Medication

So many times people ask me if I shouldn't 'have a rest' from my medication. These are often the same people who suggest people with depression should just remember how good they have it compared with people in Syria/current the international hotspot, or suggest that we harden up (We are the toughest people you will ever meet. We do battle with our own minds). The short answer is 'no' but it's slightly more complicated than that.

Imagine I was an asthmatic (I'm not).  Would anyone suggest I needed a rest from my preventer medication? Even if I wasn't getting symptoms or having asthma attacks no one would question the decision to be on medication, made in conjunction with the relevant health professionals. In fact, if I felt all better and started talking about stopping my preventer medication someone would remind me that without it I sometimes get really sick.

Have you ever thought an asthmatic should just toughen up and keep breathing? Have you thought they should just appreciate the oxygen they can get and stop worrying about what they can't have? Have you avoided talking about difficult subjects because you didn't want them upset, thinking it might trigger an attack? If an asthmatic needs to take some time off work or study while they get their symptoms under control how do you view it? What about if they decide they need to use a variety of approaches (medical and lifestyle) to deal with their illness? I have several friends who won't come to BBQs or bonfires on the cooler months because they say they can't breathe. I don't judge them negatively for that.

My illness isn't that different. I use meds, lifestyle and talk therapy to deal with it. When I have a major depressive episode I try to catch it as early as possible and put some things in place to help me manage while things are difficult. I try to remember, when I feel good, that my meds are preventative because when things are good it's easy to forget how bad things can get (what's that saying about forgetting pain?).

All that being said, there are many different ways to manage mental illness, and more and more research is being done on gut-brain interactions, and I am not going to criticize anyone who chooses to deal with their illness in other ways - as long as it is working for them and their loved ones!

Dinosaur habitat

My sister Clare is in Cambodia and blogging, my mum is travelling and blogging, my friend Megan is planning the trip of a lifetime and will be blogging, so I thought a post was in order. None of that exotic travel for me at the moment though. My life is all about parenting my kids, gardening and trying to make our house more organised and liveable (hence my Pinterest addiction) and here is a little project we did yesterday afternoon that covers all those bases.

I had a tired grumpy four year old and wanted to look at wardrobe systems in Bunnings, so I bribed the tired kid with the promise that we would buy some little plants and make him a dinosaur garden. We also bought a wide-ish, flat-ish pot, which was unnecessary but I'll use it for bulbs next spring. I was drawing my inspiration from cool terrariums I'd seen on Pinterest and originally planned to use plants I had at home, but I just couldn't resist the mini mondo grass ($1) and a few small-leaved sedums as well as something called 'corsican mint' which is a tiny little thing ground cover thing. I wanted all small-leaved plants because I think the scale looks better (same reason I don't like large leaved bonsai).

I probably took us about 10 minutes to put together, including taking a blade to a disposable water bottle to make the pond and wandering around the garden looking for appropriate rocks.


I wish I had chosen a sealed pot with a base, rather than terracotta, so it was easier to put in the boys room (although that *might* be a recipe for disaster) and I might work on the pond a bit (make it much flatter and fill it with blue glass decorator bead things rather than actual water) but I'm pretty happy with it. More to the point, Kiz loves it, and has given all his dinosaurs drinks, baths, and plants to munch on.

Advent Calendar

Yep, I'm an atheist but, as previously documented here, I love Christmas (or should that be 'christmas'?) and love to celebrate my friends and family and create family traditions. I really want my kids to use this time of year to think about others, and to give freely of themselves, so to that end I created and advent calendar. It's a work-in-progress I started last year and I'll continue refining it, but it's based around a different activity or discussion point for each day. Last year I put the little slips, along with treats (stickers, chocolates, sweets, temporary tattoos, etc) in red envelopes and hung them on a tinsel-y string with cute mini red pegs. I did  copies for a few friends with similar age kids. The effect was somewhat amateur hour but cheerful, and the kids seemed to like it. This year, considering we are in the process of buying and selling our house, and with the various family weddings and illnesses I didn't get to create calendars for friends, I just sent them the updated 'activities' file but I made one for us, out of the little screw-together containers you can get at craft and sewing shops as storage for beads, findings, whatever.

I just used ribbon to hide the goodies and we are taking them from the bottom, so the top container is an extra specially decorated number 25. I like the simplicity, the fact that I can re-do with different ribbon next year to match my mood (or decor, if I was that organised) and also the fact that as we go through the days we get to see the proportion of days gone vs still to come. I think it helps little kids understand how far away Christmas is, considering their kooky sense of how quickly/slowly time passes.

The note book with the elephant on it is for me to record some of the things that come up in discussion - sometimes the little note asks things like what each person in the family's favourite tree decoration is and I'd love to watch how that changes (or doesn't!) over the next few years.

Today we didn't get to paint wrapping paper, but I'm not going to get worked up about it - I did manage to skip work to attend Asher's preschool Christmas Concert, drop a signed contract for the sale of our apartment off to the solicitor, do some housework, take Asher to swimming lessons AND do two sudoku...


