All together now

K and I have been together for 7 years today. This day marks the day when we 'knew' we were going to be together. Lismore Northern New South Wales. The Winsome Hotel. A synchronistic meeting, an exchange of phone numbers and a quick kiss that felt like much much more!

Just came back from a great choir practice. They are wonderful people, fun and easy going and sing beautifully and it's such a pleasure to stand in front of them and hear the songs. I've never lead a choir before now and it is teaching me so much - bringing me back to music in a much more community-minded way; expanding my appreciation of musical genres and teaching me to be humble and assertive. I've had so much fear around music since I was a teenager and first declared to my desperately unhappy mother that I wanted to sing. She couldn't hear it because she had so many unfulfilled dreams of her own and so I guess took on a certain guilt around the dreaming and the hours spent teaching myself to play and compose.
My father has rediscovered his own voice in the last 6 years and sings in a choir in WA. It's so good to connect with him on that level and listen to him talk from his heart about his love of singing. It doesn't matter how old we are, it's never too late to do these things.

Beau and I rode to our friends' house around the corner this morning in the winter sun, that glorious first hint of a spring not too far away. Seeing Beau walk freely around the park lands has me yearning to get to the country. He would truly be in heaven living on acreage (as would K and I) with lots of animals about and lots of great jobs to do outside. We spent all Saturday in the garden, mulching and clearing rubbish and relocating the chickens and Beau always wants to help. He helps cook and clean and fix and dig and fetch and push.....they love it the little ones, to just do whatever it is we are doing. I feel like we could get rid of all the toys and there are still a hundred things to do.

Sunday evening we had our forth Co op collection. Lots of families coming through the house of our friends up the road. Lots of kids, lots of chatter, lots of helping hands and LOADS of really good food being sorted and weighed and bagged and bottled....So many other ideas are growing from our co op. Craft group, recipe book, sustainability (which is where it started really) bartering, working bees...it's a dream come true and it makes life in the suburbs a whole lot more exciting.

(Something weird is happening with the time down the bottom of each post. Believe me it is not 4.30am as I write this!!)

crafty

Not long home from craft night, a monthly occurrence now and so very fun and good and a long time coming. I'm making a string of felt birds for Beau's bedside - following projects will be a doll for Beau and to learn to knit. I rode my bike, glorious to weave through the back streets and felt free despite the burning in my lungs and thighs on those hills.
It's late and the small blonde alarm will wake me at an ungodly hour but I will sit awhile yet and read some more of Cold Mountain -wonderful if you are in the mood for journeying against horrendous odds and wayfaring strangers and women working the land at a time when women didn't work land they sketched and played piano.....most likely you have seen the movie which in its own right was quite good and if you agree then you must read the book. Charles Frazier is the author. I do love a good journey, hence I loved Cormac McCarthy's novels. It's such a luxury these days to have a book that engrosses me enough to have me stop cleaning while Beau sleeps of an afternoon and sit by the window and read. It's always been that a book has had to grip me within the first page otherwise I wouldn't go any further. Nowadays I give them a little more time. I have author binges, for example I'll read four Isabelle Allende novels and then 3 Gabriel Garcia Marquez and two Cormac McCarthy etc etc. I'll be needing a new book soon. Any recommendations???

Inspiration

Now and then something comes along that just totally blows one's mind yes??? I found this through Camilla Engman's wonderful blog (her art work too, is amazing). Some people just have that touch. I love it.

A Picture

Yeah I know it's not very lady like but it shows two facts about me; 1) I absolutely love to feed my face and 2) I have a tendency towards the ridiculous whenever someone points a camera at me so in terms of self portraits it's really quite revealing. There's a hint of a fear of narcissism as I post these - and then I reflect upon the comfort of knowing something of other bloggers' lives and identities and how being a bit more transparent in life can be a beautiful thing.

The day of our wedding above. Dec 2003. One of my favourite wedding shots next to the one of K and I pulling 'sharkies' which I don't seem to have on my hard drive but will post it because it's very fetching.

So given that I have no new pictures to post, here are some 'old' ones. As I said I personally can't digest endless paragraphs of text (unless I'm reading a novel) without the relief of pictures to break it up, so these are for you if you a similar........

Mental note ; must ask K to show me how to get photos off my phone.

I must go to work. This is the time of day when the last thing I want to do is to go to work. What I want to do at 3.30pm is to have a cup of tea, eat some cake, enjoy Beau's scruffy , woozy emerging from dream land, and await K's arrival home and avoid venturing outside into the cold wind. (Love the cold, can't do wind). Just as well my job is not at all like a job but more like doing some chores with good friends.

Bad Blogger Bids For Second Babe

Oh hell, really I can't sit around waiting for a camera before I get it together to write a post.......I was never one in favour of too much text and not enough pictures. And I've been experiencing the same desperate grasping of time as Soozs and Janet - squeezing Other Stuff (which sadly even includes a conversation with K at the moment) in amidst the routine. I did manage to organise a craft night at home last Thursday with a few very lovely friends and their knitting needles and biscuits. THAT felt damn good I must say - something I've long wanted to happen and again if I wait for the Right Time it ain't never gonna happen. A bit like having a baby, or going out on a girl's date with my friend Bridget, or finishing this painting (overcome with guilt sigh...). I took one look at Soozs' pictures of the Winterwood store and immediately went into deep Craft Envy. I love felt. I love it. I especially love it all rolled up in splendid colours like that. I have ordered many things from the store via mail but still never set foot in there. Craft night once a month will surely give me renewed reason to buy more felt AND to learn to knit! I know gods it's sad isn't it. I don't know how and I know once I start there'll be no stopping the wool, the hours of meditative click, click, the glorious things I shall make....Where do I start? Can I take a knitting pill? Help!!!

