7 green things our grandparents did
Since the first birthday party totally knocked the collective stuffing out of the Fearse family here is a link I bookmarked ages ago and keep coming back to. I think it’s a lovely reminder that all this simple living stuff is not new. In fact, any time that the world is in financial crisis we’re likely to start thinking about how we can live with less and for less.
Mama xo
PS “How to BNN a first birthday” post coming soon.
On the eve of Little Fearse’s first birthday we have been reflecting on our first year as parents. It can be a really daunting time, first parenthood. There is an infinite list of things to learn, a multitude of decisions to make each moment of the day and bucket loads of guilt when you think you’ve made the wrong one. Largely, we look back on the last year and feel both proud of the person our little one is becoming and proud of each other for the parents we are also becoming. There are things we would have done differently if we had the knowledge we have now. We’re sure to make many mistakes throughout the years, but today we’re not focusing on mistakes. We want to celebrate decisions we have made as parents that we are grateful for. Of course, there is no definitive list for new parents. This is our list – these are the things that worked in this period of time, with this child, these parents and this set of circumstances.
Ten parenting decisions we are glad we have made:
With a little bit awe at how fast this year has vanished and bucket loads of love for the child we chose to bring into this world,
Big Poppa and Mama xoxo
Photo taken when Little Fearse was 10 days old by the very talented [KAYO].
(You can find out more about [KAYO] Photography on her FB page.)
This week started with a birthday party (if you count Sunday as the start of the week…) and is going to end with one,also. If that isn’t enough for the average Fearsian household, there is a double birthday smack bang in the middle, too!
Birthdays – or rather, gift giving – is one of the big BNN challenges. You have to either be very crafty and time rich (read: motivated) or a creative thinker with good resources. I am the latter who sometimes pretends to be the former. We have approached gifting in a variety of ways this year, so far. I’ve made jams and cakes for some. We’ve re-gifted some of our own belongings to friends who we think will appreciate them. We’ve had some lucky second hand finds by chance and we’ve also had some long hunts online and off that have born fruit. So far we’ve not yet failed completely to find what we’ve needed, but we have had to plan well ahead for all of these birthdays and events.
The Sunday market has been one of our best resources for kids gifts. There is a stall there we LOVE with second hand toys. They’re good quality toys and usually in excellent condition. They’re also reasonably priced, which is a bonus.
With all of the Mum’s Group babies turning one within the next six weeks I’ve got my work cut out for me preparing gifts. I have a crafty plan to make toys for each of them, but so far I’m doing very poorly with finding time (read: getting started). If anyone wants to post motivational quotes in comments I’d appreciate it.
Little Fearse’s first birthday gifts come from a variety of sources, too. We found her steel truck at the market for a steal (see what I…nevermind). Her variety of wooden musical instruments were found on eBay. Her toddler bike was passed on from a Freecycler. We also plan to use our last book voucher for a few books for her, though we’ve left it a little late to order them in time. (Oops…)
Something I have only learnt the hard way is that not everyone appreciates a home made gift. Not everyone appreciates a second-hand gift. Not everyone appreciates a foodie gift. I particularly like to give a gift that is enjoyed and appreciated, but I also need to be true to myself and my values when giving these gifts. This year, if it’s coming from the Fearse household expect hand made, edible or second hand gifts.
I have to admit, this is one of the really fun BNN challenges because it can be solved in such a huge variety of ways. And people mostly seem just that little bit more impressed when they know we did it without buying anything new. Even if they do think the gift is a little bit crap and it ends up at the op shop…*
Happy birthday to you and you and almost to our no longer tiny itty bitty Little Fearse.
Mama xo
*Which is probably where we will find it, re-purchase it and pass it on to the next lucky (?) person to have a birthday!
I’ve had a minor break-through in the last day or so. We’re preparing to invite Little Fearse’s nearest, dearest and besties into the house for her birthday, so we really need to start gaining some front in the clutter wars. I’ve noticed a distinct pattern in clutter in the house. We’re much better at keeping some areas clean these days, simply because Little Fearse can reach those surfaces. Anything that is out of her current reach becomes a dumping ground for anything that she would destroy or eat.
