Ashwyn nearly knocked out another tooth today. This one was his one remaining front tooth. How did he do that, I hear you ask? Well, let's just say, that when a small boy pushes a shopping trolley into a trolley bay really fast, and the small boy's eyes are on a level with the handle of the shopping trolley, so he can't really see the metal bar at the end of the trolley bay...the laws of physics are cruel sometimes.

My keyboard is being a bit odd, so I apologise if I skip letters. Actually it seems to be okay now. It just seemed to be struggling to keep up with me in the last post.

So mum and dad got away at 4:30am on Tuesday. That is a real time. I should know. I was awake. And they were only stuck in Brisbane for one day before the waters receded enough that they could get home, although apparently it was a bit hairy getting out to my sister's house. And once I'd gone back to bed and tossed and turned and then gotten up again I discovered that my mother had left her handbag here. Her handbag with her Kindle, her keys, her mobile phone, her wallet, and the parking ticket for the airport. So if you've always thought I am a bit absent minded, now you know where I get it from.

Also Ashwyn's bug seems to have hit the rest of us. Liam got it on the first day back to school, which seemed awfully convenient, but he does seem to be genuinely sick (getting called up to school today because he had diarrhoea was one clue). In myself and Andy it seems to have manifested as exhaustion, headaches and bilious nausea. Fun, fun, fun. I'm half tempted to suggest that it's listeriosis, but it's hard to think of something among the usual culprits that cause that that the boys would actually eat.

This last week or so Ashwyn has been remarkably good. He has done nothing naughty at all. All acts of mischief and naughtiness in our house were actually committed by the Magic Hand.

I hope all of you out there are managing in the disgusting weather. The slight reprieve today is nice, but I'm starting to regret deciding not to go back to work next week.

Ashwyn had a massive nose bleed last night at 2:30am. He tends to get them when he is hot (and he also tends to cover himself up with a quilt in bed even when it is 30C overnight) and when he gets them he really gets them. I guess I'm not the only one in the family who's talented at bleeding. He then woke us up again at 6:50am because he'd had another, but at some time during the night. Besides smearing himself in blood he'd also somehow managed to splash it all over his mattress and the walls of his room. And I mean splash. There were spatter marks. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there.

Also the other day in the car Ashwyn declared he was very hot and 'all my water is coming out of me'.
He's a card that boy.

This is where you're damned if you have a father (or father-in-law) who is a complete techno-phobe and damned if you have a father who is a techno-phile. One might even go so far as to say my father is an early adopter. He should have known better, but he installed Windows 8 yesterday. It wiped most of the stuff from his hard drive. Uninstalled all his programs, cleaned out his inbox and so on. He lost 600 Gb of stuff.  If you're thinking of getting it, maybe back-up to an external place first....

Yesterday I took the kids to the Innilgard 30th Anniversary Foundation Picnic. They had a fairly good time I think, especially Ashwyn, who was into everything. I spent an awful lot of time telling him to leave the harp alone, leave that coronet alone, leave those swords alone, come out of that bag, go put that goblet back, no really put that sword down....

Also Erin seems to have given half the house a cold that she brought back from camp.

And in celebration of Halloween - disgusting cakes - don't look if you have a weak stomach (no, really)

We had a pretty mad weekend. Saturday my parents flew in, for a short visit on their way back from a trip to Europe. Their plane landed on Saturday afternoon, when we normally do our grocery shopping, so we had to do that in the morning, except Andy also managed to flood the bathroom, and Liam got up with conjunctivitis and had to be taken to the doctor. Somehow we managed to squeeze bathroom cleaning, parent collection, grocery shopping, doctor visit, the usual Saturday three loads of washing and making cheesecake into the one day. It was pretty hectic.

It was nice to have my dad in the same state for father's day though. We went out to lunch. Then we had Andy's parents and brother over for dinner, a grand total of ten people (which is not much in comparison with 150, but my kitchen  is much smaller than most hall kitchens). I made Indian - lamb korma, potatoes madras, rice, pappadums, naan bread, raita, samosas (with lots of shortcuts). And then the cheesecake (cherry) for dessert.

A busy weekend. Also our house filled up with enormous blowflies. There must be something festering in some secret hole somewhere (a charming thought, but then the kids quite often leave apple cores or melon rinds in odd places, so not entirely surprising) and giving birth to them. Andy sucked most of them up with the vacuum cleaner. But not before they freaked out Liam. He has been very anxious and nervy lately.

Liam is still not entirely well but is being annoying about taking medicine. He freaked out over the eyedrops and ointment for the conjunctivitis, so we had to hold him down to put it in. Now he has a cough but is so disgusted by the cough medicine Andy got that he gets all in a state and practically throws up whenever he has to take some. One has sympathy for one's sick children, but sometimes they try it greatly. I tried making him a honey and lemon drink and he complained that it tasted like metal.

