Do a Google image search on chicken pox.
‘Nuff said.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Today, In Lizzie's World
Did you know that it is indeed entirely possible to be so tired that the area around your eyes puffs up to Epic Bee Sting Proportions?
I actually had to check - no missed bee sting (and I’m not allergic to anything either). My face probably looks like my poor, befuddled brain feels after just three hours of sleep. I should have napped today. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Instead of depositing my weary body back in bed after the school run this morning I found myself stuck in the classroom helping tie strings to kites. Okay, so my manual dexterity isn’t all that crash-hot at the best of times, but throw in several extra waking hours and my fingers just would not work this morning. Then after that, I had to go to the supermarket. Lots of impulse buying, you can be sure. Came home. Pottered. Mostly I ignored the breakfast dishes. Decided I’d better take a nap before I collapsed but then, O Stupid Internet, you sucked me in. I checked my eleventy-six email addresses and found myself typing out a lengthy reply on a forum on the issue of private health insurance. Yeah, ’cause my head is totally in the right place for that discussion. Then I looked at the clock and watched it click over from ‘comfortable stretch of time in which to take a nap before I have to leave to get the kids’ to ‘Will half an hour do the job?’ to ‘Good grief woman! Sleep when you get to the school!’
Sigh. Sleep. It mocks me (Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact I stay up too late. No, not at all….)
My answer to all this fuzzy-headed blech-ness? SUGAR. Lots and lots of sugar.
The answer to the massive downward sugar spiral I’m bound to be enduring riiiiiiight about the time the kids walk in the front door?
Lots and lots of PARACETEMOL.
I actually had to check - no missed bee sting (and I’m not allergic to anything either). My face probably looks like my poor, befuddled brain feels after just three hours of sleep. I should have napped today. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Instead of depositing my weary body back in bed after the school run this morning I found myself stuck in the classroom helping tie strings to kites. Okay, so my manual dexterity isn’t all that crash-hot at the best of times, but throw in several extra waking hours and my fingers just would not work this morning. Then after that, I had to go to the supermarket. Lots of impulse buying, you can be sure. Came home. Pottered. Mostly I ignored the breakfast dishes. Decided I’d better take a nap before I collapsed but then, O Stupid Internet, you sucked me in. I checked my eleventy-six email addresses and found myself typing out a lengthy reply on a forum on the issue of private health insurance. Yeah, ’cause my head is totally in the right place for that discussion. Then I looked at the clock and watched it click over from ‘comfortable stretch of time in which to take a nap before I have to leave to get the kids’ to ‘Will half an hour do the job?’ to ‘Good grief woman! Sleep when you get to the school!’
Sigh. Sleep. It mocks me (Nothing whatsoever to do with the fact I stay up too late. No, not at all….)
My answer to all this fuzzy-headed blech-ness? SUGAR. Lots and lots of sugar.
The answer to the massive downward sugar spiral I’m bound to be enduring riiiiiiight about the time the kids walk in the front door?
Lots and lots of PARACETEMOL.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Yum Cha Lizzie
Because I’m too lazy to do a ‘real’ post…
The vegie garden idea has morphed - I’m now looking at container varieties. The pots will be in the same spot (it’s bare garden bed at present) because of the sun situation but this way gives a little more flexibility as the shadows come across the yard and it lends itself better to ’starting out small’, at the request of Talented Hubby. Darn that practical man. Sigh.
Next week is TH’s week-long stretch of dayshift. I actually rather enjoy the way his roster is structured at the moment - it’s more or less a week of days, a week of afternoons and a week off. With the kids in school on weekdays, during dayshift I have five glorious days of being alone in the house. This week coming I have some housework-y projects on the horizon and I’m actually drawing up a schedule for the week in order to tick a whole heap of things off my Home Projects list. Sort of like a pre-Spring clean. It’s also a good week to do things like cooking for the freezer (though none of that lately…) TH’s ‘off’ week also spans the weekdays so it gives us a chance to get a lot of errands done sans children and as a bonus, we avoid the busy times such as after school and weekends.
Did I mention that Talented Hubby got the promotion he had applied for? It only took seven weeks to hear the outcome (grumble grumble)but now we know and yay Hubs! Must say, I love his job. So proud of him.
I’ve been re-organizing my kitchen cupboards. I had intended doing this for BooMama’s “Before and After” carnival but then that went kaput so I procrastinated a little more. I finally got sick of the Tupperware Avalanche and dived in. I took a badly-organized corner cupboard and turned it into my ‘baking centre’ although time will tell whether this was a wise choice - we can sometimes have problems with ants and of course, brown sugar and icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar) stored down low might be a little too hard to keep ant-less during summer in a few months. We’ll see how we go. The cupboard in question is one of those really deep things with a funny hinged door. Two shelves. The bottom one got set aside for small electrical appliances, which had been residing in the pantry. This meant I could space out the pantry a bit. End result - much easier to find things.
Moved the cereal from the highest shelf in the pantry to one down low - I am determined to teach the kids how to pour their own cereal. This has been my own fault - the spilled cereal doesn’t bother me, but the spilled milk might. Have heard about the ‘trick’ of using a sauce (ketchup/mustard) squeezy bottle (a clean, new one!) and filling it with milk each night for the kids to squirt their own. My kids get up early. I do not. This would solve both the sleep deprivation (me) and the intense hunger (them - if you’ve seen the zombies in the movie 28 Weeks Later? Yep, that’s them). Though not nutritionally perfect (or even good, LOL) there are a couple of plainer cereals which we all prefer with a little sugar sprinkled on top so I’m going to look around for one of those large restaurant salt and pepper/herb shakers (Subway uses them for s + p)and stick a couple tablespoons of sugar in there each morning. Wha-la! Minimal mess, maximum sleepage.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get ‘mouse hand’? Think tennis elbow for computer geeks. Appearing mostly in the cooler months, mouse hand occurs over extended net surfing sessions. You’re not typing, but you’re still having to navigate between pages using your mouse. You suddenly realise that hand is freezing cold while your superfluous hand remains comfortably warm. It’s a great torture device. A ‘mouse hand’ down the back of a Playstation-playing spouse’s neck is fun for the whole family to watch. But I wouldn’t know anything about that. Nooooo……
The sun has been on holidays (or ‘vacay’ as the teen mags would have you say - what is up with THAT?)in my neck of the woods, so I’ve had to use the dryer quite a lot. It’s an itty bitty dryer and I am longing for Spring when I can begin line drying again.
I’m also really, really looking foward to the day when our fourth bedroom gets cleared of clutter (and The Beast - a rusty old home gym we have used exactly twelve times in the last decade)and Boofah moves in. He shares a set of bunks with his sister. Is it wrong that I’m less excited about my eight year old son finally having his own space and more excited about the prospect of not having to dangle precariously in mid air trying to manoeuvre a sheet onto the top bunk? ‘Tis true.
Hope your Saturday is sunny!
The vegie garden idea has morphed - I’m now looking at container varieties. The pots will be in the same spot (it’s bare garden bed at present) because of the sun situation but this way gives a little more flexibility as the shadows come across the yard and it lends itself better to ’starting out small’, at the request of Talented Hubby. Darn that practical man. Sigh.
Next week is TH’s week-long stretch of dayshift. I actually rather enjoy the way his roster is structured at the moment - it’s more or less a week of days, a week of afternoons and a week off. With the kids in school on weekdays, during dayshift I have five glorious days of being alone in the house. This week coming I have some housework-y projects on the horizon and I’m actually drawing up a schedule for the week in order to tick a whole heap of things off my Home Projects list. Sort of like a pre-Spring clean. It’s also a good week to do things like cooking for the freezer (though none of that lately…) TH’s ‘off’ week also spans the weekdays so it gives us a chance to get a lot of errands done sans children and as a bonus, we avoid the busy times such as after school and weekends.
