Hell, The Musical

School concerts: the place where you are forced to sit in an uncomfortable plastic fold away chair, smiling and clapping like you mean it, when really you would rather be waiting at the dentists’ office to get a tooth pulled. At least the dentist has the decency to put a plasma on the ceiling to take your mind off the excruciating pain.

So it’s that time of year again and all 15 students in the senior half of the primary school have been making their way by little white bus to and from little big smoke all term to practice with the other small country schools. Together they are going to perform a stunning rendition of The Lion King that us parents are welcome to attend just so long as we fork out the $5 per person sucker entry fee.

To help the children practice during the holidays, we were lucky enough to be given a CD containing all 300,000 of the songs they will be singing on the night. As the smirking teachers handed them over to us parents they reaffirmed in front of the kids that the true beauty of these CDs is that they are quite portable and can be played not only at home, but even to pass the time quicker in the car while you are travelling the 80km round trip to soccer every Saturday. How kind.

 While Buzz is a talented young man in many fields, unfortunately singing isn’t one of them, and these weekend trips to soccer with a tone deaf son? There is nothing Hakuna Matata about them. But despite my whinging I can honestly tell you I am looking forward to the concert.

 It’s a chance to watch my son perform proudly in front of a large bunch of proud smiling parents even if they are hopped up on Zanex and secretly swilling whisky from their plastic water bottles.  I get to take a million photos of him basking in his glory to be put in the album and treasured forever, but best of all when we get home I can snap that damn CD into little tiny pieces and burn them in the fire.

Wanna do some Blog Floggin of your own? Link up with Glowless!

Chorus for the night time

Well its hump day, you know what that means, don't you??

 It's time for Write On Wednesday!
This week we have an exercise based on a photo by Kristy at House of Prowse. Kristy took the photo above, emailed it to me and suggested we use it as a starting point for a  writing prompt. I thought it was a fabulous idea, especially as it will provide a huge challenge for me. I'm not a visual person at all. But I'm determined to give it a go...

The Write On Wednesday Rules: Feel free to get creative with the writing exercises - there isn't a right or wrong. Please do try to visit the other members of Write On Wednesdays and leave a comment. You can grab the button for Write On Wednesdays from my sidebar.

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 7 - Sit under a tree and write: Find yourself a quiet spot. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Take a look at Kristy's Tree Photo. Write the first words that come into your head. Keep writing whatever comes into your head. Stop when the buzzer rings. Do this exercise over and over if you wish. If like me, you struggle with visual prompts, perhaps try sitting under a tree to write. I have heard that changing your usual writing place can spark new inspiration. Try it and see. Do both if you please!

I enjoyed this exercise quite a lot and I actually ended up doing it twice, the second time it went an hour over the time frame and somehow turned into a children's picture book, currently without the pictures...

 I wont share it here right now, but it is called 'The Oak Tree That Didn't Lose His Leaves' inspired by nothing other than an oak tree that hasn't lost its leaves this winter... go figure, lol.

The first one which I have put here today is a really short observation piece I did late last night.

   

Chorus for the night time.

Out here, the heart of the bush is a healing spiritual place, the cold night air so still and silent that its’ piercing nothingness resonates in your ears getting louder and louder, until it is broken, suddenly by the distant sound of a frog calling for his mate.

As I sit alone in the dark I feel whole, at one with the Earth that surrounds me. The grey ghostly shadow of an owl passes by, descending and almost appearing to hover for a moment as it picks up its prey with its long talons and moving on without a sound. Nature, raw & beautiful.

Yep, that's it. Oh well, I'm glad I got the picture book idea out, might be able to turn it into gifts for little family members when I finally decide to start the "Buy Nothing New Challenge"!

Head over to Gill's awesome blog 'Ink Paper Pen' if you havn't already, and link yourself up to Write On Wednesday!

To my children,

To my children,

What will be, will be and what has been, was. I have been truly content, I lived 1000 lives in one, I have learned lessons for a life time in just half the time. I have stopped and smelled the roses, I have paused to reflect the beauty that exists within the stillness of the night and the momentum of the day. I learned how not to take for granted all those things around me that are so easy to get swept up into. I learned to forgive, and forget and how to love.

When you get older and place your time in the hands of another everyday for so long, you must cherish the little snippets you have left for yourself and your loved ones. We do what we have to do to bring food to the table, to put a roof over our heads and to raise our children but we still worry there is never enough time or money left for the things we feel are most important, yet when it comes down to it they are not the things that heal us and make us whole, it is instead our reactions, our choices, our actions and the small things -that define and complete us.

The day we stop for a moment in our busy schedule is the day we start to truly live. We stop to watch a butterfly pass over head, watch the children play or simply enjoy the fragrance from the freshly blooming hyacynths alongside that white picket fence we have always admired. What happens behind that picket fence we will never really know, but to me it always conjured up images of freshly baked muffins and warm timber floors, other things symbolic of my ideology.

One day the world will go on without me, and new lives in turn will begin, the circle of life, just as it’s supposed to be. As time passes, things will change, you will be amazed by these new ideas & experiences, at times you will be saddened too. It must be like this in order for us to fully appreciate what we have been given, and what we have created.

 You only ever see the world through your own eyes, you feel it only through your own fingertips and breathe it into your own lungs. Cherish this individuality and knowing you are the only one who gets to experience it, you will learn from it.

 Live the greatest life you can, try your best at all that you do and be proud of your efforts. Learn to seize the day and say yes, but also be aware of when you must say no. Help others when you can, and accept help when it is returned, follow through on the things you begin and always remember to stay true to yourself, when you do, you too will unlock the secret of happiness.

It's all a bit fishy

They say that having animals makes you live longer, and if we go off that I should live to be 100 at least! I have always been a pet lover, The Husband not so much, but he has been very tolerant with me and realisticly probably balances me out so I don't turn into one of those crazy cat ladies Glowless has mentioned...

Over the years many pets have died of old age and my zoo was slowly replaced by children. So many children in fact, that by the time The Princess was born we had well and truly out grown our three bedroom house and we had to do a few reno’s to make everybody fit. This included knocking down a wall, sadly this wall was where my pet pride and joy was. My fish tank.

So I begrudgingly made the ‘right’ decision and gave my fish tank and its inhabitants to my neighbour, as she loved pets too and I could visit it regularly. We put the fish into buckets and somehow managed to pass a rather heavy 4ft glass tank over the back fence much to my husband’s elation and her husband’s dismay.

Since then we sold the shoe box and moved to the farm and I find myself with empty walls again, walls that need to be filled. So naturally I got the husbands approval whilst in a compromising position during a moment of weakness, and before he realised what he'd agreed to I quickly went out and bought this:

And I plan to put in some of these:

And these:

and many, many more...

Unfortunatly, we kinda ran out of water this week, due to a leaking water tank and a lack of rainfall, which means I am going to have to wait for some rain before I can actually fill it up. I hate waiting, we don't really need showers do we? I'm very impatient you know.

So all is content for me in the world of animals, well, at least for a while that is. Although I did see an aviary I quite like the look of and I was kinda thinking about breeding some of these:

Do you like animals? What pets do you have?

This has been another BLOG FLOGGIN' FRIDAY thanks to the gorgeous Glowless.

Head on over to Wheres My Glow? and join in the link up party!



Write On Wednesday - Status Addition

So this weeks W.O.W brings us endless prompt possibilities, the directions are as follows:

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 6 - Status Anxiety: Log onto your Facebook/Twitter page and write down the first status update you see.  Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write the first words that come into your head after your prompt. Stop when the buzzer rings. Do this exercise over and over if you wish. If you don't do the social media thing (there's bound to be some who haven't succumbed!) email me and I'll send you a status update from one of my social media accounts. If you feel uncomfortable about using one of your friend's status updates, consider using the most recent update on Lamebook, the home of the funniest and lamest Facebook status updates. 

Alrighty, here goes:

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“No we are not eating cookies for breakfast. Because I said so, that’s why!”

And aside from the obvious health implications, it might also be because Mummy possibly ate them all late last night while they was sleeping.  Food makes everything better.

It always had, since Sarah was a young girl she had found comfort in food, chocolate biscuits were no exception. She tried hard to steer her children clear of this potentially self destructive path and offered them all the healthy options in the world, but sometimes late at night when she was alone with her memories she would curl up with a packet of Tim Tams.

 They had spent Saturday nights for as long as she could remember lazing on the couch in front of the television with a good thriller and a packet of chocolate double coat.

Sarah missed that, she missed him, Michael had loved Tim Tams.

As she bit into them and the crumbs spilled down her chin, it reminded her of him – his big comforting arms around her, the smell of his aftershave, the sound of his voice, but mostly the twinkle in his hazel eyes as he grinned and grabbed the last biscuit from the packet, waved it in front of her teasingly for a moment before gobbling it up whole.

They had always had a lot of fun together.

And there’s that pesky timer again!  Well that kind of took a different direction to the one I thought it was going to in the first paragraph and a half, I wonder if it is influenced by the fact that I have music playing in the background and the song had changed?

Want to join in the Write On Wednesdays fun? You can hop over to Ink Paper Pen and link yourself up!

The Times, They Are a Changin'

It’s time for Write on Wednesdays with Ink Paper Pen again! Sorry, I wagged last week my excuse is school holidays and the like.

Write On Wednesdays Exercise 5: Write the Music - A bit of choice this week: Pick your favorite song and write down the first line of lyrics OR turn on the radio and write down the first line of lyrics you hear. Then set your timer for 5 minutes and write the first words that come into your head after your writing prompt.  Stop when the buzzer rings! Do this exercise over and over if you wish. 

Extra Credit: After you do the exercise, try it again but this time play the song while you write. Could be an interesting way to get the creativity going... 

Song: Times they are a changin - Bob Dylan

'Come gather round people, where ever you roam...'

We would gather there, on the cold wooden floor of your room. The turquoise walls, made it feel small yet so comforting at the same time. The smell of insence burning over powering the ever present pile of dirty socks in the corner. You didn't care and nor did we, as long as we had our music.

The three of us spent so many days and nights in that little bedroom, writing lyrics playing songs talking about whats wrong with the world but we mostly listened to music, especially Bob Dylan.

Your style was just like his, your voice and ability to write amazing meaningful lyrics, you even looked like him. Your talents were recognised wherever you played and we all knew you had what it takes.

Time passed by as it does and I moved on. The last time I saw you we were gathered once again, but not to joke and sing within those familiar turquoise walls, this time we gathered in the open air to say goodbye to our friend.

This exercise got me thinking and reminiscing of a life past so after I kind of wrote a poem too if your interested...

I used to know him once, he played the string guitar – this homeless looking hobo man who’ll one day be a star.

My friend, the times sure were a changin’, our lives really have evolved. Remember how we played music by the firelight for hours? The nights grew long, our voices worn, fingers bleeding from the cold.

The life of then has all but gone, a memory from afar, an unspoken whisper in the sands of time, left without a scar.

Perhaps the secret love-child of a 60’s icon wrote that even though they never met somehow, telepathically they spoke.

The hobo man still sings and he plays on his guitar, the echo of Dylan etched deep within his repertoire.

The sun is setting, warm on his back, as he grabs his things to leave. Guitar in one hand, bag and his hat, down to the road he made. As he turns around one last time he holds his free hand up and waves , says “Goodbye my friend,” with a wink and a smile and journeys on his way.

The Gift Of Life

I am one of the lucky ones. I have had 4 pregnancies which resulted in 4 healthy babies. I never had to ‘try’ for a baby, they happened. First time, every time. It just worked.

Sadly, for so many people this isn’t the case. Disappointment comes in many forms, from the initial negative test result then month by month having the stress of trying harder and harder and then investing so many emotions into medical help only to be told that there is simply no hope after all.

It’s not going to happen.

There is someone in my family who has been feeling this disappointment for years, while family members and friends all around her give birth with gay abandon she has stood by, smiled and congratulated and been part of the joy, the whole time not sharing her secret pain.

She came to us recently, as the jestful teasing from family members about settling down, now they are married and having kids like the rest of us must have finally become too hard to bear, she and her husband told us of their secret battle with infertility. We didn’t even know they had started trying.

So the next step is one final attempt at IVF, but as so far they have been unable to pass the first stage of creating an embryo they don’t hold much hope. We spoke about alternatives should this fail and I have since done some research into egg donation, there are a number of hoops to jump through, implications counselling, genetic testing etc, but providing I fit the IVF Australia criteria I will be happy to donate my eggs to them.

Nothing is quite like seeing your newborn baby for the first time. Everyone deserves to cradle that amazing being in their arms, breath its’ sent and feel its heart beat. It is a true miracle.

 Sadly we are not all blessed with the ability to have children. I hope that if it's required I will be able to help them conceive so they too can hold in their hands the incredible gift that is life.

The Lazy Post

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So I wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy  an icicle, both the fires have gone out, it’s freezing cold and I’m pretty sure if I look out the window I will see a mammoth, a sloth and a baby staring at me. 

Today is also Friday, Friday the day before the weekend, weekend and frankly, today I don’t feel like doing anything, nothing at all. Well apart from seeing how many songs and movies I can plagerise within the first two paragraphs of this post that is.

But alas for me it’s going to be a busy one. Friends for lunch, others for dinner, SIL+BIL tomorrow for lunch, MIL+FIL for afternoon tea, somewhere in that I need to fit in an 80km round trip to the shops and try to stop myself buying chocolate- then I need to have the strength to throw away any chocolate that I do buy. Work on Sunday where I must stop myself buying Mc Donald’s for lunch. Ugh.

 Something about school holidays just makes me want to sleep in and do nothing. Even though the kids wake up at 5am regardless, part of me reverts back to my teenage school girl self and I simply can’t get out of bed.

I lie here thinking about how I should get up and light the fires, make some bread, feed the chooks, tidy the house for today’s first wave of visitors, you know productive stuff. But instead I roll over making sure to keep the warm doona over my shoulders and pluck my lap top from my bedside table and start reading blog posts and yelling things like ‘stop fighting!’, ‘share!’ and ‘do you want your friends to come over or not?’ from beneath my doona. Oh that’s class act parenting right there.

I’m a procrastinator from way back, so in my usual fashion rather than facing the day, I decided to type this blog post about nothing at all.

What type of person are you? Do you procrastinate or sieze the day? Are you reading this from bed too or were you up at 5am going for a jog?  

To make it feel like I am doing something, let’s call this a Blog Flog (see, sounds much more energetic) and add it to FlogYoBlog Friday, hosted of course by Glowless, head over there and link yourself up!

Don't make me run, I'm full of chocolate...

I am addicted to junk food, I did two years without the stuff once, but that’s a whole other story. Once I fell off that wagon it was all over. I still remember that fateful night, I had just moved out of home into a share house and one of the blokes living there offered me a piece of Cadbury Plain Chocolate, not wanting to be rude to my new house mate, I took it. I knew that night as I accepted those little squares and felt the welcoming sweetness melt into my mouth that I had just undone 2 years of hardcore chocolate-sobriety.

Fast forward 10 years and 4 children later:

 I am standing in my kitchen feeling hungry, it’s about lunchtime and there is no chocolate in the house. Damn. So instead I nuked an egg and chucked it between two stale pieces of bread and smothered it in tomato sauce and ate it, not high style dining, but food all the same.

I wasn’t really hungry but thought I could go another, this time the egg exploded in the microwave making a huge bloody mess. While cleaning up the egg mess I dropped the microwave dish into the sink full of dishes, nothing broke but the almighty crash woke up The Princess.

Got the Princess up and made her some lunch – a slightly healthier cheese & vegemite sandwich and celery sticks. I decided that I was still kind of peckish, in search of something quick, easy and not celery. I found the butter popcorn.

“1 to 5 minutes” it says on the label, do not leave un-attended. Fine, whatever.

So I chuck it in the microwave for 3 minutes and walk off to try and prevent The Princess feeding the royal Border Collie anymore of her sandwich. Back into the kitchen and I open the microwave, smoke pours out of the door to greet me. Oh Joy.

So I turned off the smoke detector and took the popcorn outside. I decided the universe was trying to tell me something which was either; STOP EATING CRAP YOU DONT NEED! or possibly AVOID THE MICROWAVE, ITS OUT TO GET YOU!

I guess I have reached a point where all my clothes have simultaneously shrunk again... and I get puffed walking to the letter box... (It’s a 500m driveway before you judge me too harshly.)

It has now been nearly a week since I last ate chocolate. For me, that is a really long time. I have been having withdrawal symptoms too – a headache I can’t shift, irritability and midnight urges to drive the 80km round trip to a shop and sink my teeth into a big bar of Cadbury fruit & nut...

So after one attempt to high tail it to the shops for a fix resulted in this:

The universe has spoken. THIS HAS TO END. NOW.

If I can go a week, I can go two, and three and so on, can’t I? My mother has always said, “Everything in moderation.” and that is fine, a true statement for many, but not one applied to alcoholics and I think one that may not apply to me as a chocoholic.

Breastfeeding my daughter has also left me boobless  at an appropriate weight/ BMI and since I got hubby desexed  am not having any more children, the last 3 times I’ve had this opportunity, I've blown it. This is my last ‘get out of fat free’ card and the time has come to make the decision.

NO MORE CHOCOLATE.

 By about blogging this, I feel it will help me stay on the straight and narrow and lose my Drab chocoholic status and turn it into a Fab health conscious one. I will also try and walk to the letterbox occasionally more often.

Are you a chocoholic too? How do you beat the cravings? How do you get the smell of burnt popcorn out of your house?

Would you like to join in on the Drab 2 Fab Link up? Simply head over to Diminishing Lucy and follow the prompts.

Winter

As I drive down the highway, the sound of the lion king sound track reverberates around the car and I try and stop it from penetrating into my mind. The fog is thick today and visability is poor.

I travel further along the road, its ghost like feel enveloping the car as I approach to a familiar spot. A windmill is coming up on the right, it is standing proud, alone in its paddock.

 I have always wanted to photograph this windmill. It speaks to me, a majestic old icon of the Australia I love. It appears different every time I pass, but in reality it’s the only stable thing in an ever changing environment, sunrise, sunset, rain, wind, sun and snow. Oh the things it must have seen.

Today it is barely visible through the mist that encases it, but it is still beautiful. I stop the car and get out quickly, I need to photograph it.

As I pause to reflect my shot, I become aware of something watching me, on the other side of the road a group of cows stand, staring at me through the fence blinking slowly with their big brown curious eyes.

I watch them back for a minute, frost resting gently on their backs their breaths visible in the cold morning air, it must be hard being outside all the time. I get back into the car and adjust the temperature. Inside it is 26 degrees, dry and warm. Outside it is winter.

For Love Or Money



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Gucci has always been the outgoing sort and a bit of a ‘ladies’ man.  He has one of those smiles and I think he has had a little girlfriend at all times since he started kindy.

When we moved to the country, within two days of starting his new school he had proclaimed his undying love for a girl one year older and two head heights above him, we will call her Ashley. She was a nice girl, smart as a whip and very polite with lovely parents. She proclaimed her love back.

They stayed ‘together’ for 6 months which is not a bad effort for a 7 year old really – until Gucci casually told me over dinner one night that he had ‘dumped’ her because she was rude to him at the bubblers.

Well.

Now Buzz on the other hand is more quiet around the girls, he had a little 8yr old style crush on a girl in his class for months but he never really spoke to her. Let’s call her Sally. Now Sally is a tiny little thing with a whole lot of attitude – she listens to Keisha songs on her iPod, watches twilight, is rude and doesn’t take crap from anyone. To be honest I’m not a big fan, even less so since her older brother has taken to bullying Buzz at school.

So when Gucci announced at the dinner table he was now ‘dating’ Sally I was surprised to say the least and after one look at the devastation on Buzz’s face, I got a little bit cranky. Short of saying  how mean that was and I don’t approve anyway, I told him in no uncertain terms he is too young to worry about girlfriends.

So when Buzz came home from school the next day with a smug expression and said he was now ‘going out’ with Ashley I had no choice but to question his motives, now I know there are only 36 odd students in the entire school and the majority are boys so there are ‘slim pickings’ so to speak but I couldn't shake the feeling he was just doing it to get back at Gucci.

So being the good mother that I am, I sat him down and asked him why he had chosen Ashley. He replied to me with a smile, “Well she is always really nice to me, we can talk for ages and not get board, she’s funny...” he paused for a moment in thought,  I was feeling terrible for doubting him and brimming with pride, until he added at the last minute, “Oh and she’s rich. Her family are loaded Mum!”

Just like that, my pride vanished with a puff of smoke and The Husband who had been listening in, snorted coffee out of his nose.

Whats the go with these 'tweens'anyway? When exactly did 7 & 8 year olds start wanting to 'date'? When I was that age I steered well clear of the opposite sex just incase I came into contact with 'boys germs' and came down with a case of cooties.

 I guess it goes to show how much times have changed and how kids are really feeling the pressure to grow up fast. I hope over time, children re-learn to appreciate their youth and have fun just being kids. 

This has been another FLOG YO BLOG FRIDAY as linked with the Galliant Glowless, join in the fun by linking yourself up. Happy July peoples!