Get up and help me!

I love Andrea Frazer’s posts at BabyCenter. (I’ll write about others whose blogs keep me sane, too!)

One post which I read today is Oh my God! Are your kids’ arms broken? Oh boy. That amused me maybe more than it should. You see, I have only one darling daughter, Mimi, who is two. However, I have two kids, it seems. DD and DH.

What on earth is normal about a woman running after a kid *and* a husband, picking up after them? Is it normal? (If you say yes, I’m going to get all medieval on your ass!) I nag DH to put his stuff in the dishwasher, to put his clean clothes away (after I ran the washing machine and put the clothes on the line), to set the table for dinner. He has learnt to be careful how he phrases requests, particularly after I’ve had a hard day at work. Otherwise he’s likely to hear “Oh dear. Are your little legs broken? And your arms, too? Let me get some splints and bandages first.” Sarcastic cow, that would be me.

His mother has apologised to me for not making him do chores round the house when he was a kid. While I was rushing round looking after my baby brothers, cooking, cleaning, and so on, he was putting his feet up and watching television in his house several states away. I think he might be a bit nervous about my mother.

Making friends

I feel uneasy posting about this.

I have not encouraged my daughter to make friends with one child, let’s call her Natalie, at preschool because I don’t like the child’s father.

The first time I met him, it was as if he had an aura of spikes and static electricity. A grandmother told me of how he had behaved rudely towards her in the parking lot and then he was brusque and cheerless when I met him in the preschool.

The other negative things I feel about him aren’t big in themselves, yet somehow my judgmental self has taken over and has made me hesitate in my approach to his child. The child is bright, usually cheerful, inquisitive, sometimes bossy, and all round seems nice - she’s a regular toddler!

I’m working on being friendlier to the child’s mother (who is thawing gradually towards other parents) and the child herself. More importantly, I’m working on examining my ability to form snap opinions that aren’t necessarily empirically based, or which need revision. Seriously, this is juvenile! This is what happens at high school. I’m the one who needs to grow up.

Ooh, just like YOU!!

Nobody has ever told me that my daughter looks like me. All I ever hear is “Ooh, doesn’t she look just like your husband!”  It’s the blond hair, I’m sure, even though there are strawberry blonds on my side of the family too with blue eyes and round cheeks. Just for once I’d like someone to see some resemblance, *any* resemblance to me instead of making out that DD’s genetic packaging is completely from DH’s side.  What am I, chopped liver?

Of course, I am exaggerating. A bit. When DD was 9 months old she was asked some obvious question by friends.  Naturally DD rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders.  Immediate reaction: “Hon, she looks just like you when she does that!” Great.

Elephant is apparently “feffant”, truck is “cuck”, and I’m often told “hep me!” (help me) and “cawwy!!” (carry). I have been told that DD says please and thank you at preschool. I remain unconvinced: she doesn’t say that at home. I never heard DD say “yes” until 6 weeks ago. She’s really good at “no”. Hey, she knows her own mind.

Jobs

I have held a number of casual or temporary jobs. Some were while I was a student at uni or high school; others were second jobs while I worked at a low-paying full-time job, like secondary school teaching.

The worst ones were those that required cleaning. Toilet cleaning was the worst of the lot. Just thinking about it now gives me the creeps. How on earth can adults be so clumsy? How can vomit fly all around the cubicle? (Actually, the answer is “First drink a lot of alcohol.”)  House cleaning wasn’t much better.  Some houses stank of urine, or animals, or the lingering aroma of fatty meat meals long since eaten.  To this day, I still can’t deal with stale kitchen smells very well.

I did some tutoring in French and English language skills which was OK. Neither thrilling nor offensive.

Music teaching. Ah, the highs and lows! I’ve been thrilled at students learning new skills and finally working out how to get their hands co-ordinated on the piano. I also remember a man who wanted to learn how to play the flute and who creeped me out considerably.  No real reason why: he was pleasant enough, dressed well, always paid on time, but I eventually made some lame excuse about increased study load and let him depart. Strange, I haven’t thought of him for years.

