The (Champagne) Bucket List

The other day, I rang my husband at work.

“Let’s pretend for a moment that one of my aims before I turned 40 was to get quoted in the Australian Women’s Weekly,” I said. “You know, instead of getting a book published or becoming a syndicated columnist for a major print and/or online publication…”

“Uh, ok-ay,” my husband said slowly.

“Well, guess what?!” I enthused. “I was quoted in this month’s Australian Women’s Weekly and I’m turning 40 next week! Yay, me!”

“Yay you!” my husband said. “That magazine has a circulation of about two million, you know.”

“Well then guess how many people have already searched for ‘Not Drowning, Mothering’ today probably as a direct result of that article?” I asked.

“How many?”

“Three!” I exclaimed. I think I might have punched the air as I said it.

“Quick, let’s monetize them before they read any more of your blog and and you lose them forever!” my husband replied, no doubt with dollar signs in his eyes.

I’m not sure if monetizing those three readers is going on my ‘bucket list’ for turning 40. And if you don’t know what a ‘bucket list’ you can either accept my definition of it as being a list of those things you hope to achieve before you drink champagne out of a bucket at your 40th birthday party or you can click here.

Somewhat predictably, my list is getting less and less ambitious the closer my fortieth birthday gets. Of course, quite a few have been ticked off  – e.g. convince someone to marry me, convince someone (preferably the same person) to have kids with me… But gone are all hopes of, say, a lucrative book deal, spending six months drinking wine in the south of France or even finding the perfect pair of red shoes to turn 40 in.

At the moment only three things on the list, with one week left to achieve them. They are:

1. AVOID GASTRO “LIKE THE PLAGUE”: Every time anyone mentions the word ‘gastro’ in my presence, I physically jump back a metre from them. One woman I saw at the shops, pointed at her son (who was wrestling with my Tiddles McGee at the time) and told me he’d been firing out both ends for nine days. Nine days. It was all I could do to pick Tiddles up, throw him over my shoulder and run from the building screaming. If I’m going to spend my fortieth dealing with vomit I want it to the be excessive-alcohol-induced variety. Just sayin’.

2. BE COLDSORE-FREE: Just two days ago, my top lip suddenly exploded into song, that song having something to do with the fact that the lip had herpes.

I rang my dear friend KT, a fellow HVP-1 sufferer, and she helped me do the maths.

“You have ten sleeps until your party,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Your coldsore couldn’t have come at a better time.”

Uh, my coldsore might have thought about coming after my party. Nobody wants to go to a party with the birthday girl looking like this:3. MOUSTACHE-BE-GONE: The volume of dark hairs on my upper lip has been causing strangers on the street some gender confusion lately. Getting rid of it is easier said than done, of course, because it’s currently sharing the same real estate as the cold sore and I’m afraid the anti-moustache lotion that I bought might anger the cold sore unnecessarily and cause it to stage some kind of hostile invasion of my entire mouth and then I won’t even have my moustache to help conceal it. It’s a bad situation.

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Of course I realise that, now I’ve blogged about these things, I’ve totally jinxed myself. Which is why I’m now planning to wear a bucket on my head on my 40th birthday. Not only will it hid my coldsore and my moustache from the world, but it will come into its own when the gastro hits.

I may even decorate it with the pages from ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly’ article I was quoted in, just to show people I’m not a total loser.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I do so love it when a plan comes together…

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Father Nature

I think it’s fair to say that my husband didn’t board the parenting plane at quite the same time as me. Yes, while I had already taken my seat and was working out how the hell to use the infant seatbelt, he was still getting in a few round of drinks in the transit lounge.

Here’s an example. A few weeks after Baby Justice and I’d come home from hospital to our London flat, I was struck down by a terrible case of gastroenteritis and spent most of the evening acquainting myself with the toilet.

The next morning, my husband took charge of the situation.

“You rest up,” he said, gallantly. “I’ll look after the baby!”

But somewhere between the words “the” and “baby”,  he, too, started vomiting.

So while my husband was down the hallway, barking like a dog, I found myself lying on the couch with a blinding headache, pushing the baby back and forth in his stroller with my foot, desperately willing him to sleep for longer than 15 minutes. It was a dunking in the deeper-end of parenting that I will never forget.

Anyway, after hours and hours of this torture, I dragged myself up to go to the toilet and, on the way, spotted my husband lying in bed, happily reading ‘Lord Of The Rings’. What’s more – although I can’t confirm this – I suspect he was reading the poems of Tom Bombadil just to further piss me off.

