This is me.

Declan got stuck into a bit of drawing this morning and was very proud to show me this portrait. He pointed out Mummy’s eyes, Mummy’s mouth (I’m angry apparently, in most of his pictures Mummy is either angry or sad… I promise I’m not QUITE that unstable!), Mummy’s hair, nose, and tumor.

The “tumor” is the large lump on my forehead, best shown in this picture, that everyone glances at and won’t actually mention until I mention it first, usually met with  them telling me that they’ve been dying to ask what the hell the large forehead growth that I’m sporting is. Dan and I refer to it as a tumor, so that whenever it comes up in conversation I can put my best Austrian accent on and say “IT”S NOT A TOOMAR!”. The sheer amusement we get from this is probably the primary reason that Dan and I were destined to be with each other. It really isn’t a TOOMAR, it’s just a cyst that I developed when I was pregnant with Declan that I’ve been putting off getting removed.

Declan loves the tumor, he’s even rewritten songs just for my benefit, “Eyes and ears and mouth and tumor” is now a Treacy standard, if he’s giving the family high fives then the tumor gets one all for itself, and he has now decided to immortalise it in his artwork in the form of a large squiggle in between my eyes.

You know how I was putting off getting it removed… suddenly it seems so much more urgent, it’s crossed from cute into “kinda creepy” territory. Give it a couple more months and I can see him getting really attached, naming it and asking to take it into preschool for show and tell.

This week has had it all, ant invasions, canine footwear and my eldest giving me the fright of my life. 

• Life up the coast is going well, other than having the dreaded lurgi for an entire week, and of course, the rain, what’s up with that? I’m starting to think that this whole drought thing is just a government conspiracy to keep the country stinky from short showers.
• Declan had a febrile convulsion brought on from a fever caused by the dreaded lurgi, I put the full story up on flickr if you’re interested, but the bottom line is that he is fine, I’m more shaken over it that he is infact. We’ve been told to probably expect some more over the coming years.
• Dan cried. I have seen Dan cry probably five times in the entire time we have been together and to this day I can still list every one of them. To see him crying over Declan shook me to the core, the image of Declan laying lifeless on the floor isn’t what is burned into my head, it’s Dan crying.
• We still have no phone and no reliable internet connection, it’s getting to the point where I am going to crack skulls.
• The job is going well and I have been introducing the family to all sorts of wonderful goodies from the UK, this coming week I’m going to buy some Bisto Chip Shop Curry Sauce, buy some chips and a battered sav and see how that goes down. Gastric distress FTW! Having lots of fun with my coworkers and the customers.
• It’s Fake Mothers Day today, that’s a day that isn’t the usual Mother’s day as opposed to a day dedicated to Fake Mothers. We delayed it so that it didn’t interfere with moving, and after last years debacle (remind me to tell you that story sometime!) there was no way that Dan wasn’t going to do anything this year. I woke up to a card from the boys and Queen Singstar. NEIGHBOURS BEWARE! Once I can finally find the box the PS2 is packed in I will be assulting your ear drums with Bohemian Rhapsody.

Tomorrow we hit fourteen days in the new house. It feels like we’ve been here a decade and have just been super slack unpacking. Yesterday I managed to sort out the majority of the toys, on Thursday (my next day off) I’m hoping to get the office sorted out and then the final thing will be the sewing and craft stuff – because you know once I have access to my sewing machine again then not much is going to get done! I have a list about a mile long of things I want to work on, quilt for my soon to be arriving nephew and another for Dan’s Cousin’s not so soon to be arriving baby, and a bag so I can go to work with a grownup bag instead of carting around Declan’s dinosaur bag.

Work is going great, I’m amazed at the amount of Poms coming into the store, it’s been great to talk to people from ‘the old country’, I even heard a customer saying to her friend the other day “That’s the girl from Bath!”, maybe I’m not quite as forgettable as I thought So far I’m really enjoying it, missing the kids like crazy, but the staff discount on Frazzles and Scottish Tablet takes the edge off that.

With not much else left to say, and a bus to go and catch, I shall leave you with this week’s daily snapshots, featuring the aforementioned Frazzles, my sulky toddler and a macro of Dan’s nostrils.

