What's on your fridge?

Daffa posted a few pics of her fridge. She has a theory that your fridge may be the part of your house that gives the biggest insight into your life and person. I think she may be onto something there, so here's my fridge ...

Right hand side: Local 'EasterFest' ad ripped out of the local news to remind us to go (we forgot) - held up by one of the magnets from Euey's magndoodle and a magnet outlining immunisation schedule.

Left hand side: More immunisation reminders and shedules, library book receipt to remind me to take them back (they were 3 weeks late when i finally did), timetable of Tiny Tot sessions at local library.

Front: Writing from when my brother had the fridge while we were in Korea (Tunzafun?!), pictures from the plastic apron I made Euey's high chair cover out of, flyer for local Primary School Fair, picture of us with shaved heads from Thaliand, magnet with timetable of home games of the Melbourne Demons (Australian Football League).

Top: The fruit bowl, basket full of medication and other random shit and the Pucca clock from Korea are always there, the other stuff just accumulates (Will's footy magazine, cooler for a baby bottle, packet of re-writable dvds).

I am tagging Bon for this one as I have heard about a cutsie lunchbox being spotted in one of her photos and I'd love to see if she has any other Korean remnents lurking on her fridge.

Mother's Day

Catching up on the news this evening and a discussion on Mother's Day in The Australian caught my eye. The original article claimed that not only mothers mother. That limiting Mothers' Day to mothers hurts women and children. What about nannies, next-door-neighbours and the women who 'get the kids to footy or netball training'? ask the authors. What about children who don't have a mother but want to recognise someone who mothers them, aren't they included?

Caroline Overington rails against the idea that mothers are no more special to their children than the lady next door. She says:

Mothers know what mothers are. They are people with a piece of their heart always on fire. They are people who would give up the last scrap of food in a famine; the last drop of water from a tap; the last blanket in a storm. Take their children from them and you will soon find them walking incessantly in circles; pulling holes in their jumpers, tearing hair from their scalp.

I LOVE this summation of motherhood. But I think both authors have missed the point. On Mother's Day, given half a chance, children will recognise whoever they feel is a Mum. We don't have to artificially broaden the definition of Mum so that every women who goes near a kid is included. Nor do we have to limit it to just Mums. It will just happen. The kid of a single Dad who goes to the lady next door every day after school will give her a kiss on the cheek and a cheeky 'Happy Mother's Day Mum'. The kid who's in day care 'cause Mum and Dad have to pay the bills will hug their carer extra hard that day. Kids everywhere will buy or make cards for Mums, Grandmums, Stepmums, Fostermums and whoever else they want. And this year I will ring Anna, Euey's Good-Mum and he will say 'log-oo* Anna'. I hope that will become a tradition.

log-oo = Love You.

Bon's interveiw.

Bon has kindly invited me to join the interview game. Thanks Bon. And GREAT questions by the way!


1. you've done a fair bit of moving around and trying new things, and now you're settled back in the homeland. if i told you that you and Will and the bubs could all move anywhere in the world for a year, all expenses paid...would you uproot again and go? and where would you choose? and why?

Can I take a few liberties here? Thanks. I would move you, us and Jen, James & Zoe to England, and the six of us would live for a year together with our bubbas. The all expenses paid would be extended to your family and theirs and we would all have a year of fun together. That way the kids could get to know their cousins and some of our closest friends all in one year. Come to think of it, hang the all expenses thing, why don't we all look for jobs in London and do it anyway?!

2. you have the opportunity to star in a fabulous indie movie and pick your romantic lead...with whom you will then go film on location for a month.who do you choose? what does Will think?

I'd love to star with Jack Nicholson, but really, who wants him as a romantic lead??? Richard Gere would be my pick. Location for a month? I reckon Will would think 'Damn, couldn't she have picked someone cooler? If I'm going to spend a month in this place why couldn't she have picked someone I could talk to?' (You see if this were an ideal world and I was a movie star I wouldn't go on location for a month without Will and the kids. Call it a cop-out, but it's true.)

