Every Mummy needs a Tribe

One of the most vital things for a new Mummy is a good support base.
I have found through both of my pregnancies and babies that my best support is my beloved Mum, she is the first person I call with any question, a never ending source of comfort, support and information.
But aside from my own mummy I found myself lacking in people around me who were… ‘baby friendly’.
We were young to start having kids, most of our friends are not only childless, but aren’t committed and a lot of them still live with their parents… not us, we were busy buying houses and growing small people.

Through my pregnancy with Miss L I found a group online to chat to and share all the ups and downs and I really enjoyed their support, unfortunately as our babies were born and grew up a lot of us stopped posting on a regular basis and the group sort of dissolved long before the babies were 1 year old.
When I fell pregnant with JJ I found myself in a similar situation, still not a lot of friends with babies or even contemplating babies and so I turned to the same website and found a new group… but this group was different, there is something special about this group of women.
We had some teething issues as we left the original forum and turned to a facebook group to make it more personal  but from there we have flourished for nearly 2 years, we have talked about babies, breastfeeding, religion, sex, what we are having for dinner, almost anything you can think of has been discussed. We have shared jokes, shared history’s, laughed together, cried together and for the first time recently fought with each other.

We have ‘fringers’ who come and go and only post every now and then and we have the ‘core’ of the group which is a group of us who post regularly (usually multiple times a day). Within this group of ladies we have shared our deepest darkest secrets and most disturbing pregnancy and post-pregnancy symptoms… things we would never tell our closest ‘real life’ friends.
We do Kris-Kringles for birthdays, we cheer on the side lines for the good things and are an endless source of love and support during the hard times.

We are now seeing some of our members become pregnant again and we all have a sense of these babies being celebrated by the tribe as a whole, being there for every morning sickness vomit story, every scan, every kick and, in time, every contraction.

We are from all over the country (and even one in another country), we are of all ages, some of us have met, some of us have travelled inter-state to meet and all of us are planning a weekend to meet in the near future, but whether or not we have met isn’t important, I know I don’t have to meet these women to know that I can count on them to be there whenever I need them and I can count them among my closest friends, they know more about me and my kids then most people I have ever met face to face.
It takes a special group of women to come together as we have and share the love and support that we share. The laughs are never ending and the tears probably too often flowing (for the good and the bad), but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We very aptly refer to our group as a tribe, and that is what we are.
We have become a tribe of the 21st century, just like way back when all babies were raised by a community or a tribe (and still are in many countries), as are ours. The advice is endless when it is sought after and it is so reassuring to be able to see what so many other babies are up to in comparison to your own (because although all those ‘experts’ say you shouldn’t compare, we always do!).

We have had new members join and original members leave, but our numbers are still strong and I think it’s fair to say the core of us will never truly leave. We have made friends for life by bonding through the most amazing thing a woman can go through, having a baby.

I wish it was possible for every new mother to accidentally stumble across their own Mummy Tribe in the way I did because my experience as a mother has been and will continue to be richer for their involvement.

A Very Hungry Caterpillar Party

My gorgeous little man has turned 1.

It is a very exciting and terribly sad day when your baby turns 1, and more or less stops being a ‘baby’ and starts being a toddler.
It is a point of celebration that you survived the year of sleep deprivation, sea of dirty nappies, being peed, poop’d and puked on and more importantly that you have proved yourself to be a competent enough parent to have kept your child safe and healthy for that time.

And what’s a celebration without a party?
I love to throw a good party, The Captain and I had a huge engagement party, and a big wedding. Miss L’s first and second brithdays were both pretty big affairs and so it was only fitting to throw a big bash for JJ’s big day and luckily enough his very first birthday even fell on a Saturday.

I decided for the first time to go with a proper theme, so starting with the invites, all the way through the cake, lolly bag, table cloths napkins and of course the little man’s outfit this was a very hungry caterpillar party!

