Oh The Places You'll Go!

After yesterday's post on one of the most awful days I've had in a while, I have been searching all my experience and knowledge of myself and of the world, trying to find where I am going wrong.  Because surely life should not be like this.  And then, thanks to a friend, I found this little gift on youtube - a magical and unique telling of my family's absolute favourite Dr Seuss book "Oh The Places You'll Go".  I do believe I could watch this every morning of the year and still be inspired by it.

It reminds me that life can be great, that amazing things can happen and just as importantly, that we all go through slumps and that, as the great man says "When you're in a slump you're not in for much fun and unslumping yourself is not easily done".  So self -forgiveness is all important and therefore I am turning down the volume on that voice in my head that is telling me I am doing things wrong and I am tuning out, for a while, to a whole heap of voices from the media, the internet and from the fickle world of facebook that purport to provide self-help advice, when in fact self-promotion may better describe their motivation, and I am tuning in to my family, my self, (the one that really does know what is best for me) and letting in a big dose of self-forgiveness for messing up today and an even bigger dose of self-love so I can be more on track to getting things right tomorrow.

Full credit to 'Spirit Tokens of the Ling Qi Jing.  It has never let me down in times of need.

A call to craft from Amber.

Today had just been one of those really crappy days when things go wrong.  I had not slept well last night, laying awake trying to work out why a singing project I had been trying to get going for the local home-schooling community wasn't working out so was already tired and irritable.  We had a paediatric appointment for Marta which we were running a little late for but could still just have snuck in on time if the car hadn't broken down on the way.  So I decided we could walk the rest of the way.  I had the four children with me but I figured that it wasn't that far, I had the pram in the boot for Marta and yes, we really would be late but we might still be able to get in.  But the children had been picking up on my mood of irritation and distraction all morning and were in no mood for this.  Plus Jovanka had worn a pair of shoes which are fine to play in but not good for walking, especially when that walking has to be done quickly.  So her shoes kept slipping off which was making her really cross and she ended up standing in the street crying because it was all just too much.  At that point it all just got too much for me as well.  I turned the pram around announcing that we would be going home.  I am sure that the man walking past with his dog saw the dark storm cloud hanging directly over my head.  We marched back to the car, I was able to at least start it and we crawled home at 10km/h with the children under strict orders to say nothing.  Not my finest hour.

A little later that day I had to tip out a full 2 litre carton of milk because it was off although it was still well within it's use by date, so we had no milk.  That's a big deal at our house because no milk means no cups of tea and that is not good.  The gnocchi I made for dinner disintegrated into mush when I cooked it, for the third time in a row.  I am no gnocchi novice.  I have cooked dozens of batches successfully but for the last few months it has been touch and go.  I don't know if I've lost the touch or if potatoes are just not what they used to be.  Okay, so it's probably me.  Anyway, that left us without dinner so quickly cooked up some pasta to go with the napoli sauce that was supposed to go with the gnocchi.  To add to this, I found that I was noticing every bit of mess as I walked through the house, and there is a considerable amount and I can turn a blind eye to most of it pretty well most days but today was not going to be one of those days.  A book arrived in the mail - a lovely book about organising oneself so that one can be a better and happier parent.  Do you think I could organise any time to sit and read it?   Short answer, No.  Long answer, Nooooooooo.  How can I get organised if I can't even organise some time to sit and read the book that will give me the magic answer?  Okay, I know there will not be a magic answer in this book but I like to pretend that there will be.  It gives me hope for a short time at least.  In the background of this day, imagine a soundtrack of two constantly squabbling boys who could not seem to get along but could not go their own ways, although the suggestion was made to them several times.  Yep.  Crappy day.  And it all came down to my mood which I just did not have the energy to try and turn around into a positive one.

