inner pickle

great expectations

 

Today was the day I was going to get stuff done. Tilly was at preschool, I had a list, I was all over it. 

It's like I've never had an eight month old. Who has just learnt to crawl. Who managed to crawl across the kitchen in a second and get her fingers jammed under the ironing board. (Which was up because I was really hoping to sew and press at least one seam, just one, in a little dress that's been sitting waiting. Didn't happen.)

The lawn mowing man didn't show up. And the grass grows quick here. And the big black snake was sighted at the front step yesterday. Awesome. 

Somehow I ended up on hold to Telstra for an hour. I should've hung up. I made Ivy lunch, cajoled her into eating it, made a small dent on the chaotic kitchen and read the school bulletin. Then after sixty two minutes and I was dead sick of carrying the phone between ear and shoulder, they disconnected me. I shook the phone. I said 'Hello? Hello?'. I stared at it in disbelief. Nothing.

I wish I could poke them with a stick. Stupid telco.

Shortly afterwards, Ivy dramatically threw up. She seemed fine, as they do, and I was totally horrified to think it might have been the result of her picking up bit of grated cheese from last night's dinner off the floor. Wee little floor sucker. (I really REALLY need to get my floor cleaning in order.) 

Some days I can just swing on the 'nothing's working' creaky gate.

Some days, I get really frustrated. 

This afternoon after school and preschool though, we went visiting. Which for us has the wonderful effect of changing the land at the top of the Faraway Tree. We go out, we chat, we play, we come home to a new environment. The kitchen was still a mess but the hastily thrown-together casserole was now slow cooked, smelling delicious and ready, and bathtime, storytime, bedtime has its own momentum. 

It's only 10.30pm. Not too late to start sewing. 

xxx

gosh she's really let herself go

 

Do you know this woman?

I can tell you what she used to look like.

She used to match. Have a $250 haircut. Often manicured. Waxed, combed, clean.

You wouldn't see her without a touch of mascara at the very least. Some nice cheek gloss. Lip glass. All on expensively moisturized skin, recently facial-ed. 

Seriously, WHAT is she wearing? 

Are they Blundstone boots? With jeans and a sundress?

Has she got anything in that wardrobe with any shape?

Did she actually look at herself before she got in the car? (No, she didn't.)

And I mean, really. Where IS that novel? Where's the PhD? Where's the big job, the world changer, the mover and shaker, the girl most likely? And I'm sure that whole outfit is Kmart and Vinnies. (It is.)

Where's the girl who drank soy lattes and furiously scribbled verse? That's not really her, sitting by the swimming pool for another swimming lesson? Is that her in daggy pants at the school pick up? Pushing a trolley in the supermarket, putting on another load of laundry, dosing out junior panadol and breaking up an argument over who sits in what chair at the dinner table? 

And, really, you should see her house. Piles of washing. Toys all over the floor. The children skating across the floor on board books. I saw a guest actually pause once before sitting down on a chair that was evidently occupied by someone eating Weetbix earlier. 

You know once, she would have been able to tell you exactly how much she weighed. Now she knows how much all her children weigh and just that she intends to lose 10 kilograms. 

Which illustrates my point: she really has let herself go. 

She can't remember when she last had an undisturbed nights sleep but she is laughing out loud and loudly at the baby blowing raspberries. 

She hasn't worn a nice pair of heels in months, but her heart is bursting because she caught her children being randomly kind to each other. 

She has nothing to show for herself at the end of the day but she's whisking eggs in pure joy. 

She's blinking in amazement that her children can independently take themselves off to the toilet. 

She let herself go, let the self-imposed rules and restrictions, all the insecurities, the vacuous meaningless nonsensical self-centeredness go, and she found she was happier than she'd ever been in her whole life. 

xxx

the hard questions

I think of myself as fairly thoughtful. 

I've been lucky enough to do quite a bit of study and although I'm suffering blackout levels of short term memory loss at present (remind me what my name is?), generally I can figure stuff out. Come up with an answer. Frequently glib and wrong, but an answer. 

So these tricky questions of the smallies. They are my undoing. 

Tilly (3) today: Mum, what is a church?

Apologies to my mother who has just fallen off her computer stool on the farm. I know. Abject failure on my part.

Henry (6) yesterday: Mum, is Santa a real person?

I was going to go all hard core and non-mythical on the Santa question. Always thought I would. Then I heard myself saying: 

Babe, do you think he's real?

