Comic Gong

I went to Comic Gong on Saturday and it was a lot of fun! The program looked amazing and very family friendly—anime screenings, circus performers, comic drawing workshops, how to make a shield, costume competitions in various age groups (and the kid dressed as Predator looked absolutely amazing!), and of course, the Artists' Alley, which is where I was.

I gave out stacks of postcards, had good conversations with people who stopped by, and managed to sell out of every copy of Kinds of Blue I'd brought with me. Other highlights included meeting lurking Sydney Comics Guild members and other Aussie comic creators—in particular, Pat Grant, creator of Blue, who went on to win an Aurealis Award for best illustrated book/graphic novel that very night.

The whole day worked wonderfully well—particularly as I'd asked the family to come with me, so Ben was entertaining Astrid during the three hours the con was on, and then the three of us had a very nice lunch looking out over Wollongong Northbeach afterwards before driving home with a very tired toddler in the back.

MCA Zine Fair

Next up this Sunday is the Museum of Contemporary Art Zine Fair, which is happening in association with the Sydney Writers Festival. That goes from 11am to 4pm. I'll be tabling with the lovely Paul Caggegi, creator of the sci-fi adventure comic Pandeia. Here he is at Comic Gong:

I don't have many print copies of Kinds of Blue left! So I am definitely looking into the costs of reprinting—but probably not on such a big scale. I'm going to need copies for Supanova in June, otherwise I'm going to look like a dork, just handing out postcards. (I have waaaaaay too many postcards!)

Sydney Comics Guild

Speaking of the Sydney Comics Guild, I'm taking the workshop for June, which is tentatively titled, “What I wish I knew about making art in my 20s”. It's an amalgamation of some of the things I've been writing about on this blog. Come along if you're free! And interested. Or just like to hear me ramble in person instead of in text.

M&M Vanity Project

Hmm, looks like I never blogged about this! I wrote it in 2011 and sent it off, but nothing came of it (hence the word “vanity” in its title). But then a couple of weeks ago, things started happening with it. I don't think I can say much more about it at the moment, though—other than it's not as vain as I thought it would be. Also, it has nothing to do with M&Ms.

Graphic novel

What I can talk about, however, is the graphic novel script (that is, what I have been referring to on Twitter as the #OGNSpaceOpera). In my last working update, I said I'd finished the first draft of the script. When I did that, I started trying to find an artist to work with. And once I had found one, we put together a collaboration agreement (which took a while as I've never done anything like that before and I had to learn a lot of legal things pretty quickly, and if you're interested, pages 51-57 of Business and Legal Forms for Authors and Self Publishers by Tad Crawford has a very useful negotiation checklist [though I had to look up what a lot of the things meant] and the St Louis Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts have a nice sample collaboration agreement, and taken together, both are a good starting point). And then we both signed it.

So now I am most pleased to announce that the supremely talented Paul Wong-Pan and I will be working together again and I couldn't be more excited! You can see more of his wonderful artwork on his DeviantArt page and follow him on Twitter. That's him on the far left of the back row at the Kinds of Blue launch: (photo care of Bec)

Paul and I worked together on the second story in Kinds of Blue—“The real you”, which was about depression in a marriage. Funny story: Ben actually met Paul at a charity screening of Serenity a number of years ago and happened to mention to him that I was working on a graphic novel (and yes, it was this particular graphic novel; I just took a very long time to actually do anything about it). I finally met Paul at his graduating exhibition at TAFE, where he had been studying illustration. Then a number of years later, I enlisted his help to finish off a comic I'd been working on with Dan Gilmore, who was the artist on the third comic in Kinds of Blue: “Toward the waves”. That comic was “Going home”: Dan did pencils, Paul did inks and I wrote the script. I think it's the first comic I've ever written. Certainly it's the first one I've ever collaborated on.

The idea for the graphic novel came about in 2001. I wrote about it here. But I dithered on it for years because I couldn't figure out how to make it work—in the production and publishing sense. My brain is a little obtuse that way: unless I can figure out the practical logistical things of how to make things happen, working on them feels like an exercise in futility. The stumbling block for me when it came to graphic novels (and I don't mean to use the term in a highbrow sense because I know a lot of people are sensitive about that because the word “comics” has been associated with lowbrow trivial things, whereas calling them “graphic novels” seems to make them so much more palatable; I use the term more in the sense of “a longer [novel-length] piece of work in comics form”)—sorry, the stumbling for me when it came to graphic novels was the expense and effort associated with getting them made given that I am just a writer. I can't draw, which means collaborating with an artist, and the amount of time an artist would have to spend working on a project of this length would be quite insane—especially as he or she would be doing pretty much everything: pencils, inks, colours and lettering. Comics are expensive. I confess I wondered whether it was worth it. I wondered whether I was better off writing the entire thing in prose.

