BRS #2: Summary Execution

A lot of people say to me “Oh, NDM. I’m far too busy too busy having a life to read your blog! Whatever is it all about?”

And other people say to me “Oh, I read it for a while. And then I stopped. Now there is so much to catch up on, it feels far too overwhelming. Can you stop writing for a while so I can catch up?”

And even more people say “Listen, I’m not going to read your blog, okay? No matter how much you harass me about it – it just ain’t going to happen, lady. Now kindly get out of my way before I have to call the police again.”

So for all these people and their questions (including the police) I thought I would summarise my blog just so:

I am very often late but it is never EVER my fault. 

My house is a mess but my blogging has nothing to do with it. 

My husband is a long-suffering individual who is either always having shit hung on him by his wife OR is just hung over.

Pretty much every day in my household, someone hides their shoes and/or vomits. Or even vomits in their shoes and then hides them. 

I think all kinds of weird shit and then lose followers on twitter for thinking that weird shit out loud and then I turn it into a blog post and lose even more readers.

I suffer from frequent menstrual accidents and occasional loss of bladder control – which is a relatively polite way of saying that I often bleed and piss on stuff accidentally.

I once started a short-lived and yet international fashion trend of wearing a pilot’s hat on a jaunty angle. 

I’ve just been diagnosed with oste0-something and am currently searching for evidence of a Champagne Cure. 

Blah blah blah.

Yep, that pretty much sums the NDM experience up, don’t you think?

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Too Much “TMI”

“My poo was a bit dribbly yesterday,” The Pixie announced casually at dinner. “Today it was like a treasure. There were lots of bits like a big soup.”

And then she lifted her fork to her mouth and kept on eating. What’s more, so did I.

Now, I have previously blogged my theory that I crossed an invisible line the moment I was put in stirrups during my labour with Mr Justice. Or perhaps it was during my first internal examination during that pregnancy. Doesn’t matter. Pretty much from the moment Mr Justice was born, there seemed to be no such thing as Too Much Information for me and I always thought it was something about becoming a parent. 

Except, well, I always knew my husband didn’t quite make the journey across that line. He’s still incredibly squeamish when it comes to bodily fluids. Just yesterday, he shouted out from a toilet trip with our daughter: “We’ve got an emergency situation here!!!”. Turns out there was a bit of wee on the floor and The Pixie’s bottom wasn’t entirely wiped clean. I don’t know about anybody else but them’s a dream toilet run in my books.

But then a chance conversation with my friend MM got me thinking that maybe it was only the mums that had “crossed over”. When I told him (a loving hands-on father to a five-year-old boy) that I was planning to write a blog post about my children’s individual vomiting styles – for example, Tiddles McGee is “The Perculator” who gurgles for a few minutes before finally delivering the goods – MM went very quiet and perhaps a little pale. “I’ll really look forward to reading that,” he mumbled in a way that made me think he rather hoped someone would burst in and make him eat his own hand instead. 

And then a recent reunion with two of my longest serving friends J9 and Ay-Kay put a complete end to my whole line-crossing theory. 

After a downing a few cocktails with my dear friends, I found myself speaking quite openly about my lack of bladder control. Which was followed by the kind of uncomfortable silence where you could hear even a driblet of urine drop. 

Then, the very next morning, Ay-Kay told me she’d found a pair of my underpants in the car. Now, before anybody starts getting any ideas, they had fallen out of my luggage, people. Out of my luggage!

My first thought was not “How embarrassing!” but “Please don’t let them be the Granny Pants”.

Luckily they were the nice frilly black pair. Ay-Kay even said she was almost impressed until she realised that there was a big hole in them (near the top elastic, people, not the crotch! Sheesh…). And she handed them back to me, not even asking how the hole had got there or even why I’d packed a pair of holey undies on an interstate trip. At first I thought “Aw, she knows me so well she doesn’t even need to ask…” but then, remembering my admissions the previous night and her reaction, I suddenly realised “Oh!…. She just doesn’t want to know…“.

And that’s when I realised the truth. You see, my friend Ay-Kay is a war-weary mother of four, who must have seen most things parenting small children can throw your way. And so that truth is this: there is a line you cross over when you become a parent that allows you to deal proficiently with your children’s snot, chuck and shit. And then there is another line further on that only I seem to have crossed where too much information is never too much.Which is probably why I blog so cheerfully about dribbly poo, menstrual accidents and vegetable porn stars.

Just a theory.

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The Silent Red Ninja

Apparently a common complaint that men have about women is that when women are at the supermarket checkout, they always seem to wait until the last possible moment to start searching their handbags for their purse. It was as if the thought that they might have to pay some money never occurred to them. 

Well, I don’t know how accurate that is, but I certainly am that way when it comes to my period. Which has come pretty much Every. Single. Month. since I was 14. And yet, every single month it surprises me in some way or another, like a silent red ninja attacking at the most inconvenient moment (see “Remains of the Day & Night“). 

So you can imagine my delight the other week when I was getting ready to fly home from a weekend away at my friend Ay-Kay’s house and there was a knock on the door from the red ninja. I probably need not mention that I was wearing white underpants at the time, but I will mention it just the same, thank you very much. 

I swiftly got changed and stuffed the minutely-stained undies into my bag. As I continued on to pack the styrofoam sword I’d bought on a whim for Tiddles McGee, I had this sudden terrible thought that the sword would be picked by airport security and they’d have to search through my whole bag and some 19-year-old guard would end up holding my stained underpants up to the world as if it was the morning after my wedding night in a small Greek village.

And so I decided to give the undies a quick spot-clean in the bathroom sink. Of course, that little stain soon spread to a slightly larger stain and quickly resulted in a completely sopping pair of underpants. Result. 

Since I was alone in Ay-Kay’s house, I went snooping about to find a drying solution. A quick search of the laundry and bathroom unturned neither clothes dryer nor hair dryer. I considered for a minute using the microwave but I grew worried that my friend Ay-Kay would arrive home unexpectedly and I’d be all “Oh, hi!” and then the microwave would go “Bing!” and she’d say “What are you cooking?” and I’d be, like, “Nothing…” and she’d be all “That’s weird. Why would the microwave go bing! like that?” and she’d open the door to find my steaming hot underpants on one of her grandmother’s dinner plates.

And so I stuffed them into a plastic bag and back into my carry-on bag, now with the fear that airport security would uncover them, still sopping wet and I’d have to explain the whole situation. And I realised that A) a tiny blood stain was far better than a sodden pair of underpants and B) I should have just coloured the original stain in with a blue texta because apparently menstrual blood is okay when it’s blue. Anyone in advertising could have told me that.  

For the record, my friend Ay-Kay doesn’t actually own a microwave, the sword got through airport security and the underpants languished at the bottom of the bag for far longer than was necessary and ended up being thrown in the bin, where I should have just placed them the minute I bought them as part of a multi-coloured five-pack from Best & Less. I mean, who the hell even wears white underpants ANYWAY when that dreaded red ninja could arrive at Any Given Moment. Sheesh.

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