And then (thankfully there was an "and then" otherwise who knows where the day might have ended up)  I read this post by Amber at Mama Moontime and quite suddenly my outlook changed.  Amber is calling for contributions of small hand-crafted gifts to make up an advent calender for her 3 year old niece who was recently diagnosed with leukemia, and for her brother and sister.  Any gifts received in excess of what is required for the advent calender will go to children at the Sydney Children's Hospital. There is more to it than this.  Amber has put a great deal of thought and imagination into the organising of it all so please, if you are interested, have a look at her blog for more details.   I have put my name down and hope that you might also be inspired to do so.  I hope she receives thousands of pledges of little gifts.  She has already given me a great gift today and that is one of perspective.

Yes, lots of things went wrong in my day and yes, we were all in a pretty lousy mood for a lot of the time but do you know what?  My little girl Marta, who has just turned one is starting to walk and today, she took 10 unsteady little steps that got her about a metre across the floor.  That's not much for us but for her it was one metre closer to her Mama which is where she wanted to be.  I had not been paying attention to how big a step that is for her because I had been so caught up in my own head.  Then this afternoon we all went for a walk along the street to a neighbours house where there is an amazing mulberry tree overhanging the front gate, inviting passers-by to feast, and feast we did.  While we were there, another family who live nearby were just pulling into their driveway and wandered down for a chat.  We hadn't seen them for ages.  In fact, they'd not even met Marta  and we had not met their 18 month old son (yes it had been too long) so it was a real treat to stop for a while and catch up on news while my children ran around on the nature strip with her children and we make plans to get together again soon.  It had been such a pleasant few moments but I later put the memory of that pleasure to one side so I could continue to dwell on the negative thoughts in my head.
Reading Amber's post just put my day into perspective.

So thanks Amber for a kick in the pants reminder to think of others and be thankful for what we have.  May your days be blessed.

Another laundry lesson learnt.

If you've read any of my posts before, you might recall a small incident involving my washing machine, a load of washed sheets and a washing machine door that refused to open.  In case you haven't read it, or would like to refresh your memory, or maybe you're just one of those people who finds that reading about the misfortunes of others makes you feel better about your own sorry lot, then you can find that post right here.

In my defence I will say of today's incident, that for the last couple of years I have been recycling the water from my washing machine, via a greywater hose connected to the outlet pipe.  So for a couple of years, I have not had to consider the possibility of an overflowing laundry sink or a flooded laundry floor.  Until today.  This is what I get for cleaning out the fernery.

You see, the greywater hose connects to the washing machine's outlet pipe, passes through the window above the washing machine, travels across the fernery floor and makes its' way out to the garden where it keeps my lawns lush.  Well, that's what usually happens.  Until today.

The fernery, well it used to be a fernery until it got piled up with a whole load of other un-fernery related stuff, had been getting a bit messy.  Well, to be honest, 'a bit messy' is kind of an understatement.  It had gotten so bad that I couldn't walk right through it without having to take very big steps to avoid stepping on something and even then it was chancey.  It had gotten so bad that I was embarrassed to invite people over because they would not be able to avoid seeing my poor, sad fernery that used to be quite lovely, as they came in the back door.

Over time, this un-fernery related stuff that had been stored there by a friend for a few weeks which turned into, oh, about 13 months not that I'm counting, had spread out as boxes were opened in a search for one thing or another and had been added to with more boxes and bags of stuff.  Boxes had split and contents had tumbled out across the concrete floor.  Thinking that surely this friend would soon be taking this stuff away, as it was very clearly becoming a nuisance and really, it had been way more than just a few weeks, and thinking also that this friend should take care of their own stuff and not rely on me to clean up the mess their stuff had created, I left it there in it's state of messy mess-ness.  Time passed.  More time passed.  Yet more time passed.  Hints were given.  Suggestions were openly made. Begging is not my style.  The mess remained.

About a week ago, it became apparent that work needed to be done along the outside west wall of the house. Stay with me.  This is relevant because, to get to the aforementioned outside west wall of the house, one must pass through the fernery.  Yup.  Visions of tradesmen stumbling over these piles, muttering to themselves that they couldn't believe anyone could live like this troubled me terribly.  (If you ever hear me say that I don't care about any one's opinion of me, please know that I am lying).  It was also a fairly real possibility that no self-respecting tradesman would bother stepping through all of that and would instead turn on their tradie booted heels, get back into their tradie ute and be on their tradie way.  If the work was to be done, as it must be, the mess had to be dealt with.

