Dear Me,
I know this isn’t the first time you’ve upped and moved, but that doesn’t mean it gets easier. In some ways, it’s harder every time – you’ve gathered more stuff, you now have another set of friends you’ll only see on Facebook, and each year you (and your kids) get older, moving is that much more emotional.
So take it easy on yourself if you have days when it all gets a bit too much. Here are some mantras to keep in your back pocket and pull out when you start to feel overwhelmed.
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I love the way Sarah Tomczak describes the layers of her love for her two daughters in this article in the Red Online Motherhood Diaries. The letters she writes to her girls on their birthdays is a particularly sweet idea. I do something similar for mine; each girl has a book I write in for them whenever the mood takes me (i.e. if we’ve managed to get them asleep at a decent hour and I have energy thereafter to do anything other than collapse on the couch with a glass of sauvignon).
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I have just recently packed up my worldly possessions for the fourth time. My family and I are holed up in temporary accommodation while we wait for visas to come through allowing us to move on to a new country and a new life… There have been a couple of nasty surprises over the last few months – our visas were delayed, our home was let out before we could request to stay on longer, and our new (one bedroom!) apartment has no bath tub and no microwave – two items I would previously have considered relatively indispensable with two kids under...
It was a rainy and miserable Sunday morning last weekend and I escaped the house as bread flour began clouding the air (thanks to an Annabel-and-Daddy-shaped project involving baking baguette for the fairies), and headed smugly down to my local gym for what looked like a work-out (in my quest to kick those last 2kg of baby weight), but is secretly my favourite bit of oh-so-rare me-time of the week. My Body Balance class.
How do I love Body Balance? Let me count the ways…
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It’s Spring of 2016 and I find myself emerging slowly from the thick and delicious fog of new motherhood. Baby number two now sleeps through the night and baby number one is no longer a baby. I blinked and she’s not even a toddler anymore – she’s a bona fide little girl… All blonde, blonde hair and long legs and an attitude to match. And it’s a beautiful life.
It’s a beautiful, messy, exhausting, messy, exhilarating, frustrating, messy, wonderful life, and while I lose my cool at least three times a day (and my keys more frequently than that), I’m grateful for...
