Hot

It’s too hot for anything much right now.  Some of our loveliest moments of the last few days have been spent on the trampoline, which appears to be McBean’s new favourite thing.  Here’s the boy and his Baba hanging out:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

This is a question I am asking myself a lot lately.  I am, officially, stuck in an employment rut.  I have a job, it (barely, maybe not really) pays the bills.  I had, once upon a time, hope that this field would provide me with a career path and to that end I enrolled in a Masters degree to further myself.

McBean has derailed me.  Well, more to the point, going through TTC and pregnancy and the first year of McBean’s life has made me reevaluate what I want and what I am willing to put up with in my employment life – and where I’m at and where I’m currently heading doesn’t cut it.

Alright then, that being said, what do I want?  Good question, and one I don’t have an answer for yet.

I am a little jealous of Clark really.  She’s spent the last few (many) years working towards a particular career goal, and now she’s reached that qualification and has enough experience to know that yes, this is really what she wants to be doing, and now it’s just a matter of her finding a suitable position.  Which is taking a little while much to her frustration, but will eventually happen and when it does we know that she’ll love what she’s doing and be happy doing it.

It’s amazing and awesome that she’s found this in her life.  I absolutely couldn’t be happier for her.  And I’m very glad that one of us has got to that point.  It merely serves to highlight the listless and unfocused state I find myself in.

WTF am I going to do with myself?

If we had all the money in the world, as the saying goes, there are plenty of things I’d like to try.  But alas reality rears its ugly head and I am stumped with what I can do given our current and very limited circumstances.  There are not really a lot of lucrative careers for antisocial smartasses who don’t play well with others and have no qualifications in anything.  Well, maybe politics.  But you need to have money for that to begin with.  And absolutely no morals and/or ethics, or a willingness to disregard said morals and/or ethics.

Unfortunately I am a principled antisocial smartass.  Uh oh.

I won’t bore you with a wish list of things I would like to be doing.  Conceptually I’d like to be in a field which is beneficial to both our bank balance and to society/the world at large.  And that I can work by myself.  Don’t like my chances.

Sunday Snapshot

Despite the heat ridiculously early in the season, today has  been a beautiful day of blissful domesticity.

It was Lazyboo’s turn for a sleep-in (something that only ever occurs rarely, I’m ashamed to say) and McBean decided that 545 was a good time to start the day.  So I stumbled out of bed and went outside to lounge on the trampoline with him in the cool of the morning while he jumped around excitedly.  After breakfast, Fenfox emerged from her room so we rushed some food into her and then went to the park for a couple of hours.  McBean walked a really long way and the dog ran herself into exhaustion even before we went to the playground.  At the playground, FenFox impressed me with her monkey bar antics and her newfound ability to swing herself (finally – it was like she had a mental block).  McBean scrambled up stairs and ladders and down slides, ate dirt and asserted himself with an overly friendly little girl.  Much fun was had.

Once we came home, Lazyboo was up and the rest of the day was spent in quiet relaxation (for the girls anyway, McBean ran around playing, messing, exploring, shouting, dancing as he usually does). We had a lovely sunday roast (foolishness on a 34 degree day but yum nonetheless), we gathered and labelled and packed up FenFox’s gear for her very exciting school camp to Mt.Eliza tomorrow.  And then I had a two hour nap, as had McBean a little earlier.

When I got up we headed back outside where it was cooler than our little hotbox of a house and watched McBean jump on the trampoline again.  FenFox sat under a tree and continued to read (her third book of the day).  Lazyboo and I hung out some washing and installed the toddler seat on the back of my bike.  Then it was time to get FenFox all washed and fed before she headed off to church with her Dad and R2 (it was a guides thing and I sure wasn’t going!)  There were some lovely moments while FenFox was finishing her dinner and all of us (including R1 and R2) watched some video of FenFox as a 9 month old, exclaiming how R1 had hair then, and my hair wasn’t yet gray, and how we were babies with a baby.

