A POST OF GRATITUDE

Sometimes we forget in what privileged circumstances we live. 

Watching the burning pyre of Grenfell this week made me feel very blessed indeed. We should never hope to narrowly escape these tragedies, or sigh in relief, as in doing so we say it's ok for it to happen to someone else, just not us, or anyone we know. But sometimes when these terrible things happen I am reminded of my blessings. That I am blessed to live in a community where if one house burned down in a freak fire it would likely do so alone, without taking with it the homes of 800 neighbours. That I have a good landlord who makes sure I live in a safe dwelling. That our financial circumstances haven't backed us into the corner that most of the residents of Grenfell must have felt trapped in.

So I thought today I would just count up a few ordinary blessings to share with you all:

1. I am grateful that my husband cleans the kitchen after dinner each night, and that he does a far better job EVERY evening than I have done in years. What a difference it makes to my mental state to walk in and see a clean slate once the children are all tucked up in their beds!! I would have thought the novelty would wear off, but it is always a wonderful gift every night, and every following morning, to walk into a kitchen that is ready to go again.

2. I am grateful for people who don't remind me about things I promised to do, that I have forgotten to do. Or people who pretend to have forgotten themselves! These people at the very least do not exacerbate my embarrassment when I finally remember! 

3. I am grateful for the opportunity, and the ability, to help other people. It's very easy to get caught up in scarcity mentality, and to think we don't have resources or time to do more than we currently do. Sometimes a little creativity is all that is needed to see how to make our time or resources pay us back more than they already do.

4. I am grateful for the health of my children. How much easier days are when they are boisterous, than when they are quietly languishing, and vomiting all over every available surface. It's so easy to forget to be grateful for this, until they get sick again and we realise how much we've taken health for granted.

5. I am grateful for my family's guardian angels. I see the intervention in our family all the time, from a narrow escape, an unexpected windfall, a whisper or an intuition to do something to avert disaster. I have had the opportunity in recent weeks to see what happens when I don't listen to these promptings, and when I do, and to fully appreciate this gift.

6. I am grateful for pleasant surprises; for a text message out of the blue, a compliment from even the very briefest of acquaintances, a gift I had no right to expect, and indeed the gift of unexpectedly meeting another beautiful human being. What a gift it is to find there are plenty of wonderful people on the planet, and we are only just scratching the surface with all the good people in our little corner of the world.

7. I am grateful for healing. Several weeks ago I had an unfortunate incident with a kitchen knife, and to see today how my body has knit itself back together is nothing short of a miracle. To remember past injuries, physical and emotional, and how they have now been repaired should remind us all that very little is ever completely destroyed. And to remember that a small effort on our part might be rewarded far beyond our small expectations. 

HOW THE SUPERMARKET GAVE ME MY LIFE BACK

A couple of weeks ago I received a special offer in my inbox from one of the big supermarket chains: 

Spend $140 each week, for two weeks, and receive 6000 bonus points. Essentially, a $30 reward for spending $280.

Now, before we go anywhere with this I want to say from the get go, that I was already planning to spend this amount, probably more, on groceries within that time period. This didn't require me to spend more money than I was planning to, nor to buy things I wouldn't use. THOSE offers are never worth it.

The challenge of this offer for me was to make two big trips, instead of 13 small trips. I usually try to do one BIG SHOP per fortnight, but always end up ducking to the supermarket for something I've forgotten every second day, if not every day! And I consider myself pretty organised, I meal plan, I write extensive shopping lists, but for some reason I still have to make multiple trips each week. Confession: Sometimes each day. Eek!

Which would be fine... Except when I was forced to make two trips I realised how much TIME (as well as money) I had been SPENDING at the supermarket. And it wasn't just time spent IN the supermarket, when you have to take three small children with you it's time spent getting ready, buckling everyone into the car, and out, and in, and out, organising what order to buckle everyone in and out so no one gets run over, but no one has a meltdown, manoeuvring a trolley that's carrying an extra 35kg, fielding comments about your lifestyle choices, sigh.

Just picking up a few things, even just milk, could really equate to an hour's work all things considered, and we only live around the corner from the supermarket! (see the problem??) Making time for that hour around sleeps, feeds, changes and meals, wondering how every member of the party is going to cope with leaving the home environment, and getting home to find you're still missing a key ingredient for tonight's dinner, is actually ridiculously stressful. Well, it is for ME anyway.

