I’m Veronica Foale and I get a strange amount of pleasure from writing about my life on the Internet.
I live in Tasmania with my partner, Nathan.
Tasmania is a little island at the bottom of Australia, it’s not at all like Tanzania which is a part of Africa. I have possums and echidnas, not lions and elephants. Feel free to tell me there are no lions and elephants in Tanzania. I will tell you there are none in Tasmania either.
Before I was a mother, I used to work in a kitchen. Sure I was just the drudge who got to wash dishes, prep many many vegetables and cook/prepare/serve desserts, but it was amazing fun.
I worked with an amazing team to begin with and learned a lot. It was taken as given that when the final year apprentice qualified, I would start an apprenticeship and use ‘recognition of prior learning’ to skip the first year.
But then the kitchen got a new head chef and everything kind of went down the drain.
I quit a few weeks later.
Shortly after I quit I found myself pregnant. Seems that when you suddenly stop working and find yourself with all this extra time, babies happen. Who knew?
Amy was born in September ‘06 and I have been a stay-at-home-mum ever since. I remember when she first started solids grumbling about how much more prep there was involved in cooking for babies than there was cooking for customers. I suppose you aren’t worried that your customers might choke if you don’t mash things well enough.
When Amy was 6 months old, we started trying for a second baby. However, it took many many months before I was pregnant again. I learned a lot from that small bout of secondary infertility and I will never forget how heartbroken I was every month when yet again, I wasn’t pregnant.
Isaac was finally born in January ‘09 after a pregnancy that I was certain wouldn’t end well. I bled through all three trimesters, on and off and was hospitalised for an infection that was threatening to send me into labour at 24 weeks.
I still love food, even when my evenings are punctuated by conversations with Nathan about what to cook for dinner. I’m very sorry Honey, but ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Whatever’ are not in my repertoire of dishes. I do love him, even if sometimes I want to smack him with a frying pan. He asks that I not rant about him on my blog, so I respect that and don’t. It makes life hard sometimes.
In April 09, I was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome after 7 years of worsening symptoms. Whilst having EDS is not exactly fun, having a diagnosis makes life slightly easier. Currently I get around okay with just a support bandage on my knee to try and prevent recurrent dislocations, but everything is getting floppier, no matter how much I try and exercise. Most of my joints either sublux (partially dislocate) or dislocate fully. Ouch is not really the operative word, with FUCK being my response of choice. Occasionally I get even more creative and end up with fuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK. Or something like that.
Ah well. It could be worse.
Right?
I love writing. If I don’t write for a bit, I start to get a bit antsy and you can find me scribbling things down on scrap paper while I cook dinner. I haven’t yet dropped any paper into the pot, nor have I accidentally served sauteed pens. So far, so good.
You can also find me blogging about myself, writing and life at VeronicaFoale.com and on Twitter with @SleeplessNights
This blog was a finalist for Best Australian/NZ Weblog 2009 as well.
