Christmas Rush Part 3 - Pass the Xanax

It's Like a comedy of errors-except that nobody is laughing.

Today is the big grand-dress-rehearsal day in preparation for She-Who-Worships-Pink's performance in the Glee Recital.  I got to bed after eleven so I could pack her lunch, early snack, late snack, dance bag, find some make-up including blush and red lipstick (yes, I cringed too). Also flesh coloured leggings and singlet (didn't see that one coming) and her news item, library book, put money in her school dress pocket because it's canteen treats day - then I printed the map from the venue website.

I'm myself yawning widely and struggling with my squirming worm of a child, to apply mascara, brow-liner, blush, highlighter and the closest thing to red lipstick I could dig out of the back of my cupboard.  With that final task sort of complete, I bundle everything up in my arms and we head off with 20 minutes to spare.

Well we sat in the drive and wasted  five minutes trying to plug the address into Homer (our Simpson-esque portable GPS).

I wasn't taking chances as we are heading into the business heart of North Sydney where town planners apparently modeled the street scape on a tangled plate of spaghetti . They then seasoned their work with a multitude of signs: NO ENTRY, NO THROUGH ROAD, ONE WAY, NO LEFT TURN, NO RIGHT TURN, BUGGER OFF AND GO HOME..


Homer, with the personality, efficiency and general laziness of his alter-ego, wouldn't wake up until we'd driven halfway to the Dance Recital Rehearsal Venue.  The first thing he says, with more exuberance than necessary, is "Turn Left Ahead!"

OK. So I keep going. Keep going into the main drag of the Central Business District in peak hour rush.

Homer tells me again to turn left and I head into a smaller road only to be confronted with two large fire trucks. Lights are flashing, hoards of people are milling around on curbs, on crossings and spilling onto the road. The building diagonally opposite the venue has been evacuated for some reason and we are detoured, and detoured some more, into a dead end street lined with parking meters. I am running low on change after filling my daughter's pocket but I have enough for the drop off - I think - if we can find how to get back there on foot.

Did I mention the rain? We've been having thunderstorms all morning. :0)

Two minutes later with, one other mother and dancer in tow, I'm sharing my umbrella with a nice teacher who is leading us through an enormous grand campus (like a movie set for St Trinians) to their Smith Auditorium. I check repeatedly that the bright yellow Pooh Bear umbrella is still bobbing along behind me. My Pinkster is huddled under it with her little friend as they run together. The other mum is ducking and diving, phone to her ear, under the stately porticoes.

More minutes pass before we are inside an enormous building doing a floor to floor search for our dance troop and we've picked up another mum and child on the way. I'm fumbling with some printouts scouring them for the emergency co-ordinator person's phone number so she can come rescue us, but before I can dial, my phone starts ringing. It's the bathroom guys, at my house, can't get in -can't remember where I left the key out for them.

Finally the search and rescue is a success and I hand my child over to a tall teenage girl with a clipboard.

She-Who-Worships-Pink is disoriented; we both thought I could stay and watch and as I stagger out into the auditorium loading dock, rain pelting my umbrella, I 'wish upon a star' for some Xanax.

To be continued...

Christmas Rush Part 2: Pass the Antibiotics

I'm looking through the rear view mirror at a large dog flying around in the back of the car and I have an epiphany of sorts.

Driving around with the dog being tossed around in back doesn't constitute exercise for said animal. Well maybe a little, considering the muscles he must flex, and keep flexing, to stay upright as I hurtle like a crazy person through roads jammed with pre-Christmas traffic.

You see the Orange Dog has some key structural problems when it comes to resting on his butt. He's like an inverted pyramid, there's a long torso with Arnold Schwarzenegger shoulders and chest,  balanced precariously on a small and quite pointy arse.  He really has to splay out his front legs to stay upright and even then it's touch and go.

So now I'm feeling really guilty (like the RSPCA might pull me over at any second) so I whip into Mackers drive-through for lunch (of sorts) for me and a treat for him. I'm not really hungry, but on doctors orders I've downed an anti-biotic for my Strep Throat, "..half an hour before food.." so I need to eat something.

I speak to the little box and say I'd like a fire-extinguisher, instead of a diet-coke, with my "meal" but he doesn't get the gag, so I ask for a chocolate thick shake instead. I need something slow moving and icy, like a liquid avalanche, to put out the burn in my throat.
I suppose a chilled beer would be out of the question.

