So this week my fairly expensive iron decided that since 18 months had passed since its purchase it was probably about time for it to leave for the great Ironing Board in the sky. Never mind that it had spent most of that time lounging around in the laundry cupboard, sipping Pina Coladas or laughing at my expense or doing whatever mostly-unemployed appliances do.

I bought a fairly cheap iron to take its place. I’m not going to explain why. It’s simple economics.

There is always a lot of discussion around the blogosphere about whether people prefer to be buried or cremated. Well, we decided that sucker should be rudely dissected and its innards used to make an insubstantial spray gun. And then its remains should be tossed unceremoniously into a landfill.

That will teach it.

This Mothers Day I wished for flowers, plants for the garden, a gourmet meal, and lots of sparkly jewels.

And I got…

Flowers from The Wictor:

Actually I got nothing. He made himself this card for Mother’s Day and a lovely flower brooch too. He was so proud of his artwork he kept repeating “The Wictor colored it in!”. And then he refused to hand them over. So, when he wasn’t looking, I stole it.

Here’ s the inside:

Obviously, he knows me well.

Moving on.

Plants from Baby Sister:

Baby Sister made some Mother’s Day gifts at school too. It all came home on Friday with strict instructions not to open anything until Sunday. But I could see the little pea plant sticking out of the paper bag and although I totally respect my childrens’ wishes I did feel obliged to open it and give it just a few drops of water. If nobody saw me doing it, it didn’t happen, right?

I also got a baby food jar of colored sand and a hand print from Baby Sister, and she accompanied her father to the supermarket to purchase

A Gourmet Meal from The Daddy:

Some of my favorite things in the world: Licorice Allsorts, Birds custard powder and a bottle of wine.

Baby Sister chose the wine, for obvious reasons.

And last but not least:

A Very Rare Diamond from the T-Bot:

The T-Bot felt left out so he “bought” something from Baby Sister’s “Store”. She assured me it was “velly velly expensive” but she loves the T-Bot a lot so she gave it to him for free.

Awwww. Somebody loves me.

Who would have guessed that we don’t really celebrate Mother’s Day at our house? Bet none of you lot were so spoiled!

I’m sure most Dads would do anything for their daughter, but how many of them would do this?

One Friday a few weeks back, inspired by that TV commercial where the businessman goes away, taking his daughter’s stuffed animal with him to photograph in different places  (I think - I can’t even remember the damn thing to be honest - and it is 12.30am - but I am assured this is the gist of it), Baby Sister begged her Daddy to take Butterfly on a photoshoot in Houston.

This is Butterfly.

To be more precise, this is Butterfly sitting on the table of a restaurant during The Daddy’s lunch hour.

I cropped The Daddy’s Boss out of the picture.

These are the extremes to which The Daddy will go for his daughter.

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Here is The Daddy in the restaurant holding Butterfly.

Yes, he does look a little embarrassed.

Even I would have looked a little embarrassed. And I look good in pink.

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Cut to Butterfly on the bridge The Daddy walks over to get from his carpark to work.

He carried Butterfly for 10 minutes along some very public sidewalks. Now that is true dedication for you. I can’t remember what that businessman in the commercial had, but I am pretty damn sure it was not a pink poodle.

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And now, some local interest shots for the folks back home. Butterfly on the bridge. See the lamp in the background?

Here’s that same lamp, on Tuesday (when school was cancelled and half the city stayed home, but The Daddy took his little car and aquaglided in to work):

Yeah, Houston floods. Just a little.

Uncool: I realised I have forgotten my 7 times table.

Cool: I have a calculator on my laptop and one on my phone. Plus ten fingers to count on if I really get stuck.

Uncool: At a meetup of moms in the park, Mom1 started yelling at the Mom2, in front of all the other moms and our children, for a decision she had made, one which didn’t actually affect her at all, using words like “you can’t do that!” and “that’s disgusting!”. (For the record, disgusting didn’t actually have anything to do with the issue).

Uncool: Although I thought Mom1’s behavior was atrocious and her stance ridiculous,  and I totally sided with Mom2, I didn’t speak up in public. I didn’t do this because I had just been through a 10 minute grilling by Mom2 which involved phrases like “if he doesn’t go back to school now he will fall so far behind he will never be able to go back” and “he should be getting specialist help”. I was feeling rather bitter and unhelpful.

Uncool: Mom3 managed to add her voice wherever it would be the most unconstructive. As in helping criticize Mom 2 and me.

Cool: All this made me take stock of my situation and have some constructive talks with The Daddy, and I emerged from the process realizing that I am totally satisfied with the decisions we have made and the way we live our life, and am in fact the happiest and most fulfilled I have ever been. So there is absolutely no reason to look outside the family for any guidance.

