The Hormones Are Coming.

Tonight’s the night, the teens will descend upon us.
About 12 laughing, excited, hormone riddled gals are coming to stay the night.
The boys will be at the out-laws, the cats will be locked in upstairs.
Every futon we own will be laid out downstairs, optimistic that the gals will sleep at some point.
I’m wondering just how much breakfast 13 teenage girls can scoff in the morning, methinks quite a lot.
Doris is beside herself with excitement, too excited it seems to help with the tidying up, but not too excited to pour over the pizza menu.
I have baked two large chocolate cakes which I am planning to ice to look like softballs, looks easy enough but I am no icer of cakes, so we’ll see shall we. Anyway, should be enough sugar there to keep them bouncing off the walls a while.
I plan to be upstairs watching a dvd with Sunshine, I don’t think they require my presence, it’s not like they’ll be over-doing the punch. These are sporty gals, ‘my body is my temple’ types, keep ‘em full of food and they’re happy.

One thing that surprises me though, out of 12 ( or is it 13) girls, I’ve lost track, invited, not one single parent has called me to confirm that their darling daughter is staying here. It’s not that I don’t trust my girls, but if they were staying over somewhere and I hadn’t already spoken in the flesh with the other girl’s mother I would call, I would check, I would confirm. Am I just over-protective?

These Boots Aren’t Made For Walking

Glad it’s Monday, I’m off on Mondays. I worked all weekend and came back last night buggered and looking forward to PJs and Brothers and Sisters on AXN at 8.
Was not best pleased to hear The Man has booked a table at a local restaurant to celebrate Doris’s leap to teendom.
I rallied though, trooper that I am, put my best foot forward and a good time was had by all.
While Doris and I had slaved away at work all day on a phonics extravaganza, Sunshine got her usual cash in hand for watching Uncle Bricks massive TV, then went shopping.
She was so excited. She sent me a mail saying she had found ‘the best boots ever’. She went on to claim, that although they were ‘a bit expensive’, she’ll wear them ‘for the rest of her life’. One look at them told me they won’t last that long.
She was beside herself with excitement and wanted to put them on in the restaurant. I managed to talk her out of it with my usual practical advice.
” How are you going to walk back up the mountain in 4 inch stilletto heels?”
The great news is, ‘ Mama we’re the same size, you can borrow them anytime.”
Thanks darling, next time I’m going out as a DOMINATRIX, I’ll hold you to that.

I remember my first pair of ‘Londoners’. Gawd they were fug-ugly shoes, but they had three things going for them. They had a high heel and I was vertically challenged, they were only 3 quid in a sale and most importantly, they were a size 3 and it was hard to find women’s shoes in a size 3.
I showed them to my Dad who grabbed my foot and bent my instep causing great pain.
” That’s what it’s going to feel like to wear them.” Oh what a sage.
I never wore them once, they hurt like all Hell.
P.S. I am still vertically challenged but have bigger feet.

A Minute For Madeleine

http://www.ceop.police.uk/madeleine/madeleine.asp

A Minute for Madeleine.
Maybe, just maybe, the someone, who knows something, will see this as people post it on their blogs and sites everywhere.
Kids DO come back sometimes.
Elizabeth Smart, Sean Hornbeck, Steve Stayner, Jaycee Dugard.
Someone knows something.

Happy Birthday Doris.

YAY for us, another teenage girl in the house.
Today Doris makes the leap from tweendom to teendom.
Being, as of, oh so very recently, a self-obsessed teenager, she thinks this day is all about her.
I beg to differ. I find myself thinking back to this very day 13 years ago.
For obvious reasons the birth of each of my children provokes very happy memories, but for Doris, it’s special, because I had the most perfect, empowering, wonderful delivery. With the other kids, some deatisl are hazy, but with her I recall in vivid detail each and every moment of the day she came into this beautiful world. The Man claims my memory is selective, and as the one who was not in agony much of the day, his memories are more reliable.
Too bad there isn’t a video to prove me right.
I’d like a parade.

This weekend is a busy softball weekend so the young lass has asked for a pizza/sleep-over party for next Saturday night for 12 of her closest friends. Thirteen, 13 year-olds, whacked out on sugar, hormones and life, trashing my house.
Oh that everyone could be me!

We discussed the details.
For cake, she would like cupcakes, iced in the form of softballs, nestling in a net.
In your dreams darling. I am not a baker of cakes. I am not an eater of cakes so have never been able to embrace the pay-off of labouring. I can make a wicked chicken pie, but picky-picky Doris doesn’t want a ‘wicked’ chicken pie for the birthday bash, she wants cupcakes.
Entertainment, there will be games and for pre-sleep settling down ( huh yeah right!) scary dvds.
Gifts, Puma sweats please.
My fine young sons will be despatched to the Out-Laws for their own safety.
The lovely little girls will come clutching their toothbrushes, and PJ’s early evening.

