Author: McPikelets

Back to work I go

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(This piece originally appeared in Little Treasures magazine, and is on their website here. ) Last year I decided it was time to don high heels and un-strained clothes to sashay back into the workforce. Since having the girls I’ve done part time work, but it has all been from the comfort of my kitchen table involving limited contact with other actual adults. I should clarify: part time paid work – because the full-time mum gig is obviously a major job in itself. With interviews done and an offer made, I got to revel in the the giddy excitement that comes with realising someone wants to pay for the stuff your brain does. Swiftly followed by panic that my brain might not remember how to do the stuff it used to. I gave myself a quick pep talk about how I’d grown actual humans, dammit, and have been juggling things like some kind of mashup between a circus ninja and a UN Hostage negotiator ever since, so I’d be just fine. Last time I was in an …

I’m doing it wrong (says the internet).

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Many things change when you have a baby. Your body, your hair, the shadows under your eyes, your bank balance, your relationships, and the information dished out to you through your social media feeds. Based on the types of conversations I have online, the photos or articles I look at and the demographic box I fit into (city dwelling 30-something mother of two), I get quite the cocktail of ads and ‘suggested posts’ served up to me on Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes I imagine there’s a plucky young Facebook executive casting their eye over the data report for the day and thinking to themselves, “based on her criteria, today this lady saw ads for leggings that make you two sizes slimmer, washing powder, toddler shoes, gin, adult slippers that look like shoes, a wine sale, crumpets, sleep consultants, frozen chicken nuggets, anti-wrinkle cream, multi-compartmented lunchboxes, a device you stick in your lady parts that connects to your phone to say how much work your pelvic floor needs, and more wine. WHAT IS THIS LIFE?!” Sometimes …

Don’t worry, baby.

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Even the briefest of scrolls through parenting sites indicates that anxiety in children and babies is a hot topic. Anxiety in adults can be difficult enough to identify and treat – let alone in a tiny person who is just learning about their world. I had a chat to registered psychologist, Cate Hey, about  developing emotions. This article appeared in Little Treasures Magazine, and is easier to read here in this pdf: AnxietyinBabies

No excuses launch-pad day

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No one was more surprised than me when I took up running a few months after baby number 2 was born. I was never…sporty, and spent many a P.E. lesson at school hiding in the loos. Don’t get me wrong, I have the co-ordination of a constipated in-bred labradoodle and will never break any speed records – I’m not a PROPER runner. But I’ve loved the personal satisfaction that has come from running half marathons, and *really* enjoyed the personal satisfaction of swigging wine from a drink bottle post-run in a hotel hot pool with a girlfriend on a running trip we did together. This year, I set myself the lofty goal of running a full marathon. Then life got in the way and I haven’t run for months and months because I’ve been full of excuses: “I’m tired because the kids have been up coughing all night, my running top smells funny, I’m getting used to my new job, the weather is shit, there’s just no time, does my thyroid look especially large to …

Now it matters

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At the risk of coming across as a bit neurotic and high maintenance, I think having babies has made me a bit neurotic and high maintenance. Previously mundane or everyday situations have taken on a whole new meaning now that there are two tiny humans in our life. The little things have become big things, and motherhood can feel a bit like one of those reality TV shows where people have to make it through obstacle courses covered in soap while big padded gloves throw unexpected blows. Except there’s no cash prize, and instead of an exciting purpose-built course, the obstacles are things like long queues at the supermarket. For example: Holiday traffic with the husband before kids: “Oh rats, traffic is at a standstill. Never mind, let’s listen to some music, have a chat, and share the chocolate bar that’s in my small and tidy handbag”. After kids: “Noooo! I’m down to the last three crackers for the bored toddler, and then there’s nothing but a half-empty packet of crystallized raisins somewhere in the …

It takes a village to dress a working mother

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Usually I get little girl side-eye, or murmurs of “that’s lots of black” about my workdrobe, but yesterday I finally sussed an outfit that my kids are happy with: See it here on my Facebook page. It totally takes a village to dress a working mother though…the leather jacket is a hand-me-down from my bestie in Melbourne, the skirt was a purchase from #Federation ‘strongly encouraged’ by one of my closest friends who rocks the same adult tutu in another colour, the inspo to try something different outside of my usual cloak of darkness came from my WorkWife who smashes out new looks more often than I change the bath towels (and she took the boomerang video – #workwife is taking over #InstagramHusband ), and bonus confidence shot from my little girls who said “Ooooo, Mummy that looks pretty!”. Can I take a moment to talk about bodysuits though? Of course I can, this is my page. So I wore a bodysuit, which I haven’t done since 1992 when all I wanted from life was a bodysuit and a pair of 501s. I loved …

The name game

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Before I had my own babies, I couldn’t understand why people would say “still deciding on a name” in their birth announcement. What? You’ve had nine months to prepare for this moment! How hard it is to choose a name? Er, actually harder than it looks, I discovered when pregnant for the first time. Jeremy (my husband) and I had decided not to find out what we were having, so we needed options both ways. We set perimeters on name-choosing rules, such as checking there were no notorious criminals with that moniker, no names of ex-partners or meanies from school, and making sure it wouldn’t sound silly with our last name (when we got married, I was keen on having one family surname, but filled out the forms somewhat reluctantly because my married name makes me sound like a drunk Irishman). We both loved the same boy’s name. Sorted. A girl’s middle name would be Clare, after my mother. BAM, we were nailing this naming thing and I was only about eleven minutes pregnant. But …

Review: Dawn O’Porter, ‘The Cows’

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COW [n.]/kau/ A piece of meat; born to breed; past its sell-by-date; one of the herd. Recently I had the sheer pleasure of taking lone flight to see my best friend. It was too early in the morning to summon the drinks trolley, but the in-flight entertainment app seductively touted season one of ‘Big Little Lies’, which I’d been meaning to see for ages, so I was as happy as a temporarily childfree woman on a trans-Tasman flight at 6.30am could possibly be. Alas, the entertainment app gave the middle finger to all passengers by refusing to work. The technology fail turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I had an uncracked copy of Dawn O’Porter’s ‘The Cows’ stashed in my bag (there were no blessings, disguised or otherwise for all the parents on the flight who had to find other forms of entertainment for the next four hours), and five pages in I was wishing the plane could just fly until it ran out of fuel so I could read the whole …

Leave it on the playground

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  With the weather sending out flirty sunny signals by way of apologising for the recent flooding in our city, we decided to get together with some friends and their kids for a combined family lunch and play. Given that there were nine of us in total (four adults, five kids), there was a bit of a wait for a table, but with a fantastic playground adjacent to the restaurant you could buy wrist bands to play on, the wait was no bother at all. The kids got stuck in to the busy playground, and the adults chatted while keeping an eye out for any potential flight risks, and an ear out for any “I’ve fallen off this thing here and something is probably broken!” shrieks.  A good waiting time was had by all. Or so I thought. Just after we’d sat down and all disputes over coloured cups had been settled, my five year old daughter whispered “oh no, here comes that mean girl”, and shrank back into her seat as a little girl …