The Man Never Ceases To Amaze Me

So today I was talking with Talented Hubby about Christmas. Specifically, presents for the children. I’m over the ‘lots and lots of stuff’ thing so this year I thought we’d just do a stocking plus one or two larger items. Top of the list (well my list anyway) was bikes for all three kids (they have been dealing with ‘too small/rusty’ for many years…we’ve never really done the ‘bikes for Christmas’ thing), desks for their rooms (J currently has his own room, but Boof and Moo share and we’re looking to get Boof into the spare room by Christmas….hopefully) and Guitar Hero World Tour.

Talented Hubby may have had a smidgeon of influence on the last one. Myself too, LOL.

Then suddenly (right about the time I was thinking to myself “We really should get to Ikea. They’ll have basics desks for, like, fifty cents”) TH pipes up with,

“I was thinking maybe we might get the kids a puppy.”

Now, for my subsequently shocked reaction to mean anything at all, you have to know that the kids have been actively campaigning for a dog for YEARS. Must say, me too. We’ve had logistical problems that have prevented us from doing the ‘dog thing’ to this point but the ‘one day we’ll get a dog, but not right now’ movement was more or less spearheaded by Talented Hubby. Me? I could find a way to keep a dog just about anywhere. Mr Practical? Not so much.

After picking myself up off the floor, we talked about breeds. Whenever we’ve spoken of a puppy in the past, it has always been with a larger breed in mind - a Lab or Golden Retriever. For smaller dogs, I was always partial to Beagles, but one time TH found an article referencing them as being one of the stupidest breeds of dog and that was the end of that (stupid huh? Bet those airport drug mules don’t think so! And quite honestly, the thought of a dog being able to sniff out drugs did rather appeal to me as we head into the scary teenage years).

So I have a question for you all. What recommendations could you give me for a breed of dog that satisfies these points:

MUST be a breed consistently good with kids (ie, it is one of its main characteristics)
needs to be small to medium in size. Not a chihuahua, because TH says he needs to feel like a man if he walks it. Preferably not a fluff-ball either.
Short-haired if possible, as we’re not keen on the shedding issue.
In an ideal world, non-yappy. You know how some breeds are just annoying? Yeah, not one of those.
Suited to a smaller yard. Not a tiny yard, just small.
Suited to moderate activity level. Aussie Sheep Dog clearly not on our agenda (though sometimes I’d love to round the kids up like sheep, so perhaps not a deal-breaker? LOL)
Any help you can give us would be much appreciated. We definitely don’t want to foul this up and we’ve NEVER had a dog (or any pet for that matter, not even a goldfish) in all the years we’ve been together, so this will be an entirely new experience for the kids as well - but we’re excited about that part of it. And I should point out (because no doubt TH will tell me this over and over in the next few days) we have not fully decided to go ahead with the dog-buyin’ plan just yet. But knowing we have certain options in regards to suitable breeds for our needs will sure help to make that decision.

So Aussie You May Just See Me Wrestle Something Reptilian

(close up kangaroo photo)

“How you doin’?”

Master J (and Hero Dad) returned yesterday from an overnight school camp to a wildlife sanctuary. They weren’t too far away, but it was J’s first school overnighter and we weren’t too sure how he’d go, so we put our hand up (okay, I put TH’s hand up, LOL) to be a parent volunteer.

Apart from some minor issues, TH tells me J did quite well. He was rather unimpressed with the amount of walking they were required to do but loved holding and patting the native animals.

(kangaroo up tree)

“Well, if you really must insist on pointing that infernal contraption at me sir, you shall have to deal with the rear end view!”

Talented Hubby tells me this koala was a bit of a daredevil, crawling out on the skinniest branches to get to the leaves. On a side note - have you ever heard a koala’s mating call? I grew up on a small hobby farm in country Victoria and we would often hear this loud, bellowing trumpet sound coming from somewhere amongst the tree clusters. Scared me senseless, not helped by older brothers who whispered horror stories to me about pigs with tusks the size of my leg, just waiting to gore me to death (my brothers were delightful creatures, weren’t they? :P) It was years before I realised the sounds were NOT wild boar getting ready to barrel out of the bush and eat me alive, but were the sounds of a male koala gettin’ ready to find himself a lady koala and have a bit of a roll around in the hay eucalyptus leaves. Not altogether different from the mating calls of modern day construction workers when a pretty lady walks past, really.

(emu chewing on finger)

“Mmmm - finger food! My favourite!”

I’ve never understood emus. I know my duty as an Aussie is to love them and everything but there’s something about their beady little Evil Eyes and funny “I’ve got a hairball in my throat” glug-glug sound that makes me want to run for the hills. And they move fast. I don’t like animals who can move in unpredictable ways.