So I spent one of my precious afternoons re-packing and re-stacking boxes and bags, sorting out rubbish that had accumulated throughout all of it and sweeping up piles of accumulated dried leaves that had dropped from the passionfruit vine growing over the fernery.  There was now a clear pathway for the tradesmen, room to park the pram and space for the children to store their bikes out of the rain.  And the piles of un-fernery related stuff looked even tidier than when it had all been dumped there in the first place.  What joy there is in a relatively tidy room / fernery.

This is where we get back to the laundry debacle of the morning.  If you are still there.  Underneath the piles and piles of stuff, the greywater hose had been lying all that time, quietly and conscientiously carrying the washing machine water out to the lawn, never asking for attention, never complaining, even though it now had a split and was leaking water onto the floor.  Being a small split and not a great big flooding split, it had managed to go unnoticed underneath everything.  Now that it was uncovered and found to be leaving a watermark on the concrete floor it seemed wise to disconnect it from the washing machine outlet, leaving the greywater to go into the sink and straight down the pipe.  As I said earlier, "until today".

What happened today?  Today I decided to hand wash some woollen jumpers.  Normally I do this in a big plastic tub that is perfect for just this very job.  But the plastic tub is currently otherwise employed, holding all the paraphernalia that one picks up from the floor of an eight year old boy's bedroom floor.  That is a whole other story which I will not go into now because probably you've got other things to do than just sit here reading my tale of woe.  Suffice it to say that the plastic tub I would normally use was not available for service at that particular point in time.  So I put the plug in the laundry sink, half filled it with water and a dash of wool wash, put the woolly jumpers in, swished them about a bit and left them to soak while I made breakfast for the troops.  If I had thought about it for even half a moment, I would have realised that the water from the load of washing I had put on five minutes earlier would also soon be making it's merry way into the laundry sink and there might be a problem with that.  But no.  I went off to the kitchen, feeling good about having a load of washing in the machine and a tub of soaking woolly jumpers, all done before breakfast.

There are days when I hear the voice of  Forrest Gump's mother in my head saying "Stupid is as stupid does".  Unfortunately the voice does not come into my head until after I've done something stupid!  Otherwise things might go quite differently for me and I might not find a laundry sink that just can't take any more and a laundry floor covered in water.  Worst of all was the fact that my lovingly hand knitted, hand washed woollies were now sitting in an overflowing sink of water that had been through the washing machine and a load of dirty clothes and did not look like the kind of water I wanted to be washing my woollies in.  Pull the plug out frantically, spilling more water onto the floor in the process, not that it matters because a bit more is not going to make much difference at this point.  Retrieve my precious woollies, wash them out in a bucket that is not quite so perfect for this very job, hang them out, hang the rest of the washing out, make myself a stiff cup of tea and spend the rest of the day chiding myself for not having the backbone to tell my friend plain and clear that the stuff in the fernery needs to be gone; for being so completely disorganised that I don't have the right tub for the job even though said tub has been in my son's room keeping heaven knows what off the floor for two weeks and should, by rights, have been where I needed it by this morning and finally, for being too hard on myself and for chiding myself for something that could, kind of, happen to anyone.  Except to those who have a backbone and a plastic tub that is perfect for the job and available at the time of need.  Oh to be one of those people.

What I learned today.

It was a toss up today, whether to join in with the 'this moment' action over at soulemama or to write something more.  I decided that today, I have too much to say, to say nothing, because today I learnt something worth sharing.

In the past when something which should be relatively easy, like undoing a knot or disengaging a couple of pieces of lego has turned out to be annoyingly not easy, I have, more often than not, found that muttering "come on" to myself or, more precisely, to the object in hand, to be very effective.  I have taught David this little trick and I often see him putting it to good use.  Ari, for some reason, does not seem to have need of it.  Things fall into place for him.  He is charmed it would appear.  And Jovanka, as you will soon learn, has her own device.

