How to give a 2 year old a haircut.....

1. Get out your instruments of tortue..ahh i mean haircutting.














2. Make sure the child is sitting down.
3. Take 'before' photo:














4. Try again for a better pic. One that is in focus and your child doesn't looked stoned:

5. Give up trying to get a good picture.
6. Spray water on hair and comb.
7. Try and cut hair while 2 year old is moving his head back and forth at random intervals.
8. Figure this is enough hair cut for the moment:

9. Wait a few minutes until your child is distracted by eating rice bubbles to try again.
10. Realise that your child is smarter then you thought because he can eat and protest against getting his hair cut at the same time:


11. Decide that little boys look much cuter with long, shaggy hair.

I, I, what to do with I....

I've been given the letter 'I' from MOF Lei. Thanks!

1. Ice creams - just got the Home Ice Cream brochure on friday. Yummo! Is there anything better then home delivered ice cream....by the boxful!! Unfortunately he only goes past my house once a fortnight, so i have to wait another 2 weeks...but that will give me plenty of time to make up my mind about what i want. And yes, its is almost winter and i'm still eating ice cream.

2. Icicle - going with the winter theme. Take a look at this cool pic i took last year on our trip to the snow:

Thats the side of a motel. I thought it was cool.

3. iPod - i don't have a' real' iPod like as in one from Apple but my dh got me a SanDisk MP3 player for Mothers Day. I love it! It plays music and audio books and has a radio. YAY! So when i join the gym at the end of the year i will have something to listen too as i stride it out on the treadmill.

4. Icky - Changing pooey nappies. Why, oh why aren't kids toilets trained when they are born??!!!

5. Imagination - we are just starting to see our sons imagination taking off. And its so cute and sweet! Though the fact that he thinks he's a dog is a bit odd.

6. Ideal - my ideal day would be one of relaxation and pampering. Its a nice dream!

7. Immaculate - what my house isn't. I love display homes because i love a house that is neat and tidy with no crap hanging around. My aim in life is to one day have an immaculate home. It will probably be when i am old and have no kids at home.

8. International - i hope one day to be able to travel overseas. Dh and I are planning a trip to New Zealand....when i say planning its more like 'yeah, for our next holiday we should go there'.

9. Ingest - what i've eaten today: 2 pieces of toast with vegemite, 2 cups of ovaltine and about 4 Milk arrowroot biscuits. You can all sleep well tonight know that. ;)

10. Idiot - how i felt on Sunday when i was corrected in how i spelt the name of the church on the newsletter(didn't put the hyphen in Latter-day) the shame!

No you haven't wandered onto some strange blog. I am just making some changes because i get bored easily and i was sick of my old colour...to be honest it was making my eyes hurt. lol. So i'm going with something less confronting, just like me :)

Blogging will continue as normal.....when i think of something useful to say ;)

Exciting news!

I had my ultrasound yesterday and we are having a BOY! Not sure of names yet. That's a whole other post! lol

I'm bored so here goes....

Two for togetherness tag

2 things you compliment your husband on while in his presence.
1. His nose, he has the most perfectly shaped nose i have ever seen!
2. HIs hands are pretty perfect too.

2 compliments you make about your spouse to your friends about your spouse.
1. pass....how bad am I?????
2.

2 traits you married him/her for.
1. He can make me feel special
2. He loved me

2 Days you cherished the most with your husband being together.
1. Our wedding day
2. The birth of our son

2 Material things you could give your husband if you just inherited a fortune.
1. Whatever camera he wants the most
2. A trip to NZ....of course i would benefit from that too ;)

2 things you would miss the most if he left for two weeks.
1. Him sleeping next to me
2. His help with our son...i'd probably be mental by the end of the 2 weeks

2 thoughts that crossed your mind when you first met/saw your spouse.
1. Thank goodness he's better looking then i thought he was going to be
2. His teeth are crooked

2 favorite dates
1. Our first date
2. Our second date...we didn't really date after that.

2 funny odd things you love.(ok i'm changing this slightly....because i don't love any odd things he does!!!)
1. He never wipes his back after he gets out of the shower so when he puts his clothes on they get wet!!!! It annoys me!
2. Cleans his ears in public

2 two places you have lived with your spouse.

