Get my daughter to school, while my partner gets the toddler (she is dressed as Batman) to daycare.

Brief (BRIEF) coffee with mums from school.

Work like the clappers until 2:30, including editing, cleaning house, more editing, and some other writing-related admin jobs.

Pick up daughter from school, take for eye test.

Early tea with children.

Attend discussion panel at Fullers Bookshop on topic of Int. Women’s Day and Stella Prize.

Get home in enough time to put (hopefully only one) daughter to bed.

Record an episode of Galactic Suburbia.

That’s enough to be going on with, right?

NOTE: I typed this while listening to my 7 year old listing all the superpowers she has when she plays heroes in the playground.

Ready… set… GO!

I finished my short story! It feels like a big achievement, the first thing finished of the year. This is going to be my year of finishing things, and rewriting things, and submitting things. Many things. For the first time in a while, I don’t have a contract or official deadlines which means I have to MAKE MY OWN.

Today is Pilates Day, an activity I took up when Justine Larbalestier started evangelising about how important it was for writers to start that kind of stuff BEFORE developing RSI or some other work related injury. When I started, it was amazing how many people were there to fix something awful they had done to their bodies. I would feel a bit abashed about being there pre-emptively, but it seems the thing to do.

Pilates is one of those things I had to circumvent a lot of guilt to allow myself to do – because it’s something that’s about ME and not the family. Especially when I was using household money to pay my way – but since our last big budget rehaul, I’ve been paying for it myself and buying less things on the internet in order to do so, which means I feel less like I have to justify This Thing.

(I know, by the way, that I shouldn’t have to justify it, and what’s good for me is good for the family and so on, but logic is logic and guilt is guilt)

Managing guilt is a huge aspect to being a working mother. Or a mother full stop, I guess. (it’s also one of the hardest aspects to reconcile with being a feminist – what works in theory often falls down in practice, and when the baby’s screaming, theory doesn’t help much!) I find it interesting when talking to other mothers that we all have different lines of guilt, those which we cross regularly and feel bad about, those which we try not to cross and feel AWFUL about, and those which we are okay with.

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It occurs to me that the blog has become less and less personal. I write a lot of pop culture essays, and put up links, but I don’t talk much any more about process, or my writing career, or even personal everyday stuff.

I’m not sure why that it – the process stuff I understand, because I’m so wrapped up in the -aargh- phase of finishing my new novel that I’m not ready to talk about it. And, you know, my kids are cute and all, but there’s only so many pictures I can post of them dressed as Doctor Who characters.

Still, I’d like to continue talking about home and domestic stuff, if only to continue my theme of – hey, writing and parenting, go together pretty well but it’s HARD sometimes.

I didn’t work this weekend at all. I often don’t – taking weekends has been a big and important step for me, and one I’ve only come to in recent years. Partly it was deprogramming from the PhD years, and partly a symptom of working from home – I’ve always been self-employed/freelance/creative and that means you never have a structured day off. You have to make one.

As a parent, the weekend is the time when I have a fellow parent home all day, and there’s a lovely decadence in that. Baby smells whiffy, there’s a 50-50 chance I don’t have to deal with it! But because of that, I regularly slip into the bad habit of assuming I will get more done on the weekend than I actually do, and feeling on Monday like I’m WAY BEHIND which is stressful and horrid.

Also there’s the thing where, during the precious Nap Hours that still occur most days (that’s when the 2 year old naps, not the rest of us), my seven year old daughter quite reasonably expects that sometimes we’ll do something together. Something Jem-free. I had no qualms about telling her to go read a comic or something, Mummy was busy, during the school holidays, but now she’s back at school, there are very few Mummy-Raeli-Jemfree hours.

So I try to keep my expectations of the weekend to a minimum, unless I have a dire deadline. This weekend, once I got the head’s up that we were going to have crazy 35 degree days with it not cooling down much at night (a rare occurrence in the Tassie summer) I decided that okay, I wasn’t going to try to get ANYTHING done this weekend at all, except for maybe catching up on my bookshelf reading.

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Here, for those who requested it, proof that I made a TARDIS cake for Raeli’s birthday party tomorrow. It’s not finished yet, as I plan to have a cupcake light on top, and some decorations around the border, but those will be added tomorrow, so more pics then! (as well as pics of my two lovely girls, dressed as an astronaut and the TARDIS)

This is basically cake (two packet mixes swirled together so some is vanilla & some choc), cut to size & liberally spread with chocolate frosting. The windows and panel are made from roll-out white icing, the details from slices of a metre-long liquorice strap, and the fancy white writing parts from one of those squeezy writing icing things. All bought from the supermarket.

I had a near-disaster when I put gladwrap over the whole thing (having refrigerated the cake for some time I assumed all the icing was set – the frosting WAS but the writing sadly got smeared all over the place) so I recovered by putting a whole piece of liquorice strap over the mess, tidying up with a bit of spare chocolate frosting (always save the last spoonful just in case!!!) and re-writing the text.

