Dances to the Beet of Her Own Drum

CJ confidentially says to me tonight that her and Miss Lou have been talking and Lou thinks that I’m much stricter now after the ‘long weekend with the boys’.

Well duh!

Considering the level of silliness. Considering that 15 year old boys were interested in my 12 year old who they thought was 14. Considering that on the same weekend my girlfriend who owned one of the girls and one of the boys had her  home broken into by yet another stupid teen who stole cd’s and tried to steal her booze and that ALL the stupid teens were in and out of that house at one time or another over the weekend with only two of them having permission to be there - one to pick up stuff she’s forgotten and one to feed their animals ………..

Damn straight I’m going to be stricter!

Though to be fair, I think she’s still recovering from the shock of finding out exactly what the rules are going to be.

Like no boyfriends till she’s 16, and then only if we have met them, approved them, know their parent’s name, their address and their contact phone numbers. Only group dates, strict curfews, no more than an hour on phone or internet on school nights, no visits on school nights and no meeting boys in lanes or parks or anywhere else. Hanging out is to be done at home with no boys in bedrooms and no closed doors to any room while boys are in the house (except for the bathroom).

Oh and I retain the right to embarress her by telling childhood stories or displaying baby photos at random to keep her on her toes.

She is also in the tough process of learning that when mum says be home at 5:20 she means that you are inside OUR HOUSE by 5:20 not just about leaving your friend’s house.

And then there is the  realisation that mum has parental controls on the computer and isn’t afraid to use them.

But I also explained to her that it is my job to set boundaries for her while she learns and matures until she is able to set them for herself because I love her and want her to be safe and it’s what responsible parents do.

She was telling one of the boys at school about her mum’s rules and they suggested that she not tell me if she had a boyfriend. I reminded her of my super ninja psychic powers.

I also told her how one of her aunts had commented to me a few weeks back about how much effort they could see her making to be responsible and truthful.

That really tickled her and personally I think my rules have taken the pressure off. She hasn’t talked about boys near as much the past few weeks.

Stricter?

I’m think she’s lovin’ it!

Let us begin this week’s soiree of screw up sharing with the car keys.

PSLS’s missing car keys. The ones that have not been seen for over a week meaning that I had to leave my keys in the house when I was flitting back and forth Firecom last week meaning that I ended up locked out of the damn house a time or two!

Speaking of working at Firecom………. that place is just screw up central!

From the ops guy who wrote on a message form that he wanted me to tell a  pilot to ‘bomb the shit out of the SE corner’ (of the mock fire) and who got a rude shock when I passed the message as requested (I have NEVER seen so many grown men drop their pens/books/jaws at the one time!!),  to the other ops guy who insisted that he wanted to use the manual T-Card board for tracking vehicles instead of letting us keep an electronic one updated for them because they wanted to do it ‘themselves’  but five seconds later asked for one of my comms staff to do the board for them as they didn’t know how!

Let us not even mention the logistics guys who tried to fob off their jobs onto us mere comms staff. Or the planning guys who refused to give us copies of maps and the days action plans which include details such as who was working what jobs that day, their contact details and their locations, then couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to pass on certain information when asked as we didn’t know who to give it to or where to find them!

But not to worry……….. we sorted them out pretty quickly………. mwaaahaahaahaaa

Lastly I have for you the screw up that wasn’t actually a screw up revelation that made my husband get down on his knees in awe and worship my sneakiness - On Saturday while visiting friends they jokingly invited themselves for tea after PSLS mentioned we were having a roast chooken………. so I invited them for real. What followed was a few hours of EVERYONE rushing around rearranging, moving boxes out of the way, finishing unpacking some of said boxes and generally tidying up. I now finally have a few livable living areas.

PSLS says to me that I really shouldn’t invite people around when we need to clean up. I asked him ‘why not’ then commented that if I waited for everyone to help clean up before inviting people around that we’d never have anyone over and I’d never get anyone to help clean. PSLS’s eyes popped wide open as his realised the depths of his wife’s trickiness and he was in AWE peoples! In AWE!

Now. Who can I invite over next weekend………… lol

So what do you have this week my pretty pretties? Any delightful disasters? Stunning sneakeries? A bajillion little balls ups?

Anything?

Every time I looked at the comments from my blog post about Lou’s father and grandparents.

Every time I see the words ’strong’ and ‘brave’ I flinch.  It’s just not how I see myself. I did what had to be done because it needed to be done. I see myself as practical but that’s it.

And I hoped that people didn’t see my posting my story as a way to get attention or sympathy.  I just really needed to clear my head and my blog has become the place to dump things so I can stop them running around my mind.

I don’t often share the whole story for a number of reasons.

Firstly it’s not something that I want to revisit. The time that I was with Lou’s father was a very dark time in my life.  I have had to work very hard at putting that crap behind me. At getting rid of the negative self talk, at pushing aside the feeling of unworthiness, of stepping past the constant self doubt to regain the things that were lost - my sense of worth, my pride, my balance, my confidence.

Secondly it does no good to rehash it on a regular basis. It’s past, it’s over, it’s gone. Sure some of what I lived through influences my behaviour and attitudes today. Unfortunately sometimes when dealing with other family members who are still in deep denial or dealing some of the issues Lou is having a result of her time with him, I can’t help but have some of this stuff in the front of my mind. And sometimes when that happens I find the doubts rushing back in and I need to put it all back in perspective again.

Admittedly, knowing what my daughter has now lived with has reopened a few old scars and I have been grieving a little for what she lost as well as for what she should have had but didn’t get, but my overall feeling about it all is of empowerment. As much as it blows that I know these things, I know how she’s feeling, I know where’s she’s been, I know what she needs to get past this. I know I can help her and that’s not a bad thing.

Lastly it makes people uncomfortable. I knew before I published my post last week that many people would not know what to say to it. What do you say to something like that? Many people don’t know any of it. Most people who do know, only know bits and pieces.  They might know my ex was mentally ill, they might know he was on drugs while we were together. They might know that I left because he got physical, but when you put some of the bits together and start to see the big picture it’s horrifying and overwhelming and unimaginable unless you’ve been there yourself. And I have by no means shared everything.

But I don’t want people to be uncomfortable around me. I don’t want them to not know what to say. I don’t want them to not know how to react when I make a  comment or a dark joke about ex’s or mental illness or the like. I don’t want people to define me as a survivor of domestic violence.  I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.

I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.

That’s really the root of the problem.

The idea of having people feeling sorry for me makes me really, really, really uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I’ve been tossing up whether to leave the post stand or making it private or deleting it or I dunno.  I even switched it to private and switched it back (sorry to feed readers).

I know this is a perception issue on my part. The fact is that I don’t just get uncomfortable, I get defensive and I’m not sure why. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and I dunno, it’s like ……. *pulls faces at screen*………. it’s like I feel that it somehow undermines how far I’ve come to have people feel sorry for where I’ve been if that makes any sense at all and I have no clue why I feel that way.

In the end, I’m going to leave it. I know that the people who read my blog, who I consider my friends aren’t sorry for me, they were expressing their empathy, their understanding, their support and their heart.People are not sorry for me. They are sorry for what I went through. I should and do feel comforted that people are so empathetic and supportive.

I know that domestic violence is always going to make people uncomfortable. It’s hard to think about people we know or love living through things like this. It’s hard to imagine how it would feel to live with, why it happens in the first place, why women stay or how abusers think.

Being uncomfortable and not talking about issues makes it easier for them to continue. Being uncomfortable and not talking about issues means they are easier to deny. Being uncomfortable and not talking about issues means that people don’t know they aren’t alone.

What happened happened, it’s uncomfortable, messy and horrid, but I’ve decided to leave it up. The more people are uncomfortable and the more people talk could perhaps mean one less future victim and I’m going to be comfortable with that.

what drives some people to need to be liked by everyone.

Sure we all like to be liked but when we take it so far as to NEVER disagree with anyone about anything EVER and ALWAYS say what we think others WANT to hear, aren’t we taking things a bit far?

Unfortunately I’ve had to deal with someone doing this a lot over the past two years and it hasn’t been pretty.

Because they are always saying what the person they are talking to wants to hear they often agree with bitching that’s going around without it necessarily being their actual opinion, never tell anyone when there is an actual problem from their point of view and always  agree with anything you say whether they actually agree or not!

End result - everyone involved thinks they have the individual in question’s support and agreement and no issue ever gets resolved.

Gah!

What a mess!

And an even bigger mess when the eager to be ‘everyone’s mate’ person is in a position of leadership.

I often wonder what drives this kind of person…………..

Did they have no mates as a child?

Were they lonely as a young adult?

Did they learn to people please to try to please an overbearing or abusive  parent?

Are their social skills so poor that they don’t realise they aren’t actually being loyal and trustworthy to the people whose loyalty and trust they are attempting to gain?

I dunno.

I’d far rather have mates who will slap me upside the head if I’m being stupid or unreasonable then have someone blow smoke up my arse all day long!

What do you reckon?

First up I just want to say thankyou to everyone who commented, twittered or emailed on my last post. Your support and kind words mean so much and I’ll be replying individually to your comments soon. I really am ok, I think I just needed to get the crap out of my head, to remind myself of what reality is, so that I could put it aside and get on with things.

Secondly I’ll be light on the ground this week because I’m working in the communications room at Firecom while the region runs an exercise for senior management on how to manage large scale fires. It’s great practice for us during our off season as well as a bit of fun.

So far we’ve put notices up saying “will work for chocolate” and when that hint didn’t work sent a request form through for 10kgs of lollies and 5kg’s of chocolate.  Though my request for a sugar fix only gained a packet of sugar from the tea room in return! Payback is in the works……….  lol Oh and some of the night shifts icecreams just may have been consumed before midnight….. lmao

We also requested our own personalised parking spaces. Haven’t heard back about those yet……….

We are also training our staff well in the use of message forms. They are meant to write down information they want us to pass on  to the field using message forms. After getting sick of them simply talking to us through the booth windows we locked them and stuck up notices saying “no form, no messages”. But the biggest shocker was when the ops manager message formed me to urgently request the aircraft manager to ‘bomb the shit out of the fire’s SE corner’. So I did. Word for word.

I wasn’t really thinking about it and just came out with it cos I was trying to deal with a few other things too but honest to god! I’ve never seen so many grown men drop pens and books and jaws at the one time. He’ll never do that again! lolol (and I’d never do that at a real fire but shit it was funny!)

So tomorrow we need to pay them back for hiding our strawberries & cream lollies and trying to fob us off with a single packet of sugar with another bogus request. What to request?

Cocktails with our meals?

A pool in the courtyard?

Heated massage pads for our chairs?

Ninja to iron our uniforms?

Bling for our headsets?

What do you reckon?

I’ve been having a bit of an on going discussion with Lou’s grandmother of late following an incident at school a week and a half ago where one of her friends inappropriately quizzed Lou about what is going on in her life. I can only assume this stupid chick thought she was doing everyone a favour, but it left Lou very upset and she needed to know her grandmother had no part in it.

So I emailed her for the first time in almost six months to find out if she knew anything about what her friend had done.

In the course of the interesting fucked up discussion that followed  she says this -

I believe neither you nor her father made adult decisions about joint care of your daughter and putting your personal feelings for each other aside in her best interests.  Also neither of you made any provision for her to have contact with her other parent when you were living in different states.

I’m now wondering where she’s been living for the past 15 years because it  definitely isn’t in any reality I know!

The freak and I separated when Lou was six months old after a beating and booting that left me with bruises covering the length of my spine and the size of footballs on my legs where he had thrown me against a wall and kicked me repeatedly while wearing his Doc Martins. The violence started 6 months after we met. We’d been together for 3 1/2 years at this point.

He told me if I ever stopped him from seeing his daughter that he would kill me and I believed him.

I never stopped him from being able to see her. Never. Not because of his threat, but because he is her father and as long as she is safe she has a right to know him.

He tried to bully me into taking a house on the edge of town with no access to public transport, no easy access to my family and no close neighbours. I managed to get a house two blocks from my parents much to his chagrin but he still used to show up at my house uninvited and unannounced and let himself in. I had to put extra locks on the doors and windows to lock us up in the house so that I wouldn’t keep having moments where I’d turn around and see him standing in the doorway watching me. I was a prisoner in my own home. This didn’t stop until a few months after I met and moved in with my husband and only after hubby threatened him in return.

Around this time I got legal advice to have access arrangements formalised and to stop him from coming to my house altogether because he still terrified me. There were more threats to kill me but in the end his lawyer told him to be grateful for anything he was given after what he’d been doing and we settled on him having Lou every Wednesday afternoon and every second weekend from Friday afternoon till Sunday afternoon. Picking her up from his house on Sunday afternoon was my responsibility, the rest was his. I had sole custody.

I also had built into the orders that he was not to approach my residence or harass me. There was no time frame on those orders affording me protection until Lou left home.

His parents weren’t particularly happy with what was going on. I tried to tell them how scared I was and how bad things had been but they didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen, told me that we were a bad match and I shouldn’t have pushed his buttons.

Things settled a bit despite her father becoming more reclusive and more paranoid. I was discovering that Lou had food intolerance’s and going through the process of eliminating things from her diet to help with that. Her father refused to comply with her diet. Didn’t want to know. He was the happy, fun parent who was all play, no boundaries and encouraged her to be naughty at home.

When she was nearly 2 1/2 we showed up to pick her up one afternoon and were met by a very hyped up ex excitedly telling us how he had saved our daughter from drowning that afternoon. As best as we could figure he had left her unsupervised on the side of a dam while he was looking for Jesus (literally) in a dead sheep carcass and she had fallen over into shallow water. Her cry snapped him out of it and he found her before she got into any trouble, but it could have been disastrous.

Three days later he was picked up walking naked along railway lines just out of town following Jesus in full blown psychosis. It was at this point that he was committed to a mental health facility and diagnosed with schizoprenia.

What followed next was a few years of him being in and out of mental health wards, in between periods of wellness, illness, court ordered medication, suicide attempts, more psychosis, alternating periods of reasonableness and rage, multiple 4 hour long phone calls from hospital while he rambled on at me about his mission from God as an archangel sent to unite the religions of the world.

And still I didn’t stop him from having access to his daughter. I just made arrangments from him to have her under his parent’s supervision so that there was always someone else around. They had a small unit underneath their main home and he often had her there affording him some privacy and me peace of mind.

It wasn’t an easy time for Lou. It was confusing to her that her dad was ok some days and not others and that he was not a consistent presence in her life. Sometimes he’d go months with very little contact. During the times he was hospitalized I’d let his parents take Lou over to visit him, but still, his contact was sporadic depending on his mental state.

The psychiatrist told me that his cycles of rage against me during our relationship fitted the pattern for his psychosis and that he believed I had seen the early stages of his illness. I really wanted to believe this. That it wasn’t really him who beat the crap out of me every 3 months, but his illness. Stupid I know but we shared a child and I wanted things to be ok for her sake.

While all this was happening I had another baby, seperated from my hubby for a couple of months, had counselling, got back togther with my hubby, got married and was battling to deal with the effects of periphial neuropathy in my feet which was causing me considerable pain and depression.

During this time we (me and hubby) realised that something was a little different about Lou and had her assessed by Westmead’s Child Development Unit. I didn’t agree with their initial assessment of an overall intellectual disability, but it was useful to further our access to much needed services.  Her local therapists and I did everything we could to counter the learning problems we could identify even though we couldn’t seem to tie them together in an overall picture.

She had speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, early intervention, speech therapy group, home programmes and socialisation help from a psychologist. We had family support workers and social workers involved helping us to cope with everything.

Her father refused to acknowledge that there was anything different about his child. He did not want information on her therapy, wouldn’t do any of the exercises for at home with her and still would not comply with her diet.

His parents weren’t too interested either. They sort of knew what we were up to but in a polite ‘we dont really buy this but we’ll play along’ way.  They were still regularly involved in not only Lou’s life and had also invited our other children to call them grandma and grandpa and had regular contact with them also, bought presents for everyone in our family for birthdays and Christmas for us all. They even gave us a case of champagne for our wedding along with a gift. They were a constant source of support and advice when needed, occasionally mediators and I really appreciated that.

Around the time Lou started school (with a teacher’s aide because the school took her problems seriously) her father decided that he had to get away. He couldn’t handle being in town where everyone knew that he’d been sick and tried to hang himself off the bridge in the middle of town (the rope broke and he landed on the river bank unhurt).

He wanted to go back to QLD where we had lived for a couple of years until a few months prior to our separation.  At this stage he was having longer periods of stability, seemed to be complying with his health carers and desperate to feel ‘normal’. I could understand that.

He told me that he would be coming to to visit Lou a couple of times a year until she was old enough to fly up to him as an unaccompanied minor. He promised me that as he was moving so far from her that he would pay all travel costs for her to see him.

He did come and visit her a few times, rang her semi regularly. She might hear from him every week for 3 weeks then nothing for 2 months.  He had one or two more psychosis before stabilising, but by the time she was 7 his parents had been up to see how he was going and he was okay, had a good support network and his doctors were saying he was stable so I let her travel up there for a visit. He also bought her a computer for Christmas at this time so he could ‘keep in touch’ by email and chat with her online, something that didn’t really happen because neither of them are great at that kind of thing.

He’d still verbally abuse and threaten me occasionally, but more often than not was reasonable and I really, REALLY, DESPERATELY wanted to believe that he would be ok. That all the bad stuff was his illness talking because then there was some hope that Lou would have the father she deserved. But he still scared the crap out of me at times.

So we did what we could to encourage Lou to email or ring her father which she didn’t like doing so wouldn’t very often, made sure she remembered his birthday and had Christmas presents (which her grandparents also did), we drove the 5 hour round trip  to Canberra for her to catch planes to visit him and drove back down to pick her up (unless her grandparents were going through and had offered to take her).

All through this we continued to do what we had always done in promoting her relationship with her father’s family by being really flexible in allowing them to have her whenever they liked for visits or weekends away or family gatherings and they were still very involved with our other kids.

Lou was visiting her dad once or twice a year for a few weeks at a time and he’d been stable for quite some time when we discovered that he wasn’t paying for her travel expenses at all. He was making his parents do it, he even stopped making the arrangements himself leaving that to them too. We were appalled but not really in a position to do much about it. If we put our foot down she didn’t get to go because we couldn’t afford airfares and we didn’t want to be responsible for cutting off her visits as he never came to see her after she got old enough to travel to see him.

He met someone, got married, started having more children, was involved with a church, seemed happy, stable and normal. He was clean. His parents decided it was the drugs that were at fault for everything.

All through this he found ways to get out of paying maintenance. He’d plead hardship even when he was working. After the child support system changed and he couldn’t get away with paying nothing he’d still get the amount reduced to bare minimum and make a point of saving it up for one lump payment as if he was doing me a huge favour handing over the measley $260 a year.

He always discussed with me (and frequently argued with me) the possibility of Lou living with him one day. He told me he had a vision that his daughter would be returned to his household by the age of 10. Then he started threatening me with that vision.

It seemed like he thought it was some kind of competition for ultimate ownership or something. It concerned me that he always spoke more like she was a possession than anything else. I didn’t understand it, but I put it down to his illness changing how he functions a little and let it go.

But then that vision became reality with a delightful (not) little piece of nastiness that had me throw my hands up in the air in despair and hand her over before my family was completely ripped apart.  I was still praying that it was me or his illness or the drugs that made him violent and hoped that she would be ok.

I didn’t expect him to go into full power-play mode once he got his hands on her. He would record my phone calls, listen in on them to make sure Lou didn’t say anything she shouldn’t, intercept all my emails, delete the ones he didn’t like/think she shouldn’t get and take me to task on anything he took exception to. He didn’t encourage her to remember his siblings or my birthdays and would take the phone off the hook on days I was likely to ring (like her birthday or Christmas) so I couldn’t contact her. She was cut off from my family almost completely.

His parents became my only lifeline for real contact with her. He decided he was happy for her to visit as long as she stayed with his parents and they appeared happy to facilitate this. I gratefully accepted what was on offer rather than try battle through the courts for something different. We’d been through enough defending ourselves from child protective services and the false allegations that had been made. We didn’t need to rehash that again.

Meantime he would ring me complaining that she wasn’t doing her chores, was miserable all the time, how he didn’t understand her and how he didn’t like what she spent the money I was sending her on. She never had any monitoring or help with her learning delays, very little socialisation to help her skills along, no counselling, no safe food diet, nothing.

After a couple of years of feeling like my heart had been ripped from my chest, and not knowing what was happening in my daughter’s life I contacted her school desperate for information, a report card, an indication of how she was coping with school, with everything.

Now you need to understand that all through everything the original custody papers were still valid. Even after he got her he never had them changed and there were never any orders made by the court when we were hauled over the coals to change them either so at this point I was still her custodial parent. This gave him a bit of a kick up the bum and he decided that if I really wanted to see her then I could, so we started negotiating for me to have her for at least half of EVERY school holidays, for my family to be central to the arrangements instead of his and for restrictions to be taken off my phone and internet access to her. We came to an arrangement on what we both wanted and I signed custody over. It wasn’t ideal but it was workable for me until she was old enough to make her own decisions.

I was actually expecting her to return home once she turned 16 after her father had started explaining to me his plans to ‘liberate’ her from anyone else’s control. He was planning on kicking her out as soon as he could do so without giving her back to me.

Then he had an argument with his lawyer over the bill and mistakes they made so they wouldn’t hand over the papers for him to file with the court but he agreed to let honour the new arrangement anyhow.

Lucky for us.

It was only after this and after Lou gained access to a mobile phone that reasonable contact was gained and her living conditions came to light - the neglect, the physical and verbal abuse she was both witness and subjected to.

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t his mental illness. It is just him. He’s a bully and a thug and a coward.

Her grandparents offered to pay for boarding school and her aunt offered a weekend home, both of which I gratefully accepted because Lou needed to be moved and he would let her go with them as long as he thought he wasn’t giving her back to me.

Had I tried to keep her and make my own arrangements he would have paid that lawyer’s bill, filed those papers and taken action to have her returned to him. The consequences for Lou would have been really, really bad. It wasn’t worth the risk.

It became apparent after around 6 months that the arrangement with her aunt and boarding school wasn’t working and I took steps to bring her home to me and my family. I told his family what I was doing and why. I kept them informed of my investigations and steps as I was doing them. They made a great song and dance about how I was the parent and in control and they would just help however they could.  A fact they seem to have now conveniently forgotten.

Her father isn’t happy, and still doesn’t want me to have her (or ‘win’ in his mind) but there is little he can do at this point and he knows it. He’s even less happy that his only available means of contacting me is through my lawyer who threatened him with actioning my restraining order if he bullies me again but meh. You get that.

Now I’m getting this -

I believe neither you nor her father made adult decisions about joint care of your daughter and putting your personal feelings for each other aside in her best interests.  Also neither of you made any provision for her to have contact with her other parent when you were living in different states.

and all I can think is ‘WHAT THE FUCK”

I could have taken their grandchild and run away and changed my name and hidden from him. I could have cut them out of her life. I could have refused to let her fly to QLD to visit him. I could have done to him what he did to me in restricting access.  I could have taken advantage of Lou’s trust fund and tried to leech them dry for every cent I could get and never paid for anything of hers myself just like her father did. Then they’d really have something to complain about.

I could have had him arrested for assaulting me numerous times or for stalking me. I could have dobbed him in for drugs too.  And with his record he’d have gone to jail and had his first psychotic break there. That could have been interesting.

I don’t pretend to have no made mistakes. There are definitely things I would have handled differently had I known then what I know now but I tried. God knows I tried. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how hard one person tries if the other person is a loon.

Her grandfather apologised to me last year for not believing me about the abuse, but only because his son was talking to him and in a fit of remorse confessed to some of what he’d done. But they still don’t get it. I haven’t even  told them about the backhanders across the face, suspected fractures including my jaw from being punched or the concussions and four day headaches from being thrown into walls or onto the floor. There’s no point.  Her grandmother is now referring to Lou’s time with her father as being ’so unhappy” instead of being neglected and abused and thinks she should be all better now…………….

I’d really like to know how anyone puts emotion aside when they are dealing with someone who has no concept of boundaries? Who is reasonable one minute and screaming obscenities down the phone at you the next, who has everyone (his parents included) walking on eggshells ALL. THE. TIME. lest they attract his wrath with an ill placed word picked at random by his whim or current obsession.

How am I meant to turn off that ‘flight, fight or fright’ reaction that was my survival mechanism while living with him when I was still subjected to his rages on a regular basis when I needed to put our child first instead of letting him manipulate me into going along with his latest harebrained scheme?

Because every time he rages at me I am taken straight back in time to being curled up against the wall trying to protect my head while listening to my infant daughter scream and scream and scream because he was yelling and I was screaming in pain as he kicked me over and over and over until I couldn’t move or scream anymmore and the whole time I’m wondering if he’ll be able to stop himself soon and if I’m going to end up in hospital this time or if he was going to kill me.

And now despite my best efforts and vain hopes my daughter has those images in her head that she flashes back to whenever anyone raises a voice or a door bangs too loud and I didn’t think my heart could break anymore.

I’m being criticised for not putting emotion aside? For not having her best interests at heart?

Fuck.

Denial must be a wonderful place to live.

Where’s my ticket?

Take one car mat

Lots of lego

add 3 kids trying to avoid housework plus a few spare hours and mix well.

Hours of fun, imagination and laughter for everyone.

Though hubby and I were wondering just what kind of children we are raising when they told us that there house was actually a winery full of wine fridges!

lmao

I was thinking after my post about being surprised that one of my kids can’t cook that some people might be surprised at how much my kids CAN cook.

Cooking is something I’ve always done with my kids from when they were very little - though obviously with being away for so long Lou had forgotten much of what she’d learnt when younger.

Apart from being a great way to spend time together doing something enjoyable, when you have children with learning difficulties you look for ways to integrate their learning goals and therapies into their every day life and cooking is a very easy way to do that which covers a multitude of areas though the learning involved would benefit any child no matter how they were wired.

Them being able to put a meal on table if need be is a great secondary result, but not the point of the exercise.

1. Cooking is great for teaching concepts.

Children learn a lot about mathematic concepts from cooking.  Cooking involves measuring, weight, volumes, fractions, counting, temperature and time as they use the scales, measuring cups/spoons, transfer things between containers, figure out how much or how many they need as well as how long things need to cook for and at what temperature.

There is also some science in there as ingredients change from liquids to solids and back again during cooking processes or when they expand, shrink, froth or gel and change colour - all great things for children to be able to get hands on with.

It’s also great for language development as your child learns and uses concepts important to recognising similarities, differences and opposites like smooth/ rough, hard/soft, wet/dry, sticky/crumbly, sweet/sour, salty/bland, hot/cold etc. Not to mention all the wonderful descriptive words that apply to food  that your child has the opportunity to learn and use while cooking with you (and I’m not talking cuss words when you cut or burn yourself) relating to size, colour, shape, scent, flavour, texture etc.

2. Cooking is great for motor skills.

Cooking involves cutting with knives and scissors, mixing, scooping, pouring, shaking, kneading, rolling and many other manipulations of your ingredients and tools.

Some of these things involve gross motor skills, some fine motor skills, some a combination of the two and it’s better than playing with playdough or finger painting with shaving cream because you can eat the end result.

3. Cooking engages all the senses.

Cooking is the ultimate in sensory rich experiences. It involves every sense - smell, hearing, sight, taste and touch.

There are many, many wonderful and some not so wonderful smells produced by cooking - nutty, fruity and spicy for example right up to the other end of the spectrum with the warning aroma’s of sour and burnt.

Cooking produces many different sounds like sizzling, bubbling, crackling and popping as you combine ingredients or cook them, crunching or slurping and other chewing sounds as you eat.

Food is also very visual with not only the many, many different colours, shapes and sizes of foods but also watching how food changes colour, size and shape as it cooks and learning to visually judge when it looks ready.

Children can experiment with how individual ingredients taste when raw, when cooked and in combination with each other. They also experiment how foods feel in their mouths. Some foods are hard, sticky, soft, chewy, crunchy or creamy and then we get into foods that are hot or cool tasting because of the ingredients used as well as experiencing differing temperatures.

Lastly there are so many different textures that you  use in raw ingredients, in combined ingredients and create in the finished product, like the feel of a fish or how dough goes from sticky to smooth as you work it or how soft whipped egg whites are just to name a few.

4. Cooking inspires creativity and helps children learn to experiment.

Just as our young children have a ball coming up with magnificent creations if we were to give them paper, glue and assorted materials for collage, they also have a ball with cupcakes, icing and assorted edible decorations. Or pizza bases, sauces and toppings. Or meat, mashed potato and veges. Or…..well you get the idea.

Our children’s imaginations are incredible things and food is just another medium that we can use to engage them. Sure their flavour combinations may at times be a little ‘out there’ for adult palettes, but as long as they are having fun and trying new things it’s all good right? (TJ, you are still not allowed to eat devon, tomato sauce and nutella on the one sandwich because that makes mummy want to heave!)

