I Had A Blogging Break

…and it was fantastic. What is to follow is a collection of totally random, sometimes confusing thoughts. I’m too tired to use bullet thingies.

More and more these days, I’m feeling the need to curtail my attempts at taking over the Internet which, thankful for you, probably would only have amounted to a couple of dropped comments on a few random blogs. But I decided to spare you all the sleep-deprived rantings. You’re welcome.

I’m all out of sorts this week anyway. Master J managed to score himself two days off school Monday and Tuesday. In their ‘wisdom’, the school council decided to schedule the annual ’show day’ (more in a second) directly after a student free day and he wound up with a four day weekend. Immediately following Boof and Moo’s school’s show day which was last Friday. The thing is, I kind of like my husband’s work schedule. It goes one week of afternoons, one week of dayshift, and one week off (more or less). As the kids are in school, the week he is on dayshift (ie, this week) is anticipated (by me…not by him….poor mite has to get up at 5:30) well in advance of the blessed event. I start lining up tracklists for blaring through the speakers (thank you $15 iPod-cord-stereo-pluggy thing) - nerdy music that makes Talented Hubby’s toes curl in disgust. Or ballads which scare him worse. I save those for when he’s not around because honestly? I could do without the sarcastic comments about my singing, thankyouverymuch.

With five days of being home alone between 9 and 3 stretching waaaaay out into the distance, I kind of melt into that first Monday like a sleep-starved mad person and usually do the barest possible amount of housework (sorry!) and just kick back. I surf the net, catch up on blogging (okay, not lately, but hey…), sometimes even do some non-blogging writing (articles for publication) and generally have a crazy good time just being by myself.

Because the rest of the time, it’s all about the other people. Some days I feel like I’m using all my available brain cells to make sandwiches for all the little people (and one big man) in my life. Which I love. But there are whole chunks of my year to date that I can’t even account for. School lets out for end of term here in a couple of weeks and I swear, I was just getting them back to book learnin’ after the last term holidays (which were - *counts fingers* - 8 or so weeks ago). Before I know it, my birthday (couple of weeks) will have whooshed by in a fit of self-made birthday cake (sigh…) and then it’s all downhill to Christmas after that, punctuated by three more immediate family birthdays. I’m so TIRED. I’m only (almost) 29 and I’m beginning to feel burned out already.

So anyway - the The Royal Show. Okay, I guess you could liken it to your average State Fair in the US. Hundreds of thousands of people filter through the gates in the 8 days it is on every September. I guess it was a few years ago that teachers began realising their student population was seriously affected by families taking a day off to visit the Showground, so now the Education Department allows city schools to set aside a designated ‘School Closure Day’ specifically to minimise student absentism the rest of the week. It works and it doesn’t. They set the day in advance, and oftentimes families can’t go on that day and will have to take a day off elsewhere in the week anyway. And the Show itself schedules reduced-entry cost days and other special events that may or may not coincide with the day the school decides to set aside. But it helps some. We had a ‘Show Day’ on Friday (Boof and Moo’s school), and one for J’s school on Tuesday, but also J’s extra day off on the Monday.

We still haven’t gone to the Show.

Teachers love us undecided parents. No seriously, everyone’s kind of cool about kids missing school during this week. I want to go to the Show because I am clearly the most immature of the lot of us and the Show is a haven for ridiculous plush hats and $5 cold drinks. The Husband is less enthused. It does cost us a little - something like $55 for entry alone for our family of five - but we take ALL our own snacks and usually sandwiches, and rarely buy drinks there. We are some of the stingiest parents I know, at least according to reports from other families who have been, or the folks who get 3 seconds on air during the nightly Show wrap-up on the News. One woman on the other night says she gives her kids $100 each to spend and then apologized because she didn’t think it was enough!!! This was as part of a segment on the rising cost of living down here (interest rates are high, petrol is expensive etc) and the people they were meant to have snaffled for their soundbite were ‘economical Show-goers’.

Big, deep sigh.

Our kids get ONE ride each (at $5-6 EACH RIDE, per kid). We make use of as much free entertainment as possible - we always go to the baby animal exhibit, watch the piglet racing (don’t ask), walk the dog showroom and coo over the puppies and feign fright over the ‘horse dogs’ (anything bigger than Moo), and the last two years we have waited to arrive until later in the day (around 4pm) and stayed to watch the activities in the main arena under lights in the evening - stunt bike riders, stunt car exhibition team, acrobat whatchamacallits. We did not burn ourselves out with a full day in the crowds. We also allow them to have one showbag each (the biggest drain of parents’ wallets in the history of all state-wide community events, I’m absolutely certain) and even then they have a dollar limit. It still winds up costing us close to $100, which is cheap by most standards. Now, we don’t do this kind of thing all the time, and I’m more than willing to shell out the cash because of that - and probably more. This is why we save, to splurge a little. But splurging to the tune of $500 for a day out just isn’t going to happen for us. If we had a spare few hundred we’d be putting it on the mortgage and delaying the middle-aged panic ulcer just another few months. We fully expect to develop these in about ten years time when Child #2 goes to university. That kid has scientific brains. I would not be surprised if he winds up a very expensively-trained research analyst (note I did not say doctor. That would be tempting fate a little too much, methinks)

But back to the point. Or one of them anyway.

So, my days of Sole Possession of the Stereo Remote have dropped from 5 days down to 3. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. I got to hang out with Boof, Moo and some of our friends for lunch on Friday, and then Monday J and I had a special outing as well on Monday. Oy, that kid can rule the world with a hug, I’m sure of it. Case in point: Because of his disability, J (now nearly ten) usually prefers not to engage in much physical interaction. He will snuggle up on the couch but will usually refuse a hug, hates kisses with a passion and just generally fusses. Well, knock me down with a feather on Monday because he gave long, heartfelt and UNPROMPTED hugs not once but TWICE during the course of our day out. I asked him why and he, in his unique halted conversational tone, said it was because we did things we don’t normally do (go out with just the two of us) and (typical boy) we got to go to the arcade to play some games. Of course after that, he got a big fat icecream and I didn’t even feel like I’d been suckered doing it. Such is living with an ASD kid. These moments of voluntary and unexpected outward love don’t come up very often for J and when they do, we strap that sucker (feeling) down tight.

Arcades are evil places designed to steal your money. A pox on them! But I don’t know who had more fun - J, who managed to score 40 tickets by stopping the counter on 1001 (was aiming for 1000, harder than it looks) or me, who got so enamoured with the claw toy picker-upperer thingy that I wasted $10 trying to get a third stuffed toy after first winning Mr Burns and Apu. We banned the Simpsons from our television screens a few months ago but do you think I could reason with myself that effigies of the characters I hate most probably weren’t needed in our home? Not likely. I was a determined woman. So was the machine. In the ’second chance claw candy grabber’ part I managed to score like $1.35 worth of candy for my $10 investment. SCORE!

But it was fun, and J was asleep on the bus before we even pulled out of the bus stop. Worth every cent.