I’ve been missing you! My new home at the same address

This post is a special shout out to my email subscribers.

Save Mum’s Sanity moved over to self-hosted wordpress a little while ago (well it was many months ago now, and I’ve been too slack to redirect my mail!). To most people this means very little, but if you are used to receiving new posts direct to your inbox you may be missing out.

Although all the old posts and comments have made the move, it seems my original email subscribers may have been left behind. So, if you want to still receive my blog posts in your inbox or re-subscribe to my RSS feed, hop on over to Save Mum’s Sanity and sign up to ‘get posts by email’ or subscribe in a reader if that suits you better.

I look forward to seeing you in my new house at the same address – http://savemumsanity.com

Cheers, Belinda

I heart my ERGO

If an expectant mum was to ask me what my most recommended baby product was, I would answer quickly and without hesitation. My ERGObaby carrier.

In the early days it was our saviour both inside and outside the home. Rocking our boy to sleep within minutes, sometimes seconds, when nothing else would work.

Asleep with Daddy

The Final Countdown

Cue the 80s power synth – do do-do do, do do-do doo, do-do do, do do-do do – it’s the final countdown!

Whoo, feeling pumped. Just need to put on Eye of the Tiger, and I’m right there. I’m ready. One week to go until I’m back at work after 12 months maternity leave.

This time next week I’ll be prepping my outfit, getting my lunch ready, getting J’s daycare bag ready, setting the alarm and then going over the ins and outs of my ‘get to work’ schedule in my head. Hoping I’ve thought of everything. Well really I should be bed, trying not to think about if I’ve thought of everything.

I’m assuring myself this is ‘no big deal’ – it’s two days a week, Monday and Tuesday, 18.75 hours – it will be fine. I’m good at my job. Well I think I still am. There will be more money coming in. I will have non-mother problems to solve, deadlines to meet, the days will go quickly and then I’ll have all the rest of the week to spend with my boy.

But then all the great unknowns creep in, the fact I’m job sharing with someone else new to the position, the fact that J is still not fully settled into daycare after three months, the fact I have to get both of us up, dressed, out the door and on the bus by 7.05am – that’s if the bus decides to arrive on time!

Too much thinking! It will be fine. Repeat, this time with feeling. It WILL be fine. Breathe. Note to self: Enjoy this last week of freedom before the juggling act begins.

Ikea catalogue love

This week I’ve spent most of my time in unproductive mode. I am sick – again – the two rounds of antibiotics have seemingly had no affect on health or energy levels and at the start of the week the good ol’ mucous factory started up again.

This time, there must have been a new employee charged with the task of running a feather duster over my throat with the express purpose of making me cough repeatedly. That, coupled with the last remnants of J’s conjunctivitus and the last week of bad news, I just wanted to lie low – horizontally if possibly – until things started looking up again. Or until I was forced out of the house in search of comfort food or toilet paper.

Then, yesterday it appeared. Like sunshine on a rainy day. The Ikea Catalogue stuffed into my letterbox. The fact that there were cheques of a hefty nature from the lovely folks at the Australian Taxation Office also stuffed in there was suddenly secondary. I had a one track mind – Ikea Catalogue!

A life like a rainbow

Last Friday a friend and I flew to Melbourne and drove to the Yarra Valley for a night. Under any other circumstances it would be my ideal getaway. But not this time.

We were going down to attend a funeral. Of a little boy, not yet three who died suddenly the Friday before last. The much wanted, first child of our good friends. The loveliest couple you’d ever meet. And he the loveliest of boys. His mother is six months pregnant with his little sister.

The Monday before his death I saw him. The family were up here in Brisbane for a brief visit. We hadn’t seen them since April. I remarked how much he’d grown. Such a strapping looking lad. Tall. Healthy. His cherubic baby face becoming that of a little boy, framed by a head of blonde curls.

If someone told me as I waved goodbye to him that he would be gone by the end of the week I wouldn’t have believed them. No one would have believed them. Especially his parents.

Father and son

Happy Fathers’ Day to all the fathers out there.

This photo of A & J was taken on Thursday, I love the candidness of it and how J looks like a ‘mini’ version of A.

As much as I don’t like the commercial aspect of Mothers’ and Fathers’ day, I do think it’s a nice opportunity to give thanks for all the great things that fathers do.

I love watching the relationship between father and son develop. The way J lights up when daddy gets home from work, his insistance on saying ‘da da’ at every opportunity, the giggles coming from the bathroom at bath time and the way no-one plays quite as fearlessly as daddy as he swoops in to grap J and dangle him by the ankles or hold him aloft and place him high up upon his shoulders.

Farewell sickness, hello spring

Parenting while sick really bites. There, I said it. Feels better already. This winter I have had more than my fair share of energy-depleting ailments.

Nothing too serious mind, just the usual asthma and bronchial problems, a sore throat that wouldn’t quit and then when it finally did, I got hit with another head cold and a greater hit of asthma making me a 24-hour mucous manufacturing facility. Great word isn’t it? Mucous. Kind of sounds like it feels, or how it sounds coughing it up.

I was running on the old ‘it’s just a virus, my body can fight it off mentality’, and with a sick child to contend with his needs were greater than my own.

Or so I thought.

Point and shoot: ball pit meltdown

This weekend seemed to fly by even quicker than normal. I don’t know if its that we’re all feeling a tad low thanks to a dreaded head cold that just keeps on ‘giving’ even after you think its gone or if the count down to my return to the workforce has imparted an ‘I don’t like Mondays’ mentality a month too early. Either way there were some fun moments amongst the squirts of Fess Little Noses and piles of used tissues.

Seven things you don’t know about me

I’ve been tagged by Jo over at Mum to J with a Kreative Blogger Meme. The deal is that I share seven things about myself that I haven’t yet shared here.

So here goes – seven things you don’t yet know about me.

On procrastination and parenting

Photo by get directly down at flickr.com

Today I went to the dentist. It has been a long time between visits. So long in fact that I couldn’t even admit to myself how long it had been for fear of unleashing an unhealthy amount of self-recrimination that would only add to the procrastination and fear that’s prevented me from going all these years.

So bullet bitten here I am, teeth shiny and clean and save for a light lecture on the importance of dental hygiene, there was nothing to fear afterall. No fillings. No wisdom teeth needing immediate removal. No extra large bill. Just a ‘look after your teeth and come back in six months’. They even gave me a goody bag.

It has me thinking about how procrastination only makes things alot harder. Things that are routine and necessary become scary monsters that wake you in the middle of the night. One big ‘to do list’ that just keeps on growing.