Two things helped me shift my thinking. Firstly, Jordan D White, editor at Marvel (who, for some reason, I was following on Twitter, which is quite funny because I don't even read Marvel comics [well, apart from the current run of Young Avengers, but that's more because, as you probably know by now, I'm a Kieron Gillen/Jamie McKelvie nut] Guh! Got lost in the brackets again)—firstly, Jordan D White started up a Formspring account and, in a fit of madness or desperation, I asked him a question:

If you're a writer, is it foolish to keep on working on a graphic novel-length project when there is little chance of it ever being published? Should you give up on the comics medium and switch to prose?

To which he replied,

If you want to make comics, it is not foolish to make comics. Lots of people have self-published, or done small press work.

But if you're writing a graphic novel*, you need an artist. And that is going to mean finding someone else who is willing to work for nothing, and split the small (if any) profits for the sake of the work. So, it's really difficult to get something like that off the ground. I would recommend speaking to/reading interviews with people who have done original GNs for their first/early works to see what it is like. It will be a hard road, but if you do good work, who knows what you can accomplish? If it is worth it to create a great book you can be proud of, then do it! I don't recommend doing it as a means to get hired at Marvel—not because it can't work, but because making comics should be its own reward, or else it is just too much risk on something so hard to break into.

Prose is easier in that you don't need a partner to share the (huge) burden and financials. But the prose print world is not doing that great, either.

*I am assuming it is an original one. You should not write a graphic novel length script of a Marvel Character—it will almost certainly never be read by Marvel. You need to make your own comics first.

What a wonderful thing the internet is! How lovely that a professional who knows what he's on about and who doesn't know me at all should bestow upon me a snippet of his wisdom. The bit that resonated with me was “If you want to make comics, it is not foolish to make comics”. (Obvious, right? I don't understand my brain sometimes.) I think the reason why it resonated was because it answered with authority all those silly little niggling voices in my head that kept telling me, “This is ridiculous”, “It's never going to work” and “Why are you even wasting your time?” and silenced them once and for all.

The second thing that helped me shift my thinking was a brief chat with Colleen Doran at the Australian Society of Authors comics masterclass in 2011. Unfortunately I never blogged about it and have since forgotten what she said to me exactly; it had something to do with publishing, publishers and writing scripts. But I do remember coming away from the conversation feeling like I had a better idea of the way forward—that what I had thought was impossible was suddenly more possible.

I'd worked on the script on and off over the years, but last year I committed to finishing it. I set myself a goal of 50 comic pages so I could apply for the Varuna Writers-in-residence mentor program. (I was unsuccessful.) Then the second half of the year was largely devoted to the Monster Editing Project (finished version), and things got a bit out of control, so I swore that this year, I'd finish the script once and for all and not let anything else distract from it.

So here we are. I've called the graphic novel Eternal Life (which may change). It's a science fiction drama—a boy-meets-girl sort of story. I workshopped part 1 with my writing group and they gave me some excellent feedback, so I am now keen to workshop the rest of it with them as I redraft the script for Paul. You probably won't see much about it until we are ready to publish pages (which will probably happen around 2015), but hopefully that's given you something to look forward to!

Right. That wasn't very “quick”, was it. (I obviously have the same issues with “quick” as I do with “brief”.)

Final thing: I'm not the only one in this family who has been developing creatively and putting work out there; recently Ben has been dabbling in stand-up comedy. Here's a post he wrote about his experiences.

I reckon it would be fascinating stuff. (Ben disagrees; he was bored just by me talking about it.) Who wouldn't be interested in how other people live—or rather, how they can afford to live? In addition, perhaps seeing what life is like on the other side of the fence will cause audiences to ponder their own financial circumstances and how to make things work better for themselves.

Done well, it would hit the right note of voyeurism combined with judgementalism (with a dash of public-service-educating-the-public-about-personal-finance-ism) so typical of reality TV—Supernanny crossed with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The current post-GFC climate is ripe for this sort of thing, I reckon.

So TV people: feel free to use my idea. It's not like I'm going to be able to do anything with it!

Well, it's really our money. I suppose that's where some of the difficulty lies: managing money when you're a couple is entirely different to managing it when you're single. I dare say managing money when you have children is a different thing again because there's this whole other person who has her own needs, wants and expenses.

