It’s not easy being green (and pink)

I thought that last whine would make me feel better but then I remembered that I am also really mad with our doctor’s surgery. They relocated and did not inform patients!

On Tuesday I got my two cranky, sick kids up and dressed and out the door in hope of being near the front of the queue to see the doctor. When we got there, a receptionist who was packing boxes told us the clinic had moved. I asked why they had not sent patients a letter (not in my nicest tone) and she said they’d sent fliers to people in the local area. Yeah, well I live in a different suburb and I have a ‘no junk mail’ sticker on my letterbox.

If I’d gone a week later the old clinic would have disappeared and I would have no idea where my doctor – not to mention all our medical records – had gone.

The new clinic is in an inconvenient location with no free parking and no kids’ play area. By the time we got there Tuesday the waiting room was packed, the kids were nuts and I was ready to kill someone.

Thankfully my doctor is also really mad with the whole situation. The doctors in the practice were not consulted about the move and have been fielding countless angry patients. We spent a good five minutes complaining about it to each other and both felt better afterwards!

And now I must away again as Hugo’s been back into the bathroom and drawn all over his face with eye liner. Great.

This past week has just been crap, with a capital everything. Spotty Hunter, sliced up Hunter, snotty Hugo and now I have a giant ear infection that hurts like hell and, oh yeah, I can hardly hear a damn thing.

It feels freaky and horrible and I spent the morning yelling at the kids (at least I think I was yelling…) because I’m so cranky. Poor Hunter cried when I dropped her off at preschool and I know it’s because she was off balance after all my amateur dramatics this morning.

It doesn’t help that I am deeply overcommitted this week, as usual. I have an assignment due tomorrow that I not only haven’t started, I don’t even intend to start it this week. I got a medical certificate last time I hauled ass to the doctor’s surgery (two days ago) and I am going to ask for an extension. But it means I’ll have less time to get through the remaining two modules I need to get done before the exam – which, incidentally, is four days after a weekend which features three birthday parties in three different towns.

I also had a preschool committee meeting this week and am now stuck reading the fine print on a lease agreement and combing through resumes (our director is leaving at the end of the year). And I wound up on the interview panel – don’t even know how that’s going to work with Hugo in tow.

I have work up to my eyeballs – though I am at least making headway on that, thankfully. Mind you, I have yet to break it to my boss that one of the people I quoted in an article is someone I haven’t actually spoken to. I couldn’t get hold of him so I paraphrased comments of his I found in other sources and I am hoping he’ll give the sign off if I ever manage to catch him. And if I don’t catch him, I need to make up 500 words from somewhere.

And now I have to go because Hugo’s locked himself in the bathroom and I need to blow my nose for the 6743436450563rd time today.

Whiny, much?

No, I haven’t taken up a new craft. Yesterday I spent nearly five hours at Westmead Children’s Hospital, and came home with a decoratively stitched daughter.

Shortly prior to the hospital visit (duh) Hunter had gone into the back yard, where she’s not supposed to be at all during our renovations, and sliced her foot open on a sheet of roofing metal that was on the ground. She has three stitches.

There were many tears and much waiting and a lot of laughing gas before we left, hoping not to go back for at least two weeks this time.

You see, last weekend we had a trip to the hospital too. Hunter had been eating a bag of cookies from the preschool fete the day before, and, being starving and malnourished, she didn’t want to leave any crumbs in the bag. So she tipped it up to empty the debris into her mouth and instead landed something in her eye. It was way in under the bottom lid and I could not get it out.

Thankfully the staff changed between last weekend and this, so we only saw one nurse, in passing, who’d been there last Sunday. I just put my head down and hoped she didn’t recognise us.

And if you think two hospital trips in two weekends is impressive, I should add that on Saturday we might also have managed to infect a large group of children with something nasty and unidentified. We’d gone to a birthday party with Hunter seemingly normal but soon after we arrived she started acting out of sorts. Then she felt hot. Then her ear looked really red.

