Humiliation = motivation?

Thank you for the lovely comments, both here on the blog and in real life about my 'before' pictures. I feel strangely proud about posting them on here - I'm not too proud, too unrealistic or too unreal to show the 'real' me and my 'real' house. If they did nothing other than make other people feel less guilty about the state of their own homes then it was a good thing. It did much more than that though. A good dose of public 'outing' (for want of a better word!) does amazing things for the motivation so this morning I donned my oldest, daggiest trackies, cranked up the tunes and set to work. It really is amazing how quickly things come together in such a small space and now I'm sitting here writing this I am amazed at how just a few hours can transform my home. I'm also amazed at how much my clean, organised home can change how I feel - somehow more calm, less chaotic, more organised. I like it! Now just to keep it that way....

I had to post this - do you have odd socks? how do you cope with them? Clearly I need strategies since you are looking at the 47 odd socks that have accumulated at my house. I have sorted and made pairs where I can but Charlotte particularly is known for wearing odd sock pairs. I think it's a complete waste of time, money and resources to throw one-off socks out but I would like it if she had more matching pairs. All suggestions greatly appreciated!!!

Our weekend

.... was spent celebrating my sisters birthday.....

.... building lego

.... baking (and of course the obligatory bowl licking!!)

and just generally chilling out and enjoying each other. We've also met some great new neighbours who also have a little girl Charley's age so the girls have had a lovely time baking, playing, dressing up, stamping and juts getting up to all the fun, girly stuff that four year olds love getting into/upto!!

I've also spent a fair whack of time getting stuff done around the house and have filled up a wheelie bin and a half already plus there are a number of piles next to the front door ready for various deliveries to friends/neighbours/charities that I will get to in the rest of the week. The laundry is finished and is looking nice and shiny at the moment but I've decided I'll leave the 'after' photos until the end of the week when the whole place is nice and shiny!! Hope you've all had a great weekend too ;-)

The "before" pictures....

That I didn't want to post because I'm so ashamed and embarrassed that I have let my house fall down around my ears. At the same time I'm sick of reading the blogs of perfect women and mothers with perfect children and perfect lives. My life isn't. And that is the reality - these pictures are the reality of my house right now. I've got five days off and on Thursday I plan on posting the "after" photos to show you all. These go some way to a public-accountability of sorts and I'm sure will give me the extra motivation should I lack some during the next week or so!!

Recently I've had that unsettled feeling where I want things to change. I want to move to a newer/bigger house, wanted to sell my car & buy a bigger/newer car etc. Reflecting on 'why' and talking to my Nana I realised that these are 'wants' rather than 'needs' - our current accommodation and vehicle are more than adequate for our needs. I'm also reading a book about parenting heavily based on Buddhist philosophy and I'm currently working my way through the chapter on respect. It's interesting and thought provoking and while I sit here posting these pictures it is ever so clear to me that I'm expecting my children to respect what they have while I am clearly demonstrating the opposite. I'm hoping to implement change and hope to be modelling the behaviour that I want my children to develop in myself in the coming weeks/months.

Just an update...

... and a thank you to my wonderful friends for their kind words on my last post.

Well almost two weeks in and there are mixed reports. On the sleep front there has been a miraculous turn around and he is now sleeping between 8 and 10 hours a night and boy does it show. My little man, who for years has had dark purple shadows under his eyes, is waking up clear eyed and bright faced almost every morning! We are in a good routine now where he takes his meds at 7pm and then has a bath and reads to me and then normally he's asleep between 8 and 8:30. None of this midnight nonsense. For the first few nights I honestly didn't know what to do with myself. Interestingly enough, I didn't give him meds one night as we went out for dinner with my folks and I didn't want him nodding off at the dinner table. We were out from 6pm-9pm then got home and all went to bed - I checked on him at 01:30am and he was wide awake.

Not such good news on the mood stabilising drug front. He's had up days, down days, inbetween days. This was not the plan. There have been massive issues with behaviour at school and they have seen an aggressive, angry, mean side of thim that previously had been under control. Crisis talks with the school and our behaviour therapist and it's a wait and see approach. Fingers crossed the next week or so goes well!

As for me - well between work & kids there isn't much time for anything else. Would love to have some crafty things to share but there just isn't time lately - I'm living vicariously through buttontree lane, kuka and knitting sprout with their sewing/cooking/knitting achievements!