In my blog reading I came across this very inspirational post on Slow Your Home. I don’t know if this is a sign that I am now officially ‘converted’ but I actually became excited while I was reading these steps. Some of them are things I think we are very good at – such as being grateful for what we have. We are. We feel very lucky and very blessed. We count these things constantly and rarely wish for things we don’t have right now.
Some of these things we are, quite frankly, crap at. For instance, I have one deadish fern in the house and some possibly dying succulents in the bathroom. The backyard contains two dead former house plants. I am crap at indoor gardening and only marginally better at outdoor gardening. I want to be good at it, I really do. I’m sure I will get better with time. I remember to feed my baby and sometimes myself – I find it difficult to remember to feed the plants.
Anyway, yesterday I performed a “clutter bust” on two surfaces that had been bugging me for months: the top of the piano and the top of the buffet. Here are some before shots (not from yesterday, but you get the general idea):
Yesterday this looked far worse than this. I’m sure that’s easy to believe.
You have to really look at this one to see the mess – most of it is on top of the piano.
I filled the laundry basket to capacity and beyond and returned everything to its rightful place. When it didn’t have a rightful place I made one…or tossed the item. It didn’t take much to get things looking a lot better. Of course, nothing is perfect…
Perhaps you can help us with this problem: what do we do with things we want to keep out of Little Fearse’s reach to avoid another clutter bomb appearing almost immediately? A partial solution is this handy box kindly passed on by some past students of mine (thanks Lyn, Jemma & the twinnies!).
This now stores keys, camera & chargers in one handy spot. If I remember to put them there…
Love to hear your ideas,
Mama xo
PS I am keenly aware that we are overdue for a clutter collage update, however every time I suggest it BP says “No, not today. I think that’s a bad idea”. I’m not sure what he’s waiting for…
I saw a photo this morning of a friend of mine face down on the carpet of his living room, passed out after a long night of drinking. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know that photo has been posted yet and I positive he would never in a million years think that the very same photo would of sparked the idea for this blog entry.
The carpet was stained. the couch was the kind with an awful floral pattern that can only be obtained from hard rubbish collection. The coffee table was littered with half empty drinks, ash and other various paraphernalia of “a good time”. I immediately thought to myself, “I’m glad we don’t live like that anymore” and then “ We….Used….To…..Live…Like…That….Ugh!”.
Mama Fearse and I used to live in a basically condemned house that was nestled in an affluent inner suburb of Melbourne. Our neighbours hated us and I often gave them plenty of reason to. Chain smoking on the front porch in my bathrobe, Wu-Tang blaring out the lounge room window while surveying our ever expanding lawn jungle. As the house was intended to be demolished and rebuilt at some stage, we took selective care of the place, especially the main living area.
Whilst we lived in the falling down house, we were robbed. When the police came to get a statement from us and inspect the crime scene, they commented, “Gee they really turned this place upside down.” We didn’t have the heart to tell them that the house always looked like that, Mama Fearse actually didn’t even realise we had been robbed for 4 hours, until I came home from work and went to turn on the missing Playstation.
After seeing the aforementioned photo this morning, Mama Fearse and I looked at some old photos from that time period and both agreed we were glad we didn’t live like that anymore. We don’t drink heavily or smoke anymore, we replaced the filthy ashy coffee table in our lives with the clutter that Mama is furiously reducing. While I may sometimes miss the lack of responsibility and general financial freedom, I’ll take the mortgage, the kid and the clutter all day everyday over the “good time.”
Guess this is growing up huh?
Old Man Fearse
A month or so ago I started reading into the idea of digital clutter. It’s not an area that I had particularly noticed to be an issue, until I started reading. I realised that my personal email inbox really did cause me some anxiety. I felt a little weighed down by all those random emails every time I logged in. In some ways they were becoming as burdensome as my physical filing inbox and my storage box full of sentimental letters and cards.
