Even the dog conspires against me .........

If I had my way I would live out of suburbia. I've never been someone who likes the city very much, or crowds of people, the hustle,  the bustle and all of that. It's not that I think Ballarat is a huge city - I don't, but I really just want some space and quiet and a little veranda I can sit on and breathe in a view.
I feel happier and calmer when my view includes either a paddock or two and some hills, or some bush - not a road, or someone else's yard. I can't help it, it's just the way I am. I want chooks, a big veggie garden, a couple of fruit trees and somewhere you can see a lot of the sky - to be not closed in by houses. I would love for the kids to grow up with a better connection to the earth and the peace that comes with living out of town.


A few months ago in an attempt to sooth my innate need for a country life I started our veggie patch. It wasn't very big, but at least I could grow a few things and enjoy it. I could show the kids how things are grown and we could pick herbs and things for the kitchen. 
Then we got a dog.


My beautiful veggie patch with tomatoes, peas, beans, celery, herbs, strawberries and salad greens quickly turned into the best place for the dog to dig and worst of all - to poo! What is with that??? This dog has the entire back yard  - it chooses my veggie patch. It was my one little patch of paradise in our yard. I haven't been able to harvest a thing since. I can't even think about it. I now have tomatoes about to ripen on the vines and the thought just makes me ill. So... it can all just stay there. .
One day, I hope, I will get my little bit of earth with a view. I will treasure it, even if I have to build a big old fence around my veggie patch. In the meantime I'll just grow some weeds amongst my wasted tomatoes and the dog can do whatever the heck it wants.

Merry Christmas

I love Christmas, I always have. Now I'm older I have an obsession with tree decorations.
I friend of ours gave us a great idea and every year now I take the kids and they can choose a special new tree decoration each (and I choose 5 or so). When and if they leave home they can take all these mementos of their childhoods with them. I know I still remember particular tree decorations on our tree from when I was a kid. A blue and red bird especially and it was also so nice decorating the tree every year and opening that box of decorations.


This year is a little more exciting as Bugs has a much better concept of Christmas. I don't think he understands that tomorrow is Christmas, and he will get presents etc, but he recognises Christmas 'things' such as Santa. I've been trying to help him understand by counting down the days with the use of an Advent Calender. Every day he's been opening a day and he gets his little chocolate. I'm so proud of him too - that calendar has been hanging up for 24 days now and he hasn't pinched a single chocolate!!! Now that's self control! Tomorrow morning I know when he gets up and opens his presents he will be excited to see them, in the past he hasn't really cared even for presents as his interests were so narrow. He would be more interested in shutting and closing a cupboard door continuously, or whatever other compulsions and little obsessions he had going. He would unwrap the firetruck and head straight back to whatever he was doing. This year however he has come out of his own little space enough that I am really looking forward to seeing how he reacts to his presents and tomorrows events. The other thing he has been doing a lot is breaking out humming 'Jingle Bells' all the time. Very cute.


Ellie is going to have a BIG day tomorrow. She's been running around saying 'Kissmass' for Christmas everytime she sees a bit of tinsel. I can't wait to see her reaction too as last year she had just turned 6 months and was too little to enjoy the day, I think if anything it was just pretty exhausting for her.
After opening the presents with the kids in the morning we are taking Lachlan's mum out to my aunt and uncles for Christmas day. It will be nice to all be together as usually we have to sort out who is going where and to what with both sides of the family.
Anyhow... I better go and wrap some more presents.
Merry Christmas to you. Have a great day tomorrow.

Grumpy pants ....

I have nothing much to say tonight. I am feeling pretty cranky....... so I'm just going to leave a song below that I quite like to listen to when I'm feeling like this and go hide under a rock somewhere ...........

Little signs ....

Note: If you want to read to a bit of music I have added a bit below - just hit play.

Today I am sensing things are changing once again. I'm probably wrong .... maybe I'm a bit paranoid.
My partner has two weeks off work which is a blessing and lovely. We all had a great day today out and about together but a couple of things have left me uneasy.


My son's behaviour seems to go in waves of good then bad. Usually the waves last a couple of months where they peak and usually crash back the other way. We have been headed upwards with great behaviour recently - in fact I have just about felt blessed with the happy, lovely boy I have been given.
This is the way it works though, just when you feel you can trust things, you can trust him ... it starts.
I can't relax. Even with how he has been lately I'm still waiting for it all to come crashing down and almost feel like I shouldn't say how good things have been because I know inside it can't be real.


It was nothing major. First we were at the supermarket. A while ago I would have never taken him to the shops. If he sees something he wants he would have to have it, no matter what. This wouldn't involve just one of those tantrums you see by kids wanting something they couldn't get who follow their parents screaming and crying. No ours would be tantrums where he would lay on the floor - kick you, hit you, scream at you, usually while holding or breaking the thing he wanted. There would be no way to continue. You couldn't resolve it, you couldn't ignore it and with my son you can't walk away. It would have made me nervous just to let go of his hand. You just can't say - "well I'll see you later then, I'll leave you here", those things I hear other parents use. The only way to move past it was to 1: buy the thing he wanted or 2: pick up your 7 year old while he pulls your hair with all his might and try to carry him out to the car. Add to that the people looking. We were like a car crash, heads would turn everywhere. The day I completely lost my nerve at the supermarket was when he wanted the entire set of Big M, 2 litre milks. The entire set being every colour / flavour. This was something that was going to happen in his mind and I had no idea how I was going to get him from the back of the store to the car parked deep into the car park. $25 dollars worth of Big M milk later we left. I honestly almost cried at the checkout. He doesn't drink Big M, he didn't drink a single drop of it.