And then of course it depends on what sort of job you have and how you get paid: the majority of the population receive a salary that comes with a regular pay check monthly or fortnightly. But if you work freelance, which is what most people in creative industries do, how do you manage money when you're not even sure when you'll get paid?

I think my parents were pretty good in what they taught me about money. For one thing, they always taught me to save. I think that's the first lesson I ever learned from them. I learned it pretty young too: as a pre-schooler (and I assume it was during my pre-school years because it's before we moved to Australia), I owned two piggy banks. One was brass and one was ceramic. They used to give me nickels and dimes to put in them. (This was Canada, remember; their names for money are more interesting.) Maybe occasionally they gave me a quarter, but from memory, holes on top of the piggy banks didn't really accommodate quarters. (An aside: I remember the Canadian quarter being the loveliest of all their coins. Mind you, this is before they got the loonies.) When the piggy banks were full, we'd take them down to the bank and deposit the coins in my account. Years later after we'd left Canada, I asked what happened to that money. They told me that it had gone; presumably they'd closed my childhood account and spent it. There wasn't that much in it anyway; after all, how much money would several piggy banks' worth of nickels and dimes be worth, anyway? But I was still a child and the news devastated me.

Later, after we'd moved to Australia, I got a Dollarmite account with the Commonwealth Bank. They operated through the schools, so every week I would deposit my allowance (which was at the time $2.50) during class in little mustard-coloured envelopes. I thought that was what you did with money. It never occurred to me to spend it until much later. (I was a strange child and was not very interested in what was available at the tuck shop—that is, until they got Mamee noodles and Ovalteenies, though the latter I only bought because my mum wanted me to bring them home for her.) I remember a family friend taking us to a toy shop in one of the Westfield shopping centre and the connection suddenly being made in my head: I could buy whatever I wanted with my money! (And what did I buy? Why, My Little Ponies, of course!)

Even so, I never spent beyond my means. I still had savings—even when I finished school, got my first casual job, moved out of home and into college residence, and all of a sudden had to handle things like college fees, textbooks, the costs of public transport, and so on. I was lucky, though: I had a scholarship and parents who were willing to continue supporting me financially while I studied. I know not everyone has that.

And then I got married at the tender age of 21, and suddenly things got a lot more complicated—not just because we were now paying rent; handling utility and grocery bills, superannuation and health insurance; doing our tax (which was a lot more complicated as a couple and used to drive me absolutely up the wall because I used to do it for both of us because it was easier since there were things I needed to know about his tax return in order to complete mine, and vice versa); and giving a portion of our earnings to things like Christian ministry and aid, and so on, but also because we were juggling the needs and wants of two individuals in the relationship. Before marriage when I was a lot younger, I would have these days when I would catch the train into the city and wander around my favourite places (which were usually bookstores)—looking at things, seeing what was out there, occasionally buying whatever it was I fancied (though within limits; I was good at putting things back if I thought they were too expensive, or if I thought I could wait). But as a married woman, my leisure spending had a direct impact on the household budget and my husband's leisure spending: marriage brought a new mindfulness to money matters.

Hmm. I'm rambling. Cut to present day: now in a family of three, I feel especially stupid about money matters—more than ever before, I think. I'm not sure if it's because now we have to handle things like a mortgage and the expenses that come with having a dependent. But as I said, it's not like I'm bad with money: I'm really not. I just don't feel like I “get” it. I feel like I don't really understand the basics, because if I did, I would feel less stupid and ignorant, and more in control and aware of my options—less like a child in the company of grown-ups who seem to be way more confident in what they are doing, and more like an adult with some mastery of the world and the way it works.

The other day we attended a friend's birthday brunch and I got in conversation with a friend who works as an actuary. (See, this is how ignorant I am: I had to look up what an actuary does.) The interesting thing about this particular friend is that he loves money—not in a negative 1 Timothy 6:10 sense, but more that he understands it and its nature and enjoys talking about it the way that some people enjoy discussing cooking. Curiously, unlike a lot of people I know, money is not emotionally laden for him. With most people, you can't talk about money in polite conversation because it raises too many volatile feelings in them—envy, covetousness, superiority or inferiority, and other sentiments that are sparked whenever one compares oneself to another. My friend talks about money as if it were water or electricity—a necessary part of life that everyone must partake of, whether they wish to or no. (Funny enough, as I was declaring that some sort of emotional intelligence should be taught in schools because it's so basic and necessary to human existence, he suggested that the same was true for money.)