This article really helped me to prioritise my digital stuff, although the process is definitely ongoing. What I am most proud of is my inbox, which has stayed empty now for a month and a half. It has never looked like this before. I was even able to delete whole folders of old emails, mostly without reading a thing. My 2004 book club folder? Scratched. That friend I haven’t spoken to in 10 years? Deleted. University email folder? Gone!
It was really satisfying to see that junk disappear and encouraged me to realise how much digital stuff matters when it is cluttering up my life. I check my email every day. Every day I was confronted with pages and pages of irrelevant messages. Now I’m not. I decide what to do with those emails immediately.
The folders that are used most regularly are ‘Admin’ and ‘Tax’. Any receipts that come through go straight into the Tax folder. I generally rejig my tax spread sheet each year in a two hour session. This can only be done because I keep my paperwork handy. I don’t want to spend days gathering my tax information. A two hour session saves me a lot of anxiety. The Tax folder is one of my key tools for keeping taxation a stress free task. The Admin folder takes anything that I may need to access again for reference – mobile phone bills, Paypal payments, bank / super / frequent flyer etc statements. This should be periodically emptied, also.
Other handy folders are:
I try to avoid having too many individual folders for separate people. Grouping them works well for me –that’s an individual thing. The family history folder is relevant because that’s a hobby of mine. Everyone’s needs when it comes to email folders will be different, but I can’t recommend having some kind of email filing system highly enough.
The key to these systems, as with any form of decluttering, is doing it now. Read the email, file it. Don’t sit on it, don’t wait to decide where it goes. The article above recommends having a ‘to do’ email folder if you need to action something from a message but don’t have time to do it right now. Just get that message out of your inbox.
I also recommend exploring the idea of filtering your emails, if you haven’t already. I receive at least one email a day from my local Freecycle group. These go straight into a dedicated folder (and are usually deleted straight after reading). Ditto for any emails from Ebay. They are also deleted as soon as a sale is finalised and feedback is given / received.
There is something empowering about having at least this small part of my life organised and under control. It gives me hope for other areas of my life, like my actual filing.
Now, if only I was able to apply this same system to my professional inbox. Eeep.
Mama xo
As an update on our pantry challenge here is my meal plan for last week while we were on holidays:
Monday: BBQ meat and veggies including eggplant pizzas (yum!!).
Tuesday: Fish roasted on capers with cous cous salad (used up some of the excess cous cous).
Wednesday: Vodka steamed mussels (used up some of the vodka left over from Easter meals…yes, we’re no longer vodka drinkers in this household).
Thursday: Spinach and ricotta cannelloni (used up most of the multitude of cannelloni tubes I have lying around) with garlic bread and salad. I might have made up the bit about having salad to make it look like we didn’t just eat carbs and meat all week. But we kind of did, which is really unlike us.
Friday: Fish ‘n’ chips (we were on holidays, after all).
As we were on holidays it was a joy to spend a bit of extra time in the kitchen, though I had some troubles with the oven. I did quite a bit of failed baking: the soda bread was under cooked, the banana cake was over cooked, the muffins were leathery. It was very frustrating and reminded me about the time needed to get used to a different oven.
I have learnt a few things since I started meal planning ( I started a few weeks before the pantry stocktake).
Meanwhile, I highly recommend joining the Mamabake community. Even if you’re not keen on big batch baking with a bunch of Mamas the page is full of great tips, awesome recipes and is a genuine community in a world in which community is largely absent. One of the Mamabakers came up with a wonderful idea that I wish she had mentioned about a month ago in time for me to implement it for Little Fearse’s birthday.
“On the weekend we had a potluck birthday for my boy who turned one – the invite was ‘bring a plate, not a pressie’ and it was brilliant – I made scones, we got a fab sponge cake from the markets and that was it as far as food prep went! Birthday mamabake style!”
How perfect would this have been as a BNN and a 2-4-1 solution?! Waah.