3. what's the thing you've done in your life that you're most proud of?

My first thought is the kids. But to be proud of something I've done I must not just do well at it, it must be something that at some stage I wanted to give up. Something so hard that at times I felt like throwing in the towel. Becoming and being a mum is physically hard, emotionally stressful and sometimes just downright difficult, but there has never been a time where I wanted to give it all away. Maybe in the very early days with Euey I would have loved to give him to someone else for a day, but only one day and I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to stay away the whole day.
I guess then, it must be law. I am proud of being accepted to study law. I'm proud that I'm getting some good results despite juggling study with kids. I'm proud that I haven't given it up as a bad joke. I'm proud that I've managed not to let the kids suffer. And I'm proud that I've allowed myself to see that I am not letting the kids suffer and that my results are good in the circumstances. I guess I'm proud that I'm allowing myself to be proud.
It was hard at first putting Euey in childcare, and really hard when I had to move him from 3 days to 5 days (although not all day, only 4 or 5 hours). I felt like I wasn't getting enough time to do well at Uni and also wasn't giving Euey enough of me. It took a long time to get over feeling like I was in the middle of a tug-o-war. I don't get all As, or even all Bs. It is the first time I've tried my guts out and still got the occasional C. I hate that. I hate Cs. Cs are failure to me. Euey having his nap and lunch without me and spending enough time in care to develop a great relationship with his carers was, at first, failure to me.
I'm proud that I can let myself accept that if I want to do both I have to lower my standards. And that's ok. It's not worse, just less. And the less means more in other areas. Studying while I have the kids means I see a lot more of them than if I went back to work. I could wait 'til they were older, then study, then work, but that would mean we live on one income for a lot longer, and that means less 'stuff' and no holidays. Unfortunately stuff is necessary, and besides, I like it. And holidays are necessary or Will would never get to see his family (they live in England). As for the uni marks, well they may not be as good as I want them to be, but by the time I'm looking for a job I will have so much life experience that someone straight out of Uni doesn't have. I think I will be a better prospect for employers because of that. And I won't have to take time out of my career to have babies. You see, there is a positive in every negative, and it is recognising that that makes me proud.

4. has there been a 'road not taken,' along the way, in any sense?something you didn't do that you wish you had?

I hate to say it, but no. A few things come to mind, only to be discarded straight away. Study law first instead of wasting time with a BA? No, then I probably wouldn't have ended up in Korea, where I met Will, made some really close friends and discovered a love of teaching. Actually study my BA, rather than get pissed every night and just scrape through? No, god no, imagine all the fun I would have missed out on. You see, as trite as it sounds, I like my life (a lot) and anything done differently wouldn't have got me here, right where I am now, where I'm as happy as Larry.

5. paint us a picture of your finished family, if you were an Angelina Jolie-type and money was no object. how many more kids would you add to your ideal family? would you birth them all or adopt? if so, from where?what gender(s) would you choose for your next child(ren) if it were all up to you?

Will and I always discussed adopting a child. We worked with some orphans in Korea and through a friend who was an orphan came to understand the lowly place in Korean society that they occupy. Made us want to 'rescue' one. My Dad's response was always 'once you have your own child you won't want anything else'. Now that I do have my own children I see what he means. Looking at the physical features of a tiny bubba and seeing yourself or your partner is a wonder I still can't get over. But that doesn't mean I don't want to adopt. Maybe. If money was no objection then almost definitely yes. But only one. I don't think I want more than 4 kids. And I want one more biological child. But does that mean the adopted one would feel left out?

See Bon taking away the parameters in which decisions like this are made just makes it all too difficult. As it stands now we are considering one more child. I don't care whether it's a boy or girl as I have one of each now. The factors that will help us decide are money and time. We would want the 3rd to be spaced the same as Euey and Aoife, about 19-20 months. If we are financially secure around the beginning of next year we'll go for it. In an ideal world it wouldn't be a question, the 3rd child would happen. Beyond that I'm not sure. It's too far away from reality for me to be able to decide.