UPDATED 20th December
I just saw this blog and really like the activities she includes! Really nice for younger kids. I might even plagiarize a little next year ;-)

Put your money where your mouth is!

...and support the arts. In my letter to Gladys I mentioned my sister's beloved. The lovely and very talented Bridget looks after my kids wonderfully but her real work is in the arts. She has a great project but needs to get funding. Here is her pitch.

She's crowdfunding her first serious short film and I'm proud that we were the first to donate! Add your voice (well, your $$ actually) to a great Australian film project. Ya never know, one day Bridget might be the next Baz Lurhmann/Fred Schepsi/George Miller/Phillip Noyce and you will be able to boast that you donated to her first project.
Support Australian film!
Support women in film!
Contribute to the arts!
Help crowdfund this project!

Art Gallery Trip

Asher showing us his art
Originally uploaded by karmakeda

Today we went to one of the Art Gallery of NSW's Tours for Tots programs (http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/for_kids/tours_for_tots). My friend Karen booked it ages ago, when I was in early pregnancy, and I didn't know if I'd be able to cope getting into the city to the Gallery and doing the activities with Asher with a newborn. It turns out that it's OK - I should have left earlier as an hour isn't long enough to get there without dragging Asher throught the streets of the city. Lucky he's a tough little thing who normally likes walking otherwise it would have ended in tears. I also couldn't have done it without the wonderful Karen who not only booked for me but also, with less than 10 weeks to go of her own pregnancy, got down on the floor with the kids when it was hard for me to manage then took Asher to the beach with her and her daughter for a few hours. They are due back any minute (I've had a rest, looked after still-sick Kiran, done a few phonecall chores, done a load of washing and prepared dinner). I really don't know how people manage without such excellent mates - I don't know what I can do to repay my awesome friends.

The Tot program was good - best for relatively calm and attentive kids though, so even though they say 3-5 year olds it seemed a bit tough for some of the younger and less compliant ones. We looked at four artworks and I thought the analysis was good and still totally appropriate for the preschooler set. I also wanted to bring the John Olsen work we looked at home with me, There were two activities that related well to the artworks but perhaps lacked a little. We used stencils to layer sea creatures onto our surfboard shapes (the surfboard will become a picture frame) and used crayons and stickers to decorate sunglasses.

I want to get this posted and the bath run for when the kids descend, so I'll post this now, without re-reading.

Unplug Your Kids

I've subscribed to 'Unplug Your Kids' for a little while now, despite the fact that Asher at just over 2 years old is a bit young (and I am a bit lazy) for much crafty stuff. We don't really watch much TV with him around - at the moment he's getting an hour or so about once a month but I generally feel like I need a bit of a kick to do anything like a 'project' or 'activity' with him. This week however I thought about their current 'smooth' theme a lot - every time we played with playdough (which was often - he's loving it at the moment) we talked about it's texture, and when we were eating, enjoying our walks, cooking and generally going about our days I've been talking about smooth vs. rough. To have an 'activity' to include I decided that this afternoon when we had some free time we would spend some time playing with, and exploring the texture of, a bunch of smooth stones that we have at home.

To get Asher interested I asked him to wash the stones, and because it was such a nice warm day I filled up his water play table, put a bunch of suds in it (baby wash!) and gave him a scrubbing brush, a cleaning cloth and a whisk (to get the suds happening) as well as the stones. He had a great time whisking, pouring water from one container to another and seemed only peripherally interested in the pebbles. He did notice that some were smoother than others (some are polished stones, some came from a beach) and that they are shiny and dark when wet and more dull when dry. He also climbed onto the table and sat in the water as soon as I ducked inside, grinning at me when I came out and telling me that the water was cold. The simple fact that he knew I was taking photos and didn't harass me for the camera was proof that he was more involved in what he was doing than I've seen him for a while.

So, although our 'project' was not an unqualified success in terms of learning about 'smooth' it was a very pleasant way to spend a hot afternoon. If you are interested in crafty stuff to do with kids (My kid preferably - come and do crafty stuff with my kid! I will make you a lovely gin and tonic! Promise!) I'd recommend visiting a proper kids craft sites, such as the justifiably popular The Crafty Crow or the fantastic Australian Kids Craft Weekly that offers really do-able stuff that's often appropriate for younger kids.

The other thing we now know is that the water table will take the weight of my two-year-old, water and a bunch of lovely pebbles and that Asher will 'smile for the camera' if he's in the right mood. The resulting photos, however, are a bit scary!

Artwork Archive

Sanjay has been looking for more and more places around the house for us to put up Asher's growing body of artistic work. There really aren't that many paintings yet but I'm already forgetting which ones he did when and Sanjay can't bear to throw any of Asher's paintings away (yet). So on Friday I decided to put into practice a tip I read in a parent hacks post some time ago. We don't have a scanner to "digitize" his artwork, but I took photos of all the work I could lay my hands on. I'm planning on uploading the pictures too (particularly until we get around to doing back-ups of the photos on our hard-drive!). I think I might use my lesser-used Picasa rather than Flickr because I'm uploading for archiving/backup purposes rather than to show off to the overseas relatives!

