these days

It has been almost a month since I've been at home on my own during the days with these gorgeous boys.* It is difficult because it is motherhood (duh), but is is also difficult because there is no cafe, no library, no playground, no pavement to pound, no neighbours' kids, no mid-week one-hour yoga escape, simply no one else around, except K when he gets home from work.

It has been a month of trying to find my groove. Of trying to rise above the 'haven'ts' (see above) and create a reality for us that is fun and memorable and celebrates our amazing location. Of realising that these are the days! And they are fleeting! It will take more than a month, all of this, of course. Some of it is a daily practice.

The best thing about this new world order has been reconnecting with the big boy. There has been much change for him in the past year, and it shows. There are shining moments where he is pure delight - kind, curious, helpful, funny, loving, playful. But much of the time, he has been moody and cantankerous, master of the epic meltdown. And he saves his very worst for me. So, after a tumultuous first week on our own together, I feel like we are re-establishing our little union. And it has been so lovely, and such a relief, to feel the love again with him. This portrait was his idea: he loves pressing the timer button on our cameras!

And the small boy, well, he just fits in. He needs to be fed often when he is awake, but is the most chilled out little being, who just laughs and gurgles and sleeps. And he sleeps! All the exclamation points in the world cannot emphasise this point enough. I would never have thought it possible after Ellery. I waited two plus years to get some me-time back in my evenings. And after just two months with the little feller, I have my evenings back again. Incredulous!! And well-earned, if I may say so.

Despite my hesitations about daytime flying solo, I'm actually enjoying it. Beyond the bonding stuff, I am quite liking the challenge of trying to get stuff done (and am now known around these parts as Wonder Woman), and reinvigorating our space and our routines.

I am writing this in the early heady days. It may be a different story by October when I'm due back at work. But it's surpassed my expectations. And fluffed out my heart a bit. I call that a win.

*We had an au pair until recently (necessary for my work from our island outpost), who stayed on for the first couple of months after our littlest feller was born.

au pair

I have hovered here a few times lately and not known where to start. I have fallen off the blogging horse. Given in to tiredness, end-of-day-brain-fuzz and the never-ending night-time settling / early rising (which seems to suddenly lift and then... whack-tumble-splat, another wonder week).

I have wanted to write for ages about life with a live-in au pair. Which has worked out a lot better than I could have hoped. I dragged my heels completely on the whole issue, but in the end it was the only way I could have returned to work (and we needed me to for many reasons), which I am doing now part-time via a telecommute arrangement. *I've got a golden ticket!* Yes, I completely realise how lucky I am in the work stakes. I have a hugely supportive boss (and executive director) who I have worked with for several years, who trusts me implicitly and has herself telecommuted way back when her kiddo was younger. Returning to work has also been great for my head, to give me a bit of breathing space. I have also recently managed (for the time being anyway) to hang onto my job when vast sections of the permanently employed public service in this Neanderthal state are marching out the door. I'm just hoping my luck continues.


So the au pair. I had dreaded sharing our space, and all the stuff of family life that inhabits it, and having to be sociable when I want to just be in my cave. But overall it has been really positive, and is sort of like the old travelling/sailing days. We're onto our second au pair already, after our first finished her three-month stint. Though I still do a lot of domestic work and commandeer the boy when I'm not working, the extra hands around the house has been nothing short of bloody fantastic. I think I got lucky with a boy who demands a lot of attention and doesn't like to nap on his own (and some of my own stupid high moral ground about no TV), so every day was a battle to get even just the bare minimum housework done, manage to feed and caffeinate myself AND fully engage with him.

The help with chores is freeing me up a bit and I am mostly managing to get some other stuff done - though I find a lot of this other stuff is all about him! Like keeping him clothed and shod, reading up on kid-stuff (devouring this site), procuring toddler chairs and potties (!) and organising photo prints (we didn't have any beyond his humidicrib days (!!), prepping activities, war-planning our missions off the island and keeping our household administrivia at bay with a big stick. I still need to get back into yoga and walking - these have slid quite a bit since I returned to work in August.

As great as it's mostly been, I have also suffered a bit from the guilts at having help. About having someone else helping with the boy, even though we have tweaked our routine so he spends most of his time with one or both of us. (Though having someone new here has been brilliant for Ellery - he has LOVED both of them and will sometimes choose to go and hang out with them.) And also it is just plain weird (though indulgent and utterly lovely, why do I even have guilt about this?) to have someone else be the dish pig!

Despite the current super-clingy and unsettled wonder 'week' (and a kimchi that is going to take me at least three days, not including fermentation, to prepare - but that's another story) I can sense that things are slowly getting easier. There is still a ridiculously huge amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep us living the life remote - and so much stuff that doesn't get done. But, y'know, it's getting better.

lighthouse days

We moved here in September last year with our small babe,

two weeks after we brought him home from hospital,
and two weeks before he was due to arrive.

He is now super sized and I've written nothing of our windswept Cape,
our lighthouse cottage or our island home.

And there's a framed note, typed by a little girl who lived here in the 1970s with her two sisters and their dog, Fluffy (!!).
Which got me thinking about writing my own notes
about lighthouse life.

I must start with the views - it's either them or the weather.
Our windows could be paintings hanging on the wall,
ever-changing watercolour daubs of ocean, banksia and sky
and dunes, coastline unfolding south. 

I often stop - mid-laundering, mid-sweeping, mid-whatever - to wonder at the impossibility of such views. 

And how we were ever lucky enough to find ourselves here.

Lately it's been clear enough to see the thin ribbon of beach on the mainland and the silhouette of the Glasshouse Mountains and Mount Coolum.
From my bed I see trawlers winking in the night.

The weather at the Cape is never dull
Some days equatorial, oppressive with not a whiff of breeze.
On these days you'd never guess that the muddy splatter on the bathroom ceiling is from the south-easterly forcing rain up through cracks in the louvres.

The wind! It is why our clothesline is inside the house!
It has all kinds of sounds.
Sometimes up in the lighthouse it's like a swarm of bees.
Other times, I'm convinced there's a choir wandering the public track.

And of course there's the plain old howling and whooshing.

We've had bushfires and flooding rain.
There's lots of burnt country now and new lakes in the dunes.
Coastal lagoons appear and fade.
Roads wash away, some by ocean, some by rain.

There are no shops on the Cape, not a thing to buy*.
But horizons and blazing sunsets and the heady expanse of star-mottled sky
Punctured by a steady beam which shines four-in-twenty - how Ocker is that!

Our local is the beach.
More often than not, it's just us and the birds. 

Curlews make me laugh out loud.
Scuttling across our lawn in their stop-start, you-can't-see-me-if-I-don't-move way
And their wail in the twilight. Haunting. Beautiful.

The holes in the lawn were a mystery until one night we spied a bandicoot.

We've had green tree frogs, red bellied-blacks and carpet snakes in our yard.
And whales, egg-laying turtles, dolphins and dugong in the sea below.

Oh, here's the note, published in the Queensland Lone Guide magazine in 1973. Excuse the crappy photograph. Also, excuse the general lack of accompanying photographs... computer issues prevail.

 

*Actually there really aren't any shops worth entering on the island. There's a crappy general store at the resort where you can get a Magnum that's past it's use-by-date, and a general store at Bulwer, which I've never ventured into but suspect it'd be good for white sliced bread, bait and ice-creams. Our favourite place to buy things is the oyster farm down south.