Kerinthian's

I'm doing something I've never done before, I'm blogging on the bus. I have 37 minutes precisely to tell the tale if my sick week. Sucky and sickly has been my health with self diagnosed bronchitis and an acute ear infection that saw me to the Doctor after only being able to take one day off from work because of the specialized nature of my mediocre job. In other words no one could cover me. But that's ok, the toughest job I have, albeit the most rewarding, is being a parent, which no man can call in sick from. There are no sickies for desperate dad's with man-flu. Actually that's what grandparents are for, "mum, I need you to watch the kids, I'm sick"... But that was me day dreaming again about a time long ago when grandparents had nothing better to do all day than knit and make syrupy cups of tea for under age drinkers (as my Nanna used to). Not to mention all my children's grans, nans, pas and pops all live out of town. So I was clearl...

I’ve learned that the strength of being a Dad is found not in intellectual brilliance, physical strength or thickness of wallet – a Dad’s real strength can be seen in his ability to sacrifice anything for his kids. At least this is what I tell myself when I eat my Sultana Bran in the morning and my two girls, like a pair of starved sea gulls swoop to my side with open beaks and their fingers, sticky with snotty goodness, reaching into my cereal bowl. Another night shift the evening before and yet another bed time taking place almost six hours after when I should have gone to bed. The last thing I see before I close my floppy eyelids is my iPhone telling me that it’s nearly 1:30 in the morning and then everything goes black… … for about 5 hours until the shuffle of tiny feet in the kitchen is my first warning that whatever dream I was having is doomed in a sea of damaged dreams, where all the ships of broken sleep sink in a Bermuda Triangle of unprocessed thoughts. I flex the muscle...

(To save on Day Care, as well as not actually wanting our children to be full time Day Care Casualties, I have changed my weekend to be on Thursdays and Fridays. Here’s how this “weekend” went… oh, and due to sleep deprivation, this may or may not be entirely accurate.) Its two o’clock in the morning and I have been abducted from my sleep by the horrific screams of my three year old in the room next door. It’s as though at that moment the kid’s room has become the tangible imagination of Stephen King and I am lying in my bed, half in shock and the rest of me in delirious denial. The screams continue unabated. I’m trying to gather together my fractured consciousness, wondering at the terrible torment obviously taking place in the other room, thinking, hoping, maybe she’ll just go back to sleep? “DADDY! DADDY!” She cries from a throat that has become the very trumpet of fear in its most concentrated form. I try to go back to sleep. Am I a bad parent? Only if this was the first tim...

You are welcome now to participate in an experiment in creative manipulation, in which I will attempt to retell my day in such a way that it may seem interesting. You are also welcome not to, but please stick around, it might get interesting. Might I said... If anyone asked me to sum up my blog site in one sentence, this would be the quip I would grace their ears with - "making the mundane interesting." And interestingly enough, today was definitely mundane. But in order to explain today, I have to splash a little bit of yesterday's paint onto the canvas. Last night I did a late shift. It was a long shift, not chronologically speaking, but the work load was like a runway and I the aeroplane, running my stubby little legs frantically on the pavement while flapping my arms and crying out, "Look at me, I'm an aeroplane!" And no matter how hard I flapped my wings or hammered a sprint, I just could not get off the ground. There were reasons other than the...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the home of some friends of ours. They have two kids with a 3 year head start on our young family. The smaller is just over a year old and every time I go round she hops up on her little trunks and waddles across the floor in a mammoth effort to make it to my legs and then tries to launch herself upward by tugging on my knee caps. They’re really cool kids. The three year old boy is already first in line to be my daughter’s husband (so far as I’m concerned) and every time I see him I make a point of asking him, “Are you going to marry H when you grow up?” He nods his head yes but sometimes gets confused and tells me who else he plans to marry. Actually he sometimes even tries to claim my wife as already being his! But it’s still early days and the brain washing process that I’ve started may take a few years, but at least the seed has been sown. He certainly enjoys kissing her good-bye at the end of each visit (In a perfectly innocent Anne Geddes sense). ...