Painted Tiles 4 years on...

As part of my laundry renovations I decided to paint the tiles above the sink blue. At the time, I was very concerned about how it would look and Googled photos of painted tiles unsuccessfully.

I hope these photos will help anyone considering painting. This photo was taken today, 4 years after the paint job. I simply cleaned the tiles and used White King tile primer/base coat and tile paint.

I'm still happy with the result so much so that I'll be painting some ugly boarder tiles in one of the bathrooms at our new house.

546 days of sewing a "500 Days of Summer" denim skirt

How often have you fallen in love with a piece of clothing only to realise it was too late for you to have it? As someone who loves vintage clothes, ALL the time.

There are a few dresses in the movie, 500 Days of Summer I fell in love with including the baby blue dress worn by Zooey to the wedding.

But for my attempt to replicate something I thought i'd aim a little lower and make a denim skirt similar to the Built by Wendy skirt worn in the movie.

Day 7: After ruining my eyes searching for a pattern for the skirt I finally find one at a vintage pattern store on Esty.

Day 20: The pattern arrives in the post.

Day 20-25: I read instructions on pattern envelope including the amount of fabric required. It reads like an IQ puzzle. I think I have it figured out.

Day 26: I purchase soft denim fabric (thick fabric is just too difficult to sew and could break the needle of my little sewing machine). I check with the shopkeeper that my reading of the fabric requirements chart is correct but she just looks me up and down and says thats enough.

Day 27-50: Decipher pattern instructions. No definitely, not plain English but what the hey, you just gotta jump in and try to learn. 

Step 51: I cut out the pieces from the pattern relating to the skirt I cut inside of the size 8 line having determined (see photo below) that the size 8 would be too large (vintage sizes tend to run huge).

As there are various styles with each pattern not piece is needed. Also pros like my mum don't cut the patterns themselves but chalk an outline. I decide to cut cause 1) its easier and 2) there is no point saving the pattern to use again if I can't finish this skirt the first time around.

length options

Day 52 - 257: pattern sits patiently as I enjoy the spring and ready made fashion.

Day 258: Pin pattern on fabric making sure the skirt is laid diagonally to the weave for a better drape. 

Day 260: Cut fabric

my cut pieces with pattern still pinned on

Day 280: Purchase iron-on stiff backing for waist band and false pocket flaps. Learn its called interfacing!

Day 285: Iron stiff backing on the pocket flaps and waist band. Trim interfacing.

Day 300: I overlock every pieces on mum's overlocker.

Day 350: Pin and sew skirt pieces together.

I try the unhemed skirt on and its still too big. I undo my work.

Day 353: I re-sew the skirt. This time it fits. I will never sew without measuring it against another skirt that fits me again.

Day 386: I sew the waist band after measuring it against my waist and cutting it to my waist plus a little extra for overlapping the button.

Day 391: I measure the waist band against the skirt. I sew the waist band to the skirt.

Day 402: Purchase zipper and button.

Day 403: Sew Zipper. Try to work out how to create a button hole. I need to download a program?

Day 515: Measure and cut button hole. Hand stitch the edges of the button hole. Its too big. I  stitch it smaller.

Day 538: Sew the pocket flaps. Attach the pocket flaps with pins. Deermine that they don't sit right. Scrap the flaps.

Day 546: Measure length and take up skirt.

Vola!

Anyone can sew. Just take your time (preferably not 18 months but hey, slow and steady wins the race) and take manageable mini steps.

"You belong to me…NOT"

Am I the only one who hates assertions of ownership used as expressions of love?

My husband recently did it with our daughter. He told her during his play time with her, "You belong to me." She in her three year old wisdom didn't feel right about it and responded, "Not."

In law, we speak of ownership only in terms of chattels and real property. No such concept exists in terms of people and with good reason. However, in private relationships we often express endearment in terms of ownership. When we do this, is it because we are trying to express a deeply held connection to the person and have no better words for it or is it because we feel we have have certain rights over them?

What Mr Renaisanc and I have over Dot is guardianship not ownership. "You are my daughter and you're special to me" is what he should have said.

Our kids are just passing through and our job is to equip them with the best possible skills to be good and happy citizens. Yes, at three she has to listen to us but not because we own her. I'm not sure how Daddy is going to handle Dot's inevitable push away from us if he feels some sort of ownership over her. Psychologists believe that the closer a child is to a parent the harder they push away and this push is an inevitable part of growing up and forming their own identity. I imagine to a parent who feels ownership over their child the push away would be just or perhaps more jarring.

Why do these assertions bother me so much? Isn't it romantic when the handsome leading man finally overcomes all obstacles and takes the beautiful-yet-relatable female lead in his arms and whispers in her ear, "You are mine. You belong to me," before kissing her passionately?

Maybe to some but it could be better. Apart from the fact that statement is just wrong in reality, the guy is expressing feelings of ownership which just reminds me of the mistreatment of women. At its most subtle, its what the boyfriend, who thinks he has the right to check his girlfriend's phone without her permission, unconsciously feels and its most confronting, its what the human trafficker thinks.

Those assertions don't seem quite so romantic anymore, does it? "You are special to me. We belong together," sounds better and doesn't contribute to normalising the view of human ownership on any level.

Resolution: stop yelling!!!!

Obviously, I'm a yeller.

Until recently, I didn't think there was anything wrong with it. I thought it was normal to yell and had never entertained the idea that I needed to change. In the house I grew up, we frequently yelled; we yelled when we argued; we yelled when we were excited;  just to stress a point in a happy conversation; in family debates about religion, politics and who shot Mr Burns - just to get a word in. Neighbours may have heard us yelling to each other about what time we were leaving for the restaurant instead of walking to each other to have a normal volumed conversation. Half of us had hearing difficulties - whether the cause or the effect, I can't say.

Maybe because yelling hasn't always been a negative thing for me I've never given it much thought, that is, until now. Now that I have one spirited three year old, a opponent with so much less power than myself (not to mention the rapid move towards high densely housing) that what I thought of as just my un-demure tom girl nature I now see as a bad habit I must change quickly.


If you were at my house today, you would have covered your ears to:

"Don't cover baby's face with a blanket!" "Don't lie to me!" "Respond to me when I talk to you! Don't just stare at me when i ask you if you want to get out of the tub! I asked you nicely three times. Do I have to yell before I get a response?"

I think the answer is yes if I make it so. I don't want my little Dot to think that only when I yell is what I'm saying important or for her to have to break a habit to properly parent her little ones or for her to be considered loud and unladylike.

So I'm writing this post to resolve to the world I'm going to quit yelling.

When I told my friends about my yelling woes and started reading the forums I was so surprised to learn that there were households where no one ever yelled. I don't think I've quite gotten over the shock cause I'm writing about it here. How do these folks manage their anger?

Anyway here's the plan:

1. Not withdraw from 'patience bank' for the following things -

            - House renovation work (limit to Wednesdays only)
            - Dirty dishes and clean house (except Fridays and Saturdays cause we have open house)
            - Resentment for skipped meals, unbrushed teeth cause you think you don't have time
            - Requests when exhausted (say no and stay firm against whinging)

2. Increase my patience bank:

            - Find time to get a hair cut when needed
            - Have monthly facials

3. If Dot isn't listening I'll put my hand on her shoulder and wait for eye contact so I don't need to yell.

4. Stop being physically lazy and physically assist instead of barking orders like a mad woman.

Well, we shall see how I go.

When he told me I wasn't actually sick I wanted to throw up on his shirt...

My experience with hypermesis garvidariam

My first pregnancy was unplanned and, in fact, until I held my little girl in my arms and gazed into her eyes I didn’t know I loved children. Kids had never been a part of my life plan and perhaps that is a part of the reason why what I experienced during my first pregnancy was such a shock to me. I held a naive understanding of pregnancy - I thought pregnancy was a joyous time, that I would eat a lot, glow and morning sickness meant throwing up a few times but still being able to work...I never would have guessed that being pregnant would mean that I would’t be able to shower myself let alone leave the house for months. 

A week after conception, week 4 of my pregnancy, my husband and I had dinner at the restaurant where we got married. We were happy, we just had a beautiful meal and I generally felt that my life was going gloriously. A few hours after we got home i started feeling nauseous and shortly began vomiting violently. It was nothing I had ever experienced, I felt like there was a clamp around my stomach while i was being shaken by the head.  The nausea I felt was as bad as the day I was stuck on a little boat for 9 hours after Cyclone Abigail had just passed through Darwin and I get sea sick from catching a ferry ride across the harbor (there is a link between HG and motion sickness).

I was so nauseated I couldn’t sleep or be comfortable no matter how I moved, not even after I threw up did I get any reprieve. I thought my favourite three hatted restaurant had given me food poisoning and the GP treated it as such but test after test they found no bugs. The nausea never left me and from that night onwards for the next 8 months it haunted me to varying degrees 24/7.

It was two weeks after that night that I began to suspect that I was pregnant and two pregnancy tests confirmed this. By this time I had already lost 12.5% of my body weight and was now an emaciated 42 kgs. Quite apart from a pregnancy glow, I would lie in bed when i wasn’t throwing up or spitting into the my bedside bucket, my dull eyes stare out from a pale face, my hair unwashed matted. I only spoke when necessary because speaking made me puke. So did moving, sudden noises and smells many of which I used to enjoy. The cracked and bleeding lips would follow shortly and I would wear them like I used to wear lip gloss for the rest of my pregnancy.

