Purple ears and an urge to kill
I got my hair cut and coloured (even though only exactly four people have bothered noting this fact) about two and a half weeks ago. M came along to wrangle Z, because I doubted I could do it with a head covered in foil. As it turned out, I traded in my trailer-blonde hue to go kind of reddish b!@#n as there is no way I’ll be able to maintain the trailer-blonde in my new role of parent. Amanda, my hair-heroine and owner of a toddler exactly one year older than Small Z, gave me some extra colour and peroxide stuff to use in a few weeks, as apparently colour fades very quickly when you put it straight over trailer-blonde.
This morning, with Small Z being very amenable, I mixed up the dye and asked M to paint it on the roots of my hair. I was a foolish, foolish person at this point, because I assumed that when I told him to imagine he was painting the waterline on a boat, and when I said “You didn’t get it on my skin, did you?” as I felt the brush poke my neck and then behind the ear, that he knew what the job entailed. My wrongness was large. He held up his hands once he had finished - they were purple.
“This will come off, right?”
I stared at him uncomprehendingly. He began washing his hands in the sink. They remained purple.
“You didn’t tell me that I should have worn gloves,” he whined, scrubbing furiously.
“I didn’t assume you would decide to coat your hands in it.” I felt I sounded reasonable - which I was, until I stood up and examined the job. I had an inch of dye from the back of my neck around to my ear. And some more around the other ear. I looked like I’d gone a round in the boxing ring, facing backwards. I began to scrub and shriek, while M tactfully withdrew and made himself a consolatory coffee. I began scrubbing using face cleanser and warm water. Some of it came off. A lot didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” M began bleating from the safety of the change table. “I didn’t realise. I’m really sorry. It’ll come off. I’m sure it will.”
I cranked the hot tap on harder, and then did a double take, as the water, instead of gushing forth, trickled to nothing.
“AGH! AGH! Jim’s turned the water off! Help! Help!! I have to wash this all out in fifteen minutes, or the world will explode!! Go and find him.Quickly.”
M went, taking Small Z with him. I began typing this lament, and watched him walk up the back paddock to where Jim was working on a horse drinking trough. There were two small boys with him. I beat myself over the head several times as I questioned why I had become a disaster magnet - the first time in about three years I decided to go back to doing my hair at home - and I enlist a crappy apprentice and the landlord turns the water off. Of course.
Small Z apparently had a great time watching Jim work furiously to try and get the horse thing fixed while my hair basted. A fly bit her on the hand and she yelped, but did not cry. She was entranced by the two small boys and the very large horse. Finally, she and M returned and the water began pouring from the tap I’d left on.
I jumped in the shower and began rinsing. Was mildly appalled by the fact that rather large amounts of hair remained in my hands as I put shampoo and conditioner through. How was this fair? I had done a home job, as instructed by my hairdresser, to prevent Small Z from being dragged along to a two hour appointment, and now was shedding faster than a persian cat in spring. This was not the end of my torment. After repeated looks in the mirror, my hair has now dried. Is it a deep mahogany b!@#n colour? Is it?!? No. No it’s not. Because that would have been too much to expect.
I swear that I ran to the kitchen and double checked what it said on the colour tubes, because my hair is now BLACK. Just like M has always wanted it to be. Oh. My. God. Of the many colours I have been, black is my least favourite, as it renders me corpselike without make-up on, thus making me look about three hundred and seven - which is about how many times I have shouted the work FUCK!!! in the last twenty minutes. I have goth hair. And I have less hair than I had before. And I have purple ears and a purple neck and a dressing gown with purple stains around the neck (thanks again, M…) I have no idea what I did wrong, but in my vast history of hair dyeing, it has never gone this pear-shaped. Gah. Kill kill.
Trailer Gloom
Dear Small Brother,
You left today to go back to bloody London, where you will be for another few months before relocating to bloody New York - an equally distant location [sigh]. It was fun having you here, though arguably, we probably had more fun last time on our sailing adventure and city holiday. However, baby wrangling is the current priority - and you were surprisingly good at it. You didn’t earn the title of Spare Parent by just buying M a slab of Coopers (although you probably could’ve…)
There were a surfeit of hot, disgusting days during your visit, which was somewhat unfair. Particularly for me, as I was unable to drown them in gin and tonics. I remember this time last year that the weather was far more accommodating. Oh. Glad you liked tooling around in my car!
