Cheeky Soul Mamma

"a mothers worst nightmare comes to life when she answers the phone to hear “theres been an..."

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:07:42 -0500

“a mothers worst nightmare comes to life when she answers the phone to hear “theres been an accident…” and upon asking if her child is okay the answer is anything but yes. i was actually out with one of my friends when i got such a call. we made it to the scene before the ambulance left - his dad rode with. me… lets just say i lost my cool on the drunk driver who hit them and leave it at that. after being checked over he was admitted for “observation” for his injuries and woke up an insane amount of times to keep an eye on things - which i understand but left me with a very tired kiddo today. not that i’m complaining… i’m actually extremely grateful he was able to come home today. i think as things were my heart stopped the moment i heard the word accident. my little guy… he’d saw the car coming and thought he was going to die… and this frantically stressed out mom didn’t cry until her little boy turned to her and said “i didn’t get my hands closed to pray quick enough…” and then he apologized to me…
checking in with an online friend to let her know we were home and things were okay i was brought to tears by emails and messages - some from people i’ve never spoken to. little did i know that it was more than my friend and brother helping us through the night. kiddo read all your emails and messages too - he said to tell you all thank you, but he did turn to me and ask “who are all these people?” i simply told him amazing people with great hearts…
thank you all from the bottom of my heart - if i could hug you all i would. maybe someday…
for now i just want to spend some time squirreled away with my favorite little guy. i don’t need anything more for christmas than that. <3
merry christmas to each of you, thank you again for your kindness shown towards a little boy you don’t know.
xx”

- A Lyrical Mind: just a little note…

Making change at New Years...

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:05:48 -0500

Making change at New Years...:

Wishing you all a very happy end of year and beginning of the next. It’s been a busy time so instead of writing a half-arsed New Years message, I’ve found what might be a good article to share. Hope you like it, see you in 2012.

Seeing the Forest and the Trees Who says we need to choose?...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:10:34 -0400

Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Who says we need to choose? Somewhere along the way, there’s been a bit of a rumour that we need to make choices instead of being able to have it all. No offense to smallgoods, I reckon it’s baloney.

There is a way, if we apply a kind of organic principle to our days, that we can have cake and eat it too. I have commitments with work, family and study, and have had for several years, so I’m not just making this up.

The first thing I do is make sure I’m following my intuition - Steve Jobs had it right, your heart and your intuition somehow know what you want to become.

It’s Sunday morning, so I had a second whilst the troops are asleep (between formatting an assignment and making breakfast) to venture a little further afield and read a few blogs I don’t normally get the chance to read. I felt sad that there are so few people spruking this idea.

Most blogs will give you instructions and step by step things to do. Unfortunately, this usually just adds to my list of things to do and makes it longer - an opinion I know that is shared by Jeannett of Life Rearranged when she started using Simple Mom Tsh’s book ‘One Bite at a Time’. Simplicity needs to be well… how can I say it… simple, in order to work.

So here I am, at my computer, which sits neatly close to my kitchen and my washing machine at the sunny end of our house. I like to keep it all nearby so I can put on a load and cook a meal and write a blog in a circular kind of motion.

I’m not one for keeping it all separate and apart, I like to do a bit of this and a bit of that, somewhat like the way I plant vegetables. Let’s just say they’re not all in rows or sections, but rather all mish-mashed together so they can help each other thrive.

It’s like permaculture for mums - I model my life on how things naturally want to work. I try not to fight the natural way things happen, but go with it and work along with it as much as possible.

This helps me remember, I don’t have to choose. I can do bits and pieces of all of it and get where I’m going in time. This means I don’t shut off opportunities, and am present and available to my familiy while I study. Of course at exam time I go to the library, but most of the time I love to have this open-door way of working and being. It means I get to sit in the forest and look at the trees whenever I need to. It reminds me that I don’t have to choose one thing over another and create hierarchies of need all the time.

A tricky subject...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:05:00 -0400

Today I’m coming clean. It’s time to use the word often whispered in public, or even not spoken at all: miscarriage.

In the last post I shared some information about first trimester pregnancy. It was open and lucid and overflowing with joy about the upcoming gifts. And then, the very common, and almost disturbingly taboo subject of miscarriage, well… it happened.

This is a post I have waited more than a month to write because I don’t wish to judge those who choose not to discuss this. It is private, extremely private. Though one thing kept popping into my mind over the past few weeks. This information needs to be shared.

