Episode 11 - Littering

It’s been a few weeks between posts.  I’ve been busy. 

Thursday.  My alarm went off at 4:30, so early my body tried desperately to convince me it must be a horrible mistake and to go back to sleep.  The day proceeded to be so jam packed, I didn’t even manage to get to the bathroom for about twelve hours, wondering vaguely at one stage, “I’m sure that can’t be good for me…”

By the time I got home with the kids from kindy at 6pm, we were all exhausted and cranky.  As I threw together a less than nutritional meal of baked beans for the small people, I realised three things: our neighbours dogs were making more noise than usual, our dogs were making more noise than usual, and there were loud birds squeaking outside.  My deduction was that the neighbours had bought a couple of birds that their dogs were barking at, and our dogs were barking at theirs.  Simple.

But night fell, and the bird noises continued.  “Hey honey,” I yelled at my weary spouse the second he walked in the door, “I think next door got birds.”  He ignored my clearly delirious statement, and we both set to work getting the kids into bed so we could collapse too.

Cleaning up the kitchen, I threw some scraps to our German Shepherds.  But Saba, our ravenous female, didn’t appear.  And then I noticed the squeaking was even louder, despite it being long past birdy bedtimes.  And finally, the slow mummy had a very belated epiphany:

“Babe?  I don’t think it’s birds…”

My husband came to the door and listened.  “Oh my God, we need a light!  Where’s the torch?”

“We don’t have one!” I said frantically, my skills as a shoddy home-maker exposed.

“We have to!  What about Smudge?  Doesn’t he have a torch?”

So that was how we found ourselves searching the backyard using a Thomas the Tank Engine shaped flash light, which only stayed on for ten seconds at a time, and made inane statements like, “Hello!  I’m Thomas!” and “I’m a really useful engine!” in an overly cheerful voice.

And we found seven puppies.

Yup.  Saba wasn’t just hungry and a bit fat.  She was pregnant.  She'd had the puppies near the fence, hence next door's dogs barking, our dogs were barking at next door's and the "birds" was the puppies crying for milk.  We moved her and the litter inside, both myself and the husband more than a little shell-shocked.

“You know,” I said to Saba as I lay on my belly an hour later, attempting to attach puppies to dog nipples, “I was going to drink wine and go to bed early.  This isn’t how I was planning on spending my night.”

In response to my lack of wonder for the life-changing event that is birth, Saba stood up, faced her rear-end towards me and another puppy fell out not ten inches from my face.  Nice.

There was one final surprise for the evening.  After we finally fell into bed, we discovered that puppies are even noisier than newborns.  Husband went to check on them around midnight, and returned saying, “Now there’s nine.”

“Nine what?”

“Nine puppies.”

“…No… No I refute that.”

But denial or not, there are now nine puppies in my laundry.  Add that to the three dogs, two kids, one husband and many houseplants in various stages of decline and there seems to be no end to the list of small needy things that require my constant attentions. 

And so, I must take my sleep deprived self and I must go.  The puppies need repotting and the basil simply refuses to poo outside…

Episode 10 - Oodles of poodles

I have a theory about parenting:  it’s 50% entertainment and 50% excrement.

Under the excremental banner flies the big four: poo, wee, vomit, blood.  Snot and spit occasionally sneak in there, but if you can deal with the former, the latter will be a breeze.

But even as a parent of two exceptionally gifted excreters, I can still get taken by surprise occasionally.  Tuesday morning for example.

There we all are, the perfect little family, mum and dad making breakfast, the 3 year old eating Weet-bix, the baby playing happily on the floor.  Suddenly, an intense odour swamped the kitchen. 

“Poo!” yells Smudge, looking up from his Weet-bix.

“Yours!” cries my loving husband.  I sigh and head over to pick up the baby.  But instead of the poo being inside the nappy, waiting darkly to be changed, the poo has somehow defied gravity and is ALL OVER the floor.  The baby is sitting in the middle of a gigantic, sloppy puddle of brown, running his fingers merrily through it, drawing on the tiles and the window.  And as I watched in shock, he lifted his chubby, poo covered hand, looked at it curiously, then stuffed it in his mouth.

I don’t need to go into further details.  You don’t need to hear about the screaming, yelling, showering, mopping, outfit changing, Glen-20ing and gagging that ensued. 

But as gross as poo eating is, this is what I found really offensive out of the whole incident: not twenty minutes prior to this, the baby was sitting in his high chair, flat out refusing to eat breaky.  And it was a good breaky too!  Cereal with fruity bits, a banana, toast spread with children’s low-sodium Vegemite and lovingly cut into little fingers.  He wouldn’t have a bar of it.

But a handful of his own faeces… yum.  What the?!  The fact that he will snub my nutritional and balanced meal and decide to eat poo is what amazes and annoys me. 

That’s why I love parenting: it’s weird in ways you can’t even imagine before you begin.  You’ll laugh harder that you ever did before and cry more too.  Sometimes you’ll do both at the same time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a nappy bin that needs changing…

Episode 9 - "Tense" conversations

My son is learning about tense.  He’s a very bright three year old, and he understands the concept of past, present and future.  Unfortunately, at the moment, everything past is “last night”, whether it happened two months or two minutes ago.  It doesn’t sound like a big deal, does it?  And yet, I find that it keeps leading me into strange conversational corridors…

The concrete slab on our house is leaking, so we’ve had workmen turning up and needing to be let in for the last few days.  They troop in and out, carrying equipment and ladders and buckets, much to my son’s unending delight.  “Men mummy!  Men are here!  Hello man!  What choo doin’?”  Smudge tends to get a little too curious in how things like power drills and concrete glue work, so most of the time, I send him off to his room to keep him out of the road.

That day, my husband had gone straight from work to a mates place to watch the footy, getting in after we had all gone to bed.  So when Smudge finally caught up with him the next morning, the first words out of his mouth were, “Daddy, men came over last night and mummy let them in!  Men came to my house last night and mummy sent me to my room.”

Luckily, my husband does trust my fidelity, so he didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that I had been hosting a threesome whilst he was out for the evening, but my son’s statement still took a bit of explaining, and me giggling through the whole thing probably didn’t help my case.

Then there was the lengthy explanation required by Smudge’s kindy teacher.  She approached me the other afternoon and gently began touting the dangers of night swimming.  Confused I replied, “I know night swimming is dangerous…  What’s this about?”

Of course, Smudge had been informing her all day that I took him to the beach “last night” and he went swimming.  Kindy immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was letting my three year old paddle in the night sea, when the reality was Smudge went to the rock pools on a Sunday morning and got wet up to his knees.

His other delightful statement for the week was to poke me in the belly and say, “Mummy, your tummy is soft and HUGE!”  What an ego boost.

We spend the first few years with our kids teaching them a language, encouraging them to learn words and form sentences.  Then we spend the next few years wishing we could make them pipe down and not repeat embarrassing phrases.  But having watched one of my close friends deal with her autistic and language delayed children, I know there is nothing sweeter that helping my boys learn to find their way vocally in this world.  Even if that means I have some explaining to do along the way.