I was telling him about my issues with money (specifically the feeling stupid and ignorant thing) and I asked him what he would say to a young person to teach them about personal finance and money management. He thought about it for a moment and then said (and here I am paraphrasing from memory), “Basically, everyone has unlimited wants but limited resources” (i.e. people usually want many things but they only have so much income and can only afford some of those things). (I said, “Really? Just wants? What about needs—food, for example?” and he replied that most needs were really wants, and that you could live on just rice, if need be. It wasn't ideal, but you could. And also, the safety net in Australia is good enough to meet your basic needs. It may not be how you want to live, but you will still be able to live.)

Then he said, “With your limited resources, you prioritise your wants, and if you can, you expand your resources” (i.e. you decide which wants are more important and concentrate on meeting those, but if you can, increase your income so you can meet more of your wants). “Prioritising your wants may mean delayed gratification”—(or being content with less, as another friend added later)—“otherwise you may not be able to meet all your financial obligations”.

Simple stuff, right? And yet I found it hugely helpful—mostly because it was taking a step back and looking at the whole concept of money from afar, rather than getting down into the nitty gritty of tracking your spending and setting budgets. The funny thing was, as I was talking to my friend and telling him a little bit of what we do with our money (for example, how we transfer money once a month into a special account that we use for household maintenance/clothes/shoes/yarn [which, I argued, was pretty much clothes in some instances because I've been knitting myself jumpers], etc., and how that came out of the whole concept of paying strata fees, which are used to maintain common property, or how I keep a special account for Astrid's childcare fees, which I privately call my writing fund [the way that Helen Garner regarded her single parents' pension as a kind of artists' grant]), he was laughing at me (in a nice way), and kept telling me, “Karen, you're all over this!”, and then proceeded to tell me about examples of businesses (not by name, of course) who managed their money far worse than we do.

Then my friend lent me a book called The Richest Man in Babylon. He said that he's a bit of an evangelist for the book because it explains the basics of money really well through a bunch of stories set in ancient Babylon. (Curiously it started off as a series of pamphlets distributed by banks and insurance companies.) I started reading it that afternoon, and despite my annoyances with some of the archaic language, I'm finding it quite helpful. More specifically, I was struck by these two bits of advice: “A part of all you earn is yours to keep” (i.e. put at least 10 per cent of all your income [regardless of how much income you actually have] away as savings immediately after you get it and adjust your expenses accordingly so that you will not miss it) and “Make thy gold multiply” (i.e. use the 10 per cent you're putting away to increase your income by investing it, making it earn interest, etc.). It's funny that even though saving was such a big part of my financial habits growing up, I never thought about it strategically—how much to save (versus how much I would spend on day-to-day living) and what to do with those savings to make them work for me.

I'm looking forward to finishing the book and learning more. However, as my friend warned, I realise that much of the book's outlook is largely selfish: there is very little in it about generosity and sharing with those in need. Furthermore, from what I've read, the author's view of the security of riches is at odds with the Bible's (see, for example, Proverbs 23:4-5 and Matthew 6:19-21): wealth is impermanent and fleeting, so it is better to trust in the one who owns all the silver and all the gold, and gives us all good things to enjoy. (Haggai 2:8, 1 Timothy 6:17).

It's not that I want to be rich (though the Bible acknowledges that poverty is not inherently good, but rather something to be avoided—e.g. Proverbs 10:15, 30:7-9). It's more that I want to be wise with what God has given me.

I've been thinking recently about ways of working—different approaches to time and tasks. Sometimes I think the world can be divided into two groups of people: people who think in terms of structures and people who are more unstructured. The structured people are (to stereotype heavily) generally more organised, and tend to think naturally in terms of categories, grids and segments. The unstructured people tend to be more spontaneous: they live in moment (or so it seems to me; I confess I'm in the former camp) and they take things as they come in whatever form they come.

The advantage of being structured is that it allows you to divide and conquer easily, and get quite a lot done in the most efficient way possible. The disadvantage of being structured is that it can result in inflexibility and an inability or unwillingness to change or look at things from a different point of view. (Note a lot of structured people work in bureaucracy. Think Hermes Conrad from Futurama.) It can also result in planning fatigue: sometimes you just get so sick of planning and organising, you let certain things go that perhaps should be more of a priority (e.g. scheduling in things like holidays and time off).

