Tortillas at Midnight

Right friends and frenemies (wait, surely frenemies wouldn’t bother to read a blog? Surely? And I don’t think I have any anyway (but cool, another thing to panic about while I don’t sleep)), here we are. Welcome to the crash course of freelancing + parenting where you have no choice but to dive right into the deep end. You also aren’t allowed to finish the course, because you will be interrupted 107 times per minute, and even if you did somehow manage to then that would be cheating, as it would make everyone else cry with inadequacy. So here you are, reading the blurb of the course on one of those nice tertiary brochures that smell glossy and are vaguely powdery, about what’s in store for you. The only available grades are fail, or, uh, fail, so buckle in for the journey. 1) Intro to Freelancing + Parenthood: Don’t Take Phone Calls. Phone calls are bad because whenever you need to talk to someone important, your children will inevitably scream. It’s just basic science. Opt for the far ...

So it’s June already (though I swear it was just Christmas? Didn’t we just take down the lights?) and I want to write, but naturally I don’t know what to write about. As per usual. So bear with me please as I delve into yet another list of miscellaneous life facts/comments/questions that are kind of irrelevant to well, everyone, and everything. 1) This blog is one year old! Happy birthday to those tortillas I don’t really eat anymore! And happy birthday to still being awake at midnight most days! But in all seriousness, I’m really glad to have had this space over the past year. It has documented a lot and I’ve gotten to connect with a lot of lovely souls who say, “wow, I don’t know how to do this parenting gig either.” And that’s just the best feeling, truly, aside from sniffing a baby’s head of course. If you want to go all the way back to the beginning, head this way . 2) I’m convinced that babies don’t have hips. They’re just made up of the cutest, big, round tummy and then chunky l...

A dear friend sent me this video recently, and it made me bawl. I didn't even know I had all those tears inside of me or all those feelings, either. All those nameless, ugly-feeling beasts. Which I guess really aren't all that ugly, but instead, they're just real. And when you're trying to exist in this cookie-cutter realm of motherhood where everything glows softly and birds chirp in the background like you're supposed  to, these feelings don't exactly comply. The disconnect between how you think motherhood should be and what it's actually like is the root of all shame. Nobody told me how much I'd miss my toddler.  How for the next 12 hours after giving birth, she was all I could think about. Her warm breath, her chubby hands, her familiar hugs. Not the beautiful, perfect baby right next to me. Oh how I loved her so too, that wildfire kind of love you know, but at the same time, my grief about losing how things were with my oldest baby was all-encompas...

 I know. I know . I’m writing about sleep again aren’t I? But this time, instead of me moaning about sleep yet once more, I want to write a little about baby sleep. And toddler sleep. And child sleep too.  I want to write about a concept that is entirely fake, packaged up, marketed, and sold to millions of utterly exhausted parents around the western world. I do want to begin with a disclaimer, though. I am not writing about sleep training as a whole (that mountain would require an entire series!). Nor am I judging parents for partaking in sleep training or the pursuit of “self settling/soothing”. We were vulnerable to it too and tried it out for a while. And sleep deprivation - in an immensely isolated, individualised, western society where parents don’t have a literal village, let alone support in many cases - is shocking in ways that one cannot understand unless you’ve lived it. Sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture, it can skyrocket mental health issues, and...

Last night I got an uninterrupted four hour stretch of sleep. Absolute bliss, let me tell you. Absolute bliss. I feel like I preface everything I write here with an evaluation of the sleep stitch. Kind of like the parent version of the diet gurus who eat 4.7 medjool dates per 3 mile ratio and then write about it. The dates dictate their day, so they say. And same goes for sleep. So here I am, feeling remarkably more refreshed and able to conquer the day! Because it has been a while since I’ve written here, I’m going to do a little round up of sorts. But not like the weed killer version, because that stuff is notably more effective than I, but more a lumping-miscellaneous-bits-and-bobs-together version of the word. So without further ado ... 1) There’s a bloody mouse plague over the ditch, isn’t there? Yes, apparently mouse plagues are a real thing. I dare you to watch the video of thousands of mice all squirming in a bucket. I dare you. This whole thing sounds almost biblical. And wit...

I’ve written my fair share about sleep deprivation on here, and you’re probably well and truly sick of hearing me go on about it now. For that I do apologise; it’s just hard to write about different things when your brain feels like mush day in and day out. Hopefully one day I’ll have enough brain power to write about something more exciting, like how awesome it is to feel awake! I can only dream . . . Anyway, in terms of major fiscal holes in the interwebs, I reckon there is a giant one when it comes to advice on how to cope with sleep deprivation, rather than trying to fix it. I’m not going to delve into the whole sleep training or not yada yada, because it’s kind of unproductive and mainly because I can’t be bothered. It might also have something to do with that I can’t articulate anything even vaguely coherent right now. Rest assured though that this is a “spend $1276 and your baby will sleep 15 hours a day until they’re 25” free zone. I’m more just going to focus on what helps me ...

I’m always on the hunt for new internet rabbit holes to venture down during all these long nights. Sometimes I’ll just read random articles or follow a Wikipedia chain or read up about conspiracy theories just for the fun of it. I’m not too sure how I got into investigating (okay, that’s way too strong a word for staring at a screen to stop my eyelids dropping) the animals for sale on TradeMe, but here we are. Upon reading several listings and gasping at the price of these creatures, I began to notice some particular themes within each subset of seller. And because I don’t have anything better to do during these ungodly hours, I’ve categorised these sellers into neat, little boxes. Healthy stuff. Let’s start with the pigs. Surprisingly, pig sellers tend to be of very few words. I was lowkey disappointed because I expected an almost rambunctious air about them, verging on mildly jolly. However, most listings just include one or two blurry photos of the pigs at least 5m away in a paddoc...