Working Full Time - A Year In Review

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A whole year has whisked its way through my life since I started working full time.  It's one of those strange phenomenon, where the days seem long but the year passes in the blink of an eye!

This time last year I was eagerly preparing myself to teach in a school where I didn't know anyone and not one of my students was familiar to me.  In short order I fell in love with that quirky, funny class.  And then six months later I left, since I only had a short term contract.  This year I am teaching in the school where I worked before I got my degree; the school my children attend(ed).  I knew all my students before I entered my classroom, some of them before they were even born!  I even get to teach my niece.  Along with all the lessons I'm learning about how to be the best teacher I can be, I've learned a lot of lessons about being a Mum who works full time as well.

1.  You can't do it all.

I've always known this.  Working part time and studying was a hard gig.  But I was home almost straight after school and I had time each week to weave in things that I enjoyed.  These days I'm not at home for about 10 hours a day.  I can't do all the things I wish I could.  At the start of the year I decided not to even pretend to try.  I have a good friend whom I pay to clean our house.  My kids cook lots of meals.  The girls help with ferrying Mr Busy to middle-of-the-day destinations, like his VET course on a Wednesday.  I choose not to feel guilty about any of those things.  

2.  Know the season you're in and respond appropriately.

I know that my current season is not an easy one.  Learning a new job, learning to do that in two different school cultures in one year, learning how to juggle motherhood with working life.  It's a big learning curve.  Working full time with a family is so different to working full time before having children.  In this season it means lots of self-protection.  Our weekends are fairly quiet and we don't do a lot of entertaining.  I sleep a lot on the weekends.  I am very careful about what I commit to.  I look forward to my work life being more seamless and streamlined than it is right now, but I know that is not my current season.

3.  Work/Life balance is a myth.

Because I can clearly identify my season and how I need to respond appropriately I am not overly concerned about the fact that my life is quite unbalanced at present.  My work takes more of my time than I would like it to, but it's part of learning how to do what I do now.  I was chatting with my BIL yesterday morning and he agreed - we need to make sure what we do aligns with what we believe is important.  I am content that my life exhibits that alignment.  I am committed to doing my job well.  I am committed to being in community within my church community.  And of course, being a mother means family is always a high committment.  My life is not and does not look balanced.  But it is totally aligned with what's important to me.

I am so grateful to have had 13 years at home with my children, focussing on just one thing: being a mum, raising great kids.  I am grateful to have the opportunity to move into a new season, where I get to do a job I love, and that this has coincided with my children being in their late teens/early adulthood.  I never thought I would want to work outside the home again.  I feel so blessed to be able to work, again, in the place where my son also spends his days.  I love that I get to work full time, and yet touch base with him in the playground, or when he stops by my classroom to ask for money for the tuck shop.  I am blessed to have one daughter who has decided she doesn't like being home when the house is being cleaned so she comes and helps in my classroom.  

Breakfast Anyone?

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We are people who love to go out for breakfast.  Usually just me and hubby, but occasionally the kids as well.  As you can imagine this means we are ever on the look out for a new little cafe that does a good breakfast, and we've become quite the breakfast connoisseurs!  Miss Sunshine found us a new little spot a half hour drive from home.  A nice drive out in the country - more country than we are already.  We visited there on Monday, thanks to a public holiday, and then Dh and I were there again on Saturday thanks to a rainy morning that prevented Dh from going bike riding.  On Monday I had the french toast and yesterday the smashed avocado, without the eggs.  You know what?  This was so incredibly good, and is an easily reproducible breakfast for home as well.  So there is no reason to feel too sad if you can't make it all the way beyond the outer reaches of fair Melbourne town.  

This morning I found an avocado, some goats cheese and some dukkah, so I got a second go.  At home.  Without the travel and without the mushrooms (which I love, but they had all been gobbled by other people at some point through the week).