Fork in the road

The past few weeks have seen us come to a real fork in the road with therapy for Izaak. He has previously been assessed for a program called The Extra Lesson and to be perfectly honest I don't think I would have known about the program if it wasn't for a friend who is a practitioner and is just getting herself set up after having time off to have her own babies.
During the assessment Izaak was his usual combative, defiant, non-compliant self. It was tedious. Anyway, the assessment basically showed all the things that I knew about him as well as a few extras. He has too much cranial pressure. And he has auditory processing issues. The cranial pressure is being worked on by a local osteopath who has made some interesting observations about my little man. His hips are not aligned and as a result his neck is compensating. We are progressing well and will see him weekly for a while to see if we can get it sorted out. Back to The Extra Lesson though - they recommend an auditory program to help him with his auditory issues which I'm okay with - until I heard the cost is upwards of $1000.00. I don't want to sound like a stingy parent and I do have the funds to cover the cost of this treatment but I am extremely wary of shelling out that sort of cash on a program that doesn't have main stream science or the ASD community behind it. This is along the 'alternative' therapies stream and while I am willing to try almost anything to help my little boy, I'm not sure that it is really the best option given that kind of money would buy us almost 20 occupational therapy sessions.
So totally opposite to that philosophy - we went to see the paediatrician yesterday afternoon who couldn't believe that we had made it this far without medications. He has prescribed Izaak a mood stabilising drug and a sedative. Given that he has really poor sleep patterns I'm all for the later - he goes to bed between 7:30 - 8:30 and at 11:30-midnight is still wide awake. So tonight I gave him the first dose at 7:30 and by 8:20 he was sound asleep. Amazing.

Although it's working (well it's only night one so I'm cautious of saying that but after so many of unsettled nights, even one is 'working'!!) I'm struggling with the social stigma and judgements of people in regards to medicating my eight year old. Effectively I am giving my child psych drugs. I don't like how that fits, how it feels but I am coming around to the fact that I have to do what is best for him. As the paed and my family have all said - there is potential that is being hid away behind all the behavioural issues. Hopefully, the medication plan will lessen the behaviours so we can get more of the learning in. Tonight he read me two home readers that I thought were at the level he needed. He read both without missing a single word. I need to get over myself. If only it were that easy!

Adventures - day one

We headed off from home early in the morning and drove up to Sydney to collect our Jucy van. Kids were over the moon when we finally picked her up and for the first few hours there was lots of jumping around, curtain opening and closing - just checking out all the great stuff!! We went past the dog on the tuckerbox at Gundagai which was cool although I have to say, as a single mother of two, taking pictures of all my family is rather difficult. However this task was made significantly easier thanks to this little gadget....

Screw camera in, set timer, smile and then done! I thought it was rather cool that mail posted from here gets a special stamp too!!

The kids played around on some old farming equipment that was close by as well.

We continued onto Albury/Wodonga and stayed there for the night after having some delicious pasta at a little place we found in a side street near the city. It took forever for the kidlets to get to sleep - emotions and excitement were at a high point. Finally after looking at the maps and talking about our plans a quiet settled through the van and we all got a well deserved rest!

Making do

We head off on our big adventure in just a few days now and unfortunately the finances have hit a snag. Not too dramatic but enough to give me a few worries. As a result we are having a 'make do' week here. Now my friend Eilleen is the queen of the 'no spend week' and although I don't have the positive factor of time to plan and prepare I am finding it interesting and surprising. It's amazing what can be made from what's around the house.



Fruit is a big issue in our house - the kids either demolish the lot within a day or two of our shopping day or it gets to the end of the week and very little has been eaten. Last night I was wondering around the house at about 8pm having that niggling snack-need feeling when I had a bright idea. Using the apples that had been sitting in the fruit bowl for a week I stewed them up and then found a recipe for a crumble topping in one of my favourite books. No piccies - the result was rapidly disappearing and to be honest, it wasn't pretty. Ugly? Yep Tasty? Absolutely!