Except for cats. Cats are hilarious. Spend an hour on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean, LOL.

(albino kangaroo)

“So that’s when I saw it. The ghost of St Bernard! Next thing I knew, I looked like Steve Martin!”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an albino kangaroo before. TH said they even had their own little posse. Think they get much ribbin’ from the other ’roos?

(J with snake)

“I wonder what will strike more fear into Mum’s heart? This freaky snake or
THE FACT THAT HER FIRSTBORN IS TOUCHING IT?”

This photo? The VERY REASON I am glad it was Talented Hubby and not me who went. I can’t even look at that photo (it took me twelve minutes just to resize and upload!) without feeling the heebie-jeebies and a cold sweat wash over me. I have a morbid fear of snakes. At least this one was big. Baby snakes scare me worse. Don’t ask me why, it’s far too gross.

I’m actually really grateful for TH this week. He took time off work to volunteer for this thing. The poor guy didn’t quite understand what an overnight trip with 56 fourth and fifth-graders would be like until he experienced it (LOL), but he scored quite a few brownie points for attempting it. Even if he does say it’s the last time :P

'Tis The Season To Be Craftin'

I’m tired, and this awful headache won’t quit, so here’s a ‘cheat post’ to sink your teeth into - appropriate too, because I got this year’s Christmas crafty edition of Better Homes and Gardens just a week or two ago :)

Oh No! It’s Starting Again!

Now….where did I put my felt stash? LOL.

Lizzie's Basic Daily Plan ~ Revisited

It’s been a while since I shared the run down of my day with you, so this afternoon I figured ‘Why not?’ Some things to remember when you’re looking at our schedule:

It is NOT written in stone. I would say ninety percent of the time, it looks nothing like this! So why put it up? Because a girl’s gotta have a dream, LOL. No, really - it serves as a loose framework over which the actual stitches of our daily life get knit. Or a sewing pattern if you like. Some of you gals are wonderfully adept at whipping up skirts and whatnot without patterns. I am not one of those gals. I need guidelines, even if I do choose to mix things up a bit as I go along.

We don’t homeschool. Don’t even begin to try to superimpose your homeschooling family life into the below schedule. Won’t work, LOL. I don’t know how those women do it - but I’m in awe. This works for our family in this particular season in our life.

The kids don’t participate in extra-curricula (after school) activities. This is mostly due to time management practicalities rather than any particular conviction against them. With our eldest attending a special ed classroom in a mainstream school several suburbs over - different to the school our younger two attend, which is just down the road - we are limited in what we can say ‘yes’ to. J travels by government-funded taxi to and from school each day and as such, can’t take up the opportunity to do after-school sports. He needs to catch his taxi at the same time each day, or miss a ride home. With TH on a rotating work roster and us being a one-car family, picking him up is very difficult. Most of the families in J’s classroom are in the same boat - they live a few suburbs over (different direction, usually) and Mums and Dads are already time-poor taking other siblings to and from school at those times of the day, so carpooling isn’t really an option either. Similarly, I have to be at home on time every school day to meet J’s taxi, which limits the extent to which Boof and Moo can take up extra-curriculas. Lest you all think I’m a horrible parent, we do encourage them to participate in seasonal sports, such as Auskick (a junior skills-learning approach to Australian Rules football, run between May and July/Aug each year) - our local group meets at the school at the end of the street (no car, no worries - we can walk) and is held on a weekend (no needing to be here or there to meet J’s taxi after school).

So - on to the plan. Remember, FLEXIBILITY is the key word for me.

6:00 - Alarm (at the moment my alarm is set for 6:45 and I’m rising at 7:00. I’m finding that a pretty rushed start to the day, so these new times reflect a change I hope to have made habit in a month or two)

6:15 - Breakfast (leisurely for a change! J rises around 6am most days but the other two sleep a little later…this gives me a chance to eat breakfast slowly (instead of standing up at the counter wolfing down a few mouthfuls of toast because we’re late). No email checking at this time though - I’m far too likely to be tempted by Google Reader and end up late anyway, LOL. Getting up earlier would also allow me to kiss TH goodbye when he’s on dayshift and leaves the house at 6:30.)

7:00 - Morning Routine (more on that soon - the others wake and are breakfast-ed, J is picked up around 8:00)

8:40 - School run (Mon/Wed in Moo’s classroom)

9:30 - Exercise (if I don’t take it now, before I get embroiled in ‘house’ stuff, it never gets done or I get too tired to bother)

10:30 - Housework (this is where I refer to my Basic Weekly Plan (more later) and just get to it. The earlier in the day I do my main housework block, the more energetic I am).

