Woo for International Womens Day !

Today is International Womens Day. What does that mean?

To me it’s a reminder to take a moment to appreciate how lucky I am to be a woman. To have be raised by a strong woman. To be raising a strong daughter.

To have been given the gift of creating life, not once but twice. 

To be guided by love and emotional intelligence in how I live.

To have compassion and maternal instinct at my beck and call. 

To have a wonderful, huge sisterhood on my journey with me in this life.

Being a woman in itself makes me no more or less a person than any other but for me, being a woman is so very awesome.
Women are awesome. To all the women in my village, YOU are awesome. Keep shining and take a moment today to appreciate yourself.
x S

Meanwhile it would be nice to just be able to stand to pee casually anywhere 😉😉😉

Welcome to parenthood and toilet training

​Well, here’s my night: got to Burnt Barrel…Miss E wees all over herself.  Clean it up, get her to do the rest of the wee behind the cubby, clean her, change her knickers. There’s flies everywhere.  Feed Master J.  Order food.  Get food. Start eating, Miss E won’t eat, she’s running around. I suddenly notice her stop and there’s brown smears all down her legs. Yep, shat herself. Take her behind the cubby and use half a packet of wipes cleaning her. Change her dress. Throw her knickers in the bin. Put on a pull up. Scrub the shit out of my hands and hers. Finish my dinner.

After dinner take Master J to change a dirty nappy. Realise the wipes are at the table. He’s leaked out the nappy, shorts are soiled. Use toilet paper to clean him up, he pees all over himself and me. Use paper towel. Bag up the shorts.

Laugh cause otherwise I’d drown myself in the toilet. 

Welcome to parenting. 

Australia Day / Invasion Day???

Imagine you are getting the kids ready for school. TV is on in the background while they finish their breakfast. Your mind is already mentally sorting through the things you know need doing at work. You only just hear and register the sudden change on the TV to a breaking news story – saying foreign troops are flooding into the capital cities in their thousands, killing any resistors and taking prisoners to use as slaves. Confused, you wonder if this is some kind of hoax, but the vision being shown looks realistic enough….a bit of fear starts to creep in just as you become aware of the sound of planes – hundreds of planes. You rush to the window and see the skies filled with planes, and parachutes, and there are soldiers landing. Now terrified you scream for your kids and you take them and run into your bedroom, closing the curtains, knowing it’s futile but not knowing what else to do. 

Within a short time the soldiers reach your house and don’t even pretend to acknowledge they are coming into your home – they simply break your locks and let themselves in. They start going through your things, your families things, taking what they want, discarding what they don’t. You hear shots being fired, screams, you know people that you know are dying and you are terrified beyond belief for your family, what’s going to happen next? Do you fight? Do you give up and hope you’ll be spared? 

Fast forward 5 years. Your home is no longer yours but was taken by a foreign family. You live in a block of apartments with all the survivors from your neighbourhood. The new Australians don’t trust you, generally speaking. You got a new job but it’s basically only the lowest tasks that you’re allowed to do, for a minimum wage. Every day you walk past your old house and see the strangers living there not caring that it was yours, not really even giving a thought to it. They love Australia and feel lucky to be there. But they look through you when they see you as if, by not really acknowledging your existence, it somehow erases the fact they are here at your expense. That they didn’t join the community. They invaded it. They took it. And don’t seem to comprehend that it was someone else’s first.

You wonder how it’s possible that someone can live in your house, sleep in your bed, drive your car and yet not care about the fact that they belong to another person? A person who was simply forced to give them up and now lives elsewhere, trading a 4 bedroom house with 2 bathrooms and a decent backyard for a 1 bedroom apartment in an old, smelly block of apartments. How can the ‘new’ family simply ignore this fact?

Then, as the next anniversary of the invasion rolls around, the New Australians decide to hold a parade and street party to celebrate 6 years in the beautiful country they are now so proud to call home. You are invited to the street party but, horrified, decline. When questioned, you say ‘Why would I want to celebrate the day when you, strangers from another country, came into my home and took everything I had from me, for yourselves? Why would I celebrate the death of so many I knew, killed just for standing up for themselves and trying to protect their families and homes? How could I celebrate that?’

They don’t understand. They shrug and say ‘Well you have to move on, some time. The past can’t be changed – and, you know, I only got here 2 years ago. It wasn’t me who did that so…. I think you people just need to accept and move forward so we can all get along.’

And the party happens. And every year it happens and gets bigger and bigger. And every year you get angrier and more sad and wonder how you are supposed to ever be at peace with these people who won’t even genuinely own the fact that they stole what was yours – disrupted and ruined your life – killed so many innocent people – changed life forever for a whole country of people, for no more reason than they wanted Australia for their own and you lot were in the way. 