Beau is getting four molars all at once which has brought forth not surprisingly a host of behaviours that usually occurs whenever a non-family member joins us. And the usual sleep disruption and not knowing what he wants except Boobie and lots of it......I can't even imagine what it must feel like to have four huge teeth piercing my gums.Bloody painful. The other morning Beau looked up at me in the bathroom after our morning shower and said "Mummy a beautiful Queen with Boobies" He can have just about anything he wants when that much cuteness comes around.

K has been through a period of doubt about having another baby. Some of his concerns have been his age and health; his job which is stable but which wouldn't support us if I stopped working my few but necessary shifts; debts; more sleep deprivation; non-existent sex-life/relationship time; less freedom to travel and study.....probably all the very normal anxieties of a 40 something year old Dad who still hasn't found job satisfaction and who has never left the country. I've tried on the whole only child prospect as a result. To be fair to K and to double check my own motives for having a another child. It's gotta be now or never really. Guy's can buy a whole lot more time at this age than us women. Does it sound really lame to say that I strongly feel like there's another little being waiting to come on in to our lives? I've considered the possibility of not being ABLE to conceive and that's a different matter. But there's the willingness to try, the openness to it, the idea of not one but two fantastic babes that leave us completely exhausted but completely enraptured and there's the companionship of siblings that I remember myself and that when all things adult were seeming oh so dull there was my brother to escape with to the record collection....

Truly if it came down to practicality I would be happy to sell this house and be debt free and move to a cheap house in the country and enjoy family life without it having to succumb to looming limitations of an economic nature. But I doubt it will be necessary (and maybe we'll do it anyway). I must say then that our calm conversation around the issue has given K the space to come to it on his own. Now we are mutually open again to that little being hovering around and it feels good, rich, natural, exciting, and still a bit scary.

Here, there and everywhere .

A week on from my little holiday and I am starting to get the Oh Dear I Do Miss the Land of My Birth Blues. I do believe that the flying of me over there and the degree of lovin' I received from friends and family was a meditated plan to have me return to Melbourne with the planted seed of desire to up-root my boys from our home of 5 years and gypsy it back to WA with her Indian ocean smells and big clear blue sky and lolling coastal train ride to increasingly gentrified but still so pretty and dear to my heart Fremantle. Oh west coast temptress with your quiet, unpretentious facade harboring creative potential and the promise of your fertile southern shores. I was determined not to come back romanticising you in any way. I had Eckhart Tolle on the MP3 player both legs of the plane journey - you'd think that his utterly inspiring advice on being always present right here right now would have permeated somehow. But alas my mind being what it is, despite odd moments of clarity and awareness, dips and dives between here and now and there and then and before and later!!
This is not to say that the joy of returning home was in any way depleted. Such bliss in my heart to see my boys crouched at the gate - Beau's delayed but beaming recognition of my return which carried on over the next few days through sweet happy exclamations of "Mummy home from aeroplane" (inferring that he thinks I've been up in the air all this time?) We have swung back into the routine that keeps our shared life sane and steady - that isn't always easy to bare when it costs our relationship time and energy but is still worth sticking up for when the mind goes a romancin' with the idea that 'everything will be better when...'. K and I are trying to practise presence in our lives so that the challenges of busy city lives as parents and partners and home owners do not undo us and we are grateful for the good people we have around us here. We talked last night about how we are feeling - about moving states, about having another child and the amazing one we've already been so fortunate to bring along. We have hit a stasis of sorts where my wish for a bigger family and to simplify and slow down are in the sort of contrast to K's wish for meaningful employment, travel, study and spiritual pilgrimage, that means we need to sit with it all and find out if we can do it all, and if only some of it - what will be let go of. K's wise last words of the evening were "let's not try to DO anything unless we are doing it from a relaxed, present. aware space". That's dead sexy talk that is! Lovely man. Excellent co pilot on this sometimes turbulent journey through time and space. Now I must sleep before I go analogy mad.

40 is the new 30

My last day of holiday, still in Perth staying with Felicity who so lovingly flew me over there. I remember the day I met her when we were 18, at the Uni tavern. She was radiant, smiling and verbose and very chic in that Uni Student way in a hounds tooth jacket that was eventually worn by all of us girls at some time or another. We spent the weekend in the country at a wonderful stone lodge surrounded by hills and trees. 35 of us gathered on the second night - a group of friends who have known each other for 21 years and for me it was a rare and precious thing to see them all again and to meet their partners who felt to me to have been there all along. We were there to celebrate turning 40 which most of us are this year or reached last year. I had many moments of feeling on the outside - of suddenly not knowing what to do with myself - partly due to being there sans family ( who help to define me and distinguish me from who I was back then) and partly due to having been away from Perth for so long. But mostly I felt very comfortable with these people with whom I shared the transition into independent adulthood.

The tragedy of the weekend was that my camera has officially expired!!! It really is time to invest in a good one. A reliable one. Thankfully enough photos were taken by others. All the old photos from our first share house and beyond, where it all began, were on display the night of the party...We were so young and gorgeous and free and often quite drunk! I remember how much I loved those people. We were a great little community of 13 or so sharing time, food, philosophies, dance floors and sometimes beds... If any of you are reading this - I still love you all - you have retained your essence and gained partners, children, wisdom, and you can still command the dance floor as uniquely as you did in the 80's. Thank you so much for including me in the celebrations.