A friend is looking after my son. She had him last night and for most of the day today. This is so rare for me to get time out like this when it’s not work related, and it’s bloody great.

I went out last night with a group of friends into the city. I don’t know where everyone else was last night but there weren’t many people in Adelaide. The weather was really nice. It was the first time I’ve been out at night for a while now without a winter coat. I would have thought this alone would have made people want to venture out. Perhaps everyone’s still in winter hibernation mode.

I had a pretty enjoyable night and got to bed about 2.30 this morning and slept in until 8.30 which I hardly ever do.

I’m doing some homework for my course today without feeling guilty that I’m occupying my son with an electronic babysitter. I also had a 50 minute conversation with an interstate friend and it was fabulous to do so without interruptions.

I would have liked to spend today going and sitting in a cafe either with a friend or by myself and sitting there enjoying watching the world go by without looking out for a little person, and reading the paper uninterrupted, but I haven’t even ventured out the house today. And that’s ok.

Yesterday morning I woke up to a beautiful spring day. A few weeks ago I was shivering with winter, but now spring is here. My orange tree is soon to blossom and I can smell other spring smells in the air.

But, I was just about to walk into the shower and I saw Monty trying to go outside. When I say trying, she had trouble walking as one of her back legs wouldn’t hold her up. I called her to me and she still had real trouble. I immediately thought the worst and told JJ to quickly get dressed while I called the vet.

I told them what was up and they didn’t have an appointment for another three hours. Monty was a bit distressed and my heart was pumping fast and I of course thought the worst. I know that when dogs get older their back legs tend to go but I thought I had more time with Monty before that started happening.

She kept trying to follow me around with her very drunken looking gait and I ended up picking her up and putting her in her basket. JJ gave her some biscuits and we sat there for a bit patting her and trying to reassure her.

I got on with my jobs before the visit to the vet while wondering if I could carry a 25kg dog out to the car for the short trip to the vet.

Luckily it didn’t come to that. By the time we had to leave she was walking pretty well, with just a bit of a stiff back leg.

The vet checked her out and said that she’s okay but because of her age, arthritis could be a problem so we need her to take it easy and not take her for huge long walks.

Phew! I’m dreading the time for Monty to go and I’m certainly not ready for it now. She’s getting older though, about 11, so it will happen sooner rather than later. I think of Monty as my first child as I got her during a time when I’d vowed I wasn’t going to have kids. Now that I do have a human child, I still love having Monty around and so does my son so we want to keep her for some time yet.

While I’ve got you here, go check out some photos I’ve been taking with the Sony Ericsson phone I’m trying out.

Oh, and PS - Happy father’s day to all the dads. I tried to tell JJ that he could make me breakfast in bed but that didn’t wash.

I’ve been reading Three Ring Circus for a while now, and following the struggles of little Ivy with her many trips to and from the hospital.

She needs some medication which she has been denied.

Please go read more about it, and sign the petition.

Thank you.

UPDATE: Thanks to the power of the interwebs - Ivy’s medication was approved.

Last night I started a course. It’s been a while since I’ve committed myself to doing something that involves after hours participation and work and I think the shock of this commitment is slowly catching up with me.

The course - in digital strategy - sounds really interesting and I’ll learn lots but there’s going to be a bit more work than I realised. The bummer is working in a group which is usually fraught with personalities but we’ll get there in the end I hope. It’s only 11 weeks worth but there’s a fair amount of assessment involved, and even an exam.

Attending this course means that I had to find childcare - which I was lucky enough to do - and I have to rush home from work, pick the kid up, feed myself, make sure he’s got all his bits to take to the babysitter (including his dinner), drop him off then drive back to near where I work to get to the course. I feel puffed just typing that. Then I have to pick him up afterwards, wake him up and get him out to the car. Unfortunately I can’t just carry him anymore but once he’s walking it’s easy. It’s just the waking up bit that’s hard.

I’ve already started my homework as I work better doing things in dribs and drabs. I’ve also created my first Google group so our group can communicate and have a place to keep our work. It’s private - so no spying!

There’s heaps of other stuff happening too, some of which I’ve alluded to ever so slightly around here and on my twitter/plurk sites, and my brain’s all over the place.

Now I’m signing off and going to watch some tv to drain the brain a bit.

Tonight I got home from work, and immediately started whizzing around doing bits and pieces. One job I did was water the flower seedlings we planted over the weekend after the mammoth weeding effort.

As I stood there watering them I breathed out a big sigh and thought that this is what I’d rather be doing than being at work.

I would have twittered this, but it would have had to have been two parts.

In part 1 of ‘How to combine a career and kid and a kid and stay sane‘ I focused a bit on the work and the daily routine aspect and said I’d talk about the switching off from the career and kid bit this time.

I think the best way for me to do that is to get a night out. When I’ve read similar things to what I’m about to write I thought easier said than done, but it is totally worth doing. That is, finding a regular babysitter and getting some time out.

It’s taken me nearly seven years to get this stage mind you. I’m finally comfortable booking the babysitter and then organising a night out whereas previously I would organise babysitting around a night out.

I got home recently after seeing a great show at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival - ‘Intimate Apparel’ and realised how grateful I was that I was able to have nights out sans child. It makes a HUGE (and I hardly ever write in all caps so I really mean it) difference to my parenting if I’m not parenting all the time.

The paradox is, of course, that some nights I find myself just talking about the quirky things that JJ’s done recently. One story I’ll probably tell my friends when I catch up with them is that JJ asked a group of Spanish people at the backpackers we stayed at recently, how do you say ‘vagina’ in Spanish. I was slightly embarrassed that he chose this word but they thought it was funny.

I’ve learned not to worry about only getting a few hours sleep before I have to do the pickup in the morning, although I’m a lot better now at drinking more water inbetween the alcoholic drinks. On my nights out when JJ was a baby and a toddler I’d get to bed after a night out and then freak out at how late it was and have a hard time getting to sleep, therefore making the situation worse. Now I look at the clock before going to bed and think, oh well at least I should get four hours sleep. And I also think of how little sleep I survived on when JJ used to keep me up all the time.

It’s now been a few weeks since I’ve had a JJ free night, and it’s about time I organised a night out.

We are currently in Perth in a youth hostel. It’s the fifth day into our holidays and it’s going fairly well. There’s one and a half hours time difference between Adelaide and Perth which means we’ve both been waking up at 5.30am and this morning was the first morning I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Up until last night we had a friend’s apartment near Fremantle and even though the traffic noise was heavy, it was a constant noise and therefore bearable. Staying in a youth hostel means having to contend with people standing outside your room talking, people cleaning up in the kitchen and throwing pots and pans around, and sleeping in a bed that’s a bit narrower than a double with a fidgety seven-year-old.

You might be able to tell I didn’t sleep that well last night and am feeling it today. Plus, it’s crap weather outside and we can’t stay here all day!

JJ is teaching a German and a Swiss how to play his rules of Uno and he’s quite the social butterfly. At least having other people around is taking the heat off me having to entertain him the whole time which is the trade-off to staying in a youth hostel.

Overall, JJ has been really good and I can’t complain. He adapts easily and is enjoying himself. I think our best day so far was a Rottnest Island jaunt. We hired bikes and he left me for dead. I’ll write about that another time though.

A side note - it took me about ten minutes of this internet time to recover my password to sign into this blog to update. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was because I haven’t had to use it for ages.