5. Cooking teaches children to follow directions.

Being able to follow directions is an incredibly important skill and one that we need to develop over time to include more complex instructions containing more steps. Starting with very simple recipes and moving on to more detailed and comples ones gives some pretty good practice at doing this.

Many children (particularly two of my children) aren’t great at looking at tasks, breaking them into steps and doing them in order. Recipes already have that stuff set out for them, but it still is good for learning to work within a process to get jobs done.

And at least with cooking if you stuff up a recipe you can chuck it out and start again.

6. Cooking teaches children important life skills.

Nutritionists are often pushing getting children involved in preparing the food that they eat. It stands to reason that if your child is helping you prepare the food that they are eating then they are more aware of what they are putting into their bodies and that they will be more aware of what is contained in different types of foods hopefully leading them to make good nutritional choices as adults.

Cooking  involves a number of skills that are not just about the food. Cooking involves planning, organising, time management, cleaning and hygiene. You have to plan what you are going to eat, when, where, how many people you are feeding. You have to organise your resources in terms of food and kitchen tools, if you need to shop and any help that you might need. You have to allow yourself time to complete each stage in the planning/organising/preparation and cooking to have your food ready at your goal time. You have to have a clean area to work in, clean up when finished and follow some good hygiene principles to ensure that your food doesn’t make other people sick.

We also come back to the whole following directions thing I mentioned in the previous point. I’m sure we’ve all had said to us at one time or another “if you can follow a recipe then you can ……………(fill in the blank)”.

Being able to follow directions or a process, being able to plan, being able to organise, being able to manage their time etc  are all skills that are going to help them meet many other challenges as adults whether it’s planning a project for work, an event like a party at home, putting together a system for doing their housework or just for programming their digital set top box for the telly.

And of course it means that they can feed themselves when they eventually grow up and leave home! lol

7. Cooking teaches kids enjoyment before it becomes their responsibility.

My theory is this -  if children have had good experiences with cooking as youngsters, feeling capable and confident in their abilities as they grow into young adults, then hopefully they will carry this with them through their life so that when the task of feeding everyone becomes a daily chore instead of an activity they won’t feel it is a burden and ditch it in favour of fast food diets.

So there you have it. My reasons for frequently experimenting in the kitchen with my kids.

Oh and of course there is the obvious reason and the most important one.

8. Cooking with kids is fun!

nuff said.

What reasons would you have come up with?

PSLS went to the doctors today about his cough, rattly chest and pains.

Like I tried to tell him - he has heart burn and his cough is hanging around because he’s a smoker.

He got some new medication to try to quit smoking (YAY!) but the doc wants him to have a blood test to try to help figure out what’s causing the heart burn.

PSLS squirms at the idea of blood tests.

PSLS is scared of needles.

The doctor gives him his ‘official diagnosis’ - he’s a big baby!

Officially confirming what we all already knew! lmfao

My love slave has been having him some blonde days.

I dunno where his head was at yesterday but in the end I told him to go back to bed until he woke up.

I’m trying to speak to our phone company when the phone accidentally gets hung up. Now between dialing their number and the hang up I had to negotiate a gazillion menu options so had pressed quite a few numbers. When I go to call them back again PSLS flogs off with the bill then snaps at me to simply ‘hit redial’. I wonder if I had hit redial with that many numbers punched into the phone if it would have dialed overseas and I’d have gotten someone local……….. lol

Then when I tell him that I need to check whether or not our electricity bill account number is still the same as at our old address in case I needed to update our automatic payments and he argued with me that I only needed to check in case I needed to update. I have no idea what he thought I said I was going to do. Even CJ told him to back to bed until he could wake up properly at that one!

Then he went shopping to get some groceries. Just lunch fixings for himself for work and some odds and ends for me. He had a shopping list that I wrote for him which included things like 6 rashers of rind-less bacon, garbage bags and grain bread for me and the kids. I ended up with 6 rashers of very fatty middle bacon, black plastic bags who’s only conceivable use would be for lining shallow, small recycling crates ( honestly they look like oversize litter tray liners) and white bread because that’s all he eats.

Sigh.

Good thing I married him for his body………….. lol

So how about you?

What delectable, delightful deeds of disarray do you have for me this week?

Leave a comment and a link and we’ll be around to visit soon.