When life hands you lemons…

Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you the whole friggin’ orchard!

Seven years ago today we lost our first baby at fifteen weeks gestation to a congenital birth abnormality. It was a little boy. And when he died, a piece of me died too.

His condition was called Megacystis, which in simple terms meant he had an enlarged bladder. In reality, it meant death was inevitable. We made an impossible choice.

At the time I felt like a spectator watching a car spiralling out of control and slamming into a tree. Except I wasn’t a spectator, I was driving the car.

I tried desperately to crawl out of the wreck, grasping at anything that could help me escape my situation, but when pregnancy number two (another son) ended abruptly at fourteen and a half weeks gestation for an unrelated chromosome abnormality, I was emotionally spent.

It must have been some overwhelming instinctual desire that took over after that, because there was no good intellectual reason for trying again – the odds were certainly not in our favour. In that time I juiced thousands of lemons.

My third pregnancy was different from the beginning, but the vice-like grip around my chest never really allowed me to believe it. My focus was always on the finish line, and when I found out the due date was three days before today’s date, I knew my baby would be born late.

As I laboured through the night, I realised my prophecy was coming true - my first living child was going to be born on the second anniversary of my first son’s death.  I felt the planets align that morning.

Five years ago today I gave birth to a daughter. She was my daughter and she was tiny and pink and breathing, and when I held her to my chest, she urinated down the front of me just to let me know that her little bladder was working.

And now she is five, and she is one of the sweetest, most complicated little people I know. When I look at her I see myself, which both delights and terrifies me.  She is creative and inquisitive and caring, and at the core of her being is someone who loves with her whole heart – and I love her with all of mine.

Five years ago today, with the scars from the squeezing indelibly etched, I learnt how to make lemonade.

Mister Maker has a lot to answer for!

I understand the value of kids and The Creative Arts. I really do. I studied music, art, and drama at school and have been known to break out in spontaneous song and dance numbers when the mood strikes me.

My husband (otherwise known as Pineman due to a questionable haircut that left him resembling the fronds on a pineapple) is not particularly dramatic but is incredibly musical and artistic, so I realise we must accept some responsibility for our kids’ artistic temperaments.

However, I think someone else needs to take some responsibility for our children’s manic craft episodes, and that is a British television show host who sports a zany vest, has crazy eyes, and fashions crafty things out of inanimate objects from his ‘doodle drawers’.  He paints, he sticks, he glues, he cuts, and somewhere in the middle of the program he wakes up some shapes that jump down from a shelf and sing, “I am a shape…la la la la”. 

He is Mister Maker, and he is an enabler!

At one stage my kids were so enamoured with Mister Maker that we had to record the show daily. They even assigned a shape to everyone in the family, and if I happened to be in the room at the wrong time, I had to be a square.

But it’s the way their little eyes light up when they see a ‘fake spilt milkshake’ being created using pink paint mixed with glue or a ‘donkey puppet’ made by sticking two boxes together and then plastered with paint, pom poms and googly eyes, that incites me to throw all easily accessible art products on a Very High Shelf.

Apologies in advance to my high school art teacher, but the three core reasons for my disdain for children’s Visual Arts are as follows:

Visual Arts are messy.

During The Ranga’s recent pre-school orientation session, he gravitated towards the painting table, and with a furrowed brow, started furiously striking the paper with the intensity of Vincent Van Gough. He layered and layered and layered and added A LOT of water from the rinsing cup and produced the masterpiece, ‘Anakin’s Footprints’, which looked suspiciously like his previous series, ‘Stars and Rope’.

Later when trying to wrangle two wet paintings, a backpack, a pair of shoes and the rescuing of The Ranga from a giant bindi patch, I copped the full force of a dripping ‘Anakin’s Footprints’ in the face; which brings me to my next point…

Visual Arts are hard to transport.

As much as I adore pre-schools and day care centres for allowing my children to creatively express themselves without my presence, they really need to consider leasing trailers.

Miss C recently brought home FOUR egg cartons containing the inside padding from a bra (apparently beds for her dolls), two paintings, two drawings and two cardboard boxes covered in paint and glitter stuck together with an empty paper towel roll and some painted yoghurt containers (apparently a boat).

And once when it was pouring rain, I had to haul a saturated Ranga, a pair of sodden thongs, a handbag, a backpack, seventeen drawings, and a pair of cardboard and cotton wool bunny ears. Plus, Miss C had to trail behind toting an umbrella, a wet painting, and a toy chicken in a basket made out of an egg carton and a pipe cleaner.

Trailer anyone?

And sometimes the art just keeps on travelling with us…like Miss C’s paper doily people who have to be strapped into the car and attend her ballet lessons.

But possibly art’s most heinous crime is its prevalence!

Visual Arts are like The Plague.

My kids never stop creating and it’s like some insidious disease that has infiltrated the house.

