Come dry with me... Let's dry away...

Ohhh! Look at me!

I'm ever so environmentally conscious, with my laundry-in-the-lounge!

On rainy days I have rows of clothes spread over my indoor lines like deflated kookaburras sittin' on the 'lectric wires (That's not even a good simile Lyndell! Gosh!)

My drying room is redolent of the fabric softener of the day, "Mountain Breeze", "Ocean Mist", "Woodland Glade" or "Sulphuric Lava Flow", and I get to be ever-so-gently brushed by my garments as I walk through them.

I like that we are saving energy as well, since we don't have a dryer our clothes are left to dry as we heat the rest of the house...

Who am I kidding? I'd KILL for dryer!

It's the dead of Winter. It's cold, it's wet, it's miserable and I just want dry, fluffy clothes! I want to burn a hole in the ozone layer above my house in the shape of that porthole that opens into the magical appliance that removes the dankness from my dresses, the sogginess from my socks and unsaturates my underwear.

Don't get me wrong! It's great to have ethics, and go about living your life without harming the environment. But when It's the middle of the night, and you have two kids vomiting all over their beds, and you're using the last of your moth eaten tablecloths as bedding, ethics don't dry your clothes!

I think tax time I'll be buying a dryer.


Could you live without your dryer during the Winter months? Or are you quite happy with a drying room inside?

Renovations, Elvis and The Hustle

As I glanced up at the clock on the mantle I was surprised that it was gone...Even more I was surprised that it had been replaced with Elvis.

"You should really get rid of those brown woollen curtains and replace them with a nice damask curtain with voile backing and a waved valance..." he mumbled in the general direction of my windows.

"Fuck off Elvis!" I yelled, "No one wants your fucking curtain advice!!"

As the ghost of the long dead rock star disappeared with a poof and a gelationous smear, I was left pondering... Those curtains really are hideous! And... I'd kill for a deep fried cheeseburger right now, extra pickles.

I have been living in my house for 5 years now and our renovations are coming along very slowly.

My partner and I are kind of like one of those revovation shows gone wrong. We've ripped up the carpet in the whole house, and only the lounge room floor has been done...
So the lounge looks nice, except for the half finished mantle piece.

(Whenever I walk into our lounge I see this sign and get this song in my head:

Do the Hustle (or in my case, Do the Mantle)

But back to my offending office curtains, (which the Olsen twins have been fighting over for that bag-lady chic look, ever since the town homeless guy turned them down as bedding) they really are awful, brown, itchy, wool curtains, which I will get around to replacing one day...

So until I have my house fully renovated, I think I'll be left with my imaginary smarmy dead rockstar friend giving me bad renovation advice.

Are you a renovator or a D.I Y queen? I'm not...

If MacGuyver was a Stay At Home Mum...

The other day, my family and I went grocery shopping at our local IGA, as we generally do on a weekly basis.

As we’d finished, my other half remembered and item that we’d forgotten, and quickly ran back inside the supermarket to get it.
To keep my 2 boys amused while he was gone, I decided to treat them to that grabby-claw-machine-thing-that-grabs-dodgy-prizes.

This one is actually a good one. Not one of those machines with a really limp claw that couldn’t get a grip on a magnetically charged, super-glue covered, velcro ball.

Therefore, in the end, our machine booty consisted of: 1 very ugly teddy bear key ring, 1 plastic spinning top that lights up (which broke on its second use), and 1 bubble blowing tube of bubbly funstuffs!
I passed my eldest, Jasper, the plastic top, my youngest, Atticus, the tube of bubbles, and popped the ugly teddy bear keyring into my bag (where I have a rapidly growing ugly teddy bear keyring collection! Please don't spill water in my handbag, or feed my handbag after midnight) and we headed to the car.

As we were loading our groceries into the car, Jasper was inside the car and Atti was standing very close to us as to not run around the car park, or so I thought...

He had been shoving the tube of bubbles up the exhaust pipe! By the time we noticed what he was doing, the tube was stuck up there. My partner tried to get it out with the car keys and was getting completely frustrated. So I told him to get Atti in the car, and I’d deal with the exhaust.

I searched my handbag, found a bobby pin and channelled MacGuyver. I made the bobby pin into a claw shape, manoeuvred the ends in around the tube, and “hey presto”, easily pulled the tube out. I had saved the day!

Although I am slightly disappointed that we didn’t get to drive down the main street of town, leaving a trail of bubbles blown behind the car.

Look out for next week's installment of MacVoluptacon when I endevour to toilet train using polypiping, tree bark and orange juice. Will teach the kids to eat vegies with the aid of PVA glue ,a roll of butcher's paper and a map of Wisconsin. And will retrieve foreign objects from the ear canal using a spatula, the backlog of Reader's Digests from 1984 and a broken Soda Stream.

I don't think MacGuyver could cut it as a stay at home mum!

Pillow Talk

At the end of the day my partner and I like to relax and chat about the important issues in life and the world:

Adoption:
-"What If we adopted a child from Mongolia? A girl! I’d like to call her Genghis Larry and teach her traditional Mongolian throat singing".

