Public service announcements

If, on a day when it has been raining heavily, you go to the shops and uncharacteristically decide to park outside instead of under cover, then even though it may not have rained for some time, the trolleys in the car park will all be wet, including the seat for your toddler.

If, while at the shops, you decide to visit the garden centre, and see some promising-looking pots for some plants you recently bought, and those pots have rims, and are stacked upsidedown on a high shelf, and the shelf is outside, then when you pick up a pot to get it down, the rainwater in the rim will pour down your arm.

The same thing will happen when you get a second pot down too. Only if that pot is bigger, there will be even more water.

If you shriek and jerk in an attempt to avoid getting drenched a second time, then the water will land on your toddler sitting in the trolley.

And you can guarantee that, when it's time to leave, and you have grocery shopping plus pots and maybe a few plants to load into the car, it will be pissing down.

I hear you little man

So I read a bit too late last night, and then C had to get up at something like 5.30 this morning, and even though he was quiet, I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. Then Lukan woke at 6.30, waking Téo too. Which led to Téo declaring over breakfast (15 chatter-filled minutes later, mind you):

I can't wake up because I'm too tired.

Illness

So I think I had swine flu.

Stop rolling your eyes - yes you, oh friends of many years. Yes I know I have been convinced I had leukemia. Yes I know my dad once diagnosed me with a brain tumour. So yes, OK, there is a slight tendency to hypochondria in my family. But just hear me out, and then tell me I didn't have swine flu.

You may remember I mentioned Lukan and I were sick the first week we were in Sydney. Well, we were pretty badly sick. My mum, sister-in-law, and brother got it even worse. My sister-in-law, for example, was in bed for 3 days.

Now, my mum and I puzzled over this bug, thinking maybe we were actually infected with two different bugs, because we had very sore throats and bad coughs, as well as nausea and for some of us, vomiting and diarrhea. Plus fevers, lethary, and lack of appetite for many days afterwards. We just couldn't imagine what kind of bug could be both cold-like and gastro-like.

But then, last night I thought I'd catch up on the swine flu outbreak... and found the following:

(Diagram from a very reliable source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak#Symptoms_and_severity)

Now, it's true we were not in Mexico this year, and actually Lukan - the one who got the rest of us sick - has never been to Mexico, and also our illnesses predate the current outbreak by a good month, and we haven't been in contact with any pigs... but apart from that, IT ALL MATCHES PERFECTLY!

I love this age

If having another kid meant skipping the baby stage and getting a 20-month-old, there'd be no doubt in my mind. I'd have 10.

Something new

See that photo over there to the right? It's a new thing I'm trying out, something between this blog and flickr where I can show a bit more of our life and the things that strike me, things which aren't worth a full post but have more of a story than a photo alone. Click on the photo to get the text.

I'll start off with showing you around the village, and see how I go from there...

Prejudice

Spring has burst forth, and so have the dandelions. I may have cleared them from the front garden, but the back is a different matter altogether - and one even my anal retentiveness accepts is not worth the effort.

My recent gardening aside, I do actually want the back garden to be more of a meadow than carefully tended lawns and beds (to which end I have even been pulling up grass and replacing it with weeds - weeds I determinedly eradicated from the front garden and replaced with grass. Why yes, you are right, there is indeed no end to my folly).

But while intellectually I know that a meadow means dandelions, those little yellow flowers still bug me. Even though I have to admit that, en masse, they are quite pretty just now. Even though I can't honestly say that they are really any less pretty than the other flowers I have transplanted these last weekends, flowers I would be quite happy to have invade the "lawn":

I just don't like dandelions in my garden.

Roots

This is one of the four wheelbarrowfuls of bulbs that, over the past two weekends, I dug up from my mother-in-law's and replanted around the walnut tree in our back garden.

They were doomed to die - C's parents moved into their new house just before Easter, and C's brother's family are having renovations done before they move into the old house, and the machinery that will knock down one wall of the house will pass right over C's mother's former flower beds.

I'm happy to have been able to save them. Some were flowers I already planned to plant in my garden, some were plants that C's mother wanted to keep, and others, well, they just seemed too pretty to leave to be squashed. And then I realised that some have special memories for C's mother, and while I didn't save them for her, I like the idea that these flowers have a history.

I hope they survive the move.