And then she broke out in spots from head to toe. After she’d been playing with the other kids for an hour or so.

Yep, we’re gonna have to build new cupboards for all our parenting awards.

You all know how much people love to attribute characteristics to gender. I’ve heard a million times that Hugo’s ‘all boy’, but I’ve really always thought it was more a case of ‘all Hugo’ than ‘all boy’. I’ve even claimed that Hunter and Hugo were very similar at the same age.

But lately that’s changing and I have to confess that the boy is, more and more, living up to the All Boy stereotype. Whether it’s really about his sex rather than his personality or whatever, I’m not so sure, but the kid climbs like a mountain goat, has no fear of anything, never learns from his mistakes and takes great delight in pursuing whatever crazy, dangerous notions come into his little head.

I know all toddlers climb. But Hunter was nothing like Hugo (and that’s saying something, when you consider she’d managed to knock herself out by this age). Right now Hugo’s sporting a nasty gash on his chin after clambering onto a chair, leaning on the back and toppling it over. It’s about the fourth injury he’s had from doing that exact thing. In fact, he was trying to get back up on the chair yesterday befeore the bleeding had even stopped.

And he’s more agile and physically sure at 17 months than Hunter was at two or maybe even two and a half. He knows how to get on things, and off them (not always – or ever, really – by the safest route). He can stand on one leg. He can squeeze into tight spaces and build towers of random objects to climb onto things. More than once I’ve gone into the bathroom and found him perched on the vanity, which he reaches by climbing onto the toilet then leaping the gap.

Even when he’s breastfeeding he’s acting like a gymnast. The other day he was feeding while standing between my knees (I was sitting on the couch). He hooked a knee over my thigh and swung himself up into a cradle hold, then slung his feet over the arm of the couch and dangled there like he was in an invisible hammock. Two seconds later he was upside down with his feet over my shoulder, then he was standing again – all while still latched on.

I don’t know whether it’s a boy thing or a Hugo thing, but I see stitches and plaster casts and grey hairs in my future.

It wasn’t exactly a Hitchcock movie but my friend and I managed to get ourselves into quite a state today as a peacock roamed – very menacingly, you understand – in our direction.

We’d taken the kids to the play area at Auburn Botanic Gardens and we were giving them lunch when the scare happened.

My friend is not a bird lover so had already been panicking on and off all morning as hungry ibises came over looking for food. But I’m not scared of them. I am a big, brave grown up. Plus, Hunter shooed them away when they got too close. My poor friend was rather alarmed though and actually climbed over the table at one point to get away from them.

Then she said OhMyGodThere’sAHugePeacockRightThere. I couldn’t actually see it at that moment, plus I was being all brave and stuff, so I wasn’t worried. And then I turned around and it was right behind me. And man, peacocks are really scary, what with their big feathers and all. Nothing says ‘danger’ like purple plumage.

Initially I tried to ignore it, while my friend started frantically chucking stuff in the back of her stroller but I’ll confess it – I was getting a bit scared of the big birdie. So I thought, well, best move a little way away, while still attempting to act Not Scared.

And so I moved a bit. And it followed. And then my friend and I both moved a bit, and it came even closer. And then we grabbed the kids and went striding off to the other side of the table, laughing at ourselves but not brave enough to stay put.

By this time we’d managed to scare my friend’s daughter, who was standing on a chair crying. We felt bad and stupid and responded as any sensible adults would. By laughing hysterically and continuing to get the hell away.

No one else in the area seemed the least bit fazed, but, well, they didn’t have a psychopathic peacock hunting them down (and by ‘hunting down’ I mean ‘wandering about looking for food and basically ignoring us’).

In the end we went over to another play area. And the peacock followed. This time it kept its distance (probably concluded we were insane) so we stayed a while longer before heading home.

My friend’s daughter probably has the beginnings of a lifelong fear of birds, but really, what’s parenting for if not for screwing up your kids a bit?