Just before dawn yesterday I had one of those very special nightmares where you wake, unable to breathe from the horror, saying to yourself, ‘It’s all right, it was just a dream. It was just a dream,’ before going back to sleep and having the bastard dream resume exactly where it left off. That’s not supposed to happen. It was a classic anxiety dream, the details of which I will not relate because nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams. H disagrees. He likes hearin

I, sadly not a celestial being, had to remain here on the earth that quaked every day for eight or nine hours as the diggers ripped through the sandstone layers a metre or so from our house. I did go mad and on several occasions came close to becoming a supernova. Not in a good way. I yelled back at the small people who yelled at me and the large people who didn’t. And we all did have to yell a lot to make ourselves heard. There was a lot of bursting into tears, wailing, putt

But I’m confused, because although I think that’s what I said, what he seems to have heard is, ‘I am a Lego Detective. I can find any piece of Lego, anywhere in our house or car. I only need three seconds to do this. ‘I am also the repository of knowledge of the whereabouts of everything else we own. I keep track, at all times, of where the extra lid to your new water bottle is, which I last saw when you took it out of the room I was in five days ago. I am a tracking system f

In the past I have been very bad at giving Valentine’s Day gifts to H, which is a great shame because he is far more romantic than I am and deserves better. Once a couple of years ago, he was cranky because he found an old globe in the recycling. He had given me the globe some years earlier, as a Valentine’s Day present. The arm that makes the globe stand up was broken, and no, I’m not a totally heartless wench, I didn’t just chuck it straight in the bin. I let the kids kick

Proper homemade gingerbread house that I had absolutely nothing to do with. Grandmothers are where it’s at. Good New Year to you, dear people of the internet. It seems to be week three of January. I haven’t written since well before that dark and dreadful time back in December when everyone was mainlining candy canes and behaving like juvenile Hunters S. Thompson, coming up with insane demands and changing their minds about what was on their Christmas list every eighteen seco

I don’t quite know what it is about December that makes me so down in the dumps every year, except oh yes, maybe I do. Maybe it’s the way the end of the year looms like a horrendous deadline for all the things you promised yourself you’d achieve this year and didn’t. Maybe it’s all the things you have to do and buy and attend and make a costume for and take a plate to. Maybe it’s because you have to decide on a Christmas tree. Historically, choosing a tree hasn’t been a probl

I need to cull our belongings. This is a truth universally known. But I am also a sentimentalist at heart. I know how you’re meant to get rid of things: ask do I wear them/use them/need them? Could someone else benefit from them? One or two yeses and out they go. Well, that’s all fine in theory. But in reality? There are more questions than that. Here are but two of the quandaries I have been wrestling with. Multiply this by a few hundred and you have an idea of why I am not

Here instead is a list, which will show you how deeply embedded in my life is the music and lyrics of Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen Song Titles That Are Also Threats or Reprimands Made By Me To My Children This Week. One of Us Cannot Be Wrong That’s No Way To Say Goodbye Is This What You Wanted? Why Don’t You Try? If It Be Your Will Here It Is That Don’t Make it Junk Going Home You Want it Darker? It Seemed the Better Way I didn’t grow up listening to Leonard Cohen. My mother

I’m doing that thing I always do when I come back from new and wonderful, and I try to transport the lifestyle. When H and I went to Borneo by steamer sometime back in the 1800s, we came home and bought an entire pantry’s worth of ingredients to make complicated sambals and rending pastes, not to mention buying five limes for what would have bought us 100 kilograms of them in Kota Kinabalu. I’m doing the Scandinavian equivalent. I’m eating rye bread and smoked fish, putting d

And well might you ask, Talking Heads, well might you ask. Is a psycho killer a killer of psychos, or a psycho who kills? It’s a crucial distinction. We’ve been dealing with this particular grammatical point at home today. This morning May Blossom realised her face was covered with mosquito bites. The rest of the family already knew, but we’d decided not to mention it because we could do without the drama. But you can’t stop the drama, because mirrors exist. Once she caught s