And so, I think about the two sides of January 26. I get that some Aussies want to celebrate Australia on this day. The beautiful country. Our freedom. Our strengths as a nation. I do too. I love this country and I’m so grateful I was lucky enough to have been born here.

But I also understand that some Aussies view January 26 with sadness and pain and frank disbelief, even. I get that. 

I’m not saying don’t celebrate Australia. We definitely should. 

Just maybe we could, as a loving and kind and genuine people, be sensitive and real  and acknowledge the reality of what did happen for so many Australians on this day in 1788, and that its not really something to celebrate. And move the date on which we honour this beautiful nation. A simple thing. But perhaps a huge gesture of recognition. 

Just a thought. 

And just like that..

He’s gone again. Such is the life of a fifo wife.

I walked into the ensuite tonight and it really hit me how single it looked. My end of the vanity: clutter of stuff. The other end: blank canvas. My other half keeps his toiletries in a travel bag so when he’s here, I have a guest, when he’s gone I have half a hotel bathroom. Devoid of signs of habitation (well – half devoid).

There’s other stuff too: only my clothes to wash. Only one adult meal to cook. The empty seat beside me on the couch at night when [finally] the kidlets are asleep. And of course the bedroom all to myself. Both good and bad I think!

It’s a seesaw, this fifo life. So much good and so much bad. Easy to get lost in the elements that drain you, hurt you, anger you. But a much better idea to focus on and practice gratefulness for the elements that are truly awesome….the long breaks of togetherness. The fact I am able to stay at home with the kidlets. The opportunities afforded to my other half by his work. These really are silver linings. 

It’s not easy. And especially on days like today, I say goodbye with a smile and a wave. Holding it in for him, and for my little girl. Hugging her as she cries for her daddy now she’s old enough to understand he’s going away but too young to understand he is coming back. Trying to just plug away and get through the day ticking off everything that needs doing, mostly to distract myself from the sadness in my heart. 

It’s not easy.

But it’s our life right now. And I’m still lucky and grateful and aware of our blessings. I’m just also acknowledging that we miss him, each and every day he is away, and that we always can’t wait to welcome him home.

And to not feel like a single woman in a hotel bathroom. Ha. 

x S

My 12 Days of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas, my true loves gave to me…

Twelve I love you Mummy’s,

Eleven hidden keys,

Ten cheeky grins,

Nine uneaten dinners,

Eight ED visits,

Seven swallowed beads,

Six broken toys,

Five Golden Showers……

Four drawn on walls,

Three smelly farts,

Two violent spews….

And a dirty stinky napppppeeeeeeeeee!

Merry Christmas everyone, and a Happy New Year!

~ May the best of your 2016 be the worst of your 2017 ~

I need to know that I know. And you probably do, too.

The other day, husband and I were driving somewhere. Both our 2yo daughter and 6mo son were in the car and I was driving. It had been a long day, we were all sick of the car and our boy was grisly. Husband had tried a few things to soothe him but we both knew he was tired and needed to sleep. And, you know, kids don’t sleep when they really need to…they fight it, hard. 

Anyway, it got to the point I had to let it go, and resolve to let him whinge and just drive. As soon as I stopped obsessing about his crying and what we could try next, I was a lot calmer. I glanced at him in my rear view mirror and suddenly I just, with only barely a conscious thought of what I was doing, reached over behind my husband and disconnected the DVD player on our sons side. His screen went black. Within 10 seconds he had stopped crying and within a minute he was sound asleep. 

Call it what you will but I just knew all of a sudden what was wrong and how I could fix it. That the bright, constantly changing picture was keeping his little eyes darting and his little brain ticking. And he was tired so he was fighting himself and that was making him cry. I removed the stimulation and voila, he relaxed and fell asleep. 

That’s a mother’s intuition right there. Maybe mixed with a spoonful of experience…but mostly it was simple – I stopped trying to work out the answer consciously and let it come naturally. 

And I think this is a way of being I can and should apply consistently during my day. So often, I’m confronted with ‘what should I do now?’ moments as a mum. Wondering what’s causing the sadness/anger/distress evident in my child. I believe that most of the time I know the answer but I try to hard to force it, work it out. Instead, I should just breathe, relax and try to let the answer come to me. Because I think – and again I will say most of the time – I think mothers know. We just don’t trust ourselves enough anymore in this day and age of experts galore, to know better than anyone else what our little people want and need right now. 

I’m going to try it – try to trust myself a bit more to be the one who knows my little people best – because I also feel certain that I will absolutely know when those times occur (and they will) that I don’t know what is needed and that it is time to seek help from my village. And that will be ok, too.  

x S

I have a mum tum

No. That  is not misspelled “momentum”, it is mum tum. As in mummy tummy, baby bulge, muffin top, etc. I hate it although I’m usually fairly oblivious to it.

