Squibblog

out of the game

Last weekend we caught up with three different groups of people we hadn't seen since before June (some, since long before that). These are our regular friends that we would normally see every few weeks at least, and yet somehow we have just been...away. Not actually away, but still in an 'away' mind set. We really haven't been living much of our Sydney life since travelling to Europe and coming home with sick kids to demanding jobs and the craziness of term three at school.

We have changed all that. The weather is warm now, so we headed off to the Biennale of Sydney, catching the free ferry to a giant industrial site jam-packed with art. All for free! The kids were totally blown away by the art ("Good ART! Not boring paintings!") and I have to admit, it was some of the most engaging sculpture I have seen in a long time.

But the real attraction is just getting on the (FREE!) ferry and being out on the Harbour in this gorgeous spring weather. We ate our noodles in the sun while the children played in the Japanese mist sculpture (MIST SCULPTURE!) and found seagull nests.

The weekend was topped off with my final birthday treat - tickets to see Rufus Wainwright on his Out of the Game tour. Rufus's gorgeous vocals and general fabulousness sat perfectly in the Opera House, amid the sparkly lights of Sydney Harbour. It's taken a while, but it now feels like, finally, we are properly back in Sydney.

five things I learned from our travels, or why I haven't posted about my holiday yet

• Audio-guides are the parents' best friend. If you want to expose your children to culture, drag them around museums or art galleries, get them to learn anything about history or appreciate what they are looking at, forget reading. Forget reading them age appropriate novels set in the castle you are visiting (for months before we left, I slaved over these), or showing them hand drawn timelines. Hell, forget everything you learned in your Masters of Art History because when it comes to French castles, what the guy on the audio-guide says is true and Mum knows nothing.
• The word for 'antibiotics' in Portuguese is 'antibiotico'. I learned this the hard way. In a Portuguese hospital with a raging fever and an iPhone.
• Food is the best introduction to a culture. Ok, so we already knew this, but food is a child's introduction to any type of new experience. Want to talk about the Crusades? Go to a patisserie and explain the history why they eat a croissant. Want them to understand the French provincial system? The cheese counter at a market tells them all they need to know.
• Children need to see other children. Our kids fought a lot while we were away, but they actually spent more time cracking each other up with their stupid jokes and then wrestling each other to the ground. We arrived in London expecting the kids to dread the prospect of being dragged around to lots of people's houses "visiting", but they loved it. They played with other kids toys, laughed at other kids jokes and wrestled other kids to the ground. They passed up an offer of a meal in a restaurant to sit at home with a toddler, a baby and the babysitter, eating pizza and watching The Big Bang Theory. Kids need time out from all this intensive holidaying. We know that now.
• The incubation period for chicken pox is exactly 14 days. 14 days, to the hour, after eating pizza with the babysitter who confirmed that the toddler did, indeed, have chicken pox, my kids came down with them. Despite all my 'tra-la-la, they've been immunised, they'll be fine' assurance, they were not fine. 

That's why I haven't posted anything about our holiday yet, but expect a few more easily digestible, bite sized posts with tidbits from France, Portugal and London in the coming weeks as the kids fully recover from the pox, we fully recover from taking time off work, and spring sets in to Sydney.

dinosaur flowers

Sydney's weather has been pretty bleak lately, but today there was a reward for venturing into the garden: one of my lovely bromeliads hatched this crazy prehistoric flower. Most of my broms were dug up from other bits of the garden, found on the footpath or bought in random mail order job lots, so I never have any idea what their flowers will look like. This one confirms that surprises are better than planning.

over qualified

Friday was my graduation from my Masters degree. I have blogged a lot about my study (like here and here) but I'm not sure I have ever really written about my reasons  why for studying this degree in the first place.

I studied Economics and Law straight out of high school. They are good, solid, lucrative degrees. I did what I had to do to be admitted as a solicitor, and then went to work to pay off my debts. By the end of 2006, I had been studying or practising law for twenty years. It has become very hard work, emotionally trying and I was burnt out. This was the very dramatic period of my life, when I quit the partnership of a large law firm and settled down to spend time at home with my family. Part of my bargain with myself about quitting my (highly paid, very demanding) job was that I would study something just for the sake of it. I chose art history because I love it, that's all.

Of course I didn't have the luxury to just throw it all in and study full time (this was when I started working as a freelance journalist and then as a photographer) so I did my study part time. Five years later I graduated with a Mater of Arts (Art History). Rather than relief and elation that I felt when I got my law degree, I feel a little bereft that I am no longer studying because this degree was all about the process, and never about the end product.

