Bolt huh? Should've called her Cujo.

Meet our new puppy Bolt. We've discussed bringing a puppy into our family for a long time now, though normally in a "one day when the cats all die of old age" kind of way. However this three month old SPCA girl had been giving us please-take-me-home eyes at Animates for weeks now. Six weeks! Poor thing.

 

Oh, these photos are completely misleading. Look at her - all lovely and innocent and butter-won't-melt-in-her-mouth. And she is. Until she sees a child or a cat, and then she turns into a rabid psychopath.

 

 Honestly. I mean, I love her, but she's all teeth and claws and TEETH! and what the hell was going on when I decided we needed a pup?!?!  

 

The kids have become eternal targets of her desire to chase anything that moves. Hell, they don't have to be moving. They only have to look at her and she throws herself on them in a fury of teeth and claws and snarls. And not in a 'puppy just wants to play' manner! We're talking nasty gashes and deep puncture wounds. My daydreams of a cute puppy playing nicely alongside the kids is cracking here!



 

 But we made our dog bed, and now it's time to pee in it. I'm sure the kids will eventually be able to climb down from the top of the furniture, and I'm sure our cat Pookie will eventually stop hiding in the wardrobe. It's just gonna take some patience, perseverance, and FML.

Let the Custard Burn

I never knew I was a ninja, until I realised I had mastered the art of the Stealthy Silent Bed Slide. This is the ability to slip out of bed from beside a sleeping child, without waking them. It's a technique that can take months if not years of practice, and often is only mastered by default, when the child has finally outgrown the need to have mumsey lying beside him/her in a state of feigned sleep, night after night.

For me, I have the Stealthy Silent Bed Slide down pat, now that my third-born is two and a half. Now I just have to master the art of Staying Awake While Feigning Sleep. Then I'll be a fully fledged Ninja Master of the 9th Order; able to levitate and start fires with my mind. Of course, pigs will fly before this ever comes to pass.

It's this tendency to Fall Asleep While Feigning Sleep that causes me to still be on the computer at 1am. (2am... 3am...) Which in some ways is a good thing. I'm still getting an okay amount of sleep... Well, except for those days when I'm so caught up in a design project that I exceed my stay awake limit and spend the next day doing the zombie shuffle, while the kids take advantage of my limited brain activity by getting up to as much mischief as they possibly can, in as short a time frame.

Take the Lily Bug's recent hair cut for example.

The pic of Bree's self-inflicted mullet was the last 6 photos my Samsung took before dying a gristly soda stream syrup-induced death. The other 5 were the same shot but blurry - the focus having died after dropping it in mud previously...

I'd like to say the reason she cut her own hair with paper scissors is because I was so diligently stirring the custard that I couldn't tear myself myself away from the stove for fear of lumps

That is true, in part. I was stirring custard in constant clockwise motion without pause. I was, in part, trying to avoid lumps. It's such a common occurrence in this house, the kids eat it regardless and think it's perfectly normal. That's right folks, those poor saps are growing up with the belief that custard is supposed to have the consistency and texture of stew.

But for the most part, I was stirring the custard so diligently because I had hit a mid-afternoon energy funk, and at that point stirring custard was the only function my brain was allowing me to do. That repetitive clockwise stirring motion had flipped the autopilot switch in my brain and I was caught in a continuous loop. Meanwhile, my darling daughter was going all Jack the Ripper on her blonde locks.

And boy, did she make a good (aka really quite bad) job of hair butchery! It wasn't a lock of hair or two that she lopped off - it was everything bar a couple of locks at the back she couldn't quite reach (or hadn't yet got to). And much of it was chopped well above her ears.  Joe Dirt would be jealous.

How do you salvage that? 

That was what the hairdresser asked, though she phrased the question a little more diplomatically.

A pixie-bob. Though still somewhat uneven looking, as the hairdresser had tried to push to one side the hair which refuses to grow any direction except straight across her forehead.  Still, it's an improvement.