It’s on my radar today for two reasons; firstly a photo of me beaming proudly beside my daughter on her first ride on her Very Own Pony. The lovely “I just ate 3 dinners” t-shirt tightness was very obvious… Only, I hadn’t just eaten one dinner let alone three. Oops. 

Secondly, and more importantly, I hurt my back again…since kidlet #2 arrived I’ve had a recurring back injury which is due, I believe, to a little gift pregnancy left me: diastasis recti – or abdominal separation. Yay! 

What’s the connection? I imagine you wondering. Well, apparently a major cause of women having a sort-of-still-preggers belly look months after childbirth is due to diastasis recti. It’s not fat, it’s literally your abdominal organs bulging out through the separation of your abdominal muscles. Great. Thanks gravity. And laws of physics. And pregnancy. Sigh.

So it’s time that I did something about it – not to look good, although that will be a nice side effect – but because I only have one body and ain’t nobody going to look after it for me.

And this is something that I want to pass on to my little girl (and boy, for that matter). The mentality that our priority is being healthy and doing the right thing by our body. That a body is beautiful when it is healthy and respected. That the number that matters is never your weight…it’s numbers like your cholesterol, your iron levels, your white blood cell count. 

Our health is something so many of us take for granted and only truly value when it’s threatened or, in sad cases, gone. I’m guilty of doing it…that’s why I hardly ever exercised and only went for my first run at the embarrassing age of 35. As  in, 3 months ago. Oops.

In saying that, I eat reasonably well and am active.  I’ve never been more than slightly overweight and I have always tried to be grateful for my health and respectful of my body.

I think too many people believe their value as a person is determined by what they look like as opposed to what they do, how they behave, how they treat others. We focus so much energy on criticizing our physical appearance – my butt is too big, nose too small, eyes to close, hair too thin, I’m fat, this wobbles, my legs are short….do we spend even a quarter of that energy reviewing our behaviour? Did I speak kindly today, is there someone who I think needs a shoulder tonight, did I waste food, create unnecessary waste, act dishonestly, hurt someone. 

What do you think you will be loved for? Your nice legs or your generous heart? 

In the same vein, do we give as much energy to appreciating the awesome and frankly amazing things our bodies do every day, as we do being ashamed and resentful at the aspects we don’t like? I’ve grown two entire human beings in this body….yes, I have stretch marks and loose skin, a 5 inch long c-section scar and the aforementioned Grand Canyon Ab Separation…and whilst I absolutely do not love these marks and scars, I recognise them for what they are: proof that my body can do and has done amazing things. In return I try to take care of it and respect it, and even go so far as to love the skin I’m in because it’s me. It’s the only one I am ever going to have and it’s a good one. I am healthy and able and that, my friends, is a gift that I recognise and value. 

If you focus on the wonder of your physical self, it’s much easier to see past your little imperfections – and trust me, majority of them are so little no one sees them but you.

This is not to say that I think you shouldn’t give a shit about appearance. That anyone who cares what they look like is wrong. Physical appearance is important to most people and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good. At the most basic level we are animals and instinctively we look first and talk/smell later. So caring about your appearance is both natural and understandable.

My point is that you should at least care as much about your actions as your appearance and that you should at least appreciate your body for what it has, can and does do, as much as you criticise it for what you perceive as its failings. 

If you can retrain yourself to gain this bit of balance, you might just find that the positives you feel about you start to overtake the negatives – and that can only make your life a brighter, healthier space.

And that can’t be a bad thing. 

So, that’s me. I’m off to write up the exercises I need to start doing to get my Ab Split healed and stick it on the wall so I actually do it. I hope it might flatten out my mum tum….but you know what, if it stops my recurring back pain I’ll be very  satisfied and if it gives me flatness of tummy I can be thrilled.

I hope you, if you’re reading this, can start to objectively counter your negative body thoughts, one by one, and turn your focus ever so slightly from what you are to who you are and  land somewhere in the middle.  The world can only benefit from more kindness, respect and happiness. 

(Well the world minus the companies that profit from our misery and self doubt…sorry diet pill people and exercise machine pushers) 

x S

A brief hello

It’s been a while…quite a while actually! since my last post. To summarise:

My son has an allergy/intolerance to dairy and eggs. Screw you, rude nurse who told me it was ‘colic’. He is much better now and I am dairy and egg free myself and it’s not horrible!

