I Love the Smell of Baby Wipes in the Morning

One of the best things about  two year old Miss Rose getting more verbal is that she can have conversations with her big sister as well as me, and it is absolutely delightful and often hilarious.

Last week I bought a different brand of baby wipes and the girls were helping me clean up the baby after I fed her.  It went a little something like this........

Miss Jade (4 years old):  These wipes smell delicious. Do you know what they smell like?

Me: What darling?

Miss Rose: Chippies!

Miss Jade:  NO! They don’t smell like chippies. Mum, do you know what they smell like?

Me: What darling?

Miss Rose:  FEET!!

Me: Miss Rose, let Miss Jade tell me what they smell like.

Miss Jade:  Strawberries, they smell like strawberries.

Miss Rose: (Sniffing at a wipe) Mmmmm.  Schawbeeees...

For the record, the wipes smell like .......baby wipes.

An Indecent Proposal

*** Mum, stop reading this post. I’m serious, skip it. Thankyou****

One night this week, I may or may not have suggested to Mr MITB that he go to visit a Lady of the Night.  Now if you also saw me making a comment on Mamamia last week that insinuated I might be interested in swinging, you could assume that I have a very very interesting relationship.  Sadly I only accidentally indicated an interest in swinging and I was joking about sending my husband to a brothel. (Although, worryingly instead of responding with laughter he did ask me to ring him a Taxi.)

****Mum, you only have yourself to blame*********

So why would a Mum In The Burbs make such a joke?  Well at that moment in time the logistics of sending Mr MITB to a “massage parlour” or similar, seemed far more workable than getting the two of us in a room together without children.  For one thing, I could stay home with the kids and wouldn’t need a babysitter ( and therefore I wouldn’t need to spend a week expressing enough milk for a feed in 10ml increments only to hear that the baby wouldn’t take a bottle.)  Also it would beat trying to find a tiny window of opportunity overnight where we were both awake, in our bed and not breastfeeding, hitting snooze on the alarm or being manhandled by our four year old princess. OK, we would not have to be in our bed (we are not quite that boring), just not in our children’s beds.

As you might have guessed, our girls are not the world’s greatest sleepers. In between breastfeeding, night terrors, co-sleeping and bedwetting, me and Mr MITB sure haven’t had much alone time in the past four years (yes, yes, OTHER than the times we conceived our second and third princesses).  And I have to admit feeling a teensy bit jealous at the families who have kids that sleep from 7 till 7 every night. OK, not a teensy bit - overwhelmingly, murderously jealous. Imagine, all that time you could be spending as a couple, it would be like the honeymoon period all over again. At least having no alone time is a failsafe contraception.  So no more little princesses on the way, and hopefully these ones will start to sleep more as they get older. Otherwise I may have to put a call out on Twitter for escort recommendations for real.

 I’m giving it a year .

Something For the Weekend

As I'm a newbie to blogging, I have never done this before so I thought I'd give it a go.

Here's a bloghop I found on Daisy, Roo and Two, who is on the list and also a great Twitter follow. Hope you enjoy xx

3 Princesses

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was because I have 3 girls and I wanted to celebrate it. When we announced that we were having a third little princess, some of the reactions we got were, well, less than enthusiastic. Everything from "Oh Well, to "Never mind," to "Oh no! Now you'll have to have four". The next question was always "Are you going to keep trying for a boy?" Um, no.
Look, I'm sure I would have loved a boy as well, if that's what we ended up with, but we really had no gender preference at all. I want my girls to know that we think girls are awesome and a family of all girls is awesome. So here's some of the things I love about having 3 daughters:

1. The clothes. Girls clothes are a massive amount of fun. Everything from their pj'sto their dress-ups. Miss Jade and Miss Rose are already unapologetically girly. Both are currently going through a phase of pants refusal. Dresses and skirts only thanks very much mum. It already amazes me how much getting dressed or dressed up is a creative process for them. They love trying on different colours, shapes, sizes and we can easily while away a whole afternoon on trying things on and being a "fashion girl", parading around in them. I try to let them choose their own clothes as much as I can, and even though the results are sometimes a little left of centre, they really are so proud of how they look.

2. Sisterly love. The girls are so loving and caring towards one another*. They love playing Mum and Baby roles and looking after each other. Unfortunately they also use this power for evil by ganging up on me. eg by both jumping on the lounge when they know I can't get both of them off at once. Also the way they look after Miss Grace just melts my heart. I often find all three of them just laying on the floor together pretending to be tucked up in bed under a blanket. I secretly hope they will be each others' bridesmaids and best friends when they grow up.

3. Concerts. Already at 2 and 4, the big girls love to put on a concert. They love to dress up and plan it. They love dancing around and showing us their tricks. They love when we clap the beautiful dancing girls. Then they love to repeat it. Again, and again and again. And again and again.