Just after you left, with the trailer under a pall of gloom, I was putting away a pair of shorts that I’d put in storage for about ten months. In the pocket was a receipt for a pair of jeans I bought that day that you, M and I cycled from the boat to the Collingwood Children’s Farm - the previous night, M had retrieved his bike from the bottom of the harbour using the anchor. By the time we were halfway there, we noted that M’s bum had become a soggy, wet browned thing. The bike seat had not dried out from it’s deep sea dive.
We refused to go to a children’s farm with someone with a butt like a very suspect pond dweller and took M into the big op-shop on the river in Abbotsford. We made him buy more shorts. I also bought a pair of jeans. It was exactly a year ago that I found the receipt for them in my pocket. I tried to look up what else we had got up to and am horrified to realise that it never made it to [miaow] - yet another task for the person who is someone else’s food source and has eyebags you could use to buy in bulk.
We here at the Trailer hope your flight was good, and we also hope that you make it back before the end of the year, at which time PartyPie will be able to run toward you shrieking “Oh! Greetings and salutations Spare Parent. I have been missing you in my own small way. Did you bring me more presents then?”
I will coach her assiduously in your absence.
May your nose not freeze and your lager be plentiful. Come back soon!
Love,
The Elder Sibling
Welcome to the World
Yesterday we hosted a Welcome to the World party for Small Z. I have to admit - it was entirely organised by M, as I couldn’t bear to wrap my sapped and exhausted brain around the mere idea of putting on a ‘do’. M sent out the invites, cleared out the backyard (goodbye to Buns’ bunny compound) and bought some party supplies. My mum was amazing and provided two huge excellent salads (she is not known as the ’salad nazi’ for nothing), watermelon, and made an equally large pink iced chocolate cake (pictures to follow).
This was the picture he used on the invite. I kind of like it :o)
E contributed her famous chickpea salad, and everyone (including my Nan, who is here from Marblehead, Small Brother, who is here from London, and Relle - our lovely doula) gathered in our somewhat dry and dusty backyard, which looks on to the paddocks.
T and Small Brother made sure everyone was equipped with champagne, and the weather was startlingly cooperative. M had worked hard on what he wanted to say and I had decided that I would also speak a few short words. M primed a few people to contribute a poem to welcoming Zoe, and E, PGR and my mum (as tribal nanna) all spoke. It was actually quite an exceptional occasion. I welcomed Small Z to the world and remarked on the fact that I have found her personality laden, intriguing and alarmingly adorable since the time of her arrival - I also introduced Small Brother (whom not everyone knows, due to his London lifestyle) and made it known that should M and I be hit by a stray asteroid, it will be he who takes over Small Z wrangling - his title? Spare Parent. Ha!
I wetted Small Z’s head with a little bit of champagne, and DJ finished off proceedings with a poem he had thoughtfulliy and humorously penned in the back of his street directory. We all barbequed, drank and nattered into the night. It was great to see my Nan meeting all our mates, and Small Z’s other baby friends (Small E and Chloe Rose) were also in attendance.
It was a day that I couldn’t have put together, but I’m so grateful that M did. Almost everyone remembered to write in the Special Book that I’m going to keep as a record of Zoe’s first year. It was a lovely day; because of the people who came along (M referred to them as “Zoe’s Tribe”) and also because of why they came. M finished his welcome speech with this:
William Blake put childhood this way:
To see the World in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
——————————–
*Salad Nazi: someone who repeatedly forces their salad upon you e.g. “Have you had some of the green salad? Have more of the green salad. Hey, I don’t think you eat enough salad. Do you want to finish off that salad?”
Not multi-tasking, just pretending.
In amongst all his reading about babydom, M saw something that said babies are happiest when they are not the centre of attention and are just being toted around as you do things. Small Z had turned on an arsenic hour last night. M cooked me dinner, then grabbed her under his arm and began narrating.
“OK Z! I’m going to walk over here. Hmm. I’ll put this cloth up here. Now I’ll walk in here. I’ll pretend to put this away. Mmm,” he said thoughtfully, “I think this is working.”
“You think what is working?”
“Pretending to do stuff while I carry her around.”
I suppressed the urge to poke him sharply in leg as he might have dropped the baby. “Did what you read say to pretend to do stuff, or is this just an inability to multitask? Maybe you could PRETEND to do something with all the clean washing on the bed? It’s amazing what you can do with one free arm.”