1. Toowoomba, Australia
2. We've only lived in the one place so far.

2 favorite vacations

1. Canberra Trip
2. All of our little road trips....our 10 hour drive was a good one!!

And i thought i had it bad.....

Today i wanted to relate my birth story to you, of my son Ethan. Don't worry there is a point to this post other then that ;)

When i was pregnant with him i looked forward to labour. Other then the fact that i wanted my body back and by the time i was 7 mths pregnant i was sick of being pregnant, I was interested in how i would handle it. Other woman can tell you about birth and the pain etc but until you actually experience it you don't really get it. And i don't care how many books you read, nothing will prepare you for giving birth for the first time.
My sister had relatively easy births of her first 2 babies - short labours(5 and 3 hours) and since she is half the size of me i figured with my 'child bearing hips' maybe i would have a similar experience. She was pregnant at the same time as me with baby #3 but had to have a c/s and her dd was born 6 wks before Ethan. Fun times!

My first indication that something was going to happen was on the 8th of February 2004, when i was 38wks 3ds. I started having contractions at church and had them for 4 hours before they disappeared. I was pretty disappointed but at my next checkup my dr assured me that that was a good sign that i might go soon. On the 13th i had more contractions that continued through the night but they didn't hurt as much as the ones previously. On the 14th(39wks2ds) i had a 'show' but my contractions stopped. I had my usual checkup on Monday the 16th and was really really hoping i wouldn't have to see him again the next week. We did some shopping and lots of walking around that day and while we were out i started feeling very heavy and sore 'down there', probably the most uncomfortable i had ever been. At 10.30 pm that night the contractions started again but i was able to go to sleep because they weren't hurting, just there. At 1.30am i woke up to contractions that weren't going away. I started timing them for the next 2 hours and they were becoming more regular. My dh finally woke up and we started timing them together. By 4am they were coming every 5 minutes and we called the hospital and the midwife said to come in when i felt ready too. We drove up at about 5am when my contractions were 2 1/2 minutes apart. I was 4cm when we got there and by 10.30am i was 6cm. We decided to break my waters to see if that would hurry things up a little. It did....but only in the pain department!
My contractions were now 2 minutes apart and i was screaming so much i'm sure they would have heard me in China. Somewhere around 12.30 i got an epidural...ahhhh blessed relief! It was sometime between now and when i got to 10cm(i can't quite remember) that they discovered that Ethan was not in the right postion. He was on the wrong side and well...yeah he wasn't about to come out anytime soon without some help. I was started on a drip of sytonison to make my contractions as strong as possible in the hope that he would turn. He didn't. I pushed and pushed. He moved down but he didn't change his overall position. So they called in a Dr and he assessed me, gave me an ultrasound and decided that if there was no improvement in like the next hour he would have to be delivered by ventouse. Fine with me! So the Dr went off and did a c/s and came back to find me and the baby in the exact same postion. In the next minutes there were like a million people in the room all ready for the delivery. Ethan was finally delivered with a lot of struggle at 6.33pm after 17 hours of labour. He was 9lbs by the way.
Because he had to go in the special care nursery, was on oxygen for a few hours and i was downright stuffed, i didn't get to hold him or feed him til the next day.

So my first experience with birth was tough and i was thinking i had a pretty hard time with it all...that was until i found a book called "Eve - Sex, Childbirth and Motherhood Through the Ages" by Petrina Brown. I just got this book out of the library on Monday so i haven't read it all. But i am in utter astonishment at what went on back in the days before medicine. Of course i knew that these poor woman had to go without pain relief but holy cow some of the stuff talked about in the book is downright horrible. It's a wonder anyone survived childbirth at all.

The book starts off in the time BC and i'm currently reading about the Middle Ages. A straight forward birth was hard enough and was always feared but one with complications you can pretty well be assured that either you, your baby or both wouldn't survive. If a baby was stuck they would try physical violence to the mother such as throwing her around the room or hanging her upsidedown to try and move the baby. Sometimes the dr would resort to dismembering the baby to get it out. In one story a babys arm was cut off and then the dr swaddled it tightly(as they did in those days) with the arm in the proper position so noone would know what happened.

What i found funny though was some of the popular pain relievers in the days BC. Here's just a sample:

A drink sprinkled with powdered sow's dung
Drinking goose semen with water or liquids that flow from a weasel's uterus through its genitals.
Placing the placenta of a dogs on the thighs
A vultures feather under the womans feet
Earthworms in raisin wine.