4. Talking. Girls love to talk and talk and talk. They tell stories, they tell you about how they feel, what they want to do tomorrow, who they want to marry when they grow up (At this stage it's Daddy, but I can live with that for now), what happened at preschool, what they dreamed about last night, what their imaginary friends are up to, and what their favourite colour is. My girls also love to talk on the phone when they are in the mood, and it gives me a giggle to hear Mr MITB or Granny and Grandad trying to get them off the line politely when they are in a hurry.

5. I'm a girl too, and it's a great thing to have in common. My girls like lots of the things I like (it was a glorious moment the first time we outvoted Mr MITB to watch a reality show about weddings), they like doing girlie things with me and want to be like me.  Being not a particularly girlie girl myself this took me a bit by suprise, but oh boy it has grown on me. It's so much fun to go for a babycino and do a spot of shopping, especially with Miss Jade who is old enough to really appreciate it.

Girls are also complex and intense and serious and funny. Sometimes I joke with my friends with daughters that they are high maintenance, and that we will have our work cut out for us in the teenage years, but I would really not have it any other way. At the very least I figure that girls are more likely to remember my birthday and take me to my Doctor's appointments when I'm old. So here's to my beautiful girls. Because girls are amazing. I love you to the moon and the sun and the stars and the trees and back. xxx

* Of course they do still yell,scream, pull hair and have turf wars over the prized baby doll of the week, but also lots of loving and caring.

A Tale of 3 Fake Boobs

At my local shopping centre there is one of those shops that sells everything. You know, the ones that have $1 greeting cards, buddha statues, cane baskets in all sizes and every piece of homeware you will never need. Some of my favourite items in this shop include seriously gothic walking sticks with metal skulls on the top, and figurines of dragons wearing judo suits. Because apparently when you are a fire breathing dragon, you still might need to use martial arts - luckily they are black belts.

Out of all these weird and wonderful items that my family love to browse through, there is one that I have had to buy, replace and now need to replace again. It's supposed to be a stress ball, but one that is shaped like a boob. These boobs are both ridiculously inaccurate (perfect spheres, perfectly round nipples with evenly distributed lumps and bumps) and alarmingly accurate (when squeezed they swell and turn red in a perfect impression of mastitis). For some unfathomable reason, the kids love them.

When my husband first arrived home with one that the girls had chosen during a shopping trip I was unsure how to handle it. On the one hand, the girls see boobs all the time thanks to the very frequent breastfeeding that goes on in our house, so of course they don't see anything unusual about a stress ball in this shape. On the other hand, it's probably not a product that was designed with children under 5 in mind. Of course, I took the cowards way out and just tried to hide the damn thing whenever noone was looking.

This was working well, until our nieces (yes, all the cousins are girls too) came over to play, and the one year old took an enormous bite out of the boob. Red stuff went everywhere and my girls cried until I relented and agreed to replace the boob. Which I promptly hid again.

Then, 2 weeks ago, Miss Rose found my hiding place and spent the afternoon pretending to breastfeed from the boob. All good, until she realised it was funny to shake her head around like a dog with a chew toy while doing it and we had another boob explosion.

So now I have had to add a third fake boob to my shopping list for the week. I think if anything could put you off getting a boob job, this is probably it. Maybe I will buy my husband a walking stick with a skull on it while I'm there. His birthday is coming up, and he does keep pointing them out to me.

What weird things have your kids talked you into buying?

A Giraffe Post

As my Mum and at least 2 other people might have noticed, it's been a while between posts. In between Mr MITB working 7 days a week and the 3 princesses having some sort of cold and flu relay event I just haven't managed to drag my laptop out.

It was only tonight when I checked in to Blogger on my iphone that I realised that I already had this draft waiting to be posted. As I told Mr MITB about my draft, Miss Jade asked "What kind of giraffe, Mummy?" So here it is, a now slightly out-of-date giraffe post. More real ones to come soon, I promise.....

When you're a stay-at-home Mum it's easy for the days and weeks to slip by, leaving you with a feeling of "What have I done today?". This can get a bit disheartening sometimes, especially when people insist on asking "What do you do all day?" and you can't think of a single thing. So here's my list of top 5 achievements for the week.

1. Making homemade pasta for the first time. (OK, it did take up my entire Saturday afternoon to produce approximately one adult serve of linguine, but it tasted great)

2. Taking up the hems on 2 pairs of my husband's work pants . Hand sewn invisible hems thankyou very much. Maybe a slight overkill on high vis safety pants, but anyway.

3. Walked to preschool for the first time with the 3 princesses.

4. Filled out the enrollment forms for Miss Jade for kindergarten.

5. Emptied the fridge of all decaying items. Embarrassingly, Miss Jade's birthday cake from the end of March was still decaying in the back fridge.

Oh, and did I mention wrangling three little girls under 5. Every day.