In comparison, unstructured people tend to be good at flexibility and improvisation—changing tacks as the situation demands. Unfortunately, being unstructured also means they tend more towards disorganisation and chaos because that's what they're comfortable with, so to operate differently requires a great deal of effort and thought because it doesn't come naturally. The problem is, being unorganised, unstructured and unplanned usually starts affecting their lives negatively at some point.

Structured people can learn things like flexibility, spontaneity and alternative ways of thinking from unstructured people; unstructured people can learn things like organisation, planning and efficiency from structured people. I'm not saying that being one or the other is any better; it's just that both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Certainly when it comes to getting stuff done, the structured people have the upper hand, and from what I've learned from talking to people who are naturally unstructured, they tend to employ strategies typical of structured people to achieve their goals.

(By the way, if you're more of an unstructured person and you employ unstructured approaches to get stuff done, I'd love to hear how that works for you. From talking to and observing unstructured people, the approaches they take seem to consist of the following:

• Stressing out and procrastinating a lot before a major deadline, then putting one's head done and working until it's done;
• Getting nagged by a more structured person until it's done;
• At the last minute, cancelling all existing engagements in the lead-up to the deadline, then putting one's head down and working until it's done.

Because I'm a structured person, those don't really seem like proper approaches to me, but they seem to work for my unstructured friends!)

What sort of strategies do structured people employ? Well, I can't speak for all structured people, but here's what I do:

• I keep lists. Lots of them. I used to use Evernote, but then Guan introduced me recently to WorkFlowy, which is a simple lists/text program that aims to help you organise your brain. (It really does. I've been surprised at how much I use it and how well it's become integrated into my life after just one week of use!) I like how you can create, delete, move and even tag items easily, and that you can change the to "Complete" and hide them from sight so that they remain as a record if you ever require them again.

  Even after almost three years, I still use this method of day-to-day organisation (which is what I like to call my daily planner). But I also keep other lists—for example,

  • Shopping lists;
  • Things to knit (though a lot of that information is stored in Ravelry, which has very handy features like favouriting patterns, queueing projects and adding notes so I don't forget which yarn I intended for which project);
  • Backburner tasks that I'll get to one day (and sometimes these will get moved into the daily schedule, depending on how urgent they are);
  • Writing ideas—categorised by medium (e.g. ideas for blog posts, ideas for short stories, ideas for comics, etc.)

• I usually have some idea of when I'll have what I call “work time” and when I won't. At the moment, it's when Astrid is in childcare or is being babysat, which is at pretty regular times from week to week. So that gives me four or five slots to work with that range in length from three to five hours each.

  One of those slots I use for rest. It's usually one the same day, but occasionally I have to move it for whatever reason. I try to make it a priority because it's the only time in my week that I get to do whatever I want guilt-free. I try not to see anyone during that time (remember: introvert) and I usually spend it at home doing not much (“not much” being things like surfing the web, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching TV/DVDs, knitting and occasionally taking a walk). If I don't use my rest time as rest time (for example, this week when I used half of it to work on the Bible overview video), I really feel it for the rest of the week. So even though it seems trivial and something of a luxury, it's actually very important because it acts as the fuel that helps me get through the rest of my week. (Side note: I think that's one of the reasons why God commands us to rest one day in seven.)

  (Second side note: I think sometimes a lack of rest can lead to a greater desire to procrastinate. If you haven't rested, your body will keep on wanting to and you probably won't get anything useful done until you do. But it has to be guilt-free rest unencumbered by other commitments, otherwise it's not really worth it! [Mind you, if you just procrastinate for the sake of procrastinating, like Lisa Simpson in “The Book Job”, then it's probably more of a case of you actively choosing to do something than a lack of rest problem, and maybe more external motivators would help you.])

  With the other slots, when I work on my daily planner at the beginning of each week, I note what I want to do with that time. I may not actually do it when the time comes, but it helps me to have some sort of objective in mind. I try not to be rigid about it either: obviously if other things come up or Astrid gets sick, that might throw everything out. But then I just reschedule it for another day.

• I always have creative projects I want to be working on and some sort of plan for each of them (vague as though it might be). I don't tend to set myself deadlines for them because I don't think I have an accurate view of how fast (or slow) I work. Or if I do set deadlines, they're vague ones because I don't the pressure of any external motivating factors (like print or submission deadlines).

  (Mind you, I don't feel like I have a problem with motivation; I want to write, and will usually sit down to do it when I plan to. However, when I do, sometimes I'll engage in procrastinatory activities [like playing Tetris!], but not for the entire time; eventually my brain will kick in and I'll write something—even if it's not much. I think sometimes that perhaps I should do what Susannah Morgan Freeman says in The Busy Mom's Guide to Writing—that is, promise yourself some sort of nice reward for writing [like a new computer or a new piece of writing software or some books on your wishlist]—but I never do. I'm not sure that sort of motivator would actually work any better on me anyway [even if it would be nice to have another reason to buy some more books!])