I set out to make a piñata, which turned out really cool but was by far more work then I ever remember doing in primary school when I paper mache ‘d, none the less the end result was great and I was definitely a bit bummed that the kids then got to bash it to pieces… I did make it a bit thick though which meant it was a bit of a work out for the kids to get through it, but you tell a group of kids that there are lollies inside something they will never run out of energy to attempt to break that thing open!

In an attempt to encourage the kids to opt for some of the healthier food on offer I made up a ‘Very hungry caterpillar” fruit platter… I did all the fruits that he ate through on the first five days, the only exception being I used watermelon instead of plums (partly because plums aren’t in season at the moment but mostly because watermelon is always the favourite among the kids), I made up two of these in the hope that the fruit would be popular with the kids and turns out it was! I had big plans to poke holes through all the pieces of fruit, but when I thought about how long that would take me and how unlikely the young children attending the party would even notice it I didn’t bother.

Healthy food aside, at any party there must be cake!
I love baking… I love it all the more since I got my KitchenAid Artisan Mixer for Christmas last year and when I saw a photo online of a cupcake caterpillar I knew that was exactly what I wanted to make for JJ.
Given the amount of people coming to the party I decided to make 50 cupcakes, for a job of this size I called in reinforcements in the form of a lovely girlfriend of mine who donated her whole Friday and her cupcake icing skills to help me out.
So we wound up with 50 vanilla cupcakes with green buttercream icing (although with 2 little girls in the house and a hungry Captain around I don’t think all 50 quite made it onto the cake board!) and one “head” cake which I chose to make a marble cake (Chocolate, strawberry and vanilla) tinting it green and red to match the colour scheme, with the finishing touches of jelly bean eyes and liquorice mouth, antenna and legs added on the morning of the party, I am really happy with how it turned out and got lots of compliments from guests too!

Inside of the head cake

So it was a lot of work (as any good party always is), but everyone had a great day and most importantly JJ seemed to have a ball, he even had fun smacking at the pinata with me (although unfairly he got none of the lollies inside). He got absolutely spoilt with presents of toys and other goodies, but even more so (and even more importantly) with love and cuddles from all our family and friends!
I was also planning on a bit of a cake smash with one of the cupcakes for him, but rather then smash he (very uncharacteristically) gentle prodded at the icing on the top and pulled tiny pieces off the cupcake until I finally broke it for him and then he devoured most of it in just a few bites.

I don’t have a photo of it handy, but I will add a pic later of JJ’s special hungry caterpillar pants, singlet and bib, they were gorgeous and purchased through ‘made it’ from some very lovely work from home mum businesses!

 

Not the teaspoons!!

Female politics…. probably better referred to as drama!
I have already confessed that I am a bit of a drama addict, but I don’t feel that it’s a confession that I really need to make. I think as a general rule it can be safely assumed that any person walking around with boobs and a va-jay-jay is addicted to drama, loves drama, thrives off of drama and is oh-so-good at creating drama where really drama needn’t occur.

My best example of this is a ‘debacle’ we are currently in the midst of at Playgroup regarding the disappearance of our teaspoons.

Now here is how I imagine this would go down if Playgroup was attended and run solely by men (indulge me a little here because realistically we know that men probably wouldn’t even bother to make themselves a cup of coffee to begin with and so this would be even more of a none issue):

Man 1 opens the drawer “shit… there aren’t any teaspoons left”
Man 2 “huh…. we better get some more I guess”
End of story.

But in woman land this is a major issue.
Not only do we make coffee all the time and so realise very quickly that the teaspoons are gone, but we have pro-actively labelled all the teaspoons in our drawer so that should they go walk-about within the center (we share the center with a childcare facility) we can easily track down exactly where they went.
So when they do go missing the conversation is a little more like this:

Woman 1: “There are no bloody teaspoons left!”
Woman 2: “WHAT? Who stole our teaspoons?!”
Woman 1: “I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out, we put stickers on every last one of them!”
Woman 2: “Right, I’ll be back”
*Storms up to childcare kitchen*
Woman 2: “Hey, have you guys taken all our teaspoons?”
Childcare Chef: “I dunno… probably, check the drawer”
Woman 2 “AHA! See, these have our stickers on them!”
Childcare Chef: “Oh sorry”
*back to playgroup kitchen*
All playgroup attendees now bitch for the remainder of the session about bloody childcare people stealing our clearly labelled teaspoons.

