By Saturday morning Baby Sister had thankfully recovered from her mysterious vomiting illness, and we were able to go out and have ourselves some family fun, courtesy of The Daddy’s office. 

But for me the fun only lasted until 1am, when The Wictor woke me up from a very brief nap to signal that he had been sick all over his bed. Was not a sight for tired eyes. Was not pretty, especially since it was obviously his second vomiting episode of the night and it seemed he had slept in the first.  A few keywords: caked, hair, pasta, grapes. I hope that is not TMI. I will leave the rest to your imagination. 

So Sunday was an At Home Day, which meant The Wictor clinging to me like a baby monkey while his big brother and sister went stir-crazy. 

By 6pm, when The Daddy put a plate of the most delicious beef stew I have ever tasted in front of me (I would give you the recipe but he is a throw it in the pot at random kind of a cook) all I could think was that it looked really soft and could I lay my head in it? I may even have voiced this thought and it may have been The Daddy who convinced me not to do it, but I don’t quite remember. I was too tired. 

So I was happy to see that The Wictor appeared to be more or less himself this morning. I felt slightly more awake too. The morning progressed, as mornings do. And then the call came from the school. Could I please come and fetch the T-Bot… 

Last weekend we made a trip to Petsmart to buy goldfish.

We didn’t come home with goldfish, we came home with Bettas. I am always wary of these big box stores, where you generally find uninspired and/or young staff who might direct you where to go for what you asked for, but heaven forbid you actually want any advice. 

This time was different. The first staff member we met was young, but she immediately told us what we didn’t want to hear: 

“If you get a goldfish you will need a 12 gallon tank. For one”.

“Then you’ll need to set it up 2 days in advance before you put the fish in it”. 

Apparently this is why goldfish are getting flushed down toilets across the country. Not welcome news for two children who have grown up reading books and watching TV programmes featuring goldfish in minute bowls, and who were looking forward to taking home their own in a little plastic bag. 

Thankfully this store clerk didn’t stop there. She pointed us towards the bettas. And the little plastic aquariums - they need one each but they don’t need to be big and they don’t need heating or aeration - then loaded us up with the best food and water conditioning drops that money can buy. She was good at her job. She had us buying and she had us leaving the store with what we wanted - a fish each for Baby Sister and the T-Bot, in individual plastic tubs. 

Meet Charlie: 

and Goldie: 

A week later, they are still a source of excitement and fascination to the whole family. Charlie is a boy (hence the beautiful plumage). He likes to puff himself up. He is not a big eater. He just nibbles his food and then hides behind his plastic plant. Goldie is a girl. She likes to gulp! She isn’t as impressive but she can sure swim fast. 

Best of all, you can feed them, a little bit, one to three times a day (no fighting with the kids about overfeeding), and clean their tank out once a week. And that is it. It doesn’t seem complicated and they hopefully won’t have an ultra-short lifespan, like other pets we have had.

I don’t know why I had never heard of these little fish, but I sure am enjoying taking care of them.  

Walking through the mall from the shoe store:

“Mommy, my shoes hurt”.

And as we changed her back into her scuffed old princess sneakers,

“Mommy, I am going to call these new shoes my Hurt-Hurt Shoes”.

… No, that is not all. Friday did not stop there. Fate was truly smiling on me that day!

Around one o’clock, having just arrived home and found more suitable attire for Baby Sister (if I remember well, this Little Mermaid dress) I received - and failed to answer - four calls on my cellphone while trying to convince The Wictor that horizontal was the best way to fall asleep in a comfy comfy bed (oh so comfy! Look! Mommy’s sleeping!). One call was from the school, and three calls were from The Daddy to let me know that the school was calling. Turned out Friday was early closing. I should have been in that car line at 12.30. 

That blank page in my agenda? A total lie. By 1.15 I had all three children at home.

One who was sick but wasn’t and wanted to watch TV while I dressed and undressed her Barbies to her whims.

One who would usually have been napping but wasn’t and spent the afternoon running around getting progressively more cranky.

