I Saved You a Little Something. No Need to Thank Me

During the evacuation it became evident that Darth Baby had chipmunked* most of his yakatori-chicken nori-roll. When the acrid smell of whatever was on fire hit him, the resulting sneezing attack covered the people behind us on the travelators with sticky rice.

(Now I can cross writing that paragraph off the bucket list… finally.)

Darth Baby thought it was utterly brilliant and followed up with an extended laughing attack; the woman and her two teenage daughters immediately behind, not so much. I gather that this was a relatively rare fashion shopping trip for them and not only had the shopping centre thoughtlessly burst into flames, but some rotten toddler had made them look like lamingtons as they fled the scene.

*Chipmunked; past participle. The act of having secreted most of one’s meal in one’s cheeks for later dispersal or use.

Banking, Spanking, Thanking and Walking On

Yesterday, I misread the television guide and thought Extreme Fisting With Robson Green was a show. In my defence, it was on after 8.30pm so Robson had at least bothered to come down on the right side of the watershed, if not limbs. I double-took and realised it was fishing. Gill by association I thought, and moved on.

Unfornately, I'm now worried that the problem isn't so much with my eyes as much as what goes on behind them.

I'm dealing with commercial banks at the moment. Emergency Contact and I are trying to get into a larger house, in the Sydney real estate market of 2013. I couldn't be more pissed off with the way in which every single step in process lifts your shirt and sticks you in a boat with a fully lubricated Robson. Maybe that's why I had the mondegreen moment with Mr Green. It's just on my mind.

It may also be why I think I saw the following.

A billboard for a bank that has very orange colouring in its campaigns, advertising an "ATM Amnesty". 

I was driving and didn't get a chance to get out and firebomb the sign, but if that is what I think it is - a period where you don't get charged fees for using another bank's ATM, then I'm driving back there to right a wrong. 

An amnesty is for the guilty, not the exploited. If I really have seen this billboard, you have my full permision to riot. If not, I'm keeping a sharp eye out for Robby Green and his marine of mean.

War Reporting From the Pillow-Fort of Full-Time Parenting

Children and crows will conspire to take over the world. Don’t look at me like that. You can’t handle the truth.

For children, the whole process of growing up is about getting smarter and better at things. The Corvidae are already notoriously smart and have done a bunch of growing up. Let’s face it, you can draw a pretty unbroken line from dinosaur to nevermore and we’ve all seen what happens when the raptors get loose in the kitchen (you had one job, Phil Tippet. One job). 

They’re highly adaptive and have good memories. They are tool users and have basic senses of humour. I mean, that “uck orrrf” call always brings a smirk to the face of an Australian of a certain age and how about that collective noun?

(It’s probably time for a change with the collective noun, though. If I was a crow, I would be on to Pointy Face Black Feather Media & Publicity and be asking some hard questions about their commitment. Maybe, even making a few suggestions. How about a ‘Crows Line’ or a ‘Russel’?)

Anyway, playgrounds in the inner-city are going to be the hotbeds of the Crow-Baby conspiracy because of the food. Crows and babies are spending more and more time together as more and more of us live in ever denser, high-rise accommodation. We take our kids to the park to let them run around and the kids throw their food on the ground. The crows know this and are moving from agrarian communities to dense urban and CBD areas in a metropolitan-drift that rivals any of the so called Tiger Economies in the 90s. (It’s worth noting that the tigers couldn’t make a go of it and moved back out to the country where they’ve been applying for jobs in Queensland zoos ever since.)

So, there I am in the park, watching birds and babies of equal weight and intellectual capacity, breaking bread. I’m the one on the outer. M. Nightshade-Salami-Wanga-Ding-Dong has already approached me for a treatment on how it’s going to go down. I’m going to surprise him and not put in a twist. It's just goint to follow logical, straightforward lines.

DIY Haircuts: After you’ve given your adored child a haircut, try to cut down on the normal number of photos you tend to take of you precious pumpkin. In other words, keep the evidence limited. 

I was certain that I was going to be an absolute natural at hairdressing. I’d arrived at this conclusion because I have met many hairdressers and I would never accuse them of putting a lump in the IQ bell-curve on the right-hand side - know wha' I’m sayin'?

Considering the challenges, I’ve actually done a pretty good job. There were no serious head wounds and Darth Baby still looks like a little boy. It’s just that it could be a lot better. The issue? The kid never stops moving. Never. If we are going to be serious about finding sustainable energy resources, we should consider tapping toddlers. Fit them with a dynamo or attach them to leads that have the dynamo inside a return reel or just make them run around under balloons.

