A friend of mine likes to point out to her children when they are having idyllic childhoods. Picnics by the river, cuddling piles of squealing kids on a trampoline, gingerbread daleks at Christmas. IDYLLIC CHILDHOOD. Of course, they never do stop and appreciate the moment for what it is – but maybe, maybe pointing it out to them will freeze a photograph style image in their head that they can pull out as an adult.

It also gives us a chance to let the usual layers of maternal guilt slide away for a few minutes and appreciate that, sure, we do so many things wrong, and so many other things just to get by, and there’s no such thing as perfect parents or perfect children, but right this second, we’re doing a good job and they are good kids, and these are the bits we want to remember when they’re glued to Playstation 2020s and grunting unintelligibly at us.

There are many days of their childhood that are so far from idyllic, with the TV blaring and the kids wanting (or actively trying) to kill each other, the days when the lack of a cup of tea can be the difference between making it to 6 o clock or everybody falling in a heap.

“Look, idyllic childhood moment, over there! You go run after it while Mummy has a sit down and breathes into this brown paper bag.”

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I have been working on my novel edits, honestly, even if they have brought along with them the most titanic attempts of procrastination than I have ever experienced before.

My favourite clanger that I caught in the manuscript yesterday is that if you’re going to use the metaphor that a character “glued himself” to his computer it probably shouldn’t be in the same sentence where he had just made himself a peanut butter sandwich. I just couldn’t stop staring at that sentence! It’s been there for YEARS.

My major achievement for the weekend, though, was something I have been fretting about for, well, years. When we moved into this house seven and a half years ago, with a brand new baby, we came from a compact 2 bedroom unit to a sprawling four bedroom house with lots and lots and LOTS of cupboard space. Naturally we exploded into the house like a cannon, filling every available corner with our (apparently compressed far too tightly) stuff.

The house was so big to us that we spent the first year or so of it living in only half, heating only half (turned out doing that saved no money btw) and sleeping with our baby in the master bedroom at the front of the house. The three bedrooms at the back were, well. Storage. Okay, a couple of studies and… anyway. We were especially cavalier with the built in cupboards because there were so many of them.

When we finally moved little Raeli into her own room at the age of two and a half (we malingered on the decision a bit because we didn’t want her at completely the other end of the house to us – took ages to realise we could move down there too, into one of the little rooms) we focused on the important things: a big girl bed, space for her toys, and so on. Kids have a lot of stuff, it’s true, but she was still tiny and certainly wasn’t going to be using hanging space any time soon.

The room was hers but the cupboards were basically still ours. As indeed were all the cupboards.

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I can tell it’s nearly the end of Term 2 because we’ve been hit by illness after illness, mostly surrounding the kids, though of course the parents tend to get smacked with versions of the same illnesses, usually just as they are most exhausted from running around after cranky/vomity/coughing children.

For example, I didn’t get the high temperature spikes or achiness of Raeli’s flu, but I did manage to get an inner ear infection that defied antibiotics and happily snapped, crackle and popped in accompaniment to my daily life for more than a month.

It’s the end of the school soccer season too, and much though I like to see my sporty daughter learning teamwork and running around enjoying herself, I have NOTICED how often a snow-chilled wind is laid on especially for the after school practice, and as for getting up for 9am muddy games every Saturday morning… well. I’m glad she enjoys it. I am. But I am ready for it to be done.

Also, school. School holidays have been a source of stress for me in the past – stress and unwork – but in my current lifestyle, with a bouncy three-year-old at home to entertain, having the cheerful and responsible seven-year-old join us for two weeks sounds like bliss. BLISS.

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We have survived Jemima’s birthday! I wanted to do something special for her because she missed out on a party last year, as the whole family was sick, and ever since January when half the people she knew had birthday parties, she has been wondering where hers is. A year is a long time between two and three…

The Alice in Wonderland theme was, admittedly, my plan because I figured it was one of the last birthdays where I would get to decide the theme instead of having to incorporate whatever crazymadawesome ideas my daughter thought up for herself.

I think I made the right call.

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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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