Did I mention that Talented Hubby got the promotion he had applied for? It only took seven weeks to hear the outcome (grumble grumble)but now we know and yay Hubs! Must say, I love his job. So proud of him.
I’ve been re-organizing my kitchen cupboards. I had intended doing this for BooMama’s “Before and After” carnival but then that went kaput so I procrastinated a little more. I finally got sick of the Tupperware Avalanche and dived in. I took a badly-organized corner cupboard and turned it into my ‘baking centre’ although time will tell whether this was a wise choice - we can sometimes have problems with ants and of course, brown sugar and icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar) stored down low might be a little too hard to keep ant-less during summer in a few months. We’ll see how we go. The cupboard in question is one of those really deep things with a funny hinged door. Two shelves. The bottom one got set aside for small electrical appliances, which had been residing in the pantry. This meant I could space out the pantry a bit. End result - much easier to find things.
Moved the cereal from the highest shelf in the pantry to one down low - I am determined to teach the kids how to pour their own cereal. This has been my own fault - the spilled cereal doesn’t bother me, but the spilled milk might. Have heard about the ‘trick’ of using a sauce (ketchup/mustard) squeezy bottle (a clean, new one!) and filling it with milk each night for the kids to squirt their own. My kids get up early. I do not. This would solve both the sleep deprivation (me) and the intense hunger (them - if you’ve seen the zombies in the movie 28 Weeks Later? Yep, that’s them). Though not nutritionally perfect (or even good, LOL) there are a couple of plainer cereals which we all prefer with a little sugar sprinkled on top so I’m going to look around for one of those large restaurant salt and pepper/herb shakers (Subway uses them for s + p)and stick a couple tablespoons of sugar in there each morning. Wha-la! Minimal mess, maximum sleepage.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get ‘mouse hand’? Think tennis elbow for computer geeks. Appearing mostly in the cooler months, mouse hand occurs over extended net surfing sessions. You’re not typing, but you’re still having to navigate between pages using your mouse. You suddenly realise that hand is freezing cold while your superfluous hand remains comfortably warm. It’s a great torture device. A ‘mouse hand’ down the back of a Playstation-playing spouse’s neck is fun for the whole family to watch. But I wouldn’t know anything about that. Nooooo……
The sun has been on holidays (or ‘vacay’ as the teen mags would have you say - what is up with THAT?)in my neck of the woods, so I’ve had to use the dryer quite a lot. It’s an itty bitty dryer and I am longing for Spring when I can begin line drying again.
I’m also really, really looking foward to the day when our fourth bedroom gets cleared of clutter (and The Beast - a rusty old home gym we have used exactly twelve times in the last decade)and Boofah moves in. He shares a set of bunks with his sister. Is it wrong that I’m less excited about my eight year old son finally having his own space and more excited about the prospect of not having to dangle precariously in mid air trying to manoeuvre a sheet onto the top bunk? ‘Tis true.
Hope your Saturday is sunny!
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Best Vegies For The Beginner Gardener?
You gals on the net have been rubbing off on me for years - so this spring (remember, we’re south of the equator down here) I’ve decided it’s high time I plant a garden of some sort.
A couple of months ago a storm blew over the only tree in our backyard - it was a tiny thing, sure, but it was a tree, and now it’s gone, leaving a big ol’ gap. I had considered throwing some vegies in there but two things are holding me back. First, I’d have to seriously overhaul that portion of the garden, improve the soil, raise the beds and so on. That’s not exactly the ’start off small’ mentality I was aiming for. Second, while the space is a nice, manageable-but-not-tiny space, the sunlight aspect is a teensy bit questionable. It’s on the west side of the garden which means it gets a large chunk of sunlight in the morning but then shadows start to creep over. I’ve read vegies need at least 6 hours of full sunlight a day to grow best and better yet if that’s afternoon sun. We may get just that much but no full, bright sun all day long. Seasoned gardeners - will this massively affect the results? I’m not after massive prize winning vegies, just a little project that I can potter with that will hopefully bear ‘fruit’ with reduced grocery spending. I’m home tomorrow so intend marking the time off in that spot to be sure, but it would be a close call on the sun thing. I had considered container gardening but would have to purchase the pots in addition to the seeds/seedlings and the cheaper we can do this, the better. Seems silly to waste a perfectly good, vacant bed. Plus then there’s the issue of moving the pots to follow the sun
The bed has the advantage of being a clearly defined space (edged etc) and it has a sprinkler system running through it but I cannot presently use that for watering due to water restrictions (Australia is in a drought) - so it will all have to be hand-watered. Not an overly large space so that’s not a problem.
I already know I want to grow tomato plants. They’d go against the fence, staked of course. No idea about varieties though, LOL. Any Aussies who want to chime in with suggestions, be my guest. There are a lot of things that I’ve read would grow really well but there’s no point in plant something like watercress or brussel sprouts because we’d never eat them. Our tastes are pretty simple but if I could grow some of the more expensive-to-buy things such as capsicums (peppers), tomatoes and fresh herbs, then yay. The herby stuff might go into a container attached to a wall. Lettuce is another thing that can get quite expensive here. We just buy the iceberg most of the time because the bagged stuff is horrid (and, I hear, covered in e-coli and pesticides). Carrots are rising but I’m not sure the bed would be suitable for them unless we raise it quite a bit higher. Potatoes the same. I can train some beans up a trellis.
Guess the first step would be to accurately guage sunlight and then measure the space. Does anyone know of a site with information for beginner vegetable gardeners on a very basic, almost ‘a child could do this’ level of explanation? LOL. Something that covers everything I’d need to know - from building the bed, to caring for pests, what to plant, how much to plant (we’re a family of two adults and three kids - we’d like plenty but not so much we’re throwing it out)?
Oh - and because the bed is a ’shared’ one with non-edible plants, should I be taking any precautions when sectioning off the spot for the vegies? I already intend building it up high and bordering it off with sleepers, but have no idea how this works with the soil underneath all the good vegie growing stuff - ie, the soil which was already in the bed that the new stuff goes on top of. Do I need to put down some sort of barrier mat before I put in the new soil, just to make sure? This will all make far more sense when you see photos of the section of the garden bed, by the way, LOL.
If you’re a gardener or have some tips, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
A couple of months ago a storm blew over the only tree in our backyard - it was a tiny thing, sure, but it was a tree, and now it’s gone, leaving a big ol’ gap. I had considered throwing some vegies in there but two things are holding me back. First, I’d have to seriously overhaul that portion of the garden, improve the soil, raise the beds and so on. That’s not exactly the ’start off small’ mentality I was aiming for. Second, while the space is a nice, manageable-but-not-tiny space, the sunlight aspect is a teensy bit questionable. It’s on the west side of the garden which means it gets a large chunk of sunlight in the morning but then shadows start to creep over. I’ve read vegies need at least 6 hours of full sunlight a day to grow best and better yet if that’s afternoon sun. We may get just that much but no full, bright sun all day long. Seasoned gardeners - will this massively affect the results? I’m not after massive prize winning vegies, just a little project that I can potter with that will hopefully bear ‘fruit’ with reduced grocery spending. I’m home tomorrow so intend marking the time off in that spot to be sure, but it would be a close call on the sun thing. I had considered container gardening but would have to purchase the pots in addition to the seeds/seedlings and the cheaper we can do this, the better. Seems silly to waste a perfectly good, vacant bed. Plus then there’s the issue of moving the pots to follow the sun
The bed has the advantage of being a clearly defined space (edged etc) and it has a sprinkler system running through it but I cannot presently use that for watering due to water restrictions (Australia is in a drought) - so it will all have to be hand-watered. Not an overly large space so that’s not a problem.
