Metabolism

I love weetbix. Just like any good Australian. I love them with a little bit of brown sugar, and enough milk that the outside softens just a touch, but the inside is still crunchy. This necessitates eating them rather quickly.

The fact that I love weetbix so much, is actually one of the reasons I haven't eaten them for a few years. I love them TOO much.

Something that is often asked on ads is how many weetbix you can eat. The serving suggestion is 2, but many sportsmen claim to eat 6, or 8. Football players mostly, big burly guys that you expect to eat half a cow for dinner and still have room for dessert. Or swimmers, who burn so much energy they are constantly eating just to stay in shape.

When I was 18, I would eat 10.

10 weetbix for breakfast. With sugar and milk. A cup of milk with each set of weetbix. Eaten by 2, that makes over a litre. A good tablespoon of sugar spread over the two weetbix, 5 times over, makes half a cup. and then I would have a glass of orange juice.

This didn't stop me eating during the rest of the day, either. When I was at school, I would eat two sandwiches for lunch - thats 4 slices of bread, 2-4 slices of cheese, and 2-4 slices of ham. Plus an apple, plus a muesli bar. And a glass of juice with lunch.

When I was working for my father, at 19, I didn't often have sandwiches for lunch. Instead I'd go to the local bakery and get a loaf of their cheese and bacon bread. And a sweet bun. And a 600ml carton of chocolate milk. And eat it all.

Dinner wasn't any better. If we had pizza, I would eat a pizza. By myself. Thin crust, yes, but not home-made, and I'd eat 1/3 of the loaf of garlic bread too. Milk with dinner as well.

Sometimes I made myself pasta - from a packet. You know the kind - add milk, water and butter, microwave for 10 minutes. Serves four. I'd eat the whole packet, plus a couple slices of bread to mop up the sauce.

What did I look like when I used to eat so much?


I looked like that. That is a 17 year old Sarah. Who hadn't started eating 10 weetbix at a time yet, but would regularly eat 6 (with all the accompanying sugar and milk) and one time ate 4 cheeseburgers, 20 chicken nuggets, 3 large fries and a thickshake within half an hour, then went to the movies and had a large popcorn and three packets of sweets (snakes, maltesers and violet crumbles for anyone wondering). I looked approximately the same until I had my son when I was 22.

HOW COULD I LOOK LIKE THAT????? On a day when I ate 10 weetbix for breakfast (with milk, sugar, and orange juice), pullapart for lunch (with finger bun and chocolate milk), and pizza for dinner (with garlic bread and milk) I would easily consume 5000 calories. Thats nearly 3 times what my current suggested intake is.

I HATE my metabolism.

Shoelaces

Critterbug started school in February. He is 5 - he'll be 6 in September. Until now he's has shoes with some form of velcro fastening, because thats really all there is around. But this year he also started playing Auskick (little kid's AFL - aussie football). He's incredibly uncoordinated, but he has fun, and he looks cute in his uniform.

Theres just one problem. The spikes. They have laces.

He's a smart kid. He can count by tens, by twos, and probably fives if I asked him. He can do simple addition and subtraction sums, and is reading and writing amazingly well - if you ignore the fact that he seems unable to differentiate between capital and lowercase letters. He just picks one at random with no thought as to what should be used. He also uses words like "delectable" to describe dinner. No, I don't know where he picked that up.

Do to the smarty-pants factor, he's picking up the whole shoe-tying thing pretty well. He's got the concept, just needs a little reminding occasionally, and his complete and utter lack of coordination doesnt seem to be hindering him too much.

No, the problem isn't with him. Its with me.

Oh don't be stupid, of course I can tie my laces. We weren't allowed to play in the playground at school until we could tie our laces, becasue the teachers refused to tie everyones shoes at the end of lunch everday, and we had to take our shoes off to play. I learned pretty quick.

The problem isn't that I can't tie my laces, the problem is that I can't tie his.

My husband taught him how, and he does his VERY DIFFERENTLY. I can't make my fingers do his way.

