Endings and beginnings

I am going to take some time away from Loobylu for a while. I am not sure how long for but I am in dire need of some space away from my blog. I have too much on my plate and it’s all beginning to wear a bit thin. I need to slow down and kick back and enjoy my kids while they are this small, because I can’t believe how fast it’s going. I need to stop talking about myself! I need to work on my books (procrastination is my constant companion)!

I am sure to be lurking around flickr from time to time, and I will still be checking all my favourite blogs (of which I now subscribe to 196 of them… hmm… perhaps I need to address that too! ) and leaving copious comments…

Thank you for stopping by to read my ramblings over the years. I have truly appreciated everything that keeping a blog has brought to me - friends, work, inspiration, comfort, laughs, confidence and support. Even just writing that now makes me realise that I will probably miss this more than I can imagine so I am sure I will start up again some time - but for now it’s a good-bye to Loobylu. It’s time to make a cup of tea and read a book and tickle little tummies.

My child the problem solver

Yesterday afternoon I was changing Lily’s nappy and it was a complicated affair as it sometimes can be. I could hear Amelia down in the playroom thumping around, tipping toys out of boxes and so on, as she does. I called down to her to ask what she was up to.

“I’m pretending to be Bob the Builder!” she replied. That sounded harmless enough so I kept changing Lily. And then just as I finished I had to start over, as you sometimes need to do.

Finally she was all done so I took her back the the lounge room and put her on the mat and watched her start to roll and roll and I started to put some cups in the dishwasher.

And then Amelia called “Mum, I need some help!”. There was no panic in her voice what-so-ever, but for some reason I felt a sudden desperate lurch, probably remembering that I had meant to check on her Bob the Builder antics as soon as I was free, and I ran down the hall to the playroom.

For a moment I couldn’t locate her in all the mess…

“Where are you?” I bleated a little stupidly.

“Here!” and I turned to see her in the corner near the bookcase, looking like this:

In fact, I have drawn the whole structure to look much more solid than it actually was. It was literally teetering.

“Can you help me reach the paints?” She asked. She was trying to get the pots of paint down from the very top of the highest (2 metre) bookcase and when I saw that she had some of the pots already on the floor and had already started to paint various surfaces I realised she had been climbing up and down this stack for some time. ARGGH!

After lifting her down to safety, I looked around and in the mess I saw other smaller teetering structures which had obviously been tried and failed attempts at getting high enough before finally settling on her Tower of Doom. One consisted of her small kid’s table, a stool, a doll’s mattress and a plastic basket which looked far scarier than any other. I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon in a state of mild shock at what could have been. I spent a lot of time pondering how you can have a playroom which has no boxes, chairs, benches, stools, tables, paint, bookcases or stackable items of any nature and instead has close-circuit video cameras, alarms and maybe some… ummm… cushions to play with. FAR better.

Flickr Favourites from this week

1. last request, 2. thrift find, 3. p_0385.jpg, 4. p_0386.jpg, 5. Sheppy, 6. I got a code id by dose, 7. 1800’s Homestead, 8. poke cake, 9. ANOTHER RAINY SUNDAY, 10. p e e k . a . b o o, 11. Owly tea for me, 12. Xana & Brownie, 13. Purple WIP - Let¬¥s get back to work…, 14. flor, 15. ben flappin, 16. Living room

Using Mosaic Maker.

Crazy us (me and my eyebrows)

I have been so grumpy these last few days! Maybe it’s just the heat… It would be too cruel if it was a result of too much sleep. Perhaps it’s something to do with dropping the overnight feed and the change in hormone levels.

Breastfeeding hormones have a lot to answer for.

Firstly, I am losing vast amounts of hair. It happened last time in the months after Amelia was born (and strangely when I worked at Wishlist… who knows what that was about, certainly not breastfeeding) and I know it’s only temporary but it’s a little disconcerting to be shedding with such abandon. It worries me when I cook, and it annoys me all day as I feel little spider feet running across my arms and shoulders, only to realise it’s just another stray hair or two or three.

And secondly… my eyebrows have gone crazy! I have been going to have them, um, “seen to” about every six weeks until now but it’s just not often enough! Last time I went to visit the kindly, motherly beautician she said: “Wow! Your eyebrows lead you into the room! It’s time to do something about that! Hooee, I don’t think I have ever seen them this bad! Wow! Those hormones are really doing it to you, hey?”.

I come from a family of generously eyebrowed folks, and it’s something I have always just accepted as being part of “me”. In fact during parts of my 20s I was incredibly proud of my lush bohemian brows. But now in my mid 30s I never bargained on my caterpillar brows becoming more like mutant mad-professor brows. And I never thought that it would be coupled with frightening hair loss, all potentially making me look scarily like my late Grandfather who was something of a bald, wild-eyebrowed, mad professor type.

So there you have it. Some things you probably didn’t want to know about me… perhaps I was crazy to post this as I know people in real life who read this blog and who I will now become increasingly paranoid around when having them over for dinner or bumping into them on the street. As we chat I will be mentally barking “I KNOW YOU ARE LOOKING AT MY EYEBROWS!”… and now that I’ve written that, they will be working very hard not to look at my eyebrows. Actually, if we have them over to dinner, they will be wise not to look at my eyebrows at all but to keep a keen eye on their dinner… unless I invest in a hairnet in the not too distant future.

(Did my social calendar just suddenly become spookily empty?).

Summer of love

Bush fires, extreme heat, power failures and possible power restrictions on top of water restrictions and smoke filled air are all daily reminders of why I can’t stand Summer.

Can.not.stand.it.

Since we got back from the beach I have been checking the Age’s weather forecast page every few hours with tired resignation but I just cheered HOORAH! when I saw that Saturday’s 38°c has now gone down to 32°c. That 6 year old birthday party we have to attend will be a little less sultry. Last year all the chocolate coins hidden for the treasure hunt had melted to sticky hot-chocolate liquid. At least this year I won’t be pregnant. I have been speaking to my mum on the phone who has recently become quite the web-savvy-gran and she will say, “I’ve been watching the weather radar and it’s raining everywhere but here!”. She, like me, is completely weather obsessed.

So we can only water twice a week and that’s if you can remember to spring out of bed (or go out in the dark) during the designated hours on the designated days. We are planning on getting a water tank to collect rainwater (if and when it rains) but there is a huge waiting list on those. So in the meantime there is the bath water. This morning I transported 7 buckets of saved kid’s bath water out to the garden and tipped them all over my thirsty beans, tomatoes, herbs and young trees. It was quite the ordeal. I had to sneak past Sleeping Lily’s (woot!) door and down the stairs while wearing my flip-flops without spilling too much of the precious stuff, over and over again. Sneaking in flip-flops is really hard, there is quite an art to sucking them up against your soles and I notice that tonight I have aching toes from scrunching them. I think there may be a new and surprising market for water carrying vessels we can wear on our heads opening up because it was tiring work.

On a side note, while I am feeling very hot, and grumpy and very AUSTRALIAN (because feeling hot and grumpy is a national pastime), the Times Mummy blog reckons Kiddley is “almost unbearably perky and American“. Who woulda thunk it?

The wardrobe of my dreams

Yesterday morning Big-P, Lily, Amelia and I all rushed off to IKEA — taking full advantage of the fact that we had all slept pretty well (and again last night!) and felt we could handle the whole IKEA experience with kids. It was still pretty mad and not something we would want to do every day but we came out with loads of good things.

I had found an IKEA catalogue in amongst all the 2002/2003 Cleo and Cosmo magazines down at the beach house and had spent several hours pouring over it’s pages (like a fool, I hadn’t packed a novel) and made a list of things that we needed. Above you can see the Hemnes wardrobe which doesn’t seem to be on the IKEA Australia site, but is definitely in-store. I love it. It’s being delivered this afternoon for Lily’s room as we still have piles of her stuff and boxes of nappies all over her floor. This is mainly why I haven’t included any photos of the ‘finished’ nursery — because it is far from finished. Pictures and shelves still need to be hung, stuff put away and that quilt is still sitting in my cupboard, half-stitched and mocking me.

But this wardrobe! I LOVE it! I think I said that already, but how cute will some fabric bags look hanging from that side peg? And some cute vintage suitcases piled on top on the luggage rack? And maybe I should even paint something on the doors… I could submit my ideas to IKEA Hacker (via Yvestown).

My copy of Children’s Rooms London arrived from Amazon Japan yesterday, which is fabulous, just as are Children’s Rooms Stockholm (on Amazon JP ) and Children’s Rooms Paris (on Amazon JP) and I am much inspired. The rooms featured in these books are loaded with (sometimes hacked) IKEA goodness, but all are so full of fun and mess and personal expression. Each room is truly a little nest perfect for its inhabitant.

Slept a little

Wow wow! I have just got home from a week’s holiday at the beach to discover all the wonderful comments for my last post! Thank you! Before we left I was planning to email everyone who wrote to say thank you but now as you can see that will be quite a task. I want to tell you that I read, considered, thought about and now treasure every piece of advice you sent me — so thank you. It has helped enormously. In a tired state yesterday afternoon it was all a little overwhelming and confusing but I have some how absorbed it all and feel incredibly lucky to have this community.

Our beach holiday was a little clouded over by the sleep problem which seemed to get a little better by the last night, but even co-sleeping become completely impossible as the bed was tiny, and Lily didn’t settle between us, instead kicking, wriggling, scratching us and crying in the wee hours. So last night in a kind of exhausted desperation we tried leaving her to cry for three minutes. We now limit naps to two one hour naps a day, and have a very strict bedtime routine - bath, story, feed, cuddle and then bed. After three minutes she was still grizzling (not howling hysterically, I wouldn’t have been able to handle that at all) so I went in and patted her and calmed her and then she grizzled for another 4 or five minutes and then after that she slept. And slept! At 2am we had a short repeat performance and then she woke again at 6.30 happy and hungry to a very happy smiley, well slept family.

I have just spoken to one of my best friends about our horror holiday, and she told me that she is amazed at how incredibly “relaxed” (read: slack) we have been with Lily’s routine compared to how rigid we were with Amelia. She rightly observed that it was different then because we probably felt so out of control and overwhelmed that we clung to our routine and in the short and long term it made for a very good sleeper. In Lily’s case we have been much more likely to go-with-the-flow which definitely has it’s benefits and I am pleased we have found a more relaxed approach but for some things in this family, like sleep, we need to find our routines again.

OH I know that there are controversies and conflicting feelings about doing the sleep thing this way, but because it was so quick and so successful and she didn’t seemed stressed in the least (just a little put out) we are going to try again tonight. I actually don’t think our success had much to do with the crying bit, which was minimal, but more to do with a gentle, loving, pre-bedtime routine which is relaxed her and left her far calmer than we have previously seen her. Perhaps it won’t go so well, but I am happy to have had a few hours of sleep overnight. It makes for a much happier, calmer us.

Thank you again for your comments. I am very grateful.

zzzzzzzz

Greetings from Sleep Deprivation Land! Population 3!

This post is not destined to be long or terribly coherent as Lily will NOT settle at night and has been finally falling off into a completely exhausted sleep between 11.30 and midnight. If we are having a really shabby night she then wakes again around 3 for another feed and then Amelia might wake us with a nightmare or her usual early morning cheerful chatter. All this compounded with the heat and I am feeling utterly shattered.

Lily, who was once “Our perfect little sleeper” has now become wired and hysterical in the evenings. She might fall asleep in our arms (as she has always done! Naughty us, I know) but then as soon as she is gently put into her cot her eyes snap open, her arms start jerking and her mouth twists open into that huge wide open chasm of WHAA-WHAA-WHHHAAAA. And after that? She utterly refuses to settle.

… ugh… sorry, I am having trouble stringing these sentences together.

Two nights ago Big-P and I decided we might try a little “controlled comforting” but we couldn’t go through with it. I can’t remember how we managed with Amelia but hearing our little baby scream and scream made me feel quite physically ill. It lasted three minutes before we caved… I left an SOS message on my Maternal Child Health Nurse’s message machine yesterday hoping she would get back to me with some advice but she had obviously taken an early Friday… I just can’t imagine how we will ever get her to go to sleep on her own.

Any thoughts? I don’t want this to turn in to a Ferber vs. anti-ferber debate, but I would really like to know what worked for … um… anyone!

And this has only been going on for four nights! I know some people endure it for months… I don’t know how.

—–

And quickly I want to mention that sign-ups for the new Mini-swap close today over at Mommycoddle. We’re signed up and ready to create and package.

And don’t forget to bid for beautiful items at the Kim Family Auction.

WIP Friday - Maminka doll

This is not such a great photo — I just couldn’t get a good one today as I left it too late and it’s quite overcast this afternoon — but you get the idea.

So, this is my WIP for today - a doll made from a pattern in this wonderful Japanese craft book.

It’s designed by the very talented Mitsuko from Maminka — which theoretically should look a little like one of these girls, but there is no way the pattern piece for the head will result in a face as round as these… instead it comes out looking a little squished. I am a little disappointed in how she is turning out as my doll making skills are a little rusty (see the puckered neck, the wonky eyes?) and I wasn’t as careful as I could have been with the stitching.

Never mind…

It is nice to make a doll from someone else’s pattern once in a while - I find it so much easier just to follow the directions rather than fiddle with pattern pieces of my own concoction which don’t always quite fit together in the way I imagined. It’s also good in terms of studying how someone else tackles the shape of an arm, the way a head fits on to the body or the proportions of the limbs to the torso etc. Unsurprisingly it isn’t quite as satisfying as visualising, designing and stitching a character all of your own but it’s a good exercise for someone who is feeling a bit out of touch with it all.

Proud illustrating mum

Amelia has discovered how fun it is to draw. It kind of crept up on us as previously she would stop to scribble something for maybe 30 seconds or so before careening off to do something else, but suddenly she is spending literally hours at the kitchen table wearing out her felt tip markers as she devises complex scenes or sweetly simple portraits. She has filled a new photo album with dozens of tiny portraits of all of her stuffed animals and dolls with a few family members thrown in for good measure. The picture above is of Lily’s new doll, and one of my favourites is this picture of Lily asleep in her car seat:

and then there is this lovely picture of me:

You can tell it’s me - with my post Christmas generous girth, my eyes like saucers and my delightful floral hat!

Sitting next to her at the kitchen table while I draw in my sketch book or do a little sewing is one of the nicest things… that and holding a freshly bathed sleeping baby. If only both girls would sleep! Ahhh!