#Parenthood

i carry your snot with me (i carry it in my bag)

jdettmann

May 29, 2017
1 min

i carry your snot with me (i carry it in my bag)

i carry your snot with me (i carry it in my bag) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my snotfaced dear; and whatever is blown into a tissue goes only in my bag, my darling) i fear there are no bins (for I am your bin, my sweet) I want to not litter (for beautiful this is our world, my true) and it’s i am where you have always put your snot and wherever your snot will always go is me here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is a scrunched up dirty tissue and so

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jdettmann

Sep 8, 2016
3 min

Psycho Killer: Qu’est-ce que c’est?

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

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jdettmann

Aug 2, 2016
4 min

RUN NOW!

Baffling contraption As we are wont to do from time to time, H and I have started a small health kick. It’s not a high kick. We’re not idiots; we don’t want to put our backs out. It’s more like the miniature kicks you use to move a school bag to another room when your arms are full of laundry and mail. Our motivating forces are vanity and pain. We’re not getting any younger. One of us has just turned twenty-one for the second time. And while he doesn’t look much older than th

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jdettmann

Jun 3, 2016
3 min

Who Will Rock Me?

We Will Rock You is a musical by Ben Elton, based on the songs of Queen. When arranging the tickets I made very sure Dad was aware that it was a musical. With musical numbers in it. Sung by people in character. It’s a singy play. You know, like an opera but less in German, and with more drums. There’s going to be dancing. There’s a high likelihood of the audience being bullied by the cast into clapping our hands above our heads in certain parts. Are you really sure you want t

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jdettmann

May 25, 2016
3 min

Yellow But Not Yellow

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

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The First Rule of the Best Start Interview is Don’t Talk About the Best Start Interview

jdettmann

Jan 29, 2016
3 min

The First Rule of the Best Start Interview is Don’t Talk About the Best Start Interview

I was hoping the test hadn’t started yet. May Blossom has just been for her pre-starting-school chat with a kindy teacher, which is called the Best Start Interview. I presume the point of this is to help decide which class to put the kids into, based on how smart they are and how high they can count, but we didn’t want to admit that to her so we told May Blossom it was so they didn’t put all the shy boys or all the kids called Gavin or all the redheads into the same class and

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jdettmann

Aug 19, 2015
4 min

Sleep Like No-One’s Watching

Gusto refusing to participate in a dramatic re-enactment of the sleeping arrangements at our house. Honestly, never work with cats. It’s been a while since I updated you on the state of sleep in the house of Gusto. I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with bated breath. Here’s the lowdown: May Blossom and Garnet share a room. Ostensibly, H and I also share a room. Every night, we read to the kids in their beds at bedtime. Because I am a very lucky duck indeed, H is almost always

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jdettmann

Feb 25, 2015
2 min

To Fiji, Come Hell Or High Vomit

Two hours and all the towels in the house later, he was a limp pile of empty little boy on the sofa, and I was reading the fine print on the travel insurance policy. We could cancel, but since it is now almost March, we realise this is just the beginning of the illness for the year, and there’s a very good chance that someone in this family will be sick at every point until next summer. We can’t wait that long for this holiday. We’ve kept Garnet pretty clear of May Blossom, s

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jdettmann

Feb 18, 2015
3 min

Shut Up, If You Please

One night I let things escalate horribly. I was so tired of being shouted at and told I was very, very mean, when really I am only a bit mean. I shouldn’t have let it get to me but I did. I told her that it was not acceptable to speak to me like that. I said that I too missed Daddy, and he would not agree I was mean, and he would not like her speaking to me like that either. She disputed this again, so we rang him. Because there’s nothing like being in the wilds of Africa and

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jdettmann

Feb 11, 2015
3 min

Train Travel For The Out-Of-Practice

Train for illustrative purposes only. Not a Tangara. When my train pulled into the station this morning, I thought ‘Ooh, fancy: a Tangara.’ Crossing the Harbour Bridge we passed several more trains. They were Tangaras too. I’m beginning to suspect that these days all Sydney trains might be Tangaras. And that maybe we don’t even call them that any more. That’s when I realised it has been a while since I was last a regular train commuter in Sydney. Before I went on maternity le

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jdettmann

Mar 5, 2014
2 min

Games for Rainy Days

Others are more prosaic. Take ‘Molly Drops Her Phone’. In this game, May Blossom is Molly. Molly takes my phone, puts it in her handbag and leaves the room for a moment. Then she comes back with an empty handbag and exclaims ‘Oh no, I’ve dropped my phone in a shop!’ I then make all kinds of helpful suggestions about how we might get it back, and like so many clay pigeons, May Blossom shoots them down with deadly accuracy. ‘Well,’ I say energetically. ‘Let’s go back and see if