• Cross the laces, tuck one under, pull tight. CHECK.
• Make a loop. CHECK.
• Wrap the other lace around the loop. CHECK.
• Pull the wrapped lace through the hole and form a second loop, pulling it tight. NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He makes a loop BEFORE he pushes it through the hole!!! I CAN'T DO IT!! I get in theory that you end up with the same result, I can see that you get the same result, but I can't make my fingers do it! They get all twisted and dumb and just won't do it!!

And it's made me curious. Is this simply an individual difference, caused by someone in our respective pasts figuring out different ways to do it, or is it a larger scale difference, anerican V australian/english?

I'm so tempted to just have the kid use bunny ears. Make my life easier by far.

Babies are weird/clever

Gosling turned 10months earlier in December, and has just recently discovered how to roll. Or should I say re-discovered. She originally figured it out at about 4 or 5 months (I think thats right... I'm not sure of exact dates), but she kept on banging her head on the floor when she did it, so she gave up. Seriously. She didn't roll for over 5 months, even though she knew how.

Recently, she somehow discovered that she would not bang her head if she rolled on a bed. Oh how she loved that discovery. The second I lay her down, she rolls over and tries to escape. And she laughs as she's doing it. Her other recent discovery that she can drag herself forward (no crawling yet, just slugging) makes things even more interesting, as she can be halfway across the bed in the time it takes me to grab a new shirt for her.

But.

She knows that she can't roll over on the floor. She lies there and cries because she knows she can't go anywhere. If I roll her over she's off like a flash, slugging her way across the room, but she will not do it herself.

This is where the clever/weird part comes into play. Its clever that she recognises the difference between bed and floor, that she can roll on the bed with no consequences, but its weird that she won't roll from her back to her front on the floor... even though that wouldn't hurt her, and she does occasionally try to roll onto her back on the floor, banging her head and ending up screaming.

I wish I could get into her head and figure out her thought process.

Gender Inequality

When a man beats his wife, and she lets him, people urge her to leave, call her an idiot, and try to get the man in jail. Apparently when a woman beats her husband, he signs a contract saying its ok, as long as it only happens once a week. And it's all ok, because she feels really bad seeing him covered in bruises.

Anyone else think things here are just WRONG????

I Never Wanted To Keep Her In Pink

When Critterbug was a baby, we often had questions as to his gender. I didn't really understand that, as to me he looked like a boy (right from the start, to me he looked like a Boy rather than just a Baby), and he was always wearing 'boy' clothes - little jeans and blue shirts with monsters and trucks and stuff on them - but I understood that people didn't want to say 'what a cute little boy!' only to be told he was a girl, and we were just a little untraditional in our clothing choices, especially since it is generally deemed more ok to dress a girl in boy's clothes than it is to put a boy in girl's clothes.

Its getting a little ridiculous with Gosling though.

Granted, she doesn't have a particularly feminine face yet (not that she looks masculine, she just looks like a 'baby' instead of a 'girl'), but when she's wearing a pink t-shirt, a pink velvet skirt with butterflies and flowers on it, a pink velour jacket, and pink tights with more flowers on them, she's holding a pink teddy, has a pink dummy (pacifier/binky) in her mouth, and has two pink blankets in her pram, people STILL ask if she's a boy.

That's right, its a boy. We're just trying our hardest to scar him for life.

Maybe once her hair grows out we'll stop getting stupid questions? In the meantime, despite not wanting a frothy frilly pink girl, I have resigned myself to the fact that if I want less confusion, I'm just going to have to have one, and I'll never be able to take her out dressed like this:

Ugh

I have about 4 posts half written, I'm just lacking the motivation to finish them off and actually post them. some of them might not happen at all because they won't be relevant anymore - time specific.

Last night's stint didn't help any. Gosling had me up 10 times. And then woke up for good at 6am because her brother's sleep-talking woke her.

And now she's sitting on the floor sobbing. Today is not going to be fun.

Someone send me soe chocolate??


In interesting news, despite getting a letter from Better Homes & Gardens saying my subscription was up, and me not renewing it (just can't afford it), I got one in the mail yesterday. I think the magazine people are stupid. Mum's subscription to a different magazine yields 3 copies. 2 sent here, and one sent to her address. They started sending the extra copy here after she renewed her subscription, and when she changed her address they started sending one there as well, instead of stopping the one(s) coming here. IDIOTS.

Oh well. They'll figure it out at some point, right? Or should I tell them?