Travelling:
-"I wonder if you could use alpacas like you can use horses? I wonder if you could harness them up to a gypsy caravan and go on holidays? How long would it take to get to Queensland you think?"

Death and funeral arrangements:
-"When I die, I want you to throw yourself onto my burning coffin like a hysterically grieving widow".
-"Ok then, but only if I can roll myself in the stuff that they coat Sparklers with first, then do it!".
-"Sure. Works for me!"



These are just a few examples of the conversations my partner and I have had once we get into bed after a long day.
Ok, Ok, we also we like to talk about the serious stuff and everyday stuff too, like work, the kiddies and whether we could turn our wheelie bins into robots and they can take themselves out (but only if that didn’t lead them to them running riot through the streets doing donuts, drag racing and generally being hoons. Can you imagine the scourge of wheelie bin hoons?)

But I seem to find that we talk better in the comfort of our own bed, like we are more relaxed and the lines of communication are more open.

I was wondering, do you and your partner talk at the end of the day? A basic daily round up? Talks about Life, the Universe and Everything? Primal grunting?
Where do you like to chat? In bed, on the couch, at the dinner table... or on a banana lounge drinking Fluffy Duck...?

Bribery for under 5's 101

So, after a long period of study, completing my Master's in Clinical Psychology as well as a Degree in Physics, to particularly study Quantum Mechanics. I think I may just have learned what it takes to bribe my two children to clean up after themselves.
I have learned that the thing they begged me for yesterday, may not neccessarily hold any fascination today, ie:

Thursday:

-"Mum! Mum! Can we buy some chocolate donuts with chocolate sprinkles?!"
-"No!"
-"Please Mum. I'll DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE if I don't have one!"
-"No!"

Friday:

(After asking, threatening and cajoling for 3 hours)

-"If you guys pick up all the blocks that you've strewn around the loungeroom, and even scrape the melted ones off the heater, I'll buy you a chocolate donut with chocolate sprinkles".
-"*sigh*.... nah..."

So instead of folding and accepting the old adage "If you can beat them, join them (together with a roll of gaffa tap)", have finally learned to offer them something they never thought they wanted.

The equation goes a little something like this...

They may not have realised that they wanted to go to the park this afternoon, but now, thanks to many years of studying the human mind, quantum mechanics, rocket science, Oprah, and with a bit of blind luck and mother's inutition- they do!
Chalk another one up to Mum!

Does bribery work with your kids all the time?

My brother the chef

My brother is a chef. He should be a celebrity chef.

He should have a show called, "How to fatten up your relatives whenever they visit your restaurant, because they obviously have no idea what food is, they've never eaten before, so you MUST give them all the nourishment your kitchen can provide. And that means finding your largest serving platters to use as plates and pile them high with every item on the menu".

He fries up the contents of his kitchen freezer whenever my children go to dine at his salubrious establishment... Have you ever seen an 3 and 5 year old trying to eat a wheelbarrow full of chicken nuggets? Or 3 milk crates worth of calamari rings? Or a 44 gallon drum full of cocktail franks? He has no children of his own, so assumes they eat as much as a growing teenager with worms, a double jointed esophagus and a 3 metre long duodenum.

His adult servings are really special too. I actually think there are some smaller religions that worship the cathedral that is his Porterhouse with garlic mash (the red wine jus, used in their baptisms).

I'm just saying he is a very generous man, generous to a fault, and could take on any other celeb chef in the world in generosity of the plate and spirit!

My brother, the chef (who, according to my youngest son, looks like Kanye West...must be the oversized sunnies and the goatee... and the awesome RnB sound!)

Surreal Sunday

This morning I woke up and decided to take the kiddies for a walk. I got dressed in my favourite jogging gear of roman sandals, headdress from Rio De Janero, footy socks, my Nanna's best chenille dressing gown, and I merrily jogged off down the street... I remembered then that I don’t jog (due to an old snorkelling injury, and I also don't possess a correctly fitted jogging bra... just an old training bra, 4 elastoplast bandaids, a coathanger and packet of frozen peas shoved down my top) and settled into a leisurely stroll (plus jogging was dislodging my Mardi Gras style head attire, and it had nearly perforated my left eyeball).

Perambulating further on down the track I was merrily greeting passers by screeching “Bake me a cake!” at them like a fish wife and painting a green stripe down their back (with my handy dulux tin I carry everywhere), then following them back to their house, making myself cinnamon sugar on toast and then leaving (stealing their junk mail).

We arrived at the park and Jasper told me he was hungry, so while the kids were on the swings, I tracked and hunted some Grouse and roasted it in my portable grouse roaster (luckily I had it on me as I wasn’t going to bring it. I was going to bring my portable Icypole freezer, just incase I wanted to pick some Icypoles for my Icypole arranging class)(Icypole is a good word isn’t it? I like the word Icypole).

We were all a bit tired by this stage, so we headed home, singing all the national anthems of the countries of Africa, with Jasper accompanying me on the ukulele and Atticus on the nose flute.

T'was a lovely stroll, will try to go for another tomorrow. I Will keep you posted of the events of that one.