Follow up on Mummyblogging

Do you know that I can't help but type Mummy with an 'o' every time I type mummyblogging? Obviously everyone I have read who discusses the notion is from North America. (Just a little aside.)

Bon commented this:
'i know you were never a handbag and makeup girl, nor i, but i wasn't sure where you were positioning yourself in the conversation about community after Euey was born? did you have it? lack it? notice it?'

Her comment just reinforced what I already knew. I tried to cram waaay too much into that post. I have been reading about Mummyblogging and it just brings up so many issues for me. All of which I tried to discuss in a few paragraphs. This time I will stick to the question. Thank you Bon for taking me back to high school English, where essays were easy 'cause the teacher gave you a question to answer! I need to remind myself (when I find time to post) that I cannot try to catch up on the whole conversation in one post. As I don't post every day, or even every week, I will have to content myself with discussing part of each issue.

When Euey was born I was the only one of my group of Uni friends to be married or have children. I got married 2 months before he was born (I'll post a photo later, it's kinda funny!) and it was the first wedding of our group. I had no community of parents. Will joined me up to the ABA (Australian Breastfeeding Association), which was great for parenting tips, but they were a bit 'mumsie'. They had meetings where they made soap and the conversation very rarely strayed from the day-to-day events of parenting. They were a lovely group of women and when I run into them in the supermarket I feel like I'm meeting an old friend, but I didn't have much in common with them.

My community developed from my Mum's group. The Victorian Governement has a great system of 'Maternal and Child Health Centres'. When a new mum leaves hospital the hospital contacts their neares centre and the centre drops in on the new mum within the first 2 or 3 days. After that you take your baby for check-up appoints every week for awhile then every month 'til they're a year. The centre starts Mums Groups every 6 weeks or so, connecting a small group of first time mums with other mums who have a similar aged baby. We met at the centre once a week for the first 6 weeks, then it was up to us. We were lucky. We all clicked and organised to meet at eachother's houses every week. We still meet weekly now, nearly 2 years later. I am the only one to have had another baby, but 2 others are pregnant. It is slowly building into what I think will be a life-long friendship group, but we have yet to make the step to meeting as families. The dads still don't know each other well, if at all. That is the next step, and I'm going to try to take it soon (scary for me, making new friends, there is always the fear of rejection, but that is a post for another day).

So that is the background to my in-the-flesh community. To date only one of my close friends has a baby (now 8 weeks old) and she lives in South Australia, an 8 hour drive away. I am becoming close to mum's group. I still see my non-mum friends, although now that Euey is not content to just sit in a pram while I have coffee it is getting less and less. I hope they start having babies soon before we grow apart. It is one thing to keep living your life with a portable little newborn, but when a toddler is introduced into the mix it's just gets plain hard.

This new online community I have found and am slowly becoming a part of is very different. I am made to think more and feel more involved in this community than with even my oldest friends. I think this comes from two things; shared experience and regularity of contact. My uni friends see each other often. They go swimming together on Saturday mornings, they play netball during the week and they live close to each other. They have evenings free to meet for coffee or go for dinner. When I see them as a group their conversations continue from when they last saw each other a few days ago. They're really interested to hear what I've been up to and I them, but I still feel left out. I leave wishing I could see them more often, be more involved in thier lives, know what they do each day at work, who they talk to, who shits them and whether they have a reasonable boss. Work and friendships are the main issues in their life. Family sometimes seems like the only issue in my life!

I never feel like that in the world of blogging. It is the perfect community for a group of people who need to time their conversations around nap time. I can read half a post, pause to play cars for awhile, come back and the conversation hasn't moved on without me. Then I can finish reading, make lunch, attempt to think and eventually get back a couple of hours later when Euey has been asleep long enough so I have formulated what I want to say. Then I can take my time to say it exactly how I want (well, theoretically, actually I just throw it on the page most of the time cause there are a million other things I need to be doing while Euey is alseep).

