It has rained here every day since for ages ago. It has rained, then stopped for an hour, then rained, then stopped for an hour. I don’t remember the last day without rain.
It has rained in the day, it has rained in the night.
The washing is piling skyward, the sheets are getting crunchy.
The mould is growing up the bathroom walls, the car has a damp carpet smell.
The grass is squishy, a tadpole smell hangs in the air.
Puddles are enormous, mushrooms are sprouting.
Mud is everywhere.
I need flippers to get around…
(with apologies to those in the south of Australia who are melting. I’m really not complaining – just making an observation.)
Remember all of that happy dancing I was doing. He knows how to stop it. This child will seriously be the death of me. Here is the loooong list of horrors he has perpetrated on his family.
At ten months he lost weight and was declared a ‘failure to thrive’ baby. Comforting words for any mother. He was hospitalised and had an endoscopy performed, but nothing was found. After a while he just started eating and gaining weight again.
At fifteen months he was watching a green frog on the screen door, leaning forward intently. The frog jumped, gave him a fright, he fell forward and chipped both of his front teeth on the metal door runners.
At two he was jumping on the trampoline with his sister – under parental supervision. He fell and injured his arm. I rushed him off to the after hours doctor who declared him fine. Three days later I returned to my regular GP who x-rayed and found it was fractured. He spent four weeks in a cast.
At three he got tonsillitis, for the very first time. He did not recover and he got an abscess on his tonsils. He remained on anti-biotics for almost three months before the decision was made to remove his tonsils. We took him off to hospital on the day of the operation and he was declared too ill to undergo surgery. We returned two weeks later and afterwards the surgeon remarked that his tonsils were almost rotten in his throat. By that time he had lost over five kilograms and was so weak he barely had the energy to even play.
At four he was doing a crazy pants dance in the lounge room. He flipped his legs out behind him and landed chin first on the tiles. As I picked him up I could see blood pouring from his chin. I held a towel to it and threw him into the car and drove straight to the doctor. My poor Pete arrived home to an empty house and a blood trail leading to the garage.
At four he burst an eardrum in the middle of the night. It was discovered that he had glue ear. A month later he had surgery to put a grommet into the unburst eardrum. Six weeks later we returned for another surgery to put a grommet into the healed eardrum.
At five he hopped out of the bath tub, dried off then did his usual nudie run down the hall to get his pyjamas. Somehow… who knows how… he misjudged the width of the hallway and run smack into the wall. There is still a crack in the plaster. He very nearly knocked himself out – not quite, but he was wobbly afterwards.
We survived a year without major incident.
At seven he caught a vomiting virus and vomited so hard that he split the lining of his stomach. He spent almost four days in hospital on a drip before he finally managed to keep food down.
At eight he fainted on school assembly. Thankfully the other children were packed in really tightly around him, so they managed to catch him.
At nine he was chasing a tennis ball as it rolled along the ground and ran right into a metal sink, splitting his head. Again – towel on top and rush off to the doctor.
At ten he burst an eardrum in the middle of the night. He took quite a few weeks to recover form the resulting infection.
We survived a year without major incident.
At twelve he ran through a jumping castle and managed to fracture his finger.
At thirteen he kicked a girl at soccer and managed to break his foot.
At thirteen he underwent major surgery to repair a severe pectus excavatum. Lots of his ribs were broken in the process.
This week, at fourteen, he went to kick a soccer ball at futsal. It was a long way away so he threw himself into the kick, lost his footing and fell onto his elbow, fracturing his collar bone. His pain threshold is so high that it took thirty-six hours for him to mention that “something wasn’t right and should this big red lump be on my collar bone?”
What can you do?
Would you like him? I’m pretty willing to give him away…provided you have good health insurance.
Thank you so much for your supportive comments to my last post and to my new website. Thanks to those people who have entered the competition and linked back to my other blog. Every one can do that -you don’t have to be a quilter. In this competition I will make a quilt for you. It has been a very busy few weeks. I have been floating on clouds with excitement as every thing came together at the last minute. Pip found a way to bring me back to earth, though… but that is another post.
That’s me. I’m about to burst with excitement. Too many good and exciting things are happening all at once! I have been dancing around my house in a way which has caused my children great embarrassment!
First of all, this week the new edition of Quilters Companion magazine was published… with my quilt ON THE COVER! Clare, the editor, doesn’t tell you if your quilt is giong to be on the cover – she likes it to be a surprise. What a lovely surprise it was. Kellie saw it first and sent me a very cryptic email. I sent my sister immediately to the newsagent beside her work to see if it had arrived in Townsville.
And…ta-da (look hard and you’ll see my name right there on the cover)
It had. Isn’t the magazine just lovely? I made this quilt some time ago, while Philip was in hospital. I may have given you a little teaser, but now you can see the whole thing.
I am so pleased with the photography in the magazine. You can see the quilted feathers. It is just lovely.
But the very best thing about the magazine is this:
an article written about me.
The focus of the article is my secret project. The one I have been working on for so many months. The one I am about to reveal to you. (You should make a ‘doo doo doooo’ sound, like a trumpet announcing something of great importance.)
