Sleepless Nights

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  • Broken ovaries and a not so broken heart

    My ovaries are broken.

    Rooted.

    Buggered.

    Which is a shame, because they looked so pretty on the ultrasound, adorned in cysts.

    Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

    It explains why my only 2 pregnancies have been acheived coming straight off the pill (the pill calms down the hormones/symptoms) and why it took so long to actually get pregnant.

    It also explains why I’ve just had a 60 + day cycle.

    However, my hormone levels don’t look too bad, so in the event I ever get pregnant again, my chance of miscarriage shouldn’t be too much higher. The pregnancy thing, well, sensibility tells me that my 2 are enough and a perfect number and my biological clock is beating me with a handbag, telling me that I neeeeeeeed another baby.

    I think for now, sensibility is going to win. Sigh.

    In the meantime, I am going back on the pill (hey, that’s going to be FUN) – but a pill without progesterone, so it won’t affect my joints. What it does to my mood remains to be seen.

    In other news, I had an echocardiogram the other day, to check my mitral valve – something that gets floppier with Ehlers Danlos and time.

    So far, my heart isn’t broken! Which is a very good thing. Yes, there may be a tiny prolapse there, maybe, but it’s nothing major and I can go away for another few years before having it checked again.

    Which is all good as far as I’m concerned.

    ***

    And to take a moment to be a total mummyblogger:

    Considering I’ve had such a crappy week (month) I would love if you could vote for me in the Babble list. I think I’m on page 3? Or page 2. Either one.

  • Any botanists out there? Help with some kind of black mould on my pasture grass.

    After a lot of rain this month, some of my grass has gone black and rotten.

    All the googling in the world hasn’t helped me find out what exactly it is – things that sound like it, don’t have pictures and most things I found were dealing with lawn diseases, not pasture moulds.

    Here it is – it’s black and very rotten. When I pull it apart it’s powdery and the black dust (mould spores?) stick to my fingers. You can see in one photo where it’s been bashing against the wall.

    You can click the images to enlarge them, or mouse over for descriptions.

    I need to find out how to eradicate it – if simply cutting the grass will work, how likely it is to spread and what else it might infect.

    Ideas?

  • Blogging Conference, I can’t wait.

    I started blogging over 3 years ago and unlike now, there weren’t a great many Australian mummy blogs about then. I complained about this fact, quite a few times, but at the end of the day, I had a good group of UK and US bloggers to read and I was happy.

    What I didn’t have though, that the US bloggers did, was BlogHer.

    As much as I wanted to attend, money is constantly scarce here and while with some serious saving I may have been able to come up with 2k, there was a better chance that that money would go on power, or food, or kids stuff every week, rather than into a BlogHer kitty. And considering I’ve watched 4 BlogHers come and go and not attended (to be fair, I was still only reading blogs during the first one, not writing one yet) I think you can count where my money went.

    Every year as Blogher came around, I watched jealously, grumbling the whole time and wishing that we had something similar here.

    In the last 18 months, Mummyblogging in Australia has grown drastically – I’m reading more Aussie blogs now than ever before. So when Brenda and I started Aussie Mummy Bloggers, we knew that we wanted to create a Blogher-like conference here, for the Australians.

    And with a little planning and an awful lot of work, we’ve pulled it off.

    Brenda, Karen, Nicole, Tina and I, we’ve been working on pulling this conference together for the last 6 months and as the end of the year draws close, we’ve just about got everything sorted.

    Sponsors have come on board (although more are hoped for) and tickets have been selling like hot cakes – so if you want a ticket before they’re sold out, you need to buy one soon. We only have 28 blogger tickets left.

    I know money is tight for a lot of you – personally, I haven’t quite worked out where the money for my flights and accommodation is coming from yet (anyone want to buy some ads?) but there have been a few bloggers who managed to pick up personal sponsorships, so that is an option too, if you really want to come, but can’t quite afford it.

    I am really looking forward to this, something that is uniquely Australian and personal blogger orientated. I think it’s going to be amazing fun.

    Plus, there is a dinner and dance afterwards, which promises to be great. It is, of course, very unlikely that I will be dancing – dislocating joints are not conducive to very much of anything, but I am excellent at dinners. Hehe.

  • Sharing the love #2

    So once a month, I share the love and point you to a blog you should be reading. If you want to join in, write a blog post about why you love someone else’s blog and leave your link in the comments.