I got diagnosed with PND about 2 months ago and it’s been a good thing to be diagnosed but I still struggle to accept that I have anything going on. Sigh. Meanwhile I do wonder if aforementioned rude nurse who’s horrible behaviour you can relive here spotted it first or created it….hmmm. The chicken or the egg dilemma…

Anyways, I need to get off my butt and blog more; that is between caring for the 2.5yo girl child, the 6mo boy child, the 6.5yo canine child, the 9yo pony child and the 4 x 1yo chicken children. And the household, the new trees and spending some time with husband. And running 2 very very small home businesses. 

When I put it like that, it seems like a lot and maybe I need to clear some of my ‘To Do’ items. Permanently.  

But write more I will. Just, not tonight. It’s bedtime now. 

Adios, amigos  – talk to you soon x

Ahhhhhh motherhood…

Obviously it’s a matter of mother nature ensuring future procreation, this apparent newborn amnesia. I ‘in theory’ remember the feelings of confusion,  helplessness and failure I had as a new mum when #1 was born… but I only have a sort of clinical, reading it in a book, numb-type memory.

The actual reality of having a screaming,  back-arching, spewy tiny human in your care at 3am is vastly different to the memory of it. The memory doesn’t do justice to the crushing weight of those feelings of failure; the fear that entwines with the confusion and the dread of tomorrow that the helplessness brings on. All made so much worse by the bone deep tiredness weeks of minimal broken sleep affords us.

As an added bonus with tiny human #2, we have the further complication in the form of another mini human who is unavoidably involved. Either simultaneously needing your attention/arms/bed/mop or absorbing the support and back up person leaving you to face this battle alone (and feeling guilty for not being the one tending to aforementioned pre-existing mini human).

Finally compounding all of the above is that overriding feeling of disappointment in myself, surely I should be better at this considering it’s not the first time? Surely I should have an idea what this tiny human needs right now? Surely he shouldn’t cry this much and this often, what am I doing/not doing/doing wrong?

…..Motherhood. I know in the morning when the sun can greet me and my daughter will hug me and my husband will assure me I’m doing a good job (and this newborn will more than likely sleep beautifully for a couple of hours), I will feel ok again and be able to count my many, many blessings and be grateful…but right now I am just sad and disappointed and so tired and full of self doubt.

My one comfort is the suspicion that I can do this and we will be OK.  All of us. Somehow.

Bring on morning. And coffee. #allthecoffee

Thoughtfulness in the modern world

So, this happened in my world recently. A post appeared on our local community site:

Within a short time, the following comment popped up:

Now, “Peter” may or may not be a real person. Maybe he actually is and in that case my issue with him is that his comment was factually incorrect [the speed limit on that particular stretch is 70km/hr], it was aggressive and it was unnecessary.

However I think it’s more likely that “Peter” is one of the newest additions to our lovely modern electronic society, an Internet Troll.

[Please Google Internet Troll if you’ve not come across this term before, otherwise the rest of this post is pointless]

Being a Troll,  Peter has no regard for fact or truth and simply writes whatever he or she thinks will illicit the maximum outrage to find personal amusement in others responses. Fishing, if you will, to catch unsuspecting REAL people, to get a laugh from their reactions.

Well, I’m sure “Peter” will never read this blog post but for anyone who does, who has been that Troll thinking it was good for a laugh and harmless fun, allow me to enlighten you.

The author of the original post (the driver) is a mother of two. A lawyer. A wife. A friend, sister and daughter. A good person who tries – and yes, sometimes perhaps fails, as we all do – to do the right and kind thing.

She was devastated that she had struck the dog and that, even worse, she had been unable to locate it despite stopping and following it on foot for some time.

To compound her distress she was dealing with a sick toddler, a husband who was away in the course of his duties for his high risk occupation and on the way to the hospital to be with her second child who was born 12.5 weeks premature.

Her emotional stress levels were already through the roof yet she took the time to search for the dog and then, failing that, made contact with several community pages to attempt to alert the owner to what had happened.

Then Peter steps in and offers his or her trolling comment hoping to get a bit of a laugh from the inevitable responses. Guess what the drivers response was?  Tears and more distress. Sitting in a hospital room, tube feeding her still very small and fragile son, she was made to cry by this worthless and pointless comment.

And this is what trolls fail to consider…or perhaps they don’t care. It’s real people with actual lives that you are attacking for your simple amusement. People who have stories you are completely unaware of and therefore you have no idea what your meanness may do to them.

So – if you are reading this and you are, have been or are considering dipping your toes into trolling – please for one second reconsider. Picture this good woman, already dealing with so much, being brought to tears just so Peter could have a bit of a laugh. She could be your sister, wife, mother – your daughter, even.

It’s not funny. It’s petty and thoughtless, cruel and unnecessary. Go rent a comedy or join a debate site if you’re bored by your own existence. Life can be harsh enough…we humans should be trying to bring love and kindness to each other to balance that, not do what we can to make it worse.

Think. Be thoughtful, not awful.

That is all.