All posts tagged mina

Vacation

by admin on June 21, 2010 in Cancer, Death, Parenting, Relationships with No comments

Before I talk about our holiday, I need to explain something.

My husband, as much as I love him, does not do ‘impulsive’ terribly well. In fact, if you could describe him, one of they very first words you would use would be “not” and the second would be “impulsive”. For all of his excellent qualities, he’s not what you would call… a go-getter. The man still has clothes in his wardrobe from when he was 16. And a $5 note in his wallet from 18 months ago. He’s not a spender either.

So when Jason walked into my office on Saturday morning and said “hey, we should go for a drive to Busselton and stay for 2 nights”, he may as well have said “I have decided I want to be a lady and I am going to go on tour with the drag burlesque travelling circus, k?” and I would have reacted in much the same way. OK, not really, I probably would have expected the second.

But, he suggested it, and we booked into the Abbey Beach Resort based on their website. On the beach? Wireless? Check. Mini bar? Check. Restaurants with room service? Check… and check. $600 for 2 nights? Well, if it has wireless and is luxurious and has room service and a spa, well… let’s just indulge for a little while. We have a funeral on Monday afternoon we’d rather not think about.

Let’s not forget, we have 3 children – all of whom are not known for being the most flexible on the planet. But, they roll with it as much as they can and are happy to come along. Which is just as well because we blew our load on the hotel room and can’t afford a babysitter. So, it was basically a choice between a holiday or being locked under the stairs.

But of course, it doesn’t take long for the feral to kick in and I feel the urge to do both.

We arrive at a $300 a night “beachfront” resort that has glimpses of the beach (if you look past the 3 tennis courts and the giant tree), no mini bar, no room service in the apartments. The wireless costs $10 for 2 hours, but doesn’t reach our apartment. There is a queen-size bed, which we can live with but we are not used to, and our children are that lovely combination of excited and cranky at the same time. So, about every 3 minutes or so the jumping around and screaming will be interrupted by crying. And then the baby will go straight for the dishwasher buttons, then the knife drawer… whilst Jason and I try to figure out how the hell we are going to have dinner in our room because the kids are too tired for the restaurant.

So I hit up the lounge bar with my laptop, check emails and drink a glass of wine whilst I wait for our takeaway dinners. Which arrive on 4 plates and a tray. I have a laptop. It should also be noted that the restaurant is roughly equidistant to our room and the lobby… and they bring me the meals to the lobby. Which was nice of them, but I a) don’t understand why they can’t just bring it to the room and b) I now have to carry 4 plates and a tray back to our room. I smile through gritted teeth. Confused, perplexed gritted teeth. Oh and some bright spark decides to wolf whistle me on the way which, you know, made me feel sexy. Fuckhead.

By this point the baby is screaming and won’t go to sleep. Mina and Mr J are basically ready to hit up the drawer with the baby and have a knife fight with each other, and I am at my wit’s end because I have had to carry food across a $300 a night resort with no wifi and am grumbling to myself how holidays are so much fun with kids.

We finally get the kids to sleep around 11pm and I decide to have a spa. A spa that, as it turns out, has a drain 2/3 up the side to prevent you filling it above that point. Apparently they’ve had issues with it flooding because people overfill it. And then it occurs to me that bogans ruin EVERYTHING. Then I think “hey, I’ll have one of these “indulgent” hot chocolate sachets they’ve laid out. Mmmm, powdery, lumpy, snotty cocoa.

Did I mention that the baby threw a spatula off the balcony yet?

We then go to bed for a very uncomfortable night’s sleep and wake up with the day ahead of us. Tired, cranky children but we manage to have a nice breakfast, where the resort redeems itself just a little bit. We stop by the resort playground, where the baby manages a triple somersault onto his face and Mr J throws a tantrum or two. We hit up the beaches, go into Dunsborough, have  look around and take some photos. The kids start complaining of dying hunger (despite having huge plates of ginger pancakes an hour and a half earlier), so we go and get them McDonald’s. Yes, the Brennan children are all about our lovely local Southwest cuisine. Sigh.

And then we head down to the Busselton Jetty and go for a walk. Mina and Mr J go down onto the beach and I take some photos. And before we know it, both of my children are in the water, in full clothes, having the time of their lives. And for a brief moment, I want to tell them to get out of the water, but instead I just roll with it and take pictures. And laugh. And relax and realise that they are having fun and so am I, for the first time in a very long time, and we just enjoy the moment.