After watching a little guy splash around in the bath (which ended suddenly after he repeatedly pulled the plug out), Lazyboo and I headed back outside with a beer (me) and some gin (Lazyboo) for a chat in the lovely cool evening.  Then we came back in and cooked my favourite meal (beef madras) to eat tomorrow night, and a leftover frittata for us to eat tonight.  FenFox was delivered home asking questions about why they use words like thee, thou and ye at church and exclaiming about the boredom of it all then she headed off to bed.

McBean has just woken up after discovering for the first time how to remove his nappy cover – I am glad that we chose the two part option and not the all in ones!  A quick cold bottle and he’s back off to sleep.

Today was a good day.

Uh oh

I missed a day.  I console myself with the fact that in parts of the world it is still yesterday for a while longer, so in the grand scheme of things I can squeeze a quick post in.

My defence is that Clark, very uncharacteristically, fell asleep before me last night.  She did remind me once, but I had expected her to prod me again about it.  Who knew she’d be asleep so early?

I’m not sure who let it be Sunday already, I’m not ready to go back to work.  Was a hard week last week, I worked my three long days in a row.  Was completely wiped out by Friday night, but got a lot accomplished so that’s always good.  And after Clark’s massive busy session on Friday there wasn’t anything urgent left to be done, which is also always good.

I am longing for spring to be over.  My allergies have been really bad this year.  This weekend Clark has walked the dog twice because the second I step foot outside the house I am sneezing like a freak.  And my eyes, they’re permanently bloodshot and itchy and weepy.  Looking good.  Not.

Of course, the end of spring mean the beginning of summer, also known as bushfire season.  Clark was looking at the news headlines today and there are already (!) fires out east.  Crazy stuff.  And we thought last year was a bad year.

I wish there was some way to equalise the temperature over the year, so that we had everyday being around 25 – that’s Clark’s ideal temp, other than sub-zero and snowing.  I could stand it being a little warmer than 25, but I’m happy in any weather when I can wear shorts.

I foresee in the future that we are going to run into some real issues because of the temperature thing.  Clark inevitably wants to end up somewhere there’s snow and skiing, whereas I would much prefer some nice little tropical island where the temperature varies somewhere around the 30 C mark.  I shut down in the cold and she melts in the heat.  I joked the other day that we need to be able to afford two houses when we retire, one in southern Spain and one in Switzerland or thereabouts.  Or maybe just a nice villa in Tuscany somewhere and enough cashola to send her skiing and me to defrost.  Ah, it’s nice to dream…

boring busyness.. and leo

I have long described myself as a failure of a housewife.  Usually when I am home alone with McBean (and FenFox after school mostly) while LB does her marathon work days, very little gets done apart from the taking care of the kids part.

Today while home with McB I have swept all the floors, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed up the hair off the dirty dog bed and sewed up the holes in it ready for washing, washed a load of mcb’s nappies and another of his clothes and hung them out, kept all the dishes up to date after feeding us both, pooper scooped and weeded the newly empty back yard (my brother came to ‘borrow’ dad’s car that has been living in it for months last night), swept up all the leaves and other debris (and topped up the compost), set up the outdoor furniture and tidied up mcb’s toys and books at least 7 times.

today i feel like a success as a housewife.

In other news, yesterday I picked up two spare Leos.  Leo is McB’s comfort toy (a soft tan leopard with blue spots and a belly button) that he cannot sleep without.  We’ve run into trouble a few times when Leo has needed to be washed during sleep times and McB remained awake and somewhat hysterical until Leo has been returned to him.  We wondered if a switch would be possible given the smell of the sucked tail of the Leo seeing somewhat important to McBean, but when I gave the new one to him, he seemed to settle just fine.  But then the little guy decided about 6 was a good time to wake up this morning and not go back to sleep.  And he only slept for an hour at nap time today despite having fallen asleep during morning tea and woke up extremely distressed.  It was then I noticed that the new Leo (I shall dub him Clean Leo or maybe Cleo for short) still has a completely dry and untouched tail.  It has not been sucked.  So it appears that Cleo provides some comfort to the boy, but not the optimal comfort of a limp cheesy smelling wet tail of the original Leo.  Ew. Hopefully having washed him will not have spoiled that, as gross as it is.

McBean with Cleo today, stolen from the cot when I wasn’t looking:

McBean with Leo a while ago, also  stolen from the cot when we weren’t looking: