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!