So sweet, you’d never know they have tiny ear canals brimming with filth and germs. Nor that the one on the right is about to throw up in that car seat.
My big brother emailed me today with two queries. ‘When you gonna blog again?’ and ‘How’s your wedding Adirondacks?’ The second question is easier to answer. The Adirondacks to which he refers so grammatically incorrectly are two chairs that he gave H and me for our wedding present. We got married in April 2009. He dropped off the chairs yesterday. They are flat-packed and likely to remain so until we achieve a vomit-free week in this household.
When he dropped them off yesterday afternoon, we pulled up outside my house at the same time. He emerged from his car grinning, laden with the two packages containing the sort of outdoor furniture Jay Gatsby and his buddies would relax in while sipping gin. I emerged laden with a distressed baby covered in his very first spew and a three-year-old who was furious because her brother had hurled all over the car just as we pulled into the car park at the parcel collection post office to pick up a gift for her. I did not, perhaps, take receipt of my brother’s gift with as much grace as I could have.
SuperChief took one look at us, dropped the packages in the back yard and disappeared with a screech of tyres. I’m very proud that H managed to bring the packages in before it rained last night, because I sure as hell didn’t think to.
So I suppose there you also have the answer to why it has (yet again) been so long since I have written on this blog. Sometimes, I don’t write because I’m sure that anything I write will come across as insufferably smug. Those are the days when my life is totally brilliant. Who wants to hear that I have a lovely husband, a beautiful home, two unbelievably delightful kids – one of whom recites lengthy tracts of T. S. Eliot’s poetry at the age of three (admittedly only because she is dangerously obsessed with the musical Cats), the other of whom can stand a bit and do impressive elephant, fish and cat impressions and is heartbreakingly sweet and loving. Who wants to hear that we have had fantastic evenings with our gorgeous friends where we sit around in the garden, eating and drinking while the children run about in their undies playing with simple toys like sticks and mud pies, before throwing all the kids in the bath together and calling it a night at 7.30 pm, so we still all get heaps of sleep? I don’t want to sound like a dick. I bloody hate braggy mummy bloggers. So those days I don’t blog.
The rest of the time (the vast majority, this year at least), I don’t write because someone has chucked up in my keyboard. Or my iPhone won’t register my fingers pressing on it because it is too coated in my childrens’ mucus. I don’t write because there is no time, what with the constant administering of antibiotics and panadol, the doing of all the laundry, the washing of carseat covers, the trips to the doctor, not to mention all the time I have to spend beating myself up about why my kids seem to have such tiny defective, prone-to-infection ear canals, why I keep getting headaches, why H and I gets the colds the kids have, why Garnet is a crappy sleeper, why I can’t fit into my pants, why why why why and additionally, why?
In short, life is either too busy being great or too busy being shit. But that, I am slowly (not quick on the uptake, me) beginning to realise is what life is like. And it’s not a very good excuse for not writing.
And on the bright side, this house seems to be a bit magical. It’s self-renovating. Last night the dining room door fell off, not two days after we discussed how much better the room would work without it. So I’m reasonably sure that if I just leave the Adirondack chairs in their boxes for a while, one evening I’ll look out the back and they will have Allen-keyed themselves into an upright position, poured me a gin and tonic, put the children to bed and be waiting with one of my two hundred unread copies of the New Yorker draped invitingly over the arm.
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