Sometimes I Disturb Myself

Yesterday, my fever-stricken Critterbug was watching TV while I did the washing (oh the joys of cloth nappies). One of the odder shows was on, one called "Sitting Ducks". Ducks who are friends with an alligator who get teased by the other alligators because he doesn't eat the ducks - he is vegetarian.

This led to one of my peculiar-almost-instantaneous-though-processes. I went through the following in the time it took to lean over and put one item in the washing machine:

• Vegetarian alligator.. Fully vegetarian, or would he eat fish?
• Things that eat fish usually taste kinda fishy.
  
• Hey remember that giant guinea-pig type thing that is classified as a fish?
  
• Probably looks kinda funny swimming around.
• Hippos certainly do.
  
• Hippos are cute.
• I wonder what a hippopotamus tastes like?

Not stupid, just different. Very, very different.

“Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them.”

Maybe you've seen it on a T-shirt, maybe a sticker on a car. Maybe you have no idea what I'm talking about, but its everywhere. Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them. Yet another dig at our other halves.

Sometimes its tempting to believe though. Sometimes they do things that are just so... different. Their minds don't work the same as ours, and its easy to mistake this for stupidity. I'm sure they think the same thing about us.

One of my jobs is laundry-put-away-er. This also translates to clothes-sorter-outer-er, since I'm the only one who knows what all we have. A few months back I told hubby I was frustrated because I couldn't fit everything in his t-shirt drawer, and he told me to just go ahead and put in storage anything I didn't think he wore any more – if he missed something, he'd ask for it back. So I attacked that drawer with a vengeance, culling madly as I went. You would not believe how much better everything fits now.

Anyway.

Since there was space to actually see the clothes, and since I'd noticed hubby having trouble finding what he was looking for sometimes, I decided to sort the clothes in the drawer in a more easily accessible layout: light t-shirts in one pile; dark t-shirts in a second; sleeveless under-shirts in a third; and shorts off to the side. It was easy to see what I'd done, no pile was disproportionately bigger than the others, and it ought to make his life easier.

Or so I thought.

A couple weeks back I saw him wildly rummaging through his drawer, and then he asked me if a particular shirt was in the wash. I told him no, but since its black he'd be better off looking in the dark pile than the light pile. He looked at me as if I'd grown a second head.

Sarah: There's a light pile, a dark pile, a singlet pile, and a shorts pile.
Hubby: Are you sure?
S: Yes, I did it when I got rid of everything months ago!!
H: Why didn't you tell me?
S: I thought it would be obvious, since everything in that pile is light, and everything in that pile is dark, and I've always kept your singlets separate!
H: Its only obvious now that you've told me!!

He didn't see. He absolutely did not see that one pile contained light clothes, and the other was mostly black. He's not stupid. My man is a smart man. He does stuff I don't even pretend to understand, and makes it look easy. But his mind just doesn't work the same way as mine.

Boys aren't stupid. Just different.

attack of the dumb

my son has been suddenly rendered stupid, and i dont know why.

i dont know if he's just Being Four, if he's tired, or if theres something wrong with him that makes him incapable of thinking after about 4:30pm.

he's a smart boy. he knows left from right, can whistle in tune, he can read his alphabet, knows the associated sounds with most of the letters (although hes been doing weird things there lately too), and can read any number under 100. he's constantly telling me how much things cost when we're at the shops. and yet, today, its all flying out the window.

for a start he's insisting on reading everything from right to left, and upon being told to read from the left, he asked which way that was. i stared at him until he stopped being silly. then he insisted that the number 4-0 is one he doesnt know. he knows every other number except that one. it took 5 minutes to get him to call it 'forty-oh' and upon being told theres no such number, silly person, he looked at me as if ive grown another head. we then had a conversation like this:

me: forty-oh isnt a number. listen to the other numbers. if 2-0 is twenty, and 3-0 is thirty, and 5-0 is fifty, what is 4-0?
critter: um.... forty-oh.
me: no. you arent listening. if 3-0 is thirty, and 5-0 is fifty, what is 4-0?
critter: forty-oh?
me: no. go to your bedroom and sit down and think about it, and then come and tell me what number 4-0 is. (because at this point, after a day of him refusing to be more than 2 feet away from me at any given moment, including getting up and running after me and trying to open the door when i was ON THE TOILET to find out what i was doing; and telling me every 2.8 seconds to LOOK AT ME when im already watching him; and mummy? mummy. mummy. muuuuuuuummy. mummy? MUMMY!!!!! muuuuuuuummyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, im ready to scream, and quite frankly 5 minutes of him being elsewhere will stop all sorts of things from happening)
critter: I DONT WANT TO!! (as he's running to his room)

this continued for another ten minutes or so, with him intermittently coming out and telling me that he doesnt know any numbers, and me telling him to go back to his room and think.

eventually it got to the point where i couldnt take it any more.

me: what number is 3-0?
critter: thirty
me: SO WHAT NUMBER IS 4-0!!!
critter: forty (looking at me as if he's been telling me that the whole time)


he is so lucky. i was on the verge of shutting all the doors and going to bed, leaving him to fend for himself till daddy gets home at about midnight.

buying stuff, and stuff

the christmas presents dilemma is beginning to overwhelm me. i have a couple things for hubby (what do you get for a guy who goes out and buys the ONLY thing you thought he wanted?) and im sure theres a bunch of stuff scattered around the house for the kid. we got something for my sister, and mum has given us a suggestion for her - the same perfume we buy her every year. boring, predictable, but at least its something she needs. the big dilemma is my dad, and still hubby.


dad well... this one is really tricky. for two reasons. 1) he's jewish, and therefor doesnt celebrate christmas, but i know he's going to get us something, so if i dont get him anything, i feel horrid. 2) WHAT DO I GET HIM???????? im NOT getting him another harmonica. he has a million of the things and they all sound awful. and i cant think of anything else. UGH.


hubby well.. ive got him a couple movies, and a book... and i dont know what else to do. do i need to do anything else? if it was just me, id say it was fine, but this is stuff from me, critter, and the as-yet-unborn-spaceghost (because it was just too brilliant to pass up). which makes it seem like really nothing at all. and i dont know what else to get him. UGH. cant get him a nice watch, because he was given one by dad a couple months back, and isnt really a watch person, so having 2 would be pointless. i dont want to get him nice clothes, because he's steadily losing weight and i dont want to get him something that he wont be able to wear soon. seriously.. all his clothes are currently falling off.. hmm.. maybe i should get him a nice belt? but thats so BORING.


UUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

having the baby steadily suck all my brains out isnt helping any, either.

gibber gibber gibber

is it the moon? not a full moon tonight.. speaking of which, did anyone see the smiley face last night? we didnt. it was too cloudy. saw some super bright stars the day before that we assume were the ones that were going to be it but hey..

so anyway, back to the point. TOTALLY in a mood and i dont know why. thought it might be the moon... but see above. any ideas? not had any excessive amounts of sugar.. cant think of anything that would do this.

oh well. hyperactivity for the win.

do we all turn into our mothers?

my mum is up here for the weekend. a long weekend, since she arrived yesterday (wednesday) night, and will leave on monday morning. i love seeing her and getting to talk and stuff, but... she annoys me too. she's a fusspot.

the weather here has been rather not conducive to drying washing (we have no dryer), so last night i put on a wash, and hung it up inside. when the ads came on in the show i was watching on tv, i turned on the light in the drying room, since its at the other end of the room and i dont see well in the dark - didnt want to fall over carrying a basket of washing - and turned on the light in the laundry so i could get the wash out of the machine, and left it on so i wouldnt forget about it (has happened numerous times in the past). then i sat down to watch the last five minutes of the tv show.

mum chose that exact moment to come out of her room and gasped. 'sarah, you know you really should be more careful about leaving all these lights on. it all adds up in your electricity bill' she said, as she STEPPED OVER the laundry basket. because, you know, since im the one who pays the bill, i have no idea what it costs. 'i know mum. the lights have been on for about 2 minutes, because im about to hang up the washing.' she looked shocked and confused. 'hang up the washing???' then she noticed the laundry basket she'd already stepped over. *HEADDESK* apparently she also hadn't noticed that the hanging rack was set up, even though she'd walked past it about 7 times already by that point.