It looks like a TARDIS, anyway! Imperfect, but delicious.

[and if anyone, not looking at anyone in particular, hon, thinks I was overreaching myself, I show further evidence that my goals in cakeitude are sensible, rational and achievable, unlike some people who take TARDIS-related cake art to EXTREMES - thanks to @greenspyders for the link]

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Hot evening, nearly-seven-year-old daughter to entertain.

Me: How about we watch that animated Batman movie you got for Christmas?
Him: Okay.
Daughter: Yay, Batman!

*family starts Batman Year One*

–Bruce Wayne returns to Gotham
–Lieutenant Gordon gets beaten up in street
–screen fills up with thugs and (underage) hookers

Me: Starting to think this film is not in fact appropriate for nearly-seven-year-olds
Him: Most definitely

*family examines DVD case*

Me & Him: Oh, crap, M Rated!

*lunge for DVD, turn it off*
*daughter wails with disappointment*
*we explain why M rated means not appropriate for nearly-seven-year-olds*
*we put on other animated Batman episode which is far more appropriate, with icecream to help daughter through the transition*

Me (guiltily): I think I just remembered that Batman: Year One was originally written by Frank Miller
Him: That explains a lot.

And this is why checking the film rating is sometimes not a bad idea, the end.

A home-made Adipose from Glammer to Raeli

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A couple of days early, but it worked for us!

a little witch, and her baby bat

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Tasmanians all take note! I’m reading at the Republic Bar on Sunday 2 October, along with first time novelist Cameron Hindrum. The event goes from 3-5 PM.

My plan is to read from Love and Romanpunk, probably the opening Agrippina story, because seriously that story was made to be read aloud. I’m really looking forward to it. If you haven’t been to a Republic Reading before, they are very fun and relaxed, you can have a drink or something to eat, hang out and listen to stuff. They also have an open reading towards the end of the session – I think they used to put it in the middle but then everyone used to leave straight away and not stick around for the featured readers. Heh.

The event is about as family friendly as stuff in pubs is – which is a whole lot friendlier than it used to be thanks to the glorious smoking ban – and I’m pretty sure my kids will be there. Hmm. Not sure how family friendly what I *read* will be, so if you have smart old-enough-to-get-smutty-references kids you might want to take that into account. Or bring headphones for them. But you can rest assured I will not be reading anything that I couldn’t in front of my six year old.

Oh dear. Maybe I have to re-think the story. Eh, I’ll just let her play with my iPhone, she won’t hear a word I’m reading.

TANSY REPUBLIC READING

DATE: Sunday 2 October
TIME: 3-5 PM
PLACE: Republic Bar, North Hobart, TAS
RSVP: Nope, just turn up.
COST: Free!
WILL COPIES OF LOVE & ROMANPUNK AND SIREN BEAT BE AVAILABLE FOR SALE: Hell yes! Not officially or anything, but I’ll have a stack of both books propped precariously beside my cute children.

Jem turns two today! Sadly she has come down with a horrible virus and is not feeling very festive.
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As we while away the long wait for the second half of the next Matt Smith season, Raeli and I have been catching up on previous Doctors.

I find this rather surreal, because I remember watching Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant with her already, experiencing the show through her eyes… but she was three and four years old, and she doesn’t remember thim now that she is a big girl of six. For a little while there, Matt Smith was the only Doctor in her living memory, HER Doctor.

Something I have learned about my daughter over the last few weeks is that she is a) fickle and b) a true Doctor Who fan.

We’ve been making our way through seasons 3 and 4 (Martha and Donna) plus a few classic stories along the way, and she triumphantly announced a week ago that Matt Smith was no longer her favourite – it was now David Tennant! She had been holding out for Rose as her favourite companion, despite not remembering any of her appearances, so I let her watch season 1… and it’s been really fascinating seeing her watch one of my favourite seasons of Doctor Who, as if for the first time.

The big difference between 3 year old Raeli and 6 year old Raeli is that the smaller version of her was pretty fearless about anything she saw on TV. In the last several years, she has developed huge panicky fears about all sorts of things – she’s terrified of dogs and cats, gets freaked out by all manner of sounds, and in the last 18 months in particular developed a deep horror of Sontarans, Daleks and other Doctor Who monsters.

But she’s a determined little thing, and while we’ve had years of her completely collapsing into panic attacks, she’s now starting to take control of her fears and her boundaries. She declared a few months ago that she was no longer afraid of dogs, which was a huge deal (much like her claim not to like pink, it was a total lie, but one we don’t call her on, because it’s one we thoroughly approve of) and a sign that while she is still severely hampered by overwhelming fear and panic, she is actually starting to imagine a future when this won’t be the case. And lo, the Stubbornest of Daughters Made Progress.

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