Surprise! I'm a single parent


how to show you know everything
October 14, 2008, 10:58 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

It’s taken me a few years to figure out how i could reclaim my previous potision but now I’ve done it. Wheel of Fortune! I’m just sharing in case YOU were displaced by the teacher years ago and haven’t found a way to be credited as intelligent since.



The under rated meal
October 9, 2008, 3:04 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

You’ve got to love breakfast. For some reason it feels OK to have the same thing for breakfast 4 or 5 or 6 or even 7 days in a row. Three days for any other meal and you know you are a slacker or have an eating disorder. It’s not seen as detrimental to the mental health of your loved ones if you leave them to forage for their own cereal and every eats at a different time and has a different thing. As long as they have breakfast you get a big tick as a Mum.

Breakfast is so great that I often start feeling like breakfast just as I’m slipping off to sleep.

Breakfast doesn’t have a lingering smell like dinner can and if it can be detected its lovely and toasty or bacony and half an hour later if you encounter it you have fond feelings instead of wishing you had an extractor fan.

Breakfast is fast food BUT its not bad fast food like McDs or fish and chips. Breakfast however is chock full of acceptable sugar which gives you a nice high to start the day.

If you don’t quite manage to get breakfast at home you can dip into your emmergency supply of muesli at work and use their milk too – and people just think you are diligent wanting to get started on your emails instead of lounging around at home in your jarmies.

Breakfast has interesting TV with snippets of actual news alongside constant reminders of the time and the weather for people who can’t focus on their watches or draw their curtains.

Normal eating protocols don’t count in the morning. Its acceptable to eat breakfast on your lap, on the run, in the bathroom, at the sink and to undertake other things while you eat it. Every agrees its great to have breakfast in bed!

When I make pancakes its much less effort than most dinners but for some reason everyone feels like its a treat and thanks me for doing it. Even better if I buy a new brand of sugary cereal and place it to be found on the counter the breakfasters are as excited as if its xmas morning and they’ve found goodies uner a tree. But I get the credit!



rubber necking sarah palin
October 8, 2008, 2:29 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

I find myself fascinated by Sarah Palin.  Beauty queen, mother of five, soon to be granny, governor of the other country of alaska, republican vice presidetial candidate. As close as any woman has been to the white house. Who wouldn’t slow down and look?

I have a  sinking Shipley feeling and I can’t look away.

Ive been thinking lately that politicians are the wrapping paper of elections. They are a product as much as the policies of their party. What sparked this was the revelation that a Canadian politician had given a speech which bore a great similarity to an Australian politicians speech. Google inadvertantly highlighted some lazy speech writing and a speech writer in Canada has subsequently resigned from their job. But…. how come we accept that politicians don’t write thier own words?

So ‘presidential debates’ are the spontaneous displays of what they might really be like. Maybe. How much can you know of a person beyond the packaging and the random finds of them on teh internet. I wonder if Sarah blogs?

If I accept that politicians are primarily (in their campaigns at any rate) orators of party rhetoric that is styled as their own words then we shouldn’t be too critical of their private lives – lives that we can never understand anyway. Ive seen a you tube clip of Sarah being blessed away from witch craft – probably something she shares with Elizabeth the first.

I can’t help contrasting Palin with Helen Clark. Not a beauty queen or a mum, a life time politician. Pilloried for not wearing the right clothesand not being pretty for the first few years. Heres a beauty queen and she’s sneered at for that. different sides of the political fence and different countries. I guess almost nobody un teh US knows there is an election on down in New Zealand. I only just clued there is one in Canada.

At the begining of the election cycle I was feeling really sick of politics. I think it was partly the obama/clinton thing. And partly the steady demoition of politicians by nationaland act over the apst few years. I said I was going to switch off the tv till after the election. But since we’ve been plunged into a global fiscal crisis its got a lot more interesting.  The Chinese say it is a curse to live in interesting times. Surely for politicians at election time it is a blessing – or for their speech writers at least.



Mum literature – a new genre
October 6, 2008, 1:10 am
Filed under: whatever

Did you ever see the movie Fargo?  Great movie on lots of levels. A super cool thing about it is the protagonist – a female cop in a snowscaped rural america – is very very pregnant as she investigates a murder or two. This got me thinking (oh i dunno maybe it didn’t but i know at some stage i got to thinking) and the think I was mulling over was how protagonists (the main characters in books) are usually single and no kids. 

An unfettered hero is great for a writer. No need to stop the plot while they go to work,  find a baby sitter, cook the family dinner, wait on the phone to sign up for next terms swimming, or hold out till pay day before they can afford to travel to the next point in their journey. In fact part of the happy ever after is often settling down to a life where ‘adventure’. 

Anyone who has been reading this blog knows I’m living in post happy ever after. 

Well it’s often ocured to me we need more stories like fargo – in fact farther along than fargo. Stories of Mums having lives as well as kids would be cool. I’ve thought of writing them mysef but I’m so fricking busy being a Mum and working and the occasional blog. But then I was reading up on my new weird fascination: Sarah Palin and I came across reference to ‘Mom lit’. Wow really? 

Of course then i was dissapointed. It turns out Mom lit is the spawn of chick lit and the apple isn’t rotting far from the tree. Boo. I am always a person to judge a book by it’s cover and chick lit is just too pink and kooky Mary Quant looking. (Hmm what would Sarah Palin think?) 

But here’s the thing – in the instant when i thought I knew what Mom lit was (the sort of Mom lit I wanted to write) I was all excited but I was also thinking to myself why wasn’t I writing that and now I’ve discovered there is a job still out there to do! Much more interesting than vacuuming.