busy bein' busy

I don't know why I haven't updated lately.
Well, OK, I guess I do - not much is happening and I'm not really feeling very inspired for blog stuff. I've been spending my time being as organised as possible - looking after babies, trying to get enough sleep (and failing), making Stef's lunches for work, washing clothes (and face-washers - I go through about 20 of those a day!) and being vomited on. I've felt more on top of things in the last week or two and not feeling as stressed as I was last month. The babies are a constant source of amazement and are changing all the time! Their little personalities are coming through more and more and I'm just in awe of these little teeny people.

They have a lot of nicknames:

Julius:
Chubsie
Chubsie Malone
Chubsie Snr.
Boofer
Julio
Honey Bear

George:
Chubsie Jr.
Little Sausage
Boris Malone
Jorge
Honey Bunny

Julius seems to want to stand up and start walking and talking (and if he were to do so I would expect him to dust himself off and say "that's enough of that baby stuff") as he's quite frustrated being floor bound. George is quite happy rolling around on the ground playing with his toys and jabbering away to himself. Julius wants to grab everything he sees but George is more delicate in both mannerisms and features and resembles a little pixie.

They are so handsome!

Julius has no comment at the request of George

Yes, they are still sleeping together but we do have two cots in the room and they will be seperated in the coming few days (sob, so sad!).

6 months old!

A few days before they were born
(I still can't believe there were two in there!)



7am - January 5th (just before we went to hospital)
yeah I had a pretty bad brown patchy face



a few days old....



6 months old!

Holy cow the last 6 months have gone really fast (but also felt like a lifetime!).

We love our baby gentlemens so much - it's so amazing that you can make two teeny people at once and watch them grow. About a year ago they were 4cm foetuses - bobbing about in my belly. Now they are robust baby mens who like to eat sweet potato, laugh when you kiss them on the tummy and try and grab the cats as they gingerly walk past.

Speaking of which (cats) - if anyone needs a cat magnet, I have one for hire:

"please love us too, daddy!"

The mystery of Bobo

This is going to sound kind of odd, but it's something I think about quite often (because I am a loser who is obsessed with cats I guess) but if I had one wish I would probably use it to know the history of our cat Bobo. How old he is... where he came from... what his name used to be... what he looked like as a kitten etc.

We adopted him from the North Melbourne Animal Shelter in 2005. All we know is that he was about 5 years old and he was found wandering around Frankston. There were only two cats to choose from that day and we chose him! (the other one was a cute kitten but I decided on the puffy full grown man).

He has had many names:
Juno
Boobie
Vlad
Handsome B Wonderful
Bobo
Bobo McSnaggles
Boab
Jame Bond (after Thailand's inability to remember the "s" in James)
Boobilina
Petunia

... but his name is Bobo - but I sometimes call him Boab. I think he has a few aliases at various vets around town, so we'd probably never remember exactly who was when he went there.

He's an inside man who yowls when I go to bed every night until he realises "oh hey, you're all in bed now.... let me join you". In winter Bobo sleeps between Stef and I under the doona and yes, it's very annoying.

He once got crystals in his penis and was in a lot of pain. He stayed in the hospital for a week and cost a lot of money and has eaten very very expensive cat food ever since (and remained penis-crystal free!) but we love him so it's ok.

He's also the most unphotogenic man around. Observe:

and

If I had a load of money I'd take out a full page ad in the paper and say "Hey, if you used to own this cat - we have him now and we just want to let you know he's alive and well and we love him heaps. You can never have him back."

If you hate cats... then I feel very sorry for you.

feel my brain power

I went to a friends baby shower today and there were about 20 other women there.

One game was to unscramble words - something I have never ever been very good at or really cared to be good at - I'm not really into puzzles. BUT.... I managed to unscramble 20 words before anyone else! I swear it was some kind of miracle. Proof that while this baby business may have bruised my brain slightly (umm... what day is it?), my brain is seemingly still able to work somewhat well.... sometimes.

I am going to Ikea tomorrow with my mum (and the babies) and plan on buying a whole lot of crap. Well, actually, I'm going to buy useful things like storage boxes and highchairs. Although Aldi do have a highchair that a child can use until the age of 10. I am somewhat tempted to get one of those, just to make them use it until they are 10 years old. Haha!


Someone please explain to me why I am looking up vintage McDonalds shit on etsy and eBay?!

two babies - or: watch me rant a lot again

We went to K-Mart today in an attempt to get out of the house and do something different.

It's really really really hard staying home and doing the same thing every day but it's also quite difficult working within a small window of opportunity when the babies are not grumpy and/or tired (basically they last about 2 hours awake and then start crying because they want to go to sleep). When you have two babies being grumpy - trust me, it's not much fun at all.

So... that means that saying you'll do something at a specific time is very risky: it might not match up to their naps on the day, they might be hungry, they might vomit/poo/wee on themselves 5 seconds before you have to leave. And then they finally do nap and I have to get other things done like the dishes or the washing or general tidying. And then they wake up. Oh and there are also things to do like get dressed and have a shower and eat.

It's not as bad as it used to be. When they were a few weeks old I basically felt like an alien all alone on my very own planet. I remember that going for a walk around the block felt like the most wonderful thing in the world - proof that there was a world going by around me, that other people were alive and doing their own thing like eating dinner or watching TV - and how very jealous I became of those simple mundane things. I doubt that makes a lot of sense (it's quite abstract unless you've been there too I suspect) but the days got a little better and I eventually felt more human. I don't think I'm 100% there yet, but getting close.

