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.

JJ turned seven on Thursday. It’s taken me two days to get around to writing this post because of birthday celebrations and work.

He was very excited to get a Playstation 2 for his birthday. This present had been a long time coming. Around the beginning of the year he informed me that he would like a remote control game, ie a Playstation. I thought that one of these days I would get it for him, then I decided that he should earn some of it himself. Therefore the weekly money earning chart was born. For undertaking certain daily tasks, behavioural and helping around the house tasks, he would earn a certain amount of money. Some of this money was to go towards the Playstation.

I put one on layby a couple of months ago - there’s plenty of bundles that you can get if you keep your eye out and we got the console, a carry case and a game for not much more than the price of a new console by itself.

A couple of weeks ago, just before the layby period was to finish, we raided his money jar and went to the shop to get it off layby. He ended up paying about one quarter of the purchase price and it sat in my room until Thursday.

He opened it up Thursday morning and we plugged it in and got it going. I soon realised that to save games we would need a memory card. We couldn’t play for long anyhow because he had school and I had a busy day at work.

I did write JJ a note on his sandwich paper for his school lunch.

I left work early and we went to see Kung Fu Panda. I asked JJ what he thought of it afterwards and he said he didn’t like, but he LOVED it - it was brilliant. It was good to hear him truly laughing during the movie as his laugh is so infectious. He will probably go and see it again as a friend has said she will take him to see a movie for his birthday present and I don’t recall any other suitable movies being out at the moment in time for school holidays.

Afterwards we got fish and chips (his favourite food) and went home. My sister came around with another Playstation game and after eating we cranked it up again. By this time JJ’s Nanna’s birthday money paid for a memory card, which we bought after the movie, so we could save the games.

The cake pictured above was for last weekend’s festivities which JJ informed me was much more fun here than at the football. Here’s some more pictures of the cake from last weekend.

To top his birthday off, he thanked me the next morning for a great birthday and for his presents which he really likes. Happy seventh year darlin’.

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.

Now, I don’t want to eat my chook before the egg’s been laid but this morning it was such a pleasure to be around my son.

This is on the back of a huge tantrum last night. These tantrums usually seem to happen from a really small incident and last night he thought I was interrupting him and things escalated from there.

This morning, he got up and got dressed, got all the breakfast things out (this is his job) and was really really polite. After breakfast we had a bit of extra time* (because he didn’t have serve three**) so I showed him, yet  again, how to tie his shoelaces and he actually did it all by himself.

He was ready and jobs all done ten minutes before we had to leave so he had time to have a bit of a play before we left the house. More often than not I’m yelling at him to hurry up because we have to go really soon. Of course the more I tell him to hurry, the slower he becomes!

I found a sticker and put it on his jumper to remind him that he’d been a really good boy and to keep it up all day.

An aside: on the way to school the other morning he was saying that he knew he couldn’t be good. I told him to be optimistic about how he would behave. This was a great thing to do because he then focused on how to say optimistic. He now knows how to say it and knows what it means. I need to come up with some other words like this for him to learn.

* We only had ‘extra time’ because the clock in the kitchen stopped working. Luckily I realised when I went into my bedroom and wondered why the last 20 minutes had disappeared so quickly.

** For breakfast JJ usually eats three Weetbix, a serve of Cornflakes, then one or two more Weetbix. If he keeps increasing the amount of breakfast he eats as he grows he’ll need to get up for school two hours before he leaves.

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.

As JJ is a bit older now I want to start taking him on holidays. This is a bit daunting because it will be just him and me ALL the time with no break from each other which puts me off a bit but I want to do it nevertheless.

So, I’d been thinking of going to Queensland as it will be warm when I want to go there. Then I realised I’d never been to Perth so I thought I’d go there instead. I looked up airfares and realised that it would turn into an expensive holiday after paying for airfares and accommodation. This is why some of my friends go to Asia for their holidays because it’s not much more expensive to fly there and it’s cheap once you’re there.

I put my holiday plans on hold for a bit to think some more. Then at work recently I nearly had a chance to go to the States for a conference in July. Unfortunately that was kyboshed so my manager could go but as a ‘consolation’ prize I get to go to Perth for a one day workshop which happens to be during the school holidays. Therefore I get a free flight to Perth.

My brain immediately started ticking when I realised that I could take JJ but I’ll have to get him babysat for the one day of my workshop.

I’ve got some feelers out but if anyone from Perth reads this blog and knows of childcare options please let me know. I don’t know if I’m able to put him in vacation care for a day at a school there as it will be school holidays there also. I’ll have to find out.

My other option is to put him on a plane back to Adelaide and have someone pick him up and look after him until I get back. I’m hesitant to do this as it’s a fairly lengthy flight from Perth to Adelaide.

So it appears as though I’m going to Perth folks. I can’t wait.