Being incentivised to reduce my trips forced me to get organised in a way that the pain and inconvenience of making multiple trips never had. And when I saw the difference to my peace of mind, it helped motivate me to try to achieve the same in the following week. 

And it didn't hurt that about three weeks later they sent me the same offer asking me to spend $145 for each transaction, forcing me to rise to the challenge again!

So thanks ye supermarket gods for giving me my life back!! What a blessed relief!

PS. If you too receive these offers in your inbox on the regular and always think "hmm, I dunno if I will remember to do that..." ALWAYS ACTIVATE THE OFFER!!! It's annoying to get to the supermarket and realise your phone is at home on the charger and it's too late to turn back and accept the offer, especially if it's one where you're probably going to spend the amount required anyway. Activate the offer as soon as you get it, there's no penalty if you forget to spend the money.

ASK AND YOU SHALL...

I don't know if you are like me in this regard, but after the third sign I have to act. Some thing good might happen and I might try to dismiss it. So if a message is for me, sometimes it really has to be hammered home before I get the hint! Of course I'm a woman, so events that are connected in my brain might seem completely unrelated to someone else!

*** 

I made a pact with myself at the start of the year, one I still break with inexplicable regularity, and that was to ACCEPT HELP. It can be so difficult when we feel we have things under control, to let someone help us. It feels indulgent to let someone carry something for you when you have two perfectly good arms, and we assume if we always say yes when people offer to help us they will eventually stop! But here's the thing; people who offer to help DO actually want to help, or at the very least they DON'T MIND doing the thing they've offered to do. 

You can tell yourself you don't need help, you've no RIGHT to the help they've offered. But if I, as a mother of three small children, turn down a stranger's offer to take my trolley back to the corral (when actually that would be a very helpful thing for them to do, and would help me get on the road faster!) then the NEXT time they see ANOTHER mother struggling they will think "Remember what happened last time?" And if it wasn't a positive or rewarding experience they won't bother to help someone else. By not accepting the offer, you DEPRIVE someone else of help!! Think of that!!

AND if you don't learn to accept help when you DON'T need it, people won't offer when you DO. 

However, what I've witnessed in the last couple of weeks is people actually ASKING for help. And in those moments, which I have just happened to be standing in the right spot to witness, I really saw the beautiful side of what the human animal is capable of. 

When I say "asking for help" I don't mean "Can you hold this for a sec?" type help, I mean actually asking for a favour. Asking for something that was against the normal rules. Asking for something that they had no RIGHT to ask.

Yet in every event the favour was granted.

I think that's because the person being asked was able to see the vulnerability of the person asking. They saw that that person KNEW they had no RIGHT to what they asked for, but they were asking anyway. And though they knew that it was against the rule, they saw that it was within their power to break the rule.

Have you ever asked anyone to break a rule for you? Since having children I seem to do it all the time, most commonly asking "Can we use your toilet?" I hate asking people to make an exception for me, I hate being late to an appointment because of "the children". I get grumpy when people offer to help me, because I assume they're ONLY offering because they think there's going to be a CRISIS if they don't!

But I do NEED help, I am not an island. And I think if you don't ask, you might find yourself surrounded by people who would like to be able to ease your burden, but are too overwhelmed to know where to start. 

So, if you've been putting off asking for something, try it. Ask for what you need and let people love you. Ever so humbly ask someone to break a rule for you. 

MY THIRD BABY - Go the F*** to Sleep

You're a parent of a tiny baby, you're tired... Sorry? Oh alright, exhausted!!! You had no idea how bad it would feel to not sleep a full night for three months straight. Everything is suffering, you haven't got the energy to think about food so your system is running on coffee and sugar, you haven't got the energy to clean properly so your home environment is depressingly grimy, you haven't got the energy to be polite to your spouse...

You want some sleep! You're both tired of the same totalitarian regime of total unpredictability day after day, night after night. There must be something you can DO! There definitely is! Here I'm going to cover the main ways I help support my babies to learn to sleep through the night. This is not a formulaic approach. There is no a+b+c = sleeping baby! There are other books that make that claim, I have used a collection of resources to form an approach that works for me. 


Settle in people, this one is long-winded, and there's gonna be some self-justification.


