Sour party mix dresses for dinner and buys garlic

Last day of preparation, day three at home involved....a trip out.
To school to pick up art supplies left behind, to Bin Inn for preserving sugar and randoms, more art supplies, then cueing one by one in the sunshine for forty five minutes to get Grandad's butcher order. The butcher in the village is closing which was a surprise so we had one day to calmly stock. Two cottage pies and a kilo of sausages should keep him going for weeks. Four square for, not a panic shop as much as a comfort one. Ice cream, chocolate (including chili flavor to put off the kids), lollies labelled sour party mix, more lollies - jet planes this time  - because I'sa feeling nostalgic, garlic (still checking vampire horizon) and fresh pasta. Weird. Gingernuts. Back to school to pick up tennis gear left behind. All the usual Grrrrr noises. All the kids went out to play tennis with their Dad and I thought wow this is what an empty house feels like.
Tried to work.
Cold water therapy sea swim after trying to work.
Gave the buoy a big hug and felt a millions times better. FYI I bags all the buoy hugs this month.
Cooked nice dinner.
Dressed for dinner and Texas hold 'em poker.
Zoom called the siblings and parents.
Five minutes staring at fucking Notre dame in pieces. Put one piece back together.
I feel like Humpty Dumpty put back together with all the wrong pieces pointing the wrong way. My nose is in my armpit. I don't know what to say or what to expect.The sour party mix was supposed to be ironic funny and the dressing for poker night meant to convey an air of siege mentality throw your last breeding dodo into the fire pit, chaps. we are all having so much jolly fun. Here we go, doing it for all the right reasons. But then I blew it by yelling at my bubble mates because they are well, really annoying and I am really annoyed. (Clarification :They are annoying only some times and I am annoyed all the time). Party on, friends. For the health of others, I know.
Jacinda says I cant invite you to my sour party (mix) but my fear is would you even want to come?

Home school lesson - achieved with various grades

Day two.
I have had a big day sorting out my now working from home regime as a person who actually has to put their hands on and touch everyone, all the time, and get paid for it. Telehealth feels quite viscerally lacking. But, am grateful for the work and I can embrace the new virtual. Home school lesson . Resilience - Achieved with pass.
I notice the boys are asking me 'Are you OK, Mum?' more today than any other day I remember. Maybe its the vacant stare while standing in the middle of the lounge with a mobile phone in one hand and a vacuum cleaner hose under my arm and 3 pack of baked beans in my pocket and the days global death toll spinning around my head. Home school lesson - Be nice to mum because she's a horses tail hair width from spazzing totally out - Achieved with excellence.
I bought a 1000 piece puzzle yesterday that Missy started this am before 8am. This wee thing gave me my truly peaceful moments in the day (am referring to puzzle, not child). A thousand pieces of the waterway in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, noticing the precise shade of green under the cathedral compared to the still dank green of  still waters and the fractured carnage of the full sun beside the river barge. A world smashed into a  myriad of reflections of light, subtle nuances of days gone by and days to come, what will and may and may never happen. I was going to tell the kids - 'This is Notre dame, chaps, fat chance you'll ever see it.', but my husband thought that was going a bit grim. Home school lesson - Keep it cool and relentlessly positive -  Not achieved.
I am influenced heavily by the amount of apocalyptic reading I've done. Not sure if that's helping right now. I keep looking out for the zombie vampire hoards. I feel an over whelming sense of doom, and I hit tearful alert level 2 tonight. But this is a short term quite lengthy paralysis. I can't remember my work colleagues names when trying to email them, and I saw them yesterday. I know this is cognitive overload, my brain cannot manage to  hold onto certain bits of information due to over riding hyper sympathetic over drive. My fight response is fueling all the actions and thoughts. Except for the blue sky edges of the puzzle above Notre dame. They are perfectly shaped bliss balls.
I realized today the true benefit of school besides education. Tires the little fuckers out. Especially the teenagers. All day long they have lounged on various pieces of furniture and technology. They managed an olympic effort late morning in folding and delivering the papers hitting at least 200m from home. Fueled by 1.5kgs of cereal and half a months worth of milk. Essential work. Apart from that they await the google classroom call to duty with a PS4 controller in one hand and a cereal ladle in the other. Until 930 pm, when they spark up with a days worth of energy and start hanging all the soft toys with shoe laces, throwing sneakers at heads and singing their usually buried emotions into hysterics. The world becomes a bad opera at 2130. Here are the energy vampires, out to attack. Must remember to recommend they put more stairs in those new school buildings, God Bless Teachers. Home school lesson, appreciation for teachers and school - Achieved with excellence.