So, about a million years ago I made a post saying how we were off on a last minute trip to Port Macquarie and I might have some exciting news upon my return. Upon returning everything was thrown into a whirlwind of moving, arguments with our completely incompetent real-estate agent, and believe it or not, employment!

The four of us are now residing in a lovely little 3 bedroom villa in Port Macquarie, after leaving the sunny climes of Western Sydney and deciding to head up north. Our previous trip up here was for me to attend a job interview for a position working at a British Sweet shop, which I am happy to say I am starting tomorrow.

I’m feeling superbly positive about everything happening at the moment, things had got stale in Sydney, both Dan and I were very firmly stuck in a rut, the move is a fresh start for the whole family and it just feels right.

I would love to say that I’m back, but we’re currently on a very limited internet connection and don’t even have a phoneline yet, so until everything is sorted out there, posts will be very sporadic, I’m hoping that by the end of the month everything should be set up as it should be

I haven’t even finished unpacking our bags from our previous trip when I find out that now we’re all off to Port Macquarie for a couple of days. I may (or may not) have exciting new upon our return, in the mean time I shall just cross my fingers and wait.

In the next 24 hours I have to:

• Clean my entire house to Mother In Law Standard (aka code red)
• Finish a quilt for my upcoming niece/nephew – the piecing is done so I just have sashing, basting, quilting and binding left to do. Was thinking of some either embroidery or applique, but hah, that really isn’t going to happen.
• Walk down the road to Aldi and get some food for our impressively bare cupboards
• Do enough laundry to last me and both the boys for six days away
• Write a couple of posts to schedule on CraftBlog so it won’t lose the rather nice traffic spurt it’s been having lately
• Do the homework for Darrens 31DTBBB that I am already behind on so I will only have six days to catch up on when I get back instead of 10!
• Run around like a headless chicken whilst trying to control my son who has just figured out how to work the computer and the ti-faux to play nursery rhymes and Roary The Racing Car 24/7.

The worse part of all this?

I have no milk. No milk means no coffee. No coffee means this list doesn’t look very likely to be completed.

1 batch of burnt CupCakes and four year old sprinkles

+ 1 overly enthusiastic toddler (”CUPCAKES FOR ME! SPRINKLES!! YES!!!”)

+ very poor supervision

(for the record, no idea what happened with the photo, but his hair is not that ginger!)

= some somewhat over-topped cupcakes

Some cupcakes with fairly significant finger dents left in them – that’s assuming you can find one of the ones that hadn’t been decorated, licked clean and then re-iced

and a particularly grotty face

Somedays I really dislike my job, somedays I love every minute of it, today was certainly the latter.

I was hit by a shot of inspiration this morning, doing something completely unrelated to sewing, caterpillars and Eric Carle, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to make a Hungry Caterpillar softie.

I would have probably got it finished within Declan’s nap if I hadn’t have messed up my first one. I tend to be more of a “draw a rough outline on some fabric, close your eyes and cut” kind of pattern maker and my first attempt wasn’t too successful, so I had only just finished sewing up the stuffing gap on my second caterpillar when Declan woke up from his nap.

“Oooo, snake!”
“Try again, who does he look like?”
“A snake.”
“One morning the warm..”
“sun!”
“the warm sun came up and…”
“POP!”
“Yep, and out of the egg came a very tiny and very hungry…”
“Caterpillar!”
“That’s right, so who does this look like?”
“A snake!”

Head meet brick wall. I was completely disheartened, convinced that my caterpillar was so terrible that even the child who can recite the entire book from beginning to end couldn’t recognise it, the boy who probably hears me read that book to him about ten times a week, he didn’t have a clue. I did the embroidery to add the segments and he was still convinced it was a snake, not even the antennae were helping. Right up until I added the eyes, it was like a brick hit him and he clicked who it was. as soon as those bright yellow bits of felt were on it. Nutty child.

If you’d like to take a look at some basic instructions on making your own caterpillar softie, I have posted them over on CraftBlog: Caterpillar Softie Tutorial.

My brain is still struggling to come up with full sentences, so instead have a video of yesterday’s toddler amusement. Taking all the back cushions off my sofa, all the blankets and all the cushions he can find – he would have brought in the duvet from our bedroom if it hadn’t have been such hard work for him to lug through the house. Covering the floor of my entire computer/sewing room in them, then leaping off the sofa. In the video it’s one of his less extreme “steps”, but yesterday morning he did a full on belly flop onto them. I vaugely remember doing something similar with a pile of cushions at the bottom of the stairs, guess I’m grateful with live in a bungalow because who knows what schemes he would come up with if there were stairs involved!

