July Fly on the Wall

Welcome to another instalment of Fly on the Wall. This is by far my favourite time of the month. I get to share little stories and tid-bits you'd hear if you were a fly on the wall. Today I am joined by 8 other bloggers who are all sharing their innermost crazy. Be sure to buzz around and visit all of them.

Baking In A Tornado
Menopausal Mother
Spatulas on Parade
Never Ever Give Up Hope
Dinosaur Superhero Mommy
Southern Belle Charm
Go Mama O
Molly Ritterbeck

I'm going to warn you now that there is a lot  of toilet humor in today's post. I try to keep things as clean as possible around here, however sometimes life has a way of keeping things in the gutter when I'm around. If you are easily offended I'd look away now.

Mum: I think I'm hungry.
Me: Well let me know when you're sure.
Mum: Why? Are you going to do something about it?
Me: No, I'm just really invested in this story.

My little sister Kim is staying with us at the moment, and my favourite thing to do with her is turn everything she says into an innuendo. It bugs the hell out of her, but it's not my fault she's so filthy.

Me: I remember that pie I made that had the cod in it, I was pretty proud of that fish pie.
Kim: Oh I remember that. I loved eating your fish pie.
My cue to fall on the floor laughing.
Kim: Oh shut up.

Kim: Mum do you want your meat separated
My cue to fall on the floor laughing
Kim: Stop it. I'm just trying to figure out if mum wants her pork loins in twos.
I have to rush to the toilet to prevent having an accident on my couch.
Kim: I hate you.

Mum walked in to the room and started smacking me in the back of the head.
Me: Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.
Mum: Oh sorry I'm just like Pavlov's dog. Whenever I see you I have to hit you.
Kim: Mum, it's not nice to call her Pavlov's dog.
Me: No, mum is Pavlov's dog. And for future reference it's called a Pavlovian response mum.
Kim: I know all about the pavlova response, I work in childcare.

Me: I'm a diverse person.
Mum: I thought you were about to say you're a diabetic.

Me: Mum do you have regrets?
Mum: I have a few, too few to mention.
Me: No, I'm being serious. Thanks a lot Frank Sinatra, I'm going to punch you in the nads when I next see you.

Me: Miss K have you eaten your dinner yet?
Miss K: I don't like it. I want a different dinner.
Me: Well this isn't a restaurant. You eat what I put in front of you or you go hungry.
Miss K: Well let's pretend this is a restaurant then and you make me something else.
Me: If this is a restaurant it's a soup kitchen, where you get what you're given or go hungry.
Miss K: I don't like this restaurant.

Mum: You're getting more and more anti-social as you get older.
Me: Yep I know. I love it.
Mum: I don't.
Me: When you think about it, I've spent fourteen years speaking on the phone to people I don't know or don't like.
Mum: I'm your mum.
Me: FOURTEEN YEARS MUM!

Miss K came up while I was surfing the web and started randomly mashing at my keyboard.
Me: Don't you even think about it miss.
Miss K: I'm going to think about it.

Earlier this month one of my dad's sons from his first marriage became a grandfather for the first time. This makes my dad a great-grandpa and me a great-aunt. This news disturbed me because I feel at 32 I'm way too young for this crap. However it does make for great conversations with the family.

Me: I found out today that dad is a great-grandpa.
Ben: Whose kid had kids?
Me: One of [older brothers] kids, not sure if it was [nephew 1] or [nephew 2].
Ben: That's crazy.
Me: Tell me about it. That makes you a great-uncle, and yet still so mediocre.
Ben: That's the pot calling the kettle black.

Me: This is freakin' weird.
Mum: What?
Me: I'm a great-aunt.
Mum: (laughs) Meh, you're ok...

Here is another in the wonderful series of Minecraft conversations which sound weird without context.

Eliza: I have a head. Where did that come from? Mum where are you, I have a head.

Miss K has been sick on and off with various viruses these past two months, but one night she woke up with weird swelling in her chin. I rushed her straight to our after hours medical service where we were prescribed antibiotics for an infection which had caused her glands to swell up like a balloon.

Dr: Now one of the side effects of this antibiotic is diarrhoea.
Me: Did you hear that Miss K? This medicine may give you runny poos.
Miss K: Runny poos in my neck?
I don't think the doctor appreciated that I laughed so hard at Miss K's shock.

Sadly for us, that visit to the doctor wasn't the end of the saga, and after going to my own GP for a second opinion we were told to rush to the local hospital as the swelling was an indication Miss K was forming an abscess in her neck. Miss K ended up spending three nights in hospital on IV antibiotics, and I spent three nights sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the ward next to her. but she took all of the poking, prodding and needles like an absolute trooper and on the fourth day we were finally allowed to go home. She's still on antibiotics for the time being, as there is still some swelling in her neck, but we've hopefully avoided surgery as long as her recovery continues as well as it has.

Conversation in a public toilet.
Miss K: Mum I did poos and wees.
Me: (Very aware that there is another person in the stalls with us) Yes I know you did now hurry up and finish.
Miss K: But there were lots of them.
Me: That's great. Are you done yet?
Cue the toilet next to us flushing and a woman comes out laughing.
Woman: It's ok, I have kids too.
Me: The conversations you have once you're a parent.

We had a federal election in Australia this month, and my sister Natalie decided to vote for the first time.
Nat: I have no idea who any of these people are or what they want. I remember watching some political show at dad's once and they kept talking about a cabinet, but they never once showed a picture of it. I couldn't understand what was so amazing about a stupid cabinet that they felt the need to discuss it for so long. What is this cabinet?
Me: It's the group of politicians which make up parliament. And you are one the people deciding who runs our country for the next few years.  I worry about you sometimes.

