A dieting post. Seriously? It's come to this.

Shall we start with a short visualisation? Let’s. Picture this. You have done your very best to arrive at your physiotherapist appointment on time. You are in the waiting room quietly high-fiving yourself for remembering, after too many times forgetting, to wear the right underpants. Admittedly, the criteria for assessing the right underpants for any occasion is open to a great deal of interpretation.

On this particular day, for an appointment involving some level of undressing for a health professional, my criteria was simply that my underpants be in decent condition. Not grey (unless they were grey when purchased), no wayward elastic, no holes. Just a decent, proper pair of knickers.  And would you believe it? I actually remembered. Dignity intact! Though not for long.

After the initial treatment my physiotherapist informed me that she would be teaching me some new exercises. To ensure I did them correctly she said I’d do them in front of a mirror. Oh and would I mind stripping off to ensure I got the angles right? (Angles you say? What angles? As we both soon saw my body was a distinctly ANGLE-FREE-ZONE.)

So with cruel, unforgiving, sunlight beaming through to compound the ignominy of the situation, I stood almost naked in front of a full-length mirror assessing the damage. (Did I mention that I paid actual money for this exercise???) The only underwear that would have rectified it would be a full body spanx suit. And that ain’t something I own. 

It was mortifying, if not a little expected. Ok, if I’m truthful, totally expected. The real surprise was that I was surprised at all. It’s not as if any of my clothes were fitting comfortably. I hadn’t exercised at all for over 12 months thanks to my faulty hip. And, well, food. Glorious food had become, even more than usual, my lovely, reliable, dependable friend. (Though in hindsight this friendship was not without flaws: read ahead.)

The image in the mirror prompted me to hop on the physio’s scales. I knew, despite desperately hoping otherwise, it wasn’t an illusion staring back at me but I thought I needed the facts. I don’t own any scales and, aside from my two pregnancies where regular doctor appointments gave me a chance to keep track of my weight, I don’t generally weigh myself. Until I did.  

Unfortunately I recognised the number staring back at me. BECAUSE IT’S WHAT I WEIGHED WHEN I WAS 7 MONTHS PREGNANT WITH MISS L. Except this time, there was no baby to account for any of it.  I’ll let you digest that for a moment. It certainly took me longer than a moment to digest. 

Eight weeks on and I am capable of sharing this with you because I have managed to buck and even reverse the trend. I am now, happily, closer to pre-pregnancy weight than peak-pregnancy weight, which considering Miss L hasn’t been growing inside me for 20 months isn’t of itself particularly astounding. But it’s a darn-sight better than it was a few months ago.   

What I am about to write pains me. A great deal. With the exception of various diets I tried to help manage Crohn’s disease back in the day when that was a problem, I have never been on an actual diet before. There is part of me that dies every time I hear the word diet. I hate the word and everything it connotes. But the truth is I’ve been giving one a whirl and it’s kind of brilliant.

I am sharing it as a community service announcement should you ever find yourself naked in front of a mirror, thinking it might be time for a solution other than a muffin and a flat white to ease the pain.   

I have been on an adapted version of the 5:2 diet, the principle of which is on 2 non-consecutive days each week you eat very little. The rest of the week you eat what you normally would. It has completely reset the way I eat and I have dropped several kilos without it seeming difficult. Truly.

This is why I think it works:

• I got an app on my phone to help me keep track of what I actually eat. Simple but brilliant. Particularly if, like me, you have never had a firm handle on exactly how many calories are in the things you eat. (I actually want to stab myself in the eye for writing this. But it works.)
• Maximising nutrition. By paying attention to what I eat, particularly on the fasting days, my mind is wired to pick foods that give maximum value. This wasn’t on my radar as much before.
• Quantity control. The fasting days have recalibrated my appetite. Habit is a powerful thing and I was in the habit of eating a lot. I can now distinguish between hungry and not hungry. I eat less overall but honestly I’m not hungry. I just don’t overeat. As much.    