Not only can I talk in my time, but the conversations are about things close to my heart. Talking about parenting is different to talking about kids. It is not just 'Johnny is talking now and this is the latest amazing thing he said' but 'wow the development of language is really interesting, isn't it?' Nor is it 'I love being a mum'; rather its 'this is how becoming a mum has shaped me as a person'. Since I was a pre-teen I have been working toward being a good parent. It is what has driven me, what I have been working toward. My career is a secondary thing. I love studying law, and I'm sure I'll enjoy being a lawyer but a mum is what I've always wanted to be. That's what I would have answered in Careers at school if it had been an acceptable answer (women's lib, while I wouldn't change it, has a lot to answer for sometimes). This is the first community I've found where I can discuss such an important part of my 'thinking' (except with my own mum, with whom I've spent countless hours discussing parenting, and of course with Will).

So that, Bon, is what I was trying to say about community, and how it relates to mummyblogging. Mummyblogging is important because it provides that community for mummies. It is not just inane kiddy bragging because the people who are involved are intelligent, conversation-deprived, thinking people.

On the term 'mummyblogging':
I discussed this with my mum, an avid rally-going feminist from the sixties, and she was MAD. She thought the term mummyblog demeaned us and lessened the importance of what we have to say. If mummyblog refers to the fact that part of our blogs are devoted to tracking the development of our children, her line of thought is that the term should be kiddyblog. Without having thought about it before hand I guess this is the separation I made when I first started my blogs. I started two. One for updates on the kids and this one, for me to think and wonder. I made that separation. I consciously sought to give myself an arena where I could talk about things other than the kids. This was not because I think the kiddy stuff is not important but because I wanted to force myself out of my comfort zone. But I am not the one devaluing what mums have to say. If anyone is I'm sure it's not mums. The picture I get of those doing the devaluing is of men, probably traditional, 9-5 men. But that, I think, says more about my own stereotyping than anything else. When all is said and done I think mummyblogging refers to content. Mummybloggers discuss, from what I've read (and that is not much so please feel free to correct me) issues of parenting, education and family values. These are all things that a lot of people in society would agree mums are experts on. I believe that ideas coming out of such blogs on such topics would be taken seriously.

I have always been an optimist though!

Mixed Bag

Mixed bag indeed. I have many thoughts roaming around in my head. It's been awhile. It feels good. Both kids put themselves to sleep tonight and hubby is off at the football, so I have been on my first real blog exploration. (I just have to add that hubby does not make a habit of heading to the footy and leaving me with the kids, he does waaaay more than his fair share. We were planning to go as a family, but it's raining - Hallelujah - so I elected to stay home in case we couldn't get seats under cover).

Can I ramble? Oh so many tangents.

Why hallelujah about the rain? Because we're in the middle of a drought. Melbourne is on water restrictions, as is pretty much the rest of Aus land. And the rain is the good sort, real drenching rain, not the useless drizzle of a normal Melbourne winter. And it has come three days in a row now. And it seems to be over the catchment areas. And my grass is green. It hasn't been green for many months now; we're not allowed to water it anymore.

Footy, btw is Aussie Rules footy. Great game. Go the Dees.

So, where was I? Oh yes, thoughts. Thoughts in my head. This blog land is doing my brain good. Working it out. Out of its narrow focus of kids, kids and how the hell am I going to get some vegies into us all today?

I've been delving around some sites, and have to mention a couple I've enjoyed so far. Mrs Chicken of Chicken and Cheese had one I loved. I think it was a while ago she posted about
'Personal grooming and other thoughts', but being new to this blogging thing I'm not sure. And now I've closed the window and am not sure I could get there again. Gingajoy and Her Bad Mother are well worth a read and i will definitely be visiting BlogRhet again to feed my brain and push it into thinking again.

