Can't get enough of ...

With a shoutout to Ampersand Duck for bringing it to my attention.

Bulleted Friday

• I've been in a bad mood all week.
• And no, the reason is not what you think.
• Oscar = never.stops.talking. but it's not proper talking and it's all asking the same thing over and over again about what is currently making him anxious or whoever's business he's sticking his nose in to.
• Felix = never.stops.the.whiney.voice and is just so melodramatic and picks fights with Oscar so very often I've taken to calling him Drama.
• Jasper = screamy McTantrum Pants. 'nough said.
• Grover = YELLING! GUTTERAL LOUD YELLING! OHMYGODSTOPTHEYELLING!
• Last night I tried to force feed Jasper, such was my irrational concern about his current diet of air and cruskits.
• As if I'd never learnt that doing such a thing doesn't end well.
• As if I had not told myself to not worry about his diet and to just keep offering and maybe by 2020 eventually he will start eating it, just as Felix did but this time we'll do it without the tears and mealtime meltdowns.
• Then this morning, he woke up crying with a tummy ache, which i put down to the fact he hadn't eaten since about 3 the previous afternoon.
• He willingly ate (and had asked for) his breakfast of 3 weetbix, milk and honey. His only proper meal of the day.
• Then spewed everywhere.
• Excellent, I gave my child an eating disorder.
• By midday the spewing had stopped and his tummy was all better.
• But because of the spewing I wouldn't let him eat or drink (except for small sips of water) much.
• OH THE IRONY.
• By 4pm he was completely back to normal.
• For dinner I made a hot chicken curry (for Chef and Felix), a mild veggie curry (for me and Oscar), pan-fried chicken tenderloins (for whoever wanted them but hopefully for Jasper) and rice.
• And Jasper ate? Plain.boiled.rice.
• 'It's my favowit' my arse.
• I actually sent my CV to someone today to hopefully be considered for some freelance work.
• Such is our poverty.
• Hence my filthy mood.
• Which is probably just stress and worry in disguise.
• Mum and I have been daydreaming about repainting/decorating.
• A post on that to come.
• On Monday I had my first day with no children in almost two months.
• Except our internet connection has been dodgy for the last three weeks and another service guy was coming out between 7 and 12.
• My SIL came down and picked up Grover for me, as I couldn't take him up to my MIL's.
• How nice is that?
• Only to be completely diluted by the fact the engineer wasn't here by 1 and when I rang they informed me the problem had been fixed on Friday, that the problem on the weekend had been another district wide problem and that the job lot had been closed.
• Wasn't it nice of them to let me know.
• After the previous week I'd had a customer service guy calling me so often it was bordering on stalking.
• So I had one hour to go and do something before I had to pick up the boys from school.
• So I went to Kmart and bought some undies.
• Awesome.
• It was Chef's b'day last week.
• He was 38.
• I didn't get him anything, well, I gave him something but this isn't that kind of blog.
• I still feel bad about it.
• I caught up with one of the mums I've known since Oscar started school (her son was in the same special ed program) and her life has been such a shitstorm (think starting a house reno involving the entire back of the house being demolished only to have your husband retrenched and then getting screwed by the bank when they remortgaged their house and her car breaking down at least once every day on the school drop-off) we've decided us and another mum (who's son was also in the same program and has t.w.o. autistic sons) are going to go out one Saturday night and get completely off our collective trolley.
• That wasn't so much a bullet point as a paragraph.
• The sourdough making experience is still quite unsatisfactory.
• Another contributor to my filthy mood I suspect.
• I did however make the most sublime apple and rhubarb pie this week.
• Which made the world a whole lot better.
• But I know the world is awesome - a walk home with the little fellas afte dropping the boys at school and stopping off for a play in the park and then on the beach makes that perfectly obvious.
• I really want to make some cumquat marmalade but refuse to pay in the vicinity of $9 a kilo for the fruit. I used to have two trees that produced enough for a decent batch, but one died and the other doesn't get enough sun to fruit.
• OMG I'm just such a developed world whinger at the moment.
• Move along.
• Nothing more to see here.
• Oh, except that our little veggie patch has taken off.
• The broad beans are reaching for the sky!
• The chives are blowing in the breeze.
• The basil is getting a good pruning almost every day.
• The oregano is liking it's little spot on the corner despite getting routinely run-over by boys on bikes.
• The parsley is a delightful grouping of stalks thanks to the possums.
• The thyme is no more thanks to the bandicoots.
• The passionfruit has some new little shoots on it, after the possums stripped it of every single leaf.
• And how are we keeping them (the possums) off the passionfruit and parsley?
• By giving them their own platter of fruit and veg each night.
• And by hanging stockings full of napthalene all over the passionfruit vine trelis.
• So now, the backyard smells like an old lady's jumper.
• Awesome.

