School Holidays

We are slowly reaching the end of these unseasonably early school holidays here at Chez Sheep Rustler. They were brought forward by four weeks to coincide with the Commonwealth Games. This meant that first term was a headlong, breathless rush, and everyone has to cope with a 12 week term starting next week. Easter will at least give us a long weekend soonish, but we think we may take the kids out of school for a couple of days mid term and give them another long weekend, just so that they can make it to the end of term!

Wombat came down with an ear infection three days before the end of last term and so started his holidays earlier than I really wanted him to. It meant I had to miss my TAFE Classes on the last Friday as George was in Sydney. George's mum did offer to come down but as I have to leave at 8.30am she would have had to have caught a train at 6.30am and that would have been just too cruel! Besides which she then got caught up in a real family drama which has resulted in her having to hare off to Broken Hill for a month to care for her sister-in-law.

Poor Wombat took a good ten days to get over the ear problem, including three visits to the doctor, antibiotic eardrops, oral antibiotics and an ear washing out session. It left him very clingy and I am, I;m afraid, looking forward to some time without him following me from room to room all day. Yes, he gets plenty of attention from me, but it would be nice not to have to be in the same room as him all the time.

Baby Bear usually spends a week in Moe during school holidays, but that hasn't been able to happen this time. So she and Wombat have been at each other's throats half the time. And because she is used to having that week of one-on-one attention during the holidays, which I just can't give her with Wombat around, she is getting clingy too and I have trouble getting any time to myself at all. All of this plus the fact that George, despite repeated promises to sort things out and stop doing it, is still going up to Sydney at least every second week and the people in the Sydney office are now treating him as a Sydney employee who should be there whenever they say Jump. (Not that they have given him an office, or a desk, or a computer, or a phone line...) And whenever I complain he says he will talk to such-and-such and it will stop - and they have the conversation and he tells me that it will stop, then nothing happens and he tells me I don't understand the politics of it. What I do understand is that it is wearing him out to the extent that I am afraid he is going to have a heart attack, and driving me into a depression that eventually I won't be able to climb out of.

Despite all this we have had some nice times over the holidays. George took a day off on Monday and we went into the city and went to the Museum to see the props used during the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. Only unfortunately instead of going to see them straight away (it being the supposed reason for out visit) George insisted on us going round most of the Museum first, until Wombat was on a verge of a wobbly, and then we had to race around the exhibition in five minutes flat. It;s a great museum (I hadn't been to it since it moved into the new building) and I really enjoyed it, but I think we should have done things the other way round. We took three boys who are friends of ours and it worked really well, as everyone had someone to keep them company without fighting. The alarming thing is that these kids (they have a little sister too, who we didn't take as the car only has seven seats) and our kids look sufficiently alike to pass for siblings, and the various heights (more so than the actual ages) made them look as though they could just be all the one family. Scary thought!!

Knittingwise - I am three quarters of the way through a second sock; I have been working on my Project Spectrum project for March, the pink Kid Silk Haze Trinket scarf; the Diamond Patch jumper has not been touched for about four weeks; I am making a hat for Beyond Blue, or rather the Blue Hat Project, which is an exhibition and then charity auction for our deperession charity; and I have made a turquoise curly whirly for Baby Bear which i must photograph. I probably won't finish Trinket by the end of March because we are having a late burst of hot weather and KSH is horrible to use in hot weather - and I can't even use it sitting in front of a fan because it is so featherweight that it blows around and annoys me!! But I have vowed to start and mostly work on a project for each month of Project Spectrum in the relevant colour/s.

And now to get the pizza dough out of the breadmaker and make pizza!!