Archive for the ‘Baby’ Category
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4
Aug
2011
Craft is the only way you will truly feel like a real mother.
It’s finally happened. Today I did craft. I am sorry it has been so long since I have written a post. I am even sorrier that it has taken craft to get me to put pen to paper. Or finger to keyboard. But such is my life right at present that craft has actually done it.
Let me not offend those crafty types amongst us. I have the utmost admiration for crafty people, with their scrapbooks and fabric and natty little sewing machines, whipping up natty little crafty things. But craft is not for me. I don’t have a natty little bone in my body. My handwriting is so bad that I got extra time in my final school exams to rewrite my essays. And if my handwriting is so bad, you can only imagine what my drawing is like. It’s a combination of very little patience, even less of an artistic eye and a solid belief (grounded in reality) that anything I attempt will generally end in a bloody finger, lots of swear words and something that frankly, looks like crap that my three year old could have made. And this is from a child that thinks drawing a black dot on a piece of paper and sticky taping it to his chest means he is wearing a superhero badge.
10
Jul
2011
Top 5 Comments New Mums Would Rather Not Hear
I’ve just rounded out 6 months of new motherhood (actually the second new motherhood, if you know what I mean) and Kate 6 weeks, so I thought it would be timely to give you my list of top 5 things new Mums don’t like to hear.
- When are you due? I think we all understand why this is number 1. No need to draw a picture. Only marginally better than the straight out, not quite as innocent and far more direct, “God you’ve still got quite a stomach, when does it go down?”
- Is that your grandson? GUTTING. I saw an actual real life exchange of this very nature. “No, this is my son” came restrained answer through gritted teeth as veins visibly throbbed in the neck. As a helpless bystander to this train wreck I mentally tried to stop the words as they came out of the offender’s mouth and jam them back in from whence they came, visualising myself goalkeeper style diving to catch them before they reached the victim’s ears. Alas, there was no hope. Those words slammed like a freight train in to new mum’s stomach so hard you could almost hear the air knocked out of her.
5
Jun
2011
Newborn baby fug review – iBaby feed
Not me
No, I’m not actually writing a review of my new baby. Although if I was, it would be quite glowing at this point. Apart from her propensity to cause scream-out-loud-pain to my left nipple. (Sorry, that noise you heard? That was the sound of our twenty male readers rushing out the door – yes, you may run, but you can’t hide from the screams you can probably hear from West London).
So I’m pretty much head over nappy in the 10 day old new-born fug. Forgive me please if I cannot wax lyrical this week on the situation in Syria as I might usually do on these hallowed pink pages. And I fear my cutting edge wit has deserted me a little in a haze of washing little white bodysuits, sleeping bolt upright with iPhone in hand, lying on the couch eating reverse double choc chip cookies (how I loathe you so, your sweet sweet reverse white choc chip evilness) oh, and managing aforementioned nipple pain (keep on walkin’ guys).
24
Apr
2011
Mentalness – and why you should choose the old woman not the normal looking person
I have one important question I keep coming back to this week – does having a new-born baby mean you automatically go mental?
Would not have surprised
The standard cliché suggests that all mothers go a bit doolally. Which could be true. Apart from me obviously. And readers of this blog. But personally I think it’s just those who are inherently loopy to start with – I mean, I am sure I have my mad moments as a parent – but I SWEAR for some people, the meeting of sperm and egg totally rouses their inner craziness until it bursts out loud and proud at about the same time as their placenta.
I sat in an antenatal clinic this week for an hour. When sizing up the waiting room prior to taking my seat (something I like to do at length from a secret vantage point, such is my fear of a stranger smiling at me, or god forbid, striking up a conversation), I decided against the slightly ferocious looking grey-haired 50 year old woman (I’m not sure what she was doing in an antenatal clinic either) and chose the very normal looking woman in her gym clothes with a McLaren buggy at her side.
18
Apr
2011
And then there were two. Well four between us. No make that five!
We’re back! Refreshed and ready to go. Well, kind of still a bit sleep deprived and distracted, but less so and relatively speaking. I’m at the highest point of my game possible for the foreseeable future. I’m past the dreaded first three months of the second baby so I’m back on easy street – as easy as they get in the suburb of Two Kids (under two) on The Block. New baby is, by the way, completely objectively, very beautiful.
Kate on the other hand is about to pass through the choppy waters of another newborn. In case you missed it she and Captain Sensible have number three on the way. I haven’t told Kate yet but when a mother of three saw another mother of two cooing over my baby at the playground the other day, she warned ominously that a third was a whole other ball game. Two was difficult. Three was utter chaos. On the upside, after that, they say it can’t get any more difficult. Three, ten, all the same . We’ll see – Kate will be telling us all about it. In the meantime, I can report that for me two is on the one hand, not double the trouble, but not filled with many moments that permit you to gaze lovingly and tranquilly on the children that are your joyous good fortune to have.