And one who would normally have been at school but wasn’t and came to me with endless requests for boxes and tape and balloons and string and please cut a hole here in the top of my robot/box and can I put water in it because it’s an underwater world now and well then which box can I have to put water in and can I cut a hole in it? No, right here in the kitchen. No the water won’t fall out, it won’t Mommy, I wanna stay in the kitchen! Oh OK, I’ll go sulk in the yard. 

(Oh and for the record, he wasn’t at all traumatised at being forgotten. He appears to have talked the ears off the lady in the office, until she gave him a bulldog clip so that he could pretend it was a robot). 

So this is how I came to be blowing eggs - lots of them - at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. I remember my mother blowing eggs for me and this was the first time I had attempted it with my own brood (If you have never blown an egg and would like to try it, instructions can be found all over the web including here. There are more high tech ways to do it but lacking syringes and dremel whatsits I just stuck to the tried and true). 

By the time The Daddy arrived I was on the verge of hyperventilation, but we had a satisfying collection of colored eggs, painted eggs, crayoned eggs … and lots and lots of egg shells in the trash, thrown by the T-Bot against the concrete “to let the baby dinosaurs out”.  

And we were all, for a few moments, the picture of domestic bliss. 

At three o’clock The Daddy called.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine”, he replied. Then a pause.

“Go on then”, I said cheerily, “ask me how I am!”

“Um…” he said, “I can hear the screaming.”

When I woke up Friday morning it was going to be my cruisy day. It was going to be my lazy day. It was going to be my day, after weeks of bouncing from one thing to another like a demented Tigger. The Friday page of my little red agenda was blissfully, beautifully bare.

Then Baby Sister threw up all over the breakfast table.

So I reluctantly allowed her to stay home from pre-school, because she had, after all, thrown up, although the thought remained in the back of my mind - no in the front of my mind, there in big red letters behind my eyeballs - that it was all just a cunning ruse to avoid school.

And at first she proved me right. She was happy during the kindergarten run, cheery when we got home and she was allowed to watch PBS Kids, and she did an admirable impression of the Cheshire Cat when it got to 10 am and I decided that if my day was going to be monopolized then it may as well be monopolized at the mall. And not just at the local exburban mall but at the fancy pants mall in “town” (as we like to call those suburbs slightly closer in).

I needed to buy her some new shoes anyway so my excuse for the day was “shoes”.

On the way through the mall, I grabbed a few cheap t-shirts and hurriedly swiped my card (BTW I always lose the receipts, so if they don’t fit I will be wearing them anyway). I had managed to shop for myself! Things were looking up!

But something started to go slightly wrong in the shoe store, right around the second pair of shoes. Baby Sister suddenly, unfathomably, began to do a very good impression of an Alzheimers patient. Every time she was asked to walk around and feel if they were comfortable she would stare into space, make a completely unrelated comment, or wander vacantly out of the store. I didn’t help matters at all by insisting she try on umpteen pairs, because they had a “get the second pair half price” sale on and I was determined to save $20 even if it meant that do accomplish this goal I would have to hand over $20 more than I had planned. After all, this was the good mall, and the last time I found the time to set foot in the place was November of 2007. No joke. I was a woman on a mission.

So finally we walked out of there with two pairs of new shoes.

… Unfortunately, there is more.

The Wictor was hungry, and we were right in front of McDonalds. Which is where I got my just desserts. For, as the food arrived, Baby Sister threw up all over the table and herself.

The really really strange thing is, this task accomplished, she perked up, and insisted on eating her Happy Meal.  I had peeled off her sodden t-shirt and jeans and she walked out of McDonalds proudly attired in one of my new purchases, which I explained to her was “just like a dress”.

Expect it wasn’t. And as we walked the length of the mall back to the car, heads held high, every single person we passed stared.

I have just been distracted. But it’s very important. 

I haven’t put the T-Bot’s story out there and maybe I never will. But I will just say that we were lucky, we went here first. Which lead us to here. And therefore didn’t have to deal with any of the sh*t that some of these people have had to deal with. 

This is not an interesting post (unless you have a late talker, in which case you might want to follow the links), but in an age when the back of my cereal box tells me and the world that if my child is not talking he must be autistic, I feel very strongly that this information needs to get out to as many people as possible. Not because I have anything against autistic people, but because so many children are getting misdiagnosed. Misdiagnosis leads to the wrong treatment. The wrong treatment gets us nowhere. 

