Yule Be Sorry

Hooray, December is upon us! Like a crushing weight in your heart! Upon us like a thousand years of late tax returns!

I don’t quite know what it is about December that makes me so down in the dumps every year, except oh yes, maybe I do. Maybe it’s the way the end of the year looms like a horrendous deadline for all the things you promised yourself you’d achieve this year and didn’t. Maybe it’s all the things you have to do and buy and attend and make a costume for and take a plate to. Maybe it’s because you have to decide on a Christmas tree.

Historically, choosing a tree hasn’t been a problem in our family. Because historically we’ve just bought a massive chopped down tree if we are going to be at home for Christmas, and used a large plastic tree if we are going away.

But this year, although we are home for the holidays, H has come over all Sting and doesn’t want a nice chopped-down pine. He’d rather we have a tiny potted facsimile of a Christmas tree that you decorate, leave inside for a fortnight, then banish to the garden, before you go to haul it out next Christmas and realize it is dead, just like the lovely big purpose-grown Christmas tree you passed up this year. He thinks he is saving a Christmas tree life, but he is wrong. All Christmas trees are meant to die. That is their purpose. They are the gladiators of the tree world. We kill them for our sport.

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RUN NOW!

Baffling contraption

As we are wont to do from time to time, H and I have started a small health kick. It’s not a high kick. We’re not idiots; we don’t want to put our backs out. It’s more like the miniature kicks you use to move a school bag to another room when your arms are full of laundry and mail.

Our motivating forces are vanity and pain. We’re not getting any younger. One of us has just turned twenty-one for the second time. And while he doesn’t look much older than the uni student who used to drive a campervan to parties that he was the first time he was twenty-one, his sore back is telling a different story.

As for me, well, I recently read one of my stories live at a comedy club for the first time (you can listen to the podcast here, if you’re so inclined), and let’s just say the official photographs made me look further up the wrong end of the Bardot-Brando Continuum than I’m happy with, jowel and chinwise. And as Presidential Candidate Trump has shown us, bronzer is only going to trick people so far. So, it’s time for action.

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Ten Years? You Get Less For Murder!

Ten years ago today, the day before I turned twenty-six, I went to a thirtieth birthday party for two people I knew. It was a circus/carnival-themed party. I thought long and hard about what my costume would be, because I knew there was a very good chance that my most recent ex-boyfriend would be there and thus I needed to not go dressed as a clown or a strong man or anything that didn’t lend itself to looking really hot and showing desperate and vengeful amounts of cleavage.

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True Romance

Because I want this to remain a mummy blog, and not morph into a beauty blog, I shall refrain from giving you the contact details of the salon I frequent for manicures. I will only reveal that it is run by the seven-year-old next door and she charges by the fingernail.

In a marriage, it’s the little things that keep the romance alive. Tiny, thoughtful gestures that show your beloved that they matter. Things like taking pride in your appearance. Not letting yourself go. Because it really isn’t that hard, even with the busy lives we all lead, with toddlers and babies and businesses and buying houses and selling flats, to put a bit of effort into making yourself presentable for your spouse. While obviously you can’t and needn’t go to the same effort every day of the week that you went to for your wedding day, you do want him to remember you’re still that lovely girl he married.

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You Give Me Fever

In the event of finding yourself over thirty-eight weeks pregnant and suffering from a virus that makes you burn with fever and shake with chills for twenty-four hours (so far…) this is all I can suggest: 

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What I’ve Liked This Week: Learning to Be On Holiday Edition

Swimming in an ocean rock pool. I am a bit slow, clearly, but I have finally discovered a place that has all the nice seawater of the beach, but no horrible sand and no scary waves. It is bloody freezing, but once you go numb it’s refreshing and makes me feel brave. There are also lots of interesting old people to talk to while you swim.

Eating five-hour Greek leg of lamb, bought from our local butcher down here. I’ll tell you more about him another day, but he is known in our family as the perpetually surprised butcher, because everything we ever say seems to astonish him. Today he told us that yesterday his daughter’s longtime boyfriend had come all the way out to the shop to ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage. It is top secret, as the boyfriend hasn’t proposed yet. I am certain we were not the first to be told this secret today.

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Holidays Make Me Sick

Things aren’t going exactly according to plan on our holiday. No sooner had we arrived and unpacked our Tetris-style car that took us a full hour to load, than I came down with some kind of horrible lurgy. Coughing like an old man outside the TAB, a headache like a horse kicked me and and a mood to match, I promptly retired to my bed and have barely raised my head since.

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Break It Down Now

My little family is about to take a little break. Not from each other, but from the city and work, from battling for parking and crowded living in a flat, from barricading our kid into the ungated backyard using a line of bins to stop her escaping onto the road while we hang out the laundry. H has resigned from his job and he will start a business of his own in one month. So for a month we are going to be all three together, mostly away from home. Thinking about this makes me feel excited and relieved and calm  at the same time.

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Is Going Out Tonight Worth It?: A Statistical Analysis

This evening H and I are supposed to go out. Out of the house, together, without May Blossom. Not to the compost bin, or the rubbish bin, or the recycling bin. Not even further afield to the video shop, the supermarket or the petrol station. Tonight we have tickets to see Bonnie Prince Billy at the Sydney Opera House.

I bought the tickets a few months ago on a whim, because H loves Bonnie Prince Billy, who is a grumpy-looking, balding, blond bearded alt-folk-country musician. I like him too, I think, but I can’t actually remember any of his songs. Whenever I try to summon one up in my head I get a Bon Iver song. Nevertheless, I am excited to be going out. Or I was until I looked at the tickets to see what time the show starts.

Nine o’clock. Nine pm. In the night. That means he won’t be finished until 11. We won’t be home until midnight. Let’s look at the stats for how much sleep I am likely to get: May Blossom has been alive for 498 days. She has slept through the night (7 or 8 pm to at least 5 am) three times. According to my maths, which is admittedly not my strong suit, that means she has a 0.6 per cent chance of sleeping until 5 tomorrow. Not great odds. Better, though, if we take into account the fact that all three of those times have been within the last seven days. That brings us up to a 42.8 per cent chance.

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Fear and Loving in Far North Queensland

Welcome to Cape Fear. Also Cape Hliarious Strategic Removal of Letters on Signs.

I’ve been thinking this morning about H’s and my honeymoon. I think it’s the intense heat and humidity here today that reminded me of it, because it felt rather like this back in April 2009, when we took off for ten days in Far North Queensland. Back in the Olden Days, the honeymoon would might have been a frightening prospect for an innocent young bride. It would have been her first opportunity, theoretically, to know  her husband ahem ahem.

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