blog stress

the trouble with blogging is that is causes me stress... where to start...what to write... i feel if i start I wont stop and still be here this afternoon with nothing else acomplished..maybe some discipline in my thinking process is required? Browsing the world of knitters blogs has led me to develop an inferiority complex. There are some incredibly talented people out there! Not only can they knit like goddesses but they can take a mean pic and then know how to photoshop it and can write an interesting blog and raise a herd of mini goddesses and gods and cook like Nigella! My mind boggles and if i wasnt 8 months pregnant and it wasnt only 1 in the afternoon and have to drive B1 to a sleepover, Id definitely go down into the cellar and open a bottle of wine!
Maybe i should lower my expectation of my creative pursuits and start where it all began.

Im not sure why such a humble object should cause me to feel such inner peace (maybe the no brainer factor) but it rekindled my desire to pick up the needles and have another go, hence the baby hat im in the middle of. I have dropped a stitch in some strange fashion at the end of a row and cant figure out how to get it back! I really should have paid attention more to my mothers knitting instructions coz there's a waaaay big difference between the humble dishcloth and the brooklyntweed! A trip to my mothers is on the cards. LOL

Managed to drag ourselves out last night to see the Northern Lights. It really was stunning to see the old buildings on Nth Terrace lit so beautifully and to see soo many people out enjoying the spectacle.


But lugging a possibe 10lb baby around at 9pm really challenges the back. B2 was a tad over 10lb and this is a boybean so odds are JUMBO BEAN...but i have reduced my carb intake considerably this time around and am not indulging in kilos of Maggie Beer pate . either, so my weight gain this time around has been minimal. in fact, i think i have lost 'my' weight as my rings are spinning.




Here's one last one. The colours and designs were fantastic, quite breathtaking, with designs and colours on each building changing every minute or so.

decision of diarising

well, I am now into my 36th week of pregnancy and end of my first week at home on leave..
PhD has been happily put to the back of my mind after finally handing over a full copy of my draft to my principal supervisor and I have given myself permission to not do anything on it until after the baby is born. The peace of mind after 8 years of work on this huge project has been immense and I feel that a substantial amount of time away from it will be theraputic. My husband has noticed how much more relaxed I am . Well, a good nights sleep after finally buying a foam mattress this week to replace my side of the futon has helped too! I swore blind after my second child to NEVER EVER go through another pregnancy on a futon ever again. So.. second marrriage.. I ended up marrying a futon maker! LOL

Baby bean has been very active this last week and the contractions are firming up and making themselves known and I have had a few 'ahhah' moments where memories of my last labour flash back and I feel that labour is imminent. I cant believe baby no.3 will be here in a few weeks, it feels quite surreal. I have been mooching about the house this week with the odd trip out, i am finding i cant do too much anymore and am just running out of steam after not doing very much at all. Its quite dissappointing and I feel useless with so many things i want to get done before this baby arrives but i feel soooo flat. I did manage to organise and fully autumn clean my chosen birthing space this morning-oh the achievements in the later stage of pregnancy!

Beans 1 & 2 go to QLD to visit their dad in a week and i am hoping they dont miss the birth of their baby brother, but I just have to let go and accept whatever happens. Oh yeah, must go clean the birth pool today as it is covered in fine pine pollen from being used outside as a hot weather soaking pool (heaven)during the 2 week heat wave we had a couple of weekends ago; 16 days of +35. New record for Oz. But now the cold has arrived and we even put a fire on last night- quite a change from the week before when my dear partner was wiping me down with cold cloths to fend of the temp! But the cooler weather and fire and cozy home means the knitting has come out again and this hat i am making for new bean may be finished in time.

I came across this interesting post" today after searching around for some blogging info. it pretty much sums up the thoughts about blogging that were swimming around in my head in bed at half four yesterday morning and deconstructing my desires for creating a blog...



We are all off to visit the Adelaide Festivals' Northern lights tonight and i will take some pics and see how I go at loading them up onto this site. B2 is VERY excited about going at last- she has been waiting eagerly all week and tonights dinner out will be the last one we do together as the 4 of us before we become 5.

Tomorrow I plan to take some shots of DPs latest project-known around the house as 'The Studio', that he is building for us all in the top part of the garden. The main house gets almost no Nth facing winter sunshine despite having a mainly European deciduous garden as we are located at the bottom of a small valley so he is building a multipurpose room for us all to use, particularly in the winter months. Being higher than the house it will get the winter sun and hence we are using the roof of the new studio to locate a full suite of PV solar cells which will provide us with a little more than half all our energy needs, the rest we will still have to pay for but at the least , we buy our electricity from a wind provider.

my first blog

I must confess to being rather shallow.... I decided to create this blog just because i really love the type setting and colours that this template offers , it's just so easy on the eye and it does something to my heart when i view it. Weird huh? Every time I came across this blog in my googled search for a cool but manageable knitting pattern or yum recipe, i was drawn to it instantly and had to read it.

