Tsunami!

So today has been interesting so far…

I turned on the Breakfast show as I do every morning and went about my routine of filling bottles and making coffee. The news came on and mingled in with the usual morning noises I heard the newsreader mention a tsunami warning. I say mention, because he read it out in his usual newsreader voice, as if it was just another story about a dog getting trapped in a rabbit hole. What the? I’d be leaping on my news desk, screaming “RUN FOR THE HILLS.” Mostly because you don’t get a more appropriate time to scream “run for the hills”.  But I guess that’s why I’m not a newsreader.

As journalists do, they then decided to dig deeper into the story – was there really a warning? Was it here, or in one of the neighbouring pacific islands? Was it actually a tsunami, or just a bigger than usual wave? Yes to all those… apparently there was a tidal wave in Samoa not long ago – the result of an earthquake just off the coast. Civil Defence have issued a formal warning and have told us that if it hits Auckland, it’ll happen at 11:44am.  Jay-sus. That’s fairly specific. What if they’ve got it wrong? What if it hits at 11:42 while I’m only half way up the hills?  Should I head for the hills at 11am just in case? Which hills? There are a lot of them around here.

Oh – hang on. Apparently the tsunami that hit Samoa was less than a metre high. I could probably just sit on the back fence then.

Oh no – breaking news. Now they are saying it was 3m and there were deaths and injuries. I guess it’s not so funny after all.

They are telling us to keep our radios on and to be ‘on alert’. The warning is going to remain in effect until it is cancelled. That is one of the stupidest statements I’ve heard today.

So I’d better go and have a shower just in case I have to flee.

If you don’t hear back from me, it’s unlikely that I’m dead – I’m just useless about blogging these days.

Under pressure

It’s fair to say that I’m posting under duress. I have become painfully aware of just how slack I’ve been. I used to be one of those people that lectured on the importance of keeping your blog up to date. Then I had kids. Priorities change, bla bla bla.

Recent circumstances mean that people have started revisiting, because they are curious, not because they care… so I figured I’d better get back on the horse.

So here it is. I never promised it would be good…

The last 18 months of my life have been pretty crazy. My kids are now 9 months old. That 9 months has gone faster than the last 34 years. The  fact that they were on the tail of the slowest 9 of my life – pregnancy – only highlights that for me. I have changed. I used to be a shut-your-eyes-plant-your-foot-and-hope-for-the-best kinda person. Now I am a responsible parent that still misses planting my foot. But the payoffs are worth it. Watching your kids grow up is all they said it would be. Having two babies is hard, hard work, but holy hell is it fun. Every day is a crazy trip and I am so grateful that I’m on it.

Summer is coming and when I’m walking through the park in the middle of a work day I figure that life just doesn’t get any better.

I’m back at the gym two days a week. It’s a far cry from my old obsession, but it’s funny – it just doesn’t seem that important any more. I’m not kickboxing due to the fact that my two huge babies ripped my abs apart while I was pregnant, but surgery in the future will sort that out. I’m looking forward to being back in the ring, but for now I’m happy being a normal person. It’s incredible how much energy it takes to be a mother – I suspect I expend way more energy each day than I would doing an average workout.

I could continue to crap on for several more paragraphs, but I have nappies to wash (yes, I stand by my old belief that to use disposables is lazy and irresponsible… and now I have the right to say so), food to mash and games to play.

Besides, I suspect you’ve read enough.

It’s getting hot in here… so take off all your clothes.

Ha! I figure you thought you’d seen the back of me. No such luck. Life is back on a somewhat even keel now that the twins are 6 months old, so I might be able to grab 10 mins every now and then to crap on about nothing.

I’m not planning on always talking about kids. Just today.

It’s been an entertaining week. Entertaining in a stuck-in-the-middle-of-a-mosh-pit-during-a-Slayer-concert kinda way. Pretty much exactly this time last week, I was in the kitchen pureeing up fish. This is a fairly new experience for me, and one that I am glad will have a limited life span. Anyway, I had just turned on the blender when Shaun announced to me that Israel “wasn’t right”. I’m not sure whether it was the monotonous humming or the fact that he was floppy that triggered this announcement, but he was right (Shaun, not Israel). He had a temperature of 40 degrees (Israel, not Shaun).

Holy mother of god.

