CONSPIRACY THEORIES, CRAWLING & OPENING RESTAURANTS

Today we are taking our builder through the restaurant space we are considering taking over which is all sorts of exciting and grown up and serious and small-business-like, but we are also taking Q with us which is all sorts of stupid.

I’ve mentioned before my child’s unwillingness to sit placidly in her chariot and be pushed around while all her favourite people walk free around her.

Why can’t I explore and follow my whimsy? Must I be subjected to following yours instead?

You can’t walk yet Q, which means that some surfaces – like restaurant kitchen floors – are not ideal for you to go crawling about on.

But mother, I don’t put my knees down, there is no danger I’ll wear out my clothes.

True daughter dear, but I’m not sure it’s all that clean.

If you don’t let me out, I’ll kick and flail and scream and yell my frustration until you do. And it should be well established by now that my stamina and threshold are far greater than yours.

Also true my darling child, I shall of course grant your request.

I know this is what will happen today, and this should also explain to well-meaning friends why cafes and restaurants are no-go zones for Q until she’s approximately ten.

The upside to this excursion is that we’re taking a posse with us.

One brother who finds himself at loose ends today is tagging along, and another brother and his girl and her brother are going to have a snoop too. (She’s heading OS today, so my brother has used it as an excuse to make a few well timed phone calls, answer a couple of key emails but actually take the entire day off work).

Work smarter not harder sis, he’s always telling me when he knocks off at 1pm.

The builder is a mate of our dad’s and we’ve grown up with him renovating our laundry and roping you into holding the hammer so you’re a captive audience to his many conspiracy theories.

Seriously, he should be on talk-back radio. Although, giving his ideas a public forum could be very dangerous indeed.

So off go Gregory and I, about to undertake the biggest professional decision of our lives (I consider packing my bags and moving to NYC to perform, a mere dip of the toe into the pool of big decisions in comparison to opening our own restaurant) with two brothers, one pseudo sister-in-law, one pseudo sister-in-law’s brother, one non-compliant child, one mad builder and an unfailing sense of optimism.

What could possibly go wrong?

CELEBRATING DYSLEXIA, AUTISM, HAEMORRHAGING AND EPISIOTOMIES.

In honour of Q’s 9-month anniversary, I’ve decided to keep the celebrations going and celebrate some of the crazy, odd, rude, weird and funny things people have said to me during the growing, delivery and earth-dwelling moments of the divine Miss Q.

In no particular order…

‘Are you a natural redhead?’ a shoe saleswoman says to me when I’m 39 weeks pregnant and decided I really needed to buy a new pair of shoes.

‘Yeah, I’m way too lazy to dye it,’ I reply, I get this question reasonably often.

‘You’d better watch out then. Redheads don’t clot well. Be careful you don’t haemorrhage to death.’

I sure don’t get that answer all the time.

‘If you want to do everything you can to avoid a miscarriage,’ says the doctor I saw for the first and last time after this comment, ‘avoid spicy food and running.’

I had already run 60k’s that week.

By the way, there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the theory that exercise can induce a miscarriage.

So there.

‘You’re definitely carrying a boy.’

WRONG WRONG WRONG world. 

The only person who was right was the old bloke who works at the funeral parlour on the corner.

‘Oh no, you won’t feel an episiotomy,’ says the midwife who took us through our antenatal classes, ‘they do it at the height of a contraction.’

Excellent.

Contractions hurt more than having my clacker snipped without anaesthetic.

Is there any way out of this?

‘It looks like you got at yourself with a whipper snipper,’ my husband proclaims when he sees the home-job bikini wax I performed on myself mid pregnancy, when I couldn’t see the offending area.

‘Miso soup is excellent for labouring women.’

No idea why. I think the midwife that told us that just likes it.

‘Try some nipple tweaking and rigorous sex,’ my godmother alarmingly informs me during my final weeks, which were full of brutal pre-labour, ‘that ought to bring this baby on.’

It didn’t.

Nor did running ten k’s.

My girl came when she was good and ready, but when she came, boy did she come. See point below.

‘Is this normal?’ Gregory mouths to the midwife halfway through our very fast labour.

‘No,’ she mouths back, ‘but she’s doing an excellent job.’

‘Eat an egg a day and the baby will slip right out of you.’

Boy am I glad I didn’t do this. She would have flown out.

‘Oh, your daughter likes to get around naked,’ a mother comments to me when Q was rudee-nudee in the middle of last year’s sweltering summer. ‘Careful, not liking clothing is one of the first signs of autism.’

‘Wack a cabbage leaf inside your maternity bra to prevent mastitis.’

Enough said.

‘Hmmmmm,’ a concerned child worker said to me a while ago, ‘you really want to encourage Q to crawl before she walks. If she doesn’t she may be dyslexic.’

And my most recent favourite…

‘Isn’t it nice you had a daughter,’ an old lady says to me at the swimming pool last week. ‘You’ll have your daughter for the rest of your life. But not your sons. Daughters-in-law are like the war, they take your sons away.’

Happy 9 months Q.

Without you, I never would have known any of this.

And then where would I be?

CRAWLING, DISTRACTION QUILTS AND HOW I SUPERGLUED MY WEDDING RING

Miss Q is crawling.

It’s not pretty, nor is it consistent, (she sort of looks like a confused tadpole on her way to becoming a frog) but she’s doing it.

I tell you, it nearly made this besotted mama cry.

Then I really did cry because I realised my time for Q-proofing the house has arrived.

Possibly, if I’d been organised like my mother always is (I means it’s not like I couldn’t see this coming) I would already have done this.

But why change form now?

Instead I’ve spent the evening working on a distraction quilt in preparation for our upcoming commutes – two weddings in regional Australia and one in New York.

It’s the idea of a fellow mother and traveller friend of mine.

She attached zippers, buttons, different fabrics and so on to a sheet of fabric and it entertained her son from here to…well at least until they’d taxied out of the airport anyway.

So I thought I’d do the same.

Only she can sew.

And I can’t.

So I used superglue and have just googled how to remove superglue from your fingers…and also your wedding ring.

I try.

Really I do.

But as is usual with anything crafty, my enthusiasm far outweighs my abilities.

Perhaps my sewing skills will improve in tandem with my daughter’s ability to crawl.

I sure hope so, otherwise we’re both in trouble.