I already know I want to grow tomato plants. They’d go against the fence, staked of course. No idea about varieties though, LOL. Any Aussies who want to chime in with suggestions, be my guest. There are a lot of things that I’ve read would grow really well but there’s no point in plant something like watercress or brussel sprouts because we’d never eat them. Our tastes are pretty simple but if I could grow some of the more expensive-to-buy things such as capsicums (peppers), tomatoes and fresh herbs, then yay. The herby stuff might go into a container attached to a wall. Lettuce is another thing that can get quite expensive here. We just buy the iceberg most of the time because the bagged stuff is horrid (and, I hear, covered in e-coli and pesticides). Carrots are rising but I’m not sure the bed would be suitable for them unless we raise it quite a bit higher. Potatoes the same. I can train some beans up a trellis.
Guess the first step would be to accurately guage sunlight and then measure the space. Does anyone know of a site with information for beginner vegetable gardeners on a very basic, almost ‘a child could do this’ level of explanation? LOL. Something that covers everything I’d need to know - from building the bed, to caring for pests, what to plant, how much to plant (we’re a family of two adults and three kids - we’d like plenty but not so much we’re throwing it out)?
Oh - and because the bed is a ’shared’ one with non-edible plants, should I be taking any precautions when sectioning off the spot for the vegies? I already intend building it up high and bordering it off with sleepers, but have no idea how this works with the soil underneath all the good vegie growing stuff - ie, the soil which was already in the bed that the new stuff goes on top of. Do I need to put down some sort of barrier mat before I put in the new soil, just to make sure? This will all make far more sense when you see photos of the section of the garden bed, by the way, LOL.
If you’re a gardener or have some tips, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
Oh Yeah...It Could Be Chicken Pox
Miss Moo’s best friend has the chicken pox.
The two girls are like peas in a pod.
They share EVERYTHING. Lunches, frequent hugs - the lot.
If Moo hasn’t got The Pox by the end of the week it will be a miracle, sigh. None of the kids have had it yet. I still hadn’t caught it by adulthood and had to be immunized against it (and the possible complications it could bring to an adult sufferer) a few years back. For better or worse, I chose not to immunize the children. My reasoning was, chicken pox is rarely dangerous in kids their age and there is some evidence to suggest natural immunity (ie, contracting the disease through regular childhood contact) works a little better. If they still hadn’t had it when they hit high school, my intention was always to seek the shots then (just for the record, I’m not pro or anti vaccinations - just pro personal choice. All my kids have had the scheduled shots. I even have an autistic son and don’t put much stock in the whole MMR debate.) Moo’s afternoon off school yesterday may be related - I’ve heard that you can feel a little ‘off’ a day or two before spots appear, like you’ve got a cold brewing? Can someone jump in and clear that up/confirm that for me?
So on the one hand, I’ve panicked and checked Moo’s extremities for spots this morning and yet on the other hand I’m not too worried about the possibility of her getting them. Clearly a tale of Woe and Destruction will fall about the house (groan, groan, groan) but if it happens, it happens.
And if it doesn’t…well that’s perfectly fine as well!
The two girls are like peas in a pod.
They share EVERYTHING. Lunches, frequent hugs - the lot.
If Moo hasn’t got The Pox by the end of the week it will be a miracle, sigh. None of the kids have had it yet. I still hadn’t caught it by adulthood and had to be immunized against it (and the possible complications it could bring to an adult sufferer) a few years back. For better or worse, I chose not to immunize the children. My reasoning was, chicken pox is rarely dangerous in kids their age and there is some evidence to suggest natural immunity (ie, contracting the disease through regular childhood contact) works a little better. If they still hadn’t had it when they hit high school, my intention was always to seek the shots then (just for the record, I’m not pro or anti vaccinations - just pro personal choice. All my kids have had the scheduled shots. I even have an autistic son and don’t put much stock in the whole MMR debate.) Moo’s afternoon off school yesterday may be related - I’ve heard that you can feel a little ‘off’ a day or two before spots appear, like you’ve got a cold brewing? Can someone jump in and clear that up/confirm that for me?
So on the one hand, I’ve panicked and checked Moo’s extremities for spots this morning and yet on the other hand I’m not too worried about the possibility of her getting them. Clearly a tale of Woe and Destruction will fall about the house (groan, groan, groan) but if it happens, it happens.
And if it doesn’t…well that’s perfectly fine as well!
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
The Mystery Illness That Was...Or Wasn't
I think we’ve been played. Played like a violin, people.
Today I went shopping with Talented Hubby. Okay, not so much with him - he was off looking at surround sound speaker stands, and I was rather dishearteningly shopping for clothes - but we were at least under the same postcode. Then my phone rings. I didn’t recognise the number.
“Oh hi - can I speak with Mrs XYZ please?”
“That’s me. What can I do for you?”
“It’s Sue from Little Brown Blazer Academy*.” Inwardly I groan because the only time your kid’s school calls you is when they are vomiting or have possible concussion. We’d already crossed the latter off of our list due to the nasty bump Boofah sustained trying to jump between two metal poles on the playground equipment.
“Moo is feeling a bit sick and would like you to come and pick her up.”
Immediately after calling Talented Hubby from the depths of the Man Cave (ie, the electronics store) we proceeded the twenty minutes home, dashing my hopes for a leisurely takeout lunch parked on the foreshore. No matter, I thought, my baby needs me. The last time any of the kids was sick - coincidentally, also Moo - it meant three days off school. I was anticipating a long, soggy and smelly night ahead.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the second we got her home, she promptly asked for her lunch, which she’d been unable to eat at school. Hmmm. Then she giggled and laughed and generally carried on in such a way as to throw doubt on the sudden stomach pain story. She is currently curled up on the couch watching cartoons, having a Grand Ol’ Poobah of a time. All she needs now are the guys with the palm fronds.
Talented Hubby and I discussed the possibility that something else may have happened at school to prompt a retreat to the front office - a fight with a friend, a run-in with a bully or something. That doesn’t appear to be the case but I’ll be asking her teacher about it when I head to the school soon to pick up Boofah. While we are very thankful the house isn’t currently residing in the green fog of gastro, it is a teeny bit exasperating. She’s as happy as a clam snuggled up on the couch with a quilt and a pillow. We recently got digital television so even though we don’t get near the channels as pay TV (cable), it has opened up a particular channel that plays children’s shows all day long, not just in the morning. Hog heaven for six year old girls :P
So do I think she was legitimate? She seems adamant that her tummy hurt but the grin on her face lends weight to the other side of the argument, that she managed to score an afternoon off school with very little effort. Teachers are trained to take the sight of a green-gilled child and send them direct to the office building and of course, when the support staff there asked her “Would you like us to call your Mum?”, she was quick to take them up on their offer.
Little Girl = 1
Sucker Parents = 0
Game on sweetpea. Game on.
* not their real school. They don’t even wear blazers, let alone brown ones.
Today I went shopping with Talented Hubby. Okay, not so much with him - he was off looking at surround sound speaker stands, and I was rather dishearteningly shopping for clothes - but we were at least under the same postcode. Then my phone rings. I didn’t recognise the number.
“Oh hi - can I speak with Mrs XYZ please?”
“That’s me. What can I do for you?”
“It’s Sue from Little Brown Blazer Academy*.” Inwardly I groan because the only time your kid’s school calls you is when they are vomiting or have possible concussion. We’d already crossed the latter off of our list due to the nasty bump Boofah sustained trying to jump between two metal poles on the playground equipment.