I would have liked to do pet sitting but somehow that never came up as a job opportunity and I was too shy to advertise for jobs.

Reduce, re-use, recycle

I can’t be the only person who is thoroughly sick of being exhorted and entreated to reduce, re-use and recycle.  Most of the public relations bumf that comes from various govt agencies and non-profit organisations assumes that we are all starting from a position of being spendthrift wastrels who seek to fill in municipal and territory garbage sites with our rubbish.

All it does is make me want to buy items with five or more layers of packaging and then throw all the packaging into the non-recycling bin.

Fact is, I have been careful with rubbish and recycling for years.  Back when I started, it was called being mean. If you were being polite, it was called being thrifty.  Either way, I would imagine that my parents had been influenced by not having a lot when they were growing up, nor, for that matter, did my brothers and I. Our grandparents grew up during the Depression and developed careful ways of living and consuming that carried over the decades.

Granted, I am not as careful in saving things as Nanna was. I don’t keep every bit of good-quality butcher’s paper for using when sifting flour when I get around to baking. I don’t keep every bit of string, either: that’s DH’s job! (Seriously!)

At the same time, there is a fine line to tread between keeping useful things and living in a rapidly-growing pile of ’stuff’. Part of my negotiation of that is what I term ‘careful consumer behaviour’. Come to think of it, there’s probably a similar term used in both ‘Green’ and Business textbooks.  Do I need to buy something in bulk, like 5kg of rice, instead of returning to the store several times and buying more, smaller packets that will each have wrapping? What about the 5 layers of plastic and cardboard that surrounded the moisturiser I bought from the pharmacy? How about the vegetables that rot in the bottom of the fridge, signifiers of a week of laziness and stress where good intentions went out the window?

It’s an ongoing thing. I have been making myself plan out menus for a week in advance. Mind you, these can be knocked for six with a two-year-old who proclaims loudly “No! No, Mummy! No want dis! Yucky!” Nothing like a toddler to bring you to earth with a resounding thud.

The importance of lunch

Lunch is simple for me, whether it’s a work day or the weekend. A sandwich and a piece of fruit in season, maybe a diet Coke or a cup of coffee, and I’m set for the afternoon. But not yesterday. Fool that I am, I sprinted out of the house with toddler, husband, several bags, DH’s briefcase, DD’s lunchbox … and not my work bag which contained my lunch.

Heck, I can manage without the bits of paperwork I trudge back and forth from home to work and back again (or vice versa) as long as I have my handbag (huge and red, can be used as an offensive weapon in a pinch). But I was a sad thing without my sandwiches.

I went to the student union to buy a calzone and tried a tandoori chicken calzone. Yummy, far too much hassle for me to make at home, and now I know it’s far too messy! Bah, my black shirt was quickly adorned with five splodges of tandoori sauce mingled with fresh tomato juice.

Today was a bit better. I was determined to have my sandwich and I remembered both it and my bag. However, I’d forgotten that I’d loaded my bag with heavy things and the poor sandwich, protected only by clingwrap, was bent, twisted and tortured by the time I thought to release it at lunchtime. It was delicious anyway.

Do drop in! Or not …

What happened to the casual drop in at home? People would be driving past on their way home from something, see the turn off to Suburb X and say “Let’s see if Meowmie is home!” Next thing, there’d be a familiar car in the driveway, and a chance to have coffee with old friends.

Nowadays we have only 3 or 4 friends who do that. I think that with the compression of life’s activities, whether they be work or leisure related, our time at home is precious and the fact that people don’t drop in most likely shows that they respect your leisure.

Of course, the alternative reasons for the decline in drop ins are:
- They don’t want to see you running around doing the cleaning on the weekend
- You might be in bed in your pyjamas
- … or not in your pyjamas
- You might end up being asked to do chores with the family (happened with my family sometimes!)
- There will be seething resentment from the unsolicited hosts at the time ticking by while being forced into civility and conviviality.
- It takes extra petrol to travel there.

