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JESSICA DETTMANN

Question Time

Nov 2, 2015
2 min

Question Time

One morning – bloody early one morning – he asked me the following questions in the space of half an hour, which is how long it takes to boil a kettle and make coffee in our prehistoric kitchen. “Why does the goanna in Blinky Bill have stripes?” (Does he? I hadn’t noticed. I’m still trying to get my legs to work for the day.) “Do soldiers have boots?” (Yes? I think? Yes. Definitely they do. ) “Why is sugar sticky?” (So I have more reasons to try to prohibit it. Also so you ca

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How Funny? Pants-Off Funny

Apr 15, 2015
2 min

How Funny? Pants-Off Funny

Benny Hill is a cultural reference that is on its last legs, I’d say. I only recall it vaguely from my childhood, mostly because it featured the only bare breasts I can remember seeing on TV. And I may even have misremembered the part about Hill often having his pants down while chasing scantily clad women to the bouncy saxophone soundtrack, because I’ve just done some very scientific YouTube research, and it seems that Hill mostly stayed dressed and the girls got their kits

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Christmas Is Coming And There Is Nothing You Or I Can Do To Stop It

Dec 8, 2014
3 min

Christmas Is Coming And There Is Nothing You Or I Can Do To Stop It

Well, I say not much, but I guess there have been some fairly important milestones for other people around here. Garnet has learned to talk. He seems to have downloaded English into his head overnight, which I know is impossible because our internet connection can’t even download an episode of House of Cards without taking six hours and crashing the computer and generally carrying on like a pork chop. So he must have learnt it some other way. I suspect his sister is involved.

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The Son Also Vomits

Aug 8, 2014
3 min

The Son Also Vomits

My daughter has a remarkable grasp of phonetic spelling. This week has indeed been totally phykd. Gastro. Again. You’re going to start reading this and then you’ll look back at the date, sure you’ve read this post before. Didn’t they all just have gastro? Didn’t we all just make jokes about how the blog should be called Life With Gastro? How can they have it again? What is WRONG with these people? Well I’m phykd if I know. After yet another months of chest infections, sinus i

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Cross

May 27, 2014
2 min

Cross

It took half an hour to even upload this far-too-small image, due to iPhoto (or iFighto as my Dad has long called it) deciding that nothing has happened in my life since 2012, which may be a bit true, but still, it’s not my laptop’s place to judge and rather rude for it to say so. I can see all the photos since then but they won’t appear when I search to select them for the blog. If there’s anything more boring than your own computer troubles it’s hearing about someone else’s

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Games for Rainy Days

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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Nearly Three Years In

Oct 21, 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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Things Are Good When Things Are Good

Sep 20, 2013
3 min

Things Are Good When Things Are Good

Thing 1: Since one or other or another of his or my recent colds or ear infections or other random maladies that have blurred into one long misery I like to call Winter, baby Garnet stopped sleeping in his cot at all. He now sleeps in our bed at night, or in the car, stroller or carrier during the day. This is good because he sleeps much more soundly at night when he is with us, neither H nor I have to drag ourselves out of bed to resettle him, and he is a delicious bundle of

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What’s Mine Is Mine and What’s Yours Is Mine Too

Aug 28, 2013
2 min

What’s Mine Is Mine and What’s Yours Is Mine Too

Every Tuesday, she will go to a fantastic home daycare, which is, happily, run by my parents’ neighbour. She will be one of five small people all roughly her own age, and she will have to learn to navigate her way through all the pushing, shoving, frustration and misery that entails. Yesterday went okay. Not brilliantly, but okay. It was probably not as bad as I am making out, because I am a noted catastrophist of our time, but still, I found it hard to deal with when her car

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Upstairs Downstairs

Aug 23, 2013
3 min

Upstairs Downstairs

The state of the carpet on the stairs is too shameful to photograph, so here’s a picture of Garnet in a massive hat instead. Our new house has an upstairs and a downstairs. How fancy. The downstairs of the place was built in 1919 and the upstairs in 1981, so naturally, the previous owners (builders of the upstairs) decided to seamlessly join the two different styles (Californian bungalow with nods to the Arts and Crafts movement and 1980s Blurgh) with a staircase I believe a

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Missing, In Action

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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The Games We Play: Angry Men Edition

Apr 19, 2013
3 min

The Games We Play: Angry Men Edition

I spent a bit of time on that flight in the galley, bobbing around while getting Garnet off to sleep, and so I was privy to the pursed red lips of the flight attendants as they took turns peering down the aisle at the man to whom they had served five small bottles of red wine, and who was now acting like he might have already had a head start with a small bathtub of gin (it was 10.30 in the morning). He was shouting and growling aggressively at people, refusing to sit in his

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My Patience Is The Only Thin Part Of Me

Nov 27, 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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Car Seat Shopping For The Hormonally Deranged

Nov 23, 2012
3 min

Car Seat Shopping For The Hormonally Deranged

One of the many dangerous roads of the world that are all out to get my children, according to my pregnancy-addled brain. Have you ever left the house to run a simple errand, like buying a baby’s car seat, and ended up going to three different shops, scattered to all point of the compass, and still not quite achieving your goal? Even though the whole miserable exercise took nearly five hours? I’ll bet you haven’t. You’re probably much too clever for that sort of lunacy. And y

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The Cat’s Pyjamas

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

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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Ages Two And Up

Nov 16, 2012
1 min

Ages Two And Up

Are you aged two (and up)? Are you bored? Have you got no-one to play with but your own shadow? Try some of the new games May Blossom has recently invented. Blocks in Socks Take off your socks. Fill them with blocks. Swing them around like the kind of dangerous improvised weapon that would be banned in prison. Gravel in a Shotglass Go visit your uncle at the Kings Cross hotel for visiting arty types where he is staying while in town to do a play. Spend the afternoon on the co

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It Doesn’t Touch The Mango

Nov 14, 2012
2 min

It Doesn’t Touch The Mango

Which of the two following stories is scarier? Thing 1. This week I saw a new physiotherapist. She told me I should wear what can only be described as a late onset chastity belt: a flesh coloured pelvic support belt that will supposedly hold my joints together enough to let me chase my husband down the street after he flees in fright at the sight of me wearing it. Coiled and ready to strike fear into the heart of he who dares to peek beneath my huge stretchy clothes. It’s hor

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This Is What You Get When You Mess With Us

Nov 13, 2012
1 min

This Is What You Get When You Mess With Us

I think we all feel like this today. Because of the wonders of Facebook, I know, for certain, that everyone else in the civilised world went to see Radiohead last night. I am not being paranoid or exaggerating. It’s just a Radiohead fact. But whatever. Grass is always greener and all that. They’re probably all wishing they got to have their two-year-old stay awake until 9 pm, then eat lukewarm curry on the sofa in silence with their spouse, then fall asleep at 9.30, only to b

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Children’s Parties for the Back-yardless

Nov 13, 2012
3 min

Children’s Parties for the Back-yardless

Invitations: To get the numbers up, it’s useful invite people to your party. I used Paperless Post for electronic invitations. It is simple to use, has lovely designs to choose from and makes it easy to track RSVPs. We also chose to keep the party little this year, which was a good idea, so we just invited a child’s handful of very close friends. There somehow still ended up being twelve two-year-olds. That is a lot of toddlers. We must make more friends without two-year-olds

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