Wordless Wednesday - Sydney

Playing along with Wordless Wednesday My little drummer boys and Faith Hope and a Whole lotta love

Fight the Frump (aka - fighting fur)

At 28 years old and the harried mother of two small boys I was starting to feel downright dumpy. My friends from school were all living it up in glamorous city jobs, going out to nice restaurants, buying glamorous clothes and basically living the dream of the 20-something girl. Don't get me wrong, I love being a mother. I wouldn't choose to do anything else, yet I couldn't help but feel that perhaps I was missing out on something. My life was so different from theirs, that I decided to try to close the gap a little. 

I decided to get a Brazilian wax.

Why on earth I thought a Brazilian would make me feel less frumpy I have no idea. Perhaps it was just a bit 'sex in the city'. 

I took myself down to the local hair and beauty and salon having told my husband that I was going to get a leg wax. This is not unusual, as a mother I sometimes make the time to pamper myself with self grooming luxuries such as a hair cut and leg wax about once a year.

However, when I had rung them salon, I had booked in for a Brazilian as well. I was terrified at the thought of it. It wasn't the pain that I was worried about, but the fear of having a stranger intimately close to the most private part of me. I was sure that I would be wrong somehow, that I would be ridiculed for how unkempt my bush was. I thought of doing a trim the night before, but had heard somewhere that you needed a minimum length for the wax to take hold, so decided to leave it 'au naturale'. It is a small town that we hadn't lived in for very long, and I didn't know anyone, so I was sure that I would be able to do it anonymously. Although I was nervous about having a stranger applying hot wax to my nether regions, it would be FAR worse if I they were anything else but a stranger.

The girl who was doing the waxing was a perky, leggy blonde who looked a few years younger than me. She was very chatty and put me as much to ease I could possibly be given the circumstances. She kept telling me that I would never go back to non waxed after I had had a brazilian, because 'it felt SO much better'. I nodded with her, trying to agree in order to be polite while thinking in the back of my mind that given my current beauty routine was lucky to include de-haired legs, it was highly unlikely to go any futher than that ever again.

As she got started, she reeled back in horror at the length of the hair and suggested quite bluntly that I probably should have thought to trim before coming. I knew I would manage to do something wrong. How humiliating. 

As she chatted away, she asked the usual questions that people in those sort of professions usually ask. I find it hard enough to be comfortable talking to a stranger about my personal life and family even when they aren't spreading hot wax over my map of tasmania and ripping it off. However, she managed to find out a lot about me and share quite a bit about herself including that she had gone to the same highschool as my darling husband and that she had been in the year below him. She hadn't known anyone named Chris though, which I felt was a bit strange as Chris had been school captain, very sporty, and had said he was friends with everyone, including lots of people (mainly girls) in the year below. Here this girl was, (Kelly), who seemed bubbly and effervescent; exactly the sort of girl who Chris would have been attracted to being friends with, and she had never heard of him. I was quite confused  Had he not been as known and as high profile he had always told me he was? It just didn't make sense. 

As I was pondering this, Kelly got on with the job of waxing and the subject matter changed to the fact that the centre line of the area being waxed was excruciatingly painful. A fact that she had purposefully decided to not tell me, deciding that not knowing beforehand which bit would be most painful would be better for me. A girl who had gone to the local high school to become a beauty therapist in the area of waxing had made a judgement about the psychology of pain. 

She suddenly changed the subject back to Chris and said, 'Did your husband have a nickname at school' – I thought for a moment, and then said, 'yes! It was Bear'.

'Bear!! Of course I knew Bear! He was a great friend of mine!', she exclaimed.

On one hand I was delighted that the mystery had been solved, and my husbands' visions of school popularity hadn't been fictional, and on the other hand quite dispirited that my certainty of anonymity while getting my nether regions de-furred had been shattered. 

As she gave me my change while it was finally over, she waved 'say Hi to Bear for me!'. 

'Sure I will', I replied, but what on earth is he going to think of what you have done to me?

The Dirty Roll - aka my head is going to explode

The dirty roll

Molly May: 'My sausage is hot! I want it chopped! I don't want it chopped! I want it in here! In my roll! It's hot! (takes sausage out), My roll is dirty! I can't eat it now its dirty! I want a clean roll!

Rocket: 'It's okay Molly, it's better that way, it tastes good!',

Molly May: 'No-o! Not better. You go to the Doctor to get better. A doctor makes you better. One day Bear (the dog) was coughing in the laundry, so we took him to the Vet to make him better. You and Me and Mummy and Zander took Bear to the Vet to make him better'.

The Rocket: 'What about Daddy?'

Molly May: 'No, Daddy is at work. I need a new roll.' 

Are there things in your day that make you feel like your head is going to explode?

Please share! - It might help make me feel more human :)

point +shoot - the weekend that was (aka - Surviving Sydney!)

So, I survived my weekend away. On Friday evening after I arrived I went for a walk down to Milson's Point, between the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park. It was inspiring for my soul.

I got back to the hotel and was confronted by something I had not been exposed to for a very long time. 

The sound of silence.

On Saturday morning while walking to the Church where the wedding was being held, I was so anxious I thought my heart was going to explode from thumping so much. I felt alone. A feeling that I don't experience much these days. Along with that, I had no idea who was going to be there. Luckily within a few minutes of arriving at the Church, I saw someone I knew, and things calmed down a little for me.

By mid-afternoon, I realised that I had become used to feeling alone. Not necessarily a good feeling, but one that I could deal with, accept, and more importantly, function with. 

The reception was held at The Spit in Mosman. One of the most beautiful areas in Sydney. The restaurant was at the edge of the water, and the Bride and Groom arrived in a boat. 

 For those of you who were interested (after the discussion of what to wear!), I am the one in the black dress. My scarf had been draped much more nicely than this earlier, but kept falling down at dinner, so I tied it up. Not very well. Unforunately in this photo you can't see my nice pink dangly earrings, or necklace, or chunky bracelet which made my outfit a bit more colourful. I chopped the heads off, because I don't know how I feel about putting photos of  people on my blog who I haven't talked to about it. What about you? Do you ask people before you put their photos on the internet?

My darling family met me at the train station when I came home. While I was away they had decided to do some camping....
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*in the dining room....

 

So when  I came home this is how they had redecorated my dining room. 

I could not possibly love them anymore.
This is the way I love them. Just like this.

playing along with sunny + scout and her point + shoot .

Grateful

Ok, i am in sydney and trying to blog on the iPad which I haven't done before, so I am hoping that I don't mess this up too much :) This week I am grateful for being brave. Most people wouldn't find what I am doing brave, but I am in Sydney, and I am proud of myself for coming. I feel so strange, almost naked, being away from my children. I desperately miss holding their sweet little hands, kissing their sweet little heads. It has only been a few hours, I'm pretty hopeless at being away from them. This mama has MAJOR separation anxiety. But I am here, and deep down I know it will be good for me. I am also grateful for the beautiful sunset that I viewed from milson's point overlooking the harbour, while I basked in this beautiful spring weather, while the cruise ship that we went on 3 years ago in the Mediterranean went by underneath the bridge (now owned by p&o). I am grateful for the advice that I got from the comments on my post a couple of weeks ago about what to wear to the wedding. I have decided on a simple black dress, with a beautiful pink and brown silk scarf and accessories. I will try and upload a photo sometime next week if I get one :) Playing along with maxabella's grateful, but now quite sure how to do the link on iPad, please go to http://maxabellaloves.blogspot.com to read other grateful posts.

Take a Walk - Write on Wednesdays

She grabbed the end of the dog's lead, and the grubby fat starfish hand of her toddler and they started up the hill. Always uphill wasn't it? Like a metaphor for her life. The first few steps were blissful, peaceful, the cool air touching her cheeks, the warm suns rays struggling to break through the clouds. And then it started. It always did didn't it? Within a few meters of starting out? The tugging and pulling, the puppy wanting to race ahead, jumping around with excitement, the toddler stopping to look at a flower, the toddler's hand slipping out of mine as she chased a butterfly, or a feather, or a bird, the puppy finding something disgusting to smell, and stubbornly refusing to budge. It would go on like this, until the toddler's legs started to give in to tiredness, and she would block me mid-stride with her arms in the air, nearly toppling me every time. I would heave all 16 kiliograms of her into the air and onto my hip, then two minutes later she would want to walk again, then carry.... It was always the same. Life. Trudging uphill, being pushed and pulled in ever direction. Up and down. The way of the world. The way of her life.

Linking up again with Gill from InkPaperPen - take a look here for the writing task for this week!

Wordless Wednesday - Beach

Most of the pics are black and white today, as I posted the colour ones a couple of days ago, if you want to take a look they are here.

Playing along with Wordless Wednesday My little drummer boys and Faith Hope and a Whole lotta love

Book Week should be Banned***

It is the annual book week parade tomorrow*. The boys' school, like many others, will host a dress up parade. Different schools have various tangents on the same theme, but for the boys, they have to dress up as their favourite character from a book. Turns out this isn't easy if you are a 9 year old boy.

Apparently none of the characters from his favourite books from recent months (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) is 'cool' enough.

He loves Pokemon, and there are books (we even have some); but his mother's sewing skills are just not up to creating that sort of costume, and the chance that he might end up looking like a really cute stuffed toy is just too great a risk to take.

For a while he toyed with the idea of a Zombie or a Smurf, but decided against them.

More recently he has been really into Deltora Quest. He finally decided that the only character he wanted to be was a 'Dread Gnome' from Deltora Quest. I asked him if he could describe it to me. He couldn't. I asked him to draw me a picture, but he said he didn't know what they looked like. Made it sort of difficult. Even my googling research didn't do me much good.

While searching through op-shops for things that might work for a Dread Gnome, he finally decided to give up on that idea, and go as a vampire. By this stage, I really couldn't have cared less if he had ever read a vampire book in his life. 'Great!' I said, and we went and bought a cape and some vampire teeth.

Last night while I was writing this he said 'mum, do you know where my vampire teeth are?'. Hours of searching later, they were still missing in action. Not such a great vampire costume without teeth. I tried to explain the concept of 'making lemonade from lemons', and he decided that he would go as a different character from Deltora Quest, and all we would need to do in addition to the black cape was a bit of facepaint. Phew! 

And then, there are always the last minute debates over whether you are meant to wear your uniform under your costume, or take it, or not...  Can't wait for next year!

Playing along with diary of a SAMH and her IBOT

* I started writing this yesterday, but life** got in the way.
** well, mainly just lost vampire teeth really.
***At least for 9-year old boys. 6 year old boy's costume was easy- he went has Harry Potter :)

Point + Shoot

 

I've been really desperate for a holiday, to get escape from the dreary, cold weather we have been having here. But for a range of timing, and budgetary issues, it is just not a good idea. 

 

 

This Sunday when we woke up, we talked about all the things we 'should' do. Then we decided that they could wait for a cold dreary day.  The day was already showing the glimmers of senseless beauty, and we needed to get out. So we declared it a beach day. 

 

We decided to head to Mornington. Why? Because we hadn't been there before. We had no idea whether it would be nice or not, had done no research. We jumped in the car and drove. 

 

We drove and drove. Then at Seaford we saw a sign for Farmers Markets. I can't go past Farmers Markets. So we pulled over. The farmer's markets had the best home grown, hand picked mandarins we had ever tasted. We bought some home grown avocados. We also bought quite a few tiny, decadent, cupcakes. Yum.

 

Then we headed across the road to the beach. It was divine. It had great sand, a pier, and a beautiful tide pool had developed that called to the children to play in and explore. It was also slightly less freezing than the rest of the ocean! I had fun photographing them and their reflections in it. We didn't make it to Mornington - maybe next time :)

Where is your favourite place to holiday?

What is your favourite beach?

What is your favourite thing to do when you can't go on a holiday?

playing along with sunny + scout and her point + shoot .

This week I am grateful for... friends and dad's who can make igloo's

I'm grateful for – new friends. Sometimes as a mum, it is hard to get to know other mums. Between irregular schedules, children interupting conversations, it is hard to get to know people. A night out at dinner with a few, can give clarity and depth to friendships. I am grateful for being welcomed into a circle of friends. I am also grateful for the good food and wine.

I am grateful for Husbands who can make Igloo.

I am playing along with the Maxabella and her weekly grateful.  

Sweet, sweet, Igloo*

 

Igloo - made from sugar cubes. 

Made blue in lightroom because it reminds me of the Ice Hotel in Sweden

 First make some royal icing

 Then make a layer of sugar cubes and icing like this - the more hands the better!

 Make sure you have a two-year old handy to lick the beaters**. Then laugh at her 'icing beard' to make her grumpy.

 

Make another layer of sugar cubes using the icing as your cement.   

Then go and have a shower with the two year old and leave the Igloo building to the engineer of the house. 

With a great deal of difficulty and huffing and puffing, when you return from the shower, the Igloo should look something like this. 

Good enough to eat?

* Warning, reading the following post might be enough to give you diabetes. 

** Please disconnect beaters before giving to your child :)

Yippee!

I went to the markets today. They make me happy.

Amongst the pyramids of fruit, I saw a row of mangos. MANGOS!!!

I took a darling mango home. It had no scent. I sliced it open. Its flesh was bright yellow. I bit into this mango and it was sour. Sour as an off lemon.

But I didn't care. It made me stupidly happy.

When Mangos begin to appear in the shops, it means only one thing - summer is just around the corner!!

Fruit lady said they are expecting peaches and nectarines next month. Life is good.

Wordless Wednesday - colour and black and white.

Playing along with My little drummer boys and Faith Hope and a Whole lotta love

Write on Wednesdays

The task at hand piqued her curiosity, she felt alive and on fire. The sweet scent of the honeysuckle that had been grabbed off the vine and shoved into the drinking glass yesterday wafted over to her from where it sat carelessly on the window sill. Just yesterday an English woman, new to the country, had turned to her and asked in a tone of desperation 'when is it exactly that summer arrives in Australia?', she had spoken through the dreary cold rain that had been monotonously drivelling like a teething baby's drool. I had no idea, as I have not spent a full year in the city, but at that point in time it felt as though the winter would never end; that there would be no end to the rain. How then, had spring miraculously appeared overnight? The sky was a never-ending blue, the sun streamed through every window in the house. Surely anything was possible. 

Obviously it would be nice if this was actually going somewhere, and a bit more polished, but that's all you get in 5 minutes :)
Task was to write 5 minutes on the word 'Piqued'.

Joining in with inkpaperpen and her WoW

Point + Shoot

Cinnamon scrolls we made yesterday

it's fun playing with the dough!

Molly May has disappeared!

Yum!

And a black and white one for the black and white photography fans out there!

Playing along with Sunny+scout