Bulleted Sunday

• It feels like it's been raining for months.
• I adore the rain.
• We completely rearranged the back room on Friday night.
• Our 'back room' is our dining room, office, living room, play room.
• It was an ambitious and somewhat stupid time to start this process.
• Saturday morning was family brunch to celebrate Chef's birthday.
• He was 38 on Wednesday.
• I got to bed at 3am and was up at 6.15am.
• Such little sleep was as awful as I remembered it to be.
• I have not been coping with the reality that this house as become Tantrum Central.
• Even Grover got sent to his room today.
• My inlaws returned from their trip to the Gulf country late last week after being away for about six weeks.
• Tomorrow, I'm dropping Grover up at their place afer I take Oscar to speech and then drop him at school and Jasper at kindy.
• I'm so excited I'm not sure what I'll do but I do know there will be a component of browsing with no agenda.
• I've been making my own sourdough breads for the last two weeks and I'm still not happy with them but it's such glorious dough to work with I am persevering.
• Tonight I made vegetable pasties for dinner and they were sensational.
• I even made the pastry and it didn't split or break or anything.
• I've lost three kilos which is good but not near the goal I had set for myself this term.
• Last week I organised appointments for Oscar at the paediatrician, dentist and cp specialist and dealt with my gallbladder.
• This week will be calls to another kindy to say we'd still like a spot and a local music school to investigate keyboard lessons for Felix and local sporting associations to find out about possibilities for Oscar.
• My MIL brought me over a big bag of lemons, so this week will also feature the production of quite a few jars of lemon butter.
• Our internet connection and payTV for that matter have been dodgy for the last three weeks or so.
• It's been really quite annoying.
• Tomorrow, the fifth serviceman - an engineer no less - will pay us a visit to try and work out why the hell it's not working.
• Possums have been decimating our backyard for years.
• After doing some research I am trying the whole new approach of actually leaving food out for them.
• Apparently if you do this they eat that and not your plants/parsley/passionfruit vine/lime tree.
• That or I am a complete idiot.

Put a gallstone over here and a gallstone over there

Put a lot of mid-sized gallstones sitting at the bottom of your gallbladder everywhere everywhere,

It's a let's take your gallbladder out kind of day kind of day,

It's a gallbladder kind of day.

So, there's about 8 mid-sized gallstones sitting in the bottom of my gallbladder.

Don't be alarmed, apparently about 1 in 10 adults has gallstones and the best way to deal with them is to whip that pesky pear-shaped organ out.

Pay attention, there'll be a quiz later. First prize will be one of my gallstones. Bronzed.

Kidding.

Anyway, the gallbladder sits on the underside of your liver on the upper right hand side of your stomach. If you get a fairly regular pain on that side, up under your ribs, a gnawing kind of discomfort pain where you feel like you can't really get a good deep breath, go on and make an appointment with your GP.

What happens is the gallbladder squeezes bile into the small intestine every time we eat. If you have gallstones then that bile can't flow smoothly as they block what's called the cystic duct and you get associated pain in the upper abdomen, back pain, nausea, vomiting and other delights.

Things can go significantly awry if the stone moves down to the common bile duct and you'll end up with jaundice and pancreatitis, by which time you're in real trouble.

So what's in these little stones of joy?

Cholesterol apparently.

Which is interesting considering my cholesterol is sub-normally low at 2.7.

But get this, gallstones have been linked to:

- multiple pregnancies (tick)

- obesity (tick)

- rapid weight loss (tick)

- ageing (sigh. tick)

- gender - more women than men get them (tick)

- some ethnic groups (brrrrr)

Apparently, when you're pregnant the consistency of your bile changes (it gets thicker and more crystalline) and makes it more predisposed to form stones.