12:30 - Lunch

1:00 - Home Project (I’ve found I’ve got to have a section of time somewhere in my schedule for this. These are those ‘extra’ homekeeping jobs that don’t really qualify as cleaning (and can totally be ignored in seasons of high-stress or low-time) but still need doing. Putting photos into albums, cleaning out the filing cabinet, that sort of thing. Sometimes if I’m light on ‘extra’ jobs to do, I’ll get the laundry sorted ready for the next day or I’ll bake something. I’ve found that actually stopping ‘regular’ housework for lunch and then not picking up again during this hour works better for me. Less burn out, plus if I didn’t allow a daily (or almost daily) section of time to tackle the additional project stuff I’d go months and months without ticking any of it off my list).

2:00 - Personal Time (by this time of the day I’ve already been up (in theory!) for 8 hours and I’ve been working hard for most of it. I read, relax a little, potter about the house, sometimes blog. It’s free time, though sometimes I’m finishing off a bit of baking or continue on with the Home Project).

3:00 - School run (J arrives home around 3:35)

3:40 - Afternoon Routine (more later)

5:00 - Dinner prep, set the table

6:30 - Eat dinner

7:00 - Evening Routine (more later - the kids go to bed at 8:30)

8:30 - Mum’s Down Time (okay, so I like my TV. I don’t watch near as much as I used to but I have some favourite shows. If there’s nothing on (we don’t get pay TV (cable) then I might blog or (try to!) do a little craft).

10:30 - Prep for bed (shower, pjs, brush teeth)

11:00 - Bedtime (I can tell you right now, the last time I saw an 11pm bedtime was prior to 2008. Maybe even 2007. I get horribly sucked in by the allure of the internet, which isn’t great, but the above is the ideal. Seven hours of sleep seems too little to some. It seems extravagant to me, at least when held up against current standards!)

I don’t even bother to plan the weekends like this - that’s part of the weekend’s appeal! We do have a loose plan, more of a to-do list rather than a schedule though. It helps. But the Basic Daily Plan is vital to the way I keep my home. I might be terribly BAD at some aspects of that, LOL, but I’d be a far, far worse prospect without at least some direction :P

The Talk

Nothing strikes as much fear into the heart of a parent than the words “How are babies made?”

My own kids are yet to give me a heart attack grace me with this question although we’re probably about halfway along the spectrum with such questions as “Why are girls and boys different?” and “Why do girls have b**bies?” They know that ‘b**bies’ (and yes, we gave them the proper name, they just prefer this one - our children are clearly refined) are for feeding babies and that girls have parts that boys don’t have and vice versa. With our kids at ages almost-10 (and autistic), 8 and almost-7, we’re pretty comfortable with the ’slow and steady’ approach. When they’re a little older, perhaps this won’t cut it any longer, but for now, we’re good.

So it was with great Coke-snorting-out-nose hilarity that I stumbled across this post by Manic Mommy this week.

An hour? LOL…

The Moo & Her Goo

My poor baby girl is suffering.

Miss Moo has the chicken pox at least as bad as her brother did, and worse in some respects. There are pox in some VERY delicate places - I’ve never seen anything like it. And her gorgeous little face is a mess. She looks like she’s got the mange!

So far, we’ve only had one really bad night. During the night after my birthday (Friday), she was severely itchy and just couldn’t go to sleep no matter what we tried. She lay awake in bed for hours in silence (she is adamant she never slept) and when we checked on her at 1:30 she just took one look at us and bawled her little guts out. Her Daddy sat up with her and watched a movie, and they finally made it to bed around 3am Saturday morning.

She woke again at 4:30.

It was my turn, so I gave her a baking soda bath and lay with her until she finally dozed off again. Folks, I watched the sun rise. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. You don’t see much through sleep-deprived eye slits.

And then I promptly took myself back to bed.

We let her sleep very late that day and in the meantime, I popped down to the local chemist (drugstore) and picked up the other seventeen ‘itchy skin’ products I didn’t get when Master J was sick the week before. No, not really, but I did allow a dubiously-efficient pharmacist to suggest children’s Zyrtec because he said an antihistamine would help with the itchies. It actually seemed to do the trick because last night, she slept through. Phew.

