Indigo Essences

I know a woman, Anne Callaghan, who runs a sort of homoeopathic practice dealing in essences for children - kind of like flower essences, but with all sorts of different components, not just flowers.



I took my non-sleeping children there, my daughter's remedy wasn't really working for her, or at least her reactions were being a bit strong for us all to handle.



Anne is lovely - my suspicious four year old warmed to her immediately, even asking to go with her when she went out to the shed to get a bottle! Anne took my case when I was younger, memorably just before I officially started going out with my now husband! And she gave me wonderful support and help when I got pregnant at a difficult time. She has always been a lovely, warm, intuitive person, and she's now devoting that energy to children. The scientists among you won't like this treatment - the children pick their remedies, and feel how much of each they need in their bottle - Anne dowses with a pendulum to see what the babies need - my 6 month old son sat with his eyes shining, smiling, his gaze fixed on Anne alertly while she asked him what he needed, and her pendulum swung! I'm all for this, but I'm very open to the emotional side of alternative medicine. It feels very right to me. I'll report back on whether or not the essences take effect.

It's worth visiting the site to read about the essences, some of it's very emotional if you need them - for instance how 'invisible friend' was created for an orphan hedgehog! - and Anne's writing on children and what they needed is very moving and inspirational.

The first thing she asked my daughter to do was draw a picture of her family - I asked my husband to do this once, I've a great book on Art Therapy - and he drew everyone in front of his house, everyone but his father had hands...

The first thing I could see, after my daughter explained it, and Anne said 'what a happy family', was that she is outside the unit of my husband and I and the baby. Surprisingly, I am the taller adult, my arms protect everyone but her, she stands beside me. Anne pointed out that this isn't so good for me - the mother being everything to everyone, and that I need to so whatever I can to nurture myself. Well, I can't argue with that - though it seems to be just the way it is. I'd be happier if my husband was up there with me, shoulder to shoulder, or holding hands. But he isn't. But my daughter left on the outside breaks my heart.

It's so hard to get having another sibling right, it's so hard! She makes herself SO DIFFICULT to include, to help, she just anticipates exclusion and sets herself up for it time and again. The frustration of that is enormous, seeing her being miserable, but being helplessness she digs a deeper and deeper hole.

I just hope that by the time she's a teenager she's got it all out of her system. Otherwise the atomic meltdown may signal the end of the world!!

Curses!

My son has just eaten a whole pot of Heinz organic fruit, while he has pretty much rejected all my home-pureed options. The little fiend.

I hope it's just that I need to puree more finely, rather than a comment on my cooking already.

Big ups for Weeshie

Check out my cousins re-committment to blogging on aweebee - see links, I'm too tired to link it right now - she'll make you cry with her first post and wish you lived in SanDiego in the other!

In response -my daughter asked to go to the playground yesterday - we haven't brought her much this winter. So I realised I should, and it was sunny, and I did a deal to get her to go to the supermarket.

The playground she seems to like best is our local community one - it had a good spinny basket slide,but that got burnt by vandals, so they also took down the platform wiht the suspended wire you can slide on, don't know what it's called.

The playground bit is fenced in but is always full of broken bottles and various knacker-drinking nasties. There were twelve year olds with cans one day, scuzzy pre-teens pouring cheap cola on the slide another.The play tiles are peeling up, bits of the play things go missing, it's so scummy. I don't know why she likes it so much but she does!

And her twenty minutes there in hte freezing cold, before it filled up with mad little boys in their dark grey tracksuit uniforms, fresh out of school and giddy with pent up aggression and energy, made her so happy and grateful, I also felt awful for not bringing her more often.

no comment

Sorry, everyone (anyone?), it's just been brought to my attention that my comments were turned off, I've no idea how that happened, bit spooky!

I thought no-one was reading - I love your comments, and value them all! Please comment if you feel like it!

I was thinking about this the other day - on forninepounds I was really sad only one person commented on my fairy godmother post - I thought it would get lots. Comments feel like grades - I'm like Lisa in the Simpsons when school is out, and she's making perpetual motion machines and demanding of Marge - 'Grade me, grade me, evaluate me, I'm good good good and oh so smart!'. And Marge groans and writes A+ on a piece of paper and holds it up and Lisa sighs in relief. I so identify with that!

mommy bloggers

Good article sent by my cousin, who I've inspired to continue blogging, but I suspect she'd be happy if nobody actually read it - she's not compulsively divulgent, like me - she's - dare I say it - reserved!

plogging, and on writing

I love blogging. I blog in my head all the time, it's become how I approach the world, mentally. I love reducing experience to columns, reporting, then mixing in prior experience with anecdotes and a philosophical view point that encompasses it all.