The first one is that because you can't explain in words to your baby what you want them to do you need to communicate it to them through their senses. In fact, our own environment contains one of the most important cues, darkness. Night time should be dark, and daytime almost dazzlingly bright! Make sure your baby gets plenty of (indirect) sunshine and fresh air during the day, and then keep the nights dark and quiet and cosy. Baby will begin to get the idea because he cannot ignore the signs. Even a sleeping baby is absorbing the light and having the requisite bodily reactions when he is sleeping in the light. Get out and about during the day, make daytime life a hive of activity, so that by contrast night will be incredibly boring and sleep-inducing.

Once again, babies seem to come with an inbuilt fear that every time they're left alone they're in danger of being carried off by ravenous wolves. It's fair enough, I suppose, but it doesn't always make them pleasant to be around. Your job, if I may be so bold, is to show them that they won't. I think to some extent it's about balance. Baby wants to be near you (he's been INSIDE you for most of his life so far!) but he will also eventually have to accept that you have set the conditions for him to be fairly safe while you're out of the room. 

Babies will generally relax once they've had their quota of "in arms" time, so strap them in a baby carrier and take them along with you wherever you go! To a baby your day to day life is something akin to you watching a deeply engaging and exciting film; everything they experience when toted along with you, the smell of dinner cooking on the stove, the sound of siblings fighting, the sight of their father's smiling face, are all educational experiences. He is learning about his environment all from the safety of a high perch, close to Mum or Dad. I have found this to be especially true in the evenings, and that sometimes my baby was content to be worn while I cooked dinner, rather than needing to cluster-feed at this time. As someone who always "crammed" for exams, this also rings true for trying to catch up on in-arms time that bub might feel they missed out on during the day.

Having said all that, it's pretty easy for baby to be overstimulated, particularly by being passed around, having to learn a lot of new faces, voices, smells, and this can make it as difficult for them to sleep as a lack of stimulation. Having a mild hearing disability myself (which also means I don't wake up to my child's every snuffle or squeak all night long!) this is something I really sympathise with. I love a big social gathering but when I get home I find myself excessively worn out, even if I haven't really done anything energetic, simply from the effort of processing all the information with my faulty equipment. Don't let every guest at a party insist on having a hold, and don't expect baby to be the same after a busy day out as he is after a boring day at home. Plan for balance for up days and down days, noisy time and quiet time. When you observe your baby you will see him learning to anticipate playtime or sleep time. You will see that after a busy day out and about one day, he almost demands a quiet day in for the next day. 

Parents always establish some sort of routine for their child that indicates sleep is coming, and our baby learns to rely on these cues. I think we are best to take control of this routine so that we can go through the motions and know we have done all the things our baby associates with sleep. This way when baby is sick, or something is genuinely wrong, we will know because in spite of the usual routine baby is still not settling. If you have no normal, you will be hard-pressed to notice when something is wrong. I believe very strongly in bedtime cues; a story, a song, a process of kissing everyone goodnight, a "primer" that tells baby bedtime is coming. It's just courtesy.

I'm also a big believer in the "comforter" ie. small soft toys that are only used at sleep times. I have had two babies born "late", who are both thumb suckers and "found" their thumbs from a very young age, and one baby born early, not coordinated enough to find his thumb and I swear he was more trouble than the other two to teach to sleep because he had such difficulty comforting himself! I swear by the "comforter" because it gives you some control over how baby puts himself to sleep. You hand tired baby his comforter and he suddenly relaxes, his eyelids droop and off he goes! I start this as soon after birth as possible, though the effect might not take hold for a couple of months the foundation is laid for the association to take place. I carry their comfort object around in my bra for a couple of days (Hilarious when you forget, and leave the house with a bunny poking out of your cleavage. Not that I've ever done that.) so that it carries your comforting "boob smell" and then start putting it in the cot with baby, near his face, when he goes to bed. (Note: not over his face obviously. If you look up "baby comforter" you will see what I mean and why this is not a SIDS risk.)

Singing to your baby the same song every night might help him to know it is time for sleep, but it might also help you to feel calm as you put him down in confident anticipation that he will now drop sweetly off to sleep. Singing forces you to regulate your breathing, which helps drop your heart rate, and baby will read these signals that everything is ok. I really do think that teaching your baby to sleep (heck, teaching anyone anything!) has a lot to do with confidence. You have to believe that they can learn to sleep. If you never expect them to do it, they will know. I believe that babies can learn to sleep through the night by three months with no trauma. I believe this because I have seen it in action. I have deliberately and wilfully ignored my child to sleep, and proceeded to sleep blissfully myself, and I think I have quite a prickly conscience generally speaking.

Some parents are happy to feed or rock their child to sleep, and have that be their child's routine for sleep. (With some babies feeding them to sleep is the only option because they keep falling asleep while you feed them!) I prefer to offer them comfort in the form of a soft toy because this is more sustainable for me in the long run. My almost four year old is still using the same comfort object that he did at six months, I was not willing to continue to breastfeed him to sleep beyond babyhood (I am also not keen to establish links between food and comfort that could set a debilitating lifelong pattern in a child's mind... But that's a whole 'nother post!!) and he quickly grew out of this anyway and then needed to be bounced to sleep. For SOME people it DOES work, and THEY are HAPPY to do this "long term", and THEIR child weans organically when THEY are ready, and it is NEVER a problem for THEM. Bully for them, I am not that patient.

Most importantly of all, you must learn to pause. You must learn not to rush in as soon as baby makes a noise. Give him a minute, or two, or ten. How serious is he about getting your attention do you think? Is he crying flat out, or only in short bursts? Does he sound frantic, or just angry? And even then, can you give it just one minute more? I now have three children, so I simply cannot always drop what I am doing and rush to the bedside of every forlorn whimper baby utters! 

The hardest part is teaching them to self-settle, and yes I will admit there is always some "crying" involved in my experience, but once it's done, it's done. And I feel like once it's done there's a lot less crying in general; baby won't cry because he's tired, he'll just put himself to sleep. There's a lot that babies can't do for themselves, they literally cannot find their own food, or change their own nappies, but they CAN learn to sleep. Even if some people think it's barbaric to insist that they do, they CAN. And, as the wonderful Maria Montessori says, "Never do for the child what he can do for himself." The best advice I can repeat comes from a dear friend who is a mother of seven, who says "put him down when he's tired, making sure he is fed, clean, warm, etc, then go hang the washing on the line." Don't sit there listening to him settle, make and drink a cup of tea, and THEN listen. I make little deals with myself, and my husband, "Lets give it two more minutes" or "If he's still crying at the next ad break I'll go get him." This might make me sound like a monster to some people... But I'm a well-rested monster!

Many of us rush in to resettle, justifying ourselves that we want to get him back to sleep before he is really awake... However in doing this we don't give him a chance to find out for himself that he is fine. The goal (and you must keep the goal in mind) in any "sleep training" process is not just for the child to settle himself at bedtime, it is that once he learns to settle on his own at bedtime he will be able to put himself back to sleep whenever he wakes in the night. All of us sleep in waves of deep and light sleep, however tiny babies (and my husband) tend to jolt themselves awake when they go into light sleep. Helping them learn to put themselves to sleep in the first place is also helping them learn to ride those waves so that when they are tired they can fix the problem without our help! Once they master that initial settle they will stop waking at that dreaded 40 minute mark, or two hour mark, they will just cruise over that wave into the next wave. Once they "get" it, they will only wake when they're hungry or dirty or sick or for whatever genuine reason. When they DON'T "get" it, they are essentially waking up because they're tired!!! ARGH! Have you had the experience of being tired and unable to sleep?? It's infuriating!!

A final thing to consider, with all things baby, is how well do you sleep? Do you (as a lifelong pattern, before the rigors of pregnancy and parenthood set in) find it hard to relax into sleep? Do you wake for no reason? Do you sleep deeply and wake feeling rested? Do you sleep fitfully and wake feeling like crap? Are there things you can do to support or improve your own sleep? Have you resigned yourself to always being a bad sleeper? I ask you to ask yourself these sorts of questions because I really think our children learn our beliefs through what we show them. If they can see that sleep is not a value for us, they will have less priority for it too.

My original reason to finally bite the bullet and DO something about getting my eldest to learn to self-settle (aside from selfishly wanting him to DIY so I could do something else with my life, instead of bouncing on an exercise ball for hours every day) was that I realised that while he was awake he was reacting to stimulus, but he wasn't learning. In order to learn, his brain needed sleep to organise and store what he had been exposed to over the course of the day, AND he needed sleep to have the energy to do it all tomorrow. I saw lots of other babies sleeping through the majority of nights, and not looking like the pale, listless, dejected little lambs I was expecting subject to this torture when I read the anti-crying literature that I took on so readily BEFORE I had the baby. 

