Lightning goes upwards as well

The cool change arrived early! We stopped the DVD, brought in the dry laundry, and opened all the windows and doors. The storm rolled over, spitting lightning and hurling rain. I'd been watching the rain approach on the BOM site since this morning. It was a thin band of red: heavy rain, but not for long.

When I was a kid, a hot spell was always followed by a cool change. We'd go to bed hot, and wake to a house still warm, but with cold air blowing in, and rain coming down outside. Bathroom tiles take a few hours to cool down. Cupboards exhale hot stale air when you open them.

The cool changes now are half-hearted. Am I just getting crotchety about how much better the old days were? I am only thirty-five!

Tonight I did not have a shower, even though I was sweaty and foul after a hot humid day stuck inside. When the rain came, after we opened up the house, I stood on the dry grass in the downpour with rain running down me. The sky was light, with pinky-grey glows on the horizon. The horizon is high up, here in the 'burbs. No idea where the glowing comes from.

Some lightning forked, and some lit up the whole sky.

Trudi stood in the rain with me for a while, and went inside when she got cold. I came in to make up the girls' bottles, then out I went again. I sat on the deck and thought.

I am angry that my girls will not know what a cool change used to be like. I think "cool change" is an Australian phrase. It means a lot to me. Now that the climate is changing, the cool change is moving south, into the ocean. I can see this from the radar images. The waves of lower pressure used to sweep from west to east, washing the whole of the southern continent like a windscreen wiper. Now the west-to-east thing still happens, but the wiper does not reach as far north. We miss out on our cool change, and the rain falls in the sea far to the south.

Save the planet. hah. The planet will be just fine, thankyou. Worse stuff than us has happened to this planet. The problem is saving the systems we depend on, and thus saving ourselves. Cool changes are nice and make me feel secure, but it's more than that. Tree frogs are cute and polar bears are fluffy, but they are just little cogs in the systems that sustain us.

So, my daughters will have very different lives from us. They won't know cool changes as I recall them, and they probably will never drink untreated water directly from a stream. More than that.

We do our best to give them the space and tools to become themselves, that they might grow into the best they can be. How useful will our help be in a world I can't imagine?

Then again, every generation grows up in a different world from the previous one. My parents learned to write on slates. They wrote on slices of stone with chalk! My grandmother once described to me the nightclubs that she went to in her youth. The waiters wore suits, and the tuxedoed pianist played a white grand piano while wearing white gloves. Her date paid for her cocktail, which she set into the nicely-designed recess in the arm of the club lounge in which she sat. No doubt the NYE dance parties tonight are different from the ones I went to. So maybe mourning the lost cool changes of my youth is just a natural stage; a sign of my age.

But. But! I had all these thoughts on the deck, with the rain running down my face. Lightning in the pink sky, and some premature fireworks popping a few houses down.

But, the very fact of each generation's new world is a symptom of the problem. Before the agricultural revolution, each generation of humans lived in much the same environment as the previous one. Sure, there were catastrophes and gradual changes, but most people lived lives like everyone before them. Once people invented farming things changed, and kept changing. Some people lived lives quite different from their grandparents.

Come the industrial revolution, the rate of change stepped up. Rapid changes propelled people out of their parents' ways of life. The rapid changes propagated rapidly, and many people lived different lives from their parents.

Now, most people live in very different ways from their parents. This is not just suburban Australians adjusting to living with their iPhones: everyone is adjusting to, and making, change. The changes have caught up with us, and the cool change is moving south, out of reach, and I'm angry about it.

So what do I do with my anger? I complain on my blog.

It's still raining. The radar suggests that a little more rain will fall tonight. Goodnight.

Hot and grumpy

My Facebook friend Bob (hi Bob!) has just posted some pictures of lovely lovely snow over his house. Of course it is not really all lovely - his wife is staying at a motel somewhere because the roads are congested with scared drivers. But it LOOKS lovely and I am overheated here is stinky ol Melbourne, and I am jealous.

I wonder if the girls will be too hot to sleep comfortably? That's my genteel way of wondering if they will wake up howling every hour all night.

Ivy walks!

In her own time, Ivy has found her feet.

She is doing short practice runs.

In which I doubt myself

Trudi looked out the window and asked, how did all those pegs get into the gully trap? You shouldn't let the girls play there; there are spiders.

I looked out the window and agreed that the gully trap was not the place for them to be playing, but they had not been there today. My, what a lot of pegs are in the gully trap!