“Moo is feeling a bit sick and would like you to come and pick her up.”
Immediately after calling Talented Hubby from the depths of the Man Cave (ie, the electronics store) we proceeded the twenty minutes home, dashing my hopes for a leisurely takeout lunch parked on the foreshore. No matter, I thought, my baby needs me. The last time any of the kids was sick - coincidentally, also Moo - it meant three days off school. I was anticipating a long, soggy and smelly night ahead.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the second we got her home, she promptly asked for her lunch, which she’d been unable to eat at school. Hmmm. Then she giggled and laughed and generally carried on in such a way as to throw doubt on the sudden stomach pain story. She is currently curled up on the couch watching cartoons, having a Grand Ol’ Poobah of a time. All she needs now are the guys with the palm fronds.
Talented Hubby and I discussed the possibility that something else may have happened at school to prompt a retreat to the front office - a fight with a friend, a run-in with a bully or something. That doesn’t appear to be the case but I’ll be asking her teacher about it when I head to the school soon to pick up Boofah. While we are very thankful the house isn’t currently residing in the green fog of gastro, it is a teeny bit exasperating. She’s as happy as a clam snuggled up on the couch with a quilt and a pillow. We recently got digital television so even though we don’t get near the channels as pay TV (cable), it has opened up a particular channel that plays children’s shows all day long, not just in the morning. Hog heaven for six year old girls :P
So do I think she was legitimate? She seems adamant that her tummy hurt but the grin on her face lends weight to the other side of the argument, that she managed to score an afternoon off school with very little effort. Teachers are trained to take the sight of a green-gilled child and send them direct to the office building and of course, when the support staff there asked her “Would you like us to call your Mum?”, she was quick to take them up on their offer.
Little Girl = 1
Sucker Parents = 0
Game on sweetpea. Game on.
* not their real school. They don’t even wear blazers, let alone brown ones.
Okay, So It's 1910 And I'm In Canada...
The recent break from a hectic blogging schedule - which we can all agree, I was never very good at keeping anyway - has done me some good. I even remarked to Talented Hubby last night that I had not turned on the computer since the previous morning, a break of something like 36 hours. Totally unheard of.
I may possibly have forgotten this little electronic device due to a little, forgotten pleasure I call “reading”.
Several days ago, again remarking to a bemused TH, I mused that I had not read a book - really read a book, not just flicked through a cookbook or other ‘manually’ type arrangement of words - in months. I know. I can hardly believe it myself.
I used to be a seriously avid reader. As a teenager I lived in a semi-rural area, in one of a small cluster of towns of roughly equal size, each about a 20 minute drive from the next. We lived first in one of the towns and when we moved to the next town over my parents mercifully left me enrolled in my original high school and allowed me to take the bus the 40 mins there each way (we did a couple of doglegs to pick up other students). I was pretty lucky I suppose - the area was sufficiently small back then so as not to be able to support public transport, but a semi-private charter bus ran between my town and the next to take several special ed students to the region’s special school. With the bus already running but only a third full, they opened it up to students from the high school as well.
I loved the bus ride to and from school. It was beneficial for a number of reasons. First, I could snooze the extra time away. I could do my homework - the run was just long enough to produce fairly proficient work, LOL - or I could read.
I always had a book on the go in those days. As a preteen I had discovered The Baby-Sitter’s Club and loved that series with a passion, collecting the books way past the age that normally held interest. Once that fad had passed (I retained my 70 or so titles well into adulthood but eventually gave them away to a delighted young girl from a family with whom we shared a common wall in our second home) I moved on to more mature titles. As most of my friends lived much closer to the school and didn’t travel on the bus, I was kind of left to myself, which is exactly how I liked it.
I still read after I met TH and we’d started a family, but obviously not nearly as much. I do remember, quite vividly actually, reading book after book during the long middle-of-the-night breastfeeding sessions with both of the boys (first and second children). Reading was preferable to the endless infomercials on TV at that time of the night. This was all before I wised up to the idea that it was possible to breastfeed laying down. We all got far more sleep once Miss Moo arrived on the scene, LOL.
But I never noticed just how little I read for pleasure these days until last week. Sheepishly, I have to admit the internet has a fair bit to do with that downfall so I resolved to rectify the situation ASAP. Hence my day-and-a-half break. I took the kids to the library last Thursday and was happy to discover Janette Oke’s books. A friend of mine had recommended them and I’d seen them in the bookstores but with my track record with reading I didn’t want to borrow yet another set of books only to have to return them past the due date. But this time around I grabbed three titles - the first three of the Canadian West series if anyone is playing at home - and would you believe it, re-caught the reading bug.
The first book was dipped into over the first couple of days but at such an easy read, it wasn’t hard to steal 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there until I’d finished. Monday morning I picked up the second book, and early this evening I finished it. Then I picked up the third book, desperate to know what was going to happen to Elizabeth and Wynn. I did something I hadn’t done since my wild, pre-children days. I read the book straight through in one sitting. Yeowch. My eyes weren’t used to it and I highly suspect a headache will rear its ugly head in the morning (it’s already blooming now) but I’d forgotten what a rush it was to get so involved in a book that you just don’t want to put it down. I even stood at the stove tonight, book in one hand, spatula in the other. It was crazy. After not having read a proper fiction book for months, I clocked up three in five days.
You might say that this brief foray back into the world of literature has given me a ‘taste’ of the pleasures of reading again. Tomorrow I’ll log into the library system’s online catalogue and request several new books - hopefully in sequence - and when they arrive (could take some time), I fully intend to go off again. The books were so simple and refreshing. As I frequently travel about 25 minutes by bus to a nearby shopping centre for errands - this time using a city’s extensive public transport system - I’m going to start keeping a book in my handbag (purse). I have this annoying habit of falling asleep on public transport - don’t laugh, it happens! I’m the fool who nods off and their head takes on the persona of one of those ‘bobble head dogs’ you see on dashboards. Or perhaps that kid you see on Funniest Home Videos with a droopy head about to fall forward, exhausted, into the mashed potato. Thought it has never actually happened, I can imagine the folk in the seats behind me killing themselves with laughter. Try as I might, I just can’t seem to stay perfectly lucid on the way home in the afternoons. Magazines help some, but it wasn’t until I took the first book in the series out with me on Friday that I was able to make it all the way home without hitting my comatose head on the bus window as it goes around a corner, LOL. I think it has a lot to do with remaining engaged with a story - not something readily done when flitting between one mindless magazine article and the next.
So, with my brain sufficiently exercised and back in 1910, and the clock registering some ungodly time - which I’ll soon regret when I have to wake up for school prep in a few short hours - I’m happy to be back in the reading saddle once again :)
I may possibly have forgotten this little electronic device due to a little, forgotten pleasure I call “reading”.
Several days ago, again remarking to a bemused TH, I mused that I had not read a book - really read a book, not just flicked through a cookbook or other ‘manually’ type arrangement of words - in months. I know. I can hardly believe it myself.
I used to be a seriously avid reader. As a teenager I lived in a semi-rural area, in one of a small cluster of towns of roughly equal size, each about a 20 minute drive from the next. We lived first in one of the towns and when we moved to the next town over my parents mercifully left me enrolled in my original high school and allowed me to take the bus the 40 mins there each way (we did a couple of doglegs to pick up other students). I was pretty lucky I suppose - the area was sufficiently small back then so as not to be able to support public transport, but a semi-private charter bus ran between my town and the next to take several special ed students to the region’s special school. With the bus already running but only a third full, they opened it up to students from the high school as well.
I loved the bus ride to and from school. It was beneficial for a number of reasons. First, I could snooze the extra time away. I could do my homework - the run was just long enough to produce fairly proficient work, LOL - or I could read.
