All-in-One Mum

My sister never had any interest in crochet or knitting when we were growing up, so image my surprise when one day she started churning out masses of crochet squares and then eventually, entire blankets! Turns out it was all for " 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day ". At the time I had not been resident in South Africa for early nine years so I had no real idea about what the real driver was or who the beneficiaries were. 67 Blankets all started when Zelda la Grange, who was Personal Assistant to the late former President Nelson Mandela, approached philanthropist Carolyn Steyn in December 2013 with the challenge of making 67 knitted or crochet blankets for Mandela Day on 18 July the following year. Carolyn soon realised that this was no mean feat and reached out to friends, family and the S.A. Facebook community to ask for their help reach their ultimate goal of creating 67 blankets. No monetary donations and no blankets were to be bought; just blankets created with th...

To be honest, technology has actually become a bit of a shit.  Where are the days of learning your best friend's telephone number off by heart, communication by letters and post it notes and actually speaking to someone in person if you had a gripe with them? I  now e-mail, text, Whatsapp, Facebook message, Viber, Skype people.  The latter is the only form (I'm beyond finding out and caring if Viber can) have actual human emotion in them, because the poor individuals on other side of the call can actually get to see your real life mug.  I do of course speak to people (yes, face-to-face).  I'm not a bloody robot. I remember days gone by where I would write detailed and heart felt letters to friends about the very exciting and riveting (bloody boring and mundane by modern terms) weekend that I'd had and wax lyrically about some or another nonsense that was important to a 16 year old girl at that time in the 90's.  I can only image what that would be like ...

Well, there is nothing quite like nearly a years' break from an actual blog post created by me in person.   Now that child 2 is nearly 13 months old and that I am more or less in tune with the lack of sleep and extra juggling of having another mini-me around the house, I think its time that I start writing again. Over the past year I have learnt that trying to be an All-in-One Mum is actually bloody hard!  For those people who think I have it all together, I can tell you that I let the balls drop many a time.  Picking them up quickly and in some sort of crazed orderly fashion did help but it wasn't always doable at the time.   When you have a child in reception, a new born, a full time job and a personality where you simply can't still for two seconds without having your hands busy and a mind that never shuts off, it is sometimes hard to get the balance right.  The "hairs of no pigment" on the top of my head had started to increase...

I'm a mum of two gorgeous little boys, 3 and 6 months - both pickles in their own right. My husband and I moved to Australia about 18 months ago where we have been lucky enough to establish some good rootes and we are starting to feel settled. We are both originally from the South East of England, Kent but left in search of a more outdoor lifestyle which we have certainly found here. My husband runs a tour business and I am writing a children's book whilst continuing my hobby of writing poems and parodies for adults. I'm hoping to maybe publish some of them in the future so "liking" my page may help me when selling myself to potential publishers or magazines if I ever take my poems down this route. The main aim however is just for people to be able to read my poems and laugh at life. Those with kids can laugh with us and those without can laugh at us. Because laughter really is contagious. Let's brighten up Facebook and the struggles of parenthood...

It's rather bizarre where you can find inspiration and finally get out of that writing slump, one which I've been in for nearly 6 months! On my way to the kitchen, plodding down the stairs in my aubergine M&S slippers (I'd wear them all day if I could plus my white robe), I had a half dressed baby in one arm, baby gros, jogging bottoms and towel covered in yellow, toxic and possibly glowing baby poo under the other.  A nappy sack with one of the most vile yellow nappy disasters known to man dangling from one of my free hands was the new accessory of the moment. That's when it hit me! If I stock piled nappies that were quite of this ferocity then I could ship them to South Africa where they could use them, along with all the other rubbish generated, to produce an extremely potent methane gas to help generate electricity.  Shedding a load to shed the load shedding, so to speak.  That was my one and only 'wow' moment of thinking during the day so far.  Poss...