Natalie was temporarily promoted to room leader at the daycare centre she works at this month, but the promotion did not come without issues, and one of her co-workers quit suddenly, saying that she couldn't work with Natalie because she stressed her out, and now she was constipated.

Nat: I don't understand what her problem is, I looked at the roster and I only spent 3 hours and 20 minutes a day with her.
Me: Well apparently that's long enough for you to constipate someone.
Nat: Yeah. You better not spend more time than that with me otherwise you'll start having problems too.

Luckily for Natalie her bosses were able to see the humor in the situation, but Nat now has the reputation of constipating those who work around her.

Well that's it from our crazy part of the world, be sure to visit all the other bloggers joining in today, and I'll be back to share more fun again soon.

An Open Letter to My Daughter's Kindergarten

To the wonderful teachers who are stuck with my daughter fifteen hours a week,

Today I am writing to you with a plea for change. Normally I'm not one to complain. Normally I'm just happy accepting that life is full of ups and downs and I can usually coast through it all with a smile. But not any more.

For the most part I love what you do. You get my daughter away from her tablet and her television without complaint, you manage to get through five hours a day without her constantly begging for food and drinks like she's a starved orphan who hasn't eaten for weeks, and you get her out of my hair three days a week, for which I love you all truly, madly, deeply. But when I come to pick up my daughter every day, you never return my sweet little princess back to me. For some reason you always lump me with a giant mud monster, and this has to stop.

Exhibit A: The result of ten minutes of scrubbing mud from ONE child's jumper. You don't want to know what the rest of the bathroom looked like when I was finished scrubbing.

I get that kids love getting down and dirty, and I get that letting them play in the mud is great for all sorts of reasons. But I'm not entirely sure that the children aren't staging mud wrestling events while in your care, which is the only explanation I can find for why they go home absolutely caked in mud every. single. day. Now if these mud wrestling matches have some kind of educational purpose, whether it be you're teaching them economics by letting them bet on the matches, or you're teaching them about physics, by showing them how to body slam their opponent into oblivion, then it would be a totally different story; but from what Miss K tells me, she has learned absolutely nothing from these experiences other than mud is awesome.

Apparently she only needed 45 minutes to get this dirty

I really shouldn't be surprised that Miss K has taken a shine to jumping through every puddle of mud she ever lays her eyes on, especially given that she feels that Peppa Pig is her spirit animal, but surely not every child has the same spirit animal, and yet I notice that nearly every child is covered in mud from head to toe by the end of the day. All of us parents stand outside in a group prayer every afternoon before you let us in to sign our progeny out for the day, begging for the mud to go no higher than the children's gumboots, and every day we all laugh with you about how much fun our children had getting absolutely filthy. We give sympathetic glances to the parents with the blackest children, and mentally congratulate ourselves for teaching our children about restraint when playing with dirt. Then we all head to our cars and cry into our steering wheels.

Some of the parents are beginning to get desperate. One parent is starting to buy stocks in hydrophobic solutions, in the hopes that they start making whole outfits out of the stuff one day, and another mother has just signed her daughter up for an internship with the local laundromat, just to teach her exactly what happens to dirty clothes. I myself have resorted to doing the laundry in the dark, reasoning that if I can't see them, then the stains aren't permanent. But without your help I fear anything we parents try will only be a bandaid solution.

We parents feel that since you and your staff are encouraging this kind of messy play, it is only fair that you provide free laundering services through the kindergarten. We have even discussed signing consent forms that let our kids work for you, free of charge in your laundromat, although we're checking with a lawyer right now just to make sure this doesn't constitute slave labour, and will need to get back to you before we put pen to paper.

Whatever the solution may be, something has to be done. I know you think your mud pile is beneficial to our children, however I feel it is more beneficial that I am not curled up in the fetal position next to my washing machine every single day singing the Peppa Pig theme song over and over again.

I look forward to coming to a mutually beneficial solution at your earliest convenience.

Kind Regards

Searching for Sanity


*Do any of you wonderful readers have children who enjoy getting as filthy as my own daughter does? Please share your horror stories of dirt for days and picking mud out of kids hair with me to help me get through the next six hours of scrubbing I have to do.*

She slimed me!!!

So for today's play date, Miss K and I decided to get a little dirty (well I decided and Miss K was forced to go along with it). I mentioned a few posts ago that Miss K hates getting her hands dirty, which is why we're having so many problems with getting her to eat finger foods. So I decided to tackle this problem today by making some slime for her to play with. We started by trying to make monster blood, but after an entire pack of corn flour, all we had was white water so I had to scrap that idea, and made play dough instead.

For anyone who doesn't know how to make your own child safe play dough at home, the recipe is as follows:

1 cup of water
1 cup of salt
2 cups of plain flour
1 table spoon of oil
food dye to colour.

Add all the ingredients together and knead until it forms a dough. To make mixing the colour easier, I put the food dye in the water. And there you have it, a child friendly dough. (I still wouldn't recommend eating it, as the salt makes it super salty, just ask Miss K)

Yup, she stuck it straight in her mouth. After half a bottle of juice to get the salt and flour out of her mouth, we set out to let her know that it can be OK to get your hands dirty. She was pretty resistant at first, and although she was happy to touch the dough, she would try to get any of it that stuck to her hands off as soon as she let go.

But once she saw that I was OK with having the goo all over my hands, she started to get into it and was really enjoying herself by the end....

...Let me try that again. She was really enjoying herself by the end...

OK so I guess we put the camera away before she started having fun, but trust me, she really did like it. She even decided to try playing with her noodles at dinner time, and they were much slimier.

So even though the battle is not completely won, we're one step closer to Miss K being OK with having dirty hands, and hopefully that will make life all round a little bit easier.