Two weeks on, and I'm getting used to her new 'do' now. Her hair had taken four and a half years just to get to the length it was in the pic on the left, so she's probably going to be 7 before it touches her shoulders again. And there's far bigger things in the world to be upset about...

Note to self: Let the custard burn.

Sometimes the strangest seeming things are perfectly normal after all.

The problem with buying your children toothbrushes styled like racing cars, is that they will at some point - when you're peeling kumara and your back is turned - start pushing them across the kitchen floor while making broom broom noises.

This is the highlight of my SAHM day.

Do you want to know the highlight of yesterday?

Taking Guy Smiley to his Plunket appointment, only to find the building had moved. 

As in, the entire building had been shifted. 

Gone. 

Vanished. 

 
It's not the kind of thing you normally expect. Unless you share the same father as Willy Wonka. In which case, it would be quite ordinary to find a building had lifted itself by the seat of its pants to an entirely new location, just on the fly like that.

 In my universe however, building don't move about. So I drove up and down the street two or three times, squinting at the bare sections where the Plunket building and several other properties used to be, thinking I was somehow somehow missing it. Like maybe it had just shrunk or something. Really really small.

Then I went home and rang them, and learned the Plunket clinic had relocated. And no one had told me. And I had been on time for once too, which was a massive exercise in time management for me.

And that is my tale for today. My children are crowing like roosters while

(Edited two days later to add: I completely forgot to finish that sentence. ^^)

The Misadventures of Mummyzilla & the Brain-Sucking Zombies

WARNING: This is not a post filled with sun and laughter and jumping through muddy puddles while singing the Happy Happy Joy Joy song. I'm going to be frank. And not in a 'let's talk about perineal tears' kind of way. (Perineal Tears... Kinda sounds like a rock band.)

Yesterday evening I absolutely lost my rag. My brain combusted. Not in a scary Jake the Muss throw my kids around the room manner, but for a little while there I was pretty close to throwing MYSELF across the room in the grasping hope that knocking myself would give me a moment of peace and quiet.

The kids had been all over me like a fungal rash.  After a solid week of being sick, lethargic, clingy and increasingly bored, they'd regained their energy and, with me pre-occupied much of the day with trying to spring-clean the bedrooms, launched into stupid attention seeking behavior (the Lily Bug in particular - hitting and kicking at me every time she didn't have my full attention. Pushing me pushing me pushing me... Literally coming up behind me and giving me a shove, just for the satisfaction of seeing me lurch forward).

By 4pm I had stopped seeing two human children and had started seeing two brain-sucking zombie demons. Seriously. They were no longer my children. They had morphed. The Teen arrived home, and seeing that I was at some kind of emotional breaking point, she ignored my subliminal pleas for help (and my not-so-subliminal cries to the ceiling of "ohmygodsIjustneedabreak!"), went straight to the computer and stuck her earphones in so she could happily zone us all out.

By 6pm I had reached a "I know where people get that urge to smack their kids from" stage ( Do I need a disclaimer here to say I adore my children and despite a long moment of feeling like I was losing it, I would never Really. Lose. It?) So I asked The Teen to keep an eye on the darling delinquents so I could jump in the shower for ten minutes of peace and quiet. Five minutes later, Guy Not-So-Smiley was in the bathroom going "muuuum... muuuum" (which to me sounded like "braaaains... braaains") and two minutes after I was trying to get dressed with BOTH Smiley and the Lily Bug now right there in the bathroom with me.
I asked them to go back out to the lounge.
No one listened...
I asked a little louder. And louder.
I found myself screaming "Look just get out of the bloody bathroom and let me get dressed by myself for crying out loud!" so every neighbour in West Auckland could hear me scream irrationally at my pre-schoolers.

I really needed someone to take the kids away from me for half an hour - ten minutes even - and give me a freakin break. I had so much fed-up-ness choking me that I thought I was going to start popping blood vessels. Then I got so incredibly fed up at Char for never helping EVER and snapped at her "do you ever think about maybe saying 'hey mum, how bout I read the kids a story so you can have ten minutes to yourself?' Do you ever think about maybe offering some kind of help when you can see I'm at my fucking wits end?"

