15 Things I have learnt this week

Being the lazy writer that I am and having no clue what topic to write about, I figure I can always go back to a tried and true format. Thanks to twitter my inner monologue only speaks in 140 character bursts so why fight it. Here's the stuff I should probably already know but didn't before this week.

1. No matter how much you try to plan your day, 15 minutes before you are due to leave to go somewhere, one of your children will fall asleep. It doesn't matter how old they are or how much sleep they have had in the last week. This will happen. Expect it.
2. If you mop your floors, within 24 hours straight cordial will be dropped on them. Even in houses like mine where cordial is no longer purchased this still happens. It's the universes way of saying 'you missed a spot'. 
3. You can have a huge backyard and all the outdoor play equipment a Toys-r-us catalogue can push on you but the best place for a family cricket match will always be the living room, according to all card carrying members of you household. Learn the phone number for O'Brien's Glass Replacement or put it in your speed dial.
4. Teenage boys can be awfully creative with their little sister's Barbie dolls if left alone with them for just minutes. These 'displays' will just confirm your suspicions that he was downloading porn in his bedroom all along. No need for that awkward conversation to take place.
5. You might think you have come up with THE best chocolate hiding spot in the house but those pesky teenagers will always sniff it out. You will only discover this when you are either frothing at the mouth with raging hormones or there is a torrential storm hitting your house and your hair is freshly blow waved.
6. Torrential storms ONLY hit your house when you have freshly blow waved your hair.
7. No matter how much you are repulsed by the thought, it is possible that your husband will open a beer at 9am when on holidays just because your shot him your best 'you have got to be fucking kidding me' look. Pick your battles. Your day will certainly end better than his.
8. Cocktail frankfurts should never, under any circumstance, be put in a Waldorf Salad. DID YOU HEAR THAT MOTHER IN LAW?
9. Having a hot podiatrist is a complete waste of an interaction with a hot person. They're looking at your feet for God's sake and you're not there because you're a foot model.
10. The size of luggage required for a person to go on a holiday is in no way relevant to their size. In fact, the smaller you are, the more you need. It is written.
11. No matter how many beautiful, colour coordinated outfits you buy for your daughter, she will always choose the most stained, stretched, ugly, misshapen, uncoordinated outfit she can get her hands on. Then she will be photographed for a newspaper article or kinder graduations photos. And people WILL judge you.
12. Your semi verbal autistic child will always manage to repeat any swear word you say with some little inflection which lets everyone know just who taught him that little gem. He may not speak all day but stub your toe on a rock and call it a 'son-of-a-mother-fucking-try-hard-lump-of-ugly-granite' and you can be sure he will find his tongue.
13. People only post the ugliest of photos of you on Facebook. You will always be taking a bite out of a burger, swigging a drink from the bottle or mid sneeze. Then they tag you.
14. Good photos of you were last taken in the late 80's. Even the ones with that perm you thought was hot but really wasn't are better than anything taken since.
15. All of this crap will pale into insignificance when your phone rings and your 7 year old ASD child picks it up and says 'Hello, Fletcher speaking.'

Have a great weekend guys. I know I will now.

12 things I discovered this weekend.

So it's been an interesting weekend in the house of the barely sane. We really didn't do a lot but I learnt many things. I thought I'd share some of them with you.