Henry: of course he's real.

Me: then he's real to you. 

I thought we'd dealt with the really hard questions with the whole where-do-babies-come-from discussion, but no. 

What does gratitude mean?

What is a season?

How did that snail grow that shell?

What's Halloween?

How do you make sugar?

I'm embarrassed by how many times I say, I don't know, ask your Dad. (Because he has an answer for everything.)

The gratitude question is a big one around here, as I'm trying to encourage a sense of gratefulness, not just acquisitiveness, particularly coming into Christmas. I don't think I'm explaining it well. Would love your help! 

There's lots of things we can google - snail shells is one of them. And sugar. 

I've got one: how did medieval women who couldn't breastfeed (and couldn't pay a wet nurse) feed their babies? Maybe they relied on the kindness of other breastfeeding neighbours? I've heard of milk-soaked fabric, but there's a whole lot of wrong in there. I really want to know! Going to have to go do some research. Any excuse to visit the stacks at uni! (I know, utter dork, did you forget whose blog you were reading?!)

If they get their question-asking from me, they get their excellent dishwashing skills from their Dad. I've got another one: what is she doing? Forget the dishes Tilly, Wiki awaits us!

As for hard questions, 'can I make baby seed with you Dad?' kinda takes the cake. 

xxx

P.S. For not a bad introductory article on mercenary wet nursing in Medieval Europe, click here. 

curious

Good, unrestrained, imaginative curiosity is probably the trait I cherish most in my small people. 

 

I love bugs in the bug catcher and escapee snails on the stairs. 

I love the little finger in the cocoa powder and the little hands which will only be satisfied playing the entire eighty-eight piano keys one after the other. donk. donk. donk. down the scales. 

I love 'indoor' curiosity. The kind that finds small people peering at the world map on the wall. Looking through books. Checking out bugs under magnification. 

 

 

And shells. And fingernails. 

And I love 'outdoor' curiosity.

The kind that leads children to dig into the ground and climb trees. 

I won't care if my children aren't amazing academically, or sparklingly social, or astoundingly commercially successful. These things aren't important to me. 

But I will feel like a failure as a mother if they have no sense of curiosity. 

And, er, if they can't cook a whisker.

And perhaps if they eat a lot of hamburgers.

You? What matters to you?

xxx

three months

Three short months with us, out here. 

What did we ever do without her?

What did they do without her?

Three months ago

I didn't know every inch of her wee face

and how soft her fuzzy head feels 

and how strong and bonny she would be. 

Three short months ago I didn't know her name

I hadn't felt her tiny hands grabbing mine

And I really didn't know that she would be 

an absolute joy

rather than a secret burden.

Wonder what the next three months will bring. 

xxx

imperfect

Kate has got me thinking, with her celebratory week of imperfections. 

It's the strangest thing sometimes, blogging. Because we tend to macro focus on the marvellous and edit out the imperfect. This isn't because I'm pretending my life is perfect, for heavens sake, my sisters both read this blog! How long d'ya reckon I'd get away with that?

It's more about what I feel like writing about at the end of the day and what I want to remember. And also what you want to read. 

So rather than write about the rushed day of a meeting I was late for and then had to breastfeed in, about taking Henry out of school early to go to his weekly speech therapy appointment, the lovely cauliflower soup I cooked for dinner that the kids didn't like; well I'd much rather tell you the story of dropping one of Ivy's wee shoes in the rush to get to the meeting and the lovely, lovely woman who passed me in one direction, found it right down the street and bought it all the way back to me. Or about the whispered "I love you guys, I love you" video message Henry left on my iPhone. 

All of it happened today. But only some of it would tend to appear here. 

Am I guilty of presenting the perfect and burying the imperfect? Of course I am. I only blog a fraction of the story, I'm sure you know that! And I want to to spend that precious hour after the kids are in bed before I start doing something else, cherishing the nice bits.

For example the old dude in the lift on the way up to speech therapy today who asked Henry how old he was then proceeded to recite this poem to him: (speech therapy is on level 7!)

When I was one I had just begun

When I was two I was nearly new

When I was three I was hardly me

When I was four I was not much more

When I was five I was just alive

But now I am six I'm as clever as clever

So I think I'll be six now forever and ever.

(A.A.Milne)

 

That was a cool moment. 

So, the view from here. 