Ok I will now stab myself in the eye and wonder how NABM came to this. A dieting post. But if it saves me – or anyone else – from the indignity of an almost-naked full-length mirror situation it will be worth it. Surely?

So it's been a while.

So. It’s been a while! So long, in fact, that I have been wondering whether I know how to do this anymore. That nagging notion has been putting me off from coming back here for too long. So I’m just going to jump back in like I did when I started. 

Boy, oh boy, has a bit happened since I last stopped by here. I remember just before I started what was about to be a new job editing Women’s Agenda I decided to give myself a month’s grace period from blogging. I knew my plate was going to be full and figured I’d need to reserve whatever energy I had for work and home. Ha! A month! 

Full doesn’t begin to describe it. It really was the most hectic, rewarding, difficult, thrilling, supercharged experience on all fronts. The work itself was an absolute blast and I loved every moment but it was addictive and consuming. It was only when I stepped back from the role earlier this year that I really appreciated just how “on” I’d been. About two weeks after stepping back I started to wonder how I had done it. Not in a smug gosh-i-am-a-bit-special way but in a brutally honest way. (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN???) I still don’t really know.

Home life was equally consuming but markedly more chaotic than work. There was far too little sleep for far too long and frankly living on no sleep for too long is no way to live. Just ask our neighbours. Despite my job being busy in comparison to Mr G’s working life I may as well have been on holidays. (Albeit, a pretty average holiday.)

So it’s been full on but we seem to be emerging from the haze. I know that because there was a time, not that long ago, where I didn’t have the mental space to even think about this blog’s existence. Lately, though, I’ve found myself thinking about it often and even composing posts in my head. Perhaps, dear readers, there is a sliver of space for me to keep an online diary again. Therapy!

To bring you vaguely back up to speed with the NABM household, this is where we’re at. Our little misses are more entertaining and – dare I say it – easier than they’ve ever been. Miss I is now 4 and would run the house if we let her. Possibly better than we do. She is one of the funniest people I have ever met and I sort of wish I could bottle her up in this age forever.  

Miss L is 20 months and delicious. She has an uncanny sense of humour; she laughs out loud at the exact moment a punch line is delivered. Even when she’s a room away from the conversation and the conversation is at least several levels beyond her comprehension. She laughs out loud at the exact moment everyone else does.

She is also the most determined person I have ever met. She makes Miss I, who you might recall we had pegged as a potential terrorist leader, look positively flexible. Miss L’s will power can – and occasionally does – crush us. Fortunately that’s happening less and less.  

In other news, I have unfortunately become acquainted with the world of chronic pain. I wish that bit was a joke. You might recall, if you cast your mind back, a particularly disastrous urban outing in which I was trying to put together a photo frame for Mr G’s birthday.  One detail which I left out at the time, probably because there were so many disastrous details to relay, was that I fell down a flight of stairs after my friend had taken the photos of the girls and I. Fortunately I wasn’t carrying Miss L or Miss I so neither of the girls were hurt. But I was. And it seems I still am. 

A few months later I started having some trouble with one of my hips and I assumed it was pregnancy or child-birth related. The pain become worse and more frequent and tinkering around the edges did very little.  I had forgotten about the fall until the beginning of this year (that’s correct 12 whole months later) by which point the pain had become debilitating and constant. An x-ray showed I had a small fracture in my pelvis. (NB I will never ever arrange a photo frame for anyone’s birthday. Ever again. Obviously.) Unfortunately there is no quick fix so I am still in the midst of trying to get myself out of pain and back into full mobility.  Until this chapter I had been blissfully unaware of the cruel world of chronic pain. Take me back to that blissful place!!

In other genuinely great news we have moved. INTO A HOUSE. A proper grown-up house. With bedrooms and a living room and a laundry and a clothes line and a backyard. Without any scary neighbours! Can you even imagine? We’ve only been here a month but it’s already made my year.

So that’s an update from this corner of the world wide web. What is happening in your world? On a side note I am really really thinking about getting a Thermomix. Do you have one? Tell me why I need it*. 

