How much is too much???
06 May 2012 2 Comments
At the moment I feel like I have a lot of balls in the air. And I feel like I am dropping an awful lot of them.
At the moment our week looks like this:
Monday: Work/ School, Cubs
Tuesday: Work/School, Maths Coaching, Soccer Training
Wednesday: Work (late finish)/School, bible study
Thursday: Work (late finish)/School, piano lessons, soccer training
Friday: Work/School, Youth group
Saturday: Soccer uniform shop from 8am – 10.30 am, 2 games of soccer
Sunday: Church, family dinner
In addition to this I am also squeezing in various appointments, shopping, cleaning and exercise. Oh, and a trip to Dubbo, a weekend at Cub camp and Sew It Together all before 30 June.
I know my boys are involved in lot of activities – soccer for both, cubs & piano for Loos, maths coaching & Youth group for Noos – but what do you say no to? And each activity is important for a number of reasons.
This is my busiest time of the year at work – trying to get tax returns completed, as well as other compliance requirements all due around this time and we are also upgrading our major software package in the next month. And I’ve decided to do the next round of 12wbt too.
So things are sliding….housework is being done at the bare mimimum. We have clean clothes, clean dishes & we have food to eat. Anything else is a bonus. As for time to try some sewing, well that is pretty much non existent.
But, as I think about how overwhelmed I am feeling, I start counting the months until I go away – 4 months tomorrow. And know that I just need to get through the next little while and then I will have some time for me!
Trip Planning
25 Mar 2012 4 Comments
in Holidays Tags: holidays, SE Asia
I have not been a good blogger lately. Life just seems to get in the way of sitting down and actually typing out something remotely readable. All my focus seems to have been on helping Noos with school – I have learnt so much about our local suburb, Howard Florey and various number systems. I may yet find all that knowledge that has drained out of my brain over the last 20 odd years.
But one of the main things taking up a lot of brain space is planning my holiday!! As a birthday present to myself I have organised and booked a month long holiday on my own – no children, no work, no responsibilities.
So, I was pretty thrilled when this arrived in the mail:
I have been avidly reading and trying to make sure that I won’t miss seeing anything – nothing worse than coming home & finding out you missed a must see place.
My birthday presents were travel related – a new bag which can be wheeled, carried or put on my back (and it looks very small to be living out of it for a month), a daypack with a mesh bit at the back so air can get between you & the bag, and a travel handbag which is antitheft in many ways.
I have now booked 2 tours & my airfare all through intrepid – the tours are wonderfully priced and will give me a full cultural experience. The 3 things that scare me the most are the night on a junk on Halong Bay, an overnight train trip on the Reunification Express from Hanoi and the public bus between Ho Chi Minh City & Phnom Penh. All well outside my comfort zone!
And today I have been shopping for clothes to take – super light skirts & pants, long sleeved anti bug shirt and and a short sleeved cotton shirt.
Biggest problem is shoes. I am thinking I will need something cool, comfy and waterproof. Also looked at those today and gave up. Any ideas???
My next job is to start organising visas – 4 countries, 3 of which require visas. The benefit of living in the national capital is this can be done relatively easily.
Back to Stitching
18 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Craft, Sewing Tags: Craft, Finished Projects, Handmade Shop, Sewing, Stitching
Today I visited our local, and quite well known, Handmade Shop to do a stitching workshop.
I have been shopping at the Handmade Shop since it opened and admired all the gorgeous things so many talented people had made. I’ve bought a lot of presents for various friends there. Over January they doubled the size of the shop and now have a space up the back to do workshops for 10 people.
When I saw that the first workshop was a stitching sampler & included learning to sew on a button I was thrilled and quickly registered to attend. I arrived at the right time, and just as it started. Disappointingly I hadn’t left enough time to grab a cuppa before the workshop, which I had been thinking about while driving into town.
Vanessa, the instructor, told us about her background which included a lot of crafty things, including making wedding dresses. She was very good at explaining slowly what to do & was very very patient. We started off with running stitch, followed by whip stitch (a personal favourite of mine) and then chain stitch. The last thing she showed us was how to sew on a button. The stitches were all familiar to me from the Prints Charming stitching workshop I did last year, but the refresher was very helpful.