I spend the next 15 traffic light stops dousing the fire and bouncing chicken McBites off the rear window into the back of the car.  This is an actual technique I'm using here. When I used to attempt strategic throws I would inevitably only get as far as the back seat and a large animal jumping over seat-backs in a moving vehicle makes for hazardous driving conditions.

Orange Dog keeps disappearing from view and bobbing back up licking his chops and looking very much cheered up by the accuracy of this process.

After one stop for 'the next birthday gift' (when can I start on Christmas shopping?) I let him out of the car into a nice park on the water near Manly, and we both let our anxieties blow away with the breeze across the long grass.

It's a nice day, probably because I emptied the washing line earlier, but I don't linger; I need more drugs, I need another Lemsip Multi-Relief. The thick shake's long gone and I need another hit.
Still a tad early for beer.

The anxiety rushes back when I think about the kind of tomorrow I'm expecting; most likely a big day. She-Who-Worships-Pink has the big dress rehearsal for her performance in the Glee Recital. Her Class is doing an all singing  all dancing review of 'Hey- Ho' from Snow White And The so-many-more-than Seven Dwarfs (at last count they had fifteen).

She'll miss half a day of school and I have to drive her, in hair and make-up (?) to somewhere (?) I have no clue how to get to.

We have Homer of course. Homer is our portable navigation thingy. It has not only Homer Simpson's voice, but it seems to have acquired his verbal opinions and reliability. Meaning; he won't always get you there by the quickest route (sometimes not at all) but you will arrive (if you do) laughing.

One of these days I'm gonna try Yoda's voice and see if The Force improves our chances.

After that I need to get her scrubbed off, back in uniform (school not dwarf) and back to school.

Then I'll have exactly two hours to; finish the novel, (yeah right), blog, do more laundry, make another batch of veggie lunchbox pancakes for the freezer, go back to the supermarket for the things I forgot today.

Tomorrow is also news item day, library day, canteen money day and swimming after school. If I don't forget something, or do something outrageously ditzy, it will be a miracle.

Oh and pray I'm home if and when the bathroom tile guys show up so we can have a working bathtub for the weekend.

Fingers crossed.....

To Be Continued...

DIY passport mugshots

DON'T try this at home..

My husband says "just sit her on a stool with the white wall behind and take her photo".. yeah right!

We have a trip to India planned for the new year, but for some reason, being allowed to holiday in a third world country involves more paperwork than your average mortgage application and ID checks that would do the FBI proud.

(There must more illegal immigrants from Australia than I imagined) So despite our good current Aussie passports, we apparently need some heavy duty visas and that means more photos.

I was actually hoping to avoid the whole passport photo thing for another year, when Lucie’s passport needs renewing. I imagine her being more of an age then, where I might be able to ask her to sit still for a nanosecond and have her oblige.

The first time around for passport photos I was given some pretty tough instructions:

Show the baby awake, looking straight at the camera, both edges of the face clearly visible, with a neutral expression, mouth closed, and no pacifier.  

I thought “but she doesn’t have head control yet and you want me to tell her to keep a neutral expression? Are you insane?”  I was also told her neck had to be visible, which sent me into a complete tail-spin, but fortunately that wasn’t correct.

But a very helpful photographer gave me a tip that worked out fine; ‘Lie her on a white rug on the floor, put a rolled hand-towel under the rug under her neck then take the photos from above her’.  Good tip – saved my life.

Young as she was, Lucie did have a considerable repertoire of ‘other’ facial expressions that apparently needed to be expressed first, but in the end after about 30 mug-shots, she tired of face pulling and I achieved that elusive ‘neutral expression’.

Nowadays Lucie is about as helpful as the dog in front of the camera. (He’s like a canine version of George Clooney but wont sit still for a heartbeat – it’s a total waste of a gorgeous face)

Ok so Lucie’s not a supermodel. She is however, still very partial to pulling faces. To make matters worse (for me) having a warped sense of humour (where did she get that I wonder?) she also enjoys my frustration to the point where she cracks up laughing at me the more stressed I get and the more begging I do.

Again, after a lot of shutter clicking, I emailed one borderline-acceptable-photo ot the travel agent, but the jury’s still out on whether it’s up to India’s Secret Service’s standards.

If they reject this one, I am going to bite the bullet - fight the chaotic Christmas traffic, the parking pandemonium and hand her over to a professional passport photographer. Let them deal with her antics before mummy develops Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from pressing the shutter button.