I was pretty much bed ridden most of my first trimester. I felt like I had run a marathon the moment I woke up. Its hard to describe the exhaustion but I would stay still in bed even when I sorely needed to urinate because it took so much effort and mental gathering of energy to make it the two meters to the en-suite. I recall lying alone most days while my husband was at work, staring at the balustrade outside our bedroom door and fantasizing about jumping off it with a rope around my neck. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just felt doomed, the doctors I saw prescribed maxolon but the pill only made me more nauseated. I accepted (i know now wrongly) that there was nothing else that could be done and I would just have to deal with it. I didn’t think I could endure more weeks of the relentless suffering after what had already seemed an eternity. It was the thought that I had to do the right thing by my baby and everyone else I loved that kept me from actually fulfilling my fantasies. 

Until my third trimester, I was unable to eat properly or look after myself properly. I had tongue ulcers, onycolysis (nail lifting) and I would later need two fillings in what my dentist had always described as a perfect mouth for toothpaste ads.

I felt that my original perception of myself of not being a mother was correct. My body just was’t built for it. This was natures way of punishing me for daring to venture down a road I didn’t deserve to go.  

Every few minutes I would take a break from my dark thoughts to empty my mouth of frothing saliva into the trusty blue bucket I kept beside my bed. I had pytalism which often accompanies HG. I couldn’t swallow my own saliva - doing so would set me off vomiting. And I made so much more of it than normal. If I dared yawn it would squirt out like a water pistol. I was surprised at how much saliva I could produce considering how dark my urine was. To keep hydrated I sipped water often and sucked on electrolyte popsicles. I know I’m lucky I could do this as there are many HG sufferers who cannot keep down water no matter in what form (ice, with diluted juice). This I think is what kept me out of hospital. 

My HG slowly transformed into what might be normal morning sickness. Sometime starting in my second trimester I would only get nauseated every afternoon and evening, dry retch frequently but would throw up only occasionally and not more than twice in any one day on no medication. I was still miserable and some days were harder than others but I could function. 

My experience with HG makes my other pregnancy symptoms almost feel not worth mentioning, like the grazed elbow you got with the broken leg but some of these were also rare like HG and others while common and just annoying when coupled without everything else just made pregnancy that much more crappy. So I’ll mention the rest of them to paint a complete picture of what my first pregnancy and hopefully, people will stop advising someone they hardly know to enjoy their pregnancy. I heard it a lot and each time it hurt.

• a constant metallic taste in my mouth 
• rhinitis of pregnancy - nasel congestion
• pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy (PUPPP) or polymorphic eruption of pregnancy - itchy rash all over belly
• reflux
• Insomnia
• Incontinence
• joint pain
• restless leg
• leg cramps
• gas pain
• taunt tummy skin
• baby kicks can sometimes be painful and sometimes made me vomit

I’m writing this blog while pregnant for a second time. I had to think really long and hard about whether I could endure pregnancy again but I guess I just really really love kiddies and in times of happiness, which this last year has been, I have a tendency to be over optimistic. I thought maybe I wouldn’t get so sick again. I was wrong and ended up tearing the lining of my esophagus from vomiting so violently but my symptoms have started to ease much earlier this time around and I think this is because I treated it early, had more medical support, prepared myself with extra weight pre-pregnancy and haven’t pushed myself as hard as in my first pregnancy.

Nonetheless, this will be my last pregnancy. I would like more kids but I know I really just can’t go through HG again. Nor can I put my family through it one more time. 

Right now I’m just counting down the days till I get my little reward.

The problem with incompetence

The problem with incompetence is that we are so often blind to our own. After all, we can only judge how good we are at something from what current knowledge we have. Sometimes we are just so ignorant that we aren't even aware of the silent ocean of relevant stuff we don't know.

I'm not just talking about work. Although, how often have you come across a superior who seems to have very little idea what was going on? Our blindness to our own incompetence applies equally to our daily lives, the husband who calls his wife lazy because she just stays home all day looking after the house and their young kids. Not ever having done her job, he is completely incompetent to make that statement.

Oh how our blindness to our incompetence plagues our lives! Its as though life is a series of episodes where we go from blindness to realising how blind we are and then were as we learn. I recall, after getting my bachelor degrees and getting my first 'real' job, thinking that I was finally now on par with all the older adults in my family who were always so eager to dish out advice. At a family gathering after being reminded to keep check of my over-zealous sense of justice at work, I declared to my aunts and uncles that there was no longer anything I could learn from them. LOL

It was only after giving birth to my darling girl that I realised how much more they knew than me. Sure, they may not subscribe to New Scientist Magazine or have a PhD in philosophy but I couldn't write off wisdoms accumulated from just life. So I guess you could say I was a late bloomer in that regards - too focused on making decisions in my life in a very pragmatic way.  

Having my baby, opened my eyes to a whole other side of being human which I never considered. For the first time I understood some of the things my mum did which used to seem illogical to me.

But there is a plus side to our blindness, each time we realise our incompetence, we gain a little bit more humility and a little bit more empathy.

I currently think I'm travelling pretty wisely...but time will prove me wrong.

My go at carpentry: wall shelves