Cool: It might be fun to find myself some new friends.

Cool: On Friday afternoon The Daddy came home early and I managed to get to the hairdressers.

Uncool: I think she gave me a Rachel.

Cool: At least I don’t have so much hair now. And it will eventually grow out.

Cool: I went to a friend’s art exhibition on Friday and saw lots of awesome new canvases.

Uncool: I met a friend of a friend who is no longer a friend because she is so apparently so appalled by homeschooling. She was desperate to get away and used the excuse “I just have to …um… see the paintings in the other room”.

Cool: I then found lots of very interesting people to talk to while she seemed to be drifting around the room alone. (Insert very immature raspberry here and maybe a casual flip of the bird, or as we Antipodeans would do, The Fingers.)

Uncool: On Sunday the T-Bot’s Sunday sport was cancelled and nobody bothered to tell us.  We were the only ones to turn up with 60lbs of gear to find the field empty.

Cool: So we went as a family to the park instead. We took the bikes and the T-Bot finally mastered the art of 2 wheeled cycling (I know, I know, it has taken a while. We are not big on cycling). He was so determined to do it and so proud of himself afterward.

Cool: Then we went for a walk and found frogspawn. The children were captivated by our stories of raising tadpoles when we were little.

Uncool: The frogspawn disappeared and we realized it was probably just bubbles of pollution.

Cool: We went to get ice cream and sat in the sun and everybody was happy.

My two eldest looked to be trapped in some kind of net box ….

And they didn’t seem the least bit concerned by the situation.

Yesterday was Baby Sister’s birthday. I learned a hard lesson last year, when I had the whole party organized in 20 minute segments, only to have half the little girls lock themselves away in an upstairs bedroom with a box of Barbies and refuse to come out. This year we stuck to a few crafts, some cake, a pinata … and of course a Bouncy Castle:

Yes, it really was that big. The lady who delivered and set it up actually suggested - in all seriousness - that next time we ask to keep it overnight. So that we could camp out in it.  America continues to amaze me.

So plenty of room for all the kids to jump, although all of them didn’t end up in it at once, because half of them were upstairs playing Barbie.

Speaking of which, the haul this year was almost exclusively Barbie. We are overflowing with them already, and every one is a favorite. Forget Barbie’s Dream House/Real House/My House. I think we are headed for Barbie Sorority House. Especially with the addition of Totally Stylin Tattoos Barbie. Yes, we got one of those and in case you were wondering about all the hype, she does come with a “tattoo gun” stamper which makes a scarily realistic noise. It makes me a little uncomfortable but to the kids it’s just another, less messy way of applying some pretty cute and inoffensive temporary tattoos.

They don’t seem as interested in applying the mini tattoo stickers to Barbie.

While I am just itching to give her a tramp stamp. Because I am evil like that and care nothing for my childrens’ morals

So, just like that Baby Sister turns 5. I took her to buy her main present yesterday. We bought her a very expensive new bike. I say very expensive because at the rate we currently ride (about 10 times a year), if it lasts her 2 years it will have cost more than $10 a ride. But my hand was forced. I started off by buying her a (what else?) Barbie bike, which was the only toy store bike I could find which had relatively good reviews. And I wanted to like it. It is lightweight and has cool styling. However, its main feature is that none of the parts fit together properly. I discovered this after several frustrating hours, one trip back to the store for a bike center employee to look at me condescendingly and tighten a few screws, and the hassle of the front brake falling apart in my hand as I tried to adjust it for the umpteenth time. The last straw.

At which point The Daddy and I discussed things and decided that our children need to ride a lot more. You need to get me my money’s worth, young woman!

…

PS I know these birthday posts are supposed to be all sentimental and full of poetry about how I remember her soft baby head and baby toes and it seems just like yesterday - but honestly? I was too sleep deprived. Don’t remember a thing. She just kind of lay there and went gaa and waa a lot.

Now that she is 5 she doesn’t do that, so much. But dammit, we do need to find a storage solution for all those Barbies.

Not some new band totally rocking the underground music scene (because I would know all about that! Hah!).

This was the photo I took of my children this afternoon after everybody else remembered St Patrick’s Day for us.

Notice that unlike 99.9% of children at Baby Sister’s preschool this morning, none of them are wearing green. However, her  teacher was kind enough to color her hair, right before she banned her from the class St Patrick’s Day party for talking too much at naptime (grrr, but that’s a topic for another post). The Post Office had stocked up on green lollipops too, nice big ones which resulted in satisfyingly green tongues.

For my part, however, yet again I FAIL! Another example: this afternoon we made a cake, and right after I put the red food coloring into the icing, I realized “Oh! Whoops! Wrong color!”.

