BigBlog

I STARTED blogging in October to vent my frustration at having two sick kids, no sleep and no life in general.  I threw my emotions onto the screen and hit save without any knowledge of blogs or the whole online community at all.

But then a strange thing happened.  People wrote nice things about my post.  And it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Wow - I think I could do this regularly!

And so I started my life as a blogger - trying my hardest to make my posts entertaining while letting off steam at the same time.  Even crummy experiences were okay, because my first thought was how it would make a good blog post!

And then more and more people came and said nice things.  I got popular.  And I don't know if I liked that or blogging more.  OF course the more I blogged, the more time I spent on the computer - reading other blogs, visiting sites that promoted blogs and blog communities.  In fact, I started spending more time reading than I did blogging!

But as my life online developed, my life off-line has deteriorated.  My bills remain unpaid, I still haven't done my BAS, my house is messier than ever and the kids are fighting like crazy.

But the most telling thing has been my son.  I have noticed now when he plays with his trains, he is constantly telling them off.  "NO THOMAS, that is NAUGHTY' "JAMES, I said STOP THAT', "GORDON, you will get a SMACK, now STOP."

It seems, the more I am online, the more they fight because I am not giving them any attention.  But that is why I chose to be an at home mum in the first place.  If I am going to sneak off all day, I may as well be at work getting some money!

Finally the last straw came last night.  I went out for a while and my boy asked my husband if mummy would be happy when she came home?

I need to spend more time with my kids and less time here.  Less time growling and more time playing.

Which is why this is going to be my last post.  The housewife of east vic park can start being the mummy of east vic park again. 

Thank you to all the wonderful people I have met online.  Your support and encouragement has been really wonderful, and made me feel like I could be the next John Grisham! 

But in reality, I am just a suburban housewife who can string a few words together.  My value is being a mum, not a wannabe writer.

So now I am going to save and close.  And get down on my hands and knees and see if I can help Thomas, James, Gordon, Percy, Cranky and all those others get along better! 

yours sincerely,

Housewife

YESTERDAY afternoon, I was struggling to cut up some veges for dinner (had the little one trying to climb my leg and the older one wanting to help do 'cutting') when I heard a car door out the front.  Thank goodness - my husband was home from work early!

I love it when he gets home early, which is really, really rare, because he grabs the kids, takes them outside and basically gives me some space to do housewifey stuff, like cook and clean.

But when he hadn't come through the door in two minutes I knew.  And I wasn't happy.

Just as I guessed, he was standing on the verge, looking at the lawn.  He stood there and looked, and looked, thought some and looked again.  Yep, it was mowing time.

Now I don't really understand my husband's thing with his lawn.  He is not in any way a do-it-yourself kinda guy.  He knows his strength is being a corporate lacky and not a handy-man.  He does nice ties and numbers, lattes at lunch and meetings-in-my-office kinda stuff. 

He doesn't drill holes in walls to hang pictures or shelves (I do that), nor does he fix the reticulation (I do that too) or put together silly things like swing-sets or Bunnings-cheaparse-gazebos (yep, you guessed it - I do that too). 

What I don't (or won't)  do, we pay silly amounts for tradesmen to do.  Change leaky taps, paint...even clean the oven once a year (in Perth - the guy is called Oven Sparkle and he is FANTASTIC... at cleaning ovens that is).

But for some reason, my husband insists on doing his lawns.  He spends lots of time thinking about his lawn, and looking at the brown patches, hypothesisng about what the problem is.  He likes stopping the car on the way out and just looking at the lawn.  When we go on walks, he likes to look at other lawns.  The man is mad.

So when he comes home and just stares at the lawn, I know what is coming.

Eventually he comes in. "I think I might do the lawns", he tells me.  Well hoo-bloody-ray.  I shouldn't sound ungrateful, but when husband does the lawns, so do I!  I have to go out there and follow the little guy so he doesn't get too close to the edger / whipper-snipper / mower, while carrying the little girl because the noise of all three scares her.

I have to admit, the lawns do look great in the front (stark contrast to the mess in the backyard) but it left me even more behind on the housework than ever - and with a husband who was now too hot and tired to mind the kids (may just go have a shower - is that okay?). 

But really, I don't know why we can't just outsource the lawnmowing too.  Our neighbours have a Jims Lawnmower man come every few weeks and he seems to do a nice-enough job.  But then my husband doesn't understand why I insist on making cakes and muffins from scratch and not from add-an-egg-and-some-milk-packets from Coles.

The whole Mars and Venus thing is sometimes very on the mark in our house!

...This one is for you, Kara!

I was terribly hungover yesterday.  I could barely function, dragging myself out of bed, drinking coffees to perk myself up, knocking back nurofen to dull the aching head.  I felt crap.

Shouldn't have drunk so much the night before?  OH No - don't get me wrong - this wasn't alcohol induced.  This is because I dared go out and stay up beyond my 9.30pm bed-time!  Just like Sandy in Grease, I stayed out TILL TEN O CLOCK!  (well actually, 11pm) and boy did I suffer for it the next day.