You see, I started this blog on a whim just to see if I could push myself into thinking again. I started another for friends and family, to update them on the kids, and figured I'd start one just for me as well. It took me a while to get going, but now I'm on a bit of a role. I've just had a comment from Gingajoy, someone I've never met, my first stranger-reader. It feels odd, but strangely welcoming. Like I am becoming part of the community that I have become aware of through Bon from cribchronicles (an actual live friend who I met in S. Korea). I also feel somewhat embarrassed by my blog address and name. Compared to many out there I am not really thinking or wondering much or well at this point. But, that is the point, to get back into the swing of things. After all, I will return to study next semester (August) and it would be nice not to have to spend the first 3 weeks of semester getting my brain above first gear.

I am off to bed now. Enough ranting for the moment. Thank you Gingajoy for your welcome into this (mad) world. I hope, now that I have discovered it, I have the will power to resist the lure of the computer. I tend to get stuck on my laptop to the detriment of the kids learning / playing time with me.

Night night

Mummyblogging

It's late. Late means past 10 o'clock these days. I've just dream fed Aoife and would be ready for bed myself if I hadn't been blog browsing and decided I need to add my two cents worth. Maybe just one cent, after all, it is late.

Mummyblogging. The debate / discussion is summed up really well by gingajoy at BlogRhet in the title of (I make an assumption here) her post 'Mommyblogging: Communal Activism or Self Centered Blather?'.

Self-centered? No. There is a strong argument that parents lose the ability to be self-centered as they are continually focused on someone else.
Blather? That would assume it's foolish and not useful. Quite the contrary, Mummyblogging provides a wealth of knowledge to the new mum.

My (somewhat jumbled) point is this:

Mummyblogging is based in detailing the daily routines of parenting. This is because becoming a parent is all-encompasing. It takes over your life. You care about the details. They are not mundane, each detail is an amazing event. Mummyblogs are a way of sharing the joy in the details with a community that understands and has details to offer. What's more, the details are amazing. Objectively, not just subjectively. Watching a child learn is unbelievable. If you watch your children carefully you discover how language develops, you begin to recognise the logical steps of physical development and you learn. Learn patience, learn how to speak concisely and exactly, learn, above all, how amazing the human race is and why we are at the top of the food chain. To discuss this is not blather.

6:51am the next day ...

On the usefullness of mummyblogging:

Having a child changes you. Changes your identity. Or adds a new one. Problem is, that new identity takes over. 'I' becomes 'we'. Handbags become nappy bags. 'I' like being 'we' and we never had a handbag before I had children. I spent a lot of my life waiting to be a parent. I worked towards it like others work towards a career. It did not come as a shock to me. But many women did have handbags. They went to work, they wore make-up, they had an identity that didn't involve kids. Becoming a parent was a shock to them, and in the process of that shock they lost the community they were involved in, the workplace.

Mummyblogging provides a community for the stay-at-home mum. It allows discussion with other adults. It provokes thought beyond what to put on the kids toast. It is like a conversation you can take up and put down at will. It is exactly what the intelligent stay-at-home mum needs to stop her turning into this:

...

The communal activism discussion will have to wait. I need to read. To learn more before I blather on about that issue. I think I'll check out what some other mummybloggers have said. :)

Playing Now

Here is the reason I had to mutate the meme. These are currently the 7 most played songs on my computer:

1. The wheels on the bus
2. Hokey Pokey
3. London Bridge is falling down
4. Row row row your boat
5. Fly away Peter, fly away Paul (I guess that's not technically a song, so ...
5. Five little ducks
6. I'm a little teapot
7. Ging gang gooly (gooly gooly gooly watsit)

Euey loves music. It seems indiscriminately, except for a slight leaning toward heavy rock or a lone piano. However, being musically and kinetically challenged I find it difficult to make up actions to go with most songs, so we end up dancing to the kids songs. This is better than Euey learning to dance like me!!!