Autumnal Beachcombing

For the first time in ages, a trip up to the beach. We climb in the car and troop up to our old dog-walking haunt at Mooloolaba or Buddina or whatever the actual suburb is for a spot of rock-hopping at Point Cartwright.

The weather has started to turn and the nice sunny yet somehow chilly days are with us, with the less hardy in long sleeves and others sticking resolutely to shorts and thongs.

We picnic at a playground, then walk around the point. Debating whether Lyra is up to the climb around the point underneath the cliffs - the tide is high and the waves rolling in, some of the rocks quite slippery - but we go for it, the heavy going soon taking its toll on the little trooper as she starts to flag with tiredness.

Around on the flat rocks on the other side, Lyra lies down in a saltwater pool and refuses further progress. I hang around with her and some seagulls looking out over the bay, the waves crashing against the rocks a little way off, the spray shooting up behind.

Returning to the car for some food and a restored Lyra messes about on the exercise area with Eloise. Eloise is showing off her splits ability, much to everyone's disgust and envy.

Attention to Dentition

Not entirely inexplicably, Eloise doesn't much like going to the dentist. Last time, Ellwyn, bless him, under instructions from Nicole, put on his stern face for Eloise in the ongoing campaign to deter thumb-sucking, and Eloise doesn't respond well to stern-ness.

Now Ellwyn has moved on and we have a new dentist-person, a very friendly lady by the name of Alice who has a child Lyra's age. Nicole got her noshers seen to, and Eloise was given a clean bill of health with her pins still perfectly preserved if not perfectly positioned.

The photo is of Eloise with her flouride gum-guards on. Mass medication, I tell you! She wasn't happy about it.

While all this was going on, Lyra and I were gallivanting around the place, playing with toys in the reception area, exploring the rooms in between, some of which were unfortunately occupied, discovering the receptionist doing a bit of furtive texting, and going back to visit Mum and Eloise in the Daunting Chair.

We chatted with the boss-man who has a child Lyra's age, and real handful, so he claimed, regaling us with stories of what seemed like frankly slight misbehaviour in supermarkets and apparently minor sleeping misdemeanours.

When Lyra let loose with one of her foundation-shaking screams he took it all back, and retreated, laughing gently to himself and shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears.

Lyra wouldn't get in the chair. We looked on it as an exercise in light familiarisation.

Inimitability

Lyra has managed, along with Nicole, to evade the general unwellness and continues to be, well, inimitable.

Hairdressing

Another trip to the hairdressers, with Nicole having her finely sculpted eyebrows finely sculpted and Eloise having herself snipped and preened.

It's up to me to control the Thuggernaught and attempt to keep the salon from irreparable damage, physical and mental. Normally I would go next door with Lyra and imbibe some craft brew, but last time I tried that I had to attempt to keep the bar from irreparable damage, and an orchid may have come off the worse for wear. Orchids! That's inner-city hipster metrosexual bar life for you.

Eloise had a couple of centimetres taken off, which must have taken something around two minutes of young Tegan's time, and then an expansive shampoo and blow-dry session that went on for, well, enough time for the Imp to rearrange the chairs in the place, sample the hair-washing area, drink some hot chocolate, and interfere with the attractive presentation of "product."

Laid Low

With school holidays in full swing, a lower back complaint, and a camping trip abandoned due to fogeyness and infirmity, what better time to contract a debilitating viral distemper!

With Nicole at work of course there is no choice but to soldier on, but with a few days off, the invisible unconscious getter-upper flicked into Bugger This mode, and with symptoms which I may list in exhaustive and melodramatic detail momentarily, Eloise and I took the opportunity to fail to leave the house for four days.

The first day I have covered already, in which I/we spent the day resting my back in front of the TV in a rarely-sanctioned telethon of titanically tortuous trash, but from there on, as my nasal cavity became dry then wet then blocked, my chest filled with anti-breathing fluid, my sinuses with hydraulic headache making goo, and my joints with what I suspect may have been low-grade grumbling oil. All of this of course required my body to adopt a strategy of sneezing and coughing, a path which with the muscular complaints already present resulted not only in kitchen-roll sheets full of snot and goo but also in paroxysms of exquisite agony the likes of which I haven't experienced in, oh, several months.

Eloise got her part was feeling reasonably chipper during the day (she claimed, but didn't look) but at night nose-diving, abandoning all pretense, and invariably chundering womanfully in the house's en-suite in the early hours before climbing into our bed for some four-in-the-sickbed witching-hour somnolent jostling.

When Eloise and Nicole both started to complain of sore backs I began to wonder whether my back was in fact not broken at all but actually recovered and superseded by viral discomfort. Still my self-administered doctor's orders were bed rest and plenty of it. I even had some AFDs. That's how serious it was.

Still I was disabused of that notion as my upper bodily motility returned, sadly not accompanied by lower body obedience, and as I emerged from y pit it was to stagger around the place in a continuing John Wayne impersonation.

Nicole didn't get it too bad, luckily. Lyra blissfully unaffected. So far,

Lower Back Trouble Leads to Lack of Moral Backbone

So I've done it again, and this year's back spasm paralysis is with me, in reasonably full effect. After a spot of ill-advised dwarf-tossing in the swimming pool, failing to acknowledge my own limitations let alone the fact that the dwarf is no longer a dwarf, I have knackered my back, again, and am wobbling about, John-Wayne-like, only tentatively able to raise myself from prone to unprone.

It wasn't so desperately bad yesterday, until Lyra swung by to say goodnight and took me by surprise while reading Harry Potter to Eloise. She gave me what was no doubt intended to be an affectionate tweak to the chest nut, but so surprised was I that I spasmoed my whole body.

This morning, only ambivalently able to get myself out of bed, I proceeded to hobble around the place, and it wasn't long before I experienced a complete moral breakdown, turned on the bloody goggle box and actually fed breakfast to the little Gavins in front of the telly. Oh, for shame.

I thought, I'll just retire and read a book, but when Lyra came in to play her favourite game (that is, waking me up) I knew the game was up. So I cleaned some windows, like you do, did some other household chores and went back to bed to rest my poor weary bones.

Of course, this activity didn't do my muscles any favours and that transition from horizontal to vertical and vice versa became increasingly difficult, leading to a decisive moment where one or the other had to be selected. I opted for horizontal.

Later, after I could take no more of the inanity that was echoing through the house, I suggested to Eloise that she might like to put on a film. Of course she chose the inanest film she could muster and so I fell asleep once more, this time on the sofa, waking up later to find Lyra asleep also, next to me.

I absented myself for a while to perform some duties, returning to find Lyra in the position illustrated above, still quite asleep, Eloise still gawking zombie-like at the second film of the day, before I exhorted her to some tidying-up, which she did on the basis that she would be rewarded with some time on the tablet - a request I reluctantly agreed to, recognising that it completed my moral bankruptcy.

We (I) woke up Lyra, gently, an event to which she was strenuously opposed, arguing as usual that not only was it not funny, nor fun, but that it was no fair and that we should stop. She took herself off to her room, and shouted from within claims of ownership: "It's my door. And it's my room. Go away."

Still, looking on the bright side, this weekend's mooted camping trip is now off the agenda.

A Hat