Updated: Down t’my chins

Posted on 30/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

Thank you kindly for the lovely comments: I am a happy girl again. That’s the thing with glum posts, I suppose – they’re the virtual equivalent of dolefully howling HOLLLD MEEEEE! And you did. Tenderly!

I am up to my chins in rubbish currently, and cannot indulge in my usual wordy pontification. I am tidying like a demon, and the heaps of crap outside my front door are getting even more trailer-parky. There is a washing machine, a TV, a frying pan, a bucket & spade, a borrowed hen drinker, a fondue set, a cuddly toy… didn’t she do well?! At this rate, Harry’s little friends will know just what to think, I fear.

I have to tell you about the website I’ve just discovered. It translates text into various dialects, and I am particularly entranced with Jive & Redneck. I shall leave you with A) a picture of Hairy Hubby, an hour after his return from the pub last night – you’ll have to imagine the snores -

and B) the above text translated into Jive. If I had more time, I would You Tube my attempts at pronunciation and kill you dead!

Dank ya’ kindly fo’ de lovely comments, dig dis: ah’ am some happy goat again. ‘S coo’, bro. Dat’s de doodad wid glum posts, ah’ suppose – dey’re da damn virtual equivalent uh dolefully howlin’ HOLLLD MEEEEE! Right on! And ya’ dun did. Tenderly! Right on! I’s gots’ta be down t’my chins in rubbish currently, and kinnot indulge in mah’ usual wo’dy pontificashun. ah’ am tidyin’ likes some demon, and da damn heaps uh crap outside mah’ front doo’ is gettin’ even mo’e trailer-parky. Slap mah fro! Dere be a wuzhin’ machine, some TV, some fryin’ pan, some bucket & spade, some bo’rowed hen drinker, some fondue set, some cuddly toy. Slap mah fro!.. dun didn’t she do well?! Right on! At dis rate, Harry’s little homeys gots’ta know plum whut t’dink, ah’ fear. Ah be baaad… I have t’tell ya’ about da damn website I’ve plum discovered. It translates text into various dialects, and ah’ am particularly entranced wid JIBE & Redneck. Ya’ know? Ah’ shall leave ya’ wid A) some picture uh Froy Hubby, an hour afta’ his return fum de pub last night, and B) de above text translated into JIBE. If ah’ had mo’e time ah’ would You’s Tube mah’ attempts at pronunciashun, and waste ya’ wasted! Right on!

http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/

Enjoy!

Update:

The party is 2pm – 5pm! BASTARD weather!

Fri
1
Aug		 0100 Partly cloudy 17°C SSW 14 mph   Excellent
0400 Partly cloudy 15°C S 12 mph   Excellent
0700 Sunny intervals 15°C SSW 10 mph 20 mph Good
1000 Sunny intervals 18°C SW 15 mph 34 mph Very Good
1300 Light Rain Shower 20°C SW 16 mph 36 mph Very Good
1600 Light Rain Shower 20°C SW 15 mph 30 mph Very Good
1900 Sunny intervals 20°C SW 13 mph 27 mph Very Good
Night Partly cloudy 14°C SSW 12 mph   Good

I haven’t started H’s birthday cake yet, and the living room carpet still looks like this

only minus the hairy hubby.

My mother has just turned up to help me tidy, but she has immediately started to tidy things that are already tidied! Give me strength…!

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 7 Comments »

Woe!

Posted on 28/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

I am going to tell you about the things that are pissing me off. I intend to enumerate all my anguished trivialities, so feel free to skip this one and come back another day when I’m chirpier.

I have been immovably stuck on 14st4 for nearly two weeks, despite being very restrained, and really had my heart very much set on being 13st-something for Harry’s birthday. I felt as if the psychological boost might make me more inclined to actually be photographed with my son, and I would love a nice photo of the two of us together. I think there’s only about 6 photos of us both in existence. There are no photos at all of the three of us together, because that would mean ceding power of image-capture to a fourth person.