Or talking about products, people, music I've found. Or venting spleen. Or perhaps writing things and leaving them on draft forever, because much as I need to write them, I know people don't want to read them.

I read the other day that this sort of blogging about blogging is frowned upon in the blogging community (for there is such a thing!) as self indulgent. Well, fair enough - but I haven't been doing it that long, and I need to make these observations.

Anyway, I'm just updating my links, I also write for forninepounds, a group blog, and more recently I hijacked the blog from my husband's band's myspace, which is getting lots of hits and will hopefully start getting feedback. It's going to be a strange balance, writing about other people while keeping it personal enough to make it interesting. At least that's what I see happening. It's pretty band focused, but you might like the music. We do.

I fancy myself as a good writer, or I used to. But I just don't seem to be able to pull it all together. And I do seem to have forsaken style in favour of the overly self-focused blurt. Messaging a friend Steve from college who is good at everything, or comparing my Barbie post with metrodad's princess post, well, it just humbles me.

Still, I got a piece of erotica published (which I will not be sharing with you) and I love it, love it. Personally, I think it's one of the best things in the anthology, and the lovely editor sent me feedback from someone else who agreed. Don't you love people who pass on compliments? So I will keep plodding/blogging on regardless.

Three wishes

I often agonise over what I would do if my granted me three wishes. Or god forbid, one wish.

I suppose it's like the Lotto ad - would you buy and pimp a mansion and Ferrarri, or would you start up a charity?

There are lots of things I want for myself personally. They've changed to a certain extent over the years - I remember being four or so and wishing on the wishbone fora bag of sweets that never emptied - very Enid Blyton. That was a great one as my Aunt Jinny visited and left a bag of Cadbury's (I can't remember what they were - chocolate box sweets, but they came in a bag?) on the table, which seemed pretty magical at the time.



Later my mother brought me and my brother to a child psychologist, I 'm not sure quite why at that particular point, just to make sure she and my father weren't fucking us up to badly, ha ha. He asked me what my three wishes would be and I said I wanted to be able to talk to animals, which he seemed to deem quite healthy, and surmised that my problems were all belonging to my parents, not me. I'd say that's true of most children, tbh. And my own analysis of that wish is that I was a lonely kid who didn't trust or get what she needed from people, and therefore longed to be able to communicate with more loving, kinder creatures.

Now, what would I wish for most? I'd love to have the physical appearance I want - I wouldn't change anything fundamental, no supermodel-transformation, but I'd like to magically become the best I could be - instant weight loss, pertness, shiny, cavity-free teeth, good eyesight, strong fingernails, muscles, shapely ankles, my former blondiness etc.

I'd like to be rid of my self destructive habits. I'd like to win the lottery.

Would I alter the way my wedding went, keep my mother alive and well, re-experience my son's birth so it went the way I wanted it to? I'd like some good luck.

But how could I wish for any of that? When I could wish that we had developed an environmentally friendly industrialisation and technology from the get-go. That people did not have the need to do hurt, so there would be no violence and war, no child abuse, no animal abuse. I could wish for an end to world hunger or poverty or debilitating disease. And come up with a solution to overpopulation too, obviously. I could unwrite history, change racial memory - no genocides, no world war.

I know, I know - if my mother hadn't died when she did, my daughter probably wouldn't have been born, and would be a different person. Any of those historical changes and the world today would be completely different - I might not exist to know about it, and would that be a bad thing? I'm sure there are clauses built into the granting of three wishes - like not being able to ask for three more wishes. A fairy-ombudsman, as Neil Delamere put it. But that's not the point.

What would you wish for? Could your desire for personal gain override your social conscience and empathy?


Check out the fairy godmother art sites if you like it! Not sure what the best way to credit the pics is...

new shoooze!

I had me a little afternoon off on Wednesday. Took the baby to meet some other babies in Bridgewater shopping centre in Arklow. It's quiet, the parking was free, it's small but gave up some nice shopping and window shopping experiences. It's no Dundrum, nom but it's a calmer experience.