I don't want to seem like I'm complaining about things again - because my baby mens are delightful - but I am feeling kind of exhausted. My mum is on school holidays after tomorrow and I almost feel I TOO will be on school holidays due to having my mother around to help (don't know if she realises that yet or not).

Blah de blah.
I feel so bad whinging but I also feel bad keeping it in.

So anyway.... at K-Mart... I think we had about three dozen comments - met a twin and met another woman who was about to become a grandma of twins. I swear that everyone is secretly a twin, judging by the amount of people I meet who are twins or who have had twins. Old ladies stop us.... kids point and comment to their parents... random people say hello and ask questions... people talk about us between themselves like I can't hear what they're saying. In a way, it's just like being a foreigner in Japan again.

But being a foreigner in Japan was sometimes really fucking annoying.

This, however, is delightful.

Apologies for the crappy ranting.... again!
Thanks for getting through that. Here is some light-heartedness:

• We owe George $5. At 6pm last night (after his nap) he woke up with a pain in the belly and was making some crazy noises like the stupid Crazy-Frog song "Nem nem nem... mim mim mim mim..." and I knew the poor duffer had a poo coming. I promised to put $5 in the money box if we got to meet the poo (yes, picture me talking up George's bottom promising a poo some money). No, I will not be doing crazy things like this when he is old enough to understand what I mean or we will have poo everywhere and the demands for cash will, no doubt, be high. So he did get the poo out - and we owe George's money box $5. I remember when I was young, I had warts on my fingers and the Dr told me to just tell them to go away (which worked). But I also promised them things - like I would say "If you go away I'll give you a car... and I'll give you a pony... etc" and then I had a mini-panic as to how I would give warts these things that I had no-way of getting myself. Would I make the warts mad? (obviously not, they never came back).
  
  
• The babies have been noticing each other a lot more. George seems to think Julius is hillarious and laughs at him quite often (Julius still quite unaware of this humour directed towards him). It's the cutest thing we've ever seen.
  
  
• Both babies have been looking a lot at the cats. This is going to be trouble!

This kind of reminds me of playing priate ships with your bed (you know... when you get off the bed you're in the "water").

I'm bored

Here are 32 things I would like to achieve before my 32nd birthday (in 3 months and 4 days):

AKA: "CMON FOOL, you have two babies now and would be lucky if you get to do one of these things in the coming months!"

1) use my DSLR to take photos of my beautiful babies! I'm sorry dear camera, I suck.
2) wear a headband out in public (I'm all into headbands now)
3) go out for dinner. anywhere! (not my parents house though, that doesn't count)
4) find that bit of my tripod that's missing
5) go to the movies.
6) read a book.
7) watch the rest of "True Blood" s1
8) join Costco when it opens (god knows when that will be though) and then, when they don't sell that Paul Newman's spicy mango salsa I used to buy in Japanese Costco, I'll get really mad.
9) go to ikea and buy some crap
10) eat some (A LOT) of Rock-Lea-Road (rocky road from Darrell Lea)
11) Convince Stef it's actually called Rock-Lea-Road
12) sims3 (YEAH KEEP DREAMING BABY!) - insert mega sad face here
13) get a wedding band
14) go to bed at a decent hour (like I'm talking 9pm here people!)
15) teach Bobo some manners (ie: don't walk around yowling in the middle of the night)
16) find more blogs to read
17) ?
....
...
..
.

ugh. I'm already bored of this.
In reality I will be lucky if I have a shower.

Ahh Japan (ok, a pretty long rant is coming....)

My ten year passport expired last month or so and I'm a little sad :(

It was my 3rd passport! We had many awesome times together - going to the US three times, South Korea twice, Thailand once and back and forth between Japan and Australia so many times that I'll probably never know (or be bothered working out) just how many times that was! That is an awful lot of hours in aeroplanes! So incredibly boring! No matter how many times I go through customs, I always feel like a criminal (which is silly because I'd never do anything naughty except, once or twice, bring lollies into Australia without declaring them -- I always declare them now, I swear).

I am lucky enough to have shared many of those adventures with my family too! I would hate to have spoken about Japan with them to not have them know, really, what the hell I was on about - "blah de blah Sharnee always craps on about Japan but we have no real idea what she's talking about"! But... I was lucky enough to have my parents, my brother and Stef to show around Japan (at different times) and they understand that 'Japan' part of me and my life. And they visited me there so it's not an abstract concept for them. This means the world to me!

I can say to my mum "remember that time I took you to the ¥100 shop three times in one day!" or my brother "remember when I, for some reason, got scared that there were wild bears in the hills behind that temple in Kyoto?" or my dad "remember when you were busting to go to the toilet and we had to stop the car at some random shop so you could go and we teased you about it for days after?" and Stef "remember in Tokyo when that drunk Japanese man pointed to you and said 'HAHAHHAHA HARRY POTTER!!!!!'?"

I left for Japan almost ten years ago. I swore I would never forget that date but now I can't remember if it was June 15th or July 15th.... but it was 10 years ago! Excuse the nostalgia that's about to burst forth:

bears?


gorillas?


pandas?


mother!


beer and mannequin!


kumquat


curry with cheese!


ginganet lesson


curry (again)


swimmer


friends


nagasaki


an all-nighter in shibuya

I don't miss Japan like I used to.
When I left in 2004 I think I did so in a rather hurried fashion that it hurt for 2 or more years after. Who knew that something so simple could affect me so deeply? I never expected that at all, which is why I had to go back for another year! I'm glad I did. It's all over red rover. I will eternally miss it, but it doesn't ache like it once did. It's quite bizarre to me that you can find a home half way across the world.

Anyway.... now we have merged our surnames into one super surname and next time I travel it will be with a new name and with a new family.