As for the paintings themselves, I'll keep a current one that I like up and put the others away to use for wrapping gifts. I hope my family are all prepared to get their gift-vouchers or other little presents wrapped in giant toddler artwork!

In other news, Asher and I finally found one of the tiny caterpillars that was eating our basil:

He was fascinated, for a very short while, and we've had to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar quite a lot recently.

Art Jam Roundup

  Well, as I think you can see by the photos art day was a success! We didn't need the carpet cleaner that Sanjay insisted I find, there isn't paint all over our fence and I think everyone had fun. We don't own kiddie easels (or adult ones for that matter) so we moved all the pot plants into a corner and made our small back courtyard into a little arts and crafts area. We tied large pieces of cardboard to the brush-box fence, one for each child and pegged or clipped pieces of paper for them to paint on. Megan and I made finger-paint and Karen brought palettes; Sanjay made a 'table' from a milk crate (with a bag of potting mix for stability) and a piece of chipboard he found in the garbage room which Audrey seemed to enjoy painting. My wonderful mother brought a roll of paper from Reverse Garbage and each kid did two or three paintings.

Asher had a bit of a go at painting but found the texture of the paint on his hands quite difficult, so when the brushes were a bit painty he had to keep washing his hands. Then he was wandering around with wet hands saying 'wash' with a worried look on his face until I worked out that he actually wanted them dried as well. I'll hook up a towel next to the hand washing tub next time we do it.

Now that we have set it up and know how easy it is I'm going to be painting a bit more at home. I think getting Asher more comfortable with different textures would be really good for him, and I'd love a bit more of his art on our walls. A big shout out to Megan, Karen, Clare and Franni for helping out and making the day so much fun.

Inspiration afternoon

I don't really do anything traditionally crafty at home with Asher yet, but he's been pretty interested in paining and glue-ing and such at playgroup recently, so we decided to have an painting afternoon (or 'art jam' as a particularly hip friend calls such events) over here tomorrow. After buying some Tempera powder paint on Friday I have been busily looking for finger-paint recipes today and came across some really good kids crafty resources that I thought I might share. There are lot's of finger-paint and playdough recipes about (I've used the playdough recipe and it works a treat. Dissolve the salt first so you don't get a grainy texture) and there are lots of different lists of ideas out there, but good ones are not always that easy to find. One of my old favourites is the very lovely Kids Craft Weekly which sends ideas direct to my inbox and is geared toward little kids. the photos on the site are great and the ideas are often really simple and good - I recommend anyone who has little kids around subscribes for ideas. There is another site that I came across whose approach I really like. . It's called 'A Magical Childhood' and so far I've only been looking at the craft ideas (there is a link in the navbar that says 'poetry' which terrifies me so much I can't click on it yet) and as the author says, there are heaps of guides for projects that achieve cute results, but little kids would prefer to focus on the process rather than the result and they get bored easily. Her ideas seem to be geared toward what she calls 'laziness' and what I prefer to think of as letting your kid give his or her creativity free reign. She talks about lying in the bath and letting your kid use watercolour paint on pieces of paper you have taped up around the bathtub. It sounds awkward to me personally, but it sounds like fun for fans of the bathtub. You will see what I mean if you look at any of her craft ideas with the word 'lazy' in the title.

The other web resource I rediscovered was the Raising Children website which reminded me that despite my recent frustration with Asher's tantrums and general toddlerness I'm doing ok at managing it. It also reminded me of the reasons these little people have hissy fits and some of the more positive ways of dealing with the difficult behaviour.

I couldn't have found/rediscovered any of this stuff without Sanjay spending a LOT of time with Asher today (and all weekend actually!). I think it's really good for the whole family for them to spend big chunks of time one-on-one - it improves their relationship, Sanj has more of an idea of how I spend my days and I get a bit of mental space. Thanks Sanjay!

I'll try and blog about tomorrow's Art Jam, perhaps I'll even include pictures!

No content was harmed in the making of this post.

We've had stomach bugs and several blackouts here over the last few days, so no posting (and even without those things Asher practices his burgeoning tantrum skills if I dare sit at the computer these days) so this is a content-free post. Instead of actually saying anything I'm going to suggest you check out the pics of Asher on Flickr and then head over to the OMSI playground (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) and make some flubber to play with as a much more tactile way to waste time than reading blogs (This link brought to you by Lifehacker).

so..... tired.....

Ok, so I've decided that I'm not that keen on this Sanjay-less existance! I've been managing ok, but today I'm just exhausted and vague (I went out today and forgot to wear shoes!) so I'll keep this short.

Today, being Thursday we had baby club and V very kindly offered up her lovely home and a stack of canvasses for 'art-jam' for the babies. There was some limited finger painting, plenty of foot prints and a fair amount of mess but it was all terrific fun. I hope Sanjay doesn't read this because it will be giving away what his birthday present is - I think I'm pretty safe!

Ok, it's 9pm and I'm going to creep off to bed pretty soon - I'm really ready for Sanjay to come home now!