30
Sep
2010
Another Genius Gift Idea
As hard as they are to come by I’m not one to keep a good find to myself, so I’ll let you in on my latest stroke of genius, made possible by Flying Start Toys on Etsy, some serious Etsy search-and-discover skills on my part in finding this little gem and a flash of creativity, again on my part, although, admittedly, as someone who is not actually very creative on a whole, this self-perceived creativeness may not seem quite as grand to the outside world. But I can assure you the outcome is good. And… you may copy.
I came across Flying Start Toys’ Sail Away boats – made from materials with beautiful patterns and in the following lovely combinations shown below – while searching for a mobile for a baby’s new nursery as a gift (in an effort to find an alternative to the OTT sound and light shows one finds in commercial baby stores). I never found a mobile I liked, but was delighted to stumble across these.
27
Sep
2010
What to expect when you’re expecting. Or rather – what to do when you’re expecting. Except that doesn’t sound nearly as catchy.
Which may well be why the authors of What to Expect are undoubtedly gazillionaires and I am writing a pink blog.
I have a couple of friends recently who have announced their first pregnancies. Naturally they have turned to someone as wise and insightful as me to advise
them as they take their first tentative steps into the world of bulging stomachs and weeing incessentaly. Or rather, one of them said ‘you must have a nerdy spreadsheet for this sort of thing.’ Au contraire my tubby little friend – I don’t have a single spreadsheet, I have several. And lots of posts. But I guess I have never summarised it all into a neat little package of a posty thing – so here it is, my guide to WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW? Apart from all the medical/hospitaly/birthy stuff of course…
- Panic. You are bringing a new person into the world. Much can go wrong and you’re probably already well on the way to f*cking up your kid’s life already. Nice one. Oh, ok, disregard that one – here’s the real list….
23
Sep
2010
Confessions of a Commercial Baby Food User
photo credit: johnhope14
Kate and I are different in many ways. She worships Gina Ford, I worship..hmm, say.. Lady Gaga and Jack and Karen from Will and Grace. She says dance, I say daance. Kate says “recalcitrant”, I say, “Remind what that means again?” Kate writes about which of the books in her extensive cook book collection have yielded the tastiest and most lauded meals. I feed my baby food from a jar and serve my husband frozen pizza for dinner. Well, when I say serve, I generally mean, point him in the direction of the freezer.
So in stark contrast to Kate’s last post on the wonders of various cookbooks, and in embarrassing contradiction to my own post on my adoption of Annabel Karmel’s toddler recipes (where, in a giddy state following an early and naïve stage of minor success I gushed that if I could do it anybody could – a self-congratulatory euphoria that quickly declined into a state of disappointment and frustration), I am not going to share any best domestic or life tips.
19
Sep
2010
Utterly unexhaustive list of good cookbooks. Somewhat related to family cooking – in a spurious manner
People are always asking me how I do it. How do I whip up healthy and nutritious meals for my family and friends night after night? So healthy and yet so
I am pretty even when whipping up meals night after night.
super tasty, the flavour just oozes out? Alright, no-one has ever asked me that. My husband once said ‘this is good’, but he might have been referring to the football results, I can’t be sure. And of course there was the memorable moment when daughter agreed to eat a second helping of chicken. Son would eat anything. I love Son. I love him the best.
Anyway, I do like to cook. I occasionally invent recipes, but mostly I devour cookbooks. I don’t read them in bed like several of my friends admitted recently – that is just weird friends. I read them in totally normal reading places like on the couch in front of Big Brother worthy current affairs programs and sitting in bookshops ignoring daughter’s mournful looks passing some time while waiting for important meetings.
31
Aug
2010
Herding cats. Or how to throw a kid’s party – part 2
So – part one was about the basics – planning the party. But every kid knows that planning the party is secondary. The venue can be ace, the games fun, the fire thrower awesome, but if you don’t get the main event right then all else may as well be thrown out with the pass the parcel.
Yes, I am of course referring to The Cake. Big, small, cupcake, multi-layered behemoth, store-bought, ice-cream, homemade – The Cake is the big kahuna of the party day. You have to have one.
If you’re Australian it is likely that you spent some time in your childhood pouring over the Cake Bible – second only to choosing your showbags from the newspaper lift-out (if you’re not from Australia, you just had to be there I’m sorry, but believe me, the day that lift-out came out was the BEST DAY OF THE YEAR) was the choosing of the cake from the Australian Women’s Weekly Kid’s Birthday Cakes Book. And if you don’t believe me, then see someone far more amusing than me…
Anyway – here are other top tips about cake preparation:
