Colouring outside the lines

I thought it was only my husband who was cultivating a household full of nerds - prepping them for a lifetime of geeky pursuits and school yard crucifixion.

And admittedly he has played a major role.

Case in point:

1.       The Ranga’s OBSESSION with Star Wars. He has only ever seen snippets of the movie, but can still re-enact pivotal scenes using Mega Bloks, plastic golf sticks as lightsabers, and a fake pumpkin as an explosion (flip one over and believe it or not it actually looks like one). He can name all of the characters, and can be found meandering around the house dressed as Darth Vader, draped in a quilt and wearing a bucket on his head.

2.       Miss C’s anal artistic endeavours. Pineman and I both have creative backgrounds. However, I am not the one who paints armies of miniature figurines and teaches the kids bizarre colour names.  Miss C dropped a pencil from our back deck the other day and when I asked her which colour it was so I could go and look for it, she responded with, “snake leather bite”. 

“What the hell is snake leather bite??” I demanded of Pineman who nearly collapsed with laughter (obviously some nerdy in-joke) and replied with, “I think she means ‘snake bite leather’”. Because that sounded far more reasonable!

Anyway, The Ranga banging on about how he can only be addressed as Han Solo, coupled with Miss C’s eternal meltdowns about people using the WRONG colour for faces and everyone colouring outside the lines, got me thinking.

If my children are this anal/nerdy/obsessive then perhaps there is more than one gene pool to blame. So I took a good hard look at myself and this is what I discovered…

I was not cool at school – maybe not the lowest common denominator - but certainly not far off. I played in the school band and sang in the choir. I took part in school musicals (anyone who has seen Glee will understand what that did for my reputation). I represented the school in debating for the annual interschool ‘sports’ visit (yes, in my mind it was a sport). I lived across the road from my high school and my dad was one of my teachers!

Amongst other achievements, I used to have to get up in front of the whole school to accept an ‘attendance award’ each year. Yay for me, fellow students – I have been to school Every. Single. Day. This. Year. Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, that’s my dad who just kicked someone out of the assembly.

Any wonder I never had a boyfriend?

And while everyone at university was wrestling in a jelly pit or sculling beer from a communal yard glass, I was in the library conducting research for my assignments. Need I say more?

But what I have found is that years of achievement in my youth has lead to years and years of underachievement in adulthood.

I have hopped from job to job to job, never knowing what to do next, never staying long enough to climb any ladders, terrified of failure, terrified of success.

I have realised that the types of people who truly succeed in life are the ones who are not afraid to push boundaries, take risks and dream big. The types of people who truly succeed in life wear thick raincoats to weather all manner of storms.

I am not that type of person.  My raincoat tears very, very easily, and I’ve never been a big fan of drowning.

I continued to ponder all of these things recently whilst attending Miss C’s school orientation session.

What do I want for my daughter as she embarks on this new and formative part of her life? We are so painfully similar in some respects that it’s excruciating to watch.

I keep telling her that it’s okay to make mistakes and there are different versions of ‘right’. But I’m not sure I truly believe half the stuff I tell her.

I want to let her know that there are so many pathways to achievement. That she has so many options. That failure is not a catastrophic event.

I want her to find something she is passionate about – anything at all – and not be afraid to pursue it.

I want her to feel like she can colour outside the lines, jump in the jelly pit and scull from the communal yard glass (or maybe not the latter – it just sounds naff!)

I want to send her to school armed with a bulletproof vest and the world’s thickest raincoat, to weather all the storms.

I’m not sure what ticks away in that little mind of hers - but when the previously anal artist presented me with a picture of a rainbow coloured mouse recently and said, “I’m going to start doing my art differently because it’s art” – I thought: perhaps the raincoat I’m sending her with is thick enough?

Much ado about poo

When I was a little girl I remember running to the huge gum tree in our backyard and hiding behind it with my eyes squeezed shut and my fingers jammed in my ears because my mother had taken some asthma medication that had made her dry retch.

I also remember not eating Caramello Koalas, roast chicken, scones and a myriad of other foods for years because (on one occasion) I vomited after eating them and somehow associated them with being spew-worthy.

And then there was the park I wouldn’t look at every time we drove past because (on one occasion) I ate some stale baked beans whilst playing there and proceeded to spend the night throwing up. Banned the park. Banned baked beans. You get the picture. Nutcase! 

So the fact I can now hold The Ranga’s heaving head over a bucket every fifteen minutes for an entire night and scrape chunks of vomit from the fibres of bed linen makes me mighty proud!

From the moment I witnessed my first meconium-filled nappy to the moment I wore my first projectile vomit – I realised I was going to become intimately involved with Another Person’s Bodily Fluids – For. A. Very. Long. Time.

Miss C is fairly low maintenance these days. She can use the toilet, rarely vomits and can wipe her own nose. The Ranga, on the other hand, is like a fire hydrant squirting from all orifices. If he coughs too hard, he spews. If he throws an almighty tantrum, he spews. If he eats too much, he spews. He has only just learnt to wee sans nappy (at 3.5 years) and was found recently in the kids’ toilet at a resort, naked from the waist down, and ‘ice-skating’ in a concoction of soap and his own urine!

But it’s poo he has the most problems with. When he isn’t withholding for three days, he is unloading giant brown packages in undies, in nappies, in the bath, on the floor, and occasionally, in the toilet! He has ‘issues’ with the whole bowel movement arrangement and I get where he’s coming from. Poo does not have many endearing qualities. It’s brown, it smells, and in our house, it incites more hysteria than Beatlemania (for him, not us).

If I were poo’s publicist, I would slam the door in its face!

However, because I empathise with my phobic son – having rejected spew-inducing parks and baked beans and chicken, myself - I am determined to put the positive in poo…and any assistance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

The only two poo role models I have come up with thus far have been:

1.   “Mr Hankey, the Christmas Poo” from South Park. But I don’t really want The Ranga a) watching South Park at the age of three or b) fishing his faeces out of the toilet or his nappy or whatever, to engage it in conversation.

2.   A woman I saw on a documentary recently who was making sculptures out of cow manure – with bare hands – because she liked the texture!! WHAT!?!

So I Googled ‘poo’ to see what came up (as Google contains all of life’s answers) and found an array of links to poo and wee songs, poo arcade games, poo humour, stories about whale poo and climate change, Bristol stool analysis charts (with pictures!!!), more people creating art using faeces (what’s with that??) and bizarre YouTube videos that I was too afraid to click on.

And I still have nothing!!

We have always been fans of the no pressure approach to toileting, and The Ranga has willingly participated in the pooing in the toilet process three times, but he now equates defecating with losing a vital internal organ and no amount of cajoling will convince him otherwise.

The only solution I can come up with (besides bribery, nappies for life etc.) is to keep allowing The Ranga to watch people using the toilet until he learns that it is a perfectly natural and convenient human function.

Like I did on Saturday - when I was using the parents’ room toilet in a shopping centre - and he hit the button for the automatic door whilst I was mid-wee. Not sure how many people copped an eyeful, as I was too busy cutting off the stream (surprisingly good pelvic floor muscles), leaping across the room, cowering in a corner and screeching with my pants around my ankles.

The moral to this sordid tale: I may have overcome my childhood vomit phobia, but have now developed an irrational fear of my naked arse being exposed in public.

And…The Ranga has not pooed for three days!

Birthday celebrations...post-kid style

I am writing under pressure tonight as I set this personal goal to blog once a week. I thought that seemed fairly reasonable, but as it turns out…it is damn hard - made especially hard by our annual trip to Spew Central this week (which requires its own post)!

Anyway, my personal deadline passed yesterday and now I’m all antsy about missing the deadline when there really is no deadline at all.

So rather than wait to write a piece of moderate quality - I thought I’d rush and produce a piece of crap – just to meet my personal deadline.

What I should be doing is writing the piece my therapist asked me to write on guilt and sabotage (why I do it to myself, not others), which is due in two days, and which I am feeling increasingly guilty about not completing.

Is it any surprise I am seeing a therapist?

The other reason I wanted to rush this one is because today is Pineman’s birthday and we celebrated post-kid style.

Celebrating a birthday post-kid style is like waking up and celebrating a Monday. There was really nothing different about awakening today except the four squishy hands prising apart our eyelids were also thrusting presents enthusiastically at Pineman – oh, and no one was vomiting.

We washed and fed people and fed ourselves and packed lunches and packed bags and dropped kids at respective care centres and I forgot to take my lunch to work and Pineman had to drop it in and then he was home alone – on his birthday – watching a James Bond flick on DVD and eating takeaway for lunch. And then he picked up kids from care arrangements and I came home from work early – with a cake – to surprise him and he was standing at the front door, drinking mocha, and looking every one of his forty four years.  

He told me the highlight of his day was realising that Octopussy was not about a girl with eight vaginas. He later changed his highlight to witnessing my top falling down when I was dancing in the kitchen – his highlight, not mine.

He washed more people while I cooked pork chops and carrot and potato and frozen peas and corn for dinner.

 The Ranga had a tantrum because he wanted to wear the pyjamas with the robots and the tractors and the monsters.  The Ranga threw his water on the floor because he wanted the Lightning McQueen cup and not the Batman cup. The Ranga threw his pork on the floor because…well because he has issues with food and certain cups and pyjamas and etiquette. Miss C started whingeing about peas and pork, and I got worked up and started using my OUTSIDE VOICE!

Pineman asked the kids if they cared about his birthday or just the cake, to which they replied in unison, “just the cake”.

They redeemed themselves momentarily with a round of apologies and a rollicking rendition of Happy Birthday to You.  

The Ranga pulled apart his cake and squished it between his fingers because he doesn’t like cream or jam or small servings of cake.

Pineman got ready for a nightshift at work and walked out the door indicating that he might play his “birthday privileges card” when he gets home after midnight.

Well, it’s now 1:18am, no sign of Pineman – birthday privileges revoked!

Good night.