And boy, did I get some photos.

We return to the hotel room (where I have managed to purchase wireless access from the Caravan park next door), the kids are happy, soaking wet, getting out of their clothes. They jump in that crappy spa, Moo goes down for a nap (after again trying to eat a dishwasher detergent block), the kids start whingeing and Mina gets belligerent.

But I go and have a nap.

I wake up to Mina complaining she’s bored and Mr J playing Angry Birds on the iPad. Jason and I then see fit to tell our children what OUR childhood vacations consisted of: poo in a bucket, showering from a bucket (at which point I said to Jason that I hope it wasn’t the same bucket), hanging around a holiday village where the most thrilling thing was a trampoline… and 7 people in one caravan. And our daughter was complaining that the resort playground was boring. Hum. The older two again start bickering and we endure dinner in the Brasserie, where they make so much mess it is embarrassing, I am wearing dress boots with tracksuit pants (because I forgot a bag), and the baby smears $30 seafood risotto all over his face. And the carpet.

I look over at the young honeymooners at the table near the fire and realise that we are that family that either ruined their honeymoon, put them off having children for the next 10 years, or if their wedding was because of a baby in her tummy already, scare the crap out of them that they are just a few short years away from wearing tracksuit pants in a restaurant, drinking wine a little fast, and barking at her kids to sit down every 45 seconds.

Naturally, we have to leave the restaurant and take dessert back to our room because the kids are tired and bickering… and we finally get them to bed at 7:30, get to enjoy each other’s company for a little while, watch the first episode of Mad Men on DVD and then off to sleep I go because I drank my wine a little too fast during dinner.

And this morning we’ll be having breakfast, where they’ll find new and creative ways in which to embarrass us with food smears and tantrums, and then we head home for my Grandma’s funeral and one of the hardest days of my life. But, in amongst all of this, I realise that this was the best idea ever and even though holidays are exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes downright disappointing, it really is all about this moment. This $1200 moment.

Busselton 11a

Busselton 10

Rangus McNuggetBurger Esq. IV, aka "Moo" aka Moo Carlin. Confused little fuck.

by admin on February 28, 2010 in Birthday Letters, Parenting with No comments

Moo.

Holy shit.

Moo!

ONE!

Where the hell did the last 12 months go? On one hand, it seems like so long… and on the other… so fast.

You poor, poor forgotten third child. I need to apologise in advance for bringing you into the world last, because for some reason, you seem convinced that you are our first. You seem to think that you can do stuff – like play – without being harassed by a well-meaning but otherwise utterly boorish 4 year old. You seem to think that you can get food without a cascade of other children nagging for my attention. You seem to think that, you know, giving yourself a severe egg allergy is something I won’t whinge about every time we need to make a cake or something. You also seem to think that if you scream, I’ll actually get up – rather than assess the cry and carry on.

Boy, do I have news for you.

That’s not to say I don’t love you… of course I do. In fact, in many ways, the fact that you had such a horrible start to your life makes me appreciate you just that smallest bit more… because we nearly lost you and I can’t not think about that every single day.

When Mina & Mr J were born, I managed to write out a story about the day they were born… you know… peppered with jokes… that sort of thing. All of my pregnancies & births have been really tough, but with the other two I managed to intellectualise a lot of it as the luck of the draw, in capable hands… and find sufficient distance.

But with you, it was so different. And I want to talk about this just for a little bit because I have never really been able to until now… and I don’t want you to think that the absence of a written birth story is somehow because of the “third child” thing. It isn’t. It’s because I could never summon up the strength to talk about the worst month of my life… because if not for something within me that said things weren’t right, you probably wouldn’t be here.

And I don’t know if that is something that I can ever shake. Partially because now that 12 months have passed, I can no longer pursue any complaints; partially because I just felt so disempowered and humiliated by this doctor for demanding adequate care; and partially because the thought of you, on all those machines, on all that morphine, on all those drugs… is just too much to bear. So I never really processed it because frankly? I spent every single day of the last 12 months just trying to forgive him. I think it might take a little more time.