Combine that with the fact you need eostrogen to make gallstones and voila! here you go Ms allconsuming, your gallstones are ready. My surgeon suspects that I've produced a couple with each pregnancy. Awesome. Stretch marks, weight I can't shift, droopage of everything and gallstones.

Because I've had pain on and off for the last 10 years (shut up, I just thought it was because I'd over-eaten or was too fat or something) and that this year the symptoms have been a lot more pronounced and consistent (the pain, the nausea, the vomiting, the bloating, the my GOD I am so attractive right now) these puppies have to come out sooner rather than later.

So basically, they make four small incisions, pump you full of carbon dioxide, dig around your insides and suck all the relevant parts out, hopefully don't leave any medical gear in there and then stitch me up. This is called a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. I call it one of the many miracles of modern surgery.

If the stones were smaller and floating around, then my surgeon would have whipped me in next week due to the whole risk of pancreatitis but as mine are mid-sized and are all having a snuggle together at the bottom of my gallbladder it's when it suits me.

Yeah, like any surgical procedure of any nature whatsoever is ever going to 'fit in' with my life.

Combine this with the fact I'd only just upped our health insurance to cover private hospital as well as public (which meant we took a much higher excess) so they won't cover me in a private hospital and I was going to be hit for the higher excess (more than double our previous cover) to go to a public hospital, I was all 'so I'm screwed'.

Then - after a delightful hour on the phone with my insurer - when we reworked the new cover to a lower excess I rang the surgeon's secretary to say we'd have to do it at the local public hospital and she was all 'oh, well you've got a bit of a wait' - to which I was thinking, no shit sherlock - and then gave me a date in August.

Sweet. In that oh my goodness I have to go to hospital and have a general but at least I'll stop feeling so crook after eating anything kind of way.

Then I asked her about some plan which would mean I wouldn't be hit for any of the surgeon's fees and she said it didn't matter anyway as I'd be in as a public patient. Oh right. Sure.

Sweet. In that awesome I don't have to even fork out my excess kind of way.

And that, my dear friends, is that.

The world according to a 3.5 year old

Dinner time:

After expressing disappointment that dinner is not plain noonoos or rice through vomiting sounds and a brief collapse on the floor.

Notice that two bigger brothers, mother, father and grandmother all have proper knives - proper steak knives with black handles and sharp blades.

Very sharp blades.

Demand similar knife.

Have meltdown when not allowed said cutting implement due to how sharp they are.

Negotiation.

Gets knife.

(Ed: shut up, there was negotiation. I'm desperate to get this kid to eat OK.)

Puts knife in mouth.

Gives three adults at table simultaneous heart attacks.

Have meltdown due to surprise from three adults sucking all oxygen from the room and sort-of-yelling at me.

Give appearance of listening dutifully to mother as she explains all calm-like about how those little grooves are very sharp and would cut me very easily and that being cut with a knife is very owie.

Hear something about mother not wanting to spend another night at hospital with an injured child.

Also something about how me getting hurt would make parents very sad.

Eat some more air and leave table.

The following afternoon:

Notice that mother is busy preparing dinner.

See one of those knives from dinner last night on the kitchen bench.

Procur knife in stealth like motion that successfully avoids detection by mother.

Jam knife into apple I've been pretending to eat (because Grover had it and therefore I had to have it, even though I don't want it/like it) and see raft of potential uses for this device.

Try cutting apple into pieces while standing up and holding it in one hand and the knife in another.

WELL BUST MY BOILERS THAT HURTS

WAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The world according to a 3.5 year old

Sometimes what you mean and what you say are not the same thing. But that could be because your parents have dirty minds and still laugh at the number 69.

Example:

Mum, come over here and hot me up. You have to stay here for two more minutes to make me hot.

Um, that would be warm you up son.

Example:

Jasper: Mummy, why don't you wear your jarmies to bed and be in the nude when you go to sleep?

Mummy: I don't know, it's just a grown up thing

Daddy: Because last night Mummy and Dad...