And to relieve the new mothers sore breasts:

Drink mouse dung diluted with rainwater and ass's milk
Rub breasts with sow's blood, goose grease, rose oil and a spiders web
Lay earthwooms dipped in honey wine on the breast to draw out pus

Makes you appreciate the time in which we live doesn't it?? I would probably be dead if i was born back then.

There are many weird, yucky and downright scary things in this book. Not just about birth but about how woman were treated and thought of while they were menstrating, pregnant and after the birth.
I highly recommend you read it!!

Shall i compare thee to a ...dining room table?


I want you to look at these two pictures.
What do you see? To the untrained eye it might look like a very messy dining table and a woman. Yes, you would be right. That dining table is mine and that woman is my mother. What do they have in common? Well i'll tell you.

That table was once nice and new. I got it second hand off my sister, she got it second hand off who knows who. After moving it from her place to mine the base got a little chipped. After i got married I moved 1200kms to my new dhs place. On the way we had a car accident. If you can't tell from the photo, its a glass top table. When we packed up our trailer to move our stuff we cushioned it between my ensemble bed. After our accident, other then making sure we were both ok our first thought was for the table. Not a scratch on it! My poor violets weren't so lucky, they ended up upside down on the floor in the back of the car....they survived though until much later when they died a natural death of not being watered by me. Anyhow getting back to the dining table.....its a hell of a thing to move. Not only is the base heavy but the top is very heavy and you have to roll it or you just can't carry it without hurting your back. So its been moved 3 move times since we've been married and always up stairs and always with care to not smash it. The top has held up very well but the base is a bit knocked up. But unless your looking closely at it you can't really tell.
It looks pretty ordinary sitting there in my kitchen. But it needs a lot of maintence. Since its glass it shows every little mark including the grubby little finger type. So i clean it with a glass cleaner to make it look nice.
Its also very handy. Not only do we eat off it, but if you look closely you will see various items on it. There are some toy trains - so it's also a train track. There are camera lenses - it also serves as a work bench for my dh when he's taking apart his lenses to fix. There's also a fruit bowl on there - for quick snacks. It also serves as my bench for preparing food etc. Its also a place where i can stretch out material when i'm making clothes. So many uses for a common old dining table. I'm sure you probably do the same sort of thing with yours.

Now I want you to think about my mother and your mother. She was once nice and new too. Well she's still nice but she was young and fresh once. Over the years she's recieved a few knocks. She's moved around the country and overseas to live. I'm sure her 'base' is a little knocked up and chipped from accidents and just from the riggors of life. She doesn't always look like she's just been polished...as we all don't..especially first thing in the morning right? But after a little bit of care and effort she looks brand new.
She might look like just any woman, but thats not all she is. Like my dining table she has many purposes. She's also a mum - providing love, kindness, a shoulder to cry on, food and endless hours of devotion to her family. She's also a friend and someone to talk to when noone else will listen. She's also a wife - sharing her life and love with her dh for eternity. She's also a daughter of God - a wonderful person with great spiritual gifts that are hers and noone elses.
I admire my mum so much. She has been through so much in her life, more so then my poor old dining table and she has come out of it all ok.

She gives me hope that if she can get through life like she has, then i can too.

Finding Happiness

Considering my largly depressing previous post i thought it would help me if i post for a while..well every now and then... about what brings me happiness. I know logically that if we just truck along that we can better our lives eventually, it wont be like this forever. And i also know that if i focus on the good and what happiness is in my life that it will make it easier to bare..bear??grrrrr. Last night as i got into bed and prepared to read my scriptures i was reminded that the Bishop challenged us to read Alma this month. So i flipped to Alma and started. Chapter 1. Have you read Alma lately? Of course you have, you read the whole BoM last year right??? ;) The chapter is mainly talking about a man called Nehor and how he was trying to introduce priestcraft into the Church. He was preaching that the church should support him and he was the type of person to wear costly apparel and was prideful. He also murdered Gideon, a righteous man.

But this is the verses that stood out to me : 27-28.