I toasted my favourite grainy sourdough bread (from Aldi), buttered it, lightly mashed half an avocado over it and then sprinkled some herbed goats cheese (also from Aldi) that I broke up into little chunks over it.  I had some zesty lemon dukkah and salt to sprinkle over, and, well....YUM.  If you're a mushroom fan you might want to have a go at sautéing some button mushies with balsamic glaze and thyme.  At least that's what I would attempt to do if our mushroom monster had not eaten all the mushrooms!

Have you discovered the wonders of going out for breakfast?  What's your favourite thing to have?

The Things We Say

Do you find yourself saying some unusual things to your children?  It seems to happen regularly around here.  Probably owing to my propensity for being direct.  And the fact that my children are just funny.

So, for your entertainment - a note recently written to my girls as I dashed out the door at 7.15am.  Written on a Thursday morning before my friend came to clean.  I simply cannot make her clean the hair out of the bath - all of which belongs to Miss Mischief!  And Miss Sunshine needs a big lead time to orient her mindset if I want her to cook dinner.

I got a text from Miss Sunshine later in the day suggesting we would not all die.  I don't believe her.  She's never tried to get away without feeding this mob of eaters.

What odd things have you found yourself saying to your kids?

Twenty Years in the Making - A Perfect Mother's Day

I haven't really enjoyed Mother's Day for well... my whole mothering life, although it has slowly improved in the past few years.  The best Mother's Day I had when the kids were small was the one two days after Mr Busy was born, because I was in hospital, being lavished with chocolate and being spoilt by nurses who get it.

Recently in our house we had a conversation around how much I don't enjoy Mother's Day.  My husband maintains that I am not his mother, and I pointed out that he had not taught his children to honour theirs.  To add insult to injury he has been overseas since late last week so he wasn't even here for Mother's Day.  At all!  As it turns out, that was the motivation the kids needed.  That, and the girls now have their own means and opportunity (money and transport) to make things happen without relying on anyone else.

On Sunday I woke up to gifts, purchased by children who thought about what would bless me.  After taking Mr Busy to church early I returned to ham and cheese croissants for breakfast.  Lunch was a cheese platter and dinner was a chicken and dauphine potatoes, a la Jamie Oliver, with apple pie for dessert.  We watched "The Dressmaker" together, and I got have a little nap.  It was perfect.

The day before I spent the day doing a flower arranging class, taught by a friend.  Mum drive down to Melbourne and joined me, and then I took her out to a local nursery/cafe for lunch and we wandered about the nursery afterwards.  In amongst writing reports and marking student work it was simply an amazing day.

So I think the Mother's Day curse has finally passed.

How was your Mother's Day?  Difficult?  Delightful?  Improving?  No hope in sight?

However it turned out, we can encourage one another and the other mothers know.  We can tell one another what an amazing job they are doing and honour the sacrifice, love and commitment they pour into the lives of their children.  Who do you need to encourage today?

Grasping at Health...A Delicious Quinoa Salad

I've learned something about myself over the past two years.  I am not a raging carnivore.  Don't get me wrong, I would miss it if I never got to eat meat, but I'm really happy not to eat it too.  The trouble with that is that the alternative - legumes - are not my friends.  I don't mind eating them, but then I don't want to be near me.  Which is pretty much inescapable!

We have had a bit of back-and-forward tussle in our house over things like couscous and quinoa.  I enjoy them; my family does not.  Until last night.  Inspired by a recipe from "Jamie's 15 Minute Meals" and a lunch I was served on a PD (Independent Schools Victoria completely spoil their seminar attendees!) I decided to try a quinoa salad.  My goal?  An ecstatic moan-inducing salad.  No pressure, right?

This salad?  Life-changing!

I cooked a cup of raw quinoa and half a cup pearl couscous using the absorption method in chicken stock, and then mixed that with:

• toasted pinenuts
• diced oranges
• finely sliced spring onions
• fried and diced haloumi (the haloumi I got from Costco - amazing!)
• finely chopped parsley

After mixing it together I dressed it with the juice of a lemon and a good drizzle of olive oil.
I would have added avocado but mine weren't ripe yet, and if you preferred you could use feta.