FIrst of all, let’s get the stats out of the way. Somewhere between 25% and 33% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (yep, that’s one in every three or four), and that’s just the ones we know about. Many go unreported. And although this is fairly common knowledge, when I awoke at five in the morning to cramps and light bleeding nobody seemed to be able to give me much information. We went to the emergency department at the local hospital and my partner and I were left in a room to let it run it’s course with very little support or assistance. In fact I have since found out we were lucky it was quiet or it could all have gone down in the waiting room.

There’s absolutely no blame here for the hospital, they are completely within their rights to put me in the order that triage dictates. I was at minimal risk of complication and there is absolutely nothing they could do except let it happen naturally. There’s no stopping something like this, your body is in control.

This does not however help the person, in this case me, who is experiencing the miscarriage. I was left in a room with a lot of misunderstanding and a massive lack of knowledge.

So that’s why I’m tackling the taboo and have decided to share some information for those who need it, hoping to help others. I’ve made a personal decision to talk about it as openly as I could muster, to help increase understanding around this subject.

Here are the things I did not know before that might have helped

1. There was quite a lot of pain, very much like contractions normally felt during delivery. I guess this makes sense if you think that the body is essentially doing the same thing.

2. There was quite a lot of bleeding, however this was not enough to confirm the miscarriage. After 6 hours at the hospital early Saturday morning and several heavy bouts of blood loss, no confirmation of the miscarriage could be given until an ultrasound was carried out on Monday morning.

3. Your emotional well being in an emergency room is pretty much up to you. If you are concerned that you are experiencing miscarriage and considering going to the hospital take someone strong and reassuring with you to help you get through it because the staff there are busy taking care of everyone’s body with very little time to act as psychologists or social workers.

4. I was extremely tired for about a week following and need a lot of rest and recuperation. It is worth getting some help from family and friends.

5. A great tip if you have told people about your pregnancy and don’t know how to tell them it’s no longer, is to ask a friend to let people know. I asked someone at work and a close friend at home to spread the word and it really helped a lot.

Most of all, this experience taught me to respect my body as a system that inherently knows what it needs to do. There was something wrong and despite all my best efforts, the pregnancy was not viable, not able to continue. As sad as that may be, in the long run it is undoubtedly the best thing for both the unborn baby and for us.

I hope that with love and with understanding people can experience this difficult process with greater knowledge and less shame. It is a perfectly natural thing, just ask anyone that has lived a long time and they will confirm it. Those oldies really know what’s going on. And as with most things that are hard to swallow, life somehow goes on regardless.

Once I started to talk about it, I was amazed at how many others had suffered in silence. I hope this post goes some small way towards keeping this conversation going, it’s an important one for women and men to have just in case we or someone we love might experience it.

After another week of early pregnancy, and another week of...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:07:00 -0400

After another week of early pregnancy, and another week of change and eating, sleeping and still being hungry and tired, I’m excited to start sharing the information as it comes to me along this well worn path.

At first I did the google search healthy pregnancy for over 35s. Mostly what I found were warnings of the risks of pregnancy for older women, and tips on how to become pregnant.

This is not what I was after, it was ways that we can positively nurture these wonderful little opportunity growing inside that I was seeking. What can we do to make the best of it?

Sure, I’m 39, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my early pregnancy living in a world of fear. We face the risks, head on, we do the tests, then we hope for the best and look after ourselves. And most of all we think positively as much as possible.

Telling the truth helps. I told my doctor I was worried and he gave me a wonderful list of things I can do:

~ avoid alcohol and coffee
~ take it easy
~ drink loads of water
~ take a multivitamin (I’m using Blackmores Gold)
~ take fish oil tablets (highly distilled is best so they don’t smell or taste queasy)
~ use natural products on your skin
~ use natural cleaning products, and
~ eat healthily, especially eat organic as much as possible.

So now, from here on, I give you insights, musings and information gathered on the ways you can encourage a healthy development of babies, at any age.

Please read on in the weeks to come and get in touch if you feel like it. Chances are there is more information on hand than I can share in these posts.

In love and health ~ your cheeky soul mamma.

24/7 on the frontline of humanity

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:28:32 -0400

Yes, it’s that time again when we use a quote by a famous person to start a discussion.

It was the Oprah Winfrey show (RIP) and Maria Shriver , the famous Kennedy-blooded, and Schwarzenegger-wedded first lady of California said “…motherhood - 24/7 on the front line of humanity”. And boy, was she right.