I will never forget that Sunday morning, when I hadn’t felt you move for a while, when I called up the hospital, went in, and found you were distressed. I will also never forget the numerous arguments with my “Doctor” over the fact that my blood pressure remained uncontrolled, that I felt sick, that I was so swollen I could barely move… and he did nothing. I asked for a second opinion and he lied to my face about the doctor being out of town. I will also never forget that Tuesday, after spending 9 days in hospital, feeling ill, not feeling you move, and hearing “oh he’s just a quiet baby” over and over again from the incompetent, bullying, private hospital midwives, and having my Doctor walk in, and discharge me with a blood pressure spike of 170/110 the night before. I will never forget asking for growth scans (having had 2 hypertensive pregnancies before) and being told “2 weeks won’t show anything new”

I will never forget locking myself in the bathroom from the stress, leaving Dad to argue with the “Doctor” in my hospital room, and finally sacking him, walking out of the hospital, and requesting that he arrange for me to be seen at King Edward by a Doctor who actually gave a crap. 2 days later, we were seen by a Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist.

I will never forget being right. For being told by an experience sonographer that not only was there no such thing as a “quiet baby”, but that in 2 weeks you had gone from the 50th percentile to the 10th. I will never forget feeling a little relief that my blood pressure seemed to have settled down, but still being told that you needed to be born, because you were under significant stress. I will also never forget being told that if we had left this another week, your chances of being stillborn were significantly high.

But apparently, you know, 2 weeks doesn’t make a difference, and that “Doctor” we had fired, to his face, had instructed me to see him in a week at his office and discharged me. It plagues my thoughts, wondering, if I had been compliant and listened to him and his assessment. And it makes me so angry that he gets to treat women who might not be as stubborn as me.

But you know… I never could really write about it in the same way, with distance, that I did with your brother and sister… because I am still not over it.

But you know, in a way, it’s been the catalyst for me deciding to go to Medical School. All of these cumulative experiences have given me the push I needed to make the decision. Not that I wouldn’t trade that experience in a  heartbeat, but, you know.

Unfortunately you were born in the eye of a storm… because 2009 was an extremely stressful year. After the stock markets crashed at the end of last year, the clients were fairly light on, I was in hospital and your Dad had to take a whole heap of unpaid leave. We had a lot of financial difficulty at the beginning of the year, and it eventually resulted in the repossession of my car. But hey… we recovered. After you were born and I got back to work (I had a conference call at midnight the night after your were born and still in the NICU), things started to slowly recover and I managed to pay some debt.

Then, your Dad got injured at work, was bullied by his employer and the insurance company and, well… that fucked us right up for 6 months, only settling a month ago. I also got really sick, have had to battle with Doctors and all kinds of stress… and basically… we started 2010 optimistic with it slowly proving to be just as fucked as 2009.

With the settlement money not even covering our losses, we are back to square one and its stressful. But, you have your Dad home with you, and he takes care of you whilst I work. All day. Every day. I am exhausted and still quite unwell… but… getting no government support, no family support and, well, basically being on our own, I have no choice really but to make it work.

I write about this now because I find it funny that by the time you are Mr J’ age I will be pretty well on my way to being a Doctor. And by the time you are Mina’s age, I will be one. So I am just taking a moment to remind you that things were hard. In fact, I expect them to stay that way, because, well… we aren’t the luckiest people in the world… and I expect things to get worse before they get better. Because I am tired & sick, your Dad is tired & sick, and we snap at each other a lot just trying to survive.

But we do try to protect you from that as much as possible. We do that with all of you as best we can. We fail frequently but… you know… we try. We just keep on going forward, one foot in front of the other… and hope that someday all the effort pays off. Maybe it ill in the form of tenacious children… who knows what the future holds, but hey… it’s certainly not boring.

So, you know, you’re walking and getting into shit and being basically cute… and I am trying to enjoy every minute as much as I can.  I say that the only good thing to come out of 2009 was you… and I mean it. I can’t imagine our lives without Moo, and despite feeling very unlucky most of the time, I am just so blessed to have you in my life… even if I have to make you special egg-free food.

Happy birthday!

Podcasting and picking on disadvantaged groups

by admin on September 7, 2008 in LOLs, Married Life with No comments

Jason and I were sitting on the couch the other night, watching the wheelchair basketball at the Paralympics. One of our old schoolmates is in the Aussie team, has one prosthetic leg (that he had back then), and it led to a discussion about the… umm… cut off point … for what state the legs must be in to play wheelchair basketball at an elite level. The interesting thing was that this guy also kicked arse at "normal" basketball, because Jason used to play against him!

It then led to a game of speculating ‘who had what’ disability. Based on the muscular tone of the legs, or absence or legs, we speculated who was a "full" paraplegic, who was an amputee, etc. After a good… 5 minutes of this discussion, Jason then also lamented how he wishes that he could cut his left foot off. He has a neurological bone problem in his ankle that makes it extremely painful to walk for too long, and I have often sympathised with him and said that I would consent to him being amputated if it was ever ‘mangled by accident’… because then he would be classed as a "disability" rather than just a "fat fuck with a bad ankle". And we could sit and collect all that fat disability cash.

Anyway, our conversation descended into how to go about the removal of said foot without being charged. It was at that moment that I realised something. I turned to Jason and said:

"See, we have to be together forever, because there is noone else on this planet that would ever put up with either of us, talking shit about disabled people like that."

In that vein, we have actually decided to start podcasting. Sure, we might only have 3 people listening, but we think its going to be a fun step. The idea is to give some people some insight into the bullshit discussions that 2 weirdos like us have. I am thinking it will be no more than half an hour, once a month or so, in which we either:

  1. Publicly share our grievances with one another
  2. Allow me to get on one of my comical rants
  3. Talk shit about disabled people and other underprivileged and completely-undeserving-of-our-pisstaking members of society
  4. Make you realise the grumpy old man in a 29 year old body that I live with, and laugh at
  5. Answer questions from our listener(s).
  6. May even be an appearance or two from Mina, if she is so inclined.

We think it’ll be fun. Submit questions for the first one and as soon as we are settled in at the new house, we’ll do our first one. Should be a blast, I reckon.

Some more quality Mina pwnage, just for you, Rob…

by admin on August 16, 2008 in Kid LOLs with No comments

Jason: “How come Mina gets so many parties? She’s had more than I have in my whole life.”

Lou: “heh, I dunno… last year didn’t really count as a party… but you can have one this year if you want one.”

Jason: “Yeah, I WILL. I am going to invite ALL my friends to my awesome party.”

Mina: “But you don’t have any friends!!”

Jason: “I will invite all my Facebook friends.”

Mina: “Don’t be silly, Facebook friends aren’t real friends”.

This kid is SEVEN YEARS OLD.

2 conversations that reveal why I love my family.

by admin on August 15, 2008 in Kid LOLs, LOLs with No comments

We were watching some weird Hippo-related animation that was making fun of a donut eating hippo that hides in the water so as not to dry out his skin, then has a facial mask and weirdness.

Jason: “No wonder they’re so grumpy”

Me: “Yeah, I’d hate it if I had to lay around avoiding the sun all day”

Jason: “What do you mean? You do!”

I gets no respect.

Between Jason, Mina and Me:

Jason: “Well, you never know, Mina could just end up a HOUSEWIFE. Would you like that, Mina?”

Mina: “hmmm…. no!”

Me: “No, you want to be a big business lady like me, don’t you?”

Mina: “Well, no, not a fat one!”

I’ll tell you again, I gets no respect.

That time, you sold your soul to the devil? Yeah, that.

by admin on July 27, 2008 in Kid LOLs with No comments

As many of you may know, I have not been your traditional, um, mother. It’s not that I deliberately go out of my way to cause trouble with other parents, or to be indifferent to the needs of my children, but, well… you know… I never much went for all that over-mothering and over-consuming nonsense. I love my kids, of course, but you would never find me in the middle of a room of mothers, sipping coffee and bignoting about my children, or even worse, the brand of pram I own. It’s just… not my style.

Which is why I have surprised myself by starting to organise a birthday party for Mina’s 7th birthday, coming up. It’s never really been my bag (remember last year’s cake disasters here and here), so I am both excited and nervous about the prospect of actually making an effort. And before you ask, no I will not be making the cake this year (although I am tempted to attempt one purely for the benefit of the blog – my cake disasters seem to be quite highly anticipated!).

So anyway, I am doing something that is completely weird to me, hiring a hall, organising a “Daisy Rock star” party that Mina requested – because she’s getting a Daisy Rock for her birthday, and she’s uber-obsessed with them… so… here we are.

It is such a balance though, teetering that line between going overboard and over-indulgent with the party, and wanting to give Mina a great party. Mina came to me about 2 weeks ago, with a pile of sketches, telling me how she wanted her invitations to look, how she wanted to the cake to look, what colours, who to invite, etc etc… if she was paying me she’d be a great client (or the client from hell, I am not entirely sure!).

Anyway, so here I am, trying to plan a party when I have no inclination or experience… simultaneously balking at the excess of the party and being at least a little excited about organising it.

I gotta get out of the middle class-ness quick smart, I think it might be eating my soul ;)

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