To give you an idea of the tone required, in case you should wish to employ the "come on", the best I can think of is this.  Think of Lleyton Hewitt, if you follow tennis (which I don't) and the aggression of his now famous yell "COME ON!!!"  Well, that's not it.  In fact I find that this can exacerbate the problem.  In my case, it just makes me more angry.  It's more like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, when she's at the Ascot Race Day and her horse is racing.  It's that quiet, hopeful "come on" that she utters shortly before letting fly at the top of her voice with "Come on Dover!!!  Move yer bloomin' arse!!!!!"

But today, whatever tone I was going to use, it was not going to open the door on my front loading washing machine.  The one that had just finished washing a load of sheets.  You see, the catch has been broken for some time and had been temporarily fixed by a very resourceful friend who knows how to fix just about anything, although never in quite the way you might expect, and certainly never in an orthodox fashion.  His solution was to wind a bit of nylon string around the catch and then through to the front of the door so that pulling the string released the catch.  It was meant to be temporary but it has been working so well that I don't generally think much about it and had not had it properly repaired.  So yesterday Ari thought he would help out by filling the machine with some washing from the basket and, in the process of trying to close the door, pulled the string out, couldn't work out how to fix it and wandered off.  Before I loaded the sheets in this morning, I fixed the string back in place (feeling quite proud of myself for being able to fix the problem relatively easily), closed the door and left the machine to do its job.  When I came back to unload my clean sheets, the door would not budge, no matter if I pulled on that loop of nylon string until it cut into my fingers.  I suppose the saying "Pride comes before a fall" exists for a reason.  Because it's jolly well true.  I did the obvious thing and went to the kitchen for a knife - one of my often-used 'handymama' tools, to see if I could weedle away at the catch from the outside and release it.  Nope and I was getting worried that the blade could snap so I went for a screwdriver but still no luck.  And my very resourceful friend was off being resourceful in a distant town, with his mobile  phone turned off.  (Could it be that he sensed something?)

The man at the electrical repairs shop probably heard the frustration in my voice when I rang to see if they could send someone around to fix the problem.  I wasn't expecting immediate service - some time today would be okay.  But no.  He answered calmly that they couldn't possibly have anyone here before next week sometime - mornings would be preferable.  This man has maybe never smelt a load of wet sheets that has been locked up in a machine for four days.  No sympathy what-so-ever.  I returned to the laundry, wielding the screwdriver menacingly, aware that I should probably step away from the situation and come back when I was a little calmer. Ha!!!!  After several more attempts which, in retrospect may have done more damage to the machine than actually fixing anything, I was getting pretty cross with myself for being so complacent about the 'temporary' fix and was muttering all sorts of things to myself about my own stupidity.  Soon after that I was kneeling in front of the washing machine in tears, giving in to the anger. 

That's when it dawned on me.  When Jovanka, my three year old daughter is feeling really frustrated, she lets out a very vocal,  but thankfully brief, scream of rage.  It seems to work for her.  "Why not?" I thought.  So I let rip.  Loud, brief and venting all the rage I felt at myself and at this 'stupid' washing machine.  In that moment, I pulled on the string and blow me down if the door didn't swing open, freeing my washing from the threat of everlasting stinkification.  I would have laughed victoriously, had my washing not been sitting in a pool of water at the bottom of the machine because it had not drained properly, meaning that I would still have to ask the repairman to come and fix it - probably "next week sometime - preferably mornings".  So I fixed the string again, taking care to do it right this time and to TEST IT before closing the door once again, setting the dial to spin and walking outside to reassure the children that Mama was okay.  They received the explaination for my outburst with good humour and at least attempted to laugh with me as I explained that I had got the idea from Jovanka and that it had worked amazingly well.  Our neighbours may have been a little more concerned.

After all that, I was free to go and prepare our morning tea and sit out in the Spring sunshine, making a daisy chain to adorn Jovanka's wrist.  My thankyou gift to her for a most valuable lesson learnt.