I’ve been taking a bit of an unexpected holiday from this website. After work, after dealing with child, after dinner and after cleaning up I’ve looked at my computer sitting here on the kitchen table and decided not to open it at all this week.

I had a busy weekend with domestic bliss and a lovely ladies lunch that took up most of Sunday (will be writing about that). This week at work’s been really hectic and work will continue to be busy for at least the next month, probably longer.

I’ve also had the lure of a new Playstation in the house. This only consumed one and a bit nights and the other nights have been spent in front of the telly and going to bed early.

JJ had the tantrum of all tantrums last night and ended up in bed without dinner. It was his choice not to have dinner and it was the first time this has ever happened. I was mostly calm throughout and surprisingly settled afterward (when he was in bed). I usually churn a lot more after we lock horns.

He apologised to me afterward and again this morning. We were best friends tonight and he told me I was the best and then noted that he hadn’t said that for a while. I’m glad it’s school holidays from next week as the end of the school term is hell for everyone and I think I can partly attribute him losing the plot last night to that.
I’m also really looking forward to taking a week off and going away with my lad. I think it will do both of us the world of good. Now if I just had time to do some research about what to do in Perth before I go that would be great. I’ll have to make time. But the bare bones is organised like getting to and from, and accommodation.

So that’s me folks - all over the place.

Just over 20 years ago I was in my first job where I used a computer a lot - they had me working like a slave over many documents. Consequently my eyes started to hurt. Not too far down the track I got my first pair of spectacles - nice big framed 1980s ones which I still have because I can’t throw out a perfectly good pair of glasses. Never mind that I will probably never wear them again and even if I did the lenses would need to be changed. I’m long sighted and staring at a computer screen all day gave me bad eye strain, hence the glasses alleviating that pain.

I’ve cruised through the past 20 years with two new pairs of glasses and not too much of a change in strength. That is, until recently. In the last year or so I’ve noticed that I have to read things in good light otherwise it’s just too hard. I’ve also noticed that it takes longer to get something at the right distance and in focus so it’s comfortable for my eyes to read.

As it had been two years since my last eye check I went and had another one and the outcome was that I needed to upgrade my glasses because my eyesight had deteriorated markedly since my last prescription about four to five years ago.

There is a name for this eyesight deterioration. The common name is ‘You are now 40 plus and your eyesight is deserting you along with your youth’ and the more scientific name is Presbyopia.

Because my new glasses are much stronger from my old ones they took a while to get used to. It’s also made me realise that this is just the beginning of eyesight deterioration. They aren’t going to get any better and I will soon be at the stage where I will need to take my glasses everywhere so I can read. I haven’t got bi-focal glasses as I couldn’t face that just yet. So if someone talks to me at work I peer over the top of my glasses. It reminds me of watching people doing exactly the same thing. Soon my glasses will be perched on the end of my nose when I’m not doing closeup work because I can’t be bothered taking them off.

At the moment my glasses stay in my work handbag because work’s the main place I use them. If I’m doing a longish stint on the computer at home (like now) I’ll put them on but I still read books and the newspaper without them.

I can see a time where I will need to keep them on me at all times so I can read the labels on grocery products and menus at restaurants when I’m out.

Yesterday afternoon 13 of us went to see an Australian Football League (AFL) game. Let me say that I’m not a fan of the footy as we call it but being at a game is different than sitting down and watching it on telly. It was also JJ’s birthday outing - he will be seven on Thursday.

The leadup to the afternoon footy outing was horrendous. I was accused of his lordship being bored. As I reminded him more than once I was busy preparing for most of the 13 to come back to our place after the game for dinner. Because the attention was not focused on himself he was particularly awful to be around so by the time people started rocking up to our place I was ready to just stay home and leave them all to it. It’s sometimes very hard to act like the adult in this relationship!

Things, however, got a lot better. We caught one of the footy express buses to the game and it was great. It took half an hour from door to door and because we had tickets for the game it was free. We didn’t have to worry about driving there or finding a park.

We arrived an hour before kick-off so we had some time to kill but there is plenty going on around the place from activities for the kids to just people watching. These big blocks were a winner.

It was also a good opportunity to catch up with a couple of friends that came along while making sure the kids didn’t run off, but by the time they’d curbed their over-excitedness they were fairly bearable. Toward the end of the game JJ even sat by himself just watching the game.