I always had a book on the go in those days. As a preteen I had discovered The Baby-Sitter’s Club and loved that series with a passion, collecting the books way past the age that normally held interest. Once that fad had passed (I retained my 70 or so titles well into adulthood but eventually gave them away to a delighted young girl from a family with whom we shared a common wall in our second home) I moved on to more mature titles. As most of my friends lived much closer to the school and didn’t travel on the bus, I was kind of left to myself, which is exactly how I liked it.
I still read after I met TH and we’d started a family, but obviously not nearly as much. I do remember, quite vividly actually, reading book after book during the long middle-of-the-night breastfeeding sessions with both of the boys (first and second children). Reading was preferable to the endless infomercials on TV at that time of the night. This was all before I wised up to the idea that it was possible to breastfeed laying down. We all got far more sleep once Miss Moo arrived on the scene, LOL.
But I never noticed just how little I read for pleasure these days until last week. Sheepishly, I have to admit the internet has a fair bit to do with that downfall so I resolved to rectify the situation ASAP. Hence my day-and-a-half break. I took the kids to the library last Thursday and was happy to discover Janette Oke’s books. A friend of mine had recommended them and I’d seen them in the bookstores but with my track record with reading I didn’t want to borrow yet another set of books only to have to return them past the due date. But this time around I grabbed three titles - the first three of the Canadian West series if anyone is playing at home - and would you believe it, re-caught the reading bug.
The first book was dipped into over the first couple of days but at such an easy read, it wasn’t hard to steal 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there until I’d finished. Monday morning I picked up the second book, and early this evening I finished it. Then I picked up the third book, desperate to know what was going to happen to Elizabeth and Wynn. I did something I hadn’t done since my wild, pre-children days. I read the book straight through in one sitting. Yeowch. My eyes weren’t used to it and I highly suspect a headache will rear its ugly head in the morning (it’s already blooming now) but I’d forgotten what a rush it was to get so involved in a book that you just don’t want to put it down. I even stood at the stove tonight, book in one hand, spatula in the other. It was crazy. After not having read a proper fiction book for months, I clocked up three in five days.
You might say that this brief foray back into the world of literature has given me a ‘taste’ of the pleasures of reading again. Tomorrow I’ll log into the library system’s online catalogue and request several new books - hopefully in sequence - and when they arrive (could take some time), I fully intend to go off again. The books were so simple and refreshing. As I frequently travel about 25 minutes by bus to a nearby shopping centre for errands - this time using a city’s extensive public transport system - I’m going to start keeping a book in my handbag (purse). I have this annoying habit of falling asleep on public transport - don’t laugh, it happens! I’m the fool who nods off and their head takes on the persona of one of those ‘bobble head dogs’ you see on dashboards. Or perhaps that kid you see on Funniest Home Videos with a droopy head about to fall forward, exhausted, into the mashed potato. Thought it has never actually happened, I can imagine the folk in the seats behind me killing themselves with laughter. Try as I might, I just can’t seem to stay perfectly lucid on the way home in the afternoons. Magazines help some, but it wasn’t until I took the first book in the series out with me on Friday that I was able to make it all the way home without hitting my comatose head on the bus window as it goes around a corner, LOL. I think it has a lot to do with remaining engaged with a story - not something readily done when flitting between one mindless magazine article and the next.
So, with my brain sufficiently exercised and back in 1910, and the clock registering some ungodly time - which I’ll soon regret when I have to wake up for school prep in a few short hours - I’m happy to be back in the reading saddle once again :)
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Mrs M? Where's My Dinosaur-Egg Sized Fake Gold Nugget?
After spending ELEVEN LOUD HOURS in the company of SIXTY 4th graders (and a handful of teachers and parent helpers) yesterday, today I’m feeling tightly wound and, I don’t know, cluttered-up inside. Does that make sense? Perhaps when you hear about my day yesterday, it might!
My eldest, J, has been participating in a national ’story dance’ competition so far this school year. This is a pretty big deal for J, who by nature of his disability, needs a little extra instruction and explanation - especially with things that don’t have a clear cut answer. He is gifted in math, working above his year level, and he is a moderate ‘off the top of his head’ calculator (though please don’t get that confused with autistic savantism, which is very rare - its just a quirk of his and its not, you know, multiplying 6 digit numbers or anything) but he ‘gets’ math because it is finite. There is (usually) only one right answer to a math problem. Similarly, his written language skills are wonderful and he spells better than I do - mostly because of the ‘only one right answer’ aspect.
But throw him in a totally abstract, free-movement ’story dance’ and I admit, I had misgivings at first. He’s not known for his slow and steady movement. He hand-flaps when he’s excited. But several months ago when he first expressed interest, I talked to his special ed teacher. She encouraged it (she’d had several students in years past have a go, with good results) and thus started several months worth of rehearsals, culminating in last night’s state heats.
Knowing that any extra pair of hands would come in useful for the day-long outing to the city, I volunteered as a parent helper. Most of the time, helping out at J’s school isn’t always possible - he travels to his school a few suburbs over by government-funded taxi each day, so we miss out on a lot of the ‘face time’ with the staff and helping out in the classroom type activities - things that his younger brother and sister get regularly due to the fact that we live just five minutes’ walk from their school. I miss that kind of interaction with J’s class. So we made a special effort this time around.
I was at the school at 10am to help corral the sixty hyper kids onto the bus. Forty-five minutes later we were in the city, and apart from a couple of minor hiccups (not being allowed into the theatre for another 20 minutes, getting caught in the rain) we eventually made it inside and were escorted to our dressing room.
The room was a shoebox.
We were a 70-plus crowd.
And we were sharing the space with another school group of the same size.
Can anyone say “sardine”?
Please don’t think I’m over-exaggerating either. There was not a scrap of bare carpet once all the kids had parked their tushes. If you wanted to move, you had to wait for someone else to stand up first. No. Room. What. So. Ever. Our dress rehearsal was at 12:30 and the other school didn’t arrive until 3:30, so we were able to spread out a little at first, but toward performance time later in the evening it was like trying to get changed in a child’s outdoor playhouse. With 59 other kids. In full costume. Cuh-razy.
We’d arrived at the theatre at 11:00, our dress rehearsal was at 12:30, and the performance wasn’t until 7:15. That’s a whole bucketload of hours to occupy 60 kids in the space my THREE kids would find confining after the first two hours. During the afternoon the teachers were able to break them up into groups and take them on walks around the city streets, during brief windows of time in which it did not BUCKET DOWN WITH RAIN. The original plan was to take the kids (in several batches!) to the nearby museum and art gallery. The torrential downpours at unpredictable times during the day put an end to that plan quick-smart. By dinner time, most of them were wet, cramped and annoyed. Good times!
And then there was the Great Pizza Debacle of ’08.
There was one particular staff member who was clearly frustrated at the lack of space and this was the woman who was in charge of the pizza. Forms had been sent home with the kids several weeks in advance, with boxes to tick for preferred pizza choices. This staff member extracted six or seven kids from the ‘mosh pit’, as well as myself, and we went downstairs (stairs…so….many…..stairs!) at the appointed time to pick up the pizzas in the foyer.