• I work with my strengths and limitations. I know that if I've only had six hours of sleep the night before, I'm probably not going to be very productive and that's okay; I don't beat myself up about that. If I'm sick, I'm probably better off resting. If I haven't slept that much and need something more to get me through the rest of the day, my time is probably better spent napping. I remember that I am only a finite person and that that's the way God made me.

  I wish sometimes that I had the luxury of working the way David Mack works (i.e. creative stuff as soon as he wakes and is fresh, and then on emails and administration later in the day when he is more fatigued), and maybe I will one day. But not now: now I make the most of my afternoons and the post-lunch slump.

• I try to work with the natural rhythms of the human body, which kind of operates according to 45-minute, 90-minute and three-hour cycles. (Babies tend to have a sleep cycle of 45 minutes, whereas the adult sleep cycle is around 90 minutes.) Tony Schwartz did a very interesting talk on this subject (it goes for 31:11 minutes) in which he basically argues that although time is not a renewable resource (you can't get more of it; everyone has the same amount), energy is, and you can change certain things in your work habits in order to get more of it. So regarding the body's 90-minute cycle: generally you'll be fresher at the beginning of the cycle instead of at the end, so make the most of the beginning, and then at the end, take a rest before embarking on the next one: take a short walk, have something to eat, give yourself a brain break, etc. I don't quite operate so rigidly, but I try to work roughly according to those sort of time periods, or at least remain aware of them.

As I wrote the above, I kept thinking back to the post I wrote about “What I wish I knew about writing when I was in my 20s” (particularly some of the later points where I wrote, “To write, you have to make time to write”) and the one where I reviewed Rachel Power's The Divided Heart: Art and motherhood. Children make writing time much more finite, which means you need stamina and some degree of organisation to make it work. (But on the other hand, limited time may result in better use of that time simply because it is limited and there is no way you can extend it.) However, in my experience, most creative people tend to be unstructured people. So if that's you, what works for you?

Anyways, I thought it prudent to run it past someone with more theological training than me before I made anything public. I also had some ideas about what needed to be fixed, and it turns out I was right. And then the project got set aside as I strived to finish the first draft of my graphic novel script—mostly because the graphic novel script was more fun, but also because I knew I'd have to teach myself how to use iMovie. (And it's not that I'm anti-learning new things; it's just learning new things takes time and energy and effort, and no matter how many video tutorials you can watch, nothing beats getting in there and trying to do what you want to do (with the aid of Google).

I wanted to have it finished a lot sooner so I could move onto other creative projects, but then I got sick and that basically decimated a week's worth of working time. But here it is for your viewing pleasure.

A few things to note:

• Some of the images I used in the original slideshow were fine for a slideshow but couldn't be used for a video because of the licenses attached to them, which meant I had to swap them for other images, or draw some of the images myself;
• I'm really crappy at drawing. And colouring. And other assorted art stuffs;
• I am very grateful to Mark Barry who allowed me to use many of the diagrams and resources he put up on Visual Unit. (Mark also saw an early draft and gave me some feedback.);
• This is my first time ever using iMovie, so I don't really know what I'm doing, and of course I've overused the Ken Burns effect;
• I am not fond of the sound of my voice, but was unwilling to go through multiple takes to get it right. (Also, I figured it was easier to do the voiceover myself instead of trying to find someone who would do it for me as I couldn't pay anyone.);
• I'm really happy for Christians to use this in Bible study groups or other contexts in which you're studying the Bible and this would be a useful aid;
• I do not want this video to be remixed or re-appropriated in any way; please use it as it is;
• Feel free to contact me with any feedback or criticism, but as you do, please be aware that revising this video is pretty low on my list of priorities; I've got other things I want to be working on, and unless it's something major that needs fixing, I'm probably not going to re-do it. Sorry.

Right. Here's the video: “The Bible: A crash course” (10:26 min). Enjoy!

This week I've been sick with some sort of viral infection thingy manifesting itself in the form of a sore throat and a mild fever (though if that was mild, I'd hate to have a serious one). Being sick while trying to look after a small child is challenging, but fortunately for two of the days, I had booked half-day childcare in advance, and on the other day, Ben was also home sick, which made things feel easier even though he was also not in very good shape to share parenting duties.