I reminded my husband of this story the other day and he was flummoxed.

“How do you remember these things?” he asked.

“Oh, I remember plenty of things. Plenty,” I think I might even have crushed a walnut shell in my bare hand as I uttered that last word.

My husband then tentatively reminded me of all the things he *did* do during that period, including buying and cooking special food to bring me back to good health and packing up our entire flat ready to move back to Australia.

“Oh, yeah, there was that,” I said, somewhat sheepishly.

As much as I love to hang shit on my husband in this blog, there is so much else that he does that goes unblogged, unthanked and unacknowledged. There’s the way he brings me coffee and food  when I’m blogging and the way he makes the bed in the evening and cranks the electric blanket up to Number 3 (Mmmm… Number 3….). And there’s the way in which he loves our kids and teaches them stuff like how to ride a bike, play pool and fetch Daddy a beer from the fridge. And the way he still thinks I’m beautiful in all my saggy-baggy post-partum glory and how he trusted me enough behind the wheel of a car on my P-plates to nap when I was driving. And then there’s the way he forces me to stop being a goddamn martyr all the goddamn time and to go out and enjoy myself every once in a while.

So, although we don’t really celebrate Hallmark Occasions in this household, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish my husband a very Happy Father’s Day.  I can’t think of anyone I would rather be taking this journey aboard the parenting plane with –  especially since he really knows how to work an in-flight service.

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Reclaiming The Mountain

All families have their own family folk lore. You know, the stories they like to tell each other.

In my little family, we like to tell of how a newborn Mr Justice lay in his hospital crib with his legs completely stretched out, causing a passing midwife to comment “You don’t see that every day!”. And how the Pixie, was born the size of a small planet and had cheeks like giant marshmallows. And how Tiddles McGee managed to urinate not only on the delivering surgeon but on the pediatrician, too. This last story is particularly popular with the kids and Tiddles takes great delight in randomly telling people that he “peed on the doctor’s face!” – which, when taken out of context, sounds like all kinds of wrong.

It’s little wonder that our vomitous misadventures on the mountain last year have become the stuff of legend. The kids often like to sit ’round retelling the sorry chain of events.

“First, Pixie threw up on Tiddles’ head,” they like to say. “Then Tiddles threw up in Mummy’s hand in the snow. Then KC, Master D and Daddy got it, too. Although, Daddy didn’t vomit, he just got a ‘blurty bum’. Then Mummy starting vomiting… But only Mr Justice and MM stood strong!”

Turns out this nostalgia is as contagious as the gastro itself. As we drove to the ‘scene of the crime’ (our holiday house) last week, I found myself pointing out a bleak stretch of road and exclaiming “I think that’s where we stopped for someone to throw up!”.  Once at the house, MM and I found ourselves standing in the laundry, looking wistfully at the washing machine and laundry sink, site of the scrubbing and soaking of many stained sheets and clothing. A lot of good times, a lot of good times. Over in one the bedrooms (and scene of the initial vomit-on-the-head incident), I found myself thinking “If only these walls could talk…” shortly followed by “Shit, someone should really either clean these walls or slap a gagging order on them before they can talk…”.

Slowly but surely, however, the house was transformed from the House Of Horror to our happy holiday home again, thanks to plenty of good company, good conversation, good food and good wine.

There only remained the mountain for us to reclaim.

It should be noted here that driving up to the snow each year involves the same kind of precision planning and execution required for a large-scale military coup. There’s all that damn snow gear to pack and snow chains to hire and the drive up a perilous stretch of road and then the scramble in the back of the van to locate everyone’s gloves and hats and boots before anyone can even start getting wet and cold and whingey.

It’s the kind of thing that really does made me wish the mountain could come to me instead of me going to the mountain. Especially when I can still remember the hot, wet weight of Tiddles McGee’s vomit in my hand eleven months after our last mountain trip.

For the record, our trip to the mountain this year was vomit-free (or “free vomit” as The Pixie later misquoted). Indeed, I wore the NDM Children’s Vomit Scale t-shirt’ KC and MM gave me as a birthday present last year.

Yes, I made that mountain my bitch again.

But while there may have been no vomiting, there was this:

In case you can’t tell, that is a hot jet stream of piss coming out the sliding door of the Starwagon, giving credence to the adage “Don’t eat the yellow snow”.

And yet this was no holiday mishap. Oh, no. This was another act of reclaiming that mountain. All we needed was for the piss to be hitting a print-out of last year’s holiday blog post. Or, even better, having a bemused and panicked doctor in its direct line of fire. Then this blog post would have been complete…

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