That went straight to a dead end street. She snapped at me for taking my shit out on her... Obviously completely missing the universal point that I was simply at my wits end...

Oh yes. That was the icing on the cake. I hear her teen angst problems every single day. She never asks how I am. She never raises a finger to so much as help wash the dishes. Never ever pays her sibs a shred of attention except to tell them get out of her face. I got on the phone to the Lad, balling my eyes out like I'd gone bat shit crazy...

Yesterday I felt like I completely lost touch with how to be a mum. Today I'm sharing this tale because I figure I'm not the only one who has these days. Right?

In those quiet moments, fear eats me alive.

Guy Smiley made a bolt for the road a couple of days ago. 

We were on the driveway of a friends house, about to hop in the car and go to a park. Distracted, I jabbered away about car headlights until my friend noticed Guy Smiley had edged well away from us and was waiting for me to notice him meters from the driveway's open gate.  I headed towards him. He bolted. I could see a 4WD coming and I ran, but he had a head start and in the nanoseconds before he reached the sidewalk I knew there was no way no way I was going to quite reach him before he reached that road. And he would have run straight out on to it, if it weren't for the fact that he faltered slightly when he hit the sidewalk - a fractional moment of hesitation that gave me just enough time to reach his side and grab him, and within seconds of the car that drove past in almost that same instant.

For a moment there, as I ran after him and saw that oncoming car, I truly thought I wouldn't reach him in time. It was a waking nightmare that lasted only seconds, but it has quite literally become a waking nightmare. Every small silent moment that I've found myself trapped in between then and now has caused those seconds to play again in my mind, and all the possible "what if" scenarios have churned over and over until I've felt my stomach begin to churn. Over and over.

Yes, it was all a happy ending in the end; what with me scooping him up in time, and hugging him, and repeating "oh god oh god" while he happily laughed and smacked me playfully in the face, as I walked back up my friend's driveway and buckled him into his carseat. Safe and secure. Not to be set down upon a front lawn when a gate is wide open ever again.

But the "what ifs"... They're going to torment me for a really long time. And rightly so.



                                                                                 End note: I'm terrible at self-editing. As you can probably tell by 90% of my waffle. However I have managed to remove about 9 paragraphs of what I wrote here originally, as I decided I didn't want to burden the world with all my self-doubts and blinding anxieties after all.

I'm down to my last clean pair of underwear...

Winter is never kind to my piles. And before you roll your eyes and think "oh great, she's resorted to writing about hemorrhoids", rest assured, it is washing piles of which I speak. (This time...)

I know, blogging about laundry is one of the most droll topics in the world and quite possibly worse to suffer through than hemorrhoids, but before you roll your eyes even further, just wait a moment. I need help. I'm in a serious situation here. There is... I can't... I'm... I'm desperate. I'm drowning. Laundry seems to have been dumped upon our house like a snow bomb. I don't know where it's come from, but I'm almost tempted to roll it up into balls and throw it at the kids while shouting "snowball fight!" (Or in truth, while shouting "do your own bloody laundry for crying out loud I'm over it!")

I had a horrific nightmare on the weekend that the children were crying out for me and I couldn't reach them. I was trapped in a pitch black room, completely disorientated and something had tangled me up so I couldn't break free.

Then the Lad flicked on the bedroom light and I realised in my sleep-groggy state that the children were crying out for me and I really was tangled up - in washing!

I had slept through Guy Smiley calling out for me through the monitor at 3am.
I slept through him crying for me.
I slept through the Lily Bug waking and joining in the chorus of "Muuum! Mummy where you?!"
Then when their increasingly-frantic voices finally switched me into middle-of-the-night autopilot mode, I jumped to my feet and veered off in the wrong direction.
The dirty washing mountain had avalanched through the night so that it was no longer contained behind the bedroom door but in fact sprawled across the floor.
It disorientated me.
To make matters worse, I was so half-asleep, I wasn't even sure at that point what room I was in (Hell. The room I was in was called Hell.) and I kept trying to head towards the sounds of the kids through the baby monitor rather than the actual door on the opposite wall.
Truly, it was a horrific unnerving experience.