I also enjoyed taking the camera for an outing - it’s been a while, and I love the photo below. Not sure what he’s so excited about but it makes me smile just looking at it. JJ took this one! We were in the east stand and the sun shone in our eyes for the first half of the game and it was quite warm. I didn’t need my warm woollen coat at all. I ended up using it for a cushion.

It’s easy to get distracted from watching the actual game. The guy with the beard behind us in this photo was very vocal and had lots to say about the umpires. There were some Richmond supporters nearby who got pretty drunk. One of them looked very seedy at the end of the game and ended up vomiting. JJ stood nearby mouth agape until he finally heard me calling to him to come along as we were going.

I did, however, take some photos of the game and this guy was about to kick a goal.

At the end of the game JJ informed me that he hadn’t had a good time and maybe it’s not his thing, but everyone else enjoyed themselves and we’ve decided to make it an annual event. I’ll just leave JJ home next time. There are more photos here.

Around 20 years ago I used to go out a lot. I was into seeing live music and for a while hung around two girls, one of whom wore lots of makeup all the time. Unfortunately I’ve lost touch with these girls but we had lots of fun.

We were getting ready to go out one night and for some reason her Piaf eyeshadow (like the pictured above) came out and she decorated my eyelids. She recommended I go and buy my own. Not long after I was in the Piaf shop and bought the eyeshadow pictured above.

Obviously I don’t wear lots of eyeshadow all the time otherwise this would be long gone, but I put some on the other night and it brought back memories of these two girls and the times we had when we went out.

I also realised that for relatively cheap eyeshadow - I think it was about $20 for all these colours - the eyeshadow is quite good. Eyeshadow and me don’t have a lasting relationship. Some people seem to be able to put it on and it stays on for hours, but inevitably with me it will come off. However, this eyeshadow lasts that bit longer.

It’s also been really handy for the numerous 70s nights I’ve gone to because I’ve been able to plaster on blue eyeshadow. No matter what outfit I wear, there’s a colour to match.

I guess you could say when I’m in the mood for makeup, this is the cream.

Just letting you know I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve been pretty busy and the last thing I’ve wanted to do is look at a computer when I get home from work.

My Perth trip is coming together. Flights are booked and I think paid for. I’ve organised childcare for the one day that I need. I need to organise accommodation now but think I’ll spend some time in Fremantle and the rest in Perth itself. I’m excited!

My aunt is down from northern New South Wales at the moment. We went out for dinner the other night and then she, mum and my sister came back to mine for drinks. Mum and my sister didn’t drink. My aunt waltzed around the lounge room dancing and singing and she got me singing too. She said I have a lovely voice!

My son is up and down with his moods. We had a good weekend but he’s back to hating me. Last night he riled me up so much it was really hard to control myself. Grrrrrrr!

Anyway, busy day today - gotta go.

A while back Jeanie asked how I combine a career and a kid and stay sane? The fairly short answer is that I don’t always stay sane.

The other morning found me red-eyed in the bathroom silently screaming ten minutes before I had to leave for work. These episodes fortunately don’t occur too often. Once JJ’s dropped off at school if we’ve had a tough morning for whatever reason I can take numerous deep breaths without hyperventilating and once I’m at work forget about it for a while.

One morning I got to work and announced that I was very glad to be at work that day because my son was giving me the royal shits and a colleague couldn’t believe that a gorgeous boy like him could be such a pain to make me want to be at work. I tend to laugh comments like this off and get on with my work. This colleague isn’t a parent so one day, perhaps, she’ll know but I didn’t say that to her.

I work four days a week and often maintain that there’s no way I could work full-time and be a full-time parent. Now I’ve got the work part-time bug I can’t see myself ever going back to five days a week. Although I also maintain that I do a full-time load and that employers usually get more out of their part-timers than they might realise because we’re there to work and don’t have the time to have down time that most full-timers get.

I do hope that one day workplaces and specifically the people within (at all levels) will be more sympathetic to people wanting to work part-time. Even employers that are supposedly work/life balance friendly have a lot more to do for this to actually happen. For instance to change from full-time to part-time work while keeping the same job is really hard. Of course this hits women the most after they’ve had a baby.

