Broken

We had a night of wild wind recently and when I went outside the following morning I discovered our driveway gate had broken. One shoddy hinge had sheered off a shoddy post. No surprise - it's shoddiness comes from partly from being old and mainly from being poorly made.

My bigger concern was that my dogs had escaped. My fear was misplaced, however. The poor old body of the elder one, Razz - the escape ringleader - was also broken. She could only manage a couple of steps and her back legs would collapse.

She was 12 years old and arthritis had been creeping up. But it seems something had happened overnight that suddenly resulted in nerve damage and severe pain. So we had to say goodbye.

And we went to bed that night with our hearts broken. 

She was my first baby, so to speak.

She had to be involved in whatever you were doing. 

She loved being on holidays.

Hanging with the toddler (in the last photo
I ever took of her).

Just imagine...

Image from www.thenomonworkshop.com

Children are simultaneously a source of great inspiration, and an impediment to, creativity.

I'm currently doing a part-time graphic design course. The tutors - obviously - encourage us to pursue creative past times. Doing so is also recommended by the primal living guy.

Both say its good for the mind and soul. That it doesn't really matter about the quality of what you produce. The process is the point. Devote enough energy to the process and, more importantly, have enough fun with it, and the results will take care of themselves.

My current lifestyle allows ample opportunity for creativity, at some level. My 'job' involves lots of mindless tasks during which my head is free to turn over ideas. And there's Rosie herself, of course. Her laugh, the tiny curls at the back of her head, the light resting on her round cheeks, little hands and feet in action - it all has me longing to capture every fragment that is the beauty and joy of child and childhood.

Yet whenever I sit and attempt to commit these concepts to paper or pixel, it is invariably that moment in which she climbs on the couch and falls off/gets stuck under a chair/gets a little too affectionate with the cat/has a meltdown because some toy or random object won't do as she wishes ... You get the picture. 

And I remember it's not just about chasing my own creative genius (ha!) but being a mummy who comes to the rescue. Who soothes that precious little soul so it can dust itself off, jump back up and once again follow where imagination leads. 

Imagination at work in recent weeks.

Going bush and facebook shame

Those of you who see my facebook feed may have noticed a recent status update - about camping - with no punctuation and no capital letters. None, I tell you! How embarrassment.

This is because I committed the cardinal sin of fiddling around on my facebook page, getting distracted (I'd like to blame the toddler but it more likely was the fact that my coffee was ready, or the mail was delivered) and leaving it open without logging off. My husband (who never met a rule of the English language he couldn't disregard) came along, assumed it was his page, and posted the offending update.

Now, he never logs out of his facebook page, which has me constantly shaking my head. I've 'liked' any number of things - mummy blogs, nappy sites, feminist writers etc - on his behalf, thinking I was logged in. But this time it was the other way around. Thank god he put up something so innocuous - though omitting full stops remains a grave offence, in my book.

Typing and facebook felonies aside, we did indeed have a 'good camping trip out to the block'.

To clarify, 'the block' is a parcel of land less than an hour from home on which we have a prospecting lease. I don't go much for the prospecting, but I do appreciate having somewhere peaceful to escape to for short camping trips, or even shorter day visits. It's not an actual camping site, just a patch of bush, so we don't have to share it with anyone.

I've always loved camping. And since reading up on this primal lifestyle thing I'm an even bigger fan. Turns out being out in the fresh air, away from crowds, being in sync with the sun, getting a bit dirty, staring into a fire, all the usual camping business, is how we're designed to live.

While out there Paul, the prospector, obviously did some prospecting. In his slippers. Including a stint on the edge of a dam:

This is why, despite repeated requests to do so, I did not buy him a pair of uggs of pure wool and costing upwards of $150. I knew something like this would be their fate and the $12 Kmart jobs were the best option.

He also did a bit on dry land with his 'helper'.

Who also helped with the sieving of product.

We saw a rainbow. And an echidna, emus and a baby goanna that popped out of a log once it was on the fire. Luckily it didn't fall into the flames, and the Prospector got it to safety.
Then we came home and I revelled in my flushing toilet and comfy bed. This is the 21st century, after all.

Doing it for me

There’s been very little activity here lately. Obviously. I’m hoping to change that. Well, a little, at least. Because I’ve kind of been missing blogging. Not all of it – some elements of blogging I feel like I ‘should’ do can become a downright chore. And, hey, I don’t have the world’s most fascinating life, so topics can be hard to come by. But the actual writing bit, I love.