Oh, and if you still feel like reading, go back to the Pumpkin Shell, and read again about Jack. It’s a story not 100% dissimilar to ours, and she writes it better than I ever could. 

We are a bilingual family. Less and less a bilingual family as the older children spend more time at school and the english language becomes more and more dominant. But still bilingual enough. 

I hope bilingual enough that they will retain at least their understanding of the french language, even if they have some trouble speaking it. Bilingual enough so that when they reach the age where they realise that, hey, another language could be interesting, or fun, or (gasp!) useful, they will have no trouble picking up where they left off.

I hope that this will happen sooner rather than later, and in the meantime I do what I can, and am more or less at peace as I sit witness to the gradual decline. 

But this week I realised with a jolt that I also have a problem. I hardly ever speak french with adults any more. I am getting out of practice. Not because there aren’t like a gazillion French people in this city but more because the friends I have haven’t been chosen according to their nationality. And I have been busy with other things. I have sort of dropped the ball in that respect.

Then yesterday, even worse, my one good French friend dropped in and while excitedly explaining something to me came out with this sentence: 

“Un oiseau, qui flappait des wings”

And I knew I was lost.

…

But No! Here comes Prince The Daddy on his White Steed, laptop balanced precariously! 

(There is an awful lot of princess imagery going on in our house right now) 

I am saved! I swoon in his arms as he introduces me to France 24 . 

They are not paying me to say this (I wish they were paying me to say this), but I am hooked. I am a click-click-click kind of a gal and get really bored waiting for news sites to respond. But this one is blazingly fast and has none of those annoying pop-up ads. Just text and video news, plain and simple. In perfect english too, for anyone who is interested. 

Now they just need to start me up a childrens’ channel. 

I feel the need to apologise again for the state of this blog. Someday, I promise you, it will be… at least …um…  I would hope fairly attractive.  

The Daddy - who was supposed to take care of all prettifications - has been very very busy at work with a project which has a two week deadline but involves re-writing the web from scratch… or something. I am not too sure because 5 minutes into his detailed explanation I sort of… well… to be totally honest I tuned out. There. I said it! I. Stopped. Listening.

I promise you it was only because I was scared my head might explode and I might become a different person. Forever. 

Also the reason why, when he began to explain to me how I, myself, could beautify my blog, I found myself mentally putting my fingers in my ears while chanting a virtual La-la-la-la-la.

Silly really. I used to be able to do all that stuff. Second nature. Along with a lot of other unrelated stuff which I have also forgotten. 

But it’s all gone now. Because I am the Queen of the Brain Dump. If I need it I can learn it but if I don’t I dump it. Two weeks maximum and it’s gone. Poof! Disappeared into thin air, as if it never was.

I like to call it Selective Retention. You may call it just a Lazy Brain. I maintain that it is just Hugely Efficient. No junk in this brain! 

But that really doesn’t help me because after a few days of waiting, waiting, waiting and no Prince Charming in sight,  I relented and decided to try to work it all out, to do at least some of the work myself.

But …

oh …

so difficult…

Why do they have to make it so complicated?

Groan. What goes where?

The Daddy could do this in three strokes of the mouse or probably even just by muttering Abracadabra.

Damn… 

OK. I admit it. Lazy Brain.  But I am sure, somehow, sometime I will work it out.

In the meantime … really sorry about the Fugly Blog. 

“Daddy uses his liddle eye pooter* to work the big eye pooters.  Daddy needs his liddle eye pooter to tell the big eye pooters what to do. That’s what he does in town. ”

*She can say computer, she just chooses not to. If nothing else, she knows how to work the cute factor. 

Left: The Mommy.   Right: Chewbacca (photo credit USPS)

Kindergarten had a student holiday on Friday so we had extra time before the preschool run. The T-Bot used it to style Mommy’s hair. 

He lovingly combed every tress of my long, brown, frizzy hair into place, stood back to check out his handiwork, then exclaimed admiringly:

“Mommy, you look like Chewbacca“

Time to get a haircut…