Monday 13 September 2010

Highlight of The Day...

...was Hamish coming around the corner from the hall, wearing a cloth nappy on his head, announcing that he was "King Solomon!"

And yes, it was a dirty nappy!

I wonder what the Queen of Sheba would have thought...

Poetry competition

Kitchen clutter crowding my bench
Termite mound casting shadows


This is an example of an Ezra Pound couplet. I've written it for Nicole's poetry competition - why don't you enter too?

More details here and here.

Saturday 11 September 2010

At The Moment

At the moment, it is hard to:
  • Get Wiggles songs out of my head.
  • Do the laundry.
  • Finish a cup of tea (somehow I always finish my coffee though...)
  • Get any job done that requires exiting the house - like putting the rubbish in the bin, or the washing on the line.
  • Wear matching socks (yes, this affliction affects me as well as the kids now!)
  • Get an early night.
  • Not rely on tv as a babysitter.

But, it is easy to:
  • Laugh. A lot of laughing going on here.
  • Realise that the things I'm seeing and experiencing with the kids will be treasured memories in years to come.
  • Pray.
  • Wear a lot of fluff. You know you have a problem when people regularly comment 'you must have some pets at home!'
  • Not really care about the fluff.
  • Enjoy the sunshine.
How about you?  What's hard and easy in your life at the moment?

Sunday 5 September 2010

Four Moments

Today is Father's Day. (Not sure where the apostrophe goes there!). We gave Adam a card in bed this morning and I enjoyed seeing him start the day with his two sons. He is a great dad. I reflected on his Pop, who passed away in January 2009. I'm sad that he's not with us today.
*****
At church, as I stand singing, listening to the voices of those around me, I remember previous times I have sung these songs, with the voices of friends lifting around me. It gives me a sense of connection with Christian friends from my old church. Although I don't keep in touch with most of them, we remain connected by our trust in Jesus, and this ritual of singing each week. I think of all the people who have sung the same songs over the course of time, and am grateful for the family of God.
*****
After the service, I give Hamish a cup of cordial from the kids' food table. It reminds me of church when I was a kid - we used to line up at an outside window at St Lukes Hornsby Heights to get our cordial, in brightly coloured plastic cups. I remember crowds of children, eagerly reaching up to the window. The cups we use today at Gosford Presbyterian Church are exactly the same, and it's a little surreal to be helping my little boy drink from one today.
*****
I open my fridge, and see the orange and mango jelly I made the day before, sitting in a blue mixing bowl. I am reminded of my childhood, watching Dad mix jelly in the kitchen. We used to have big jars of the crystals, not the little packets you get today. We'd sneak spoonfuls of it - a sugar hit! Jelly always felt like a real treat. Dad would mix it up in glass jugs and always stick a metal spoon in - something about it preventing the heat from cracking the glass.  As I look at my jelly today, I suddenly feel very rich. Its value seems so much more than the few dollars it cost me.

Friday 3 September 2010

Dedication

This is the dedication inside the Agatha Christie novel, "The Secret Adversary":

To
ALL THOSE WHO LEAD
MONOTONOUS LIVES
in the hope that they may experience 
at second hand the delights and 
dangers of adventure

Thursday 2 September 2010

Redefining Success

It's a strange thing in our culture that success as a parent is often defined, for babies anyway, as getting your kid to sleep through the night - 12 hrs without a peep from your bub is the goal. In their own bed too.

The pressure is real - one of the questions I get asked regularly is "how is he sleeping?" and "are you getting much rest?". Most of these are asked with good intentions, but it can be hard to always be answering in the negative. You only have to look at the baby section of any bookstore to see the proliferation of experts guaranteeing their methods for training babies to sleep.

Oscar and Mike enjoying a nap

Lack of sleep is hard at the best of times, and I certainly don't blame anyone for chasing a decent night's rest. However I wonder if one of the implications of our cultural setup - where a mum is left alone with the kids for long periods of time during the day - means that sleep becomes more important than it would otherwise be. After all, looking after littlies all day on your own is exhausting - who wouldn't be craving uninterrupted sleep to cope with it all? Perhaps sleep has become a bit of a holy grail of motherhood as we are left literally holding the baby during the day!


We have such a drive to present as 'coping' as well - and this gets hard to maintain without solid rest. Therefore it can be easy to push for more sleep - trying to teach your baby that they don't need you there to fall asleep, they don't need cuddles in the middle of the night, and that they need to develop a little bit of independence - right when they are at their most dependent!


It's crazy. And easily leads to frustration, resentment and stress.

It really goes against the grain of what's natural for lots of babies. Mine certainly need me overnight! Michael sleeps on his own for the first half of the night, then in with me for the remainder. He usually feeds 2 or 3 times. And that's ok. Yes, I'm zonked. But he's only a little bub - it won't be like this forever and for now I'm content with letting him know I'm there for him when the sun goes down. I'll often feed him to sleep, which is breaking all sorts of rules if I want him to sleep more independently. But you know what? It works! It gets him to sleep. And I don't have a problem with that for now.

I think we need to redefine success as a mother - am I responding to my baby's needs? Am I taking steps to make sure we get as much rest as we can, without it being a painful process? Am I teaching my baby that I will be there for them whenever they need me?

I think it's ok to help your baby learn how to fall asleep. It doesn't come naturally to them all and there are great benefits from getting extra zzzz's. Let's not force it though - far better to get less sleep, but teach our babies gently. And to count success in other ways!

(Incidentally, another big measure of 'success' in our culture is breastfeeding (rather than formula). Full night's rest and breastfeeding don't often actually go together - breastfed babies routinely need night feeds anywhere up to a year, if not longer for some. So can formula fed babies for that matter. So it's a bit silly, and hard for mothers, to put the pressure on to get babies to sleep through the night, when other cultural standards don't match up.)

Toot toot!

I heard Hamish wake from his nap on Tuesday, and start singing:

"toot, toot, chugga chugga big red car.."

I opened the door.

"Hi buddy, how was your sleep?"

He looked at me seriously for a few seconds, then said "shut de door".

I shut the door.

"toot toot chugga chugga, big red car..."!

I guess he didn't want to be interrupted mid song!

Little Red House

My friend Jen has started a blog - check it out!

Six months

Michael had his half birthday a little while ago. Six months old already! We're enjoying getting to know his personality and finding out what makes him smile. His latest trick is blowing raspberries. He can go on for quite some time - makes quite a dribbly mess.
Being Abraham (from the bible)

Hamish is adapting well to big brotherhood -he tells Michael to 'share!' as he runs off with the baby toys. They have started to make each other laugh which is just beautiful and feels like a bit of a pay-off for all the hard yards.

We hear these phrases regularly:
No, mum, no!
I do it.
I fix it!
Just one more (holding up one finger to emphasise the point!)
Cake?

Not to mention all the Wiggle-isms - at the dinner table tonight, he announced "ok everybody, time to party!"