We are disgraceful: this was one of only two photos we have of anyone in this family doing anything even vaguely athletic, while also not being naked. The other choice was H carrying 9 pizzas, which I agree is pushing it as an illustration of a post about the Olympics. We’re all sick this week. I’m pretty sure it’s Olympic Fever. Being sick and living with your parents is basically exactly the same as being world-class athletes in the Olympic Village: we’re living away from h

Garnet searching for his socks. We’ve been on a holiday. A driving holiday, and while I’ll try to write about that soon, and tell you all about the long car trip to Melbourne and the long car trip back and all the in-between parts that involved snow, alpacas, honey prawns and a new tyre, today I can only write about socks. Because I have realised that it’s not the pram in the hall that is the enemy of creativity. It’s the fact that as designated Chief of Socks in this family,

Sample bookshelf from my parents’ attic: Just one of the many collections of books that tells you probably more than you need to know about my family. Our renovation is about to begin. We have packed everything from one half of our house and jammed it into the other half. The builders are going to knock out few of our walls, fiddle around with the layout a bit, and put in a new kitchen. The house is very overdue for some care and maintenance, but knowing the renovation was ap

Here’s how it goes: the kids catch a cold from school or kindy or licking a parking meter, they spend four or five days being snotty and gross, waking us up many times a night because they feel crappy, which sends H’s and my immune systems into meltdown. We go into panic mode, cramming handfuls of vitamins down our throats, but to no avail. We both come down with it just as the kids bounce back. The crossover point of my downward trajectory and their upward one was Monday, wh

Poor little kid. She and her brother are so prone to ear infections and croup. They just have tiny little respiratory tracts and miniscule Eustachian tubes, positioned in such a way that they don’t really drain well. I find myself eying H, in the cold light of morning after yet another night of no sleep, wondering if it’s his poorly angled face drains or mine that the kids inherited. His ears do look remarkably in line with his nose. But then so do mine. There should be some

This week he has been brought to howling tears by many and varied injustices. There was the fact that I would not go under the house to drag out the old double stroller to push him the half block to pick up May Blossom from school. Why the double stroller? Because he wanted to ride in it with his friend Charlie. Charlie who lives on the other side of the city? Yes. We never do school pickup with Charlie. Yes, that was understood. This was some sort of protest against never do

Occasionally he makes up a word (‘You nuckus!’) or just pops something that’s not an insult at all (‘You big sandwich!) None of it is true swearing but the intention is there. He just doesn’t have the actual profanities in his vocabulary. How this is possible, living with H and me, is something of a mystery and perhaps a sign that he needs his hearing checked. It’s tiresome in the extreme. His answer to our every attempt at discipline is, ‘But I don’t care.’ I know he does ca

Dumbledore (left) and Huntsman Who Did Not Heed Me (right) Sydney’s in the middle of a plague of spiders. Summer forgot to end and for weeks the weather has been like a skipping CD: humid, 30 degrees, sunny – every single day. Mostly people have been enjoying this, except for the fact that you cannot walk anywhere without charging face first into a spiderweb. For safety, you have to walk with one arm flailing in front of you, like a Dalek at a Donald Trump rally. Apparently b

How I cope with this is to put aside what I should be doing (perhaps preparing my keynote speech for the International Conference on First-World Problems) and spend a lot of time researching where to go on holiday later in the year. I am looking exclusively at places where the weather is exactly like the weather I hate so much here. I’ll admit it doesn’t make much sense. We have been exceedingly fortunate to be able to travel overseas a fair bit, both before our kids were bor

Garnet’s preschool curriculum focuses on how to induce guilt. The slow process of settling the kids into school and preschool continues to be the main focus of life for us. Every morning, May Blossom still says she doesn’t want to go to school, but it seems to be becoming more of a formality now. She goes through the process of putting on her uniform, having her hair plaited and getting lathered up with sunscreen with less resistance every day, and while there are still tears