I might be guilty of posting a photo like this. Making some joke about the imperfection of the activity as only three jars does not make a chromatic scale. Or even a pentatonic one. Haha.

It's a pretty typical Inner Pickle picture, right? Fairly wholesome. Kid in uncoordinated clothing. Bit of IKEA furniture. 

Shall I pan out? 

Oh look. There's not a small amount of washing on the end of that dining table. If you look closely, there's a bathmat halfway down the left hand pile that used to be a nice grey, now mottled pink. Not even sure what the offending red item in the load was. 

Oh and look...

She hasn't even finished folding the washing. And if she adds that to the piles on the table they'll probably topple over. That wall's pretty grubby.

Oh, and look...

The baby's crying. 

And..

Something's gone horribly wrong with the wholesome musical activity. 

Oops. 

But you know what?

It's all about choice.

Choose how you react. Choose how you remember. 

Henry told me tonight that in his workbook at school, where they wrote today what they did on the weekend, of all the fun, family-oriented, thought-out activities he did, he wrote "On the weekend I went to MacDonalds and had an icecream."

Right. Perfect.

xxx

Looking good, Vern. (Or not).

So I MAY have forgotten that the community nurse was coming to our house this morning to check out Ivy.

Now I know she's not 'community services' and she's not actually technically judging me in terms of my competence, but I really didn't do myself any favours. 

Bit of a disturbed night, not too bad, but up a few times and a bit bleary this morning. One of my godsons, Sebastian, arrived early for a play while his mum went into work for a few hours. I was in the shower. Adam's still home, thankfully! Another week!

An hour later, Ad suggests he walks up to our local cafe to get some coffee for us, and thinks he'll take Ivy (cafe owner Judy is already smitten with our little lady.)

So at some point I hear the kids open the front door and an adult voice say: Is your mother home?

I look at my two, it's a cold day in Sydney and they seem to only be wearing their pyjama bottoms. Sebastian at least is dressed. But is carrying a gun. (A gift from my brother for Henry. A Nerf Gun. I keep finding Adam playing with it.) 

The house is a mess and I don't mean that generously. It's a mess. I'm dressed, albeit with excellent bed head and committed ugg boots on. I am so all over this parenting thing. 

Of course the nurse wants to see Ivy. Oops. Call Ad, thank goodness he took his mobile. He retrieves Ivy from Judy and flies back down the hill.

I guess this nurse goes into lots of muddled houses. She did comment that our children seemed very happy (they were marching through the house with drums and maracas at this point.) She surprised me by commenting as she left what a confident mother I was. 

Confident my two half-naked smallies weren't going to catch pneumonia? Confident an additional kid (Sebastian, I mean) actually makes things easier, not harder, 'cause he plays so well with the other two? Confident that coffee happily cures all bleariness?

Oh yes. So confident. 

P.S. Don't know about the kids, but I am happy. Grateful for my family and friends and most of all my gorgeous wee girl, well, healthy, settled.  Very grateful. 

xxx

stuff I learnt this week

: Turns out some newborns do just eat and sleep. I thought that was something people just claimed. We're not naive enough to know this may not all change tomorrow, but we're super grateful for Ivy being so chilled out right now. (And not feeding two-hourly through the night like her sister used to!)

: Having a newborn makes your older kids look ridiculously big and grown up.

(Henry and I having some downtime in a cafe this week over hot chocolate and gingerbread men. Gamer-boy preoccupied while I was breastfeeding.)

: Friends are awesome. This week ours took our older kids away and sent Ad and I out for lunch, they brought cake, they brought/sent/made amazingly thoughtful gifts and came around with champagne and lots of laughing. 

: Sydney Aquarium rocks.  

: It's a bit of a shame to go to the aquarium with a flat camera battery. (The iPhone doesn't really cut it.)

: Sydney Aquarium has a pretty proficient lost child procedure.

: Note to self: dress Matilda Daisy in bright colours, preferably fluorescent, when taking her to fascinating places with hundreds of other people amongst whom you can easily lose sight of a waist-high person in search of the turtles; thereby saving us ten minutes of rising panic wherein we each shed ten years off our lives. 

: My brother, visiting from the US this week, is superbly talented (no bias here. Absolutely objective.) New demo CD. He rocks. 

: My friend Vanessa, mum of one of Henry's besties at school, is super clever. Check out these cupcakes she made and brought over yesterday!