Mummy: MOVING ON

Jasper: Tonight when I go to bed I'm going to go up to your woom, clean my giggies (teeth - long story, it was what Grover started calling them a few months back and now we all do), do a wee and then take off my pants and GO TO BED IN THE NUDE just like you. Mwhahahahahahaha

Mummy: OK. But won't you get cold?

Jasper: No, becawse I'll have you to warm me up.

(Mother takes quick moment to appreciate correct temperature related word in this situation)

Daddy: But only grow-ups sleep in the nude, you've got to sleep in your jammies to keep you warm!

Jasper: When I'm a grown up I'm going to sleep in the nude with mummy.

(OH MY)

Daddy: When you're a grown up you'll be sleeping in your own bed in your own house with your own wife or husband.

(OHHH MY)

Jasper: NOOOO, I'll be living with u two and sleeping in ooorrr bed.

*****

I love rice* and noo noos** (pasta) and toast*** and pizza****. They are my favorwits.

*****

Maybe I'd like to go to the park today.

*****

The best part of the day is going for a walk in the mornings with Grandmama. "I love dat."

*****

Discovering lego is both wondrous and infinitely frustrating.

*****

Maybe I'd like ... is the phrase of the moment.

* with nothing on it

** with nothing on it - although on occasion he will eat it with a basic tomato sauce on it or with oil and garlic, but even that can sometimes cause meltdowns of catastrophic proportions

*** with butter and vegemite

**** with tomato sauce and cheese. Don't try to slip some ham on there, he will see it and refuse to eat one more mouthful.

The world according to a 3.5 year old

Wake up

Tell older brother to MOVE from where you want to sit on lounge. Even though there is another entire lounge and indeed other end of said lounge to sit on.

Demand bottle

Announce desire for bweakfast. Ceweal pwease. NO I want toast. With vegemite. And butter. NOT CUT. On a pink plate.

...

...

Pwease

...

...

Take toy, regardless of what it is, off little brother.

Hit little brother when little brother screams in protest at having his toy taken from him.

Claim toy as your own as defence for unprovoked attack on brother.

Have complete meltdown when little brother's toy is returned to little brother.

Stalk little brother.

Scream some more.

Really scream in that dual pitch scream which makes your mother either cry or pitch a complete fit of her own.

Be sent to room.

Demand Poppity.

Break lego ships of older brother while in bedroom for taking toy off little brother and hitting him when he protested.

Draw on pillow in permanent marker.

Stick stickers on wall.

Draw on wall.

Sneak out of bedroom, out front door and come into house through back door.

Grunt at mother when she comments on your return.

Refuse to wear underpants

Refuse to wear pants mother has chosen for you

Refuse to go and choose pair

Play with penis

Tell everyone to 'look at my penis'

Over and over

Do a huge fart

Laugh

Tell everyone you did a fart in your bottom

In case they'd missed it

Like idea of going for a walk with Grandmama so get dressed

Refuse to put on socks

Or shoes

Scream about that for a while

Accept gumboots as solution

Happily put on jacket and beanie

Come back from walk

Take toy of little brother claiming it is your favourwit

...

Rinse and repeat for the following 12 hours or so

Doogie Allconsumihowser MD

So -

Multiple mobile gallstones. Largest measures 12mm (is that good? what's the standard for gallstones?).

Fatty liver.

Sub-normally low cholesterol (2.7).

This last fact was in the category of AWESOME for my GP. He was all 'I've never seen someone with cholesterol that low occurring naturally' and 'it doesn't make sense' and 'I have no explanation for you on that one' all with multiple exclamation points and excitement.

Have I told you how much I love our GP - he has a wacky name, is around our age and always gives you the whole picture - explaining why and how and so on.

We had a chuckle about me being a medical mystery.

You see, apparently, if you have gallstones it is pretty much a given you will have a fatty liver and high cholesterol. But somehow, my Jedi mind tricks worked on part of that threesome.

The fatty liver is because I am fat and because I like a drink - it wasn't too bad and that is probably due to the last six months of me trying to lose weight and the last two years of me not drinking that much, if at all.

Next stop, specialist.

Awesome.

Say it don't spray it

Spray cans Grover has discovered and distributed liberally in the last week:

- Sards Wonder Spray (at least he was spraying clothes)

- WD40 (which I didn't even know we own)

- Exit Mould (which I discovered after looking at his shirt and wondering what was on it, only to realise he had bleached the crap out it. And the bathmat.)