In frantic first birthday preparation (I thought I said this would never happen to me?),
Mama xo
Somehow I managed to get through the whole first term of school without having a rostered yard duty. Yesterday I had my first yard duty of the year. It was a miserable day; cold, windy, rainy. One of those days that you just want to be curled up in the staff room with a coffee and a warm lunch.
The highlight of yard duty is usually the kids that come and chat to you from other classes. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to touch base with children you used to teach, or their brothers and sisters dotted throughout the school. I like yard duty for that reason. It’s also a chance to have a laugh with your students without the pressure of getting a task completed or ensuring the point of your teaching and learning is reached. Schools can be very fast paced places. Yard duty never goes fast. Ever.
While I was hugging my too thin jumper against me I spent a moment pondering the time a tree fell down in the back of the school ground a year or so ago. It was in an area of the yard that wasn’t used much for children’s play – somewhere between a playground and a cricket pitch. Suddenly this fallen tree became hot property. Kids of all ages played in and around it. Cubbies with roofs of spindly branches and hidey holes between earth and trunk. Pirate ships, planks to walk, swords to swish. Their imaginations were endless. I’d watch with awe and fascination at the people these sometimes previously lack lustre children became in that fallen tree.
Likewise, when another tree trunk was partitioned into pieces to be taken away the children quickly adopted them. They were stepping stones first and then, when some bigger children found a clunky awkward way of moving them (rolling usually), they became a fort. There was always a teacherly warning – Be careful of the ants! Don’t fall off! Mind for splinters! They were fine, they were always fine. I noticed yesterday that the years have passed and the grass has grown a little around these wooden forts, but they haven’t been taken away as originally planned.
There are lots of slides and monkey bars and towers to climb in our playground, but I think the imagination really happens around these natural play grounds – the ones that pop up without planning. I love to see what comes alive in children when they are given something without rules and instructions.
Play is the most wonderful thing – I love that in my job as a teacher and my role as a mother I’m given more and more opportunities to play in my day-to-day life. It brings something alive in me, a feeling that yearns back to rickety tree houses and war games in ditches, ball gowns as costumes and tunnels in the hay.
I’m excited about the many years of play I have ahead of me. I can only hope that sometimes, just sometimes, Little Fearse will make those cubbies and tunnels big enough for me to join her.
Mama xo
This week I visited my parents’ holiday house for the second time this year, but the first time since I started to do some serious reading on minimalism. It gave me a good opportunity to examine how my thinking has changed.
I have always loved spending time there – it’s in a quiet area, by a rocky beach. The TV doesn’t get turned on much, and if my parents are there we will almost always play a game of cards after dinner. There are rock pools, bays and surf within walking distance. As the weather turns cool a view of the ocean out the front forms a back drop for endless hours of book reading. It’s a simple place to be.
What I noticed this time, however, was that holiday houses tend to become a retirement home for our stuff. Somewhere between usefulness and the junk yard these items find their way into cupboards, shelves and drawers in our holiday homes. I found myself itching to return the jars of shells to the beach and gather up the dusty books, unread for so many years, to be donated to the local book sale. I peeked into each nook and cranny in my old bedroom and was horrified to find the junk I’d transferred there as a ten year old still remained. I spent some time throwing away balls of old blue tack and rusty paper clip chains. There was a bottle of deodorant at least 15 years old. Who knows how long the moisturiser had been there?
Driving by many other holiday homes I spied through windows dusty vases on sills, whole rooms of standing fans, sunrooms overfilled with cane furniture and dusty house plants. It seems that the holiday house phenomenon is not particular to my parents’ house.
Once I would have seen the charm in these dust catchers. I don’t any more. I’m not sure whether to spend some time mourning the loss of that part of who I am. This really is a major shift in my mindset, and not something I expected at all from the BNN year. While this is something that is certainly exciting it’s also left me feeling a little sad. I hope when I am done with my decluttering and the 2-4-1 challenge ends I don’t look around and feel a little empty.
Three steps forward, two steps back.
Mama xo
The Fearse Family 