The haircut was more complicated than a 16-year-old girl and to an observer would have resembled more a joisting match than an appointment at the beauticians. I sort of took snips off him as we passed each other. I refrained from yelling “Ole!” but it did require memory and tactics to get it done.

The reason I don’t particularly want the cut recorded for posterity is it could be used as leverage at some future point. It’s the opposite of those photos that a parent saves for the ritual humiliation at the kid’s twenty first birthday party.

You Men Will Never Understand

Darth Baby and I were at the Magic Yellow Bus yesterday. I managed to put my foot in it with some sub-urbanites.

Inner-city types like to think that they're open-minded and anything goes, but really, apart from that one embarrassing threesome at uni, they're less daring than the septuagenarian tranny at the Rooty Hill RSL who vows that Danny La Rou will make a triumphant return. (That lovely lady will be back, I’m sure of it. She didn’t appear that ill.)

Darth Baby was making his way through the miniature earth-moving equipment on the play mat to mug a pigeon, when one of the women supervising said to me, “Why don’t you sit down and join in?”

I am 20 years older than most people schlepping around with their kids on the play mats. Getting up and down isn’t something that I ‘just do’. I need notice and pants that are going to retain my dignity and not need to have every pocket unloaded to get down there. 

More to the point, Darth Baby moves fast. There is no point in getting settled when he can outflank and out-manoeuvre in seconds. Better to retain a war-room overview… utilizing air-superiority.

Ignorant of the above, another woman said, “Here’s a spot… just here”, and it was then that politeness dictated I respond. I thought I'd deflect by making light.

“Thanks, but I’ve over estimated how these jeans were going to work with my post-baby-body and I think I’d rather stand this one out.”

They didn't think I was joking. They got angry. So angry.

The Expensive Apple Device Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

This year, generational obesity is Channel 10's weight-loss lynch-pin. A heavily reinforced, industrial lynch-pin being asked to deliver too much. Self-Obsessed Cohabitating Delusional Malcontents (7.30 pm, Sunday till lard-knows-when) is yet to be shown as a ratings failure, so here’s to making the most of it and thinking about something else.

It did highlight one of my own intergenerational issues, though, but without all the cliff jumping and cannibalism... sorry, "backbighting".

Generational Technobastardry

Generation Battleground Alpha:

My father was a music-obsessive by birth and an opera singer by trade. The way a High-Fidelity Stereo was placed and adjusted in the home was an operation of such technical finesse and importance, NASA's approach to the moon shots were considered a bit slapdash by comparison.

As a toddler, apparently I sensed that any dial or button needed to be put through its paces regularly and to destruction. My family has never let me forget that I was “The Menace”. Daddy's Hi-Fi ain't never been the same.

Generation Battleground Beta:

Toddler Darth Baby escalates inter-generational techno-war on Ex-Toddler The Menace.

Pre toddler wrangling, our telly had a hard-drive tuner and I waxed lyrical on its arrival. 

That telly tuner meant a lot to us. To mangle a metaphor for the fun of it; if you wanted to turn our telly off against our will, you would have needed to send Sir Alec Guinness wearing a hessian sack and waving a fluorescent tube to get it done.

That HDD tuner had a gorgeous and unfortunately enticing electric-blue button on the front. Darth Baby pressed the button so often (somehow through the baby barrier by means best explained by Sir Alec) that the HDD Tuner punched its own clock and checked out.

Not content with that, while I had the HDD Tuner out of the shelf to rewire, Darth Baby threw it on the ground with such force and accuracy, the USB memory stick in the back that held the back-up operating system was mashed and then somehow separated from the box. If I was The Menace, Darth Baby is Menace + Cost.

Generation Battleground Omega:

It is a law of nature that each generation has to somehow improve upon or at least apall, that of its parents. As sure as Beiber enervates Underworld, Darth Baby’s wife will have her cyber-intertube-implants thrown through her bionic pelvic floor in-utero, by Darth Baby’s feckless thug of a son.

... and I wouldn’t have it any other way, Daddy-o. Groovy.

3 Barden St Tempe, NSW

Open Letter to Any Prospective Buyer of 3 Barden St, Tempe.

Hello Prospective Real Estate Purchaser,

I recently had a building and pest inspection done at the above address. If you are interested in my thoughts, do feel free to contact me on the links at the right of the blog. In a just world, the contents of the report would be made freely available to anyone interested in the property before holding deposits or contract exchanges, particularly without interference from "interested parties".

Yours Sincerely,

Nick at AGA 

The Poop That's Probably on The Scoop... Among Other Places

Week two and a bit

The very fact that I have to give this blog the title, “Week Two and a Bit” is proof I’m losing touch with the normal measurements of time. I don’t go for your mundane lunar cycles or solar transits anymore. I now measure time by naps. In fact, the whole “now” thing is a bit shaky for me as well, “Sit down now, please… ok… when you’re ready.”