When I went back to work after having my baby I was given a different job and the person who’d filled in for me kept my old job. I worked three days a week and he worked full-time. I had to really negotiate the type of work I’d be doing and stand my ground about what I would and wouldn’t do. The job I was given was okay, but it wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing when I went back and I wasn’t really that happy about it. I lasted a year before I moved on. My suggestion to job share was rejected without being considered.

Despite all that I’m pretty happy with my current work but I’m not able to stay past my allotted hours because I have to be at after school care by 6pm to do the pickup and I’m not able to start any earlier, around 9am. When I’m not busy at work this works out okay but I’ve been really busy the last month or so and it’s been a bit hard to switch off.

I can’t switch off when I get home because I keep working to put dinner on the table, do reading with JJ, organise whatever he needs for school the next day, and other assorted household tasks. By the time I plop down in front of Big Brother at 7pm I can feel the tension in my shoulders and it’s hard to get rid of that sometimes. After I’ve rested for that half hour that Big Brother’s on, JJ is out the bath (see I time it well) and he pretty much goes to bed straight away. I then do whatever else I have to do like wash dishes and then relax before going to bed.

Of course I haven’t included the time I spend blogging etc in this. Truthfully with work and child both being full on at the moment, blogging and other online activity has taken a nosedive. Honestly I’d prefer it to be the other way around.

So with all of this I need time to completely switch off and try and maintain some sort of work/life balance to stay sane. I’ll tell you how I try and do that next time.

It’s not too much that I read anywhere on the web that makes me go ah-ha but something I read recently did.

Before I share that here’s some background. I guess you could say I fit into the category of mummy blogging because I’m a mum and because I blog about being a mum sometimes. It crosses my mind occasionally that I’m writing about another person - albeit one I pushed from my loins - and he knows that his photos are on the web, but he doesn’t really get that I write about him yet.

I’m also aware that there are potential safety issues around me posting images of him on my website and on Flickr. People have differing views about this and I fall into the category of posting images and stories about my son. He’s such a big part of my life that he can’t be obliterated completely from my blog because it’s a personal one. I don’t advertise my address or details of where he goes to school so we are fairly anonymous, and let’s face it, it’s not like millions of people read this website anyway.

Lots of people, however, do read Heather Armstrong’s website - Dooce where she blogs with her real name and writes a lot about her daughter. My ah-ha moment came when I read a recent post of hers where she wrote about blogging about her daughter.

She says:

‘Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.

These are the stories of our lives as women and they often include you, yes. Am I endangering you by posting pictures of you? Many people think so, but then they’d have to admit that when I take you to the grocery store I am exposing your face to hundreds of strangers, people who can see what car we drove up in, the license plate number, and the direction we head home. Maybe we shouldn’t ever leave the house, otherwise? STRANGERS WILL KNOW WHAT WE LOOK LIKE. Worse? They will know I prefer Tampax to the generic brand.’

In particular the second paragraph above of Heather’s where she talks about exposing her daughter’s face to people during their day-to-day life struck a chord with me.

The number of times I walk around with my son and say his name for one reason or another are extensive. Anyone can hear me say that, store the information, approach him and pretend they know him if I’m looking in another direction or otherwise distracted. This is probably more likely to happen than someone stalking him via photos on a website. I lost him at a department store once and while frantically looking for him I heard over the loudspeaker for JJ’s mum to please find him at the front desk. I asked how they knew his name because he was a bit too young to say it, and they’d heard me say it to him. The amount of times I’m saying JJ come here, or JJ do this, anyone could use that information to their sick advantage.

I included the first paragraph of Heather’s above because it sums up so well why so many of us are mummy bloggers. I know that writing about some (not all) of my parenting struggles here has helped me enormously and for me outweighs any potential safety issues surrounding him. I figure that it’s better for me to get some stuff off my chest now than to bottle it up for a melt-down along the line somewhere.

My son will be able to read this one day and cringe with embarrassment that I did write about it, but if he becomes a dad, he’ll be able to say, ‘Yes, I did that when I was a kid.’ I’d love to be able to read about what I got up to as a kid, because it might bring back some memories of being a kid and what it was like from my mum’s point of view.

Hopefully, JJ, when you read this one day you will see this for the document of your life that it is and you’ll have every right to blog about me. And hopefully you’ll see that I blogged about you because I love you.

Keep in mind that there’s a heck of a lot I don’t say about him, or about me for that matter, on this website and I don’t publish any naked pictures of him. I’m saving them for his 21st birthday party.