Andy has also not been well. I think he has finally succumbed to the lurgy that has been going around.

Also it was so nice to see the sun for a while over the weekend, but Tuesday's weather brought on a nasty bout of hayfever. Honestly plants, what is it with you? A couple of sunny days and all you can think about is sex?

And then the wind knocked down a tree in our front garden. Fortunately it fell on the lawn. If it had gone the other way it would have taken out the power/phone lines into the house (and also the peas and beans that are just coming up).

There's a number of things I've been wanting to post about for a little while, but I haven't had the energy (physical or mental) and now I'm forgetting what most of them were. But don't be surprised if you suddenly see a heap of posts. As noted in the previous post I was ill again - last Wednesday and Thursday I completely lost my voice. So far just viral, although with the way I am getting up and expelling vast quantities of mucous (yummo) every morning I do wonder if it's not become sinusitis.

Anyway, I have just started reading a book about swearing of all things - namely Filthy English by Peter Silverton. And it's quite timely because I have been thinking a little bit about swearing lately. Partly because of discussions on some blogs I am in the habit of reading about tone trolling and politeness, and partly because of thinking about the way I police my children's language.

I should note that I don't swear much, although I certainly do now a lot more than I used to (especially since having kids, funnily enough). This was mostly upbringing. My parents didn't swear much, and English people don't swear anywhere near as much as Australians or New Zealanders. My mother, in particular, policed swearing very strictly, and emphasised that nice people don't swear - an impression that has stuck with me very strongly. By nice she didn't mean proper or respectable, as some people often do, but virtuous, kind, etc - actually nice. I absorbed this, as noted, and also later picked up those other common arguments against not swearing centring around it being unintellectual, demonstrative of poor vocabulary, unimaginative, etc.

Over the years I have come to realise that much of this is not really true. The nice thing is obviously complete bollocks, and there are many deeply imaginative and highly creative uses of four letter words out there. So I am not particularly shocked or distressed by other people swearing around me, although I still don't do it much myself. Unless it's children. I always found foul-mouthed children particularly shocking, although with our spate of neighbours even this has become more sadness than shock.

Maybe this is why I'm so strict about my children's language. Or maybe it's just that we tend, in parenting, to copy our parents a lot. You would think we would learn from our own parents' mistakes (not that I think mine made too many - I'm pretty fortunate in that regard), but no we just go on repeating them. The thing is, I don't feel like I have a good reason for banning certain words (others I am less circumspect about - all my children are banned from using 'gay' as an insult for instance, which is still a thing apparently), apart from these specious reasons of niceness, politeness etc.

And, the other day, when thinking about tone-trolling and so on, it occurred to me that perhaps the policing of language is extremely classist (as is much of etiquette when it comes down to it). Which made me even more uncomfortable about doing it. But then this book has vaguely hinted that the attribution of foul mouths to the working classes to be a bit of myth (in the 'more on this later' vein - I hope I get to that bit before I have to take the book back to the library). I when I think about it, my mother's working class family were not exactly grand swearers. So maybe that's not a thing to be concerned about.

Which leaves me ... nowhere in particular really. Any thoughts on this issue?

...that is, that after all the rushing around and craziness that I would fall in a heap and get sick. So I was a bit relieved earlier in the week when this seemed to be manifesting as little more than a regular head cold. However now it is mutating into the sinus pain from Hades, which seems untouchable by all the standard means of dealing with decongestion (given that one cannot stand in the shower with the water running all night). So, yay for that.

Ashwyn started school yesterday. He was very excited, and seemed to have a good day. I'm not sure if his teacher would have agreed with him, but we had no phone calls from the school or anything. He is a very different child from Liam and is not likely to have the same difficulties, but rather a whole brand new set of his own. But he has always loved novelty and new things, so I think so long as it's all new and exciting we're probably safe.

Sometimes I think Liam is in the constant grip of an existential crisis (this is the child who, when he was six, asked me how he was supposed to know whether he was real or not). But every now and then he gets worried about dying. Sometimes this comes across as just another excuse to get out of bed when he is supposed to be going to sleep. At other times as a rather more genuine concern. It disturbed me too, when I was a child, so I have rather more sympathy for him than Andy does.

But just a few days ago it seemed to come to a peak. He was deeply, genuinely depressed about dying, and all the explanations about 'most people don't die until they're old' and so on didn't seem to be getting through. Fortunately Liam seems to have come up with his own solution: when he grows up he is going to invent some pills to stop people from dying. End of crisis.

Well, there was a small ancillary concern about what would happen when the world ended, but he seemed to get over that when I told him it wouldn't happen for 5 billion years.

But don't worry about the dying thing, because Liam has that in hand.

And yes, I am procrastinating from my homework, however did you guess?