My interest in blogging began when procrastinating over preparing my final edit for my PhD dissertation during my 7th month of pregnancy and working from home...how thrilling to be swept away in the sheer ordinariness of someone elses life . Hours would pass at my pc and i would find myself panicking and hitting the ' word count' button in my word document to see just how little I had achieved. But now i am on maternity leave for 9 months and can guiltlessly ( is that a word?) cruise interesting blogs to my hearts content until this beanboy is born.

But now, a new dilemma, what makes for an interesting blog?
First person or third?
Great pics or regular shots?
Rambling musings or structured sentences...
Stream of consciousness writing is easy but does anyone really care?
Food for further thought.

about

Im Kelly,a 21 year old girl living life in the body of 38 year old woman. When i started this blog i was 8 months pregnant with baby no. 3 , on maternity leave and decided to blog primarily as i was dying of boredom but couldnt go out and do all the interesting things i usually do. This No.3 bean was rather large and made doing anything that involved moving more than my fingertips rather unappealling. Also, im a bit of an anally retentive order lovin' freak and i like the idea of being able to blab on about whats on my mind and have it look good at the same time. Im an epidemiologist (when im not on leave) at a well known research institute where Im currently also trying to finish my PhD ( year 5 and counting), which has the rather droll title of 'Performance of a prediction model to triage access to priority public dental care in South Australia', Angelina Jolie eat ya heart out! What was i thinking when i moved over from the social sciences?? So if prediction models are your thing, drop me a line, i need some motivation.

Prior to being an epidemiologist i was a nanny, a cleaner, a research assistant, a tutor, a waitress, a data entry mole and human guinea pig. Ive lived and studied overseas and travelled to all corners of the globe and I still love an airport. My other career research work has involved more exciting subjects than teeth and involved the foreign sex trade in australia and tobacco control. Although having said that, teeth can be quite interesting if you know where to look! ( i think that might make me a nerd). I had my first daughter (B1) at 24 while all my friends were off exploring the world and partying hard so to stop myself going nuts I went back to university to do a Masters degree in Public Health (what was i thinking at 6 weeks post partum!?). This changed my life course and led me to space the Im in now. Somewhere along the way a had another daughter (B2) and started a PhD. Nuts.

I share my life with a husband, two daughters in addition to new boy bean and 3/4 of a cat- 1 leg removed due to feline occupational accident. i ran over the other cat, accidently. The kids still dont know it was me. In a previous lifetime i was married to a man who is not my current husband but is the father to B1 and 2, lost lots of weight, took up running, kick boxing and weights, took on a mortgage whilst supporting 2 kids on a PhD scholarship and internet dating! In same previous lifetime i also had 2 whippets, great running companions but not a lot a brain power in a whippet, but then you dont need a foot warmer to think... Then I met my man, sold the house and dropped the mortgage, moved into his amazing Japanese inspired house that he built in the hills and we have been traveling the world and creating new things since we met.

Simon is Jaspers' dad and my partner of nearly 5 years and is lifes' eternal optimist and my zen master. Its his second round at life now too, having lost his first wife suddenly to meningitis after 25 years of marriage and a step daughter in an accident 4 years prior. He spent his early adult years cruising the world sailing other peoples' yachts to port and living in Paris supporting himself as a nanny, a busker and an artist. He moved to Australia from California and eventually settled in Adelaide where he built our amazing, inspiring and eclectic house and garden. He constantly challenges me and I love him to bits. He's a very generous and open soul who can pull some very funny faces. He is now a full time activist and volunteer, having retired at 38 to devote himself to the environmental cause and is about to become a full time dad. The bastard. Having waxed lyrical for years about gendered roles, having to go back to work next year and leave him home with the boy will put my politics to the test (and my trust!!). We're a family of crunchy feminists from 2 lines of hippies who try and live simply with sustainable principles and life is pretty cruisy around here. Cruisy but not mindless...

We have some pretty awesome vegetable patches, a creek with an island, lots of bonsai, solar power, a 'recycled' biological house, (called Pandragon) half a boat ( Simon is yet to finish the other half), a cellar full of homemade fruit and vegetable wine; even beetroot, a forest of blackwood, a shrine in the dining room with a gravel garden, a hole somewhere in the roof, lots of fun and a grand plan to sail around the world in five years (NOT in the boat simon is building) taking the girls and boybean on a 3 year family building, life enhancing adventure.

This blog is about all that.