Note sarcasm about that 'otherwise immaculate house'...

Now normally, in the ideal world, nice neat laundry lives in a dresser or a wardrobe (or so I've been told.) And this is the conundrum we've arrived at: When we have more damp or dirty washing than we have neat and clean, where does it all go?

There are five of us in this house (excluding cats), we don't have a drier, and although winter has been fairly mild for us so far, Murphy's Law dictates that every time I try to hang washing on the line - even if it's a fine winter day - the clouds will smash together and dump water onto my nice clean laundry. Not because it's winter and that's what clouds do, but because I pissed off a Pagan Rain God, and I don't even know why.

The drying rack in the lounge is buckling beneath the weight of one load of towels, one school uniform, as many socks and undies as I could find amid the wreckage of the bedroom.The changeable weather has me darting in and out the door, hanging out washing then whipping it back in again at the sign of a shower until I feel like a human yoyo. (We had a thunderstorm this morning, then clear blue sky for most of the afternoon, then a sudden shower. FML!)

I'm down to my last clean pair of underwear. I've worn the same pair of jeans for four days straight. I haven't seen the Lad in over 24 hours but I did hear muffled screams yesterday and in hindsight, I think he may have been buried alive in the washing pile behind our bedroom door. And if that's the case. It's too late for him now. There were far too many of his rotten old socks in that pile for anyone to have survived the toxic fumes.

So as you can see, we're hitting crisis level here, and it won't be long until the house itself is buried and our family will be nothing but a history lesson for future school children. Kind of like the people of Te Wairoa. But without the volcanic eruption.

[Edited to add: Look at how much I have managed to write on the subject of LAUNDRY for crying out loud?! I need to get out of the house more...]

It's been a long week...

It's been a long week with the Lad in America, and the monkeys and I'm counting down the day until he comes home (one more sleep - yay!) while snotty tissues mount up around us, and the early onset of winter sickness quells any urge to stomp around outside in muddy puddles.

Right now I sit here with nerves frayed from too many late nights trying to catch up on my tendency to schedule in too many design jobs all at once, as the monkeys swing off furniture, using my body as a spring board. Who knew my shoulders would be such a fun place to leap from?

Usually when the household turns to chaos, I grab a camera and photograph it. It's like I'm planning for my eventual Alzheimers and every little experience - even the messiest ones - are moments I never want to forget.

But not today. Today I'm missing my Lad, and sick and tired of the cabin-fever. Today it just feels like too much weight for my shoulders to bear.

I think... I think my blog is moving...

I have not had much time to blog these days. In fact, I have barely blogged since January when I began creating graphics in exchange for the cash that funds our additional groceries (you know, the additional groceries we need by the weekend, after we've already spent our budget on the week's first wave of groceries, followed closely by 'money the teen needs for stuff like the school bus' and 'petrol to raise the gauge to empty').

And it sucks. It sucks because there is many a time when I want to blog, but I also need to finish a graphic job I've been commissioned to do. So when I weigh up financial gain against prosical soul purging (prosical? I made up that word. I couldn't think of the right word.) ... well... financial gain tends to win time and time again.

By the way - and this is completely off topic from my original topic - but no one even tried to guess what the fecal-looking matter was that was photographed upon a piece of toast in my last post. I am so so sad about that. That photo was my ultimate April Fools prank (April Fools day is 365 days a year in our household).  And I thought an open-ended question upon the lines of "guess what the poo-looking stuff on my toast is!" would generate feedback of some kind... :P

I did wonder if I'd offended people with my take on, eh, photographic art. But then I realised, Silly Callie. The scant few who read this blog never even saw the photo - they stopped reading when the opening paragraph suggested chilli sausage and labour would not make for a very ladylike combination!

Tree gum.