All of my non-quinoa people enjoyed this salad.  Guess what's for lunch this week?!

The Frog My House Killed

The last thing I expected to find on my lounge room floor, the other morning, was a frog.  In fact, it wasn't immediately obvious that the little brown blob was a frog.  The kids and I looked at it.  We discussed what it could be.  We looked at it some more.  And then I prodded it (because mothers are the bravest ones in the house), and the little blob kind of stretch a limb-looking thing.  Slowly.  Just a little.

It took a little bit to convince ourselves that we did, indeed, have a froggy little visitor.  After many questions about how it got inside (I just don't know, asking again won't get you an answer, people!) we decided that all the fluff and hair and dust had clogged up its ability to move, if it was alive enough to survive.

I got a tissue to pick it up, and tried to rinse it off a little with some water.  It stretch a little more.  Then I took it back outside into a protected, but wet, spot outside in the rain.  I suspect a kookaburra decided to eat it, because this poor little froggy friend really wasn't moving much.  It was certainly gone by the time I got home from work.

Miss Mischief was so excited that our house was healthy enough to have a frog in it.  I pointed out that the frog wasn't healthy anymore because our house had killed it.

Just in time, my very precious friend is coming to clean my house on Thursday.  Maybe then the house will be healthy enough not to kill a frog with dust bunnies and hair!

She's Ours

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"Ooohhhh.  She's ours!"  My aunt made this proclamation as she hugged me tight.  "Us" who have little mercy and struggle to show sympathy.  "Us" straight-shooters who don't mince words, and tell it like it is.  "Us" who know these are not always strengths in a world of broken, messy people with expectations about how they should be treated.  I'm one of "us".

Changing churches four years ago ripped away so much of the belonging and being known that I had so treasured.  It happened under difficult circumstances as these things often do.  Rebuilding community and establishing new friendships has been slow.  Uncomfortable.  Difficult.  It has torn at the edges of my identity layers.  Not that who I am has changed, but who I am in the context of community just didn't exist for so very long.  In the first year or two at our current church I did a spiritual gifts survey.  Mostly it affirmed and confirmed things like me becoming a teacher.  I understood that my love of history and geography comes from my apostle/mission gift.  Apparently I am wise (a new career path kind of puts a bump in that road).  I have a spiritual knowledge that is supposedly heightened.  I don't know - these things just seem normal to me.  Then I looked at the bottom of the gifts.  Mercy was ... well ... almost missing.  I have just enough to know I need to work on it.

What I discovered, over Easter, as I spent time with my Mum's siblings is that my lack of mercy is a family trait.  I come from a long line of people who are not inclined to be overly sympathetic.  My mother described a time when my brothers and I had a week of injuring our feet.  A by-product of never wearing shoes that didn't seem to change our bare-footed ways!  I'd had a wort surgically removed from one foot, and then sliced the other open on some glass.  My youngest brother came in, just days later, having sliced his foot open in a similar way.  When my middle brother did the same thing later that week my mother's response was "sit down and be quiet," and she went to gather the foot dressing stuff that had not yet been put away.

I cannot explain what a relief it was to know that my lack of mercy is not unusual.  Each of us in my non-merciful family have other gifts the world needs us to use.  I among a beautiful group of people who are perfectly OK with their kids leaving home - celebrate it, even.  They are great at figuring out how to unlock passworded spreadsheets and fixing computer glitches and finding geocaches.  They are creative and funny and cheeky and they laugh a lot.

The precious gift I received this Easter was a repair in my identity.  Not just because the weekend was about remembering that Jesus made me part of God's family.  But because I truly belong to an amazing group of people.  And mercy isn't required to be valuable, loved, accepted.