Yes, we had drop ins this weekend. Yes, I ended up several hours behind in what I’d planned to do that day, but the inconvenience and extra work were outweighed by the chance to catch up with friends.

The Three-Second Rule

As a kid, I grew up eating stuff that had the three-second rule applied to it - usually toast. You know the rule: if food falls on the floor, it’s OK to eat it if it’s been only been on the floor for 3 seconds or less. I must have scraped the equivalent of several pounds of fluff off innocent pieces of toast. Pieces of orange or apple got quickly rinsed under the kitchen tap. My mum’s motto was “Waste not, want not”, possibly taken to extreme.

There’s an article today on the top five food safety myths. Honestly, it’s a miracle that my brothers and I didn’t have galloping food poisoning through our childhood.

Seriously, in an average kitchen or dining room where people do not wear their outside shoes (ie everyone has slippers or bare feet), is the bacteria concentration sufficient to make someone keel over from eating toast that landed on the floor? I don’t have the lab facilities to hand to investigate this, nor does DH (he’s the practising scientist in our family).

I know that Mythbusters did an item on which way toast lands on the floor in season three but there were no bacteria counts. They did another test on the five-second rule contrasting bacteria counts from food left for 2 seconds and 6 seconds, finding that there was little difference. However, there was no distinction made between different floor surfaces. Must admit, I am a fan of How Clean is Your House? for the horror movie petri dishes from various corners of ill-repute in filthy houses. But they don’t do it on (normally) clean houses. ETA: Here is an article on salmonella transfer experiment.

I’ll leave the last word to the SMH article:

Of course, this [refutation of the three-second rule] does not apply to extremely yummy foods (e.g. chocolate) or expensive items such as truffles.

I’m not the Queen of Clean

The refrigerator is giving me the hairy eyeball. Not as bad as the old fridge, which would burp foul stenches and frost over the lettuce regularly, letting me know that I needed to get out the chisel and hot water to attack the freezer. This lovely new fridge (bought in 2006) is still sparkly white on the outside, despite DH and Mimi trying to add “decorations” to it. You know the sort of decorations … pumpkin soup, margarine, Vegemite, blackberry jam. Never fear, I can Mr Sheen that sort of stuff into submission.

The thing I don’t want to do is to take out all the heavy glass shelves and scrub them. That would entail reaching into the farthest recesses to find things like a can of Tasmanian beer from 2003 (ie it was in the old fridge, fer cryin’ out loud!), a tin of pineapple that nobody really wants to eat, a jar of mayonnaise that has been open for over 6 months, and so on. Then, of course, it would be time to deal with the vegie crisper. What a treat! Again, it’s heavy and unwieldy and a pill to pull out and clean. I could visit the miniature tomatoes that rolled under the old bag of carrots to mate in an unattractive way with seedless green grapes, sharing their blue fluff o’doom.

Nope, I still haven’t convinced myself to do it. I have a couple of library books that I have to read, three cats that need grooming, labels to put on Mimi’s clothes, shoes to clean and washing to put away.

Mmm! Mmm! (My cooking)

Ah, such sweet words! I made pumpkin soup on Tuesday evening and Mimi’s immediate reaction was “Mmmm! Mmmm!” as she lapped it up. I haven’t seen that enthusiasm for anything vegetable-based for ages.

I gave her tuna mornay on top of mashed vegetables on Weds. evening. Same response. Tuna mornay is wonderful and she would have liked to have some more.

I got some long speech from her about Maccie, who is in her group at childcare. OK, his name is Max but Mimi’s version is understandable … which is more than I can say about the rest of her speech. I have no idea what she meant but apparently they had a good time.

I gave the cats tinned catfood for breakfast. The two older cats were ecstatic. The tabby tried to lick the bowl clean.  The Siamese, on the other hand, was highly unimpressed. That stuff? Moi? No way.  Her pathetic expression worked.  I found a solitary sachet of chicken casserole in the cupboard which perked her up no end.