Despite my best intentions to follow the advice of every parent and magazine and book with their ‘great ideas’ about displaying/storing/using children’s artworks - turn it into wrapping paper, take photos of the art and make a photo book, create a crafty display wall (which would involve me creating craft to store the craft!), frame it - to the parent of the prolific artist, it is all bullshit!

I have saved some, framed three pieces for Miss C to hang in her room, stuck them to the fridge, made numerous, subtle trips to the recycling bin, and yet we are still destined to be like one of those families who have to be rescued by a bulldozer and a team of cleaners and a television crew because we have horded so much crap.

The moral to the story…

I can tolerate The Ranga’s made-up songs about Star Wars characters to the tune of Train’s Save Me San Francisco for ten straight minutes, followed by a cry of, “Mum, I can feel another song coming on”.

I can even tolerate Miss C dressing up in a petticoat I wore as a flower girl in a debutante ball when I was nine, coupled with an old bikini top, and dragging herself along the ground pretending to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

But the next time I hear the theme song to Mister Maker, please allow me to rock in the corner and silently weep.

How to deal with a visit from the great-grandparents…

I come from a long line of perfectionists on my mother’s side – my maternal grandparents being the Patriarch and Matriarch of Perfection. They are always prompt and extremely polite. Their cars have always been polished until they shone, every log book service completed on the due date. When they had a lawn, it was always manicured, the plants pruned and the gardens weeded. The house was always pristine, and when I stayed with them as a little girl, I’d never slept in fresher sheets or been tucked in tighter.

My maternal grandmother is the quintessential 1950’s housewife – she has had weekly hair appointments for her entire adult life, she wears heels and stockings – all year round - even on the hottest Australian summer days. She always dresses as if she might bump into The Queen at any given moment.

She and my mother are the most obsessively organised women on the planet. They diarise everything (my grandmother even transfers things from her handbag diary to her house diary) and both have supreme budgeting skills. They have always kept a rigid cleaning/ironing/housekeeping schedule, which my mother somehow managed to juggle with work.

 I, on the other hand, am seriously flawed. Yes, I inherited some of the organisational skills, my grandmother’s uncanny knack for remembering dates, and their obsession with details, but somewhere in the mix I lost the Suzy Homemaking gene.

My sister is the exactly the same. My mother has been known to place her head in her hands and utter, “I just don’t know where I went wrong”, like our lack of ability to iron, or more to the point, our lack of ability to care about ironing is somehow a reflection on her parenting skills.

I would love nothing more than to exist in a tidy environment, be able to find a matching pair of socks on demand, or pull something out of the wardrobe that is *gasp* already ironed, but sadly this is rarely the case. And having children has just exacerbated the situation. Most of the time it looks like a crazy dictator just released a nuclear bomb in the house, except that I have two crazy dictators and twice the explosive aftermath.

And that’s what the house looked like yesterday - at 11.00am - when my grandfather rang and asked if they could give Miss Curious (Miss C) her 5^th birthday present TWO WEEKS EARLY! I looked at the clock. I was still in my pyjamas and my hair looked like a scarecrow. I looked at the bedraggled kids. I looked at the monumental pile of filing and paperwork and miscellaneous crap on the coffee table. I looked down at the suspicious brown stain on the kitchen floor, which had only been brought to my attention moments ago by Miss C. “When Clare (Miss C’s Best Friend Forever) comes over when I’m 10; I hope she doesn’t spot THIS!”

I paused and then said to my grandfather, “sure, we’d love to see you. What time do you think you will be here? In 20 minutes……….great!”

During these moments, I am torn between wanting desperately to impress them and really not giving a toss. Under the time constraints, I usually manage to satisfy both.

The kids are aware of the dire need to clean up at these times. They have learnt from experience that at some point I will spontaneously combust. So they started running through the house. The Ranga was throwing cars into a drawer at an alarming rate. Miss C cleaned the entire back room in a matter of minutes. I showered, threw the scarecrow hair into a ponytail and made all of the beds.

And then I saw them walking down the driveway. I glanced around but there was no more time. The kitchen benches were covered with breakfast dishes, left over fast food packaging from the night before, and another miscellaneous pile of paperwork (where do these piles come from?)The Ranga had also traded cleaning up all of his cars for emptying the entire contents of his wardrobe onto the floor.

On a positive note, I wasn’t naked. Last week, after showering, I was walking from the bathroom to the bedroom (in the nude) and noticed, through the bedroom blinds my husband had kindly left open, my mother, my aunty, my uncle and my cousin all arriving for a ‘surprise’ visit. I immediately dropped to the ground and commando rolled across the floor to reach my robe. But a robe wouldn’t have sufficed on this occasion.

My grandparents don’t do nudity.

 I answered the door fully dressed and lead them through the bomb site to the back room where we made pleasantries and drank cups of tea and ate the ‘good biscuits’. I told them about The Ranga’s major toilet training achievement - the wearing of undies for two days in a row (even though he is three years, five months and they hail from the era of toilet training children at the age of one). The children then regaled them with lessons in Star Wars 101, reciting the names of ALL characters from the trilogy and the three prequels.

And then The Ranga disappeared.

The thought crossed my mind that I should check on him…and then he reappeared. His skinny white legs were moving at lightning speed. I scanned him up and down and realised he was wearing nothing but a   T-shirt. In the time it took for me to wish I could just wiggle my nose and materialise a pair of pants (and a clean kitchen), he streaked past, his weapon of mass destruction dangling from side to side. I lurched forward to grab him, but it was too late. My 82-year-old grandmother was clutching the side of the buffet and hyperventilating.

We promptly shuffled my grandparents down the hallway, kicking The Ranga’s bedroom door shut on the way through to contain the hazardous waste that was spilling from the doorway, and bid them farewell.

I slowly exhaled, glanced around, and thought: perhaps perfection is overrated…

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye…or their hearing?

I dread the mere thought of indoor play centres during the school holidays. So what did I do the other day when a light hearted conversation with a friend and some hardcore entertainment for the kids were desperately required? I threw my children into a giant circus-themed menagerie for four hours.  

Just walking through the Magna Latched gates, kids tagged like homing pigeons, was like heading into a zoo. My kids couldn’t get at it fast enough – leaping like little lemurs across the floor. My red-headed three-year-old son otherwise known as, “The Ranga”, was swinging through the oversized enclosure like his namesake orangutan within seconds.

Where does all of the energy come from?? And the noise!! The cacophony of squawking children was giving me a twitch and I’d only been there for five minutes. I glanced around and noticed some grandparents with earphones listening to an iPod!

The frenzied, primal rock concert (devoid of any music) continued while I waited for my friend.  And then she arrived…with one, two, three, four, FIVE children. That’s five plus my two equals SEVEN! She has three kids of her own but had acquired a couple of ring ins. This disturbed me on a number of levels…

1.   Is this what happens when your kids start school (as my daughter will be doing in a few months)? You have to look after Other People’s Children under the guise of a “play date”?

2.   We were about to add seven children to the seven hundred children already darting, leaping and squawking around the room.

I scanned the room for a table but every single one was occupied by parents with backpacks and water bottles and prams and shoes and seventy macerated hot chips. I began to stalk the tables like a crazed woman and wouldn’t have gone past bribery and corruption to attain one. When one large group FINALLY decided to leave, I pounced on them, and much to their dismay, I was sitting down before they had a chance to clear their belongings.  Not my usual style but it was survival of the fittest!

The food arrived and my friend and I managed to retrieve all SEVEN children, who in turn proceeded to squish another seventy hot chips into the furniture. God knows how we located all seven. I believe indoor play centres should introduce a large piece of elastic that attaches each kid to their parent or carer. This would alleviate the inevitable journey up a fully enclosed plastic tunnel to rescue a stuck or lost child, or a trip to the bottom of the God forsaken ball pit. Ball pits are cesspits – dig deep enough and you will find a veritable lucky dip. I know they are cleaned blah, blah, blah, but I have, in the past, penetrated the plump, colourful surface to search for a missing sock and have discovered a treasure trove of crusty socks, clumps of hair, nit-infested combs, and mucus-filled tissues.

The magnificent seven then stuffed their faces full of ice-cream and lined up for the carousel. They chanted and rattled the gate like caged animals and my immediate thought was hot chips + ice-cream + spinning = projectile vomiting. 

The Ranga giggled with delight as he whizzed past and then suddenly decided that enough was enough and crawled out of the cup…WHILE IT WAS STILL SPINNING! I screamed and rattled the Magna Latched gate trying to get in, but discovered it was also parent proof.

By some sheer stroke of luck he came out of it unscathed, apart from being emotionally shattered.  I braced myself for the vomit but it didn’t come!

My children are champion vomiters and don’t do well with dizziness, as I discovered one day at a local park when they spun themselves into a frenzy on a spinning thing. The Ranga fell off, staggered like a drunken sailor, face planted in the wood chip and then vomited. I was both amused and horrified and assured everyone that he did not have a gastro virus as I casually kicked some wood chip over the pile of vomit. My almost five-year-old daughter saved her vomit for the car park.  

The kids darted off again and my friend and I tried to continue our staccato conversation, which was punctuated by toilet breaks and the comforting of squashed children. When we came to the realisation that we were flogging a dead horse, we rallied the troops.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, EIGHT! My daughter had befriended a random child who was her “new best friend and could she please come for a sleepover?” NO! I had to explain that random children CANNOT under any circumstances come to the house for sleepovers.

After a final head count I cast my eyes over my children. All limbs appeared intact, only one squashed hand and a scratch on the forehead. Both were wearing TWO socks – matching and their own!  The Ranga had a tub of tomato sauce and an entire chocolate ice-cream down his front, and surprisingly no one had vomited. I could no longer hear a word anyone was saying, but even with a lollipop shoved in their sticky mouths I could see they were smiling.