Gotta Laugh

I was the weird child at my school

by Veronica on May 29, 2012

in Gotta Laugh

I was the weird child at my school. Rumours about “those hippies on the hill” flew through our conservative community with relative frequency and I was stuck at school with all of the super straight, super normal kids, whose parents had 9-5 jobs.

Add in that our house had no indoor plumbing and the power came from a meter box through a series of extension cords and power boards and you had a recipe for school yard teasing.

I was also quite smart, which I’m absolutely CERTAIN helped me to be pretty much a social outcast for a lot of school.

Of course, when you’re the weird kid at school, you absolutely need to dress up like Wednesday Addams for the Dress Up Night.

Doesn’t it just make SO MUCH SENSE?

You can see why I had very few friends, can’t you.

PS, Happy Birthday to my Father today! He’s responsible for 50% of my awesome you know.

 

 

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Do you know what the inside of a chicken looks like?

by Veronica on May 28, 2012

in Animals, Gotta Laugh

When reality sucks, I am very good at escaping into stories. Between this pregnancy destroying my joints, my blood pressure making me want to pass out and my children screaming at me, I can safely say reality sucks, and so I won’t be writing about it.

Instead, you can have some stories from my childhood. I grew up the daughter of two punk/hippy/greenies who built their house out of recycled materials and killed their own meat. My childhood was awesome.

***

I remember being about four years old when my father first showed me properly how to skin and gut a chicken. We’d had poultry for as long as I could remember and Dad had always killed them for us when chicken soup was required, or when our young roosters started to crow, but this was the first time I remember him walking me through the steps.

He was good at it and by this stage it didn’t take long for him to finish, lopping off the ends of the wings to dry out for me (I liked feathers) and asking me if I remembered how he’d done it.

Of course I remembered.

Then came the cool bit.

You know how chickens scratch and peck around? Not everything they’re eating is edible. Half of the time they’re picking up small pebbles and stones to store in their gizzard to help grind their food.

My father hunted through the entrails he’d dropped below the dressed out chook and picked up the gizzard.

“Look at this Ronnie” he said, as he took his knife and split it, showing me how poultry actually crush and partially digest their food before it hits their stomach. Inside was a mess of pebbles, rocks, grass and a few tiny squashed grasshoppers. Our hen had been happily pecking in the yard the moment before Dad dispatched her and had obviously found some tasty bits.

He explained how it worked, before rinsing the gizzard free of rocks and rubble in the bucket of water next to us.

Grabbing the hen, he lopped her feet off with the choppy thing he had and with me tailing him, we took the hen inside for Mum to make dinner.

Dad kept the gizzard for us, slicing it finely and frying it with some onion and bacon.

Turns out, gizzards are delicious on toast for lunch. I made Dad save them for me with every bird he killed after that.

Except pigeons.

Pigeon gizzards are too small to bother with.

 

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My parents ruined all of my good ideas when I was a kid

by Veronica on May 25, 2012

in Animals, Gotta Laugh

When I was little, probably about Amy’s age, I wanted pet mice. I wanted pet mice so badly that it made my teeth ache. The thought of little white furry mice that were MINE was enough to send me into paroxysms of delight.

My parents however, were not impressed with my choice of desired pet, insisting that there were enough bloody mice running around in the roof and why would we want pet white mice? I think they thought that inevitably, my mice would escape and we’d end up with little white mice running riot through the entire property.

They were probably right.

You see though, I wanted a boy and a girl mouse. I wanted to breed them and have babies and set up a large mousey empire. I wanted to be queen of the rodents, wielding the power of life and death with a single decision.

It was a relatively simple idea.

I loved my cat.

My cat loved mice.

Therefore, in my mind, the best thing I could possibly do for my beloved cat was breed her an endless supply of fattened mouse treats.

I think once my parents knew what I wanted to do with the mice, they were impressed with my reasoning and a little concerned with how bloodthirsty I was.

Needless to say, it wasn’t until I was much older that I got pet mice, and I was absolutely forbidden to breed them.

Which is a shame, because I could just see myself with minions and a scepter.

This is not a mouse.

Did your parents destroy your dreams when you were a child?

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I am stuck peeing in a bucket

by Veronica on May 22, 2012

in Gotta Laugh

So, the great plumbing disaster of 2012 continues and I have been stuck peeing in a bucket since yesterday afternoon. For a pregnant woman with a baby bouncing on her bladder, this is not my idea of fun.

On the left, you can see the toilet pipe, that attaches to my outside toilet, with the spot for the new pipe (for the NEW TOILET!!!) to attach. On the right, you can see the septic tank. You will notice that they are not joined together, therefore, no peeing in the toilet for us.

[I will point out here that the water you can see is not pee, but muddy water from the small water tank that was left dripping. I know, I thought that was excellent when I discovered that this morning too.]

The grey water pit is finally dug and filled back in, although it too, is not connected. Nathan grumbled something about having to dig something and poke a pipe somewhere, but my brain had switched off.

This morning however, it was finally connected enough so that I got to have a shower, while cackling gleefully to myself. It’s the small pleasures in life, like a hot shower, when you’ve been washing in the sink for the last three days because we were to avoid putting as much water down the drain as possible.

Sure, there is now a large puddle of shower water sitting at the base of the pipe Nathan has to work on, but it smells like shampoo at least.

Like I said, it’s the little things.

Aside from the fact that at the end of this, we’ll have fixed a problem that we’ve been procrastinating about since we moved in, AND we’ll have an inside toilet (in the next few weeks), the only good thing about all this digging and dirt is that I have a blank canvas in which to discuss grown up things like landscaping and the relative merits of different grass seeds. I’m angling for flowers and trees in this spot, which is where the car used to get parked.

Flowers and trees are much nicer than a car.

There is a lot of dirt piled up out there. And you know what children love? DIRT.

Despite me not being able to shower because “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON’T PUT WATER DOWN THE DRAIN”, we’ve had to bath the kids every night since work started. Piles of dirt and gravel are irresistible, apparently.

I’m told that the regular outside toilet will be hooked up and working again by tonight, but in the meantime Internet, I am peeing in a bucket. I know. My life is so cool.

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Getting into things they shouldn’t…

by Veronica on May 11, 2012

in Gotta Laugh

Yesterday evening, after dinner, I took myself to my bedroom with a book in order to get some peace and quiet and hopefully stop my back aching quite so much. I could hear the children running around the house screeching and playing; with Nathan occasionally breaking in to ask them to PLEASE go and play in their bedroom.

It was relaxing, right up until my son came into my room, tucked himself under my chin and nearly asphyxiated me with the smell of perfume. It seems, during their playtime, Isaac had tipped the remains of a bottle of perfume all over himself.

It wasn’t pretty.

For the record, a little bit of perfume is lovely – a lot of it is nauseating.

This morning, after a good wipe down, a bath, a sleep and another wipe down, he still smells vaguely of perfume whenever he tucks himself under my chin for a cuddle.

It could be worse however – there was a time when taking my eyes off Amy meant that she would fingerpaint the kitchen with butter, or the hallway with nappy cream. At one point she smeared both sudocreme and bepanthan into her hair, leaving her looking punky and smelling like sweet baby bottoms for a week. Waterproof nappy rash cream is not designed to shampoo out easily.

Nowadays Amy hides herself in the bedroom with a pair of scissors, paper and the sticky tape, madly creating before anyone discovers her absence. Despite the little bits of paper she leaves everywhere that refuse to vacuum up, I can’t say I mind this style of creative expression.

It’s certainly less frustrating than discovering an entire box of cocoa tipped out, or the corn flour tipped onto the floor!

What do your children get into when you’re not looking?

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