I jumped in the car and drove him to A&E. You’d think that in the middle of the day on a Sunday there wouldn’t be that many emergencies. But there were. I was told that the wait would be an hour long. After sitting there for 10 minutes I decided that my emergency was more important than everyone elses’ and asked for an ambulance. A doctor came out straight away. They stripped Israel off and pumped him full of paracetomol. We then had to stand naked (Israel, not me) in the carpark. It is the middle of winter here and it was 8 degrees at the time.

I could see people walking past thinking no wonder we were at A&E. It occurred to me that I should probably mention Hunter’s rash. I didn’t realise that the word rash + fever + baby = ambulance. We were taken to Starship (Childrens’ Hospital) where Israel decided that he was fine. After half an hour of watching him eat his lunch, they discharged us with a diagnosis of ‘a virus’. How particularly helpful.

The next day, when said virus made him power chuck in my eye, become unresponsive and pant like a dog, I called the ambulance again. It seemed like the right thing to do… until it arrived. That was shen he decided to start laughing as if nothing had ever happened. We went to the hospital anyway, where he proceeded to scream in pain for three hours while we waited for the doctor. As soon as the doctor arrived, he started chirping and giggling again. He was then diagnosed with… tonsilitis.

I’m not a neurotic mother, but you’d be forgiven for thinking I was.

I think that’s just the nature of the job.

Busted

I had a bit of a car debacle this morning. It happened on my way to the gym at 6am. I was in Shaun’s car, which isn’t unusual these days, as he always gets home last and parks me in. I don’t much like driving his car – although I’m getting used to it – because I’m useless at judging its length so parallel parking is a bitch.

But anyway.

I arrived at the gym and was looking for a park. Parking at my gym is hard at the best of times because it’s huge and is right in the middle of the city. Whilst trawling the side streets I spotted a park on the other side of the road. I turned into the nearest driveway to turn around, but annoyingly, the car behind me chose that exact driveway to go up. He sat on my ass with his headlights in my eyes and didn’t give me room to pull back out. I was forced to try and do a u-turn in the driveway. Ridiculous, I hear you thinking. That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking.

On the way into the u-turn I heard the rim scrape on the curb. Not good. I realised after about a second of scraping that I wasn’t actually going to make it round. That meant reversing back… more scraping. I bit the bullet. Whilst this was happening, the monkey behind me drove up onto the footpath to get up the driveway behind me. And monkey is a euphemism.

I finally found a park and managed all further manoeuvring without incident. I hopped out and in the dark I ran my fingers around the rim to check out the damage. It didn’t feel good, but I’ve done worse. I went to the gym and did my workout. I got a couple of strange looks, but I figured that was probably something to do with my morning hair.

When I got back to the car, I surveyed the damage. It would have been virtually unnoticeable had Shaun washed his car some time in the last year. Unfortunately my finger prints in the inch of brake dust served to draw attention to the situation. So, using my gym towel, I cleaned off the wheel. All that did was draw attention to the one clean wheel. So I cleaned all the wheels. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself…

…until I walked in the door and he asked me what I’d done to the car. What the hell?

Just as I was tossing up whether to deny everything or come clean, I looked in the mirror and was slightly shocked to see that my face was almost entirely black. That explained the strange looks. I guess I’d wiped my face with my hands at some stage before entering the gym.

Shocker.

Carrion

It all started with the rotting bird. Well to be honest, it was a bit past rotting when I found it. I have no idea how a carcass can rot just inches from a persons head whilst they sleep, yet they remain blissfully unaware. But it did. And I was. For a while.

At the moment I have a cleaner coming in for an hour a week. She is supposed to clean the bathrooms, do the vacuuming and mop the floors. I say ’supposed to’ because whether or not they actually come out clean is debatable. But mum is paying for her as a favour, so I’m not in much of a position to complain. She makes a token effort, so on the surface things look clean. I sure as hell don’t have time to do it.

So I guess that’s how the carcass went unnoticed for so long. One of the cats must have dragged it in and toyed with it for a while before it died, smack bang in the middle of the floor under our bed. On the day it was discovered, the cleaner had the week off so I was doing the vacuuming. I got down to vacuum under the bed properly (it took a bit of strength to push the vacuum cleaner through the inches of dust) and noticed a white writhing mess. God knows what possessed me to do it, but I reached out to see what it was. And touched the maggots.