It was knobbly brown tree gum photographed on top of that piece of toast. We discovered it when geo-caching with friends at a nearby reserve. The Lily Bug ran towards me screaming "hold this poo mum!" and I nearly died. After finally being convinced it was tree gum, I collected up as much as I could find, to use in pranks on the family members. I'm incredibly mature like that.

 This photo contains no fecal matter at all. Though with a stormwater pipe running directly into Narrow Neck beach, I cannot offer a guarantee.

Anyway, back to the original point of this long-winded post...

While in the process of setting up my Infinite Monkey Design website, I've realised that rather than register yet another domain name (I have three already. Greedy pig I am.) it would make more sense to shift infinitemonkey.co.nz off blogger.com and on to my own webhost, which will revert this blog back to being infinitemonkeynz.blogspot.com. Unless I can redirect the subdomain blog.infinitemonkey.co.nz to my blogspot url.

Whichever option I go with in the next few days, I'm not sure if this blog's rss feed will become broken once the URLs change. So the gist of this ramble is, if you never have an update from me ever again, my switching about has likely disabled my rss feed, in which case please go directly to infinitemonkeynz.blogspot.com (or blog.infinitemonkey.co.nz).

Because... Seriously... Oh invisible and most likely non-existent readers... You don't want to miss out on my next blog post that's all written up and ready to post. 

It's all about perenial tears.

I've never had one, just for the record. But my next blog post is going to be all about them and you don't want to miss something like that, right?


RIGHT???!!!??

Things you probably don't want to know about me #37

What I'm about to tell you should not be revealed to anyone.

 I mean it.

I shouldn't be telling you this.

Why?

It's not highly classified government information. I'm not whistle-blowing on a large organisation. It's not a deep dark childhood secret that only a trained professional should ever have to deal with.

It's just pretty distasteful really.

In just a couple of days, Guy Smiley will celebrate his 2nd birthday. And I've been reminiscing on the events that led up to the birthing of my 10lb monster (sweet, lovely, loving monster that he is). Events I wish to share. Events that are perhaps, best kept between me and those poor hapless souls who were present in the room at his birth.

You see, I made the mistake of eating home made pizza with large quantities of chilli sausage & cheese the night before labour.

I don't know what drove me to it, especially when I knew the bun in my oven was well overdue. And especially after having endured a few weeks of excruciating 3rd trimester constipation. So as my own personal brand of Murphy's Law would have it, I woke the next morning at about 6am with bowl cramps that surpassed the labour pain I also found myself experiencing. Yup. There was no way I'd be having a water birth now.

I know. Whether or not you know me in person, this is already more than you've ever wanted to know about me. But wait, there's more...

So, a couple of weeks later when I had the courage to ask (and because I have a strange poo curiosity at times), I asked my midwife how common it was to poop oneself during childbirth.

"Every time." She told me. Every time?

"Yes. But usually the mummies have no idea, and even the dads don't notice - I'm very good at cleaning up discreetly."

I should've left it at that. Much as you should've left this post after my opening sentence. But like a rubber-necking passing a road accident, I had to know.   "So... Did...?"

"Absolutely."

Oh. I was so hoping she was going to lie to me.

But being as frank as my wonderful midwife was, she felt compelled to elaborate. "But don't worry, I just kept layering the paper towels over top. Again and again and again...."

Oh. Dear. Gods. No.

Which is probably the same thing you're thinking, as you wonder why I'm sharing this.

So I'll leave you now, with that to mull over. And I'll also leave you with this photo I took the other day. 10 points if you can tell me WHAT ON EARTH is on that piece of toast?

Seriously. I'll give you 10 points if you guess correctly. Because I'm generous like that. I'll also throw in a free piece of toast.



dɐs ǝǝɹʇ s,ʇI :ɹǝʍsuɐ ǝɥʇ

Finding My Wonderwoman Alter-Ego

I doodled a series of stick figure pictures the other night, when I was waiting for a turn on the computer. I had been wondering how I'd ever get time to finish the various graphic & website projects I've simultaneously begun, in the variable time between getting fractious children to bed, and one of them waking up again (thus causing me to fall asleep along side him/her, for the rest of the night.)

