All posts tagged: #children

Say hello to my little friend

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The magic of Christmas is a special thing when you’re a kid. Twinkly lights, the Snoopy’s Christmas song on high rotate, seeing extended family, decorating trees, waking up to presents and a note from Santa, a special lunch and a free pass to gorge on candy canes. When you’re a kid, it all just…happens. When you’re a parent, however, it all just…happens because you do it all. I’m no grinch, and Christmas is pretty much the highlight of my year (note: Due to printing deadlines, I’m writing this column quite far ahead of Christmas. I will laugh at myself long and hard when I see that sentence in print), but from somewhere around mid-September my right eye starts to twitch as I think about logistics. Where will we be? Who will be coming? Does everyone fit? Are there any more vegetarians than there were last year? Oh, and a vegan now, too? Where are the Santa Sacks? Are we allocating enough time to all sides of the family? Can someone please turn off Snoopy’s Christmas …

Friendship survivals & casualties

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I consider myself extremely lucky to have a core group of girlfriends I’ve known for a while now, we share a lot of our thoughts and lives with each other, and have supported each other through life’s ups and downs – which has preserved our sanity many times over. They’re the kinds of friends you could rely on to help you hide a body. I met those friends through other mutual friends, through work, and through old relationships. We’ve done life things at different times…moving countries, getting married, separating, having kids…and while we sometimes don’t see each other as often as we’d like to, we know we’re all there. Last night, I went out with a different group of relatively new friends discovered in the last year or so, and the conversation ranged from hilarious to intense and back again, with much cheers-ing and clinking of glasses. Were it not for the fact that our kids are in the same year at the same school, we probably wouldn’t have met, and that table of belly …

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 …

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 …