Trudi looked at me and asserted that they must have, because how else could those pegs have got there? The girls are avid peg-users.

I averred that no indeed, they girls had not been in the back yard that day. I had gone out to hang washing, but Hazel came no further than the deck, and Ivy stayed inside.

Trudi's face was sceptical. Perhaps you put the pegs in the gully trap, she suggested.

Hm. I paused for thought. Hmmmm. Nope, I don't believe I went outside and put a lot of pegs in the gully trap. I think I would remember doing that.

Well it must have been the girls then. How did they manage it? They can't carry the peg basket yet, so they must have done it peg by peg. Carried each peg around, dumped it, and come back for another one. That would have taken a long time. Surely you would have noticed if they were off doing that.

Hmmm. Maybe I had a fugue state and put the pegs in the gully trap and then forgot that I did it. I have had some tough nights with not much sleep: who knows what dastardly deeds I am capable of?

And there we left the peg issue, unresolved.

Later, Trudi stood at the back window, and said Hey I know


And it popped into my head at the same time.

The girls had dragged the peg basket across the dining room, and posted pegs out of the cat-flap. They fell down into the waiting gully trap. It must have been a lot of fun.

I feel that there should be some moral to this story. I should have a pithy learning that I can deliver to you, about the folly of doubting oneself, or the grandeur of childish invention. Perhaps you could supply one for me, because I am all out of pithy learnings today.

More antibiotics, and a poo story

I'll tell you about the antibiotics first, and then we can settle in for the poo story.

I took Ivy to see Dr Luke Sammartino the paediatrician again today, and she was a trooper. She missed her afternoon nap completely, and managed remarkably well. She was wired by bed-time, but she has managed to fall asleep without any help.

Anyway, Dr Luke thinks that it's likely that it is still the same mycoplasma bug in her system. The Royal Children's are advising a second course of Augmentin for stubborn mycoplasma infections this year. Not sure what that means - a more resistant strain has arisen, perhaps?

Anyway, anyway, she's on another ten days of antibiotics. If that doesn't work, he said that we will "investigate" whether it's asthma.

Now for the poo story.

Yesterday Trudi and Ivy were on the couch. It's a leather couch, so it was OK that Ivy was bouncing around with no pants on. The kids have a lot of no-pants time. Ivy was standing up, playing with the toys that sit along the back of the couch. Trudi noticed Ivy concentrating, and acted instinctively.

Yes, Ivy dropped her load neatly into Trudi's outstretched hand. Trudi showed me on her way to the bathroom. "Look what I've got!". Ivy went on playing with the teddies and dolls.

As a bonus, here is Ivy sitting on the pot, reading:

Notice her foot - she pops it up on the stool, for that extra comfortable look. She's going to be the kind of person who retires to the loo to read the whole Saturday paper.

Ivy's cough is back

Poor possum. I can hear her hacking away as they are napping.

After we saw Dr Luke Sammartino three weeks ago, Ivy had a course of Augmentin, which is a fairly scary mix of two antibiotics. She did fine - no gut problems, no other reaction, and she actually rather liked getting a syringe of sweet goop twice a day.

After the 10-day course, her cough was gone. Gone! After nine months of coughing, this seemed like a miracle. But I knew that the real test would come when she got a cold.

So, she got a cold a few days later. Convenient. Thankyou, everyone, for arranging that.

Actually, Hazel got the cold, Ivy got the Pox, and then they swapped. Either way, the cough is back.

I just rang Dr Luke's office to see if we should wait it out or come back to see him, and I heard him and the secretary in the background as they moved things around to fit us in at 3:15 this afternoon. He is a good bloke. I like Dr Luke a lot. He didn't have to do that.

So we will have a bit of an afternoon of it I think. Ivy would normally be napping at that time. I have asked Trudi to come home early so that she can be home with Hazel while I drag Ivy out of her bed.

Hazel has Ivy's pox, and Ivy has Hazel's cold

It is AWESOME having twins. You get to see the same diseases progress through two different kids of the same age and background. It's like a controlled scientific experiment (and yet also not). So many symptoms are the same! But some are different! Wow!

Self-referential

I was wondering how other parents of twins do the Aware Parenting thing (still not liking that term). So, of course, I googled "aware parenting" "twins" to see what the internet had to tell me.

The answer is: not much. Lots of pages have both phrases, but they are not connected. Halfway through the second page of results, I came upon a page that had them both in the same sentence, and here it is.

Bummer.

Why are you reading this?