The other morning when I fell into rage at my son’s inability to get ready for school in time, I had a less than perfect moment and lost my temper. When I dropped him off, he looked so sad… and I felt so guilty. So I called another mum who told me she’d give him a hug and that I was normal, just as human as everyone else, and it was OK. I can’t tell you how much it helped.

Parenting, as any mother or father will happily tell you (usually in the long version) is one of the most challenging and rewarding roles we may have the great good fortune to experience. It is a role we may find ourselves in without enough preparation, or with too much. It is a part of so many people’s lives but is relatively rarely discussed just how personally challenging it can be to fulfill this place in a child or teen’s life.

I also feel like we all-too-often forget to acknowledge that there are so many kinds of parents in this bag all together (blood parents, foster parents, step parents and adopted parents to name just some).

Speaking with a girlfriend recently, it occurred to us to differentiate between the frustration we feel when our kids don’t listen to us because they’re not listening and the frustration we feel in the same situation, but caused by the fact we are not being heard in other areas of our lives. When is it a behavioural issue in our child, and when is it our own issue? How do we tell the difference?

Though there’s no single answer to these questions, communication always helps. Communicate with your children and teens when you need to, and most of all, communicate with each other.

Useful links
http://www.community.nsw.gov.au/parents_carers_and_families/parenting.html
http://www.naturalparenting.com.au/

Mothers - In Full Flight

Sun, 08 May 2011 06:32:00 -0400

It might be a long bow I’m pulling here, but I know there’s some pertinent truth in this too, mothers (and the people who support mothers) are so often the women we all count on to get things done. Just look at all the people who want to recruit mums because they know that women with kids can usually almost certainly multi task and can usually be relied on.

It was a while ago now, but the day I left home my mother wrote me a note that said at the end of it “..spread your wings and fly”. I’ll never forget it.

At the time it was with mixed feelings that I left home and I really didn’t appreciate what she meant with those words at all. The situation was not ideal, but it was time for me to go and learn to be independent.

And sure enough, that’s what happened. Now I’m a single mother with a 7 year old boy, and thank goodness I’ve had enough strength and self sufficiency from earlier experience to be able to do it, and still retain my sanity.

Not without help, let’s be really clear on that. It really is as the cliche goes, it takes a village to raise a child. In my village I have incredibly supportive friends and family, and more recently even a new partner. For this, my gratitude is unending, so of course I do all I can to support all of these people too.

Today was mother’s day where we live. I made a wonderful grilled cornbread with tomato salsa recipe which fed us all day. During this most lavish of brunches my mother and I mused at how it was she and I who had made the food.

And this was done with love, for our family. We do this because we did learn to fly when we left our nests. We do these because we love to love our children and feeding them good food still gives us a buzz.

So to all the mothers out there who are single, or not, or who cook, or who don’t, whatever your flavour of flight is, enjoy it. Spread your wings and fly through life. You never know when that sense of freedom to be who we are in whatever form will rub off on those around us, or even possibly our kids.

It’s family holiday time for our little clan. And this...

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:45:00 -0400

It’s family holiday time for our little clan. And this time we’ve decided a trip overseas is a good idea. The boy wonder is seven and ready for an adventure that he may even remember in the future, so we’ve gone to Bali, Indonesia for a couple of weeks.

The island of Bali is 75% Hindu in a country that is mainly Muslim, but also a mixture of other creeds including Buddhism and Christianity. It is an incredibly welcoming place Bali, and not only because so much of thie economy is based on tourism. It is also a real mixture of old and new. The international visitors bring so much global culture and products, yet last night our Balinese host was telling us that one of the people working at our villa had eloped with his woman to marry because she was of a higher caste. The beauty of it was that he said her parents wouldn’t speak to her for maybe a couple of weeks, but then they would forgive her and it would be alright. He told us he himself had married a woman of a higher caste and it had worked out just fine.

While we are here I have been doing my best to parent the newly independent little man that is my son with relaxed ease. Mostly it has worked. Where it gets interesting is when he throws that encouragement I’ve been giving him to be more independent back at me. Example: I might almost instincively go to help him get his head through the neck of a tight shirt and he’ll get really cross and say “no mummy, I can do it myself!!”.