The pressure I put on myself to be everything to my child was not sustainable, and I'm not just talking about the prospect of tandem breastfeeding three children under four who all needed to be rocked to sleep every two hours throughout the night... I mean just day to day, face to face, with ONE baby. Getting enough rest allowed me to be a much kinder gentler mother, and closer to the image I had had in mind of me, serenely rocking my child to sleep... Than the truth of needing to rock my child for every sleep and feeling resentful of the baby I had so lovingly prepared for. When he learned to self-settle (at 4.5 months, after four days of sleep-training, and after two weeks he was reliably sleeping through the night, and in fact the first time he slept through the night was in his portacot, not even his familiar comfy bed!) my whole world opened up again. I was excited to see him in the morning! He woke up with a huge grin on his face, and I could see he was grateful (in his own baby way) to finally be empowered to put himself to sleep when he needed to.

Isn't that what this parenthood game is all about?



And for goodness sake, FORGIVE yourself if you get it wrong! If baby doesn't settle after twenty minutes of "just five minutes more" deals, or you decide to relent and go get him only to find he's got himself into some sort of awkward predicament in the cot bars, just untangle him and rest assured he'll never know unless you decide to tell him! Failure is inevitable as a parent, there's always tomorrow to start again. Your child will forgive you, what right have you to hold it against yourself if they won't??

CHICKEN KORMA PIE

This year I made this for the feast of St. Joseph, The Worker - March 19th. Hence the "JMJ"

***

I apologise, sometimes I feel like I'm just thinking out loud on this blog (at best) and other times I worry I'm preaching (worst!) how to live your life according to me... Me, who does NOT have it figured out. Ask anyone who knows me, they know. If they don't... They will soon!

But if I'm gonna preach, I'll always try to preach truth, and the truth is you HAVE to make this. You have to make it just cos I've made the effort of editing the recipe, so you get my version, rather than the flawed original that I made and had to rework to this perfection!

That said, I make this once (maybe twice) a year, it is a bit of an effort! It's worth it, but it's also maintained the status of a feast in our home. I've been making it annually for 8 years now! At a certain point of the year we pour a deep red wine, the leaves begin to fall, there's woodsmoke in the air of an evening, and then my husband turns to me and says "You know what you should make...?" 

I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.



CHICKEN KORMA PIE

3 chicken thighs
1 leek, white part sliced
2 garlic cloves, 1 sliced, 1 crushed
4cm piece ginger, 3cm sliced, 1cm grated
1 bay leaf
50g unsalted butter
2 sheets frozen shortcrust pastry, thawed (I make my own)
1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
1 onion, finely chopped
3 tbs korma (or other mild) curry paste
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 cup (35g) plain flour
150ml coconut cream
150g green beans, halved1 large parsnip, halved length ways, sliced fairly thin
1/2 cup chopped fresh coriander
1 egg, lightly beaten

Place the chicken in a big saucepan with the leeks, sliced garlic, sliced ginger, bay leaves and 1 tsp sea salt flakes. Cover with water and bring to the boil. Cover, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked. Lift chicken onto a plate, reserving stock, and allow to cool.

Line and grease a large springform cake tin. Use the shortcrust pastry to make the pie shell (If I have them on hand I usually sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of breadcrumbs in the bottom as an insurance against a soggy bottom.)

For the filling, strain the stock, discarding the vegetables, and return to the saucepan. Boil rapidly over high heat for 15-20 minutes until reduced by about two-thirds. Set aside.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the onion and cook gently, stirring, until soft but not browned. Add crushed garlic, grated ginger, curry paste, cumin and cayenne pepper and cook for a further 1-2 minutes, stirring, until fragrant. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute, then gradually whisk in stock and coconut cream, then add veg. Increase heat to medium and bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer til veg is just off cooked, stirring regularly.

Chop the meat into small chunks, stir into the sauce with the coriander, and season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a large shallow dish and chill for 20-30 minutes until the mixture has cooled completely.

Spoon mixture into pie case leaving about 1cm at the top. Brush the inside edge of the case with beaten egg and press the sheet of puff pastry in on top, press to seal around the edge and then cut off the excess. I then roll the edge down, with the shortcrust over the puff pastry, and press the pastries together all around with a fork. Decorate top with leaves etc cut from the leftover puff pastry if desired, poke some holes for the steam to escape, then brush with a little of the beaten egg. Chill for 30 minutes - this will keep the pastry from shrinking.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius. Bake for 40-60 minutes until the pastry is crisp and golden and the filling is bubbling hot. Served with steamed greens and a nice crisp beer, one last Summer Ale before the cold sets in!