My husband, Paul, and I have been renovating/ adding onto our house for over two years. Our life is like The Block, but without hair and makeup or clever use of dash cams.
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Instead, we hammer away while raising our three-year-old daughter, Daisy, who sleeps in a cot roughly a metre from our bed and our 18-month-old son, Axel, who sleeps in our closet. (I promise it’s a big closet without a door. No need to call social services, people.)
Since Paul works on our house in his time off from work, we currently have a kitchen/ living room and one master bedroom with an en suite. We would have more house by now, except it rained for six months straight. What makes our living situation difficult is the fact that you have to walk through the bedroom and closet aka Daisy and Axel’s rooms to get to the bathroom. Since our surname is Land, it’s literally like walking through baby Land mines.
Almost every night, I have to tip toe ever so quietly while trying to squeeze my bladder shut to avoid waking one of our little ankle biters. If I’m lucky to reach my porcelain solace, I try to relax my muscles slowly so my pee stream isn’t too loud. Since Axel’s closet shares a wall with the bathroom, we live by the age-old rule, If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown flush it down.
Raising kids in one room is pretty tough, but I always remind myself that it’s probably about the same space as an apartment in Manhattan. Plus, there is a light at the end of our renovation tunnel: more bedrooms and bathrooms! Even though we like to spend every weekend building our dream home, we also love to entertain, which is why we were excited when our friends came to visit for October Long Weekend. When you visit Mudgee, it’s inevitable that you will indulge in craft beer, soft cheese and an abundance of Mudgee wine. Taking people to my favourite wineries like Lowe Wines and Botobolar make me fall in love with the Central West all over again. It also makes me one very bloated, lactose intolerant cheese lover with serious red wine heartburn.
On the Monday night after everyone left, the kids and Paul were asleep and I stayed up to read. I turned off my flashlight around midnight and tried to get comfortable. I noticed that I could hear and feel little bubbles travelling through my intestines. The kind that almost feel like early baby kicks. Since the hubby had had the snip in April, I silently prayed that this wasn’t a vasectomy baby. I flipped over onto my stomach to see if the pressure would help settle my gurgles.
My movement must have pushed along my gas bubbles because I let out a fart. Not just a little, pffff, but a BAHHHHHHHHHHH. You know the kind. They sound like a tornado barrelling through a small town like a freight train.
I immediately started silently vibrating with laughter (because I’m a 12-year-old boy at heart) when Daisy jumped up in her cot and started crying, “I need help!!!!!!! I need help!”
My flatulence had woken Daisy from her slumber.
Flabbergasted that my guts even had that kind of wind power, I whispered, “It’s okay, darling, It’s okay!” and shhhh’d her back to sleep. While I patted her back, I imagined Daisy blissfully dreaming about Peppa Pig and then a SUPER SCARY THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE TAKING OVER.
After I was confident Daisy was asleep again, I rolled over to cuddle into Paul, who I thought had magically slept through the October Long Weekend Fart of 2016. After all he did have earplugs in.
He whispered, “I can’t believe your fart woke Daisy.”
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Get Summer Land’s hilarious memoir, Summerlandish: Do As I Say, Not As I Did, here or at The Shop by Botobolar at 28 Church Street.
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