Detox and Liver Cleansing Diet

I have decided to add a number of tabs/new sections to this blog with all the information I have found useful since becoming a mad mother!  I'm adding to this over time, for example, I will publish many of my family and friend approved recipes under the "Home Economy Tips" tab.  This week instead of my usual blog I have worked on publishing the Liver Cleansing and Detox diet plan I've come up with after years of research and refinement. It will now live in the Health & Wellness tab/section. I'm not sure who is interested but feel free to give it a shot.  I will endeavour to publish the accompanying recipes to make this eating plan interesting in the next few weeks.  Hope it is helpful!
Here is the direct linkhttp://madmummy74.blogspot.com/2011/03/liver-cleansing-menu-1.html

Dealing with the Elderly

There’s a scripture about applying a new patch to old fabric and when that was written I’m sure the parable was not about the circumstance my husband and I faced the other night......  My husband was on the phone to the tax department when his Dad (who usually asks me ) came up to him failing to notice he was on the phone,  due to his hearing and vision impairment .  He said in his usually loud voice “Can you come down to my room and stick a patch to my backside?  We are lucky that the tax consultant having heard this comment and interpreting it any number of ways didn’t stick us with some new tax.

My husband thought I must have delegated since I was cooking dinner,  and with sticky tape in hand and on his way down to the granny flat said “I’ll go stick that thing on Dad’s bum”.  Because both men are prolific communicators , I decided I better ask what it was all about and he just shrugged.  The passive compliant soul that he is was just going to do what he was asked, no questions.   This is why I am his Father’s carer!

For starters, what patch? It couldn’t be a hormone patch – he’s not having menopause.  Nicotine? He hasn’t smoked since 1955.   Secondly, I pointed out that you can’t use sticky tape on the skin of someone taking blood thinners because they bruise, graze and bleed easily and when he tears it off, then he'll have a bleeding and then infected butt.  And what’s this got to do with his butt anyway? 

My Husband knew nothing and he was just going to close his eyes and patch up whatever needed to be patched up.  He is a tradesman after all.  He once was in a work team for indoor cricket and they called themselves “no more gaps”.   Are you starting to see why I didn’t just let it go?

So, I went and interrogated my Father-in-law and without not really knowing why or how, he had bought a pack of adhesive panty liners from a woman who came to talk at the over 60’s club.  All he remembers is that the talk was something about arthritis relief and some magnetic strip.  On closer investigation and after reading the packet it turns out the panty liner has some metal or magnetic strip in the core of it. There ain’t no information about men slapping it on their backside for joint pain!

What I want to know is why some woman is peddling menstruation panty liners at an over 60’s club - It’s not really the right target market.  Maybe in marketing terms this is what is called a “Product Line Extension”  - selling the same product to a new target market and/or finding new uses for an existing product line.  My other thought was in terms of the primary market of menstruating women - who would actually risk putting something with a magnetic strip up against their privates?  And what is it supposed to do – attract all the negative ions?!!!

At this point my husband did one of his usual dry witted one liners and suggested  that since I am a migraine suffer, if this magnetic  panty liner works on his father’s bum then I should strap one on my temples and it might work.  I might be able to do school drop off without being drugged on Panadine Forte but the school will think my son has a complete loony for a mother.

After eventually adhering the thing to his Father’s butt cheek my husband looked pale and had to immediately have a shower. I told my husband not to be such a wuss – he’s lucky he wasn’t there for his last prostate examination. Or worse still, the day I was icing my daughter’s 1^st  birthday cake and he announced he was going to try Viagra because there was a lady at the over 60’s club he thought was interested!  Luckily, he misread her intentions and she really was just being a nice lady making him some fruitcake.  I don’t know what was worse – the thought of him on Viagra or having to have a discussion with an 88 year old (who was faithful to his one and beloved wife until she passed) about reading Women’s intentions and not jumping to conclusions and that even if he did read it right that Viagra can cause strokes.  I am grateful that my carer’s role has not included a hospital trip with rigamortis!

The next saga is finding the right electric chair for him to “trade up” to from his motorised gopher so he can safely go to the shops and to his social outings.  I need to get up to speed on wheel turning bases, investigate the gutter sizes on common trips he will take, explain to him that once he gets in this thing he will have to avoid becoming lazy otherwise his ligaments and bones will start to seize up without some range of motion etc etc.  All I can think of is that I’ll have Dr Who’s Davros leader of the Daleks to contend with in a few years!

God will give you the grace to deal with any situation he asks you to stay in.  I have received a greater measure of grace and humility since being the full-time carer of my 90 year old father in law.  But grace in my case takes the form of coping by being able to laugh at myself and the confronting situations that a woman in her thirties should not be exposed to.   