"And they did impart of their substance, every man according to that which he had, to the poor, and the needy, and the sick, and the afflicted; and they did not wear costly apparel, yet they were neat and comely.
And thus they did establish the affairs of the church; and thus they began to have continual peace again, notwithstanding all their persecutions"

That kinda smacked me in the face. Continual peace from just being good people and not being worldly. Not peace from bad things happening but peace in their hearts. How nice :)

So today i have 2 things that have brought me happiness and made me smile.

1. Rubber fish:

I bought these for my dh when we were dating. He had 2 fish die so i bought him some rubber ones to replace them ;) You can actually fill them with water and then squeeze them and the water squirts out. They are now bath toys for Ethan. He loves them! So last night we were having a bath together and i had the job of squirting water in his mouth with a fish. He was in fits of laughter because i'm not a very good shot and i kept getting it up his nose. lol Its even harder to squirt 2 fish as once!


2. I Spy book:

We got this recently and Ethan loves it. We read it everynight before bed. Our usual routine is that i ask him where things are and he points them out. eg. 'wheres the horse?' he does the horse noise and points it out. But last night he wanted to hug all the animals. So i'd say 'wheres the horse?' and he would hug the book with a huge smile on his face. We did this the whole way through. He's just so damn cute!

Do you ever feel like you've totally ruined your life? Like if you had just made a different choice where a decision was concerned that your life would be better? I have been thinking about this lately. I have been trying to figure out where i fit in this thing called life. Some people breeze through life with no apparent struggles or hard decisions to make and i am jealous of that. But do they really have no struggles? I doubt it. I guess people cope with their problems differently. A lot differently then i do. I tend to want to tell people, to somehow make them see how hard things are for me. Crying for help or sympathy? Maybe. But sometimes i don't want people to see how hard i struggle with life in general. I never want my family to know if i'm upset or depressed or wanting to walk out on my life and never come back. But i have no problem telling complete strangers or MOFs. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they don't have to see me everyday and i don't have to pretend to have it all together. I can be myself. With those who see me everyday and are related to me i want to appear normal and content so they won't think i'm a freak who struggles to keep the house clean and look after one child.

I'm a very jealous person. I never used to be. Not at all. And i really want to stop being who i've become. But how? How do i change the fact that every time i see that someone has something better then me i get envious. Not just saying 'oh how lucky, i wish i had that' But i get very depressed and almost obsessed about how my life is wrong, how it should be different. If i had done such and such i could have what they have. If i didn't have kids we would be better off. I'm not always talking about material things here. Its everything. Skills, looks and possessions. I'm seriously a screwed up person. But like i said - i never used to be this way at all. It's only since i got married. 3 years of wishing things were different. 3 years of hating my life. 3 years of regretting. 3 years of struggling to keep my mind on things that are important. And i've failed.

Yesterday i thought about leaving the private board i belong to because seeing peoples lives makes me sad and depressed. Lives that include new cars and new houses and more put together women(spiritually, emotionally and financially) then i could ever be. I had anxiety about it. I haven't had anxiety since November last year. I know alot of them read my blog and i want to apologise now. I'm sorry i'm so pathetic. You are great women and deserve everything you have.

I guess my biggest problem is learning how to fix it. How to fix myself. I'm not even sure of where to start. How do i start to love my life and get rid of my regrets and envy. I was thinking last night that if i lived in the middle of nowhere i would be fine. No contact with the outside world. Nothing to envy, no way of seeing what others have. Only relying on ourselves. Building up my skill of survival - i could finally be good at something.
But thats not really practical or realistic. I have to live in this world like everyone else.

So how can i be content with what i have? How can i make myself like being a sahm? How can i make myself enjoy my family? How can i save my sanity?
Lots of rhetorical questions. I have no answers.

I'm feeling a little covet-y(i know that's not a real word but work with me ok) So i thought i should do a list of 20 things i'm grateful for . I rarely do this so it's long overdue.

I am grateful for:

1. My dh who loves me no matter what
2. My ds who smiles when he sees me
3. A place to live
4. A regular income
5. A heater, its very small but it works at least ;)
6. Beautiful warm days and chilly nights
7. Autumn leaves
8. Track pants
9. My uggies - holes and all
10. My morning sickness is going away at last
11. Chocolate mud cake...is there anything better?
12. Good friends
13. Finally feeling the baby kick! twice just tonight when i was having dinner....it likes pizza apparently ;)
14. Repentance
15. My Heavenly Father is kind and loving and knows how i need to learn things
16. Eternal families
17. Having a Temple just 2 hours away
18. My family, who are my best friends
19. Our DVD player to keep Ethan entertained when i need to do housework
20. The internet. I would not be able to blog without it ;)

Happy Birthday to my Sweetheart!