Yeah yeah

I would be posting ... if I just had something interesting, enlightening, fun or, well, anything to tell you all.

I had an ultrasound - which went for an hour for goodness sakes - and blood tests done last Friday. I'll go to my GP tomorrow to find out what the gall bladder is doing.
*****
After a year of procrastinating I updated/changed our health insurance last night. Apparently we were over-insured for extras and under-insured for hospital. Well derr. Now we've got 'proper' coverage for us but there's still a year wait on procedures in a private hospital. Even though we've been with the same health fund since 1994.
*****
I need to ring the paediatrician for Oscar. I've been procrastinating on this for about a year as well. After I made the appointment last year and then promptly forgot to go. Do you think they would have forgotten about that by now? Is it safe for me to ring again or do you reckon they'll try and hit me with a no-show invoice?
*****
I need to ring Oscar's CP specialist for an appt too - I'd forgotten about this after the last time we saw him because sorry, my head was already full of catastrophising over his now-required surgery.
*****
I am one of those despairing housewives at the moment. It's boring and does not make interesting reading. Let's just say I'm in one of those grim thin-lipped clenched jaw mindsets and short of winning the lottery it's not going to shift in the near future.
*****
The little fellas are rather exasperating today. I just took Jasper to his room because he was screaming that I wanted to use my computer and I had therefore closed the Bananas in Pyjamas website. Grover has not had a sleep, instead he chose to scream the street into a heightened state of alarm with screaming. Now he's lying on the floor farting and watching Blues Clues, the host of which makes my neck itch with those caterpillar eyebrows and bowl-cut hairdo and creepy waiting for us to answer when hello sir, tv - is a one way medium all the while reminding me of Burger from Sex and the City. Shudder.
*****
Speaking of Sex and the City, I've been watching a lot of it lately for reasons even I can't explain and MY GOD they all shit me to tears but Miranda? Miranda just got the biggest bum steer of all didn't she. Season after season of hideous hairdos and questionable wardrobe styling.
*****
On the other hand, I can watch rerun after rerun of Seinfeld and laugh and smirk and find my mood infinitely improved with never a thought about their hairstyles or wardrobe styling. Curious.
*****
There's questionable sleeping patterns going on over here too, which explains the questionable movie watching - take for example Teeth. I was relieved to see on IMDB that it was meant to be a comedy and a horror film, because once you have an actress perfecting the Marcia Marcia Marcia face of Jan Brady playing a dedicated to keeping her virginity until she is married all the while discovering she has a condition called Vagina Dentata (yes, it deserves caps) teenager, you really start wishing the insomnia would go disturb someone elses reality.

*****

Chef had some 24hr vomiting, exploding arse virus, so now I'm just kinda waiting for the family to come down with it one by one. Yeah, I know, the eternal optimist in me sometimes just SHINES right on through.

*****

He has also been coughing up a lung for about a month. I'm getting bored with it quite frankly.

*****

The two youngest fellas have had green train tracks running from their noses for the last eternity. So much so that when one of Jasper's kindy teachers mentioned it on Tuesday I feigned ignorance. Is that bad? That in a kindergarten run by a church with the most godly of staff I pretended to have no idea that a) my kid had a green snotty nose b) that I should have therefore kept him at home and c) apparently when it's green it's contagious instead just thinking to myself what a dickhead she was because she's saying this to the mother of four children who knows everything there is to know about snot.

*****

Speaking of kindergarten, I've tried to be positive about where Jasper is going but you know what? It really really shits me. They're so prim and proper and neat and orderly and well, meek. Seriously, my neck's itching just thinking about it. For example, they had a table set up this week with bugs and insects on it, with a new unopened packet of a butterfly with each stage of it's development. Jasper wanted to open it and as I started to I asked the staff if I could and they all jumped on me with a 'NO!" followed by - 'the pieces will get lost'. Excuse me? In this place? A piece of dust can't even get lost in that place. And HELLO. It's a kindergarten. A place where kids play. Not look at toys still.in.their.packaging. so none of the pieces get lost. GOD.

*****

Yeah I know, it's Day 3.

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