*More accurately please tell Mr G why our household needs it. I am already convinced.

Love is...

I remember when Miss I was just a tiny bundle of baby, not more than a week old, I wondered how she would know that I loved her. I really wasn’t sure. I whispered it to her, in the same way that, two and half years later, I whispered it to Miss L. I whispered it knowing that neither of them would, or could, understand my words. But I did it anyway because I wanted them to know. And if I didn’t tell them how would they know?

When babies are newborns they are quite like little strangers. They are tiny, tightly-curled balls of baby who mostly want to be swaddled so they feel snug and warm like they did for the first nine months of their lives. They are finally so close, here in our arms, and yet they seem so faraway. For several weeks it feels like nearly everything we do is to help make them feel as if they’re back in their cosy cocoon of their mother’s womb. Really, we want to learn everything there is to know about this little person we’ve finally got to meet. But we wait. 

We hold them close, we pat, we rock, we wrap, we sing, we gently shh. We stare at them sleeping and feeding and stretching. We watch everything that they do. We are always nearby peering in their eyes hoping to catch a glimpse of the character that will eventually emerge. Gradually they start to uncurl. Their focus adjusts and soon enough they begin noticing everything in the world around them.

But, back before this happened, I genuinely wondered how Miss I, this faraway little friend of mine, would know that I loved her. A book, an apt gift from a friend studying psycho-analysis, called Why Love Matters held the answer. I learned that babies receive love through the accumulation of all of our gestures. It is obvious enough and I doubt many mums need a book to teach them that but I did and I remember feeling a flood of relief. 

I didn’t need to worry about defining my love in language because just the way I held my little girl close spoke volumes. My love was loud in the way that I patted and rocked and wrapped and sang and shh’d. In the way that I fed her when she was hungry and picked her up when she cried and burped her when she was uncomfortable. In the way I smiled and spoke to her. My love was complicit in all of those tiny things that I did without thinking. It’s easy, I thought! It’s in everything I do.

In the three and a bit years that have passed since I first realised that, I have revisited the lesson many times and each time I do I feel the same sense of relief. Although it’s equally applicable with toddlers, to me, it’s never more valuable than when tending to a baby who can’t yet talk. Because tending to a baby who can’t yet talk is often tricky. Particularly when a baby is unhappy and all babies are unhappy from time to time.

Whether it’s because of a cold, a tooth, a development milestone, separation anxiety or just because, at some point, usually several, every baby will be miserable. And it can really test their parents’ mettle (not to mention their neighbours’).

Through practical experience I have discovered there are only so many days I am capable of being saintly in the face of our girls being sick. A few days with a crying baby or toddler in constant need of comforting is fine. More than that isn’t. It’s around that point, when trying to soothe a screeching baby for the nineteenth time that day, for the fourth day that week, that less-saintly thoughts float around my mind.  

These vary between “PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST BE QUIET!!!”, “JUST CONCENTRATE REALLY HARD AND YOU MAY LAND ON A BEACH WITH A COCKTAIL, A BOOK AND NO DEPENDENTS”, “HOW ON EARTH DO ANY PARENTS SURVIVE BABYHOOD???”, “WHY DID I EVER THINK HAVING CHILDREN WAS A GOOD IDEA???”, “PLEASE JUST MAKE IT STOP!!”   

It’s always when I’m swimming around in these waters that I happily remember that my love is in everything I do, not in everything I think. When I’m feeling like that I love remembering that love is a verb.

Just because I don’t enjoy a particular day (or week) or because I occasionally will the time away or often wish they would just sleep a bit longer or cry a bit less (and a lot less loudly) doesn’t mean I don’t love the girls. The fact is - rain, hail or shine - I’m still here feeding, cuddling, caring. No matter the conditions, in the face of illness, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, frustration, impatience, I tend to them.  And that, my dear readers, is love. Love that is unmitigated by any disillusion or weariness.   