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jdettmann

Jan 27, 2014
4 min

The Lucky Country

It’s the Monday night of the Australia Day long weekend, and I’m watching my daughter jump on our rusty mini-tramp while my son steams around the backyard being deeply fascinated by everything from a plastic Ikea plate to the discarded paper lanterns they just peeled off the gooseberries I picked from my mother’s vegetable garden. May Blossom is telling me about a ladybird couple called Florence and Boris and Garnet is asking for ‘Dat’, which is his word of preference at the

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When You Think He’s Fast Asleep, He’s Always Wide Awake

jdettmann

Jan 15, 2014
3 min

When You Think He’s Fast Asleep, He’s Always Wide Awake

Why the italics, you might ask. What has Gusto done to merit that? Nothing. Gusto is being an exemplary feline. It is the jellicle cats that are the problem around here. The cats created by T. S. Eliot in his 1939 book of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and made more annoying to the power of infinity by Andrew Lloyd-Webber in 1981. You see, about three months ago May Blossom, Garnet and I tagged along with Other Jess to a Year 6 Production of Cats at the school wher

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jdettmann

Nov 3, 2013
1 min

Does Gin Sink?

I want to know because H just made me a gin and tonic to stop me being so very grumpy and Sundaynighty and horrible (my mother suggested I meditate but the gin was more easily to hand than inner peace), and it didn’t taste at all ginny. So I added some more and we both tasted it and it still didn’t taste very ginny. Until I got closer to the bottom of the glass, through all that wretched tonic, and found all the gin lying there, exhausted. Obviously I poured it all down my ne

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jdettmann

Oct 22, 2013
3 min

Nearly Three Years In

Tomorrow is May Blossom’s third birthday. If you’d asked me three years ago what I thought my life might look like now, I would have looked at you like you were crazy, because I now realise I never really looked much further than a few days ahead. Pregnant, I could only focus on the birth. Once I had a newborn I couldn’t picture her as a toddler. As a toddler I couldn’t picture her as a pre-schooler. When I was pregnant with Garnet I couldn’t see how I could ever love another

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jdettmann

May 14, 2013
4 min

Missing, In Action

‘It means he’s sad,’ I told her. ‘It’s a metaphor. Why do you think he’s sad?’ ‘I think it’s because he misses his mummy and his sister and his brother,’ she said. May Blossom is quite concerned with missing people at the moment. When I leave her, which is rarely, she frets about it beforehand, telling me she will miss me ‘so, so much’. But I’m not sure it’s really me she misses. Recently I went out without her for about five hours, and took Garnet with me. Their reunion upon

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jdettmann

Mar 8, 2013
4 min

Make ‘Em Laugh

May Blossom at work in her office. A month or so ago we let May Blossom watch Singin’ In the Rain. We were on the hunt for a movie that wouldn’t frighten her, and that seemed to fit the bill. What I didn’t know at the time was that I would then spend hours every day afterwards explaining the finer plot points to her: why Kathy hits Lena in the face with a cream pie. Why Don Lockwood is trying to escape from his marauding fans. What fans are. Why it’s funny that Lena has an ug

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jdettmann

Nov 28, 2012
3 min

My Patience Is The Only Thin Part Of Me

But, weirdly enough, it was one of the loveliest nights I can remember. Partly because nights in general, in my opinion, are for sleeping and not for making lasting childhood memories, but mostly because I just lay and stared at my daughter’s face in the moonlight and loved her. On her other side lay H, doing the same thing. We are sappy idiots. Yesterday she was still ill: feverish and not hungry. The GP diagnosed tonsillitis and so our old friends antibiotics are back for a

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jdettmann

Nov 20, 2012
2 min

The Electrician Cometh, Again

Inside our confuse box. The bombs in ‘Spooks’ are more straightforward. On the weekend, three of our power points – all quite close to each other – stopped working. One was in the bathroom, one just outside the bathroom, and one on H’s side of our bed. The one in the bathroom was important, because it was the only one in the bathroom and thus the power source for the washing machine and dryer. In spectacularly-unlike-us fashion, we didn’t just work around this problem for yea

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jdettmann

Nov 19, 2012
2 min

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

Today nearly slipped by without a blog. Today was hard. Physically I feel like crap right now and trying to be funny feels forced. So grumbles it shall be. Sorry about that. I’m very sore and I can’t find a comfortable position to sleep in: the Internet and everyone on it suggests I try sleeping in a recliner. Who has a fucking recliner? I’ll just book a business-class flight somewhere every night, shall I? The fatigue and pain make me sad because these are my last weeks as

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