Contingency plans? What if the school closes again due the flu ‘epidemic’? Will we postpone, will we downsize?
I do not know.

Doris: Mama?
Me : Yes oh little one?
Doris: You know I might get the flu right?
Me : Indeed you might.
Doris: Well, if I do, and I die, can you tell everybody that I died saving a small child from being hit by a truck.
Me : I can if you want I suppose.
Doris: Or… I know….an old woman who could hardly walk asked me to help her across the road, so I piggy-backed her, but she was actually a bad person and she stabbed me.
Me: Okay, but no more Criminal Minds, Third Watch or Law and Order for you, okay?
Doris: Okay.

Happy Birthday darling.

When One Door Slams….

I think maybe some anger management classes!
Conversations with teenagers not going well here, and poor Sunshine felt the need to slam the door on her way to school, because we, The Man and I, are ‘ruining her life’. Yep ruining it.
She has been invited to a nabe party. Nabe is where you cook various ingredients in one pot, and everyone sits around a low table chatting, cooking and eating.
Nothing wrong with that. we do it all the time in the winter with friends.
‘Nabe party’ might be just that, a nabe party, but it might also be a euphemism for unsupervised piss-up, I do not know. I know when I was a teenager it meant unsupervised piss-up, and I don’t want to project my own mis-spent youth on my daughter, who is of a different time a different culture and is in fact an entirely different person, but the concept of a teenager lying to a parent isn’t too much of a stretch is it?

‘When is it?’
‘On Friday.’
‘What time?’
‘We’ll all meet up straight after school.’
‘ Where is it?’
‘ Near Saidaiji’ ( that’s on the way home from school)
‘Whose party is it?’
‘ A girl I work with, all the girls from work are going.’
‘ What girl?’
‘ Hara-san.’
‘ I’ve never heard of her.’
‘I’m always talking about her.’
‘What school does she go to?’
‘She doesn’t, she’s finished school, she works full-time’.
‘ How old is she?’
‘Why?’
‘ I’m just wondering.’
‘ 25′.
‘ Are the other girls all coming back on the same train afterwards.’
‘No, we’re all going to stay the night.’
‘Stay the night where?’
‘ At Hara-san’s house’
‘ Oh, no, sorry love, you can’t stay there, we don’t know anything about her. You can go to the party, but be back by 9.30 and I’ll pick you up at the station.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘why is there no point?’
‘Because I’ll have to leave at 8, it wont get started till 7.’
” Why will you have to leave at 8, you can leave at 9 and get back from Saidaiji in time.’
‘It’s quite far from Saidaiji.’
‘I thought you said it’s ‘just near’ Saidaiji.’
‘Well it is, it’s quite near, but it’s quite far too, and there might not be many trains at night.’
‘ Sorry but, if you go you need to be back by 9.30.’
‘But everyone else is staying over, we’re all going to go to work together on Saturday morning.’
‘I understand that, but sorry we can’t let you stay God knows where, with God knows who.
Just tell her you can go to the party but you can’t stay over.’
‘But she made it a sleep-over because of me, because I’m the only one who isn’t allowed to stay out late.’
‘That was nice of her, but we don’t know her, so it’ll have to be 9.30 home or nothing. That’s my final answer.’
‘ But if I don’t go, they’ll just say, let’s cancel it then, then no one can enjoy themselves, because of YOU.’
‘You CAN GO, ( voice beginning to rise a little), you just can’t stay. That’s it HONEY!
‘You don’t know how it feels to be me, always ruining the fun for everyone.’
‘I appreciate that, but you can’t know how it feels to be me, wondering where my daughter is.”
‘I told you where I’ll be.’
‘Yes you did, somewhere, near to, yet, simultaneously, far from , Saidaiji. Sorry it’s a ‘no’. Not this time.’
‘You always say ‘no’. I’m never allowed to do anything, I’m always the only one who can’t go to things.’
‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’
‘You’re not sorry, if you were sorry you’d let me go. You’re ruining my life.’
SLAM of door, Sunshine exits stage left.
DORIS enters stage right.
‘That went well.’
Thank you Doris for your support, observe, takes notes, we’ll be having the same conversation in 4 years and my answers will all be the same.
2 hours later, The Man returns. He is far less emotional than my goodself. Let’s ask him.

‘Sunshine wants to go to a nabe party on Friday with the girls from work, they’re all planning to stay over at someone’s house’.
‘Whose house?’
‘Someone she works with.’
‘Do we know her?’
‘No.’
‘No frickin way.’