Image from www.escapenormal.com

So, my plan (as it stands today, anyway):
1. Take a leaf out of the slow blogging book. I only just heard about this, and basically it means uploading the odd post now and then. Not caring about how relevant your timing is to current events. It also means taking time to create thoughtful, well-considered posts. Ha! Think I’ll skip that bit. I’m not that bloody dedicated. If I’ve actually managed to write something, it’ll get a review or two and posted.
2. Write about what interests me. Which is myself, basically. What I do. Where I go. What I think about. Clearly this means my posts are likely to be rather mundane. Dull, even.
3. To elaborate on point 2, my topics will probably consist of:
* My daily life. Bet you're dying to read all about that.
* Rosie. Of course. Naturally, these ones won't be in the least bit dull, not even for readers completely uninterested in new teeth, nappies, breastfeeding and so on.
* Some work I do as part of my graphic design course. Figure I may as well include it.
* My move to a simpler, more – as described by its proponents - primal life. This was prompted by the enormous sense of calm I felt when I left full-time work and my days followed the rhythm of a baby. But then life got busy and draining again (not that I’ve returned to full-time work. Or much work at all) and I started looking into ways of reclaiming that sense of physical, mental and emotional wellbeing and vitality.
The first step was deciding to quit eating sugar. And led to adopting what is called The Primal Blueprint (and Primal Connection). The most tangible way of practising this is through food and exercise, but there is much, much more to it. So you, lucky readers, will get the chance to hear all about what I eat, my strolls through the countryside, and various attempts to live ‘in the moment’. Again, bet you can’t wait.

Working it

I have a new 'workspace'. Behold:

One where the toddler cannot grasp any number of cords and play giddy-up with them. Or pull down the flap on the printer, stash away some food, and retrieve it several hours later. 
The old set-up had been cramped for a while. And I kind of said in a workspace safety audit review I did earlier in the year as part of my graphic design course, that I'd purchased a new cabinet that meant operating the printer (which had been basically at floor level) was now ergonomic. 
It was the first piece of flat pack furniture I've assembled myself. Being married to a fitter means I'm generally relegated to unfolding the instructions, which never get read, passing tools/screws/'the f***en top bit' and bearing audio witness to streams of obscenities flat pack projects inevitably elicit. 
Granted, the table needed a bit of expert touching-up once the fitter arrived home. Gratifyingly, he resorted to power tools for the adjustments. 
All in all, I'm happy with the result. Of course it remains to be seen whether it leads to any increase in the amount of work actually done.

Has this breastfeeding 'debate' been overblown?

I've been living half under a rock lately and have only caught glimpses of the apparently raging debate about public breastfeeding on social media (Twitter, Facebook and a couple of blogs). 
I suspect it's been overblown. 
Women who are tired of a lack of support for breastfeeding, including doing so in public, have answered back at their perceived critics. 
Which is like waving a red flag at a media that seems forever itching to paint women as irrational and reactionary shrews, always with a bee in our bonnets over something. And bingo, a war of words is born. 
So I'm going to add some of my words to the war.
* I breastfeed in public and while have had a few awkward moments, have never been stigmatised. For which I'm grateful. I've even nursed at the local pool and no one batted an eye, as far as I could tell. 
* However should anyone feel offended by me doing so, tough luck. You don't like it, look away. 
* Breastfeeding is an inherently discreet exercise. After a brief and essentially unavoidable flash of skin the baby's head covers any 'scary' bits. I don't dispute claims some mothers flaunt themselves but really cannot believe this happens much at all, let alone at alarming levels. I've never seen it. 
* Having said all that, these days I often do go somewhere private to feed. Not because I'm uncomfortable, but because it doesn't take long for babies to become enormous stickybeaks. My daughter has the sense - unlike some in the community, it seems - to realise there are far more interesting things to look at than my boobs, and so we find a place where she can focus on the job at hand. 

If people are uncomfortable with mothers breastfeeding in public, fair enough. They probably can't help it. But they need to learn to live with it. And asking us to 'calm down, all we want is for you to be discreet' is unfair because it implies we are irrational (which we aren't) and that we are deliberately indiscreet (which, in my experience, we aren't). 

Who wears short shorts? I do, provided no one sees me

God bless Coolgardie and its bush tracks. I've posted a couple of times about why I love living in this little town (here and here). But I also love how you can go for a walk along the edge of town and not see anyone. Or, more importantly, have no one see you. 
This is particularly handy when I look a right fright because I am wearing either 
A) ill-fitting shorts from not just the pre-baby age, but way back from the pre-65kg+ Emma era; or
B) baby vomit, and very likely also some kind of kitchen leftovers, be it last night's dinner or baking mess; or
C) panda eyes. Mascara doesn't come off very well when all you tackle it with is a quick scrub in the shower; or 
D) some combination of a, b and c. 
It also means my dogs can poop in the bush and I don't have to worry about anyone frowning at me, or cleaning it from my back yard. (Please don't mention this to council.)

Not my actual lower half. In fact,
I don't think this lower half even
belongs to a human.
Image source.

My actual lower half.

But should anyone see you, one thing you must not do is refuse to wave. Chances are you know each other, and if you don't wave they'll probably think you're a snooty cow. They won't realise you're hiding your head in shame and pretending you haven't been caught wearing shorts that should have last seen the light of day when Kevin Rudd was in charge of the ALP. 
As you can tell, it's all glamour out here. Just the way I like it. 

Is finding exercise gear that is comfortable and suitable for public consumption tricky for you too? Or do you look like you've just stepped out of a Lorna Jane ad?

Update: Summer has forced me to fork out for membership at the local air conditioned gym. As im more likely to encounter others there I invested in some longer though not much more flattering shorts. I decided if I scare anyone they'll just have to live with it.  

Linking up with Jess from Essentially Jess for I Blog on Tuesdays. Thanks Jess.