i understand that she's worried about us. obviously she thinks we're very very poor, since every time i talk to her one of her first questions is 'and are you sure you guys are doing ok financially?' i know that as a parent you cant help but be concerned for your kids. i watch my critter constantly and every time anything happens to him i panic. but at the same time... i am an adult. he is 4. he doesnt have the same life experiences and brain function as an adult, to know when he's doing something dangerous or stupid. i do. and i would have thought mum might have realised this by now. (when i rang her four and a half years ago to tell her i was getting married, her immediate response was "OH sarah... you're not pregnant are you?" not 'congratulations' or 'when so i can be there?' (she was in a different country to me) she didnt quite realise i was a grownup then, and still doesnt seem to realise it.)

and really.. is having 2 extra lights on for 15 minutes once a month going to be a huge problem? especially since lights are not turned on during the day unless its exceptionally cloudy?

what concerns me most is that it might be genetic. am i doomed to become this worrywort? will i constantly be convinced that my kids have no money and dont know how to live their own lives? will i panic constantly because they are not doing things the way i would have done them?


will i become my mother?

give the pregnant lady a heart attack why dont you

i just hopped on to my bank's website to check my account balance, and transfer some money from my savings to everyday account, so i can pay some bills before i get slugged with late fees.

and when i saw the balance in said accounts, i nearly had a heart attack. theres about... 20 or so times more than i expected in my account.

first i thought i'd gone insane.

then i realised maybe taxes had come in earlier than i was expecting.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

now i just have to wait for the form in the mail to tell me how much was from what....

but its almost summer!!!!

summer starts in a little over a week.

and today, it snowed.

oooooooooooooooh how we grow up

when my husband (then boyfriend) and i first moved in together, laundry was my responsibility. since he worked monday-friday, and i only worked a couple days a week, it would have been silly to do it any other way. so i did the laundry.

and i was soooooooo embarrassed. because it meant i had to touch his... underwear. luckily the apartments had dryers, not a washing line, or i would have died of embarrassment. and when the laundry was done, i would put mine away, hang up anything of his that could be hung up, and leave the rest in the basket. partly because i didnt want to put any of his things in the wrong place, partly because i didnt want to touch... his underwear. i was pregnant. with his kid. and i was embarrassed to touch his underwear. sigh.

now, not only do i TOUCH his underwear when i do the washing and put it away, i do random inspections to see if he's neglected to tell me theyre falling apart and we need to buy new ones. (seriously, how can he fail to notice a hole big enough to fit his hand through???) oh how we grow up.

and then the clever left me

i came here with a purpose.

i was going to write something important.

and witty.

and decisive.

and then i forgot.

and now i feel stupid.

and i really want orange juice, but we're out.

and.. i dont know anymore.

yeah.

ok.

yeah.

my kid is weirder than yours PART II

we went to a restaurant last night. a new one, for us. one of hubby's work mates has been raving about it so we tried it out. it was nice. and now, we are not going to eat out ever ever ever again, because we have to save all money possible to pay off the new car as quick as possible (eek! a new car! shiny!!)

husband got far too much steak (which he ate all of anyway), i got a burger, kid got a burger. hubby's steak came with veggies - including broccoli. when kid realised this, his face lit up like a christmas tree. it was hilarious.

so we bribed him.

if he ate an entire half of his burger (we cut it in half so its easier for him to hold and eat), he would get some broccoli.

he ate that burger so fast....


my kid is weirder than yours.

i need to stop reading the technology and health sections

this makes me sick.

this is mean, but they do have a point.

this... i cant figure out how that works.

and this.. well. im sure in a few years there will be a 'trend' in the opposite direction.

im sorry.... what??? (and on a related note.. people are weird)

and why???

and are you joking?? yetis?

and seriously? huh? wha? STEAK???????????????????

um.. what?

can someone explain this sentance for me please?

"thats what i do all the time and sometimes i dont."


has my brain not turned on yet this morning, or is my son really just not making sense?

does anyone have nay head-screws?

im not too keen on looking like frankenstein, but my head jsut doesnt seem to be screwed on right at the moment.

either that or all the changing weather has shaken my brain loose.

im having a lot of trouble thinking.

i think im going to go stare vacantly at some childrens television for a while.