Imagine That… quilts.
I am so delighted and excited and proud to link from here to my new website and to my second blog – this one is written exclusively to support my website and Imagine That… quilts. I am having a competition to launch my business out into the interweb. I hope you’ll join in and help me test the theory of six degrees of separation.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and dance around a bit more.
I have succumbed to the interview meme that is working its way around blogs at the moment. I asked the very lovely Stomper Girl to provide my five questions. She has asked me some incredibly tough questions. This post has taken me almost an hour and a half to write! I have been very reflective in my answers and I hope that Miss Caroline is pleased with the answers I have given. I have rushed my response because I know she is about to head off for a few beachy days and I’m certain she cannot begin her holiday without knowing the answers to these thorny questions…
What is your favourite ever love song and why?
You hit my soft spot straight away, but OH, I hate to play favourites. I’m a sucker for a love song, basically I love any falling in love moment. There are a lot of lines in songs that come to mind immediately when I think of love songs. It is often just one line that gets me, a single thought of love expressed as poetry in a song. When I hear that one line it takes my breath away, it pulls at my heart and very nearly makes me cry.
Hey There Delilah – a thousand miles seems pretty far, but they’ve got planes and trains and cars, I’d walk to you if I had no other way.
Sew My Name – Know I’m always thinking about you and how you always wear me well, you can’t outgrow something sewn under your skin, so I will always wear you well.
Don’t Worry, Baby – If you knew how much I love you baby, nothing could go wrong with you. What she does to me, when she makes love to me.
First Day of my Life – Yours is the first face that I saw, think I was blind before I met you. (watch this film clip with a tissue)
There She Goes – There she goes, there she goes again, and I just can’t contain this feeling that remains. She calls my name.
You’re All I Have – It’s so clear now that you are all that I have, I have no fear because you are all that I have.
My absolute favourite, the one which is the truth, the one which I can hardly sing for tears, but I manage to… really loudly.
This is the way, I always dreamed it would be, the way that it is, when you are holding me:
I have an arrangement with Fixit that I’m allowed to heartlessly dump him should Billy Bragg, Hugh Grant or David Tennant ever call me. Who is on your list?
Straight up, it is Johnny Depp – he’s been there since the 21 Jump Street era. I am very loyal. He rarely disappoints me. Others come and go – Hamish Blake, Wil Anderson are up there, but I’d dump them for Johnny too.
When I read quilting blogs I’m always struck by the element of supportiveness you have with each other. Coming from dancing, which can get a bit competitive and occasionally bitchy, I find this wonderful. Does it ever get bitchy or competitive in quilt-world? (Digging for dirt here)
Get a group of women in any place and there’ll be bitchiness, it is a genetic guarantee! Having said that, I do find quilting to be very supportive. I very rarely hear of one quilter trying to bring another quilter down. Although it is a competitive industry there is a distinct lack of negative competitiveness. Quilters do have to be careful with their copyright and I am an enormous advocate for people protecting their intellectual property. I would never copy the pattern of another quilter and am quite happy to openly articulate my disapproval to anyone who does.
Besides your gorgeous children, what are your 3 best achievements in life to date?
Three things. This is kind of tough. I don’t know. I am very proud to have been published a number of times in quilting magazines. I have a degree and am well respected in my workplace. I am most proud of the life that I have created with my Pete. We live comfortably and happily. We don’t stress, we don’t worry, we know that whatever happens we will always be fine. We could have lived a more ambitious life – we both work in industries that would have rewarded us for our ambition and talents, but we have the most wonderful balance in our lives. We don’t aspire to material gains, we don’t need for anything, so why would we accept extra stress? I hope we created a life that left our children happy, not because they had ‘stuff’, but because we were all in it together.
You’ve got 4 weeks to get fit, what would you do?
Hmmm. It is just over four weeks until I come to Melbourne to visit you. Is there an underlying message to this question?
If I had four weeks to get fit I would walk and walk and walk. Then stop to stretch and walk again. I’d get a massage or two during that four weeks, just to work out the knots before I start walking again.
Please, everyone leave me a link below to any love songs you think I have forgotten. Tell me that line in the song that gets you. I’ll have a box of tissues here at the ready. I definitely need to hear this from you Stomper.
If you would like to be interviewed and you think you can stand the heat of five questions from me, then you need just ask. I’ll email your questions to you.
Thanks for the questions, Stomper. You were very thoughtful in putting together this interview. I enjoyed it.
While you are eating your breakfast check the radar loops to see if there is any rain imminent.
Next check the simple loops to see where cloud is building across the country.
Now check the analysis chart, comparing it with the simple loops information.
Finally check the forecast for your city – be sure to look at the extended forecast, the detailed forecast and the current conditions.
Repeat this process daily. (except the current conditions, this can be checked hourly if desired)
I wrote this post a few days ago, so all of the images are old. We are now in the shadow of a cyclone which is moving through the Gulf of Carpentaria and it is very rainy. Due to the influence of the cyclone on our weather I also have to check the current tropical cyclones page.
Peppermint Patcher 