You can take my freedom but you cant take away my C'ronut Virus. Live from the FungeonNZ

And just like that, I'm the motheronboard. And the teacheronboard. While workingonboard. Paying back the mortgageonboard. While preserving the plums and feeding the sourdough starter. And keeping an eye on the latest global death statistics learning to crochet being a community minded carer and rocking it across all my social media feeds. Did I mention the chickens? Got to squeeze those suckers daily. Already drank most of my red wine. Bringing my virus baggage with me. Chapped hands is the new black.
Fuck. Sorry. Shouldn't swear but probably will.
Day one. Lets begin this thing called LockDownFreakyShitNz or otherwise known as 'the Fungeon'.
Home schooling (8 hours in) has started with the boys teaching me (anyone surprised?) about the fudge dungeon which is a torture house made of fudge that is supposed to be fun. (Thanks Wreck it Ralph)
I'm not sure who is going to learn the most in this fungeon.
I was driving over the Remutakas (GO YOU LITTLE TAKAS!) when the country escalated to Level 3, slippery sliding with extra bubbles rapidly into Level 4 in 48 hours, to a Lockdownnz. What were you doing?
Usually putting NZ on the end of the word makes it cool and happening and funky. All in it together. Not in this Fungeon. FungeonNZ. Meh. That's a bit better with capitals.
Post announcement I popped into Kiwi bank to get a pin number on my new credit card, Hallelujah, and gave $40 bucks to two old looking homeless dudes wrapped up together in a sleeping bag under an old shop front awning. 'Find somewhere to stay and keep warm and safe' I advised them. 'Find somewhere thats warm and safe on Wednesday at 130pm'. I said. They nodded and rubbed the two twenties together. What a cheap arse I am, I thought later, vigorously rubbing my hand sanitiser into the cracks.
My fungeon isnt even going to be that fun, I expect. I'll try and at least give an honest ratio of spazz to 'gram moments.
I am so lucky. An grateful. And even though I cant answer my daughter's math's question she wants to start at 9pm (I don't know! Go to sleep ! Its a home school night!), I did answer the whats going to happen tomorrow question. Tomorrow darling, its going to be OK. Whatever happens in the fungeonNZ tomorrow, it will never be the same, but it will be OK.

I'm having another baby

I’m having another baby.

Well, not literally.

But literally.

A word baby.

Its been at least three years gestation, in my brain-ovaries. My imagination gestation station. And now its nearly at the stage I’m going to have to let someone else read it.

Its petrifying. I’m really scared. Again.

I feel like I’m going into labour for the first time, excited and loved up but scared of whether I can give birth to the parent I want to be, let alone force a child (or two) out of my intimate bits previously only wielded in pleasure and about to be the source of a universe of pain.

Am I the writer I hope I am? I feel like an elephant, full of enormous word poos. Or could I produce a one ton miracle of wrinkley skin and miraculously long nose/incubation?

It’s like starting a new job. Will anyone like me or will they all know I’m a fraud from the way I sharpen my pencil?

But it’s worse. The only way to train for this job is to write shit and therefore what I have probably written is shit.

It’s like telling someone you love them. Via a huge loudspeaker in front of the world who is laughing at you already.

The real thing it’s like is this.

Everyone loves a baby you birth by whatever method gets the bloody thing out fast enough to have a gin soaked blue cheese fiesta. Everyone who sees your baby says - Wow you’re amazing! This is the most beautiful baby ever born! You are so clever! You lap it up but all you really did was have a few drinks, forget your pill, disengage your logical brain for a few seconds of mindblowing bliss and lie around eating, sober enough for nine months while body and nature do the rest.

But the midwife is not the editor. The editor is actually the midwife from hell. He or she-beast (they range fierce ugly in my minds eye) can take one look at the product of all your hard word working - painstaking word mongering world building torture confused blind driven motivation fueled manuscript of seventy five thousand pieces of loneliness blood and tears - and calmly pronounce:

‘That is the ugliest fucking baby ever.'

‘Rejected’.

Word poo after all.

Welcome to the world, baby book.

Now, I slay you with my red pen rejection letter.

Hope you are more resilient than a milk tanker, stronger than a hurricane, fiercer than a shoe, cause you're about to be set on the world. Welcome to the outside of my head, little one.

Dinner time conversation starters

‘Mum - Do you think my stomach operates on an alternate universe?’

‘I’m hot! - both mentally and physically!’

‘Now,’ (having just eaten his veges and starting on his chop) ‘for the delux part of the meal!’

‘I can’t wink, I can only blink with one eye’

‘Mum, when you explain stuff, you don’t start with 1 plus 1 equals 2,  you start with 24 times 1.7.8’

LB: ‘I don't think its all that bad, - Jail.’

BB: ‘But there’s nothing to do!’

LB: ‘You get a perfect toilet. And, a double bed. Well, I mean bunks. They’re like, chained to the wall, it’s so cool.

BB: ‘But, what would you do?”

LB: ‘There’s other people in there! I’d ask them maths questions. And we’d play Paper- Scissors-Rock.’