Issue to be raised at next meeting: Childcare keep stealing our teaspoons!!

It is beyond ridiculous that teaspoons, I can pretty safely say accidentally, going missing to another kitchen in the center is such a big deal and only in Woman-land could this be turned in a heinous act by the childcare staff to somehow sabotage our right to coffee… when it is much more likely that the new staff that have recently joined the center simply do not know that we have our own specific teaspoons which are not under any circumstances to find their way into the child care’s kitchen!

I think the first agenda item at the next committee meeting may be to issue chill pills to all mothers in attendance.

*The conversations in this story may have been altered slightly for dramatic effect 😛

Tanta-rama!

JJ surprised me this week with a major developmental milestone… his first ever full blown, no holds bar, screeching, screaming, crying, yelling, kicking, flailing about tantrum.
It came about because he was playing in the sand with Miss L and he wanted the bucket that she was playing with and then the spade that she was playing with and when he didn’t get either all hell broke loose.
I attempted the replacement – ‘here JJ try this spade, it’s nearly identical to that one’… nope
I attempted the distraction – ‘wouldn’t you much rather have Mummy push you around on this cool trike?!’… definitely not…
The only thing left to do was ignore him or pick him up and cuddle him so tight he could hardly move and wait for it to pass… I went for option B and given that JJ isn’t the easiest baby to hold at the best of times this may not have been the wisest choice, but it passed surprisingly quickly.
It was enough though, to stop me dead in my tracks and start the internal freakout!

Miss L has never really been a tantrum child… don’t get me wrong, she knows how to crack it with the best of them but regular tantrums have never been her thing.
She has a hilarious grunt that she does while she comically stamps her foot when she is really, really cross about something. Which generally winds up in her being even madder then she was originally because I almost always start laughing when she does it, (it’s nearly impossible not to!) and that is clearly not the desired affect.
She will never fail to cry when she doesn’t get her way (like any 2 and a half year old), but never really throws those full on tantrums where they can’t communicate, listen or respond to anything you do or say.

I’m not going to pretend that I have never passed judgement on those poor parents with an out of control tanty throwing child in the middle of the shopping center, because if I did you would know I was full of it… just the same as if you tried to tell me that you hadn’t I would know you were full of it.
Mostly because before you have kids you have no concept what so ever of what it takes day in and day out to raise those kids, to look after those kids, to love those beautiful kids and to take endless shit from those kids, and this is when you judge.. well before you are even close to being in their shoes you think to yourself, ‘crikey! get control of your child!’ or something along those lines.
It is damn hard work to figure out the best way to deal with their bad behaviour while they are testing every boundary you put down for them and even the ones that you don’t.

JJ has backed up his first ever tantrum with several more all in the space of a couple of days, I am hoping against hope that this is some kind of developmental stage that with the right guidance he will pass through very quickly… now if only I could figure out what the ‘right’ guidance is!
At this point in a desperate attempt to not be that ‘poor parent’ in the confectionary isle or the toy shop accompanying the child rolling around the floor, screaming uncontrollably and kicking towards anything near them that moves, copping judgement from every man, woman and animal in hearing distance I am consulting all my favourite baby books (oh yes, there are a multitude of these) and of course my good friend google!

What  I have discovered so far is that tantrums can be the result of genetic make up, in particular stubbornness is a contributor (we can thank The Captain and his lineage for this… but that is a whole other post in itself!), that 1 year old is incredibly young (but not unheard of) for tantrums to start and basically that I should be very afraid because once full blown temper tantrums set in, there ain’t much you can do to stop them… minimise yes… stop them apparently not-so-much. It will be my life’s mission in the coming months to prove this wrong and stop JJ’s temper tantrums early.
I’m sure this won’t be the last you hear about my journey to stopping the tantrums…. first stop… “I’m ignoring you town”…. wish me luck!

