Lake Macquarie mum Jill Berry has been documenting modern day life as a parent on her popular Facebook page, The Motherlode.
Jill posted this pic of a rapid antigen test, which is surely the perfect metaphor for pandemic life. After a while, everything becomes a bit of a blur.
She raised the somewhat philosophical question of whether this RAT test, with its blurry positive line, was an accurate representation of mums "trying to determine if they are doing okay as a parent and making the right decisions for their kids".
"Kinda hard to tell isn't it? For me anyway," she said.
"Meanwhile do one of my kids have mega COVID or was this a faulty test? Did another and decided it was a faulty test. At least one thing is clear!"
Heidi Berglund added: "An accurate representation of 2022 right there."
Kim Wilton said: "Faulty test. Seen this many times as an aged-care worker testing daily."
Caroline Graham said: "Imagine if a pregnancy test ever looked like that."
Hayley Challen added: "Haha! Mega super pregnant."
Pure Genius
This RAT test cast our mind back to early in the new year when a mate of ours and his family had COVID.
They lined up at Wyong Hospital for four hours to get PCR tests. They never did receive their test results.
It was around the time the PCR system was completely overrun.
ScoMo, as you'll recall, came out at the time and urged everyone to stop getting PCR tests and take RAT tests instead.
Only problem was, there were barely any RAT tests around. A week or two later, you could hear crickets at the PCR testing sites.
Pure genius, that.
The Lobster Hotel
We wrote recently about Dudley Beach being named the 11th best beach in Australia.
Tony Davis, of Elermore Vale, said it was "so good to read about Dudley Beach".
"We lived at Charlestown, not far from Central Leagues for many years and brought our kids up there. It was a great spot, handy to primary and secondary schools and shopping. Our kids really enjoyed Dudley Beach," Tony said, in an email.
"Daughter Melissa and her group of friends thought it was their beach! I ran with a group of blokes at Redhead Beach in the mornings, but had some great adventures also at Dudley Beach's northern end, fishing off the rocks for bream and tailor.
"We called this The Lobster Hotel. There were three of us and we did this for many years. Usually this was at the weekend, but we found that if we got there early enough we could drive home, get showered and changed and get to work on time.
"One of the blokes, George, had a house as a weekender at Seal Rocks, so the three of us had some great holidays there as well.
"George had a beach buggy garaged there and I had a small four-wheel drive vehicle as a second car, so this worked fine to explore the fishing there for a few days.
"Time caught up with us and we lost one of our trio, Graham, while George and I became a bit old to be scampering over the rocks as the sun was coming up. However, it was great while it lasted."
A Mum Joke
"I love my kids. Not enough to flip the fish sticks halfway through cooking, but I love them."