    This month, I’m pointing you towards ABDPBT.

    Anna is snarky. Very snarky, in fact, in some mummyblogger circles, she is one of the most disliked women on the Internet.

    I think her blog is fantastic however and her take on mummyblogging is what we need to see more of. Snark and honest truth, rather than the culture of silence and refusal to talk about white elephants.

    Anna blogs about the business of mummyblogging, including doing things like making us think about trust capital and our actual worth. Every post that makes me question what I do and how I do it, is in my mind, priceless.

    Her blog is set up with 4 distinct categories – I receive all of them in my reader and enjoy all four. There is ABDPBT, Commodity Fetishism, Personal Finance and Tech – each one deals with something different and while personal finance has never been my favourite thing, her posts there on the business of mummyblogging are always something I look forward to.

    I’ve found most aspects of Anna’s blog incredibly worthwhile, especially as we’re running the AusBlogCon next year, her sharp honest breakdowns of the US conferences have given Brenda and I things to discuss and also things that we hope to avoid happening to us.

    Anna might not be your thing and that’s fine. But I think honesty is always going to be something we need to read more of, even if some mummybloggers find that honesty incredibly hard to swallow.

    I recommend her blog to every mummyblogger. Reading ABDPBT lets me know which things I need to be avoiding doing and lets me learn from the mistakes of other mummybloggers – especially as the US is a few years ahead of the Australian blogosphere.

    And you know if you end up on Anna’s shit list, not only have you fucked up big time, but that you’ve made it big in the mummyblogging world. Her shit list is NOT something we should aspire to be on.

    Read her.

    Image is taken from Anna’s header.

    Other people playing along:

    Frogpondsrock

    Fiona suggests Blag Hag

    Wanderlust

    Toni suggests Mid 30s Life


  • Welcome swallows and the readjustment of my eco-system

    When we bought this house in early 2008, we joked that it came with a ‘dead’ eco-system. The only spiders were redbacks, the only birds common farm varieties, the sparrow and the starling. Both pests and in plague proportions.

    We’ve been slowly and steadily building things up, hoping that we could address the imbalance without resorting to chemicals to kill the ‘bad’ spiders. We planted a garden, we reseeded the lawn, we had horses for 6 months and we’ve got poultry – at a steadily increasing number.

    All these things have worked to decrease the ‘bad’ bugs and spiders and restore a balance to the system. We haven’t seen a redback spider in a while, the huntsman spiders are increasing in number and we’ve got a few black house spiders hunting in various corners outside.

    The bugs appear to be a good mix of everything and the ducks and ducklings spend most of their time darting through the grass catching everything that flies. The chooks scratch out the beetles and grubs and my paddock has never looked so lush, with the grass desperately needing whippersnipping – it’s waist high in places.

    It took twelve months for the small garden to look any good – that was 12 months with the soil covered entirely in hay to promote moisture and growth. We’ve had good results with everything I’ve grown in there since.

    Obviously some parts of the paddock need work, my big garden in particular. I’m slowly building that up with potting mix, sheep poo and left over horse poo. Next time I see the farm manager I’ll corner him and ask for some more spoiled hay for the garden, if they’ve got any.

    One of the best things about having planted flowering shrubs and getting the whole cycle of things sorted out is that the native birds are coming back

    I saw a honey eater the other day and the welcome swallows are hanging around.

    Welcome swallows have to be one of my favourite birds. They are cheeky and let me get rather close with the camera. Not to mention flying around my head in circles when I’m out in the paddock, making me wonder if I’d accidentally fallen into a cartoon and hit my head.

    This current pair is looking for a new place to nest – they had attempted nesting in the old water tank, but all their nests have fallen off and broken. I’m not sure if it’s the mud they’re using, or the metal of the tank. Something isn’t working for them in any case.

    In amongst all the partially built and broken nests, I found an entire one. They had made it to the lining stage, before it fell off. No eggs lost though.

    It looks like they’re favouring my barbeque area as a nesting site, or that general area. Needless to say they’ve been flying in and around my kitchen windows, darting in and flying around Nathan’s head before flying out and assessing the situation.

    It’s been great to watch and I can’t help but be pleased that they are back. Not to mention, this isn’t the only pair. I counted 4 different pairs taking a bath in our puddle last week.

    Lovely.