But I'm fairly sue that a trip through French art galleries in July will help to ease the pain a little...

last minute skirt

I love having a new outfit for a party. This was one I made for Nell for a disco party last night. She already had the tshirt from Target, but no decent skirts. This one took an hour on Friday night, made from this pattern, edged with sequins. She loves it, that's the best bit.

a tribute to Howard Florey, or why I am not dead yet

I don’t know how many times I have cut myself, but I realize now that in all those time I have not marveled enough about my skin’s ability to heal. Until last weekend when it didn’t.

Last weekend I have a few scratches on my hands from pruning the overenthusiastic bougainvillea that brightens up our back corner. They weren’t anything serious but I came in from the garden and soaked my hands in Dettol, smeared on some Savlon and trusted the rest to my immune system. The scratches scabbed over and all was well.

Except on Saturday night the scratch on my thumb started to really hurt, then it started to throb and look a bit nasty. On Sunday Soy and I made jokes about my thumb having a life of its own. I was a little dismayed by how much it hurt, but it’s a little scratch and my skin will heal quickly, I thought.

Sunday night the joint in my thumb started to ache and grow hot and I knew I needed to see a doctor. All the late night GPs were shut, so I headed over to RPA hospital to enjoy the ambience of late night A&E. I have to say, I felt a little foolish because I thought this was a problem that could be dealt with by a GP, a hospital seemed like overkill. The doctors and nurses at RPA didn’t share that view, especially when they pulled up my sleeve and saw the pink line tracing up my arm, showing how far the infection had spread.

They pumped me full of antibiotics via IV drip, cleaned up the wound (now 3 times the size of my other thumb) and sent me home with a script for oral penicillin. They had mentioned scary things about infections in bones and tendons, confirming that it was entirely appropriate to come to Emergency with an infection like that.

Today my thumb is back to normal size, my skin is normal colour and I am tempted to revert to my old view that it was really a lot of fuss over nothing. But 100 years ago, before Howard Florey experimented with using penicillin on human infections, that infection would have raged on and done who-knows-how-much damage to my hand and, possibly, my life. How lucky I am to live in this age of modern medicine and this country with a free health system.

Euro 2012

For the past year Soy and I have been planning a trip to Europe. We first became serious about itineraries when Soy was  sick in October last year - I gave him my laptop and said 'if you're going to be stuck in bed for a week I want you to work out where we're spending three weeks in July 2012'.

That was when July 2012 seemed like a long way away. Now it's only a few weeks away and we are starting to get seriously excited. All of the accommodation is booked, itineraries are sorted, we have been printing out public transport maps for the cities we are visiting, bought Oyster cards for London and forced the kids to start reading the pack of Paris Walking Tour cards we purchased. I am making lists of rooms in the Louvre, cafes in the Tuilleries and places to hire bikes near Loire chateaux. 

It's been six years since we last took the kids to Europe. While that was a wonderful trip that time, we were travelling with toddlers. We are in such a golden period with the kids at the moment - they are old enough to behave properly in public, young enough to be enthusiastic about everything. And they still think we are cool and fun. So this time we are not just planning how to see the things we want to see, in spite of the children, but how to see things that they will love as much as we do. We are shamelessly plugging castles and pastries. And I am looking forward to eating in cafes without tables being knocked over this time.

attention deficit guilt

I saw this article by Amity Dry about mother guilt for spending time on a smart phone instead of with kids and it made me want to scream. It's not just that I hate articles about mother guilt (as if we don't heap enough of that on ourselves) but I actually think that paying too much attention to kids is counter productive. 

My kids are no longer toddlers and now I can share why I think that too much parental attention is bad for kids. Aged 10 and 7, my kids couldn't be more different from one another in personality. Nell enjoys spending time alone devising her own play. She reads for hours, makes up elaborate fantasies and draws and draws. Zac, on the other hand, has a lot more trouble entertaining himself. He still needs much more parental attention than Nell ever has. He's the one who comes to us on rainy days saying that he's bored. I know that this is a familiar story for many families because my friends and I call it 'first child syndrome'. While some of that behaviour is explained by the fact Zac is a boy and Nell a girl, friends with first-born girls confirm that it applies to those kids as well.

I think that this behaviour is not because our kids have been deprived of attention, but precisely because they have had too much. When Zac was a baby there were no smart phones, blogs were few and far between and I never took calls on my mobile phone because I was far too busy paying all of my attention to him. I let him know from the time he was born that he was the absolute centre of the world, just as the mother-guilt lobby said I should. And now I wonder why he finds it hard to think of other people.

