who's your daddy?

Mum, why are your legs so stickly?

'Cos I shaved the hair off, and now it's growing back a bit prickly.

Why'd you shave your legs Mum?

Otherwise I'd have hairy legs like your Dad.

Well you've also got a hairy fanny like Dad's, Mum.

****

Bye bye September, that's all I've got for you.

bundt envy

'Twas the weekend for it so I made this delicious cake from the fabulous gibberlicious blog.
I couldn't be less of a vegetarian but I'm a big veggie fan and have been greatly inspired by the Gibber's recipes and great step-by-step photos.
Any one of their dishes would make an awesome accompaniment to a fat juicy steak.

It also seemed an appropriate way to celebrate the last of our lemons. Our tree's finally given up its Type A tendency to over-produce and it looks like sometime soon we may have to (gasp) purchase lemons.

This Lemon & Buttermilk cake's a keeper. Or in this case, Lemon & Yoghurt 'cos I was too much in my pyjamas to go to the shop. Yup, I heated yoghurt. I'm fearless I tell you.

 Of course I don't have a big bundt like Rika, but enough of this cake should remedy that soon enough ...

dirty pig

She was very worried that he couldn't swim. But her Dad told her pigs were really really good at holding their breath, and she was ok with that.

what you gonna do?

My first year at school I fell for the Bad Boy of the class. All of 6 years old.

Mark had big white blonde curls and very red lips. He would spend break times revving round the playground pretending to be a motorbike. (Not ride a motorbike mind, be a motorbike).
A Bad Boy Bike(r), that was my first love.

We would hold hands during story-time, sitting cross-legged side-by-side I'd drape my skirt over his knee to hide our entwined fingers.
Heady stuff.

Once, in an attempt to impress him, I told him the puzzle we were working on was made from our teacher's poo.
Another boy overheard and, motivated no doubt by unrequited love - mine, tortured me for weeks by threatening to tell Mrs Mitchell.
My first memory of romantic love forever linked with sore tummy angst and guilt.

Seems like Frieda might be following suit. She's not a little in love with the Bad Boy of her class. All of 3 years old.
Mich (the 'ch' pronounced with that gch sound Afrikaans and Dutch gets such a bad rap for) has sparkly mischievous eyes, an abiding passion for dinosaurs and loves to talk about poo.

He calls my star-struck daughter 'Frieda Force' (uh?), hugs her goodbye after school and shows her a booger on the end of his finger. She laughs a laugh I've never heard before and calls him a poop-head. He beams.

In the car on the way home she tells me that Mich sat on a caterpillar this morning. 'He squished it Mum,' she says, 'and I told him it left a bit of poo on his pants.'
She's quiet in the back.
Then, 'And he laughed.'
She radiates pride.

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do ....

internal dilemma

And so I shunned the distractions of the digital screen for a week and turned inward upon myself. To ponder and examine, to assess and evaluate.
And lo, it was not good.

And no, it was not just withdrawal from facebook, I genuinely had a pretty low emotional week. Turns out making time for my internals made them uncomfortable, they didn't enjoy the scrutiny and certainly didn't feel like showing a stiff emotional upper lip and pretending they were fine and dandy just because I'd deigned to show them some attention.
Hmpf.

Turns out in fact that my emotional inners are not fine and dandy and are in fact deeply resentful of how they've been ignored in recent months. Turns out I have quite a bit of uncertainty, angst, concerns for the future and general low-grade worry that I've been harbouring unawares for some time.
I'd have to say I blame breast-feeding hormones, those ones that tell you everything is fiiiiine while at the same time stealing your brain. Not unlike recreational drugs, or so I'm told.

It may also having something to do with my baby reaching 6 months (six months!!!) and the realisation that she'll not be a baby forever (what? WHAT?) and that there might just be some life waiting to be lived when I pop my head out of this baby bubble.

Don't you just love the indulgence of the privileged? Six months of blissful stay-at-home breast-feeding with no real end in sight and still she moans ...

But the point is I wasn't. Moaning that is.
I thought I was happy and loving it all, but turns out that, amongst other things, I hate my house, am reallio trullio worried about my career, am able to burst into actual tears at a moment's notice, am capable of being Grumpy McGrumpness from Grumpville for a whole week and most interestingly, can suppress all of this whenever I don't feel like dealing with it.

I had some genuine extremely and most delicious fun times this week with some of my favourite friends, but in the quiet hours when the day's fun was over and the girls in bed and there were no distractions to be had, I found I wasn't happy. And that sucks.
Especially for Husband who, as always, had to pick up the pieces.

There's work to be done y'all, there are facts to be faced and plans to be laid and grown-up type grips to be gotten.
I'm meeting my tax accountant in the morning. I'm seeing the dentist later this week. And most urgently, I'm planning a holiday.
'Cos my internals deserve a getaway, and pary tell how else will they get here if I don't physically take them?

just a normal afternoon ...

in which ~

My 3 yr old performed a c-section on me with wooden surgical implements from her doctor's kit, including entreating me to 'try and push it out first Mum'. Lordy I have to be careful what I tell this kid.
(oh and head's up - this reminds me I've still to post the Birth Story - watch out ...)

My nearly 6 month old proved herself to be a brand slut. Her first rice cereal was lovely Olli organics toasted rice cereal, which she consumed with relish. It was out of stock when we needed more so I bought a different brand. She didn't like it.
Today I bought Olli again. She had a double-serving.

This conversation played out:
Frieda: I love my Dad.
Me: I love your Dad too.
Frieda: No, you love your Dad, Grandad.
Me: But your Dad is my husband.
Frieda: No, [inserts name of my best friend] is your husband.

Um, okay ...

cold turkey

Case in point, I should've titled yesterday's post 'putting out'.
Humorous, enticing, tongue-in-cheek yet inherently relevant to the topic.
Maybe if I'd not been so distracted by my decision to deactivate my facebook account I'd've been more creative.

Yup, I did it. I cut the digital cord and moments later, obviously, Stella sat unassisted for the first time. In times of old (read half an hour earlier), I would instantly have started composing my status update. But no, no longer will I be enslaved by that particular social media.
Naturally I immediately texted my Mum and 3 friends, but I like to believe that's different ...

Now that I've done it, spectacularly 'unfriended' 160+ people in one fell click, I'm wondering how to tackle another new (artificial?) social convention: do I mail people to tell them I've left the building? Should I have updated my status 24 hours before deactivation, notifying them of my intention to leave?
Molly is ... sayonara suckers!
Molly is ... closing this particular book
Molly is ... sticking it to the man (in this case Mark Zuckerberg)
Molly is ... a mollygone
Molly is ... outta here mofo's

No. I needed to cut the supply line, shoot the dealer, go cold turkey. And honestly, it kinda amuses me that there are people out there who'll notice their number of friends has dropped by one and spend real time angsting about who left, why? why? was it something I said, omg am I not interesting enough?

I'll tell people as I make contact with them in the real world. I've already sent TWO long over-due newsy mails to friends this evening. I am so smug.

And naturally I'll still be spying via Husband's account.

external dilemma

I think the reason why I'm feeling so unable to blog at the moment (besides the time constraints etc etc) is that I'm living so externally that it's really hard to order my thoughts. Honestly its hard to HAVE thoughts at all.

The things I'm thinking about are immediate things; lists, what to pack, who to call, reminders, memo's. Life moves at a crazy pace from one immediate priority to the next, with so little space in between.
Amanda Blake, one of those bloggers one should never, never try and compare oneself too, says she thinks/dreams/composes in small pockets of time while doing other mundane chores - while hanging out washing for example, or changing a nappy. I'm just not that disciplined. When I find myself with some 'free' head space I tend to just drift off, switch off, blank out for a moment. I can't seem to muster the brain energy to be remotely creative then, I'm so grateful for a snippet of time in which nothing or no one else is demanding output from me that I squander it on that increasingly precious commodity, nothing.

And I'm starting to realise this isn't the wisest thing to do.

I'm living externally. My life is about doing, moving, outputs.
I output milk, time, reassurance, love, strength, dinner, patience. I spend time talking, making, doing, feeding. Let's be clear, its not that I'm not enjoying these things, this is not intended to be a whinge post about how I never get to do anything.
I'm very aware of how immensely privileged I am to be doing what I'm doing. In more ways than not I'm loving my life right now. It's just that I've realised how external it is.

And that's starting to bug me a bit.

Writing makes me happy. I write my blog. My blog makes me happy. I need more time to blog.

How do I make more time? I fear I've touched on the answer already ... discipline. Alas alack this is just another area in which I'll have to buck up and be a grown up.

So that's the answer then.

No more facebook.

random drivel brain spew yada yada

Going through one of those patches of reading lots of other blogs and then either running out of time or feeling too cowed by other's humour/adventures/perfect lives to blog myself. Not so clever.

Feeling more technologically inept than ever before. Starting to have moments of real stress about re-entering the working world (no plans as yet) and being the tech neanderthal in the corner ...

Starting to have moments of real contemplation about re-entering the working world.

Hating the sound of my own voice, the read of my own words.

Cooking lots of food and having a giggle at this (thanks Rika).

Running some posts through here and discovering that I mainly write like either Jane Austen or Stephen King.

Noticing blogger's Stats tab probably months after it arrived and a bit weirded out to discover this is my most viewed post. Think it's something to do with people doing image searches, mainly on the still incredibly fugly necklace. Then I check the posts I linked to in that post, wondering if there's anything there to entice a random reader. Then I find I've linked to this post and with over a thousand views on the first one if there was ever a moment for the karma gods to come over and bite me in the ass it would be now. That chick's so going to find me.

Wondering whether twitter wouldn't be more appropriate to my available time and head-space these days but then realising I don't even have words to update my facebook status and that my friends, is a new kind of low.

Getting stuff done.

Feeling superior and laughingly agreeing with this, while at the same time feeling smug and dying for an excuse to post a picture of this,

our vintage veggie-rack not thrifted (urgh, spew, hate the word) but inherited and lovingly restored industrially powder-coated and styled by moi. [Frieda: 'zucchini lives in the fridge Mum!']