Modern Family

Some families are so interesting and complex. My mother for example, married her second cousin when she was eighteen. Prepare yourself to be confused...

This marriage produced two sons - my half brothers. However, since my mother’s husband sits on the branch of my family tree as my third cousin, that also makes my brothers my 4th cousins, which means that they are also 4th cousins to themselves as well as each other.  Add to this that after my mother and her first husband divorced, her husband’s brother’s wife introduced her to my father, who was also her brother, therefore making my aunty Mum's sister-in-law throughout two seperate marriages. This is sounding far too incestuous for my liking.  Still, that was decades ago and people didn’t get out much so I suppose it was pretty much normal.

Then there’s my family today. The other day I was sitting on the laptop replying to an e-mail to my former boyfriend. You may remember the “Lust Muffin” from a previous blog entry (also, I’m fully aware that sitting on my laptop could cause it to overheat and damage the hard drive). While I was e-mailing the LM I was listening to my ex husband, “Flitwick”, playing in the other room with my six year old daughter to my current husband, “Beloved”. Now there’s an interesting situation.

Flitwick and I had a happy marriage for almost 17 years which produced three of the most amazing kids I’ve ever met. But eventually things cracked and sadly we parted company. Although it was distressing at the time, a mutual decision was made for us to remain good friends and still share family connections. Flitwick lives in another country now but being the good dad that he is, he makes an effort to see his kids every year or so.  Jet setting across the Tasman can get rather pricey so offering accommodation is one way we can contribute to this “Dad” time.  Besides, I love having him here. Flitwick cooks. Flitwick folds washing. Flitwick babysits. Flitwick makes cups of tea. It’s just like having another wife for a week!

So this week our household is made up of two husbands (or possibly two wives, with the temporary wife sporting a five o’clock shadow), a mixture of kids ranging from full-blooded to half-siblings and fosties, as well as a number of chickens, cats and a dog.  I’d complain about all the mouths to feed, but I am getting a little extra help this week., thanks to Flitwick.I'm hoping he'll be able to teach Beloved a thing or two...

When is a hippopotamus not a hippopotamus?

Last week we headed to the zoo with a van packed with kids of all ages. It was a crisp, sunny winters day so it seemed like a brilliant plan. Trouble is, everyone else thought it was a bright idea too.  We pulled off the motorway behind an excited young mum who kept turning at every stop to wave to her kid in the back seat with a goofy grin on her face. After driving around the carpark a number of times and heading in a circle around a few blocks, her excitement was waning dramatically and the li’l guy was screaming.  I hope they found a park closer than we did.  We ended up on some cliff face a few kilometres North of where we wanted to be.   

 Fortunately my Beloved was driving because I don’t take too kindly to hill starts.

Auckland is a very arty-farty place at times and the Zoo management has obviously paid someone far too much to install some ill-designed drinking fountains. The first was not far from the entrance and it wasn’t until later that I learned that it was sculpted in the shape of a koru, which symbolises all sorts of wonderful things about new life and growth. You see, from the front it looked like...THIS:

My advice - take your own bottled water. What WERE they thinking?

Zeeb might be 19 years old but she loves the kids’ area. There’s a big stone dragon there that has been around since I was a wee sprout.  Over the years the dragon has laid some concrete eggs and kids travel from near and far to crawl in and out of these things. Zeeb forgot that she was 19 and thought it would be fun to be a baby dinosaur hatching from an egg.  Cute.  I thought it was strange that she wouldn’t keep still while I was trying to snap her photo.  It took a bit of desperate whimpering to convince me that she was actually firmly wedged. (Oooh, that reminds me of a story about M when he was a lot younger! I must remember to tell that one)

Zeeb and I are pretty stoic when it comes to demonstrating affection towards each other. A sniff and a nod is as good as a hug where we’re concerned. It works for us. I haven’t carried Zeeb since she was about five and she certainly didn’t have boobs back then. Incidentally, where’d she get those things? It certainly wasn’t from me!  Still, there’s no need to join a gym when I can pump weights by lifting adult, teenagers out of concrete dragon eggs.

Animals are very good at hiding when there are too many people trying to see them.  We were squinting to see the well-hidden hippos (I wrote the abbreviated word because I don’t know the correct plural for “hippopotamus”). We decided that we could definitely see two of them. Wanting to outdo our super-spotting, my Beloved was adamant that he could see four. We had some discussion about a couple of blobs in the water. He said they were definitely hippo nostrils while Zeeb was pretty sure they were pine cones - not that there were any pine trees nearby. After weaving through the crowds to the other side we found that Beloved was the closest. The blobs were definitely hippo-related. They were two blobs of floating poo. I don’t think Beloved was going to give up on that one. There was some indistinguishable muttering about the hippos hiding underneath...yeah, right!

I think Zeeb's favourite animal was the serval: "The serval is so hot. It has stripes AND spots. It flauts all the fashion laws!"

So that’s the school holidays done and dusted. Kids are back at school tomorrow and so am I. Ooh, so many new adventures to look forward to!

School Holidays! YEA!!

One of the big advantages to being a Teacher Aide is all the holidays. One of the big disadvantages is that I don't get paid for the holidays. Things are pretty cruisy this week, our two foster boys, T & N* ("not quite their real names etc, etc") are at camp until Friday, my 19 y/o daughter, Z* is house sitting for a friend and I'm only left with 6 y/o daughter, C*, and 14 y/o son, M* (all these abbreviated initials are confusing me!).

So I promised C we could have a craft day, naively thinking that we'd have a cheap day in. We trotted off to the craft shop for cardboard, glitter, glue, felts, a silver pen. Who knew that I needed to take out a mortgage for PVA glue?! Being at the shops we couldn't avoid stopping by the Warehouse (sort of New Zealand's equivalent to Walmart) to see if they had cheaper glue and...well...there was a sale on clothing. Where has all my money gone? We got home to squeeze in the crafty-making-of-stuff and THANK GOD, Z arrived home for a visit - just in the nick of time! I just left them to it.

I've seen other blogs about perfect kids in perfectly clean clothes doing perfect crafts. Nobody is perfect in this house!

After an hour, things were getting ugly. C left Z to do all the work and wouldn't help clean up. Tempers were beginning to fray. Ahhh siblings. We did get a beautiful work of art out of it though - mostly done by Z.

There was glitter in our dinner last night.

*not their real names because I don't know if I'm allowed to use real names of real people without their real permission. Hey, I'm new to blogging.