Blame it on the rain

Regular readers of this blog will know that we are little bit obsessed, okay very, interested in the weather around here. Unfortunately, the weather is not that interested in us at present. Cold. Grey. Rainy. And on a public holiday Monday as well. Has it no respect?

After three days at home, pretty much alone with two bouncing boys as The Builder attended to business in The Big Smoke, I can honestly say that Cabin Fever is a very real condition. In fact, Mr7 has developed a raging temperature just to add to my joy.

But it is Mr4 who is most affected by the weather. Mr Perpetual Motion goes completely insane when stuck inside for any length of time, let alone for several days. He is literally bouncing off the walls. And the sofa. And the bed. And, once when I wasn't watching, the dining table. If there is something to be leapt upon, jumped off or attacked with the pair of socks he is currently wearing tucked into his pyjamas to represent nunchucks, he will find it.

After three days, I am ready to find the nearest happy, quiet, peaceful place and crawl into it. And I'm certain that preschool teachers around the state are at home preparing themselves for the week of rainy days ahead. Imagine being confined to a classroom with 20 or so Mr4s. Shudder. I take my hat off to them.

[image: cute art print from leearthaus/etsy]

Have you got a family password?

How many passwords do you have in your life? Ignore PIN numbers for the time being - heaven forbid we should bring numbers into the equation - and concentrate on passwords. Are you a person who has the one password for everything? Usually something really clever like 'password1'. Or do you actually follow all that IT advice and keep a different password for every single account and change them every month? If you are one of these people, please send immediate tips as to how you remember this month's passwords.

I ask about passwords not because I'm going to share mine (hundreds of different ones, since you asked, updated regularly and written down nowhere...that's my story and I'm sticking to it), but because an article I read today at SuperParents gave me food for thought. A great guest post by Kelly Burstow of Be A Fun Mum (clearly she had me in mind when she named her blog) on stranger danger introduced the idea of a family password.

This is a word specific to your family, to be used if you need to unexpectedly send someone they're not expecting to collect them from somewhere. If the adult knows the password, the kids know it's okay to go with them. If they don't know the password, the kids run screaming for the nearest teacher or trusted adult.

This got me thinking. First, I thought how useless I would be as the person sent in the emergency because I would no doubt forget the password en route, arrive to pick up the children and fail the test. They would have to stand there in amazement as I ran through every password I know in the hopes of lighting on the right one.

Then I started thinking about what our family password might be. A word specific to our family that a stranger would not guess by chance. And yet one that would not be completely embarrassing to share with the adult on their way to collect the kids. Family language can be a strange thing. Sister C (MultipleMum) wrote recently about some of our extended family vernacular and you should have a look at it here if you are game. (One read and you won't understand how you've existed to date without the verb 'to parp'. Trust me.)

In our house, chickens are known as 'bokkens' because this is what Mr3 called them for a long time. They make a 'bok, bok, bok' noise, therefore they were bokkens. Junk mail is known as 'reklame', the German word for advertising. The daily weather update on the news is greeted with shouts of 'Het weer!' - 'the weather' in Dutch. (There's not much to get excited about in Fibrotown... and there is that genetic predisposition...)

You see my problem. "I need you to pick up the kids."
"Okay."
"You need a password."
[pause] "Okay."
"It's 'bokkens'."
[long pause] "O-kay. Um, sorry, something's just come up."
[dial tone]

I am going to talk to the kids about this. If anyone can come up with a password it is Mr6, with his background in smugglers, spies and groups of kids with time on their hands. Once we work it out, I'll let you know.

Actually, no, I won't.

Do you think the password thing is a good idea? Would you struggle to come up with a suitable word? Or is that just me overthinking my attempts to Be A Fun Mum? Again.


{image: hklinger/etsy}

Sailing close to the wind

There's something about a windy day that puts your whole body on edge. Lips are dry. Skin is parched. Hair is tangled. And every nerve-ending is standing to attention, scratched and bleeding every time the air rolls over the flesh.

 Is it any wonder that the wind brings out the crazy in all of us? Kids get high on the breeze, whipped into a frenzy by the constant movement. Adults are brought low by the same thing, longing for a moment's peace, every straw one step closer to the last one.

Even the Fibro is edgy tonight. The wires from the clothes line creak and bang against the house, like ghostly feet walking over the walls. The neighbours' trees rustle and whisper to each other, dropping leaves and tiny branches on our roof, like small, unwelcome gifts.

Mr3 is coughing. Coughing, coughing, coughing. Whimpering.

He wakes. He asks for a cuddle. I'm happy to oblige.

Everybody needs a safe harbour in the wind.


I'm high on more than the wind today, having been chosen as one of Kidspot's Top 50 Bloggers. The 'real' Allison is asking you to use my bright, shiny new button on the right-hand side of the page to vote for me. In other exciting news, I'm doing my first-ever guest post today - visit the lovely Lucy at Diminishing Lucy to see the Fibro on the move.

{image: greatmodernpictures.com}

An alternate Toy Story

The first of the big Toy Sales begins tomorrow and the Fibro is all aflutter. Not because the boys have any clear idea of sales dates and opening hours, but because it means The Season Of The Catalogue is upon us.

My children are obsessed with catalogues. Obsessed. They pore over them. Take them to bed and read them carefully (or ‘read’ them in Mr3’s case). They get out their pens and ‘ring’ the items they most desire. We still have copies of the 2007 Big W Toy Sale catalogue. True story.

I blame my mother for this.

Catalogue Addiction is a little-known but serious affliction, the cause of which can be solely lumped at the feet of genetics. Much as The Builder and I are morphing into weather-obsessed watchers of The Bill, so too the boys are tottering along in their grandmother’s footsteps with a worrying predilection for advertising material.