‘Is that your final answer?’

“

Bunka No Hi.

Culture Day, yet another public holiday.
The temp suddenly dropped as we prepare to land in winter, must get to Uniqlo for more fleeces.
The gals are fighting fit today, Sunshine has gone to work wearing nothing but a sweater, she claims it’s a dress.
My idea of a dress is longer than a hanky, but I suppose that’s me channelling my Mother again.
Doris has gone off to play softball for the day. Leaving The Man, 2 fine young sons, 2 cats and a chicken to find ways to amuse ourselves.
Having taking a poll, seems we all have different expectations of what fun would be today.
The Man wants to sit around and play guitar. I’d like to do something more productive like lie on the sofa eating toast, watching TV.( because that is cultural for me). Kev motioned with his fingers that he’d like to either tickle a trout or do his DS, Jim, cat blanket complete, wants to knit a new coop for the chicken.
There can only be one winner!!
Bet it’s not me.

Yesterday I trapped my finger in a draw, that completes my run of three bad things and I am now ready and willing to move onto a run of good fortune.

Oven -Ready Chicken.

Darn chicken attacked me yesterday, as I was on my way to the car. It was an unprovoked, vicious, and I believe premeditated attack. It repeatedly hurled itself at me, causing painful injury to my right leg. Injury so deep, bruising so close to the bone, there is hardly a mark on my outer derma. I was temporaily rendered entirely witless, and could only manage to scream at Jim that unless he wants to sleep on a fresh feather pillow, he’d better lock his darn chicken up. He did, but by the time I ( limped) back from my errands, I was still so mad I had to pre-heat the oven, just in case!
While I was out an old woman almost backed into me, saved only by my wits returning and leaning heavily on the horn.
She pulled forward, I parked, then she backed out again almost hitting the delivery guy, once more my horn to the rescue. I am not a fan of elderly people driving, I think they need to have the guts to say, ” I shouldn’t be driving anymore, my eyes and reflexes no longer serve me well.’
11a.m. and so far not a great day. I decided to unpack my new sewing machine and finish making curtains for the boys’ bedroom. Turns out, my eyes no longer serve me well either and I couldn’t see well enough to follow the threading instructions, so had to abandon that plan and watch some House instead.
In the afternoon, there was a plan to take the boys to an art class, organised by a teacher from the Steiner school.
This involved driving through torrential rain with Jim to pick up Summer Sky and drop them off, then return an hour later with Kev and Summer Sky’s older brother. I had just dropped Jim off when I got a frantic call from a payphone, saying, when I pick him up would I bring his knitting with me, he wants to show his friend.
He is knitting either a scarf for me or a blanket for the cats. Luckily for me it appears to be going in the blanket direction. He cast on 25 stitches but at last count has 76, so it’s an interesting shape, and he’s keeping the colours interesting by unravelling all the God’s Eyes we made last Christmas.
Now Monday morning dawns and we are already two pipers down, Doris and Ruby are both sick, they may or may not have a fever, the thermometer has gone the way of my good ink pen and the remote control for the region free DVD player, so will have to rely on the hand to head method and dispense lots of TLC.

Sunshine and the Chocolate Factory.

So Sunshine is now having to make important subject decisions in school. Let’s put aside a moment the fact that I think it’s too early, most kids are fairly clueless about what they want to do beyond go shopping and purikura at this stage in their young lives, the fact is, she has to make decisions, which will affect which universities she can apply to and thus, what courses she can take, thus what career she can follow.
She has to make choices like, World history/Japanese history ( Me; world history, her; J. history) Economics and current affairs in English/ Maths ( Me; economics etc, her; maths) biology/chemistry.
Now might be a good time to explain, that even if she wanted to, she doesn’t have the option to take both in any of the given choices, because the choices she has today are the result of choices she had to make 18 months ago. (aged 15 and a 1/2)
So at that time she opted for a language-humanities based course not a science course, so she doesn’t have the option of pursuing 2 or 3 sciences, even if god forbid as a teenager she had now changed her mind and decided on a science based future. Anyway, it all is what it is, and none of it is the point of my blethering.

So Sunshine herself has contacted various Unis and got the bumpf on them and has had some thoughts on what she’d like to be.
1. Not a teacher but maybe working with students, a student councellor or something.
2. Working with kids with disabilities, particularly educational disabilities.
3. a social worker.

How fab I hear you say, give the child’s mother a parade, a career helping others, what more could a mother want?
So she found a course that appeals, but at a Uni quite far away.

A few days later, during one of our intimate in-the-car chats, we talked about the Uni-far-away, and I said,

If you need to go there, and it’s what you really want to do, we should look into it.

she said.
It’s not what I *really* want to do, but I’d quite like to do it.

