Well, all I can say is finalmente.
It’s been almost three weeks since the birth of my little boy. Almost 21 days of soothing and rocking and holding and snuggling and swaddling, clutching at spare minutes of sleep and crisis-managing the occasional nappy FAIL.
But I am very pleased to confirm that he is truly scrumptious.
There is nothing more delicious than a newborn baby. There is a certain freshly-baked scent that barely lasts a day or two, but in those first hypnotic days it fills the room like a siren song. I’m sure it’s all part of the charm offensive…
I’m hooked. But I can now, with cast iron certainty, declare…never again.
Three kids?? Why, oh why did I start my blog three months before giving birth to baby three? What was I thinking? Why didn’t someone shake the hell out of me, slap my cheek in a kind of 30s movie style kinda way and say “For God’s sake woman, get a hold of yourself!”
Surely I was trying to do too much?
The truth is, you see, I have never been one to take it easy. If I start spinning a plate, I tend to say “What the hell, let’s spin twelve.” My imagination has always struggled to slow down and wait patiently for my circumstances to catch up, red-faced and puffing and apologising for the mess.
But despite the exhaustion and the guilt and the spinning spinning spinning, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because there is only NOW. continue reading…
Today I wanted to share with you the exciting and quite frankly terrifying news that in the next week or so I will be introducing baby number three to the family.
Yes, as you may not already know, I have now finally arrived at the very end of that 9 month growing-another-human-being thang. I’m tired, and a little over the being kicked part. I know that this will be nothing compared to the exhaustion that comes with the “actually having baby in the room” part that is coming up, so I’ve forgone my usual 5am starts in favour of staying in bed as long as possible.
So this week I have been a little quiet on all fronts – and I wanted you to know that this, like everything, is only temporary.
In the meantime, I offer this little poem continue reading…
Have you ever thought about why it really bugs you when your partner leaves the lid off the toothpaste? Or why you are obsessed with being on time while your best friend thinks nothing of always turning up late?
Why does one person live perfectly at ease surrounded by piles of clutter while another would consider it an irritating mess? I remember visiting the flat of an ex-boyfriend for the first time and discovering he basically never washed a dish. Ever. His kitchen sink was like a horror movie. And I just couldn’t understand why that didn’t freak him out.
It was clear that we each had a different set of rules.
Our rules are hugely important in helping us to quickly and easily navigate our way through life. They allow us to shape our reactions to the things we experience and to judge whether we are moving towards things that work or moving away from things we want to avoid.
But we don’t usually choose these rules knowingly – most of them we soak up from our parents, our culture or our education. They may be obvious and mundane – like manners, the highway code or the etiquette of queuing. (Seriously, in the UK it’s an art.) Others are more ethical and moral, such as vegetarianism, or our laws against killing and stealing.
Whether we’re aware of them or not, all of these rules share something in common. continue reading…
“What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.” ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton.
There is a general consensus that talent alone does not make you a success. You also need application and the right kind of hard work. You need the skills to analyse the results you get, and the perseverence to continue where others give up. And luck, of course.
But is it really as simple as that?
I was moved to write this article in response to a Triiibes discussion I have been taking part in. One of my friends on this excellent forum was discussing the book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
and the thoughtful, intelligent responses were very much in line with the consensus I described earlier.
But my perspective on this is quite a different one, and I’ll do my best to not make it too lengthy.
As a teenager I was considered Gifted and Talented. I attended a school based on academic selection, and very soon I discovered that I also had an unusually beautiful singing voice with operatic potential. continue reading…
Despite having been through childbirth twice, I’m having to go through a number of “firsts”.
- This is the first time I have had a baby in Australia.
- This is the first time I am booked in to have the baby in a hospital.
My first daughter was a water birth in a Midwife-Led Unit. My second was a home birth that was complicated by a post-partum haemorrhage where I lost over 2 litres of blood. I was told afterward that if I was ever to have another baby, it must be in a hospital.
So I have been trying to get my head around the way the maternity hospital system works here, and it’s even more complicated by the fact that childbirth is available on private health insurance here in Australia, whereas in the UK it is not. So my choices here in Brisbane are very limited.
I was “bounced” from the Mater Maternity in South Brisbane (all shiny and new) because it is too full, and told to go to Ipswich instead.
So I visited Ipswich Hospital Antenatal and Maternity Departments on Monday to check it out. And I left literally in tears.
How could I have my baby here? The place was dirty, the furniture and walls old, rubbish on the floors and bathrooms that looked like they were last cleaned in 2008. We couldn’t even find a place to park our car when we arrived – the huge multi-story car park next door had a sign outside saying FULL. The receptionist in the foyer confessed it is very rarely otherwise.
Compared to my first two birthing experiences, the thought of having to deliver my baby in Ipswich was pretty much my definition of hell.
But now that I’ve had a few days to calm down and reflect on the situation, I find myself asking a really important question: is this an opportunity for me to just be grateful?
Let me explain.
Following my haemorrhage last year, I became very interested in the work being done by the UN and organisations such as Unicef to improve maternity mortality rates in the 
developing world. In countries such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, they are so high that there is a 1 in 6 chance of the mother dying in childbirth. The vast majority of these are entirely preventable deaths caused by isolation from hospitals, lack of skilled attendants present, basic hygiene, nutrition and even family/gender prejudices and ignorance. You can read the Unicef report on Maternal and Newborn Health for yourself by clicking here.
In my case, I was incredibly fortunate to have been tended to by a team of doctors, midwives, ambulance staff and paramedics who all came together the morning Sophia was born, to save my life.
Almost one and a half thousand women who die every day from similar causes are not as fortunate.
So should I call my GP and demand that I be allowed to birth elsewhere? Should I raid my finances to afford a private birth in a “nice” hospital? Or should I be grateful that at least I have a hospital to give birth in, where there are staff who know what to do, where there is a bed to lie on, where there is a bathroom and not a hole in the floor.
I don’t know what the answer is. But I am reminded, at least, that I am blessed enough even with things as they are.