Been looking at the search terms that bring people to this blog.

Most of you want to know about slow lorises. Not surprising really. Sorry folks... you'll get no fun facts about any kind of loris here. Go to Wikipedia instead.

However, someone found this blog by googling the phrase "funny pictures of rubbish skips". Right.

That's all folks, good night.

Doing just fine

While the rest of us are at differing levels of sickness, some members of the household are doing just fine...



- T

Pox

Ivy has the pox

It's actually just some virus or other. We all have a cold, and Ivy also has an impressive set of spots all over. The doctor says it's nothing scary, and Ivy is clearly feeling better, but I can't really take her anywhere where other mums will see her and freak out that their kids will also get The Pox.

So I hope it's dry this arvo and we can go to a park.

We are going to skip tomorrow's swimming lesson. Because we are planning to go away for a few weeks early next year, we are not signing up for another term. Also, the teacher is a bit of a nutcase and is getting harder and harder to deal with. Her swimming teaching is great, but her running-a-small-business is not so good. So we will shop around for other lessons.

We have had a few nights of shitty sleeping, but now 2 nights of good stuff. Poor of T has a bad cold so is not sleeping, but I had 7 hours in a row, so I am laughing.

A good long cry

I've got religion, again. This time it's in the form of a bunch of parenting techniques that you could probably call "gentle parenting".

I started with a website called Hand In Hand Parenting, which seems to be a very Californian thing. They call their approach "parenting by connection", and their idea is that no matter how crappy your kid's behaviour is, it's often due to a lack of connection with you or others. They have a few cool techniques for establishing and deepening this connection. A lot of it is aimed at parents of bigger kids than ours, but it's still useful already.

I then moved on to Aware Parenting.

I get annoyed at the name Aware Parenting, as if all the rest of us are unaware parents. This seems rude. It is also a bit intense on the topics of natural childbirth, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping and the like. All a bit daunting for those of us who didn't get this stuff happening.

Apart from that, aware parenting appeals to me because of its approach to crying kids, which is similar to the Hand in Hand crew.

Their idea about crying is that a crying kid feels like shit, and is expressing that feeling. If you try to distract them by feeding, patting, rocking, reasoning with them (or whatever), you might get them to stop crying, but they won't stop feeling like shit.

The fix for that is to get as close as possible, listen really well to their crying, and don't try to stop them. The kid might cry for ages. Crying itself is the way that a kid sheds their intense emotions, so you just have to wait it out. It doesn't work to let them do this crying by themselves, or with you only half listening and half worrying about getting them to stop. They need your genuine presence so that they can feel safe enough to do their hard crying work.

That's the theory so far. Trudi and I both feel that this idea is a good one, but it's hard to implement. There is always something that needs to be done, and not enough time to sit down and listen to the hardest thing to hear: your daughter howling.

I finally managed it this morning. I don't know why I did - it was just a morning like any other. Hazel has just started a cold, so she had a rough night, and woke up a bit grizzly. By breakfast time she was whiny and miserable, and then something happening to make her cry. I sat down on the floor with her, and held her. Ivy came barrelling up and wanted to play. Convenient! So I trapped Ivy between my knees, which she thinks is the Best. Game. Ever.

Hazel wept and flailed, struggling in my arms. I held on, letting her wriggle away a bit so she wasn't trapped, but I always gathered her up again. I said quietly, yes, yes, what else, yes. She kept crying, and couldn't meet my eye. Ivy was having a ball, falling about over my legs.

Hazel kept crying for about fifteen minutes. Eventually she was just murmuring a little, resting completely in my arms, holding my gaze steadily. At that point, I set her on her feet, and she went off to do those things she does.

For the rest of the morning she was remarkably calm and happy, given her cold and lack of sleep. So it's a success. I just need to do it whenever I find the time and emotional energy.

Zoo

The new seal and penguin exhibits at Melbourne Zoo are open, and they ROCK.

The penguins are in a pool surrounded by tiny sandy dunes. They hurtle up and down their pool, and stop at the ends for a splash and giggle. You can hang over the edge watching them shoot by, plus there are some glass sections on the side of the pool so you can watch them underwater. The girls loved the penguins. So did the mummies.

The seals have another deep pool with lots of fake cement rocks around it, plus a wave machine. It looks credibly like a rocky sea inlet, with little rock shelves. Apparently in their old pool, the deepest part was 1m. In this new pool, they can go down to 5m. And they go down! And up! And down again! And now they do it upside down!