This last week I’ve tried so hard. I’ve been so good. I’ve skipped my main meal three times in favour of bloody weetabix; in fact, I’ve cut my food intake quite ridiculously low. On Saturday and Sunday I sweated like a navvy, wielding a blunt spade on unyielding clay. I got on the scales last night to find I was a pound heavier. I’ve got on them again several times today, just in case there was some dreadful mistake, but no. I haven’t been this savagely angry with my body since it was persistently refusing to either downregulate, ovulate, conceive, or stop killing babies. I have cried about my weight 3 times today, and might not be finished yet.

Not only has cutting down on my food intake failed miserably to shift a single ounce, it became apparent this morning that my boobs were sagging limply like a pair of empty sacks: I’d been so intent on eating less that I forgot to consider my milk supply. Poor Harry was thirsty, and sucking so hard that he had hollow cheeks. This is not my intended weaning strategy, and the thought of my only-barely-on-his-growth-chart-line son not getting his vital milk because I’ve been a stupid twat, is upsetting me. I am now awash with the copious liquid and rather more substantial spag bol I have eaten.

The current Met Office forecast over our house for Friday:

Date Time Weather  Temp  Wind Visibility
Fri
1
Aug		 Day Heavy Rain Shower 23°C SSW 13 mph   Poor
Night Heavy Rain Shower 15°C SW 12 mph   Poor

Only their symbol for tropical storms has more raindrops. The garden party is obviously a washout, so I will therefore have invited 20 babies and 18 mothers into my lounge. Imagine how pleased I am with myself.

The EWCM that I mentioned a few posts back? What a waste of some perfectly good soul-searching. I started spotting a day or so later, and things are now working – very slowly – up into a proper period. The length of intro is highly suggestive that here is another 70-day humdinger of a bleed.

Whilst finishing the black-out blind for Harry’s room – he will move to his nursery soon – late on Saturday night, I managed to get about a dozen glass fibre splinters into my fingers, and both my thumbs. Seriously, who was the moron who decided to make the rods for roman blinds out of glass fibre? Bring me his freshly-severed head. I wish to stick pins in it.

My ezcema has flared up wildly since the weekend, and I have a particularly irritating rash developed under my (aforementioned sacklike and sagging) boobs. I look so classy when I scratch it. 

I have to haul Harry and myself into town early tomorrow, along with the appalling rush-hour traffic, in order for the optician to peer at my left eye. I appear to have some sort of bacterial nasty living in there, as my monthly-wear contacts are becoming fogged with immovable cloudy deposit shortly after insertion. I suspect he will send me on to our GP, who will do nothing.

It is the kind of day that would, in times gone past, have sent me to bed in disgust with a good book and a plate piled high with nice things, in search of some perspective. Except it’s hotter than Hades here tonight and the bedroom is absurdly stuffy. The plate of nice things A) would not solve my misery, rather the reverse, and B) are non-fucking-existent because I purged the cupboards weeks ago of anything illicit. (I did, however, eye up the cooking chocolate I have bought for Harry’s birthday cake.) And there’s still a baby sleeping in our room who has the hearing of a sodding spaniel if you open that tasty pack of crisps I haven’t bloody got.

Quite a few people love me and, to the best of my belief, no-one hates me, but I am still going down the garden to eat some worms. I hear they’re low on fat.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: , | 12 Comments »

…and suffocate the ants, in an English Country Garden

Posted on 26/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

I have been gardening. I am hot, sun-burned and cross. I bet this never happens to Alan beatific bloody Titchmarsh.

It hasn’t been the best of weeks: child has been teethy - the sixth one has broken cover – and hubby and I have been unhappily and increasingly squabblesome about tensions that we must and will address. You’d think that merrily surviving the trials of infertility would subsequently render us bomb-proof, but seemingly not. In consequence, the garden has not progressed much beyond the default state of untidy scrub, and the car-full of plants I bought on Wednesday were beginning to look stressed. They were starting to realise that they had not come to Kew.