I had relaxed a lot by the time Nell came along, but I think the main difference between them is because, by necessity, I simply could not focus all of my atteniton on Nell because Zac was there, still demanding to be the centre of the universe.

Let's be frank: Nell has a lot easier time functioning in the world because she understands that the world does not revolve around her. She understands inherently that other people have needs, and that, while she's important, she is ultimately responsible for herself. I am sorry that I didn't get those messages across to Zac as a baby, and he has a harder time working them out as a child.

Sometimes when I am with the kids I deliberately turn away from what they are doing, because I think they need to work stuff out without the glare of parental attention. While I began raising my children I believed that they needed stimulation, guidance, love and attention. I am more and more coming to the view that benign neglect makes for healthier kids. I try to ensure that my kids spend some time every day (especially on weekends when we are together a lot) doing something without me, so that when we sit down to eat at the end of the day, they can tell me something I didn't know - rather than me 'being present' for every single second of their lives.

 

I refuse to feel guilty for looking at my smart phone when I am with my kids. Indeed, I think it's probably a good thing for all of us to have a little time away from each other's every attention.

musical obsession

When I was in my early teens I spent hours in front of the stereo, album cover in hand, listening obsessively to music. One of my great musical obsessions was with Prince's Purple Rain album. It was everything from Prince's look, his ambiguous sexuality, the funky beats and the tortured screaming that embedded those songs deep in my psyche. Even during the years when new Romantic music was most on the nose, I still loved everything Prince produced.

On Friday night my friend and fellow Prince devotee, Jackie, and I went to his stadium concert in Sydney. It was probably the most polished, staged and glittery spectacular I have ever been to (I'm more a pub-rock gig kind of girl than a stadium-spectacular lover most of the time). What I loved most about it was not just the three-hour non-stop hits playlist, or even the beautiful deconstructing and reconstructing of truly excellent guitar riffs, it was being so expertly emotionally manipulated. When Prince first came on stage, dressed in gold sequinned tails and five inch heels, I screamed and held my face in my hands like a teenaged Beatles fan. When he slowly descended off stage after an epic twenty minute jam of Purple Rain (during which we all sang the backing for at least ten of those minutes) I cried. Not because he was leaving, but because it was just so beautiful. And all that time I was fully aware that my reaction was EXACTLY what Prince had scripted.
I jumped to my feet to the first strains of 1999, and I sat down when his backing singers sang a slow number (allowing him time to change, and us time to rest - we are all a lot older now, you know). It is so rare, these days, that I allow myself to be emotionally manipulated because I am so cynical about what someone is trying to tell me or sell me. It was liberating to feel like I was fourteen again. Like no one has ever felt like this. Like it was just me and Prince.

And twenty thousand other people all feeling EXACTLY the same way.

The kids are just reaching the golden age of musical obsession themselves. Zac is learning to play guitar. As we hoped, this is mostly taking the form of obsessive practice in his room, because we haven't enrolled him in paid guitar lessons yet (he is still learning violin and two instruments, plus swimming, footy and homework seems a little excessive). The real devotion began when we were recently in Canberra, travelling home from Tidbinbilla. We had my nephew in the car as well who requested we play The White Stripes Seven Nation Army. The boys then asked for it over and over. Zac came home and learned the riff on his guitar and whenever he has a spare moment, he's in his room, picking out that riff. 

Yesterday Nell heard, for the first time, the Gotye song Somebody I Used to Know. It instantly grabbed her and she begged for it on her iPod. She has spent hours in her room since, listening over and over and learning the lyrics. Now she can sing it. With feeling. Of course it's vaguely inappropriate, being a song about heartbreak, loss and being treated badly by your ex, but my early obsessions (Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, as but one example amongst many) covered similar topics and my innocence was not spoiled for the times I was *actually* screwed over badly by an ex, so I'm not too worried for Nell.

 

 

new newness is news

I have been feeling a little complacent about sharing much on this blog lately. It hasn’t been a dramatic decision, just a lack of stuff to say. Perhaps it’s because my kids are older and it feels weird writing about them when they can read. Perhaps it's because so many blogs are slicker and more commercial than mine. Maybe it’s the rise of Facebook and Twitter. In truth, I have a little bit of sharing overload.

And yet, almost ten years after starting this blog, I didn’t really feel ready to give it up completely.

So I have taken the first step in getting my blog mojo back (if it’s going to come back, that is) by giving my blog a face lift. A new pared back look for pared back visits. Perhaps this fresh new face will inspire me to share a little more and if it does, I hope you will visit from time to time.