This morning, hearing of my situation, a very kind church friend invited us over for a playdate—and even offered to mind Astrid without me and take her up to childcare when the time came if I was too ill. I was functioning on four hours of sleep, but I was feeling better—and as it turned out, well enough to stay for the duration of the playdate and enjoy my friend's company while Astrid enjoyed my friend's children's. The three of them played together quite happily and relatively independently, allowing us to actually have some semblance of a continuous conversation throughout the morning.

And I was struck by several things—firstly, how less intense parenting seems once the adult-to-child ratio rises above 1:1 (even if the ratio is in favour of the children); secondly, what it's like to juggle and attend to the needs of two little people (a skill I haven't yet needed to master); and thirdly, how important and valuable it was for me to be able to witness the lives of other people's families and their particular mix of personalities, the ways in which they operate from day to day, their attitudes and methods when it comes to parenting (which also arise from the personalities of their children), the things that the parents struggle with, and so on.

I think it's important because often I can get stuck in this little bubble of how I think parenting and family life ought to work—a view that can be reinforced (negatively) by the culture of parenting around me. I'm not sure if I've ever written about it here, but the state of modern parenthood—modern motherhood—seems to me to be immensely challenging: never in my life have I felt so much implicit and explicit judgement on my actions as when I became a mother. Once I did, suddenly everyone—from my immediate family to the stranger on the street—had an opinion on how I ought to be raising my child. (And it didn't matter if the person voicing the opinion was a parent or wasn't.) I used to think I was just being paranoid about it, but then after talking to other mothers, I've noticed that they feel it too. I visited a friend with her newborn in hospital recently and she expressed the same feeling to me too—that she constantly felt like she was doing the “wrong” thing; that she never knew what she ought to be doing; that even though she was sick of being hospital and wanted to go home, going home terrified her because then there would be no one around who could tell her what she should be doing with her baby. She had only given birth a few days before and already she felt the weight of societal judgement! I came away feeling amazed, slightly amused but also rather angry.

I don't think I'm the only one who's angry about it. I've noticed a whole bunch of articles coming through my Twitter feed about modern parenthood and the so-called Mommy wars. There's a growing recognition—at least among parents of my generation—that parents have very little control of how their children will turn out—that living up to some impossible standard of parenting is ridiculous—that one can only do one's best when it comes to one's child—that every child is different, every parent (and parental unit) is different and therefore every family is different. Whether or not this way of thinking will permeate into the rest of western culture remains to be seen (and probably there will be some sort of backlash against it too). But one of the threads of this reaction against modern parenthood that I've found very interesting and enlightening looks at modern western parenting in context of both parenting history and parenting in the rest of the world. Slate often has some fascinating articles on this subject—for example, this one on the history of toilet training advice (spoiler alert: a good portion of it has been dreadful) and this fascinating exploration of parental ethnotheories—that is, parental attitudes from different parts of the world. This paragraph (and the ones immediately following it) were particularly interesting for me:

Every society interprets its children in its own way: The Dutch, for example, liked to talk about long attention spans and “regularity,” or routine and rest. (In the Dutch mind, asking lots of questions is a negative attribute: It means the child is too dependent.) The Spanish talked about character and sociality, the Swedes about security and happiness. And the Americans talked a lot about intelligence. Intelligence is Americans' answer. In various studies, American parents are always seen trying to make the most of every moment—to give their children a developmental boost. From deep inside the belly of American parenthood, this is so obvious it isn't even an observation. It is only by looking at other societies that you can see just how anomalous such a focus is.

(Definitely go read the rest of the article if you're interested. It's totally worth it.)

How other countries and cultures thought about children and why had never occurred to me before. It made me think about the modes of thought and trends that are influencing the way my particular segment of the world views childrearing … and why. The article's author Nicholas Day writes, “Culture operates at a deeper level than any individual parenting choice”, and that struck me as being particularly important as I continue to work out what sort of mother I want to be and as Ben and I determine how we'd like our family to be.

