Oh No Melanie

So I'm on holidays, enjoying the Christmas cheer. All of a sudden I hear Melanie yell out "Oh no. Melanie" followed by an evil giggle.

What has she done?

Well she's at my computer with the mouse in one hand and the cord in the other, snapped half way along. For the life of me, I don't know how she managed to break it.

So now I've downgraded. It's the $2 mouse for me from Coles supermarket. It's big, chiunky and belongs on the 1980's.

All's good with the nose

Well the day finally came.

Melanie's had her day at the Mater to get surgery. It revealed a piece of purple foam lodged in her sinus'.

It's the purple pom-pom we thought it was.

Till next time... :-)

All's well...

Thursday 7:20pm.

No random acts of Melanie.

The Sandy House / Peanut Butter beauty Mask / MSN Messenger Blast day...

Well the title says it all really. If you're one of those power readers, you can stop reading now if you like?

My day was fine. Thanks for asking. I had a nice day at work while Lynda had the following one ....

*** Sand is Fun ***

• Lynda has the kids in the back yard while she's hanging some washing.
• The kds go upstairs of their own accord.
• Lynda thinks "Hmm. That's nice. I'll keep hanging washing"
• Turns out they've each dragged a bucket of sand from their backyard sandpit into the house and proceeded to build little sand castle in EVERY room in the house. They particularly liked building sand castles on their beds from what I hear.
• There were tears and lots of cleaning.
• Everything's all cleaned up now. There's clean sheets on the beds. The floor's been vacuumed and the rugs no longer resemble a beach.
• But as I walk around the house bare foot there's still that little bit of sand grit in everything.

*** Ben likes to MSN Blast ***

Simple story. This is the thoird time he's done it.

With his new l33t 4 year old computer haxt0r skills he's now going Start / Programs / MSN Messenger. He likes sending the little characters to my contacts. You know the kisses, the pig, the alien. All those annoying little things.

So I've had messeges left on my phone from our company lawyer "telling" me to stop sending mim this Sh*t. My colleagues in my office also keep getting messages from Ben.

He particularly likes sending people the little pig character.

What worries me though is that I have many Microsoft employees and other vendors as contacts in Messenger and I have absolutely no idea what Ben has sent to them and I don't want to ask.

Today's lesson.... If you are stupid enough to let your kids on your computer. Make sure your messenger is set to NOT remember your username and password.

*** Melanie Likes Peanut Butter ***

So we buy food in bulk. It's cheaper.
Now imagine your 6 year old smothered in the entire tub of this...

Enough said. So that was Lynda's day today. :-)

And the nose has it....

Ah yes.

About 6 weeks ago Melly comes running from her room in a bit of distress with blood coming from her nostrils. With her inability to tell us what she's done we had a look in her nose as best we could and summized there was nothing up there.

Yeh. You guessed it. We were wrong :-(

I had last Thursday and Friday off so I could play with the kids on their school holidays. A day where I sleep in and eat breakfast late, then laze around doing pretty much nothing all day. But no, Lynda kept compaining about the "foul smell" coming from Melanie.

"I'm sure there's something in her nose. We're going to get to the bottom of this today." Lynda says.

Yeh, so my holiday........... ended 10:00am Thursday.

First comes the local doctor's appointment. There's the obligatory couple of hours wait. I mind Ben while Lynda takes Melanie to the local doctor. Well "Doctor A" wasn't much use. But wrote a referral to take her to the Mater Chilidren's hospital.

So, we drop Ben at the Grandparents and head up to the hospital and sit in Children's casualty. We sit patiently, amuzing Melanie while trying to subconsciously avoid the very sick little girl next to us with Meningitis.

Eventualy we get seen some time around 4pm between the Mesozoic period and the Cretaceous period. She was a nice Doctor, but after a quick look up the nostrils she says there's nothing up there.

Melanie by this stage was taking offence to having large insrtuments
stuck up her nose all day.

Do doctors actually realise how scarey they are to kids? When you cannot explain to your child what's going on Melanie was getting justifiably scared.

So "Nice Doctor B" organises for Lynda to come back on Monday and see the ENT (Ear Nose and Throat) specialist.

Along comes Monday and Lynda has everything organised with her parents to mind Ben and off she goes back to the Mater hospital again to see the Ear Nose and Throat specialist.

Low and behold. "Nice doctor C" says...

Yep there's a lot of something up there. It's up really high and it needs to come out. We need to book her in for surgery this Friday.

Yay! Lynda was right all along. Mother knows best!!! Ha!

So that's it for now. To be continued. We'll see what this Friday brings. It's back to the Mater for a third time for what the smart people in the medical professoinal have affectionately termed "Scheduled Surgery to remove foreign object from sinus cavity of Melanie Wade"

It's been a while...

A couple of the guys at work mentioned to me today that it's been a while since my last post.

Well where do I start?

As I stare at my LCD monitor with the deep pen gouges from when Melanie drew on it last week with a biro pen, or as I tap away on my ice cream soaked keyboard I'm lost for a place to start.

Hmm yes funny that.

The ice cream is a new one. Looks like it's occurred early today and has been allowed to dry into sticky solids. Judging by the globs on the "t" "r" and "o" key and the big icecream stain that's oozed down the monitor and the big sticky patch on my nice timber floor, I'm guessing the kids have been spending the day playing their drawing and counting game on the computer.

We got this educational software from the SEDU the kids go to. It teaches the kids colour recognition, counting and lots of useful computer skills.

Bear in mind my kids are 4 and 6. I'm amazed at how well they have picked it up.

A $400 monitor and a $20 keyboard. cheap price to pay for teaching your kids to learn really. :-)

The first ten minutes.

So Lynda rings me right on 5:30 asking if I can come home on time...

"You’re not working late tonight are you?. She's wild. I need you here".

"Yeh yeh Yeh I'll come home now", I said.

On the way home I think I'll be nice to my lovely wife. I knew she was stressed, so I called in to Woolworths and bought a little bunch of flowers and chocolates.

Then I get home and put the key in the door. I turned the key blissfully unaware of the world that awaited me…

I open the door and Melanie comes running over to give me the usual warm welcome home.
"Don’t touch her she's wet and slimey." shouts Lynda.

Turn out she's tipped out an entire bottle of shampoo on the bathroom floor and proceeded to roll in it.

Sounds not so bad so far.

I'm like "hold on hold on, I'll get changed quickly." rather than wreck my work clothes.

I start by running a bath and dropping her in it. No need for bubble bath, there's plenty on Melanie. So Lynda's trying to wash the slime off her while I'm tasked with cleaning up the floor.

Firstly I use a towel and soak up most the shampoo. All is good…. Well I thought so anyway.

Melanie steps out of the bath with wet feet and the first thing she does is slip over.

Water + shampoo = slippery floor.

Do you know just how hard it is to mop a detergent covered floor? The more water you use, the more suds you get on the floor?

Anyway- after a lot of rinsing over and over with the mop, I finally get the floor clean. (I'm talking really clean).

In the meantime, Melanie has run out of the bathroom and rolled on Ben's bed.

Here's the formula you need to use to assess the temperature of the household at this point:

Wet child + bed = dry child x angry mother(2)

So Lynda's now finished drying Melanie properly and got her dressed. She then starts to strip the bed of the wet sheets.

So while Mummy's occupied with that, and daddy's still mopping the floor, Melanie makes a bee-line for the kitchen where there's pretty flowers that daddy just bought mummy. She destroys the bunch in about 5 seconds flat.

So I then move from finishing the bathroom floor, to immediately cleaning up the flowers petals and mess from the kitchen floor.

Finally everything settles down for a normal night. Oh well. Gotta love it. Lynda liked the chocolates. :-)

Hmmmm Yummy Biskit!

Well I'm back. Long time no blog.

I have just sat down at my computer tonight to find dried biscuit mashed into my keyboard and smeared all over my monitor.

It would seem Melanie was given biscuits earlier today and decided to pay daddy's office a visit.

1. You know when you eat a biscuit and get it all mashed up in your mouth? Now drool it on your keyboard. Yes. Yes it's a pleasant image isn't it?
2. Still got some left? Well spit it in your hand, then wipe it on your lcd monitor.
3. Now disappear and leave it for daddy to find about 5 hours later.

"Hmmm Yummy Bis kit!" is her favourite saying.

Oh well. It's strange. At some level I'm grateful it was only biscuit. :-)