So, today I concentrated on a 10ft by 3ft border, that, until I attacked it violently with a fork, was a matted tangle of creeping buttercup and grass with a single crocosmia and three ornamental grasses protruding listlessly. One of those is dead, but I left it anyway, as it vaguely looks like a circa 1983 Tina Turner has been dropped feet first into the ground from a great height.

The ground here is clay. Solid clay. A randomly-chosen spadeful would doubtless make a nice little pot for a deserving granny, as they tend not to mind things that look rustic, cracked, and a bit shit. Hence, when you drive your favourite earth-inverting implement hopefully into the… look, lets call it soil for the sake of argument, yes? all you tend to achieve is a gigantic clod balancing heavily on your fork. Assuming you’ve missed your sandalled foot, which I only narrowly managed on a number of occasions. My clearance technique consisted of grabbing all clods that had grass still attached and hurling them savagely over the fence into the field towards my startled geese. John obligingly ignored this blatant fly-tipping onto his land, and wheelbarrowed over some of what he cheerfully termed ‘topsoil’. Yeeeeeeesssssss. This would be the agricultural variety, as opposed to the horticultural, then. The boulders are significantly bigger in the former.

I made the mistake of covering the head-sized chunks in the border with this… substance, before I dug the holes for the flowers. As soon as I began to move the stuff about, the smaller bits promptly flipped me the sedimentary bird and disappeared under the bigger blocks, leaving me once again with what could accurately be described as a really fucking lumpy layer of crud. Undeterred, I kept mining away at the rock-hard slabs to create planting holes. I’m sure gardening should not be about scratching what looked like (and will doubtless amount to) shallow graves for these hapless plants, followed by scrabbling about to back-fill the edges with a bloody cairn of some of the smaller pieces.

There is still a 45ft stretch of border along the front of the house to tackle, and 2 trays of pot-bound dahlias left, all desperate to get their roots into something squelchy. John is out there now, hopefully armed with a mattock and a HRRrruUUUaaAAAaaarrRR attack-mode mentality, as nothing less will dent the thick carpeting of weeds.

Bastard things. We had been consoling ourselves that the pampas grass that mother planted was doing well this year - and occupying a useful 6ft of border to boot – but then I read something the fabulous Antonia had written, and since then we’ve been a tad uneasy about it. It may meet with an accident this autumn. 

After all this, I bet it will piss down on Friday, when I have approximately 20 (Yes. Party has out-grown its original specifications.) small children, all replete with a mama, descending, and we will all be tightly confined to indoors.  There is also a vague threat that Severn Trent are planning to cut the water off that afternoon as well.

Christ.

Brownie points for any commenter who can include an couplet from the school-assembly title ditty. I’ve been humming it all day. No cheaty-googling!

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Photo Finish

Posted on 22/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

The thing with crawling, you see, is that there appears to be an inherent speed-limit. There is only so fast you can move hands and knees before overcooking it and plunging forward in a spectacular dive. Usually, these moments occur when excitement has reached such an enthralling peak that it begins to impinge on co-ordination. Crawling races with Daddy, for instance, can bring about this particular set of circumstances. Throw in the new and interesting aspect of crawling races on the beach… well, it was always going to end with a face-full of sand.

Lucky that Mummy was on hand to intervene, and wasn’t messing about taking photos of her chaps’ bottoms. Ahem.

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Thaw

Posted on 19/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

A frost that could chill your beer has finally lifted from the HFF household this evening. It settled coolly around everyone’s vitals on Wednesday at lunchtime, when I lost my rag with the hairy hubby over tense horticultural issues. 

Context: I have been planning Harry’s first birthday party since… Oooo, since the final attendee of his Christening party departed the house, say. Balloons and fairy cakes excite me greatly, you see. I have some over-compensation issues as well: Harry’s early arrival resulted in a distinct absence of glorious baby-festival. The champagne never made it out of the wine rack, the cards and beautiful gifts piled up, unopened (sight of the gorgeous wrapping and be-ribboning of the boxes alone would normally have sent me ecstatically into stratospheric orbit whilst clucking madly), and the bouquets shrivelled unnoticed on the kitchen floor. We celebrated a little when H came home, but it just didn’t feel like the new-arrival-baby-bliss I’d dreamed of for so many years. The window for wild and joyous revelry in the birth of our child seemed to have gone past. The balloons had gone all saggy.