 

Love to hear if you have any anti-tantrum tips to share?

 

Cluck Cluck Clucky

I find ‘being clucky’ to be a very strange phenomenon.
Some people view it as something that can be turned on or off and others like myself know that when you feel that deep seeded need for a child that there is no of button for that.
I think it depends on the ‘kind’ of clucky you are…
For some of us women (and sometime men) being clucky is a distant feeling of wanting children, not so much a need them but an awareness of our biological clock ticking away and that feeling that you are kind of obligated to have kids (or this is how it’s been explained to me by others). For some it is a small voice in their back of their head that says just one more baby might be a nice addition to the family.
For others (including myself) feeling clucky can be much better described as an overwhelming desire to have a baby. It can be all consuming and very emotional, not at all rational and should your partner not be on the same page as you it can be very damaging to a relationship.

I am fairly confident that I can say I am done having babies, the clucky urge in me has been suppressed by the birth of two beautiful babies. I’m not usually one to say never, but after a combined 36 weeks of morning sickness so severe that I had to be medicated and at one point hospitalised and 62 hours of labour, one natural birth and one Caesarian I really feel like my body is done creating new people. Not that I think these are the reasons I am done, just a large contributing factor… I think emotionally and mentally I have always prepared for 2 kids and the fact that I have been lucky enough to have one boy and one girl probably also contributes to the feeling of completeness (is that a word?) I have in my family now. There are no clucky vibes lingering here.

However I was speaking yesterday to a friend of mine who has two beautiful boys the same ages as my two and she is clucky all over again (not specifically for a girl either mind you, just for a baby, she even loves the idea of 3 boys… I know I think she is a little crazy too!), and clucky in that all consuming, very emotionally charged way. The problem is… her husband is not even remotely clucky and they have always agreed on 2 children.

So what happens when you come to this kind of head in a relationship, when your ideals for the future change. I imagine that it’s a very difficult thing to overcome… if The Captain had of told me no when I was clucky for either of our children it may well have been a deal breaker for me, mostly because as I mentioned above being clucky like that is in no way rational and it is a very highly emotionally charged way to be.
My lovely friend is hoping the feeling will subside in time and I hope for her sake that it does (or that hubby comes around), however in my experience I don’t think that it’s a feeling that ever really vanishes… fades with time perhaps as your realism about being a much older mum sets in and eventually having more babies isn’t really an option anymore.

The unfortunate outcome is probably a much less happy marriage then you had before.
Should you go ahead and have the baby you wind up with an unhappy husband who feels like he had settled on a future that both of you agreed to long ago and is now being pressured to alter those plans in a big way.
But should the baby be decided against the outcome is an unhappy wife who has this eternal urning for a baby which will never be fulfilled because of what she thought she wanted before the deep primal urge for a child reared it’s ugly head for a third time.
No matter who ‘wins’ in this situation everybody loses because a man will never be able to understand just how powerful the need for a baby can be in a woman and just how miserable a woman can become should this need not be met, but by the same token a man cannot be blamed for wanting to stick to a life plan decided on long ago.

Unless of course I am wrong and given a little time the cluckiness disappears to leave the original happily ever after story in tact… this is one of the rare occassions that I do hope I am wrong. Because I hate to think of any women in the kind of emotional turmoil that being clucky with no baby on the horizon brings.

What do you think? Is clucky a state of mind/emotion that can go away or is it something that can only be alleviated by fulfilling the need for a child?

Cleaning out the Junk Box

I have taken on a challenge, 20 days to organise and clean your home, put forward by ‘The Organised Housewife‘. My first stumbling block was the development of a morning routine… I have always been a morning person, until I had kids and then the morning became this sacred time where I might sneak in a few more minutes sleep before they come and wake me up or start crying and pull me out of bed to get them.

