It's a hot wind that blows no good

It is the middle of winter here, but there have been a number of discussions on hot breezes at our house lately that have taken our minds off the winter chill. On Friday Grace sat me down and said she had a question it wanted answered and she wasn't sure if I could help. Wondering is this was the prelude to "the talk" that every parent dreads having with their child, I cast my eye over the bookshelf to see if "Where did I come from" was anywhere nearby. With her next words, I realised that this was something far more difficult to answer - she turned her big blue eyes on me and said "Mum, why is it that when you do a fluffy and it feels really, really hot, it always smells bad?" Oh holy jesus, give me the sex question any day. Firstly, a Friday afternoon fart discussion was not high on my agenda and second, I actually had no idea on the answer and did not want to enter the search term "hot fart" on google while my kid was watching (or ever, for that matter).

My sons wandered in and once they worked out the subject of conversation, well, it was a riot in at our place. The words "bum" and "fart" were shouted numerous times as they rolled around laughing on the floor. This was accompanied by "sound effects" and me trying to keep a straight face and explain to Grace that I had no idea and try to work out why she wanted to know. Apparently one of the kids on her table let slip an absolute cracker today and when the other kids all were choking, he explained that he had had "a hot fart, the ones that always smell bad". Cool - it would seem that biology was on the agenda for school that day and I have to say, there's nothing like prac to make sure that the message gets through. I wasn't really able to answer grace's question, but I think I might send it in to Dr. Karl on JJJ for his morning segment - surely it rates up there with belly button fluff.

The last two weeks Part 2

I bet you are wondering how I can possibly top my last post. What an action packed week! Things calmed down a bit and then revved up again on the Friday, where we attended the birthday party of my daughter's best friend. The amount of noise that 4 girls can generate is quite phenomenal, then throw two excited boys into the mix and you could safely call it a lunatic asylum. Add several pizzas, soft drink and lollies and the result is something that even Dante could not have imagined. My daughter stayed for a "sleepover" (whoever coined that term NEVER attended one, as bugger all sleep actually happens) and we dragged the boys home. William decided that the best way to end the week would be to copiously vomit everywhere for the next 6 hours. Pink, heart shaped marshmallows mixed with pizza and red fizzy drink go a spectacularly long way when forced out at high velocity from a small person and I can now confidently say that all of my sheets and towels are freshly washed and disinfected. The mattress in our room and his room are also very clean. Lovely. We spent the next day lying on the lounge watching kids DVDs as we were all running on very little rest and hey, when you are that tired, "Finding nemo" can make sense to you in a way it never has before. Our daughter was delivered home with an attitude roughly the size of Texas and gave us a lovely preview of how much fun we are going to have when she is 13, when I am planning to lock her in her room and just post food under the door so I don't have to deal with her.

Sunday rolled around and we all seemed to be getting back to normal when Tim came down with the same vomiting bug, which meant not too much sleep on Sunday night, as our ensuite does have a lovely echo going when you're in there. I reckon the poor bloke nearly bought the socks he was wearing back up. Anyway, Monday meant chaos, as Tim is the organised one in our house and suddenly I had to do it. So I cheated - the kids got lunch orders from the school canteen and I have to say I was considering the virtues of packaged, dried noodles for brekky pretty seriously when William decided to plaster his nutella toast all over the chair he was sitting on. Very art deco/modernist but hell on the fabric. Anyway, we somehow made it out the door without anyone wearing their undies on the outside of their clothes or school bags on fire. Various drops offs took place at schools and childcare centres, then I went to work, put my head on my keyboard and had a fabulous day of what I like to call "presenteeism" - I'm physically at work (present) but my brain was in the Bahamas. I think. It didn't send me a postcard. Tim is now much better and is facing the endurance event that is parent/teacher interview night at his school. I never appreciated how hard these can be on a teacher until I ended up married to one - how do you tell a parent that their child is going swimmingly in classes, but something really needs to be done about the way they keep taking their clothes off and running around the oval? Tricky, very tricky.

The last two weeks part 1

I know I've been offline for a while - the hamster that powers my modem died and I felt a proper period of mourning should be observed before I fired the internet back up again. Have also been a little busy observing various traditions such as father's day, lying on my bed occasionally wondering why I have children and hunting through my cupboards for anything that vaguely resembles vodka. Yes, it's been one of those fortnights.
To start off, father's day this year was a cracker. The kids bought Tim a greenhouse and we spent some of the morning wrestling the bloody thing out of its packaging, which progressed to sitting on the back step with cups of coffee looking at it and trying to decipher the instructions on how to put it together (the kids by this stage had abandoned us but were shouting helpful advice from the trampoline) and then finally we left it in a great big pile in the backyard and trooped off to have brunch/lunch with my parents at a local park. It was a beautiful day - sunny, light breeze and there was enough room in the park for the 100s of people out HAVING A GOOD TIME WITH THEIR DAD (whether they wanted to or not). The park is quite nice too, but due to the drought they have had to drain all of the ponds so there were a number of fraught parents trying to ensure that instead of their kids falling in the pond and getting wet, that their kids didn't fall into a great, open pit and break their arms. It's what family time is all about, really. We ripped around, the kids ran themselves ragged and I found out a new fact - did you know that when a combination of apple juice and potato chips are sneezed into your hair by your 2 year old, it sets like concrete and takes quite some time to wash out? If you ever need to find something that will plaster your hair to your head and make sure it won't move, this is the combo for you. A little chunky and it looks like you have mutant head lice, but I can guarantee not a strand of hair will move.
Once I had de-chipped my hair, it was back to a normal week - school, work etc. Things were going fairly swimmingly until about Wednesday afternoon, when I got a phone call from the assistant principal at my children's school. Apparently, there had been an "incident" involving my middle son, another boy and some urine. Actual details of what led up to this "incident" are a little hazy, but it would seem that Cameron weed on the other boy "on purpose". The AP said he was a little "perplexed" by this behaviour and needed to know if this was something that had gone on at home!! I assured him that it wasn't, all the time wracking my brain to try and think of any incident that may have led to this behaviour - had my insistence on giving him veggies finally pushed him over the edge? Was it one too many screenings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Is there a chapter in a parenting book I had skipped called "How to teach your children that weeing on other people is not nice"? In the end we all had to sit down and have a chat and the conclusion amongst the adults was that it was probably one of those "boy things" that got out of hand. That said, Cameron said sorry and I think everyone was ok. I was not reassured by my husband later that day, who told me that at that age, all boys do things like pee up the wall or out of the window, if the bathroom has one. I am now considering boarding up the windows in our bathrooms. It also bought back some wise words of advice from my - just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Or, in the immortal words of the great Australian movie "The Castle" - "get your hand off it, Daryl".