Sleeping on a sliver
Last night we dropped in at my mum and T’s house to say hi - I’d just had my hair cut off a few minutes down the road. On arrival, M got stuck into the bottle of red I’d bought him as a ‘thank-you’ for enduring the hellish drive to the hairdresser and wrangling of Small Z while I sat and was improved from my Trailer-Skank state. So, in the end, after my mum said they had a mattress we could stay on (as my nan is staying there too, and there is a bed shortage) we decided to sleep the night - Small Z had already crashed, and the idea of waking her, stuffing her in the car and driving for an hour, was too much to contemplate.
In retrospect it would have been BLISSFUL. I failed to realise that when my mother said ’spare mattress’ she actually meant to say “Something about the width of a piece of sliced bread and equally as comfortable.” ARGH! Z had her sheepskin, M had his red wine insulating him (and a helpful absence of hips to stick into the floor) and I had… Nothing. I just lay there and fed and changed Small Z when required throughout the night.
M had the front to wake up and tell me that he hadn’t slept a wink. I almost bit him on the face, but resisted manfully. I told him I didn’t know how that was possible as I’d lain there most of the night listening to him snore, with the soft tones of Taylors Shiraz drifting past me. We left secretly at around 8am, fleeing down the road, narrowly avoiding running out of diesel and leaving the petrol cap at the service station. You see? Lack of sleep does not do well with EXTRA LASHINGS of MORE lack of sleep.
Moral of the story? A slice of bread is NOT A MATTRESS.
M’s Appalling Day
It is sad to think that in 2008 - that’s right, TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT (I remember when I was smaller thinking “Oh - in the year 2000 I will be 26 - how stupidly old and ridiculously far away that is.” D’oh.) there are only TWO places that sell biodiesel in the whole of Melbourne. One in Prahran, and one in Boronia. If I may coin a word? PATHETICO.
Did M think that he needed to TELEPHONE them before driving an hour into town to ask if they had biodiesel? No. Why would he. Thus he called me, steaming with freshly laid rage that he had been stuck in traffic on the way to Prahran, only to be told that there was a delay with the biodiesel and there was none available. He then drove to Boronia - and from there called me on a payphone that kept eating money he didn’t have to ask what the address of the other biodiesel station was. I found them online, called them. They had none either. I was barely brave enough to relay this information to M when he called back (the telephone having eaten more money).
“Argh. FUCK!!? I will NEVER get this chunk of my life back. This day, the ENTIRE day, I will never get back. It’s a gaping hole in my life. Totally, totally useless. ARGH. ARGH! ARGH!!”
I sat wide-eyed on the other end of the line. M barked a hopeless goodbye and hung up. He eventually returned to the Trailer a sadder, wiser entity. I made him a coffee. And yet the day was not finished with him. He realised he had lost a hubcap while on his fruitless mission. I had not thought he could look more woebegone. And yet the day was not finished with him - although it almost finished us when we decided to join Small Brother up in Loch and were almost squashed by a truck when we pulled out of our road.
The truck driver was so infuriated that he got out of his vehicle and, without using one single swear word, managed to reduce M to a small cheeping sparrow. At that point, M ceased to fight his fate and decided to soothe himself with beer on arrival. We also purchased some Moonlite Grand Ridge Beer for me. Really for me! It’s the only light beer I have ever had that tastes just as good as normal beer - I would drink it regardless of it’s lightness. And when we got to my dad’s place, I sat in the sun and, after feeding PartyPie, I did. A whole one. Exactly 9.9% of one standard drink. It was totally brilliant.
SB, UFO - Arrives!
The title translates as Small Brother, Uncle From Overseas - Arrives! Actually, that should be ‘arrived’ ashe flew in this morning. His style can only be described as ‘casual chic while visiting the colonies’. Sweat from being chauffered in a non-airconditioned Humber added to the whole authenticity.
He met his new (and only) niece, and deemed her worthy of the loot ge had brought with him - EXCELLENT bib with her name on it and one of my cat drawings that used to grace these pages, a long sleeve t-shirt emblazoned “PARTYPIE”!! A very cool long armed and legged pink and green suit and TWO pairs of what must be the cutest and softest little leather shoes on the planet…
He is going to spend some time at the Trailer, and will no doubt be helping M return to the Land of Beer. Mmmm. I faintly recall that amber fluid.
There is actually an online workshop manual!!
Via dooce - here is everything I needed to know about baby wrangling in easy-to-understand signage. Thank god.