So Harry’s Christening party was a swell affair – with balloons! and fairy cakes! - but I had 65 adults and 11 children in the house, and did all the catering myself. With a volcanically refluxing 16-but-should-be-9 weeker.

AND made a big ol’ cake.

 

Unsurprisingly, we so were desperately behindhand that I ultimately had to delegate the balloon-festooning I had been looking forward to, and after the service I was so busy cutting cheeses, pies, rolls and cold joints, whilst simultaneously organising my aunts into teams of carvers, servers and waitresses, that the whole event passed me by rather. 

So, I have been looking forward to Harry’s birthday like a rabid dog who sees a cool bowl of water and a juicy leg up ahead. Delighted with his summer arrival, I had planned an outdoor party. (I am mid-February, which is a crappy time for parties. The day after Valentines day, as it happens. Hubby has threatened to find scope for economy there before now.) This involved the transformation of the only flat section of ground (solid clay, stuffed with broken glass from where we stupidly demolished the last house without removing the windows first) that we possess by the house into a nice lawn for babies to play on. This would necessitate John building a flight of steps, moving the hen fence (which he has put up in the wrong place, according to me, and the only right place, according to him), and shifting the topsoil from the large heap in the orchard over to where I wanted to lay the turf. The soil would need to settle and be raked before laying the turf. The turf would need to be watered, cut and cared for, before unleashing 15 small people and their proud mamas on top of it.

You do not need a qualification in landscaping or indeed in husband-management, to know that this is a tall order. I had been on at John since the start of spring to get something done, and he had been the epitome of masterly inactivity. He claimed to be busy with work, and his JCB signally failed to trundle up the drive. 6 weeks ago, my plaintive appeals turned into outright nagging, and a month ago I started to become mildly abusive on the subject. My explosion of disappointment and rage occurred when an exasperated enquiry resulted in an admission that it was now too late to achieve anything prior to the date.

I consequently took the only adult, civilised option available to me, and froze the bugger out for 2 days.

The cold shoulder was turned. The icy back was presented. Syllables were confined strictly to the subject of the child, and rationed heavily at that. Meals were not provided.

Today, however, a good friend of ours came round for coffee and passed on some meaty gossip that I kept to myself for over 5 whole hours before yielding to the need to share it with him.  

I did not cave without dignity. I made sure I prefaced my juicy guess-what-A-said about-B olive branch with a unexpurgated explanation of my wild irritation, with due pause, emphasis, and repetition of any points that I felt he may have missed the full significance of. And because he is really a good hubby who always does mean well, I at no point belted him slightly with a spade. He also had sufficient self-preservation instinct to actually admit to being a bit crap, although I am wifely-wise enough to realise that his fingers were probably crossed behind his back when he said it. His sorriness for my disappointment appeared sincere after I cried, though, and I know he will consequently try his hardest this week and next to render the sloping area of spiky-grass-with-half-bricks-stuck-out-of-it by the kitchen habitable for toddlers.

I know this also because I will be making damn sure that I’m stood over the dear man.

And I would willingly share with you what A said about B, by the way, but I fear it is too convoluted and contextual to amuse you. Instead, I shall leave you with a photo of the week-old chicks, who are already losing their cute fluffiness to feathers. 

Around here, Tempus don’t half Fugit lately.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 13 Comments »

That is the Question

Posted on 14/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

I generally assume that my lovely little audience is exclusively female. With the honourable exception of my regular lost-in-cyberspace hairy porn surfers, of course, but to be frank, I am assuming that anyone who is actively googling for the lower end of a hairy granny is not of a delicate disposition, and can consequently look after themselves just fine. So, this is me tentatively enquiring: are there any men here today?! No? No-one hiding behind a pair of virtual falsies? Cool. I can talk about me EWCM then.