Ugly but yummy fruit crumble topping

1/2 cup flour

50gr soft butter

1/2 cup soft brown sugar

1tsp cinnamon

1 cup chopped hazelnuts

Mix dry ingredients. Rub butter into dry ingredients until it resembles bread crumbles. Top onto fruit and bake at 180 degrees until it's hot, bubbly & brown. Add ice cream, cream or both!

I also have a bag of frozen berries in the freezer so tonight I'm going to try a new recipe for the crumble and see how it goes - I'm liking this one because any unused crumble can be frozen. I think one of the reasons last nights crumble didn't go so well was because I had too much crumble mix over the top of the fruit.

Crumble for fruit topping

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

60gr chopped butter

2/3 cup flour

Rub butter into flour until it resembles pea-sized pieces

Add the other ingredients

Top fruit to a depth of 1cm

A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to be the recipients of a home grown pumpkin but given that neither of the kids are keen on soups and I really didn't have any other good ideas to make with it the said pumpkin has been sitting and waiting. Tonight we are having roasted pumpkin & creamy spaghetti. Not sure if the vision in my head will be what turns out on the plate but we'll see what happens. It's amazing to really sit down and evaluate the food situation and see exactly how much we waste or misuse. I am here to publicly declare that from yesterday until Sunday (departure day) I will not be spending a single cent on food (or anything else for that matter!) - we have enough in the freezer & pantry to make it through, more than half a tank of petrol in the car and a new found will for saving money!

As a side note blogger recently discovered a blog of mine that I started AGES ago - it's so funny to look back. It was almost like another life back then. Anyway, if you want to have a look it's here. Pumpkin smells delish so I'm off to create an either perfect or perky pasta! Wish me luck!

We're all booked & paid...

... well, the deposits anyway!

Later on this month, the kidlets and I will be heading up to Sydney to pick up one of these....

Which we will use to drive around this....Before we finally head home on one of these... Needless to say we are SUPER DOOPER excited about it all !!!

Snotland

Our house has been retitled - 'snotland' - at the moment.

Son has respiratory infection in the lower bases of both lungs.
Daughter has same in upper airways.
Me? I've got tonsilitis, ear infection & respiratory infection.

This sucks. Bad.

New chapters

It feels like there are lots of new chapters in our life/lives at the moment as this little man starts grade three...

He is anxious about going back to school tomorrow and it's times like this that I wish I could take it all away - take away the sleeplessness, take away the yukky feeling in his tummy. I can't though and I've come to accept that ;-( According to our behaviour therapist year three is often make or break and is, statistically, the year that main streaming will either work or it won't. We are hoping that we'll be in the former rather than later camp but only time will tell.

and the little lady starts preschool - seen here meeting "Boris", a friends bearded dragon...

She is *so* ready to start preschool and is eager to learn writing and reading although is somewhat upset that there isn't any homework!! I feel like a whirlwind of emotions with her. I'm sad that she's starting preschool because it's such a developmental step into the 'big kid' world but at the same time I'm loving the little girl that she's becoming. Her temper is there but seems to be simmering rather than exploding these days and I feel closer to her than ever before.

As for me, I'm embarking on new adventures, opening new chapters both professionally and personally. Professionally there is just two weeks until I start my new job which I am thrilled with. Personally, I'm starting to plan our first 'family' weekend away as things go from strength to strength with TOH.

Introducing...

TOH aka The Other Half

The man who adores, challenges, infuriates and motivates me. The man who makes me laugh, cry and finally get my ass of the couch and into all the things I've been putting off for a long time. The man who never makes a judgement, accepts and appreciates my past and how it is intertwined with our future, a future that we are starting to plan together. I'm scared. He knows I'm scared and is patient and kind with me. He loves the kids and they love him because he's such a big kid at heart and is always up for a game. Once upon a time it hurt so bad that I didn't think I'd want to share my life with another man again - things are changing and apparently a change is as good as a holiday...

My perfect Sunday is...

... spending the morning cleaning and sorting the mountain of stuff lying around our place that we no longer want or need.

... dropping off 4 black bags to the Salvos

... sending yarn to a new house where it is sure to be loved and used ;-) and to see a lovely lady who is gentle and kind with my children and who has a record player - too cool!

... seeing another friend and dropping off fabric for her to create with while watching our beautiful children play and create together

... catching up with the extended family

... and finally...

... nachos, skittles & a movie with the smalls. Perfect? Much!