The authorities also seem to be in cahoots with children to keep reality at a distant grasp. Darth Baby is quite fond of a public get-together for children known as the Yellow Magic Bus. This council run purveyor-of-playtime gets around to local parks and unloads a bunch of toys and paints that are manned by well-meaning women. 

Three things I want to point out, though:

1. It’s not magic. You find out exactly where it’s going to be through the internet
2. It’s not a bus – it’s a two-tonner, badly in need of a tune
3. It’s not even particularly yellow. It’s got some yellow on it, but with the other two bits of misdirection on how to identify it, the yellow is not what you would call the defining factor about the truck

Anyway, Darth Baby reckons it’s ok and goes to whichever place it magically appears by the magic of the internal combustion engine and ignores the toys and books and chases the pigeons.

New Topic. Actors are desperate not to have a real job. Let me explain. Playschool.

If I was an actor and the choice was doing Playschool or being a chimney-sweep between real acting jobs, you’d hear me saying “Roight-ho Guvner, how far you want them bristles pushed up your flume?”

Here’s another thing about Playschool, not only is it paralysingly dull, it uncovers the little bits of missing talent on some of our better known TV faces. If someone’s not the best singer (Georgie P, I’m thinking your Mum had a touch of the Missus Worthington, here) or gets lost in some pretty simple script (looking at you, Kate) it gets exposed in front of the merciless cardboard background of the Playschool set. You’ve gotta have the goods ‘cause there’s nowhere to hide if your special effects consist of a moth-eaten teddy and a toilet roll with pipe-cleaners glued to it.

Babies are not good navigators. They call the turns late, if at all.

Ball Kicking Area. Give Children Priority

A few blogs and ten months ago, Darth Baby entered the lives of Emergency Contact and me. That’s my excuse for the break in posting blogs, but as far as reasons go I think that one’s a cracker.

When a Small One waddles into your life, venting your spleen to an anonymous audience in the shape of a blog sort of takes a back seat - one with an Australian accredited five-point harness.

EC is now back at work and I’m Mr Mum for three months. I have the following advice and observations to offer other parents.

Things Learnt in Week 1 (Only 11 to go):

It takes a village. Unfortunately.

I have made every effort for the last few decades to remove myself from the odours and opinions of other people. I drive to work alone. I park in my parking space. I work only with people I know and respect, and then I drive home to the safety of the compound. Now I am assaulted with the asinine opinions and strange olfactory offerings of every pin-head and… and… commoner who cares to poke their face into that of my child’s. You know the saying - It takes a village to raise a child. It’s true and I would like to add that the village sux. Once you leave the confines of the house, everything about the kid is so freakin’ communal! The swimming leasons. The libraries. The shops. The toilets. Fine for him, he loves a crowd. Not so good for Dad who has met the crowd in its various manifestations and knows exactly how dumb the crowd can be.

You can stop your child from chewing things you don’t want them to chew by terrifying them.

EC and I have a pretty old-fashioned and therefore pretty modern view of disinfecting (what goes around comes around. Particularly with bacteria). Once the kid can crawl, most bets are off. We don’t let him chew the thongs that have been on my feet while I’ve been at the urinal at the local club, but we can’t and don’t stop him eating the “floor toast”.

Darth Baby (DB – 15 months old) likes to chew the plastic covering on the safety chain while he’s having a swing in the park. There are life forms I can’t identify living in that particular plastic sleeve covering the seatbelt chain. I couldn’t convince him to stop, whether through a failure in rhetoric or credibility, but I have found that if you push the swing high enough, he gets so scared he will just hang on and not chew anything. I don’t think he can even see anything with his eyes that tightly shut. Win.

Children have a strange grasp of history.

DB and I built “Baby’s First Kursk Submarine” with Duplo. As much as I am sure the Soviets had some pretty interesting ways of ensuring their crews were fed, I’m not sure they actually had live chickens on board. Maybe DB knows better than me. He certainly seemed pretty insistent about the Duplo chicken. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve heard about how the Russkies kept competitive during the Cold War. For posterity though, I’m pretty certain they didn’t allow cows on the bridge.

Re-enactment-wise, Darth Baby was bang on. When the Duplo hull split, there was screaming and saliva and lots of lying down and kicking.

Tips for the novice “In the Night Garden” Hunter.

I would like it recorded that if the camera stays low, you are catching the Ninkynonk. If the camera starts to pan up, you are trying to catch the Pinkyponk. Isn’t that a pip?

For those who don’t understand, don’t worry. For those that do… am I right? Huh?