Well. TWENTY-FIVE pizzas and a non-English speaking delivery driver later, we again climbed the steps to the slobbering, ravenous children (who had, mind you, been snacking continuously on edibles brought from home - but, you know, this was PIZZA and it was FREE, so…) only to discover that every single one of those pizzas were pepperoni. At least half the kids had picked ‘ham and pineapple’ on their forms and for probably five of them, it was the ONLY type of pizza they ate. Remember, we’re all trying to manage elbow-to-elbow in an itty bitty space and we’d been there six hours already, so the kids could be forgiven for not being very flexible. Frustrated Staff Lady concurred and, after a huddle with the other staff members, decided there would be Major Repercussions for the pizza chain involved (I won’t say who, but it rhymes with Eats-A-Mutt…) End result? Firm phone call and 45 minutes later, we got our 9 ham and pineapple pizzas and we got them free, LOL (in case you were wondering, each school is allocated a budget for the production costs and the original pizza was covered in that, ie, pizza place didn’t donate them, but we demanded these new pizzas at no cost). I’ve never seen so many pizza boxes in one place in my whole entire life. That’s 272 slices folks. At my family’s usual rate, it would take us 17 monthly visits to snarfle that down - and that’s if we got pizza every single time we had takeout, and none of us can stomach that much grease.
The next drama centred on makeup. Again, the problem was compounded due to the close quarters but essentially, there were three people - two staff members and myself - doing the makeup for the whole 60 kids. Thank goodness it was simple! The Chinese miners were to have yellow on their faces, the Irish people pale makeup. But I don’t wear makeup. I didn’t know what end of the application sponge was which! Through trial and error (and I sincerely hope the first ten kids I plastered were in the back of the stage), I got into a groove. I spackled 32 kids. It was hilarious - the girls loved it, the boys hated it. Each kid’s had a friend sandwiched in somewhere nearby who giggled whenever the stage lipstick came out. The boys looked at me like I was about ready to stick them in a dress, LOL. I had one girl who grimaced so much I had her hold an icecream bucket in case she felt like rowfing. She was decidely green underneath all that Chinese Yellow.
All the way throughout the day, we had been warned continuously about the noise. The theatre where the event was held has the best/worst acoustics on the planet - great for performers, bad for roomfuls of fourth graders. The nature of the competition meant we were not only scored on our actual stage time, but on waiting time, following directions, staying quiet etc. We did badly, LOL. In the kids’ defence - did the organizers actually think it was possible to keep 120 kids to a whisper in a room smaller than the average basement? It defies logic.
But, we survived. And the performance was wonderful. Our ’story’ centred on fisticuffs between the Chinese and Irish miners, a mine collapse, and the two groups working together to ‘restore the earth’. J completely floored me. He not only followed the rehearsed movements just as well as any other kid - and at the right and deliberate speed at that - but he was right at the front of the stage for part of the performance - in front of a crowd of more than 200 - and didn’t do what I was fearing, which was to completely lose his place (physically or emotionally) and muck up the routine. He was brilliant!
That kid continues to amaze me.
We arrived home sometime around 10pm. I must have been exhausted because for the first time in - gosh, months - I went to bed on the ‘right’ side of midnight. Talented Hubby said he was only a few minutes behind me and I was already snoring away when he came in. Apparently, it takes a day in the company of 60 kids, two doses of paracetamol, 1 ½ slices of cold, discarded pepperoni pizza, a brief 2-hour sojourn on my own (the teacher graciously gave me some ’sanity time’ during the afternoon), a bag full of jelly snakes (which I kept in my pocket and snuck when nobody was looking - particularly hard to do in a room filled with kids trained from birth to sniff out sugar) and a combination of 32 white and yellow makeup jobs to get me to bed on time!
Mercifully, today was a teachers’ strike. All of the kids who did the peformance were already excused from school the next day due to the late night, but the strike was co-incidental and it meant I didn’t need to get up at Dawn O’Clock to get the younger two ready for school either. Ahhhh, it felt GOOD.
Somebody please direct me back to this blog post the next time I volunteer for a class trip, okay? LOL.
My eldest, J, has been participating in a national ’story dance’ competition so far this school year. This is a pretty big deal for J, who by nature of his disability, needs a little extra instruction and explanation - especially with things that don’t have a clear cut answer. He is gifted in math, working above his year level, and he is a moderate ‘off the top of his head’ calculator (though please don’t get that confused with autistic savantism, which is very rare - its just a quirk of his and its not, you know, multiplying 6 digit numbers or anything) but he ‘gets’ math because it is finite. There is (usually) only one right answer to a math problem. Similarly, his written language skills are wonderful and he spells better than I do - mostly because of the ‘only one right answer’ aspect.
But throw him in a totally abstract, free-movement ’story dance’ and I admit, I had misgivings at first. He’s not known for his slow and steady movement. He hand-flaps when he’s excited. But several months ago when he first expressed interest, I talked to his special ed teacher. She encouraged it (she’d had several students in years past have a go, with good results) and thus started several months worth of rehearsals, culminating in last night’s state heats.
Knowing that any extra pair of hands would come in useful for the day-long outing to the city, I volunteered as a parent helper. Most of the time, helping out at J’s school isn’t always possible - he travels to his school a few suburbs over by government-funded taxi each day, so we miss out on a lot of the ‘face time’ with the staff and helping out in the classroom type activities - things that his younger brother and sister get regularly due to the fact that we live just five minutes’ walk from their school. I miss that kind of interaction with J’s class. So we made a special effort this time around.
I was at the school at 10am to help corral the sixty hyper kids onto the bus. Forty-five minutes later we were in the city, and apart from a couple of minor hiccups (not being allowed into the theatre for another 20 minutes, getting caught in the rain) we eventually made it inside and were escorted to our dressing room.
The room was a shoebox.
We were a 70-plus crowd.
And we were sharing the space with another school group of the same size.
Can anyone say “sardine”?
Please don’t think I’m over-exaggerating either. There was not a scrap of bare carpet once all the kids had parked their tushes. If you wanted to move, you had to wait for someone else to stand up first. No. Room. What. So. Ever. Our dress rehearsal was at 12:30 and the other school didn’t arrive until 3:30, so we were able to spread out a little at first, but toward performance time later in the evening it was like trying to get changed in a child’s outdoor playhouse. With 59 other kids. In full costume. Cuh-razy.
We’d arrived at the theatre at 11:00, our dress rehearsal was at 12:30, and the performance wasn’t until 7:15. That’s a whole bucketload of hours to occupy 60 kids in the space my THREE kids would find confining after the first two hours. During the afternoon the teachers were able to break them up into groups and take them on walks around the city streets, during brief windows of time in which it did not BUCKET DOWN WITH RAIN. The original plan was to take the kids (in several batches!) to the nearby museum and art gallery. The torrential downpours at unpredictable times during the day put an end to that plan quick-smart. By dinner time, most of them were wet, cramped and annoyed. Good times!
And then there was the Great Pizza Debacle of ’08.
There was one particular staff member who was clearly frustrated at the lack of space and this was the woman who was in charge of the pizza. Forms had been sent home with the kids several weeks in advance, with boxes to tick for preferred pizza choices. This staff member extracted six or seven kids from the ‘mosh pit’, as well as myself, and we went downstairs (stairs…so….many…..stairs!) at the appointed time to pick up the pizzas in the foyer.
Well. TWENTY-FIVE pizzas and a non-English speaking delivery driver later, we again climbed the steps to the slobbering, ravenous children (who had, mind you, been snacking continuously on edibles brought from home - but, you know, this was PIZZA and it was FREE, so…) only to discover that every single one of those pizzas were pepperoni. At least half the kids had picked ‘ham and pineapple’ on their forms and for probably five of them, it was the ONLY type of pizza they ate. Remember, we’re all trying to manage elbow-to-elbow in an itty bitty space and we’d been there six hours already, so the kids could be forgiven for not being very flexible. Frustrated Staff Lady concurred and, after a huddle with the other staff members, decided there would be Major Repercussions for the pizza chain involved (I won’t say who, but it rhymes with Eats-A-Mutt…) End result? Firm phone call and 45 minutes later, we got our 9 ham and pineapple pizzas and we got them free, LOL (in case you were wondering, each school is allocated a budget for the production costs and the original pizza was covered in that, ie, pizza place didn’t donate them, but we demanded these new pizzas at no cost). I’ve never seen so many pizza boxes in one place in my whole entire life. That’s 272 slices folks. At my family’s usual rate, it would take us 17 monthly visits to snarfle that down - and that’s if we got pizza every single time we had takeout, and none of us can stomach that much grease.