In a fit of disgust and panic, I sucked up the whole lot, along with the birds head, which vacuumed straight off the body. It was lucky that I remembered to ask Shaun to empty the vacuum a couple of days later. He wasn’t impressed.

He also wasn’t impressed about the flies. I guess I missed a few maggots. And by a few, I mean 50 or so. Thankfully it only took a few days for me to forget the whole debacle, so it took me a while to make the connection between the incident and the large swarm of blowflies that was hanging out on our curtains a week or so later.

They were strange blowflies. You could approach them with a tissue and pluck them straight off the wall. They didn’t even attempt to fly away. That is what triggered the realisation that they were newly hatched babies. And they just kept hatching and hatching.

And hatching.

After a day or so Shaun mentioned them. I pretended I hadn’t noticed them. I couldn’t keep up the charade for long though, because they were hatching overnight and by the time we awoke in the morning they were almost blocking out the light. It was a complete nightmare. I considered moving the bed to see how many were left, but I couldn’t find it in me. I was too emotionally scarred by the whole experience.

Finally they seemed to slow down and we were able to pick them off the walls faster than they could hatch. (I didn’t want to spray because of the babies). So now the house is back to it’s original rotting-bird-and-hatching-fly free state.

And the cleaner is back from holiday so I guess I can go back to being blissfully unaware again.

The leaves are leaving

One thing that I hadn’t considered before I had children was just how differently I would see the world once I did. I see it through the eyes of a child these days. Well, to be fair, I guess I always did to a degree. But now I see it through the eyes of my children. There’s something kinda wonderful about that.

On the one hand I notice all the swear words on the radio, and just how provocatively dressed every woman on every music video seems to be, but on the other, I see everyday things as something exciting. The park is no longer just somewhere to exercise. Now it’s a whole world to be discovered.

Things are simpler now. The world is good. We go for the same walk every day, and every day it is different. One of the most beautiful things about Auckland is how green it is. We live on the edge of 200 acres of parkland. I’ve lived here for most of my life. My parents used to walk through this park with me when I was the age that my kids are now. I feel deeply rooted here. That’s a nice feeling. Stability is one of the biggest gifts you can give a child, along with safety and your love.

So I guess we’ll continue to walk here. And perhaps one day my kids will walk here with their kids.

And look at it. Who wouldn’t?

That’s life, but it’s sad.

Life moves to the beat of a different drum for me these days. The beat is one hell of a lot faster than it was. There is no jazz-in-the-sun kinda beat for me any more. It’s more of a thrash metal kinda beat. In the life of a mother of new babies, time is measured in the hours between day-sleeps. From that first waking moment of beaming smiles to the last grizzle of the day, I am watching my babies grow into children.

Every day something new happens. Whether it’s more hair or a new noise, what would probably be the most trivial of things to an outsider now has the ability to make me look at life with a feeling of wonderment that I haven’t felt since I was a child myself.

But I’ve had to say goodbye to things and that’s sad. My friendships have changed. While I haven’t lost any, the nature of my relationships with them has turned a corner. I see my best friends (the ones without kids) every couple of months now, rather than every couple of days. While that’s life, it’s sad.

I’ve had to quit things that used to make up such a huge part of my day. This week I am leaving the staff of Sitepoint – a web community that I’ve been part of for many years now. I have realised lately that I just don’t have the time to commit to it that is required, and that’s not fair on the team that I was leading. Time to move over and let someone else take the reigns. That’s life too, but it’s sad.

I haven’t stepped into the ring for a year now. I haven’t wrapped my knuckles or pulled on my gloves. I haven’t felt the rush that comes with kicking the crap out of someone and I miss it terribly. Again – life. But it’s sad.

I haven’t worn killer heels, or power dressed, or pumped weights, or read the weekend paper. I haven’t worn a sleeveless top (which would call for a strapless bra, and they don’t do those in maternity styles!), or read more than one chapter of a book at a time, or seen a movie.

But as much as I miss those things, they don’t compare to the thrill of opening that nursery door every morning and seeing two beaming smiles looking up at me.

So life is different now. Sometime’s it’s sad, but mostly it’s magic.

Simply happy.

Today I was driving along the motorway as the sun was rising. It has risen on one of those days when the sky is completely clear and blue, but the air is crisp and cool. Days that remind me of the Easters of my childhood when we used to travel down country to my nan’s house. It was while I was thinking about those days, which were perfect days, that I realised that right now I am the happiest that I have ever been in my life.

