submarine

the faucet & the blonde

Have you ever wondered - if you'd sit on the drain in the shower, would that turn the bathroom into a swimming pool?
It does. If you don't have much of a threshold and you sit there long enough, you can actually turn the whole second floor into a pool! Great for getting dust out of those hard-to-reach corners!
It would have been amazing to see the indoor waterfall I could have created, but I inadvertently got up, shortly before that would have happened.
I'm leaving that to other courageous explorers... Let me know if it works?

P.S. for privacy reasons, the faucet photographed is not the tap involved in the actual incident. As for the blonde? Well, yeah - that's her.

Oh, and edit: the duck is an innocent bystander. It has no idea what the fuss is about ;)

more

Okay, so like I said, there is more!

It was easier to start telling my colour story from black and grey to my safe colours. The colours I gravitate to, sort of naturally.

But ever since being pregnant with Squirt, I've been falling in love with something a lot more dangerous... RED! I've no idea how that happened. I just woke up one morning, and found out that - apparently - I had a colour theme on my hands! And as it goes with colour themes: once you start, it's hard to stop. Red has become the colour of contrast in this house. As simple, or complicated, as that.

So the first grid I photographed - before deciding that my colour story as such passed through green and blue first and foremost - was red in nature. Food, more accurately.

Then, I looked around & found - way more red than is necessary for any one life time. After some serious editing, I could claim it's only accentuating the edges - but the truth is, this mosaic is me, showing a lot of restraint... But it gets worse. The goth deep, deep down inside of me could claim red as a colour of passion and be done with it - albeit grudgingly. If there wasn't evidence - and now proof - that there is more to it than just that. There is something fishy going on here. In my head, and even - in a curious single incident - in my closet (the clogs are for gardening purposes only, and the socks came in a batch with blues and greys. That's my story & I'm sticking to it!). I've struck... PINK!Pink! What's happening here?! Is it some sort of reaction to the fact that I'm the female minority in this house these days? Some form of defiance - resistance? Proof that I'm here? Has becoming a mamma made me aware of the fact that I'm a girl or something?! This really snuck up on me!

I have no idea where this is coming from! What I do know is, finding pink really shocked me out of my photographing frenzy of colour. I needed to sit and brood. Reclaim my inner goth for a bit. Listen to some Type O Negative & Nick Cave. Come to terms with the idea that my new-found interest in colour goes past gel pens, watercolour paint, crayons and pastels & what they can do on paper - straight to the heart of things: a PINK iPod and beyond!

I'll be back when I'm ready to embrace my inner girl...

care

In the morning, before Squirt took his tumble, I had dropped a plastic container holding spag bol (well, something like it, anyway) on the kitchen floor. It cracked & spilled. Of course. I tried to clean it before little man crawled through the dregs, and in a 'mental note: clean pants later' kind of way I succeeded. Also, he was wearing one of his old shapeless onesies because I had had to change him three times the day before, for various reasons, and that's what was left. And, as I had spent the morning cleaning the attic and spare room, I was still in 'shower later' mode, which isn't pretty either.

So Squirt took his spill and we had to get to the doctor's office quickly. And that's how we looked. Squirt in his sauce-stained pants and his overly washed onesie, me with my unwashed hair in a careless ponytail. I had only just taken the trouble to put on 'real pants' instead of the tracksuit bottoms I was wearing! I'm painfully getting why old ladies tell you to always wear clean underwear because you don't know what the day will bring. It's not limited to underwear. Really.

And then Squirt started 'talking' to the doctor's assistent. And I said, as a sort of joke, 'oh, that's normal, he always talks like that!' The guy looked at me critically and asked me what Squirt was saying, then. I told him I didn't know; he's only 16 months old, and while he has a vocabulary of 50-odd words (which is impressive for his age!) I can't make sense of everything that comes out quite yet. Which was okay, because the assistent had thought Squirt was older than that. But still.

And then what happened yesterday!
Man took Squirt out on the train - a free ride to and from the town where he works, just for fun - and decided to change diapers in one of the bathrooms at his workplace. It was a bathroom for the disabled, so it had an alarm pull cord installed. You can connect the dots, I suppose ;-) Squirt happily pull-pull-pulling the cord while Pappa was obliviously bent over naked baby bum when security came bursting through the door using a passkey...

It all adds up! Had the proposed Electronic Child File been in place yet, I'm sure Squirt would have been flagged for showing possible signs of neglect AND abuse! That's how easily our efforts to be responsible parents can be misconstrued (hey, my kid might have fallen down the stairs, but I got him to a doctor real quick!!).

It has been quite a week!

bumps

A couple of weeks ago, I tumbled onto Sara's blog, FULL HANDS. She writes about incorporating bicycling into her daily family life. Reading and clicking around a little, I got the impression that cycling is pretty much an alternative lifestyle to many Americans, and there seems to be a thriving community of people on bikes connecting through blogs!
Pretty cool to read about, and at the same time so alien to me! Over here, in this flat little frog country, everyone (apart from the newest immigrants) learns to ride a bike early on, and most of us stick with it throughout life. In many instances, it's much easier to grab the bike than to go by car, and this country is geared to cyclists - to the extreme! You'll find bike lanes and separate paths almost everywhere, and riding a bike is - pretty much - as safe as walking the sidewalk (I guess I have to add that walking is quite safe here, too).
Now I'm an oddity in my own right for not knowing how to drive a car - but that's a different story :-)

On Sara's blog, I read this post. It's not so much about riding a bicycle, although the author of the excerpt - Joe Kurmaskie - is taking cycling to a whole nother level, even for a weathered Dutch girl like me! But what he writes about raising children, exposing them to the elements, so to speak - that is so true, and really touched something!
There is no way for children, or adults for that matter, to experience only the good. To protect yourself and the people you love from all possible mishap means you'll miss a lot of beauty, too. Besides, there is no way to stop bad things from happening altogether...

When I read that post, my punchline was going to be about Squirt taking a nosedive over the side of the couch, and quite possiby swallowing my nose stud. As you do. About how I didn't imagine Kurmaskie was talking about those particular life experiences, per se.

And then, life happened a little, again, and the post didn't get written. Until today. When Squirt fell down the stairs; backwards to start off with. Top to bottom, hitting all 13 steps on the way down. Ending up with two bumps, bruises and a friction burn on his forehead and chin... And thank the little angel on his shoulder, that was all. Well, that and a severely shocked mamma. Who can't get over how unbelievably stupid it was not to close the perfectly fine baby gate for whatever, whatever reason! And who really doesn't want to think about how much worse this could have been...

Resulting in the - not so much punchline, more like stern warning that there is a lot to be said for experience and against overprotection, and I agree. But not taking basic measures to prevent calamity from happening is plain stupid. No one can argue with that!

Okay. That wasn't funny. At all. I'm going to get me a cup of coffee and try to get the shakes to stop! Squirt was checked over by a doctor and pronounced 'fine'. He's sleeping off his own hangover of sorts - probably deciding when it might be safe to trust the female parental unit again... ;-)

cold

From watching too many Detectives, Thrillers, and other edifying death-related television shows, you get the feeling only dead bodies spend time in the morgue... Not so: Michael Jackson did, too. He was buried last night. That means he spent the past 11 weeks in one of those drawers.
That really does send shivers down my spine!

(Don't even get me started on burials. I saw 'Return of the Living Dead' at a way-too-tender age - I was 10, I think - and have never gotten over it, really...)

fiend

Yesterday, Baby Boy had his first Brush with Nature - Up Close & Personal. He had grabbed hold of a huge monster that was taking a walk through the living room, insect-style (what was it doing there in the first place?!).
I was busy with the breast pump, BB not directly in my line of vision, and when he cried out, it was just after a bit of thunder outside, so I didn't immediately disentangle myself to see what was going on (bad mommy!). But when he cried again, I unplugged to see what the fuss was about. The Thing was stuck to his little hand, and it must have bitten him, or done something with its pincer-stinger-thingy! Bastard!
I checked BB's hands, and kept a close eye on him for the next few hours, but thankfully there seemed to be no ill effects... All the better since I couldn't find out what the Thing was, apart from it being an insect through basic determination. Here are the pictures, the building block measures 4.5 cm!

After its little scrap with Baby Boy, it found itself dead. & no, not by me - I'm too scared for my karma!
Four reasons why it wasn't Michael Jackson, even though it's dead:

• I couldn't find it on the internet,
• it was really BIG, relatively speaking,
• it was actually black,
• last but not least - apparently it didn't like children.

Do you know what this thing is? Please let me know, FFR!