  

 
Amazing, right?

: Adam can cook. I don't mean to sound surprised, but I don't mean whip-up-scrambled-eggs-and-bacon cook. He's been cooking all week, and we had friends round for dinner last night and he made fabulous gourmet burgers (yep, a bit of meat is back on the menu here - more on that in another post) with haloumi and chutney, served with crispy and fluffy twice-cooked potato chips and a divine, light passionfruit flummery for dessert. Damn I hope this doesn't mess up our I cook/he cleans arrangement. I am seriously crap at cleaning. 

: It's illegal to bury someone without a coffin. My friend Ben (who appears in post comments here as Benoss) and Adam were cheerfully discussing funeral options, as you do, and Adam was saying he wants to be buried in a completely compostable (preferably cardboard) coffin, preferably with worms included. (Could you be any more green, baby?) Anyway, Ben suggested doing away with the coffin and so we sent another friend (the other Vanessa) who loves this stuff, off to call up a few funeral homes and find out the deal. Deal is: gotta use a coffin. No shroud only option. But she's making more calls so will update you as news comes in. 

: The weirder the better. And if you can come up with REALLY weird, send it over to Kate at Picklebums, OK?! (Everyone's going way too easy on her so far.)

xxx

fine for YOU to laugh

Henry: (To me, while in the car, Adam driving.) How did the baby get in your tummy?

Me: *cough* Really? We're having that conversation?

Henry: (steely-eyed) But how?

Me: Daddy put it there. 

Henry: Daddy, how did you do that?

Adam: (straight-faced) Mummies and daddies have special cuddles and that's how babies get into mummies tummies. (Yes he used the expression special cuddles. My take away coffee was coming out my nose about now.)

Henry: Do you cut a hole in the tummy to get the baby in?

Adam: A very reasonable question Henry, but no, daddies make baby seed and put it in mummies.

Henry: Baby seed?

Adam: Baby seed. 

Henry: Can I make baby seed? I want to make baby seed.

Adam: (Still straight faced. I've given up on the coffee as I'm currently seriously choking.) You can make baby seed when you're a grown up. 

Henry: Can I make baby seed with you, Daddy?

Adam: No, that's not how it works. Hey Henry, look at that interesting car over there! Isn't it interesting!

Henry: I want to make baby seed.

Adam: I have to pull over. Your mother has inhaled her coffee. That's enough about baby seed. 

Henry: Can we have one more baby? We need a boy baby. There are three girls and two boys in this family. We need a boy baby. 

Adam: No more babies, Henry. Get used to being outnumbered, dude. Honey, put the cup down. Deep breaths. OK? Let's go.

xxx

 

Mother guilt

Here's one for you: Why are mother's so good at guilt?

Does it fall to us naturally to feel like we're never quite cutting it or is it a twenty-first century working-mother specialty? I wonder.

I am so bloody excellent at it. Guilty of letting my children watch TV. Guilty of raising my voice. Guilty of occasionally serving popcorn for dinner. Guilty of not homeschooling. Guilty of bribing with chocolate frogs.

And now preschoolers are being diagnosed with depression? Heck.

I'm sensing an anxiety connection. 

There are sad coroner records from the Middle Ages detailing the deaths of infants who had been left swaddled in a crib near a fire while Mum went out to work or who were disastrously left in the care of a three year old sibling. There's some serious historical mother guilt. The mothers weren't usually charged but neither does the coroner record her grief.

There are a hundred self help books about mothering without guilt and I'm guilty of walking right on past and buying a Stephen Fry novel instead. 

So here's one for you who are truly giving it a red hot go. The ones who frequently think: I should be doing this differently but who follow instinct anyway. For you who ponder: if one more person tells me stop-and-enjoy-this-time-it-goes-so-fast I am going to tear their head off. I give you this:

You're reading a blog. Which means you search out stuff. Which means you're curious which naturally means you're intelligent which means your kids are REALLY LUCKY because even if they do occasionally get popcorn for dinner or perhaps have the odd afternoon of TV they've got a Mum with smarts and this means everything will be OK. And YOU. You have a plan. You always have a plan. You don't have time for guilt. You're too busy getting through this totally lovely year and trying to remember how it felt to feel totally lovely. HOLD ON, OK?

Because even if you eat five pieces of yesterday's caramel, your bum will never look like this.

xxx