Category: Life

It feels like it’s been a busy few weeks. Evelyn is amazing at hearing the clickety clackety of my fingers on the keyboard and deciding she needs to be sitting on my lap immediately. She also loves to climb onto my desk and type herself, usually deleting any project I’ve got open at the time.

Needless to say, I haven’t been on the computer much.

And considering it’s just taken me 25 minutes to write 65 words, I’m not sure this is set to change any time soon.

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Gardening:

I say gardening like I’ve been “doing it” but what I’ve really been doing is watering the gardens, picking the produce and thinking about the things I need to do for Autumn, rather than actually doing anything. The tomatoes and pumpkins are doing well, although it turns out I planted three tomatoes of the late fruiting variety and hahahahaha I’m an idiot. They’re only just finishing their flower now, which gives them a month, maybe, to turn into green tomatoes I can pick and hang.

It’s unlikely to happen.

Luckily the cherry tomatoes are doing well and the little gannnets I call my children are thrilled to be able to search and destroy red tomatoes. Nom nom nom.

The pumpkins, well, I only planted one variety this year and I’m a bit annoyed at myself. They’ve done well, but not amazingly, and I think I prefer a smaller variety of pumpkin which produces a lot, rather than a larger variety which struggles to squeeze out two pumpkins per vine.

The vines themselves have done well, growing along the ground to catch any stray chickens who might be looking for an easy meal, but the female flowers have started turning yellow and dropping off before they even get any bigger than a 5c coin.

Which: Hmmmph.

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Parenting:

Gah. Parenting. Who’d have thought having three children would make me so time poor?

Well, actually this is a lie. When I’ve got time to read books, play in the garden, game and do other things for pleasure, I’m really not time poor. I just feel like I am because yesterday, Amy talked non-stop. NON-STOP. Not even an hour at the dentist did much to stop her discussing everything from planets to oceans to the latest mods on minecraft in obsessive detail.

I had a headache by bedtime, but I was glad Amy was feeling better. She’s got an ear infection and I’m just grateful our doctor was able to squeeze her in so she could start antibiotics.

Isaac has adjusted to kindergarten amazingly well. I’m surprised and pleased at how well he’s doing. He’s confident in the space and comes home telling me about all the fun things he’s done at school. I’m pretty impressed.

Both kids had a great time at their athletics carnival. Isaac ran a fourth in the running race, and second, third, fifth in the novelties. So proud.

Amy did brilliantly too, running in every single race for her class group, which was frankly a miracle for a child as bendy as she is, and brewing an ear infection to boot.

Evelyn, she’s doing well. Not quite sleeping through the night yet, although now she’s back on pediasure rather than cows milk, she’s down to waking once, rather than five times. Turns out our dairy trial was a miserable failure, with Eve breaking out into eczema, getting constipated and otherwise being a miserable little git. Dairy doesn’t agree with her – although she seems fine with small amounts of yogurt and cheese. Something something enzymes partially digested proteins, something something.

I am worried about her overall mobility however. Her left leg keeps collapsing under her, sending her hurlting towards the ground more than I care to count. She’s hypermobile, and so low tone. I’d hoped a lot of this would improve when she was running around, but no, and in fact she’s been a bit worse. The physio team wanted to see her at 2, so I think I’ll move that appointment up.

She sees her Paediatrician this coming week, and while I’m sure he’s going to be glad to see how she’s grown and gained weight (HALLELUJAH FOR EATING), she’s not talking. Her receptive language is fantastic, but her functional speech is practically non-existent. At 19 months, she says Mum, Dad, Nan and HI! Occasionally if she’s in a good mood you can encourage her to copy words back at you, but mostly she silent except for various inflections of eh? eh! EH.

I’m hoping speech will just appear magically, but we’ll see what her team thinks. For a toddler who understands pretty much everything we say, I feel she ought to be talking more.

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Soapmaking:

New obsession.

I asked Nathan last night to come and smell my newest batch of soap (who wants plain soap when you can add things? CHEMISTRY! YAY) and he looked at me plaintively.

“I didn’t think you’d make this much soap so quickly.”

But it’s like Christmas! Waiting to open a soap mould, waiting to see what the chemical reaction has done to the ingredients, it’s so exciting. AND, I’ve only made five batches in a week, so I’m not sure what he’s complaining about. Also, who wants to continue making the same boring base when you can add things to see what happens? Honey and oats for example. Or kaolin.

I’m still very much a newbie at it all, but the science of soap is endlessly fascinating and I love how tweaking just one ingredient changes my whole soap makeup.

Science! Is fun!

So I’ve been making soap, and hopefully some of it is going to be amazing once it’s cured.

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Life:

Is good.

Every day I am grateful we own this house. Mostly it’s because I know we won’t lose our safety deposit when the kids draw on the walls, or I kick something too hard and make a cupboard fall off it’s hinges.

I’m not so sure Nathan feels the same way – not after he just spent a week stripping the years of caked on paint off the bathroom door so we didn’t have to look at an ice blue mess anymore.