I have a sticky conundrum. My hormones are patently just as buggered-up as normal, but there is a faint and exceedingly far-off possibility that deep in my very chubby tummy, an ovary is Doing Her Stuff. Now, despite the fact that my chance of becoming pregnant all by myself (so to speak) is somewhere between Fat and None, my instinct is to fling myself lasciviously towards the startled and delighted hubby. Bless him: he can never get too much. Most of him is 36, but his willy remains in its enthusiastic and effervescent late-teens.

However.

I do not, at all, want to be pregnant just now. I am 4 stone overweight, my super-input-demanding child is not yet one year old, and pregnancy always (if successful, it would be my fifth bloody go at it) makes me exhausted, miserable (in a nice way) and sick as a dog. It’s unfair of me to plan to spend Harry’s formative months of learning to walk and talk lying on the sofa cuddling a bucket. Or in hospital, miscarrying. Or in hospital, on bedrest. Or in hospital, sitting next to a premature baby. Or with my joy in our son’s childhood blighted by my grief at losing that baby. I can’t shortchange Harry like that; he’s too precious to us. If we can never have another child, he is so much more than enough. We are daily overwhelmed with just how fabulous he is.

But but but. What if I am ovulating, and won’t do it again for…. well, ever? My ovaries are somewhat pathetic and don’t exactly provide a plethora of opportunities for conception. What if this is the only baby-window I’m going to get? Before we got as far as IUI & IVF, we tried for 2 years: tracking my ovulation (never even saw its bloody footprints) and then 6 months on Clomid, and got nowhere. Admittedly, I hadn’t figured out the mucus thing back then, but even so, eggs from Ann are scarce. I’m 34 in February, so the ones that are hanging about aren’t going to get any fresher, either. 

In short, ARRGGHH! To shag, or not to shag?

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 9 Comments »

Then I Met A Man With No Feet

Posted on 13/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

It’s 9.30pm and I have just woken up from my booze-induced stupor. And it’s Sunday!  Dear me. How hedonistic. Two glasses of wine at lunchtime and I could barely string a sentence together. I was obliged to crawl blearily out of the car and lurch upstairs to sleep it off. Hubby, as usual, was both amused and slack-jawed in disbelief at my total inability to process the good stuff.

We have been to Derbyshire today for the Christening of my cousin’s little boy. The smashing little fella is a few months older than Harry and was impeccably behaved throughout. Harry, on the other hand, threw a screaming paddywhack in the packed church, right in the middle of the very important water-chucking bit, so I carted him unceremoniously outside, cheeks a-glow with shame.

Whilst perambulating amongst the gravestones, one in particular caught my eye. Now, I am not the type of person to mock grief. Losing your son is tragic, even after 172 years. However, gravestone fashions have moved on since 1836, and this one was so bloody lugubrious that I actually found it vaguely funny, and pointed it out in passing to all my relatives. Who all obediently peered at it, whilst transparently concluding that actually, I was distinctly odder than they had thought. Oh, well.

The verse at the bottom reads:

A pale consumption gave the fatal blow

The stroke was certain, but th (sic) effect was slow

With lingering pain, death saw him sore oppress’d

Pitied his sighs and kindly gave him rest.

Phew. Heavy.

And whilst we’re all miserable, I must share my shoe agony with you. Three days of intensive, miserable shopping for a brown and pink outfit just so I could wear my pretty brown and pink shoes.

I dragged them out of the shoe heap storage area yesterday, to find an ankle strap missing. My distress was palpable! Even Hubby had a poke about looking for the missing strip of leather, but it has vanished into that lurking fourth dimension that contains all the odd socks, used biros, and that special valuable edition of Barnaby Rudge I borrowed in 2002.

I returned to town with Hubby yesterday in an attempt to start my outfit plan from scratch, based on my identical yet inferior black shoes. Predictably, after an hour and a half of fruitless searching for something elegant, inexpensive and large, I began to get uber-anxious and teary and was duly taken home, empty-handed, apart from the very-tightly-clutched hubby paw. I ended up in much-worn but comfy black linen trousers and a slightly NHS-ey pink linen top. But I managed to avoid all cameras, all day, so… RESULT!