This one's dedicated to any parent who's ever found it difficult to have quality time for themselves:

Now it's time to go. As I sit here wasting time on the computer, I'm missing out on serious quality time with the kids, quality time with the dishes waiting in the sink (still), the vacuuming, the large pile of 'too much stuff' to sort through in the bedrooms, the pantry that needs cleaning out (don't get me started on the fridge), the sprawling train tracks waiting to be rebuilt across the lounge floor (after the vacuuming), the batch of playdough waiting to be made, the overgrown lawn....

I'd like to have a Wonder Woman alter-ego to deal with the majority of this (or a paid cleaner, or a Really Helpful Teen as opposed to Really Apathetic), but who am I kidding? This is all just Normal Every Day Woman stuff. Suck it up Callie!

Mirror Mirror on the wall....

Avoiding the mirror is why it's taken several weeks to realise I once again have Trump hair. A clear sign that I should probably make more of an effort. (Or 'an effort'. In general. Truth be told.)

My weekly make up routine is to coat my eyes in black eyeliner at some point throughout the weekend, and spend the rest of the week pushing that same application back up under my eyes until it finally wears itself off. A 'mud masque' is what the Lily Bug gives me when she's been outside jumping in puddles and has squeezed my face with her hands as a way of saying 'shuush mum, don't tell me it's time to come inside yet'.

In all honestly, I barely even remember to look in the mirror before I leave the house.  Most days, I can actually have a shower and brush my teeth without flicking a single sidelong glance at the looking glass. I probably walk around with toothpaste at the corner of my mouth far more often than I'd ever like to know. Which is why ignorance is bliss.

So when a skin care product was sent out for me to review, I was slightly bemused at the notion that I now had a reason to push my face up to the mirror (you'd think a little bit of pride in ones appearance would be a motivating factor in the first place eh?)

Here I am, prior to Olay. Serious.

The product? Olay Total Effects 7-in-one Day Cream with SPF15. The back description of the packaging promised to fight the following:
1. Fine lines and wrinkles.
2. Uneven tone.
3. Age spots.
4. Uneven texture.
5. Dryness.
6. Dullness.
7. Pores

Wow. Did this product have its work cut out for it with my lined, tired, dull, dry, uneven and open pored skin!

As you can probably determine by my opening sentence alone, I'm not a skin care routine kind of person. That whole process of cleansing, toning, moisturising... even applying sunblock. Way too much effort for me. Partly because I'm deeply cynical of beauty product pick up lines, and partly because I've been existing on a combination of 4 hours sleep per night, a bucket of caffine per day and sheer force of will for so long now, I think anything that promises to fight my body's age signs is facing a losing battle.

But, I gave this product a shot. And okay... Maybe I even hid it greedily from the rest of the family, and secretly reveled in having something to put on my skin other than coffee dribbles and toothpaste.

First thing I noticed about Olay Total Effects is that it was nice to apply. It felt nice and light on my skin, didn't leave a grease slick in its wake, and absorbed quick enough for me to apply make up shortly afterwards (yes, I busted out the all-but-forgotten Shisedo Moisture Mist for the occasion. Being that I was finally at the mirror and staring bleakly at my tired tired face, I realised I needed it.)

There's another reason why I usually make no effort to wear moisturiser. In times past, I've had issues finding something that my skin doesn't react to, and that doesn't make my make up slide off my face and pool at my feet.

My lil' bottle of Olay Total Effects promised to be formulated for sensitive skin, but I'd tried 'sensitive skin' moisturiser before, and ended up with nasty itchy under-the-skin bumps all over my face and neck within a fortnight. With Olay, I was pleasantly surprised to find my skin didn't react negatively at all. Not a bump. Not an itch. Not after a week, not after three. And, my make up stayed in place over top of it. Bonus.

I was also really pleased to be wearing something with SPF protection. I HATE putting gross and greasy sunblock on my face, but my inner-goth tends to steer clear of the sun anyway so I tell myself it doesn't matter. Except for those days where I've spent 3 hours in the full sun while at the beach with the kids. Stupid inner-goth for forgetting the children LIKE to go out into sunlight with their mother. Thanks to Olay, I was able to spend an afternoon at Western Springs Park with the munchkins, and not wind up with a burnt nose. Awesome sauce.

But wait, what about those 7 Signs of Aging? Unfortunately I have to tell you I didn't have visitors stop by and jump back in shock while declaring "Callie! You remind me of that Star Trek episode where the people grow younger as they age!" But, that could be because there were no visitors...  But although my age lines are still present, I do think it helped with the dullness somewhat. I'm prone to skin breakouts once a month, but during this trial, I didn't suffer that problem.

I'm still sitting on the fence as to how effective Olay Total Effects was at fighting those seven signs of aging, but I have to admit that after a fortnight or so of applying it every day, I started feeling good about my skin. Maybe it was the power of suggestion, maybe it was my body simply feeling grateful for getting a bit of TLC. We may never know...

But, I've given you a 'before' picture, now I'll leave you with an 'after' shot. Let you decide just how effective this product was....

After Olay. Rrrooowl!

And runny grobbles for the children

I don't want to blog about my supermarket misadventures - I don't want to be that tedious. But if we're going to be honest here, I have been driven bat shit crazy and I have to get this off my chest:  My last half a dozen trips to the supermarket have been like a trip. A bad LSD trip from my teenage days. Except this time the chocolate bars aren't talking to me.

You know those contests where a person is given 60 seconds to race around and fill their trolley with as much random crap as they can throw in it? My shopping trips are like that, except I don't get to win my groceries at the end. Nor do I end up with anything I actually want and/or need. I just get a small child who tries to climb the confectionery shelves at the checkout while I shove my random stuff onto the conveyer belt and pray I've slung together enough groceries to actually prepare at least one complete dinner for the week. Because Gods help me if I have to come back to this damned place again today.

This isn't my photo. My camera is broken again, so I kinda borrowed this from foto-grafik.deviantart.com

 The agitator here is Guy Smiley, who, at the darling age of two-in-three-months, is at this charming stage where he rebels against any kind of constraint. Car seat constraints are where the trouble begins, but that's a halfway manageable problem. With enough perseverance and brute force on my part (gentle brute force, I should add), he will eventually consent to being buckled into his seat. It's the battle for the supermarket trolley's toddler seat that I absolutely cannot win. Not even with chocolate bars. Talking or otherwise.

Being constrained to stay at my side once we enter the supermarket sparks insurgence. For approximately five seconds, Guy Smiley will pretend to hold my hand, until that exact moment when I think to myself "yay, he's going to be placid toda - aaahhhfuckit!" And he's off. Legging it at the fist opportunity, as fast as his fat little legs can project him. Then as an added blow to my will to live, he'll drop to a thrashing dead weight when I try to pick him up.  It's guerrilla warfare, and I'm throwing canned missiles into my trolley in the futile hope of being able to strike some kind of culinary taste-bomb once I get home.

The Lily Bug is no help at all. Not that I should expect her to be, at the tender age of four-in-two-months. She'll say "I'll go get him mum!" and the next moment she's hot on his heels, tugging at his hand and squealing "come on, let's go this way!" The supermarket has become my children's training ground for total anarchy.

As the Lad helpfully offered, "really Callie, you're trips to the supermarket are pretty fucking pointless". And the Lad would be right.

Though, I challenge him to do a better job, when his son is rocketing through the store like a runaway pinball and the walls are closing in on him as he's caught in the grip of what could be an acid flashback of '93 but is most likely a really bad anxiety attack..

My dreams are still filled with the disapproving frowns of disapproving shoppers with their disapproving head shakes and their disapproving mutters of .. well... disapproval. Bastards.

Please, if you see a blue haired lady dashing through Countdown Westgate in pursuit of two wee Che Guevara's... Please throw some grocery staples into her trolley. She always forgets the sugar, flour or toilet paper, and it's it's been about two months since the bathroom last had a light bulb.