OH so far gone are the days of my twenties, where a Saturday night was planned for in advance, where I got ready to go out at 7-8pm, wore nice clothes, ate out, then hit the pubs / clubs till the wee hours.  Where staying in on a Saturday night was just not an option - even if I had nothing to do, I would still do SOMETHING! 

For now I have children, who tire me terribly, all day every day.  Although I love them to bits, I am ever so relieved when they are both finally tucked into bed, and off to sleep for the night.

Most nights, this is when the cleaning starts.  Dishes, sweeping, putting toys away, washing the clothes, hanging them out, mopping - usually never ends until after nine when I fall into bed totally exhausted.

Of course my IDEAL Saturday night is now - shock horror - a night in, in front of the telly.  Get me out a good DVD, a bar of chocolate and INTO BED BY NINE.  Oh, sure, lets have some mummy and daddy time if we must, but lets get it over with quickly so it doesn't take away from potential sleeping time. 

Because right now, sleep is better than sex!  It is even better than CHOCOLATE!

But this weekend we had to go out to a party and even worse, we had to stay until the formalities ended.  My husband and I looked at each other across the crowded dancefloor - not in love or lust, but in a mutual understanding that we wished we could just be in bed....together....asleep!

Ah, the shared bond of exhaustion. 

My garden is an urban oasis in the making.  Or morelike, it has the potential to be something great.  You see, I am one of the types that can find a crappy old house and see the masterpiece that it could be.  With a lot of money.

So last year, in a fit on inspiration, I got a landscape designer in.  It cost a bomb but she came up with some fantastic ideas but then before she got a chance to do a final design, we ran out of money.

It seems not having a regular job is kinda rough on the finances.  Go figure.

So I have, in my wisdom, decided to get busy in the garden myself.  To describe my garden as a garden is a bit of an overstatement.  The front is really nice.  IT has lawn and trees and flowers even.  But kids can't play un-supervised in the front yard (stranger danger etc) so I really want to fix up the back.

The back is just plain scary.  About a zillion years ago, some bright spark planted a mass of palm trees, bouganvilia, gum trees, peppermint trees, those big leafy oh I cant remember the name things, plumbagos, and ivy, grape vines and that awful fish-bone fern.  And then left it for - I dunno - forty years perhaps?

It is just one massive, gross tangle of scary-ness which no-one goes near. Heaven knows what lives in the 'jungle'.

But I am inspired and I have started on a daily 'clearing' project.

The boy and I get out there and hack the crap out of the garden.  We dig, lop, pull and generally get very dirty, very scratched up but it is lots of fun.  Our block is actually looking a lot bigger already.

Unfortunately work has come to a standstill while the weather hovers up near the forties.  But I am inspired to keep going.  But, if anyone wants to get Groundforce or Backyard Blitz in to surprise me - go for it!

IT has been hot in Perth of late, bloody, bloody hot.  I think it was like, over forty degrees for three days in a row.  We have been all cranky and hot and restless.

Sick of the kids climbing the walls, I decided they needed some outside time.  But, with the sun being strong enough to burn their precious skin straight from their flesh, I also decided I would be a responsible parent and buy a sun-shelter-gazebo-thingy.

Luckily, Bunnings had advertised a cheapy - $19.95 in fact - so I was pretty happy to duck down to my local in Cannington to pick one up for the kiddies.

Of course, getting out is no mean feat.  Had to pick a time where both were rested, fed, clean, toileted (or in clean nappies) and of course, couldn't leave the house without bringing every train my son owns in his backpack.  And a drink for each.  And a biscuit for each to keep them quiet in the car.  And my mobile, wallet, sunnies and a bag with a spare nappy and wipes.

But I managed and off I went, on the weekend, in the bloody blistering heat.  It was very, very hot.  I think it was 43 degrees or something equally stupid.

Got to Bunnings where there was a kickarse big display of the gazebos - at $29.95.  So I asked a young guy (aren't they ALL young there?) where the $20 ones were.  Well he couldn't find them, so he found some young woman who explained, very nicely, that the $20 weren't in Perth yet.

You see, she told me, the advertising was organised in the East Coast and sometimes it wasn't coordinated with deliveries to the West. 

Well I should have just bought the $30 one.  But I am a stubborn cow sometimes and a point is a point.  My point was, in the nicest possible way, that I didn't give a rats about the advertisers in the east, quite simply, they advertised one for $20 and I wasn't leaving without a $20 gazebo.  Perhaps I could just buy one of THESE here for $20.

Well off she went and came back to tell me that they WERE in Perth, they just needed to be unpacked.  So she went off to organise a forklift or whatever and I wandered the aisles with an increasingly irratable couple of kids.

The little one was hungry, but the louder she got, the louder the boy got to match her.  Oh they did have fun having little squealing contests.  Then the girl wanted to get out of the trolley so I had to carry her squirmy little butt around while the boy tried to put containers of fertilizer and draino into the trolley so 'mummy buy it'.

After, not 10, not 20, but 30 minutes later, I got my gazebo.  By now the kids were entirely feral and I was hot and headachy and not at all happy.

Yes for the sake of ten pissy dollars I put myself and my kids through half an hour of grief on the hottest day both of them have probably ever lived through.  Ah but I made my point didn't I?  Aren't I clever!