But my goodness, she looks horrible! She’s at that ‘third day stage’ where she looks worse than Day 1 because everything is bursting and starting to scab and change colour and the pox have peaked in number. She makes me scratch just looking at her! And there are, uh, cleansing issues that she needs help with given where the pox are situated, the poor thing. I really hope she comes good in the same timeframe that J did - it was really only a week between his first spots and when he was all scabbed-over (ie, non-contagious). But at least no missed school for Moo :)

It’s daylight savings here from today - threw my whole day out of whack. Talented Hubby gave me a sleep in - sweet, sweet man - and with the time change I was eating breakfast at lunchtime, very strange. It’s also a public holiday in my state tomorrow (Labour Day) and the grocery store, which I hit at fifteen-minutes-before-closing for a couple of things (big, big mistake - was in the checkout line for 25 minutes!) was the busiest I’ve seen it outside of the Christmas holiday period. It was insane! As with all public holidays, they start to wheedle back the amount of stock on the shelves over the course of the day before, so you’re usually hard-pressed to find the full range of meat or bread, which can be frustrating. On the other hand, if you time it right, you can pick up meat and bakery items super-cheap. I got half price loaves of bread today, but missed out on the beef mince (ground beef) I needed. So half and half.

We’re all a bit cabin-feverish round here at the moment. We had only a week between J being non-contagious and Moo getting spotty and half of that time was taken up with a visit from cousins and Daddy’s usual work week, so we haven’t had much of a chance to do anything these school holidays. The kids are frustrated (as am I…sigh). Normally, I’d take them out for a Special Mummy Day - cinema, lunch out, window shopping etc - but we have had to settle for a couple of trips to Blockbuster instead. God bless weekly rentals - without which my life would be a whimpering mess of pox ointment, bald patches (my own) and scabs (theirs), LOL.

You Know That Awesome Childhood Disease Called The Chicken Pox?

And remember how I was hoping and praying for a reprieve from Chicken Pox, The Sequel until AFTER my birthday?

DIDN’T HAPPEN.

Miss Moo has now taken over the reins.

Fun day out with family? Cancelled.
Shopping for my birthday present? Cancelled.
Going out to dinner, which I’ve looked forward to for weeks? Cancelled.

Big sigh.

But, I’m trying to look on the bright side of it all. She won’t have to miss any school, with our new term not beginning for another 10-ish days (J wasn’t contagious from around 8 days, but he got it over the last week of the term and missed school for most of that time). She appears to (SO FAR!) have a less severe case than J did. It also happened on the tail end of several-days-long visit from a favourite uncle and two cousins instead of at the beginning of the visit. We were able to go bowling on Wednesday as a group (in retrospect she was probably contagious then, but we weren’t to know). Poor J had the worst case of cabin fever I’ve ever seen from his week-and-a-half on house arrest right before this so I think he would have disowned us completely if he learned we’d be stuck at home again. And Talented Hubby took today off for my birthday so even though it’s a major drag to be stuck at home instead of out at the arcade with the cousins, at least he’s with us.

But you know what? The Chicken Pox vaccine sounds MIGHTY FINE to me right now….

My Birthday ~ And I Share It With Some Crazy Historial Events

(chubby baby photo!)

Twenty-nine years ago today, this chubby baby made her big entrance into the world. To the great relief of her mother, who had been pregnant (according to her calculations) for 43 weeks.

This is me, aged 4-6 months (the folks weren’t great with the photo labelling!) in early 1980. Born October 3rd, 1979, I was a child of the Seventies for about three months. Peace, man.

Here are some awesome facts about October 3rd - the greatest date of the year :)

1226 - St. Francis of Assisi died. He was the founder of the Franciscan order of monks.

1863 - U.S. President Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November would be recognized as Thanksgiving Day (irrelevant to Australians, but kind of interesting for my US readers!)

1873 - Emily Post was born. Unfortunately, we share no genetic traits.

1964 - First Buffalo Wings were made at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York (paging Jessica Simpson…)

1974 - American baseball got its first African-American manager when Frank Robinson took the reins at the Cleveland Indians.

1990 - the Berlin Wall was in the midst of being dismantled, 11 months after people were beginning to be allowed to cross the borders. October 3rd of that year marked the official reunification of East and West Germany (Happy German Unity Day!)

1995 - OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder.

2002 - Five people were killed in random sniper shootings in the Washington DC area over a 14-hour stretch.

2003 - Roy Horn, of the duo “Siegfried & Roy,” was attacked by tiger during a performance.

I also share a birthday with Tommy Lee, Gwen Stefani, a singer from the Backstreet Boys (Kevin Richardson for those playing at home), Neve Campbell and Ashlee Simpson (maybe she's a bit clearer on the whole Buffalo Wings Issue?) People who have died on my birthday include Black Hawk (chief of the Sauk Native American tribe - in 1838), Gwyneth Paltrow’s father Bruce Paltrow (in 2002), and Janet Leigh (of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and being Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother fame - in 2004).

Stay tuned later today for a second post. It’s a doozy :)