On a more upbeat note, Harry’s first visit to a pub went well; he spent most of the party playing happily under the table, soaking up family adoration and dispensing carefully-calculated doses of charm. There are far worse places to spend an afternoon than relaxing on a pub floor…

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Life & Death

Posted on 11/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

It’s been a polarised kind of day.

Hubby attended the military funeral of one of his friends.

I have been up since 5am attempting to watch the chicks hatch out, and doing badly. I thought the first little guy was stuck, so helped him out myself. I went back to bed for an hour at 8am, convinced that no more action was imminent. I expect the second chick erupted from his shell the moment I left the room; his chirrups had a faintly triumphant air to them. I began to wonder if hatching was something that poultry like to do in private. Call of nature, type o’ thing. Something like peeing behind a hedge when you’re out for a long walk.

I watched the pip holes like a suspicious hawk for the next 3 hours, in vain. I then left for a long-booked lunch date with a friend (lest you think me a lady wot lunches, let me assure you I can easily go a year or more between these oases) and arrived back home fractious, Harry having roared and misbehaved in the restaurant. I was unsurprised to see chick number three had shyly emerged from his shell in my absence.

The fourth waited until I was putting Harry to bed.

Five and Six are poking little beaks out of their pip holes, and still aren’t ready to commit. It’s nearly my bedtime and I am vaguely considering taking the incubator to bed, but I fear Hubby would make Remarks.

Mrs Brahma (a supposedly placid breed) should be proud: all three of her chicks are intermittently pecking hell out of one another and the Orpington already.

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One Man in a Tractor

Posted on 08/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

The immortal JK Jerome once wrote:

‘You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris – no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never “weeps, he knows not why.” If Harris’s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.’

I am married to Harris.

Is anyone else married to Harris?

 PS. Honesty compels me to add that John indignantly repudiates my opinion of his Harris-ness, and claims to think many deep thoughts.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

Robin vs Priscilla, Round II

Posted on 07/07/2008 by Hairy Farmer Family

Today I went on a shopping trip to Birmingham with both my mother and a teething baby. Brave, yes? I went with the intent of shopping for clothes, both for self and child. So frankly, it was never destined to go well.

Recent experiences involving reflective shop windows and my mile-wide bottom have taught me to skulk in the shadows wherever possible, but there’s just no-where to hide in a changing room. It’s as if you’re supposed to actually look at yourself in there: there’s mirrors and everything. I cowered into the corner as far as I could but the lighting was remorseless, and I could clearly see just how far apart the fasteners were on the size I had – hopefully - selected. Also, the material was… was… how can I put it? Bluntly, I suppose. Ladies, I had camel-toe.

Oh, that cringing trail of shame back onto the shop floor, past the helpfully-beaming assistant. ‘Any good, madam?’ Back out to where I could hear my screaming, over-tired infant being pushchaired in a holding-pattern outside the changing rooms by my mother. Instantaneous increase of stress levels and haste. Searching with fumbling fingers for the next size up and OMG, they don’t make them any bigger in this style.

Firmly fight back tears, visit pushchair, make laudable effort at happy-noise smiley-face at scarlet-faced bawling child. Who immediately discerns my concealed distress and promptly attempts to incorporate the essence of my despondent karma into the tenor of his protests. If he continues along this vocal path, he will shortly only be audible to dogs.

Mother decides that he is over-heated (he isn’t) and wheels him outside into the rain. I strongly suspect that Harry is now wailing because he is in titchy shorts, a t-shirt that has ridden up to his armpits, and is being rained on.

And so it went on. For 4 hours. Oh, and the train home was rammed, so child naturally trotted out his soaring ululations again, to the delight of our fellow passengers. Groan. Not a happy day. What my poor mother must have suffered. I went out determined to buy something simple and well-cut in a bright, cheerful pastel for a family christening this Sunday. I came home with a £12 pair of brown crop trousers. Robin of Sherwood just kicked Priscilla’s arse again.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

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