It’s territory I have frequented rather a lot over the past six months with our lovely Miss L who will celebrate her first birthday today. It’s been a year since the most magical afternoon of my whole life, the afternoon we met. It was magical in a way I never anticipated because her arrival was serene. I’d relive it a hundred times if I could. She, of the most luscious locks and the loudest lungs, arrived so easily and early, almost three weeks before she was expected, and, just like that, she stole my heart. 

Her early weeks and months felt easy simply because they weren’t as daunting as those first few weeks we had Miss I in our care. Miss L was placid but quickly proved herself to be something of a mixed bag. A great daytime sleeper but painfully stubborn about letting go of her middle-of-the night feed. She would self-settle without fuss most of the time but then unpredictably wouldn’t. And when she wouldn’t settle herself it proved to be an almost impossible task for anyone else.

A lot of the time she is quite laid back; happy to watch what goes on around her. But at others time she’s been so determined that it’s really tested us. She flat out refused a dummy – despite some persisting on our part – and at six months old, for six weeks straight, she refused even a sip from a bottle. She’s a bundle of extremes: extremely happy or extremely unhappy, with little else in between. I’m terrified to admit she is every bit as resolute as her big sister. 

Of course she is also so impossibly sweet and lovely that she takes my breath away often. Her grin and giggle melt hearts from a mile off. 

It is impossible, I think, to celebrate a baby’s first birthday without a sense of nostalgia and pride and love. It’s not time that is ever returned – which for the most part is fantastic – but it’s also daunting. This time last year Miss L was just a teeny, tiny thing. Now she is an almost-walking, babbling little girl on the brink of toddlerhood. This time next year her and Miss I will no doubt be terrorising Mr G and I, honing their skills in preparation for their careers leading terrorist organisations.

I have no idea what the next twelve months will bring but I know I am relieved and happy and proud that we’ve survived this year. I can't imagine our family without our darling L but I can't quite believe she's been with us for a whole year. A first birthday is a milestone that is always worth celebrating: babies are adorable but they're not low maintenance and emerging intact is remarkable. Almost as remarkable as a parent’s capacity to love, no matter the conditions. So today, with champagne, cake and chocolate crackles, we will celebrate our gorgeous girl turning one and the fact we're still standing. 

Life and other catastrophes

Hello!! Remember me?!? I’m the blogger who always makes you feel better about your own life simply by virtue of it not being mine. Ok that’s not strictly true - there are parts of my life that are lovely. But, if you’re really honest, you probably read most of my posts and think ‘Thank the Lord/Buddha/the gods of rocky road/mascara/wine/sleep I’m not her’.

And, if you don’t, I promise you would if you could watch even a small highlights package from the past six or so weeks. Things. Have. Been. CRAZY. I have been back battling the urban jungle in the only way I seem to know how – with calamity - and the travesty has been I haven’t even had time to blog about it. I mean, that’s basically the whole point of having a blog, having somewhere to constructively channel life’s disasters. Instead I’ve been stuck just living them.

So let me tell you that not being another blogging mother isn’t nearly as much fun as being Not Another Blogging Mother!! I have never had more material for this blog than I have in recent weeks which is the very reason I have never had less time to write here. Every cliché you have ever heard about people combining work and small children? I’m living all of them. At any given point in time I have about fifty balls in the air and I run around all day trying to keep them from crashing around me.    

The funny thing is though, from the outside, my life doesn’t always look as chaotic as it actually is. It’s almost like I live parallel lives. I thought this the other morning as I sat on a full bus on the way to work. From the outside I looked just like most of my fellow commuters; fairly respectable, dressed in work clothes, with hair brushed and some make-up hastily applied. Beneath the surface? Different story.

I had been up since 4.30am (Miss L’s current favourite time to start the day) after being in and out of Miss I’s room all night (double ear infection). Since 6am I had been wrangling two unhappy little girls, the highlights of which included administering antibiotics into a wholly uncooperative three year old and trying to prepare three bowls of breakfast with one hand whilst also holding and attempting to soothe a fractious, tired and hungry ten month old. I showered and dressed myself in under five minutes but spent 30 minutes negotiating and cajoling the girls into their clothes. All the while I was expecting a knock on the door from our neighbours to discuss the girls’ overnight festivities.