We had tasty Eddie Rocket's (though they did burn my burger a bit, what's up with that!) and then hit the shops. I was encumbered only by my sweet mannered son, so it was nice to watch the other mothers deal with their high maintenance two year old girls, and know I'm not alone. Our three baby boys were all angels...



In TK Maxx, I found - Hush Puppies! In the style I'd previously been looking at, down from an original €80 to €45. Whee! So now I have me the grown up lady pretty shoes I've been yearning for. And they're comfy. And so cute.



Now I have to get back to frantic work, it's due back tomorrow before I pick up some more. Bleh. I'm only online because it's dinner time and my daughter has kicked me out the sitting room because she's developed a nose as sensitive as my own, and won't let me in with my garlicky dinner!

ailments

First the baby got this horrible horrible cold type thing - though in actuality, I think it was much more than that, he just wasn't able to tell me how awful it was. Midweek he went quiet and pale and got a low temperature, which went away fast enough, leaving him with a debilitating runny and blocked nose. His eyes went scarily bloodshot, and he insisted on breathing through his nose to suck his thumb and feed, and seems to have burst a blood vessel, so his nose started bleeding, and he'd wake up with all this scary dark stuff round his nostrils. Not a comforting look.

Then over the weekend, I got what my husband had before Christmas (though I wasn't able to retire to a darkened room for a few days). I've had to slow way down, which is a bit scary, because I wasn't going that fast before... thankfully, my mother in aw as actually come up trumps and done the school runs for me on Monday and Tuesday and taken my daughter off my hands a lot, which has helped so much. I've had an alarming barrage of symptoms, which seem to be going around: hot and cold chills, swollen glands, aching bones, inflamed sinuses and therefore a headache, nausea, stomach cramps, a sore and swollen throat, I can feel my ears being affected by it all. And most horribly, itchy, prickly eyes that have become terribly bloodshot - I won't say they're completely red but I feel like a character out of the League of Gentlemen (not the extraordinary one, the weird comedy one). I took a remedy or two today, having finally been able to get in touch with my homoeopath, and I feel a bit less woozy and weak.

We went to counselling last night, and I actually felt better for getting up and washed and out and about, not that there was much about, but on the way home, we stopped to bring the mil's car up the drive and I drove ours - but I made the mistake of thinking I could climb over the front seats so as not to go out in the cold. Just as himself told me it wouldn't work, my foot slipped, and I crashed my knee onto the stuff holder in between the seats. The pain! I started to faint! A wave of nausea and a steely blue tunnel, and whooshy feelings started, though they stopped when I put my head down. But I felt quite sick with it there for a few minutes. The point of all this is that I took Anica to stop the bruising, and Ledum to stop it swelling up with fluid, and I sat down with my knee on a pillow and a cold pack on it. When I looked at it, I had a 2.5 cm sort of bruise/cut from where I landed on the edge of the compartment, but nothing more. Today it's stiff and sore, but there is a sort of completely flat, see-through scab and NO BRUISING OR SWELLING. Fantastic.

My eyes are still crappy though. And I'm not looking forward to going out in the morning, but I have to do it sometime. I am SO looking forward to the summer, when my daughter will be staying home, and we can all sleep in (well, ok, some chance, but we can all hang around in our jammies if we so please).

the evil of Barbie

www.thealmightyguru.com/.../EvilBarbie.jpg

I was just reading metrodad's blog, and apparently his next post will be in defense of buying his three year old daughter a Cinderella doll for Christmas. Sigh. Late in the year, our daughter just put 'a Barbie' on her school Santa letter, and asked us individually too.

Dilemma!

I think Barbie is fairly evil. I remember the Christmas I was three, saying I wanted a Barbie, and my parents worriedly saying I was maybe too young for one - but it didn't matter, I was actually asking for a Spacehopper, and I'd got confused. (This still happens - I spent the holiday saying Stephen's Green instead of Christmas Eve, and I can't say saxophone without thinking jaccuzzi, and vice versa). Back to Barbie: The thing is, the insidiousness of her. I remember playing with the two dolls my aunt brought me from the States - one was black, the height of exotic. But I clearly remember how beautiful they were. With their supermodel figures and perfect, vacuous faces. They spent their naked (and often tied up!), but I'd wrap them in a square of green satin, secured about the waist with a hairband - instant ball dress.