So when Katrina suggested as a precursor to the challenge to get a morning routine happening, I thought hey that is a fantastic idea… but a week on the only morning routine that has developed is Miss L (who use to sleep 7pm-7am) waking at 5am and calling me into her room because she is cold and can’t be bothered to pull her own blankets up!
I will try harder as of Monday and attempt a morning that resembles a routine… who know’s maybe I will even managed to be organised enough to make The Captains lunch for him before he leaves for work!

I am very much enjoying the 20 day challenge though.. I find the biggest issue I have with decluttering and cleaning my house is that I can’t decide where to start and when I finally do decide where to start I find things there that belong else where, go to put them back and then get side tracked tidying up that area and never end up finishing the task I set out to achieve in the first place. So the lists and specific tasks approach to the 20 day challenge have been great in keeping me focused.

When it came to the laundry I got a bit carried away though and strayed from the list of tasks because as I was in there wiping things down and I realised that I didn’t need to do one of the tasks on the list (decluttering my laundry pile, I already have 3 laundry baskets to separate colours, whites and darks – although after seeing a picture on Katrina’s blog I have changed to a similar set up with a standing set of wire baskets which looks heaps better and takes up a lot less space!) I stumbled upon our “junk box”.

We always had a junk drawer when I was growing up, which was just a drawer in the kitchen that was full of things that didn’t belong any where else (key rings, bottle openers, elastic bands, batteries, and other assorted goodies). And it’s funny how you tend to layout your kitchen drawers how your mum (or dad) organised them when you were little, but in my kitchen we only have the big double drawers and I couldn’t dedicate a whole draw to miscellaneous crap, so instead I bought a cheap crappy picnic basket to keep our cheap crappy odds and ends in and it lives in the laundry cupboard.. it’s been about 18 months since I put it in there…. and about 18 months since I last opened it!

I did consider dumping the whole thing in the bin since we obviously don’t use anything in there, but curiosity got the better of me and I had to see what it was that I had deemed crap enough to banish to the junk box but not quite shit enough to throw away… and here it is

I am glad that curiosity won because there was some very interesting finds in there, including

• my childhood tamagotchi…ok that’s a lie.. I was actually an adult when I bought that particular tamagotchi, if I remember correctly it was a good way to show The Captain that I was totally capable to look after a pet before we got Buddy (pretty sure the first one died after a few days.. on the upside 4 years on Buddy is still thriving!);
• my old Nokia mobile phone and the awesome case that went with it that spelt out light messages when you waved it back and forth like a crazy person;
• my engagement ring box
• a hackie sack (I think these were cool at some point in high school… )
• Two forever bear key rings that The Captain gave me when were first started going out and a troll doll keyring
• Two disposable camera’s (man they must have been around for a while!)

And obviously a lot of other random junk…
I am happy to say that a good half of it went into the bin, I now have a troll doll on my keys and I will be taking one of the disposable cameras to my cousins wedding on the weekend!

Go the f*ck to sleep!

It’s been a long day… we walked to and from playgroup today (4 and a bit kms each way), and I thought I had it all planned out… JJ will have his morning sleep on the way there and his afternoon sleep on the way back. But he was all too eager to let me know when we got home and he woke up the second the pram stopped moving that this was definitely not enough sleep (cue screaming baby until dinner time).
So my afternoon has been filled with a screaming baby and a very cranky toddler who wants Mummy to play dollies or doctors or blocks or anything that doesn’t involve the screaming baby that seems to be stuck to Mummy’s hip!
When I finally settled the two of them down enough for dinner they decided they would spend that time practicing blowing raspberries at each other with their mouths full!
As soon as the Captain walked in the door I put him on kiddy duty, I think the last of my patience evaporated right around the time that Miss L intentionally tipped her bowl of rice into her lap.
So while they got bathed I frantically ran around and got dishes done and cleaned up rice… with bottles and milk cups prepped 7pm couldn’t come soon enough, but I should have known it was going to be one of those nights…
JJ went down without a squeaked, but Miss L has been calling out and up and down for the last hour and the best I can do to bring a smile to my face and remind me that I am far from the only parent trying to get a toddler to “Go the fuck to sleep!” right now is to watch Noni and enjoy my own soothing Play School story for the day…