Anyhow.... we have been going to the supermarket. He has been brilliant. The trust has been built after quite a lot of successful trips. In fact we walk around and I feel SO proud I could almost cry at the checkout for another reason. We are there, smiling and paying for our groceries. He is beside me and I barely need to hold his hand. I used to hold him with a tight grip around his wrist wherever we went.
Today at the checkout he hit the deck. It was out of the blue. I don't know what he wanted but bang he was there with that look on his face. My partner tried to pick him up and my son kicked. He did get up .... but my tummy dropped.


The second sign .. family dropped by and my son wanted to go outside. He pushed his way through the door but I grabbed him and asked him to come in. He turned straight around and hit me a few times. It's not that it hurts me physically, although there have been plenty of times it has, but the thought that always zooms into my mind is this happening with my 16 year old. It's the thought for the future and knowing he could really hurt someone.


Anyhow.. a weird day. Maybe something was just bothering him. I hope he is ok.
I am trying to just focus on the fact that if I think him dropping to the ground at the supermarket is unusual - look how amazingly far we have come.

Autism vs. Normalism

Tomorrow I go to work, tomorrow school holidays begin. Today is in some ways my last day of freedom for quite a few weeks.

Before I had my children I would hear mothers groan about the school holidays and my first judgmental thought was - why have kids if you don't want to spend time with them??
What a fricken idiot I was!

Now I actually have children I now realise that you love your children with everything you have. You really can't imagine life without them. You orbit around their every move and they can be the sweetest things you have ever known .. and here it comes .... BUT ...... you can also feel very guilty when they are bored. You would occasionally like to sit down and just have a coffee. Your arms ache from carrying them even thought it took you 9 months to make those chubby little legs, and fair bit of the time it doesn't really enter your children's minds that you too are a person.

I wont go into my son's story at this time, that's a whole other post, and also I didn't want to write a blog solely about him, because really it's about me and possibly my issues. However he has quite high needs, but at the moment so does the toddler who is becoming a monster in her own right. Last school holidays I pretty much carried her around, while I chased her brother. These school holidays I think I might just be trying to chase both of them. My son has autism, my daughter has what I now describe as 'normalism'. Strange sudden behaviours brought on by toddlerhood. Perfectly normal, but occasionally feral.

To end this post I thought I would share a few weird things I have noticed going on around here lately with me.
Firstly - outside the front door I have a ceramic flower pot that used to have a nice plant with red flowers on it - until I killed it with lack of care. Now outside my door I have a huge weed that is THRIVING where my other plant struggled. Each day I look at it and think I should pull it out, it looks like I am growing a weed on purpose. Each day I don't pull it out. I think it, but I don't do it and I end up with an obvious weed that looks like I love it.

Secondly - I have this woman who comes to my door every few weeks - she is a Jehovah. She caught me once when I was feeling too polite and I said 'just leave the pamphlets with me and I'll have a read'. I thought maybe that would be a good way to deal with it - NOT - now she comes every few weeks talks to me about stuff and gives me the books. She is rather nice, and we mostly chat about life in general but then all of a sudden she will throw in something like 'that's why we are looking forward to the day when God takes us' ... my head kind of spins...... Anyhow.. she usually comes on a Thursday every few weeks. Today for some reason, it must be my 6th sense, I was thinking that I hope she doesn't turn up. I also even debated turning on the lights on the Christmas tree in the window - WHY? because I am an idiot. This woman comes to my door and preaches her religion to me, did I invite her? no... do I have the guts to say - look lady I will never join so please leave me alone - no. What I do is feel bad for putting my christmas lights on in case I offend her.
See... this is why I worry about me.

Who is Juni?

When I was 9 years old we moved from suburbian Dromana to a property - 27 acres of mostly bush, surrounded in state forest. We lived down an eternally dusty or muddy dirt track (depending on what time of the year it was) which was about 15 minutes out of Daylesford. Mum, Dad, my brother and I.

My first memory of seeing the property was when we followed a real estate agent down this dirt track that seemed to never end. It started with pine trees on both sides, then changed to eucalyptus trees on both sides and then all of a sudden you turned a bend and it opened out to a view of a gully and out to Daylesford. It was beautiful. The house was a shambles of bits and pieces - a half finished house, but it's exactly what my parents were after.  The house was surrounded in lawn, which was then enclosed by trees. Our home was on a patch of green amongst the forest.

I have a lot of memories there, that are tied in with that place. In someways it feels to me now like my real home still. It's funny how your heart can tune into something and never let it go. It's also funny how you can identify yourself with something - such as a place - and when that place is gone part of you feels gone to. It's not just the place - I know that. It's what I associate with it. It's all the good things and the bad things, moments, rituals, family, sounds and even smells.

A vivid memory of my childhood was when I was out on the lawn. It was dusk, it was that weird in - between temperature when it's not hot and not cold and there is no breeze. I was dancing on the lawn - I can really only remember doing this once. Pretending I was a real dancer - kind of like ballerina - and I was dancing with a pretend friend - Juni. I didn't care who could see me, in fact I think I was hoping Mum might see me out the window and see my true potential and send me out to dancing lessons.

Juni and I danced until it got a little dark. Then I laid down and the sky was spinning. The grass was a cold underneath me, everything was quiet except my breathing and the frogs near the dam.
I was so happy. I thought Juni and I must have looked amazing in the twilight.

Start .....

I've decided to start a blog like the millions before me.


My new years resolution (I'm a little early I know) is to be loud and proud of me and my life!

Sometimes I can be so hesitant in my life of speaking my truths, or standing up and saying what my life is really like that I feel like I am hiding. I'm not sure when this started or why. It's hard to explain.

It's weird. So much in my life has changed in the past 10 years that I almost feel like 'back then' was another person.


Anyhow... this is a start .....