Right now, my daughter looks a lot more likely to conform to the Barbie figure than I ever did or will -she's looking long legged and athletic, but likely to be curvy too (she's gorgeous! If only she'd smile more!). Me, I was always dumpy and frumpy. Apple shaped and overweight. It has to be that beautiful Barbie reinforced my sense of self loathing brought about by being the shape I was.

My husband and I sheepishly came to the conclusion that we had to get her one - I don't want her to stop believing in Santa at four because he ignores the one direct request she made. The other alternative was to go to Imaginarium in Dun Laoighre - they have lovely dolls, a la Barbie but with a healthier lifestyle, and they look more like children than super-waifs. But then I didn't want my daughter to be the lentil child who has the homemade, eco-ethnic alternative - Momma says this doll promotes a healthier body image...' like Eddie Murphy's bit about his mother making him her version of McDonald's, a giant, greasy home-made burger with green peppers in it, leaking oil onto two slices of wonderbread - that's not McDonald's!

I suppose the compromise is to get her one of the other ones too at some point, and let her draw her own conclusions.

As for me, I was surprised how crappy Barbie is these days. I remember her being quite an expensive, quality toy back in the day - now she's fragile, with limbs and a head that don't match her torso. Cheapo Barbie! She doesn't seem so beautiful anymore.

back to basics - I haven't mentioned this in a little while...

Hathor the Cow Goddess and the Evolution Revolution » Blog Archive » 2008 Resolution #1: Homebirth!

AARRGG!

My mother in law goes away to see here sister each new year, in London. She's never very happy to go, since her grandchildren have been born she's not so into it, she keeps saying she wants to stay home and see them, that she's too old. And yet, she goes every year. This year she booked an open ended ticket, as her sister hasn't been too well, though despite my MIL's terrible fears and predictions, she's fine!

The Juice have a gig in the Sugar Club, a lovely venue, I would have loved to see them there - but it's on the 5th, I asked her if there was any chance she'd be home by then, she vigorously denied she would be, and I said of course, don't worry, I was just checking - just don't come home on the 6th... No, no, she wouldn't be home by then.

I just heard my husband on the phone to her, heard him say 'see you Sunday'. I don't know why I'm surprised - she's coming home on the 6th...

The one consolation I'd had for having to miss the gig was to get a little break from her, she's been driving me nuts recently, and I haven't been making her happy either.

But no, she's back - the husband is working from today through to Saturday, then playing the gig, he will doubtless sleep most of Sunday, then go pick her up at the airport. You can call me mean spirited - I don't care:

ARG!

sugar fest 07/08

You remember I posted some time back about the havoc thrush was wreaking in my life? Well, the struggle is still sadly ongoing, though thankfully much improved. However, I had a bit of a moment of clarity, and realised that the itchy stinging in my armpits I'd had during pregnancy (and just put down to pregnancy sensitivity) was probably some awful manifestation of the same thing - I checked with the wonderful breastfeeding ladies on Rollercoaster to have it confirmed. Whodathunkit? Bleh!

So I finally gave in and used Daktarin in the baby's mouth and on my nipples, got some Citricidal Grapefruit seed extract, resorted to Caneston as well - and committed fully to the dreaded Candida diet.

Which, as I'm vegetarian, means eating pretty much nothing - no sugar, yeast or anything processed. No dairy. Nothing fermented, no wine or vinegar, no mushrooms. Apparently no refined carbs. So for a couple days I really ate three scanty meals a day, lots of eggs. No snacks, as there was nothing to eat. I don't think that sort of severity is good for you, but I have to say, due to the lack of sugar or snacks I'd lost my ridiculous appetite by the second day! No more cravings. I actually forgot to feed my self and my poor daughter lunch one day!

Now as Christmas came on and I was doing the baking, I did give in and let myself eat my own cookies, which I love. And I've gone back on the sugar over the holiday, but I figure now New Year's day is over I have no more excuse to celebrate foodily, so I'm going back to my sugar embargo.

I am aware of how addictive sugar is - I used to crave fast food, McDonald's and Burger King, insanely, until I stopped eating them, and now the smell of the 'restaurant' as I walk by just smells like rancid grease, instead of some desperate elixir. It's scary, isn't it? It was incredibly freeing, on the weeks when I was eating nothing, not to crave crap at all. And, I lost 9 lbs in a fortnight! I've put a pound or two back on over the Xmas as I let myself loose on the cookies and crisps, but hopefully I can keep it going down with a bit of walking and no more sugar - it certainly beats my usual festive half stone I put up!