Ironic, when you consider the fact that had the kids’ great, great, great (not sure how many greats) grandfather not found it necessary to change his identity to avoid the forces of the law, their surname would have been Finucan.

In related news, this morning The Daddy woke me up at some totally unreasonable hour as he was leaving for work, to inform me that one of the drawers in the master bathroom was full of water. As it turned out to be a closed drawer situated nowhere near any pipes this can only be the work of the Little People.

The Leprechauns. I have been dismissive of them. They are surely showing their displeasure.

(Update: It wasn’t Finucan. We are not quite sure what it was but I got the wrong side of the family. The saintly side. My apologies to all concerned…)

My life has been mysteriously following the same path as Marinka’s recently.

Well, actually … NO.

But I did get a cat!

It was all planned for a few weeks ago, and then there were complications. But finally, last week, the T-Bot, Wictor and I went in to pick up Fiji.

I happen to love black cats and did you know they are eight times more likely to be euthanized than other cats? I picked him up and that afternoon the shelter replaced his picture on their website with three more black cats.

So, he is settling in surprisingly well, especially considering the fact that for the first two days, whenever he ventured out from his hidey-hole under our bed he was greeted with toddler and pre-schooler squeals of delight, which of course sent him scuttling right back under there.

And, although he had hardly been out of his 4 ft square cage since October, he is playful, cuddly and curious. He is sitting purring under my desk right now.

And his name? Well, he came from the shelter called Fuji. And for want of further inspiration we called him that until -duh- it occurred to us that Fuji sounds exactly like Fugee. Lightbulb moment! He hadn’t been named after an apple after all! By then we couldn’t think of anything else to call him that wasn’t obvious, pretentious or difficult to pronounce. So we just changed a vowel. That way when the kids get confused we can just pretend it was a slip of the tongue. Or many slips of the tongue. Or that they all have terrible diction. Oh, wait a minute, they do.

Kind of in the same way Baby Sister will present some elaborate and fanciful excuse for a wrongdoing after the fact,  we’ll just forget that we have never even been to Fiji, and it that doesn’t actually look like this, and pretend that this is why we named him:

We’ll also try and forget that I don’t even really like this painting.

(*Yes, Fiji is a budget vacation destination - if you live in New Zealand. )

Because I am not at all a new feminist and because I believe a woman’s place is in the home wrestling with dust bunnies*, this is what my daughter will be getting for her birthday this year:

That way she can get in lots of practice and won’t even notice when we substitute the real thing.

Click through the picture and read the blurb on this one! It made me laugh. A vacuum cleaner for every class! Classy!

*BTW, we don’t have dust bunnies in our house. We have dust dragons.

(Scene: In the car coming back from somewhere …)

Baby Sister: Mommy, when I grow up I am going to be a superstar!

T-Bot: Hmmm….. Daddy, what’s your job?

The Daddy: I’m a software engineer.

T-Bot: And Mommy, do you have a job? What’s your job?

The Mommy: You know I have a store. And I look after you people. I have lots of jobs.

T-Bot: Oh… You know, if you don’t like your job you could become a policewoman. Or a pizza seller. Those are natural jobs. Your job is not a real job and neither is Daddy’s.

The Wictor: And the mail carrier!

The Mommy: Why isn’t a store owner real? Does everybody have to be a policewoman or a pizza seller?

Baby Sister: How about being a superstar? T-Bot, superstars sing in rock bands! How about that?

T-Bot: How about a bus driver?

The Mommy: Aren’t computer jobs real jobs?

T-Bot: OK, how about someone who works at Honda?

*********************************************************************

And on that note, I would like to show you where The Daddy’s world and my world meet. This is the Era Browser, a whole new way of shopping on Century Finds. It was originally conceived as a showcase of what can be achieved using Microsoft’s recently released Silverlight plugin, but as it happens it’s also a pretty nifty way of browsing my store. Although this first edition won’t be replacing my traditional store just yet, I really see this kind of interface as the future of internet shopping.

So, if you are a geek at heart and/or don’t mind downloading another browser plugin, you can experience the real thing here. Otherwise, I have a few more screen shots over at the Century Finds Blog which should satisfy your curiosity.

You know, seeing as you asked

This morning we are tracking Santa on Google Earth!

We celebrate the Hallmark Santa. He is a jolly, fat man living at the North Pole with his Magic Elves, who just loves to give out toys to children. He is not affiliated with any religion, which is why he is happy to come down our chimney 

Although I wish The Daddy had told me before last night that at our house Santa only brings the presents. For the last 2 weeks I have been telling my kids that Santa’s Magic Elves make the presents. They make them exactly the same as in the store. Because they are magic Elves.

I know, I know. Hopefully they will forget by next year and then we can get our stories straight.