It sneaked up on me.

If someone had’ve told me a year ago when I was staggering out of a club at 8am after having ‘the best night of my life’ that I’d be happier at home with two tiny babies, I’d have told them that they didn’t know me very well. I guess I didn’t know myself.

I never would have imagined that I’d be racing home from the gym before the class was finished because I missed their smiles. The gym used to be my life. And I would never have thought that twin playgroup followed by a walk in the park and coffee group would have sounded like a pretty good day to me.

More than anything, I never would have believed that I’d actually enjoy being woken up three times in the night by crying babies, but it means I get to sit in the dark and stroke those fluffy little heads and think about just how incredibly fortunate I am.

So life is simple now. And simple is perfect.

Rest in peace, little man.

The last couple of days have been noisy and difficult ones in our house. At the age of just 12 weeks, Hunter is teething. While teething is a horrible experience for some children regardless of age, it’s worse when your mouth is too small for a teething ring and you don’t yet have enough control over your hands to hold something against your gums. So she’s just having to cry it out. No amount of rocking or cuddling from me seems to have any effect.

The cruelest thing about teething is that it affects her eating and sleeping cycles, meaning that she is exhausted and starving, as well as completely miserable. I can see the little tooth just below the surface, so with any luck it will come through any day. Tomorrow would be good.

All the crying it pretty hard to cope with. When you hear your child screaming and you can’t help them, you just feel useless. After several hours of it you just have to walk away for a while, before it breaks you. Then it’s hard not to feel like a bad mother. It’s also hard when I feel I’m neglecting Israel because Hunter is demanding so much attention.

But something happened today that helped me put it into perspective.

A good friend of my sisters fell pregnant with twins a couple of weeks before I did. We became friends as a result. Our pregnancies were very similar and she ended up having boy/girl twins as well. Sadly, the little boy was born with a damaged heart. His name was Ryan. He was flown straight up to Starship (they live down country) and underwent surgery. His mother didn’t even get to feed him.

The surgery was successful and after a couple of hard months they went home again. Although progress was slow and Ryan was a lot smaller than his twin, things were going ok. I went down to stay with my sister a few weeks back and we went around to meet Ryan and to spend some time with him. He was a gorgeous wee boy with huge eyes and a peaceful nature.

This morning Ryan had a heart attack and died. I can’t really express how deeply sad I feel about that on so many levels. As the mother of twins, I know that to go somewhere with just one of the babies feels as if you are missing a part of yourself. I once took Israel to the doctor and left Hunter with mum. I kept turning around to pick her up and thinking I heard her cry.

I’m so very glad I met Ryan. If you’re too young to leave a legacy, all you have to leave is memories.

Rest in peace, little man. It was an honour to know you.

Cicadas

Since I was a child, my favourite sound in the world has always been the sound of cicadas. I have two siblings and when we were little, we would have ‘daysleeps’ on the weekends and mum would seperate us into different bedrooms so that we would sleep rather than play. We would rotate each weekend. On the days when it was my turn to sleep in mum and dad’s room, I would lie in their bed and smell the mown grass and listen to the cicadas and think about what games we could play when we were allowed to get back up. That sound brings back those memories of endless childhood summers. I love it.

Our cats are doing their best to rid me of that love.

They have a new game. Rather than catching birds or mice, they have started catching cicadas and bringing them into the house. It was pretty entertaining at first. We’d be sitting in the lounge and suddenly we’d hear that chirrupping sound getting louder and louder, then the catdoor would open and in would come Chico with a cicada in his mouth. Hilarious.

What isn’t so hilarious is that he then lets them go to fly around the house whilst in hot pursuit. He runs up curtains, leaps onto cupboards and claws his way up furniture and walls in an attempt to recatch the bloody things. All hell breaks loose.

This new game takes place 4 or 5 times a day. Every now and then, he brings in a cicada that is slightly more clever than the others. These smart guys find somewhere cunning to hide. Like up the extractor fan vent in the kitchen. Or behind the wall heater. Or on a chandalier. The cats team up and spend hours trying to lure it out. And then they give up.

The cicada remains in hiding for several hours before it gets the courage back up to start singing. But eventually they all do.

So now we have a house full of singing cicadas all in impossible to reach places.

It was pretty funny.

For a while.