Another mother-moment has been occurring as we eat around a table with not only new food on it, but also seating my mother, my brother, his girlfriend and my sister. I’ve found a wonderful way of helping my son’s eating habits expand through Eve Reed at Family Food Works in Sydney (they have a great newsletter too if you feel like subscribing). With her years of experience in kids nutrition, she has given me some very simple methods to allow my boy to eat healthily and regularly. We are a family of fussy eaters you see, so that advice is golden to me. However changing my habits is one thing, changing my whole family’s is another. I’ve been managing to ask and explain and continue to assist my boy in adapting to the food here without drama. I’ve had to be a little staunch with my family to break some old patterns here and there, but that’s being a parent I suppose.

It has been a wonderful holiday so far, I’ve been monitoring the amount of junky tourist gifts that the boy can buy, I’ve been breaking family patterns in how to raise healthy eaters in a gentle and loving way, and I’m also having a great time. As a first trip overseas, as a single mum with her son, it’s been amazing.

And best of all, I promised my boy I’d bring him here, so with a bit of saving and great support from those around me… here we are. The value of a promise fulfilled to a child is unquantifiable. His confidence and joy are priceless.

If you have any questions about travelling in Bali, leave a comment, I reply to each one.

Simple moments

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:53:00 -0400

Some moments are most inspired and complex precisely because they are so simple.

Take for example hanging up your child’s freshly washed clothes in the backyard on a clear autumn night. There’s a multitude of twinkly little stars in the sky, the sounds of the neighborhood all around (be it buses passing, people walking by, or just silence) and the intoxicating smell of clean washing blowing by.

This is the kind of moment that reminds me how simple it is to feel happiness from just what we have. Not the kind of happiness we feel on birthdays or anniversaries - although this is still totally valid of course. This is the kind of happiness that sneaks up on you unexpectedly. This is the kind of happiness a little girl feels when her Daddy helps her down from a high place, or the kind a little boy feels when Mummy helps him spell something. This is the kind of happiness we have available to us everyday if we choose to tune into it.

So without waxing lyrical and over-complexifying these beautifully simple things… here’s to the basics. Here’s to the wry smile you find on your face accidentally. Here’s to the suddenly lovely moments that might take us by surprise if we let ourselves love what we already have. Here’s to our simple charms and little loves.

It’s love time! It’s love-o-clock! Need a clock,...

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:02:38 -0400

It’s love time!
It’s love-o-clock!
Need a clock, well show this clock some love.

Kickstarter - Costa Rican feature film: The Return

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:07:20 -0500

Kickstarter - Costa Rican feature film: The Return

Digging this song today, absolute quality…Aeroplane - We...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:19:02 -0500

Digging this song today, absolute quality…
Aeroplane - We Can’t Fly (Full Version) (via scraatching)

Eden Seeds Autumn planting list, a very good resource for anyone...

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:29:00 -0500

Eden Seeds Autumn planting list, a very good resource for anyone who gardens or wants to buy a present for a gardener as the weather grows cooler.

black-and-white: (by Bill Jewitt)

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:40:08 -0500

black-and-white:

(by Bill Jewitt)

Sustainability Street, gettin’ all villager on yo ass....

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:17:05 -0500

Sustainability Street, gettin’ all villager on yo ass. This is a fantastic and very accessible resource on how to get active and get local, right here, right now, at your place.

The Gradual Demise of Phillipa Finch /HeartWorks

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:10:00 -0500

The Gradual Demise of Phillipa Finch /HeartWorks:

Such a very clever lady our Emma Magenta. Just look what she’s done now. The Gradual Demise of Phillipa Finch is a beautiful project employing the web with all its interactivity and allows user interaction which will lead to a real life exhibition. She belongs well and truly in the Lolly Bag for Valentines Day. Happy love day to one and all.

The $300 House: A Hands-On Lab for Reverse Innovation? - Vijay Govindarajan - Harvard Business Review

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:02:26 -0500

The $300 House: A Hands-On Lab for Reverse Innovation? - Vijay Govindarajan - Harvard Business Review:

This idea has not just legs, but walls and roofs for the poor as well.

mind your peas & queue | house of lovers

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:01:08 -0500

mind your peas & queue | house of lovers:

In this entry Cathoel Jorss mentions how there are some simple ways to view what’s going on in our micro-worlds. Surprise, the way we live affects the way we live, it’s almost Escher in action.

Giant Grass Design. Fantastic bamboo construction specialists....

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:41:52 -0500

Giant Grass Design. Fantastic bamboo construction specialists.

http://www.giantgrassdesign.com/

jolly rancher… mmm lolly bag

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:13:53 -0500

jolly rancher… mmm lolly bag