Camping With Kids

Parents know that life with kids involves compromise and what were once mature adult holidays become child friendly extravaganzas.  In camping language this translates to having to pack everything – including the proverbial kitchen sink! 

And when you think you have every angle covered you arrive to find that in camping terms you really are an amateur and your little ill-equipped site flags to experienced campers you are small fry.  To use an Aussie analogy, it’s a bit like comparing the size of a man’s shed (or worse still not having your own shed!)

The one essential piece of camping equipment we don’t own is a camp dunny.  In most cases it is not good form to encroach on another camper’s dunny since they have to empty it themselves. Here lies the compromise as there is always with kids.... save energy (and midnight walks avoiding toads) by camping close to the amenities block,  or save supervision energy and set up camp in close eyesight to  the communal bike tracks. The bike track was the vote. 

This meant many long trips to the toilets versus mastering the art of squatting.  I have not mastered the art.  I ended up peeing on the hem of my trackie daks and almost fell backwards onto a cactus.

Given I’m too much of princess to every really enjoy camping (it is a duty thing – Godly submission to husband and children...) there is no point in investing in all the camp equipment it would require to make it reasonably tolerable. 

But I have found a solution to not squatting! 

While watching  an Aussie reporter in a satirical  attempt to showcase Indian culture, there was a story on  the “Indian Dunny Man” – a bloke who has a historical toilet museum. 

The one that caught my eye is the “Go Girl” purple plastic contraption that is a mobile device when there are no loos to allow a woman to pee without squatting.  Without too much graphic imagery and doing an anatomy lesson, let’s just say that it has a bowl like thing at one end and then flows downward in a tube like shape to deposit the urine away from you and closer to the ground – ok, call a spade a spade – it is a purple open ended penis attached to a small dish!

I was very amused and excited and told my husband about it to google it for my Mother’s Day present.   He replied “No way, I’m not going to give you anything that gives you the ability to stand up to pee”

This device gives new fuel to the “penis envy” argument!  I’m getting one.

Football Role Models

Last night I watched the channel 7 interview on Brendan Fevola and it sparked another instalment between my husband and me on the AFL saga.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with the AFL.  My husband is a mad Lion’s supporter and the success of the team can have an effect on our sex life and his overall demeanour.  And during the AFL season he has around a dozen outings without me and I used to sit at home lonely and resentful. 

The wifely duty here is to learn the rules and how to hoot and holler and avidly discuss the nuances of the game on his return home and over the weekend sports pages. However, I don’t really like sport .  My activities have always been solo sports such as horse riding, skating , gym and aerobics.  Out of love and devotion for my man, I really did try to show an interest in the beginning , but abysmally failed.   It has just highlighted my ignorance and how we are polarised in many aspects of our existence (apart from the introvert/extrovert poles!).  He recently pointed out that the reason most of our family are control freaks is positively correlated to that fact that none of us played team sports at school.  We simply aren’t team players.  Then he added that was what the problem is with most terrorists too. 

So, given this rather convincing observation and in the spirit of good debate I’ve had to come up with some of my own arguments for why I don’t want to take an interest.  For starters, I’m affectionately referred to as the AFL widow.  My chef friend books in his diary every date for the whole season and brings me dinner while we watch Project Runway and Gok’s Fashion Fix.  This is actually a positive thing, but the widow status can be interpreted a number of ways.  Early on in my marriage after running into one of my Brother’s mates for the fifth time without my husband  – desperate and dateless – he inquired in a concerned manner if my marriage was on the rocks.  He had NEVER met Rob.

On the positive side it affords me a credit balance in terms on shopping days and girl’s nights out.  I’ve also worked out that if savage PMT falls on an AFL weekend I always get away with it because he’s too sheepish to fire back given I’m already inflamed about staying at home alone while he gets away from the kids.

I guess another positive is that I get  to catch up on the interesting TV I have taped but never have time to watch such as historical dramas,  chick flicks and  movies I want to watch and contemplate and cry in peace (e.g The boy in the striped Pyjamas holocaust movie – did you see that heart breaker?)

But now I really have fuel to add to my fiery angst.  Due to media sensationalism and love of showcasing smut, my impressionable football mad 7 year old son has seen time and time again how in our culture if you can kick goals you are extended greater levels of forgiveness than if you were a teacher or pastor or public servant.  The message to our children from celebrity is that you can behave badly providing you have talent!  This theme really came out in the Fevola interview last night as a major contributing factor to his downfall.  

And the evidence of how impressionable football role models are exists. It bought back a memory of an incident a year ago when my kids and I were in the front yard waiting for the home icecream bloke.  My son with his penis in his hand was flashing his sister and passing cars and I told him to put it away and that flashing in the front yard is not appropriate.  It is your private parts and you touch them in private, not public.  His response was “Why not?!  Fevola does!”

This had got to be the ultimate trump card in the AFL debate don’t you think?