There's also an enormous underground aquarium thingy, with big windows into the penguin and seal pools, plus a few little windows into little pools with seahorses, puffer fish, etc. It was really dark down there, and I worried that not everyone would be OK with that dimness. Old people might fall over. Twenty minutes later I realised that I had my sunglasses on.

Hazel walked up and down and around, and she admired the seagulls. Ivy rode in my sling on my back, and craned to look at the lions. Both girls can now "be a lion" which means going "raaaa". Ivy does it silently, with a big wide mouth.

Hazel seems to be starting a cold. We will see.

I had eight hours of sleep, without interruption

Nothing happened last night. No cats yowled, no kids howled, no insomniac mummies stared red-eyed at the dark ceiling, no neighbours started their shitbox Ford with holes in its muffler at 3am.

Surely it's not that hard

This week Trudi and I renewed our binding nominations for our superannuation. Fascinating, I know. Every three years, we each have to tell our super funds that if we die, our super money is to go to our estates, rather than allowing the super fund to decide who it goes to.

So.

Even though we have different super funds, each of our forms required that our signature be witnessed by two people.

So.

When Trudi was at our bank for another reason, she asked the bank dude and his colleague to witness her signature. They were reluctant. They seemed frightened. Trudi was persuasive so they did it.

Yesterday we went to the Preston library so the girls could let off steam. They like to tear up and down the kids' section. The librarian was afraid to witness my signature, because it seemed scary. not sure what she was scared of. She would not ask any of her colleagues to come over and see what they thought. We I intended to do mine yesterday, by going to a post office. They seem kind of official and used to this stuff. But I forgot. Today I met Sonia and Karina, and I forgot to ask them. Forgot forgot.

So, this afternoon I left Trudi and the napping girls and took my form out to be signed and witnessed. First I went to the Preston police station. The dude there was lovely - really helpful and kind, but unfortunately he was on his own. He recommended the post office. The rain started again. I walked around to the Preston Post Office. Nope, they don't witness signatures. They said I should go to the pharmacy.

Off I trot to the pharmacy, through the thickening gloom on a small storm. The stony-faced person at the counter in the High St Pulse pharmacy (yes I am naming names: I had a long afternoon) said that the pharmacist would witness forms between 9 and 3, and it was 4.30. She was not interested in doing it herself because she "had better things to do". She said to go to the local MP's office. I did not go there. Too far in the rain.

I went to the Preston council offices. Nope, can't do it. It is not to do with council business. Grr.

So I went back to the library, on the way to the car. I asked the lovely guy behind the desk if he would do it, and he said "Yes, sure!". Then I asked if he could ask a colleague and he said "Yep, hey come over here and witness this" and they did it on the spot, no worries.

So the summary is that everyone is a pillock, puling and afraid of shadows, except for some lovely librarians.

And so to bed.

Reservoir Pool

Trudi dragged herself around the baby pool videoing our future swimming champs.

A lovely kid (aren't the lifeguards getting younger each year!) came and asked her to stop - if you use a camera you have to register first. So she put away the camera, and posted the photos on the internet as soon as we got home. Next time we will register.

7:16 AM

The girls had a rough start to the night, with a lot of inconsolable-sounding crying that ended up being consolable.

Then, at 3 AM Selby the cat banged on the lounge-room door (the cats are locked in there at night so they don't walk on our heads) because she was THIRSTY. I ask you.

A few times Hazel shouted in the night, but she always went back to sleep by herself.

Trudi left for work at 6 AM.

I dozed for a while, waiting for the girls to wake up. Usually 6:20.

At 7:16 AM I finally heard a convincing shout from the girls. They were awake and perky, ready to start their day.

This is a record, I think. Sometimes one or the other sleeps past 7 if she has had a terrible night, or if she is sick, but there was none of that last night. I am not holding out any hope that it will happen again this year.

n + 1 pegs, where n is the number of nappies

Most mornings I peg out nappies on the line. I use fewer pegs if each nappy shares a peg with its neighbour. We have many pegs, but it feels good to economise.

How many pegs are required? Well, if you have four nappies, you need five pegs.

n+1, in fact.

After I idly realised that, I took it as a sign that my mind is still a little active, in parts.

It's all lovely

Today was a lovely day.

Ivy woke at 5am, but she was in a lovely mood. We stayed in bed, she had a feed, we drowsed, Trudi got up and went to work. Not fair, but someone has to pay for everything around here, and it sure isn't me. Not even a little bit. I used to pay for a little bit, but then the government noticed that I am not a single mother. But I digress.