BB:’What if you’re the only person?’

LB: ‘I’ll ask the wall maths questions. Or, I’ll carve’

BB: ’But you won’t have a knife!’

LB: ‘- Then, I’ll carve with my face!’

BB: ‘You’ll rub your nose off!’

LB: ‘And you get three square meals a day. In prison.’

LB : 'Mum, can I watch TV?'

Mum :‘You can watch TV…..NOT!’

LB: 'But that means I can watch TV, because what you said doesn’t qualify as a sentence’.

From lion to chicken

I am hardwired to protect my child, shield them from pain, keep them alive to go forth and breed thus ensuring the survival of my particularly winning genetic combination of squinty eyes and pun-ability.

However, the truth is this - pain is a part of living, in fact, it is the price we pay for such a gift. (How much you pay seems random and somewhat distributed unevenly to me, but we all pay.)

When the children were babies, the protective mother-lion in me picked up things that they could choked on, prevented them from walking into swimming pools and let them teethe on my cracked nipples cause that’s what mums do, right?.

But now, as they get older, I can feel my mother-lion role is being downgraded to more of a mother-hen. I’m clucking around the outskirts of the pen offering scraps of advice that are largely swallowed whole or ignored.

Sadly, I cannot rid the world of all hazards anymore, nor keep them swaddled in the dark room for 16 hours a day. These days I have to teach them the world is not fair, how to deal with the unchewable bits, how to meet a challenge, and how to pick themselves back up from a fall.

And to do that I have to role model it.

Everyday I am reminded that I have to role model that I’m ok that Life is totally not fair. That I’m ok with Life being actually quite hard work. That when things go wrong I can and must pick myself up. That when I fall out with someone else I have to build a bridge and get over it. That I will be happiest if I meet the the daily unexpected fall from plan with a response of  “what ev’s!’ and go with it. Everyday I remind myself that I can’t and shouldn’t protect them from the world because they’ll miss out on too much joy if I do.

In mother hen style I must scratch myself out a little dust-bath in the sun and cheer/bok when they choose to be happy no matter what, watch over them as they fall over, and cheer/bok again when they pick themselves up.

Killing Christmas with Kindness

When the eldest child comes of age, there is a nasty job to be done. If like my son, the fantasy element runs strong and you passionately believe in dragons, magic, time travel, gremlins and vampire-zombie-mutant-house-pets, then this day may come later in life than for others. If you have a daily onslaught of fantasy play, fully supported by your brother, you are in the lucky position to let the force for suspending reality run strong and together commit to lengthy ongoing fantasy role play (latest one being an epic vampire-zombie-mutant- house-pet saga which involved the entire plastic animal collection strategically placed around the house, and the floor littered with the decapitated bodies of lego mini figures lying in their zombie attack crazed wake).

I often lament the lack of time I get to spend in the fantasy world these days as an adult, yet there comes a time when I must share the brutally truth of reality with them.They really do need to know some of the facts of life, even if to protect them from the teasing of other children.

That is why, this morning before work, I slaughtered Santa. The opportunity came up. And like all good assassins, I calmly took aim and fired.

The oldest child will always get the longest ride, as we try and protect the younger ones from losing their imag-innocence. But there needs to be some resilience building-shocks to the system, imparted in a safe and secure environment, where they can weep into the pillows for a few moments, as the dreams of flying reindeer, jovial chaps in bright colored britches,and bulging sacks full of every present on the planet dissolve into the murky pooled reality of a lifetime of parental lies.

He took it rather well. He actually admitted he did know the truth, all along, but he just refused to accept it, until Dad or I had confirmed the betrayal. (There’s my boy - denial in the face of overwhelming evidence is my personal M.O).

Its just like any other pretend game, I told him, once the tears had ceased. If you still play the game, Santa will keep bringing you a stocking.

I related the painful time I learned ‘the truth’. I was 5 years old and my older brother and sister sat me down and told me all about the great santa scam. Next they went straight to Mum and said ‘Gina knows all about Father Christmas, Mum’. Mum said ‘Thank God thats over’, and never made another stocking for me or any of my 5 siblings again.

5 years old!  We bonded over my obvious childhood neglect, despite the painful truth of his situation he could appreciate he’d had a good run.

He then suggested he could help me pull the wool over the eyes of the other children - join the giant conspiracy - and be santa's helper this year. We agreed, and he promised not to tell the others until they were at least 10 years old. We carried on into our day, him with the glint in his eye of having a secret to lord over everyone else. Welcome to the adult world, I thought. It’s all about haves and have-nots, those in the know and not ‘privi’ to the juicy bits.

I thought, Im glad thats over.

But, then I realised - It’s not for long though. How many more awful truths must I tell? What next on the hit list?

Exterminate the easter bunny and break the messy news on how babies are really made.