I managed to finish my sampler:
I’m not particularly happy with the colours I chose, but the choices were limited when I was picking & the lady next to me quickly grabbed the pinks I had been admiring. But I finished it!
We also discussed with Vanessa other types of workshops we would like to do – so now I will be watching out for other interesting crafty things for me to learn.
The next stage
05 Feb 2012 2 Comments
In 2005 this small boy started primary school.
He was excited to be starting big school, even though he didn’t really know anyone he would be going to school with. We packed his lunch, covered books, labelled all his uniforms and went to orientation days.
At his first orientation day he made a friend
And then at the end of last year these 2 friends finished primary school together
still friends.
Tomorrow they go to high school together for the first time.
We have packed bags, labelled books (not allowed to cover them anymore as it is not cool), organised a lunch box. My boy is again excited to be starting on the next phase of his life. This time he knows many people he is going to be at school with, he has had orientation days and has spent many hours at his new school attending vacation care. He is super confident.
But how do I feel as we enter this new phase? I am excited to see my little boy growing into a young man. I am nervous and thinking about all the things that can go wrong at high school. I am sad that I will no longer be a part of his daily education, communicating regularly with his teacher. I am terrified at what he is going to be exposed to with so many older kids. I have to let go now and watch him slowly start to make his own way in this world, scaffolding his independence, sending him off on a bus each day.
This morning our Assistant Pastor preached on sending kids back to school, asking us what we were packing in our kids school lunch boxes, whether we were encouraging them in their christian walk to be prepared to uphold the values that are increasingly becoming uncool in this modern world.
I’ve been thinking about this today – what am I sending him off to high school with? I hope I am sending him off with a strong sense of who he is and what he believes. I hope I am sending him off with knowledge of right and wrong and the ability to tell the difference. I pray that I am sending him off with the ability to say No, and to stand alone if needs be.
So we embark on the next 4 year period of his education, with my fingers crossed and hoping beyond hope that he will emerge from high school as a strong, determined, positive young man.
A Reading Wrap Up
08 Jan 2012 1 Comment
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of (some of)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Posession A S Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
How many have you read?
Disney!!
17 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Family, Loo, Noos Tags: Disneyland, Family, holidays, Hong Kong, Loo, Noos
I have been very neglectful of this blog of late. Part of this is due to the effort I have been putting into the exercising component of 12wbt. Other reasons are work being busy, children being busy and plain old laziness. But the most exciting reason was that we spent a week in Hong Kong!
Our first day in HK happened to be Loos birthday. What better way to spend your 9th birthday than at Disneyland! And so that is where we went. HK Disney is a very small park and is only 5 years old. There are only 3 worlds apart from Main Street - Fantasyland, Adventureland & Tomorrowland. This week they are opening a new land all about Toy Story. The benefit of it being small is that you can do it in one day. The other joy for us was that going on a Monday meant that lines were virtually non existent and we could ride what we wanted, when we wanted, ignoring the options for Fastpasses.
We caught the train from Kowloon, changing onto the Disneytrain at Sunny Bay. The train was so cute - Mickey Mouse windows and little golden disney statues all through it.
We walked up from the train station into a stream of people all heading to Disneyland. We were very excited!
And then got to the gate & waited for half an hour to get in. Lots of fuss was made over the first people to arrive at Disney for the day – they were let in first and had some special time with Minnie & Mickey. We had to make do with admiring the statues out the front.
It was Halloween and so the House of Mouse was all decked out in Halloween finery. Disney does celebrations like noone else!
And lots of special halloween goodies to be bought in all the stores.
All the old favourites were there – the boys loved stumbling across the disney images.
The boys weren’t too keen to line up & have their photos taken with the characters – they think they are too old and cool. So instead we went and saw some shows – this was the Golden Mickeys. Most of the speaking was in Cantonese, with english subtitles on the screen, but all the singing was in English. The dancing was amazing! We also watched Mickey’s Philarmagic – a 4D movie. Best 4D movie I have ever been too, the 3D effects were incredible, I just had to reach out & touch Donald Duck as he flew at my head.