We had a lovely morning. Can't remember it, but it would have involved porridge. I know this because just before dinner, I found the bibs that I did not clean this morning. Dried porridge fuses into something that NASA could use to get heat-resistant tiles to stick to returning space shuttles.

The girls had a nap this morning, which was just lovely. Trudi works at home on Fridays, so I swanned off to the toy library. There I discovered that the toys I was returning a week late incurred no fine, because there is a week's "grace period". Lovely. I borrowed another wooden box with holes and blocks that fit the holes. The girls are heavily into posting things at the moment. They don't get the whole round-block-in-round-hole thing yet, but it will come in time. For now, they angrily try to stuff non-fitting blocks into resistant holes. I also borrowed a plastic table covered with bits and pieces that you can flap, flip, flop, press, and rotate.

When the girls woke up after their lovely long morning nap, they saw the new table. They stomped over and glued themselves to it. Those little people played with the table so frenziedly that I had to hide it so that they would attend to their bottles.

Then we went off to meet Melissa the Twin Mum at the Fairfield Family Spaaaaace (a church hall with a blow-up jumping castle and a lot of daggy toys). But it was closed due to a robbery. Not lovely. We relocated to Fairfield Park, which was lovely except for the large number of flies. We enjoyed sandwiches, fruit, and hot chips (my fault), and then had a go on the swings, and some climbing stuff. Hazel slipped and banged her chin, and I think bit her lip or cheek. She had a little blood in her mouth. BAD MOTHER.

Off home for another nap. Again the girls went easily to sleep with no protesting or shenanigans. Lovely. Again they slept for an hour and 20 minutes.

This afternoon we went to the Reservoir pool, which is lovely. All this time we have lived so close, and never have we been there, because we are snobs. Reservoir Aquatic Centre sounds like it is going to have broken tiles, dingy water, mouldy showers, and Legionella. But no! It's new and shiny, and we had a blast. The babies' pool is beautiful, and not a thoroughfare that bigger kids stomp through. There are water sprays and bubbly things and a beach ball. We are SO going there again. Hazel awoke from her nap in a cross mood, and the second she got into the water she lightened and brightened.

We managed to get home in time for dinner, and all has been lovely since. The girls dropped straight off to sleep. Trudi has just returned from Bunnings with a hired trailer. Tomorrow morning she takes a piles of grotty pine pallet slats to the tip. I had used them to make lame little garden edgings for the front garden, but we are ripping everything out and putting natives.

OK, not so good now. Hazel woke up crying because I forgot to pause the washing machine and it started its noisy spun cycle just as she surfaced after her first forty minutes of sleep. The washing machine is against their bedroom wall so it's pretty loud. Off I go to calm her.

Interview with Kurt Vonnegut from 2006

Not sure why I've been thinking about him so much lately, but I have.

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=794

Mycoplasma?

Dr Luke Sammartino the paediatrician is a nice bloke. He seems thorough too.

He thinks that Ivy's persistent cough might be a mycoplasma infection. This is a bacterium, but it behaves a bit like a virus in that it can lie low and keep coming back. Sez Dr Luke. I didn't know that that was a defining feature of viruses.

So Ivy is going to take a 10-day course of antibiotics, and if she's better at the end, great. If not, back to Dr Luke. He says it might be mild asthma, or it might indeed be mild whooping cough, but these are less likely than the mycoplasma hypothesis.

I am eating chocolates left behind by Judy. She stayed for a few days and I'm sad to see her go. She's a great help with the girls, and they love her. She taught Hazel to say "car". We have funny chats about how things were "in her day".

I ain't good-lookin; I'm built for speed

I've been playing my Best Of Bessie Smith CD at the table lately, hoping that the girls are taking in a bit of kultcher.

Off to the paediatrician today, to see if there is anything interesting about Ivy's nine-month cough. She's had it since her first cold, at the age of four months. I'd like her to not have a cough. At our most recent visit to a doctor, the child-GP (she looked about fifteen) suggested that even an immunised child can get a low-grade version of whooping cough, and that the only way to know is to do a nasty nasal swab that surely involves strapping the child down while you get an instrument up her nose.

But then this is the GP who did not diagnose roseola when it was hugely obvious (now that I know the facts of roseola).

In other news, our chickens are so cute! They get a little bowl of porridge each morning, and peck peck peck it's all gone in an hour, but they keep coming by for a check and a peck, in case more arrives in the bowl.