading a long list of things from a paper?  Sounds like garbledy-goop.  He was talking really fast, accent flaring.  He could have been speaking a different language for all I knew.  Luckily I had already read everything online.  I like to know what I’m getting myself into ahead of time. I’m all prepared like that.

When I got off the phone, there was a text message waiting for me.  “Hi, this is Rahesh from Vodafone, I was speaking to you about an upgrade.  Sorry, I accidentally transferred you, I will call you back right away.”  Only I was still on the phone when he tried to call, trying with all my might to actually get a new phone. Humph.

Then the phone rang.

“Hello.”  I said.

“Hi, this is Rahesh from Vodafone, I was talking to you about your upgrade.”

“Yeah.”

“I tried calling you seven times, but I can see now that you’ve already had it done.”  Then why are you calling me???

“Uh…yeah.  I got transferred 3 times, and no one knew who I was speaking to, so I couldn’t get back to you.”

He actually sounded cranky.  I’m sorry, but whose fault is it that I got transferred???  Yeah, that’s what I though cranky call centre man!

At least I’ll have my new phone next week.  About time!

Where does the bin man live?

Today I took Hannah to Bunnings to get some new heat lights for the bathroom.  It is FREEZING in there!  The current bulbs have been in there at least 20 years and when they died, no one ever changed them, they just left them in there, all dead and useless.  Humph.  I like to be warm, rather than cold, wet, and bedraggled and on the verge of getting frostbite when I step out of the shower ,thank you very much.

Anyway, I spotted a pink set of drawers that would be great for Hannah’s socks and things for the bargain mark down price of $15 bucks.  Done.

We got it home and Hannah decided she wanted to open it.  She ran to her playroom and fetched a little pink and blue plastic toy knife.

“Need a knife!” she told me.

Trying to open it with her little plastic knife

She poked and prodded at the plastic packaging with the “knife”, unable to free the lovely pink drawers inside.

She flipped it over and tried the other side.  No luck.

She flipped it on its side.  No luck.

She got frustrated and wanted a real knife.  I opened it for her with my finger nail instead.

“Hannah open it!  Hannah need a knife!”  She yelled.  It was nearly nap time, so she was starting to get cranky.  She somehow snapped her toy knife in half.

“Oh no, broke the knife!” She told me with a sad look on her face, tears threatening to escape. “Mommy fix it.”

“No sweetie, it can’t be fixed, we’ll have to throw it away.”

“Put it in the bin!”  Hannah said excitedly.  She really likes putting things in her bin (that’s garbage can for those Americans reading this).

Hannah: “Bin man take it.”  FYI, the bin man is the garbage man.

Me: “Where’s bin man going to take it to?”

Hannah: “Bin man’s house.”

Me: “Where does the bin man live?”

Hannah: *points to cupboard* “in THERE!”

Me: “Oh, he lives in the cupboard?”

Hannah: “YEAH!!!  In the cupboard!”

Me: “Where does Daddy live?”

Hannah: “In Daddy’s cupboard!”

Kids are so funny!

P.S. don’t forget to visit Pencils of Promise and help me raise money to build schools for underprivileged children in developing countries CLICK HERE

And when you’re done with that, please vote for my blog!