It's my husbands birthday today! So this is a post to celebrate that. So here's his life story in a nutshell - he was born, he met me and lived happily ever after!! Sweeeeet. ;)

Ok, seriously now. Though i'll leave out the dirty details ;).

He was born on the 5th of May 1972 in Dalby, Queensland, Australia. He was a smart little cookie and when he was 6 he had a teacher do a study on him. In high school he thought he was even smarter ;) I find this comment from a Year 9 report card highly amusing:

"Graham seems to feel that because he is achieving highly he has the right to talk whenever he likes and disrupt the rest of the class"

LOL!

He graduated Dalby High in 1989 and then went off to the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba in 1990. He studied a Degree in Information Technology and graduated after 4 years. He worked in a few jobs, living out in Dalby then back here in Toowoomba. He was also married from 1997 -1999 and engaged in 2001 but we won't mention anymore about those unpleasant episodes :P.
We met in 2002 and the rest is history and i've already wrote about it.

So today my husband is 34. Wow. This morning he realised that he was almost half of 70! LOL Well if you look at like that of course its going to be depressing.
I tease him alot about his age, since i'm still in my 20's i'm allowed, right ;) But in all honesty i don't think he's old and i don't think he looks old. Sure he has a lot of grey hair but so do i!

So sweetheart, embrace your grey! Embrace your cane! Embrance your false teeth!

I'll still love you!!!

One husband...*cough*...pair of shoes 4 sale.


They say that woman are hard to figure out. Of course 'they' are probably men who have no desire to find out what woman are all about and just dismiss it as some strange phenomena that noone will ever get to the bottom of, kinda like Nessie and Bigfoot.
But you know what? I am here to say today that woman are not so complex as men. Yes, you heard me. I think most women will agree that if you have a question about something that we as woman do, if you just ask we can explain it to you, in easy to understand words. You won't even need a dictionary, i swear!
Now men on the other hand are different. After 3 years of marriage i am finding this out little by little....ok and maybe a big bit right at the start when i had some culture shock. There is nothing that can help me understand the reasoning behind how men think. Seriously, it boggles the brain to think about it.
If your wondering why i'm writing such a post, let me tell you. It stems of course from my wonderful, beloved husband(i have to write that because he reads my blog ;)) and the fact that i can't figure out how his brain works.

He has a pair of shoes. Jandles we call them, not sure why....but they are essentially what was commonly called Reef Sandles back in the days when they came out. They are the kind you can wear at the beach because they can go in water and sand and you can just hose them off or whatever to clean them. Very practical and cool to wear in summer. Now i generally would not have a problem with my Dh wearing shoes like this, except for one thing. The smell. On a scale of 1 -10, 10 being reserved for something like a rotting human body(not that i've smelt that, but i'm sure its pretty bad), these shoes get a 9.5. I have never smelled anything like it in my life.

Now here comes the fun bit.

My dh doesn't think its bad. Half the time he can't even smell it! So he's walking through the house with this smell eminating from him and he's oblivious. How can this be?? My complex female brain doesn't understand. What is even harder to understand is that he gags at the smell of a pooey nappy.
Even with my very sensitive pregnant nose, a nappy is nothing compared to these. Even at my most sickest with morning sickness, i could still change nappies. Of course i had to. Dh couldn't because they make him too sick. But get these shoes in the house and i'm feeling sick and Dh? Well you would think he had roses strapped to his feet.
Of course once i complain, he takes them off and then washes his feet but i can still smell it....everywhere. Its like a gas leak. It gets in everything. Only some heavy duty Glen 20 and washing the sheets gets the smell away. Washing the sheets? you may ask. Yes, once he wore them while lying on the bed! I can't remember exactly what i said to make him take them off but i'm sure if i find him doing that again i'm going to blow my stack.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

So, can you see why i think men are more complex? They can be around horrible smells, they can even make horrible smells and delight in it. But get them near a stinky baby and its like you've asked them to cut off their left arm and hit themselves over the head with it.


* Note: I wouldn't really sell my husband....unless you paid me heaps.