We also went on some rides – you can’t go past the teacup & Saucer. Noos wanted to try Space Mountain, but wouldn’t go on his own. Loos was not keen, and as I didn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone to wait for us, we gave it a miss. We did have fun in the Buzz Lightyear ride, enjoyed the orbitron and, just to make my Dad happy, went on Its a Small World – and the HK version is exactly the same as the LA version I went on 30 years ago.
We had some fun with food – tried roast chicken & rice, and discovered it to be full of bones, definitely not the way we normally eat our roast chicken. But Noos had this very cute waffle while I chatted to some people from Melbourne.
We loved our day in Disney – we were all exhausted, especially after arriving very late in HK the night before. We managed to find our way back to our hotel via train & taxi. Loos was asleep by 8, and missed dinner! But what a great way to spend the day you turn 9!
Why Michelle Bridges’ 12WBT works for me
06 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
in 12wbt, Exercise, Weight Tags: 12WBT, Exercise, Running, Weight Loss
A question was asked this week in a facebook group I am involved in about the pros and cons of the 12WBT. I knew I couldn’t answer this in a facebook comments block, and so thought it easier to blog about. I also know that today isn’t the ideal day for me to be blogging this as I have really really struggled today & made some bad choices – hit the week 4 hump in the road. But here goes.
12wbt is more than a diet, it is more than an exercise or weight loss plan. To me it is life changing. I have tried many programs – Jenny Craig, Easyslim, Herbalife, weight watchers, Fernwood’s slimplicity as well as various attempts at watching what I eat, joining gyms, starting walking plans. But this is the first program that has not only worked for me, but the first one where I have actually achieved my goal weight.
I believe the key to 12WBT success is the preaseason, 4 weeks when you spend time contemplating the reasons for why you have ended up where you are and recording them. Thinking through all the excuses you use and how to overcome them. You get your kitchen organised, you make sure you have the right gear and you measure & weigh yourself.
So apart from this my pros would be as follows:
- the amazing support you receive from Michelle Bridges & her team through the 2 weekly videos (generally one is live where you are able to ask questions), forum posts and facebook page.
- Being given a menu plan, shopping list, recipes & and a workout plan everyweek. No thinking involved (and there is a con with this too).
- You are dealing in calories with every meal and snack. You learn to read the nutrition boxes on packets and understand how many calories are too many – no hiding the facts using points or other methods or carrying around books advising how many points etc in things. This can then be taken outside the program easily to work out whether food that looks OK really is.
- the support from other people doing the program. It really is a community, and as such you see the good, the bad & the ugly. But definitely the good far outweighs the bad. I have made some wonderful friends through 12wbt, primarily through local meetups.
- the cost (though some would say this is a con) . Compared to other programs I don’t believe this is expensive. I know I have spent way more on other programs that have not been as successful.
- you are eating and preparing real food, not prepackaged frozen meals, meal replacement shakes or a heap of tablets. You are learning how you should eat.
- Having a freezer with frozen leftovers of healthy meals for those nights when life gets in the way or I just can’t be bothered.
- Learning new habits & learning to love new things. Who would have thought 18 months ago that I would kinda enjoy running & would voluntarily enter fun runs. How good my day is depends on how much exercise I have started the day with (hence my bad day today).
- Feeling awesome about myself and how I look. This is huge! I have confidence in myself that I never had before. I know I can achieve.
And to be fair the cons:
- it is not magic. You need to work hard, you need to be organised and consistent. But put the effort in and you will see the results.
- the weekly meal plans & shopping list – makes my life a bit tough sometimes. There are some foods I will not eat and so I spend time each week tweaking the plans and working out our own menu plan. Some things I can’t convince my fussy eating boys to even try so need backup meals.
- The consuming nature of the program. I find when I am focussed on the program other things slip by the wayside as I try to find time to fit exercise & cooking into my day.
Each of the 4 rounds I have done have been very different for me, and I have been looking for different things. Round 1 last year was all about weight loss, and I achieved that. Round 3 last year was about consolidating the weight loss & also meeting other 12wbters – again successful. I told myself that round 1 this year was about fitness, and yes, I did run my first ever fun runs, but let the food side slip & did not achieve my goals. The current round is about changing my mindset about food – reinforcing that I am an adult and shouldn’t continue to eat like a child. This is a big deal for me and if I get it, it will set me up forever.
I love 12wbt and I will be forever grateful for the changes it has made in my life!
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