I’m writing more about what it’s like to buy a house in a total state of disrepair over at Money Circle today.

And yes I know I’ve been sending you over there a lot, and I’m hoping to write more here soon too. One day. When Eve doesn’t keep stealing my keyboard, or shutting my computer down, or screaming at me because she’s getting her eye teeth.

Save me.

(As I was writing this she put a hat over her head so she couldn’t see and walked into the table. Now she’s sitting on me screaming because I won’t let her type.)

Anyway, click over and read. I think you’ll like it.

 

I’m counting down the days, hours, minutes.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Wednesday, Amy starts grade 2. Thursday, Isaac begins Kindergarten.

Then, dear Internet, I will have somewhere in the realm of fifteen hours a week with only one child at home. I am pumped. I am stoked. I am carefully working out a regime of eating alone, drinking cups of tea and reading books.

It is going to be GLORIOUS.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this school holidays, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little mentally exhausted. Everyone keeps asking me questions and expecting intelligent answers from me, when all I want to do is sleep for a month.

It hasn’t helped that Evelyn was sleeping terribly. Waking five-six times a night, wanting boobs, screaming, fussing, tossing and turning. She was getting molars, but come on, enough is enough.

But, just quietly, she’s stayed in her own bed nearly all night for two nights running. Only needed one breastfeed at 4am.

And I am feeling much less exhausted. Waking three times a night is easy, blissful in fact, when compared to double that amount.

(I am writing this and Isaac is playing Minecraft: “Mummy! Come here! YOU NEED TO SEE! Another skeleton dropped a bow! COME AND SEE.” You can see why I’m exhausted. I am also not walking the length of the house again, to see a minecraft bow, again. Again again again.)

So! School. Going back. Beginning. A new chapter. One toddler at home. One toddler who NAPS. Naps, people.

It’s going to be great. Fantastic, in fact. And after Easter, there will be even MORE alone time, because Isaac will learn to catch the school bus with Amy and angels will sing, choirs rejoicing at the extra hour I have to Get Things Done.

Of course, Evelyn will probably end up terribly bored and sit on me for the entire time her siblings are gone, but I’m remaining optimistically dreamy.

SCHOOL!

I read a lot, eagerly consuming books as fast as I can download them. Anything and everything, I’m not a fussy reader.

Of course, I have my preferences – I’ll choose Urban Fantasy over a mystery, and a mystery over literary fiction. I love my kindle, I love the Book Depository, I’m never happier when I stumble across a book sale, or second hand books being given away.

So when Anita Heiss published her Black Book Challenge, I expected to have read at least a few of the books.

No.

Not even one, I’m ashamed to say.

It’s ridiculous, because clicking links and reading synopsis after synopsis, they are amazing books one and all. But because I rely on discount books, word of mouth recommendations and things I find in second hand stores, I’d missed every single book on the list.

This is my challenge for 2014 – to read at least 20 of the books on the list, possibly more depending on finances. Because they’re not mass market paperback, they’re not cheap, but I’m treating every single book as an investment.

With information coming out about plans to change the school curriculum, and the way history is taught, I feel it’s important my children have access to stories which tell of what happened when England invaded Australia, and the atrocities which followed over the next two centuries.

It’s a dark history. Shying away from it, and refusing to teach our children the truth about how our country came to be won’t change what happened. And frankly, history is schools is already woefully inadequate, and Aboriginal history is even worse.

I’m hoping by the end of the year I will have learned more, found new favourite authors, and gathered together a collection of books I wish to read and read again.

I’ve been reading the inheritance series and I really like it but it also reminds me I’ll never fly a dragon and that makes me want to die

— Em Elizabeth (@the_writer_life) January 24, 2014

I read a lot of books, and lately it’s been mostly urban fantasy style stuff. Ilona Andrews. Carrie Vaughn. Patricia Briggs. Kalayna Price. Richard Kadrey. Also Robin Hobb, who isn’t urban fantasy, but she writes the best characters and magic I’ve read.

I finish these books and I’m left feeling emptier somehow, wishing for magic, for meaning, for something more.

Em Elizabeth tweeted above about dragons not being real and I sat there, looking at the screen, stunned for a bit. I spend an inordinate amount of time wishing magic were real. Constructing elaborate fantasies inside my head involving the existence of werewolves and fae, debating their existence.

And it’s strange really. I’m a married mother with three children, and yet, I desperately wish these things were real.

I’d like to say something beautiful and poignant here about bending reality to my whim, and etc, but really? I just think magic would be really fucking cool.

This is why I’m a writer. My daydreams get to become reality in some small slice somewhere. I can write rules which have to bearing on my current reality. I can have faeries, and yes, even vampires. Because why not?

But it does seem disappointing to only have the reality I want exist in my mind, completely oblivious to the world that is.

You might think me strange and that’s okay, because I am. All writers are a little weird.

Do you read Urban Fantasy? Who does it best?