The next drama centred on makeup. Again, the problem was compounded due to the close quarters but essentially, there were three people - two staff members and myself - doing the makeup for the whole 60 kids. Thank goodness it was simple! The Chinese miners were to have yellow on their faces, the Irish people pale makeup. But I don’t wear makeup. I didn’t know what end of the application sponge was which! Through trial and error (and I sincerely hope the first ten kids I plastered were in the back of the stage), I got into a groove. I spackled 32 kids. It was hilarious - the girls loved it, the boys hated it. Each kid’s had a friend sandwiched in somewhere nearby who giggled whenever the stage lipstick came out. The boys looked at me like I was about ready to stick them in a dress, LOL. I had one girl who grimaced so much I had her hold an icecream bucket in case she felt like rowfing. She was decidely green underneath all that Chinese Yellow.
All the way throughout the day, we had been warned continuously about the noise. The theatre where the event was held has the best/worst acoustics on the planet - great for performers, bad for roomfuls of fourth graders. The nature of the competition meant we were not only scored on our actual stage time, but on waiting time, following directions, staying quiet etc. We did badly, LOL. In the kids’ defence - did the organizers actually think it was possible to keep 120 kids to a whisper in a room smaller than the average basement? It defies logic.
But, we survived. And the performance was wonderful. Our ’story’ centred on fisticuffs between the Chinese and Irish miners, a mine collapse, and the two groups working together to ‘restore the earth’. J completely floored me. He not only followed the rehearsed movements just as well as any other kid - and at the right and deliberate speed at that - but he was right at the front of the stage for part of the performance - in front of a crowd of more than 200 - and didn’t do what I was fearing, which was to completely lose his place (physically or emotionally) and muck up the routine. He was brilliant!
That kid continues to amaze me.
We arrived home sometime around 10pm. I must have been exhausted because for the first time in - gosh, months - I went to bed on the ‘right’ side of midnight. Talented Hubby said he was only a few minutes behind me and I was already snoring away when he came in. Apparently, it takes a day in the company of 60 kids, two doses of paracetamol, 1 ½ slices of cold, discarded pepperoni pizza, a brief 2-hour sojourn on my own (the teacher graciously gave me some ’sanity time’ during the afternoon), a bag full of jelly snakes (which I kept in my pocket and snuck when nobody was looking - particularly hard to do in a room filled with kids trained from birth to sniff out sugar) and a combination of 32 white and yellow makeup jobs to get me to bed on time!
Mercifully, today was a teachers’ strike. All of the kids who did the peformance were already excused from school the next day due to the late night, but the strike was co-incidental and it meant I didn’t need to get up at Dawn O’Clock to get the younger two ready for school either. Ahhhh, it felt GOOD.
Somebody please direct me back to this blog post the next time I volunteer for a class trip, okay? LOL.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Typical School Mornings, Uniforms and Other Associated Ramblings
Gosh I’m tired.
This morning Master J comes bounding into our bedroom, panic in his voice. “MUM! IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY-FOUR!!!” And before I’d even had a chance to mentally register that it was, in fact, a school day, my mama radar was in full force and I was already up and in the kitchen. There’s nothing like being utterly, completely asleep and then suddenly awake and expected to, you know, do stuff.
Now, normally J’s taxi comes at 7:40. So a 7:34 start to the day would be near disasterous, although not impossible. I’ve done it before. The child went to school with a piece of toast in one hand and one shoe untied but by gosh, he was in that taxi on time! Big tick for mama, LOL. Thankfully, however, there have been changes to his taxi run and now the driver doesn’t arrive at the house until after 8:00. Of course my sleep-deprived brain did not remember this until 7:58 after repeated exclaimations of “Where IS that taxi?!!” but oh well. I could have slept another ten minutes!
The only reason my mornings run so smoothly is because I have a working Evening Routine. Part of this includes pre-making the kids’ school lunches. I make sandwiches, wrap and pop them in the fridge overnight. I leave their lunchboxes open on the benchtop with most of the ‘extras’ already inside. I fill water bottles and refrigerate those. Consequently I can go from zero (comatose) to waving a breakfasted, dressed, clean toothed child out the door in something like 8 minutes flat. I would completely die if I had to battle the lunchbox lunacy first thing in the morning.
I also lay out the kids’ uniforms in the family room. I realise this won’t work forever, but for right now, when they’re not concerned about ’sibling cooties’, changing in front of the gas heater (and sometimes each other) on a frosty morning is working quite well. Between pre-making lunches and laying out their school clothes, I must save something in the vicinity of eleventy-six minutes each morning.
I am also lucky enough to live in a great neighbourhood with a good public primary (elementary) school close by. I would hazard a guess and say every public primary school in Australia wears some type of uniform, ranging from ‘here are the school colours, you’re free to pick what you need based on those’ right through to ‘the only acceptable uniform items are ones you purchase through the school uniform shop and sorry, a polo shirt with the school emblem is going to cost you $39 and oh, I see you need a dozen of those suckers and that’s just for starters (*insert evil laugh*) - will that be cash, credit card or second mortgage?’ Thank goodness our kids have never attented that type of school! (Private school is a whole other kettle of fish but I’ve heard some scary, expensive uniform stories - just don’t have personal experience having to buy them) Though the local school governing council sets some uniform guidelines, for the most part, you are free to choose whatever brand or style you like according to the school colours and the guidelines (no slogans and so on). In addition to this, our school does have a uniform shop where you can buy the more expensive polos, school dresses and so on (with logos), but they also run a consignment section, which is where I purchased Miss Moo’s winter pinafore and two summer dresses, saving a boatload and helping the prior owners to recoup some of their cost. After 18mo they have held up very well and will be re-consignable when Moo is done with them. But as for the day-to-day uniform items, such as shorts, long pants, sweatshirts etc, you get to source them yourself. This is a good thing, because it allows you to shop for the best deals, which almost always pop up in the last couple of weeks in January, right before the new school year begins.
There’s a particular schoolwear brand down here (Stubbies) which I have been in love with from the first day. Thankfully, the January back to school sales are filled with discounted Stubbies clothing so I am able to outfit all the kids at a reasonable cost. As luck would have it, despite always having been at a different school to the younger two, Master J’s uniform at his new school is in the same colour scheme. When he outgrows his stuff, Boofah gets to inherit it. The other thing I love about this brand is that it almost never needs ironing. Yeah, you heard me, LOL. I don’t iron school pants, shorts, polos or windcheaters. About the only item which graces the ironing board is Miss Moo’s pinafore and dresses, when she wears them, because they are pleated. Everything else I simply smooth out by hand and you can’t tell the difference. Of course, this method becomes void if you leave a dried load of laundry crumpled in the bottom of the basket for a week, but hey.
I also purposely keep a high number of uniform items in rotation. Each kid gets three ‘bottoms’ (shorts or pants, depending on the season), five polos and (during winter) two or three windcheaters. This allows me to ignore the uniform laundry all week and do two loads all at once on Saturdays. Usually its the tops that get grubby first, hence a clean one every day, but the pants can be carefully resmoothed and worn again.
I do not always need to re-purchase entire school wardrobes in January of each year, either. Boofah is rather short and is still in shorts and polos from his first year at school (three years ago!) I have replaced his long winter pants this year but he wore them out at the knees before he outgrew them - and I think three years is a good run for something he wears just about every weekday. Master J, on the other hand, is growing like a weed and generally needs new pants every year. It’s crazy, but you never see the really good school clothing sales repeated in, say, April for the coming winter term. It’s pretty much all up in January so if you want the best deals possible you have to learn to anticipate growth for a whole year. It also means that doing one big shopping trip for school gear can be SCARY. Presuming everyone grows out of his or her uniform in a given year (unlikely, but go with me here) that’s 9 pairs of pants ($20 each on sale), 9 pairs of shorts (skorts for Moo - $10 each on sale), fifteen polos (around $7 each on sale), 6-9 windcheaters (this is completely unpredictable each year and I often have a hard time finding appropriately plain, navy sweaters to suit…I’m almost never able to purchase them all when I need them and are still looking when the cooler weather arrives) - hundreds of dollars and that is before new socks (the kids wear white socks year round and totally destroy them each year, so I replace pretty much every pair in the January sales), underwear (they usually need replacements), and various girly hair bobbles in school colours for Moo. Throughout the year we also tend to misplace school hats at an amazing rate so I factor in four per year for each kid. At $7 each (purchased through the finance room at the school and available year round, thankfully) that’s $84 just in hats! Both the kids’ schools have a ‘no hat, no outside play’ policy so this isn’t the area to economize.
What about you guys? Does your primary (elementary) school have a uniform? If not, do you purchase your own ‘uniform’ of acceptable casual clothes each year? How much clothing do you keep in rotation at any given time specifically for school days? Where do you usually shop for deals?
This morning Master J comes bounding into our bedroom, panic in his voice. “MUM! IT’S SEVEN-THIRTY-FOUR!!!” And before I’d even had a chance to mentally register that it was, in fact, a school day, my mama radar was in full force and I was already up and in the kitchen. There’s nothing like being utterly, completely asleep and then suddenly awake and expected to, you know, do stuff.
Now, normally J’s taxi comes at 7:40. So a 7:34 start to the day would be near disasterous, although not impossible. I’ve done it before. The child went to school with a piece of toast in one hand and one shoe untied but by gosh, he was in that taxi on time! Big tick for mama, LOL. Thankfully, however, there have been changes to his taxi run and now the driver doesn’t arrive at the house until after 8:00. Of course my sleep-deprived brain did not remember this until 7:58 after repeated exclaimations of “Where IS that taxi?!!” but oh well. I could have slept another ten minutes!
The only reason my mornings run so smoothly is because I have a working Evening Routine. Part of this includes pre-making the kids’ school lunches. I make sandwiches, wrap and pop them in the fridge overnight. I leave their lunchboxes open on the benchtop with most of the ‘extras’ already inside. I fill water bottles and refrigerate those. Consequently I can go from zero (comatose) to waving a breakfasted, dressed, clean toothed child out the door in something like 8 minutes flat. I would completely die if I had to battle the lunchbox lunacy first thing in the morning.
I also lay out the kids’ uniforms in the family room. I realise this won’t work forever, but for right now, when they’re not concerned about ’sibling cooties’, changing in front of the gas heater (and sometimes each other) on a frosty morning is working quite well. Between pre-making lunches and laying out their school clothes, I must save something in the vicinity of eleventy-six minutes each morning.
I am also lucky enough to live in a great neighbourhood with a good public primary (elementary) school close by. I would hazard a guess and say every public primary school in Australia wears some type of uniform, ranging from ‘here are the school colours, you’re free to pick what you need based on those’ right through to ‘the only acceptable uniform items are ones you purchase through the school uniform shop and sorry, a polo shirt with the school emblem is going to cost you $39 and oh, I see you need a dozen of those suckers and that’s just for starters (*insert evil laugh*) - will that be cash, credit card or second mortgage?’ Thank goodness our kids have never attented that type of school! (Private school is a whole other kettle of fish but I’ve heard some scary, expensive uniform stories - just don’t have personal experience having to buy them) Though the local school governing council sets some uniform guidelines, for the most part, you are free to choose whatever brand or style you like according to the school colours and the guidelines (no slogans and so on). In addition to this, our school does have a uniform shop where you can buy the more expensive polos, school dresses and so on (with logos), but they also run a consignment section, which is where I purchased Miss Moo’s winter pinafore and two summer dresses, saving a boatload and helping the prior owners to recoup some of their cost. After 18mo they have held up very well and will be re-consignable when Moo is done with them. But as for the day-to-day uniform items, such as shorts, long pants, sweatshirts etc, you get to source them yourself. This is a good thing, because it allows you to shop for the best deals, which almost always pop up in the last couple of weeks in January, right before the new school year begins.
There’s a particular schoolwear brand down here (Stubbies) which I have been in love with from the first day. Thankfully, the January back to school sales are filled with discounted Stubbies clothing so I am able to outfit all the kids at a reasonable cost. As luck would have it, despite always having been at a different school to the younger two, Master J’s uniform at his new school is in the same colour scheme. When he outgrows his stuff, Boofah gets to inherit it. The other thing I love about this brand is that it almost never needs ironing. Yeah, you heard me, LOL. I don’t iron school pants, shorts, polos or windcheaters. About the only item which graces the ironing board is Miss Moo’s pinafore and dresses, when she wears them, because they are pleated. Everything else I simply smooth out by hand and you can’t tell the difference. Of course, this method becomes void if you leave a dried load of laundry crumpled in the bottom of the basket for a week, but hey.
I also purposely keep a high number of uniform items in rotation. Each kid gets three ‘bottoms’ (shorts or pants, depending on the season), five polos and (during winter) two or three windcheaters. This allows me to ignore the uniform laundry all week and do two loads all at once on Saturdays. Usually its the tops that get grubby first, hence a clean one every day, but the pants can be carefully resmoothed and worn again.
I do not always need to re-purchase entire school wardrobes in January of each year, either. Boofah is rather short and is still in shorts and polos from his first year at school (three years ago!) I have replaced his long winter pants this year but he wore them out at the knees before he outgrew them - and I think three years is a good run for something he wears just about every weekday. Master J, on the other hand, is growing like a weed and generally needs new pants every year. It’s crazy, but you never see the really good school clothing sales repeated in, say, April for the coming winter term. It’s pretty much all up in January so if you want the best deals possible you have to learn to anticipate growth for a whole year. It also means that doing one big shopping trip for school gear can be SCARY. Presuming everyone grows out of his or her uniform in a given year (unlikely, but go with me here) that’s 9 pairs of pants ($20 each on sale), 9 pairs of shorts (skorts for Moo - $10 each on sale), fifteen polos (around $7 each on sale), 6-9 windcheaters (this is completely unpredictable each year and I often have a hard time finding appropriately plain, navy sweaters to suit…I’m almost never able to purchase them all when I need them and are still looking when the cooler weather arrives) - hundreds of dollars and that is before new socks (the kids wear white socks year round and totally destroy them each year, so I replace pretty much every pair in the January sales), underwear (they usually need replacements), and various girly hair bobbles in school colours for Moo. Throughout the year we also tend to misplace school hats at an amazing rate so I factor in four per year for each kid. At $7 each (purchased through the finance room at the school and available year round, thankfully) that’s $84 just in hats! Both the kids’ schools have a ‘no hat, no outside play’ policy so this isn’t the area to economize.
What about you guys? Does your primary (elementary) school have a uniform? If not, do you purchase your own ‘uniform’ of acceptable casual clothes each year? How much clothing do you keep in rotation at any given time specifically for school days? Where do you usually shop for deals?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