Feelin' Kinda Smurfy

Okay, so dying my hair blue wasn't one of my smartest ideas. Though, couldn't be worse than the mohawk of '99, the Accidental Mullet of '93, or the I Ran Away From Home Now No One Will Recognise Me Undercut of '91.

... I think ...

Callie Logic dictates that if you're feeling kinda old and haggard and full of promises and dreams unfullfilled; dye your hair Smurfy Blue. It will make you feel younger, and it will make children laugh. At you or with you? What does it matter.

Do I wish I'd worn gloves during application? Yes. *facepalm*

Do I wish I'd gone through this makeover after the upcoming Kindy Christmas party and young child's birthday party? Absolutely. Someone is bound to ask if I juggle. For a living.

In other news... Where can I find advent calenders? The Teen has been moaning and whinging for days that she has never ever had an advent calender (though I argue she did have one once upon a time, a long long time ago - and I believe she may have eaten all the chocolate in one sitting. Or maybe that was me?) Of course, just my luck that when I finally venture out to the dreaded mall to buy three of them (what's the harm in starting late in the month?) they're all gone.

Once again I have proven to be a total let down - filled with promises and dreams unfulfilled. The hair colour didn't save me from that after all. (Aww don't worry, I'm not going all sad and Emo - I write this in mirth. Mirth I tell you! Maybe I should just do a lil sticky-out-tongue face? :P)

101 Totally Awesome Things About My Life *note sarcasm*

I am not a Mall person.  Malls make me anxious.

I don't know if it's due to the throngs of people who meander slowly ahead of me when I'm trying to chase down my wayward children, or a sub-conscious fear that if the Zombie Apocalypse was to happen while in a mall, I'd be trapped with a shitload of annoying teenagers and prissy office girls enjoying an 'extended lunchbreak'.

God forbid. I wouldn't know whether to run from the brain eating zombies or the girls stampeding their way to Supre for a free-for-all. Either way...  Though, least if I were trapped in a Mall, I could find refuge in the confectionery isle of K-Mart - no self-conscious teen or stereotypically skinny office girl would be seen undead there, right?

Wait, it's the zombies I'm meant to be running from in this scenario, isn't it? Damn it, I forgot what nightmare situation I was writing about for a minute there.

In fact, I completely forgot what I was writing about from the moment I typed the words 'Zombie Apocalypse'.

Oh. That's right. Christmas shopping.

 For the most part, we've got Christmas sorted, but there's going to come a time - very soon now - where I'm gonna have to suck in a big brave breath and negotiate my way through a mall teeming with crazy-eyed shoppers and brain-eating teenagers.

It is inevitable that in the next three weeks, I will find myself trapped in a unbearably long checkout line with my six rolls of gift wrap, shopping basket of confectionery 'stocking stuffers' and a box set of American Chopper that no staff member will be able to find the discs for.  I will worry that my card will decline, even though I know there will be enough money on it to cover what I am about to purchase. The children will transform into snarling Wargs and Grumkins as soon as they see the shelf of lollipops alongside them. Someone will begin to cry.

In that moment, the walls will close in on me as the anxiety attack takes its hold. I will consider Pirate Bay as the source for the Lad's box set, rethink the necessity of Christmas stockings and start wondering if we really need all this wrapping paper, or if we could just upcycle the kids impressive stash of Playcentre paintings...

Looks like they're painting Christmas colours to me! Or as the Lad suggests, Zombie brain splatter patterns!

All of this will happen. It's a scenario that's as much a nightmare tradition for our family as leaving up the Christmas tree for the first four months of the new year and drawing a face on a toilet roll and calling it the Xmas tree fairy because we've lost the original (actually, that one's not tradition at all, but I'm planning on making it so this year - just for shits and giggles.)

But as far as shopping malls go, I'll have my say in that at least. And I'll take my chances with Westgate. It's spacious outdoor design and dead boring selections of shops should filter out most of the teeming hoardes, and if all else fails, there's a Hunting and Fishing shop up the road, just in case I need to score myself some guns to deal with any f#%^ng annoying teenag  zombies.