I mentally high-fived myself about thirty times for the fact I didn’t need to get the girls out of the house – I just counted the minutes til our divine and delightful nanny turned up. After doing a handover with her, I then raced out the door and started thinking about the half a dozen stories that I would need to edit, write and publish that morning. 

I was also still getting over the shock and trauma of doing a whole Woolworths shop the day before WITHOUT MY WALLET. (And just for future reference if you ever do that, no they won’t accept payment with your credit card details that you have displayed on your iPad right in front of them or a bank transfer, also right in from of them. Not even if there is a screaming baby in the trolley and a nearly-crying mother at the cashier. They will insist you go home and return later. By which point you will also have your toddler with you and they will have, helpfully, lost half your shop which you will then have to do again. FUN!!!)

Anyway I was shattered and I sat there on the bus and marvelled that none of my fellow passengers would have cause to be aware of the zoo that my home life, just a few moments earlier entailed. I felt like a fraud, like I should have disclosed “If you think I look like a normal person going about life with ease – WRONG. Wrongity. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You should see where I’ve just left!” Except I then realised that the same would apply to them.

I mean, their personal dramas might come in a different shape or size to mine (surely the chances are slim that two people on the same bus would have gone to a supermarket the day before without a wallet???) but whatever commotion their personal life might entail was invisible to me. To me, they all looked like perfectly ordinary, functioning adults without a care in the world. And, though I doubt anyone actually looked up from their iPhone to do this, if they had they probably would have concluded the same about me. 

And for some reason realising that made me feel better. We all have double lives – what we present on the outside doesn’t always mirror what’s happening on the inside. Different settings require different approaches. And the fact that for ten minutes a few times a week I look like any other commuter – unencumbered by anything other than the bus meandering along the road - just waiting to get to work? I like that. Truth be told it’s the most relaxing part of my week.

So. That’s me! How are you??? What have you been doing??? I wish I could say I was back for good but the truth is I’m probably not so I will just blog when I can.

PS As my loyal readers I should let you know that NABM got a mention on national television a few weeks ago. Somehow I don’t think the audience will be flocking here though. You can ready why here.  

Putting a blog to bed

I have put off writing this until the very last moment but my denial can last no longer. I am placing Not Another Blogging Mother into administration for the next little bit*. I will pause now while you sob dramatically and ponder how on earth you will ever cope without my weekly whinge. (Take comfort knowing I am sobbing louder than anyone right now pondering how on earth I will cope without my weekly whinge.)

From tomorrow I am taking over the reins at Women’s Agenda on a practically-fulltime basis and for many reasons I’ve decided to dedicate myself to it wholeheartedly. There are only so many minutes in a day and between my job, my girls, Mr G and running a household, I know I’m going to be spread thin as it is. So for now, while I get myself acquainted with a new order of affairs, I’m going to let NABM lay idle.

Even typing that sentence was painstaking because I am so reluctant to leave this space, my quiet haven in the world wide web, even temporarily. While I am obviously not expecting anyone to sob, or even mind, about my hiatus I wasn’t joking about my own (internal) sobs. It’s hard to tear myself away.

For the past two and a bit years a week has barely passed where I haven’t perched at my computer and happily tapped away. Not because I think I have to but because I always want to. There has never been a day or a week where I have felt anything remotely close to ambivalence about sitting here chatting to you.           

Which is why this is not a eulogy. Blogging is the only real hobby I have ever embraced and I have no intention of abandoning it for long but for now my job and my family are going to be the dual recipients of every bit of my energy. And until I’m back THANK YOU for reading.

PS. Of course if you do happen to miss me here I will be writing regularly over at Women’s Agenda so come visit! Daily! And bring all your friends. And all their friends! And your family! It’ll be fun. I promise.

*I am giving myself a full calendar month before I am even allowed to think about logging on here again. I have to be strict because I will want to be writing here but I figure it’s better to (try) to do a few things well rather than lots of things badly.