I said,
You should do what you *really* want to do, chase the dream baby blah blah blah. What do you *really* want to do?

Something with chocolate!

Umm, umm, what do you mean by ’something with chocolate’?

Well I could go around the world, tasting chocolate in different countries, looking for new flavours and stuff.
Or I could have a TV programme about chocolate, I *know* chocolate, I’m good at eating it, I have great hair, I’d be good on TV with chocolate. Or I could be a chocolate advisor. Different people need different types of chocolate. I could profile people and advise them on their best chocolate type.

Go for it honey, who am I to squash a kid’s dream?

Poop Fiction.

So far we have not been buried in cat poo, the little cuties have managed to do all their business in the allotted spot. I don’t know if cats usually clean themselves after evacuation, but Jim has taken to running around with a bit of toilet paper and wiping their bums for them. I’m not complaining, it keeps them clean and keeps Jim busy.
So far there has not been the aniticpated huge increase in my work load concerning said cats, though I never saw a day, where I had a cat on my knee while I tried to get gunk out of it’s eye, but life is full of surprises isn’t it.
Got to go with the flow.
The one small change is, it’s no longer safe to sit at the PC in my rocking chair, someone could lose a tail that way.

Meanwhile there has been drama-rama. My friend and neighbour, the woman I walk with in the mornings, was telling me the other day that her husband was suffering from headaches. Then suddenly I get a call to ask me to pick up her daughter from school, her husband was in the hospital having his head drilled. Yes, drilled. Not even with a suped up, precision engineering, black and decker type thing. They drilled into his head with some kind of hand turned pencil sharpener device, and drained 35 ccs of blood from his head. I know from 13 years of religiously watching ER, that this was a subdural hematoma. So they drilled into his head, with only a local anaesthetic and now he is fine and the drama is over. He’s coming home tomorrow.

Doris’s school year is closed because of the flu for yet another week, so she’s home glued to the telly. Though she did make dinner for everyone last night.

I am a little concerned with a new feature that has appeared on my dashboard.
Now, next to the ‘publish’ button, it says in red, ‘move to trash’.
Has it somehow read this post and is offering advice. Does it really mean, ‘for the love of God no one wants to read this drivel’?

Someone Tell Me Why I Am Going To The Vet.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse. I believe I mentioned a certain gnarlyness to my 3rd Wednesday of the month. The only glimmer of light I have is, that I can watch The West Wing at 12 while I fill out my co-op food order and eat my lunch, before going back into the fray at 1 pm.
So I was all ready, my falafel, smelled great, I had located a pencil, I was managing my world quite well, until they changed the frickin time for The West Wing, it was on at 11 instead.
I did not let it get me down, I sucked it up, I moved on with my life, I moved on to CSI.
Went to another class, came home, put co-op order in fridge, went back out to another class.
Came home, made dinner, bribed my fine youngest son with a ham sandwich to come with me, and went back to another class, leaving instructions for my lovely teenage gals to eat their dinner when they get in at 7.

Neighbour’s husband was picking Kev and their daughter up from the school at 8 ( delays on the expressway).
All is well. I came home at 8.15. The smell of burnt offerings greeted me at the door. Doris claims, she was so engrossed in her history revision she forgot to turn the pan down and the dinner was burnt, beyond rescue, a panfull of carcinogens.
Not a problem, more vittals can be created, let us not worry how we will clean my Le Creuset.
I get to cooking up other stuff, then go into the living room with fresh cooked nutrition and I say,

Where is that sofa cushion cover?

In the washing machine.

Why?

THE CAT SHAT ON IT.

Are you practicing from your phonics reader?

No, the cat actually shat on it, so I put it in the washing machine.

( dare I ask) What cat?

My cat.

The cat I said ‘no, no way, not happening, not now, not ever’.

No, his brother.

Where is it?

In my bedroom.

Since when?

Since Sunday.

Why?

Cos it’s so sad, he’s got gunk coming out of his eye, he’s ill and they were in a box and they were going to die.

They?

Yeah, they’re both upstairs.

Both who?

The one you said ‘no’ to and his brother, ‘Sora’ and ‘Sun’.

They have names.

Well I’m calling them Sora and Sun, but Kev’s calling them Natural and Flat.

Kev knows about them?

Everyone knows except you. Please, please, please, please can we keep them, I’ll do everything, I’ll pay for everything,please Mum, please.

Oh God! I give in, I give in, I give in. okay, you can keep them.

Oh Mum, I love you, I love you, I love you. Thank you, thank you , thank you. I love you Mum, you’re the best.

I need a hot bath.

So I guess we have two cats now.