1. When you drive your husband's car and go to pinch $1 from his console to go through the Macca's drive thru, only to find the speeding fine he has hidden in there, you no longer need to feel guilty about pinching said $1. Just imagine a $1 coin in your left hand and the $282 you are about to hand over to Civic Compliance in your right. Guilt instantly evaporates.
2. If you ask your 4yo if she knows just how beautiful she is enough times, eventually she will sigh and just say 'yeah'.
3. If over the course of one weekend your 4yo asks to no longer be referred to by the beautiful name you agonised over for months but by the names Dora, Glassiola, Sweetheart, Lola or Princess Holly, she is not suffering from multiple personality disorder, she just watches too many cartoons.
4. I confirmed that I will always despise unpacking groceries but it can be made bearable if I also buy a couple of Rekorderlig Strawberry and Lime ciders along with the broccoli and toilet paper.   
5. It is possible for me to overreact when my Facebook friends keep hitting 'like' on the RIP Morgan Freeman page when the man IS NOT DEAD! No, I take that back. It is not an overreaction when all they had to do was Google 'Morgan Freeman dead' and they'd find it is a hoax. Seriously people, University of Google. You can learn a lot.
6. If you get very fashionable FCUK glasses and your 16 yo is dyslexic, he is probably gonna question what the hell you're wearing. And the word he uses may not be 'hell'.
7. Just because you have a 12 cup coffee pot and happen to be the only person in the house who sets it up each night, you're the only person who empties the old grounds and cleans to pot each day, you a not guaranteed any more than 1 cup from that pot. And really, even that 1 should not be taken for granted. It's the quick and the dead here.
8. I learnt that if you cook dinner while wearing a scarf there is a significant chance you will catch fire. Don't test this theory at home people, just take my word for it.
9. I also learnt that if you set yourself on fire cooking dinner you may need to change your underwear shortly after.
10. I learnt that if the guy who lives at your place decides to teach your children how to play poker on his iPhone you should not be concerned about early onset gambling addiction. As a glass half full kinda gal, you should look forward to a possible future in card counting for at least 1 of them. Be proud.
11. If your 16 yo son rings you from school and asks if you'll look for the wallet he is pretty sure he left at home, under so circumstances should you look in it after finding it. Just accept your baby is gone.
12. And finally, if the guy who lives at your place declares to the world that he's going to participate in Tough Mudder next year, YOU will be the one reaping the rewards. 

Bored. Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored.

I'm bored.

It's one of those very rare moments when all of my family are home and awake and I have a serious case of the CBF's. (for the uninitiated, that stands for can't be f.....! ) There are a gazillion things I could or should be doing but none of them seem even remotely interesting enough to inspire me. I'm finding myself sitting here refreshing my Facebook and Twitter pages, praying that someone, somewhere is doing something so I might be able to comment or at least covertly observe (AKA stalk) them doing it and live vicariously, just for a moment, through them. But as I look at the top of my screen, there are no magical little numbers on the tabs letting me know that the rest of the world is not as bored as I am. So it seems the rest of the world either IS as bored as I am or they are so busy doing something so exciting or interesting that they have *gasp* forgotten to tell me via social media. Heaven help me, I might even have to wait till the phone rings and speak to someone to see how they're going and what they're up to.

Or, I hate to even suggest it but I might have to make the effort see someone IN PERSON.

Though if I think about it, that's not likely to happen because I am that person that might always be at every party or social gathering but only because someone rang me and invited me, not because I rang them and said 'hey, been a while, lets blah blah blah'. The odd thing is that it's the first Saturday night in forever that we have had no plans and usually I would love the veg night after so many weeks in a row of going out but I think I have gotten used to my dance card being full.

OOH hang on, a number 2 in brackets just appeared on the Facebook tab, must go check, be right back....

(8 seconds later...)

Okay friends, I appreciate when you 'like' my fb updates but if you don't comment there is still nothing for me to do. *big sigh* Right, where was I? Oh....

So I have a few choices. The first being accept my boredom and learn to deal with it. The problem with this option is that I don't really like being bored. My second option is that I do something. Hmmm. What to do...what to do... The book I'm  reading at the moment is bordering on shite, I refuse to do housework when everyone else in the house is bludging, doing almost any form of exercise means going outside and it's bloody cold outside and I (super-soft-cock-who-lives-in-Melbourne) don't like the cold, my kids have their heads buried in their own things (ipads, laptops and 30 Peppa Pig episodes on Tivo) and the guy who lives at my place has some game of rugby on the telly which means all he hears when I speak is some strange form of annoying feminine white noise.

Or I could just get a drink and keep on typing...

What would you do?

Cheers bloggers!