I kind of want to say to him, we have hundreds of dollars worth of toys and a telly that seemingly streams 24 hour Dora and Sesame Street, so why the cushions? I know I would much rather him doing this than stuck in front of the telly, but sometimes I just really want to tell him to go and do a jigsaw or any other task where I don’t have the phone in my hand with 000 on speed-dial.

Whilst I’m at it, have another video of Declan tickling Connor, and then showing off his battlewounds from a recent fight with a door. Oddly enough caused by just walking along and tripping as opposed to climbing it or doing anything else than may go through his over-active toddler mind.

Declan’s current favourite game to play with his brother involves the two of them laying on the sofa in the spare room, Declan giving Connor his dummy and tucking him in under the piece of fabric (the fabric that’s meant to cover my beautiful sofa to stop it being abused by my kids, hah!), giving him a kiss and saying “night, night, Connor” and then grabbing his own dummy and, of course, the ever present “Lion” and then cuddling up to his brother and pretending to fall asleep.

Cue thirty seconds of over dramatic fake snoring while Connor laughs his head off and tries to work out what is actually going on. As far as he’s concerned this is high level comedy.

Declan will then leap up, announce “WAKEY WAKEY DECLAN!! WAKEY WAKEY CONNOR!!!” as loud as he possibly can, pull the blanket off his brother and run around like a nutter for a couple of minutes until he returns to the sofa, covers his brother up with the fabric… lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh to be a toddler.

Unfortunately, getting Connor to sleep right now isn’t quite that easy.

It all started going down hill when we went up to visit my inlaws. He wasn’t keen on the porta-cot up there, which I can understand with it being unusual to him, and so he slept for the five nights or so in his bouncer. Then we got home and he didn’t want to go back to the crib. Fair enough, I started putting the bouncer in the crib to try and get him used to it again and make the transition back a little easier.

Then he decided he wanted the light on, he would calm immediately when we flicked it on, so I did.

Then he decided that he needed some white noise, because of the heat he’s always had a fan going near him, and now it was cooling and needed to be switched off, he was having a tantrum again. So we left the fan on, just facing away from him.

Then he would freak out when we walked away from the crib, one of us would have to sit next to the crib to get him to fall asleep, and you can see where this ended up, a week of cold dinners and we brought him into the lounge to fall asleep. In the bouncer, with the lights on, with the telly or computer going and with us right next to him.

Then he decided he wanted some appropriate viewing to fall asleep to, so we put on In The Night Garden for him, figuring it was all about falling asleep etc. We’ve watched Makka Pakka lose his sponge for the last four nights whilst we eat dinner and Connor dozes off to sleep.

I’ve just gone through this all again, starting him off in the crib, then the lights, then in the lounge etc etc hoping that tonight he’ll settle just one step earlier. Hah, never! Why on earth would he want to make my life easier? I eventually end up having everything perfect for him, exactly how it wants it, the planets are aligned, I’ve slaughtered several local virgins (and don’t forget, I live in the Western Suburbs, making it a harder task than most ) and maybe, just maybe, he’ll go to sleep.

Screaming. I try feeding him.

More screaming. Give him a cuddle and try some gripe water.

Yet more screaming. Remember that yesterday he developed a new fixation with a half finished crochet toy that I made years and years ago, a grey pirate with only two limbs. I spend five minutes trying to find it, mentally threatening to injure Declan if he’s taken it into his room. I finally find it, put it next to his face, walk into the family room to get another dose of gripe water. I wasn’t halfway down the hall when I hear the noise, the room is filled with the sound of an overweight asthmatic rhino after a mini triatholon, with just the slightest hint of a dodgy car exhaust thrown in there, that sweet sound, my beautiful six month old babe snoring in a deep sleep.

Where does this all lead you ask?

Tonight I made a breakthrough in a question that has been on the minds of the greatest philosophers, scholars and drunks.

Pirates really are better than Ninjas! Assuming one of the skill sets you’re judging is their ability to soothe a baby to sleep.

Pirates – 1, Ninjas – 0