My mum is at the top of her game. Not a day goes by when a new mail order catalogue doesn’t drop into the mailbox. Rarely does a day go by when a rushed courier or laconic Australia Post worker doesn’t knock on the door with a delivery. If it’s a new and wonderful solution for an age-old problem, my mum will love it. If it’s warm and lightweight, she will love it. If it offers her the opportunity to try clothes on at home and return those she doesn’t like, she will love it.

Thank heavens she hasn’t got the hang of eBay yet.

The boys, of course, are mere apprentices. They’re only interested in the junk mail if it features toys. But give them time…

Sometimes, all this ‘ringing’ is useful. Take this evening. I am one of those people who has their Christmas shopping finished by October. Sue me. So I was perusing the catalogue, getting some ideas and considering a midnight run to Kmart (Fibrotown is 24-hour land when it comes to variety shopping) tomorrow night. I made a list of things I thought would be suitable.

The Builder, being much less dictatorial than me in these matters, suggested I give the catalogue to the boys to ‘ring’, so I could cross-check and be Super Santa this year. They sat together, freshly scrubbed in their flannel pyjamas, and carefully assessed each page before ringing the essentials.

I was way off. Hero item for Mr6 was a pack of nine Star Wars key chains that I hadn’t even noticed. Mr3 had, in his own inimitable fashion, gone for the Let’s Cook Chocolate Rotator (don’t even ask me what brought that on). Nobody bothered with the 200 connector textas, despite the fact that the 20 we have are on their last legs thanks to some radical Lids Off behaviour. The DS Lite that I thought would have Mr6’s scribble all over it was ignored in favour of a walking, talking Buzz Lightyear doll.

It seems I’m not as good at this as I thought. But I’m making no final decisions yet. That would be an amateur’s mistake, what with the Target and Big W catalogues still to come.

Makes you wonder how one old man in a red suit manages to get it so right, for so many, every year.

Bah humbug.

Stone cold poetry at the Dry Cleaners

Was it only weeks ago that I was blithely regaling overseas friends with tales of our never-ending Indian Summer? Oh, how the warm have fallen. Winter arrived on cue, with biting breath and blatant disregard for the fact that Autumn had missed the party.

It’s cold.

Very cold.

Not sub-freezing or anything and very unimpressive to anyone who’s just emerged from a Northern Hemisphere winter, but still. The shock of going from long, warm days in the low 20s to short, cold days in the low teens is much greater when you don’t get a mellow period in between.

Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. It’s not that we’re not a hardy lot, nosirree. Just fortunate.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was blown through the drycleaner’s front door this morning to discover him standing there – right in front of the freezing blast – wearing a singlet. Not a wife-beater or anything, but a tank top nonetheless. I tried not to say anything. Chances were he’d heard a lot of ‘goodness me, you must be crazy cold’ in the hour since he’d opened. So I tried. I really did.

But I couldn’t help myself.

“Goodness me, aren’t you cold?” says I, throwing out the line that won me ‘wittiest opening gambit’ at the last Small Talk awards.

“I’m from New Zealand,” he answered, as though that said it all.

Mr3, resplendent in the corduroy jacket known by Fam. Fibro as ‘The Furry Bear’ because that’s what every child who wears it looks like, peered out from behind his pram’s plastic windbreak, removed the scarf from the bottom half of his face, and looked up into the man’s face with a raised eyebrow.

It was enough to provoke a further response.

“I had a paper run when I was a kid,” said the meaty, blokey drycleaner, directly to Mr3. “I would go out in the morning and the frost would crunch under my feet. I used to love watching my breath blowing hot into the cold. The air smelt so new and fresh…”

He turned his attention back to me.

“Nothing has ever felt cold since.”

Mr3 nodded. I nodded.

Poetry at the Dry Cleaners. True story.

{image: www.allposters.com}

Talking about the weather: it's genetic.

When I was writing my weekly ‘what I talked about’ post (see below), the one thing that kept coming to mind (beyond wine, but I blame that on FebFast) was the weather. The last week has been too rainy or too sticky or too hot or too damn something every single day. I have had countless conversations about the weather. I think it’s genetic.

The older you get, the more you become like your parents. Hence I now watch The Bill (and not just for Smiffy), love my garden and talk about the weather. I have not yet reached the stratospheric heights of The Builder, who shooshes us all at 5.57pm so that he can concentrate on what Tim Bailey is telling him about the minimum overnight temperature. But I’m working on it.

I blame my Dad (hi Dad!). This is a man who keeps a diary. The only thing in the diary is a record, each day, of the minimum and maximum temperatures for the day, as forecast by the TV weatherman. He writes this down every day. Underneath it, written the next day, is the actual minimum and maximum temperatures. I kid you not. You can see at a glance how accurate the whole process is.

Occasionally, he goes crazy and writes down an outstanding news event. The day Jennifer Hawkins lost her skirt on the runway was described as ‘Whoops, Jennifer Hawkins’. Only the big stuff makes it to the comment stage.

When I first read this diary (it was open, really) I was in fits of laughter. Who would go to the trouble of doing this? But now it makes a lot more sense. It’s a legacy, in its own way. If you ever need to know the forecast weather, for any day of the year, any year, and the actual weather that occurred on that day, just ask my Dad. He’s got that info right there at his fingertips. It’s climate change as it happens.

Given how much we all talk about the weather, Dad’s on his way to a national consulting role. Just you wait. Kevin07 will be calling one day. If only to check Dad’s availability for the Independent Inquiry Into Weather Reporting In This Country. Yep, any day now.