All this haphazardly flashed through my head as I watched my friend and her children. It made me think that perspective is a beautiful and helpful thing. (Well, at least for me.) It stops me from getting too neurotic about what I am or am not doing right, and frees me to be a little more relaxed about the whole parenting gig. It also reminded me of something Tony Payne wrote in Briefing #343—not about parenting, but about applying the Bible:

The wonderful thing about the Bible is that it addresses reality—in both its simplicity and complexity. Its moral demand on us is, in one sense, simple and universal: love God and love your neighbour. No-one is exempt from this, and no-one has a higher obligation than anyone else. It's a truth that addresses every one of us identically. And yet the landscape in which we live out this singular command is complex and varied, and as individuals we are complex and varied. To speak the language of ethics, the moral field that confronts us is pluriform. (p. 5)

(Sorry I seem to be jumping around a lot. Let me see if I can pull it all together.) I think sometimes we parents can get a little too caught up in the nitty gritty of the practicalities of parenting—for example, whether we discipline our children by using the Naughty Spot or by taking away privileges, or a combination of both. Because of the implicit and explicit judgement we face, we can often feel like we're doing the right thing or the wrong thing when it comes to our children. Which then results in us worrying about whether we should have done something else because it's better. But if we are Christian parents, the moral demand God makes of us is to love him first and love our children. How we live out the latter command is complex and varied, and furthermore, that's okay.

This sounds like a rather simple and obvious conclusion to come to. I suppose I am having my own little reaction to the state of modern parenting. If I have bored you with this post, my apologies; please feel free to skip all future parenting/domestic posts and read the work-related/writing/arty ones.

Hmm, better stop there. After all this time, I still have issues with being brief.

Since I last did an update, I have:

• Sorted out CCLI matters at church. (In brief, that has to do with music copyright and various related reporting.) I also cleared out a big stack of old overhead transparencies and copies of sheet music;
• Finished the first draft of my graphic novel script. (MASSIVE woohoos!);
• Booked joint and solo tables for promoting and selling Kinds of Blue at Comic Gong (which is a comics event down Wollongong way), the zine fair at the Museum Contemporary Art that happens in conjunction with the Sydney Writers Festival in May, and Supanova Sydney;
  
• Been interviewed by the lovely Emmet O'Cuana on Beardy and the Geek, a podcast devoted to Australian comics (the interview goes for about an hour). (Oh, also Kinds of Blue was reviewed briefly on the Watcha podcast—the Super Aussie Special.)
• Started the process of uploading Kinds of Blue to Comixology under their indie creators Submit program;
• Knitted a whole lot of random stuff (which you can view on my Ravelry page if you're a member);
• Received feedback on my Bible overview slideshow, which I hope to redraft and put online at some stage; and
• (At Kathleen's encouragement,) attended the Speculative Fiction Festival at the NSW Writers Centre, which then led to me joining a really interesting writing group whose members produce really high quality work (and also—BIG SQUEES!—I met Garth Nix and Melina Marchetta and got books signed by them).

Right: in the interests of keeping things short, I'll leave it there. Hopefully more random writing-y bits and pieces on other stuff in the future.

Marc is also the author of Catalyst (The Passage of Hellsfire Book 1), a young adult fantasy coming-of-age romance, and its sequel, What Once Was One. (He's got six books planned for that series.) His work is mostly available through e-readers, however, if memory serves correctly, you can now get Catalyst in print.

Right then. On with the self-interview.

1. What is the title of your book?

As I've only published one book, I'm going to be talking about Kinds of Blue, an anthology of short comics about depression. I called it that because I wanted to bring out the idea of different aspects to depression (depression and marriage, depression and music, depression and suicide, depression and food, etc.) And, of course, I was riffing off of Miles Davis.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

As I wrote here and here, it was a combination of wanting to make comics and having lived with depression for a number of years and having a rich pool of experiences to draw from. Despite depression being such a common malady (BeyondBlue reports that it affects one in five people at various points in their lives), it's not very well understood. Which also means that people who aren't depression sufferers have very little idea of how to help. The nice thing about comics is that the medium can convey so much more than prose can on its own. So what I and my collaborators aimed to do with the book is to, firstly, capture the experience of what it's like to have depression and convey that in such a way that people who don't have it can understand, and secondly, provide a few suggestions on what can help and how others can help the depressed.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Good question. It's sort of self-help/mental health, but then it's also a comics anthology. I guess, broadly speaking, it's more non-fiction than fiction, but that categorisation doesn't quite sit so well either. What would you call it?

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This is a difficult question to answer in this case, but here are a few ideas:

• Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Anne Hathaway for “The real you”
• Andrew Garfield or James MacAvoy for “Toward the waves”
• Audrey Tatou for “Reel life” (though I wonder if I only think that because those scenes of her in the cinema in Amélie influenced the script)
• Michael Fassbender for “Nihilo”
• James MacAvoy for “The black dog must die”
• Zooey Deschanel for Knitting therapy
• Dakota Fanning for “A friend in need”

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

An anthology of short comics about different aspects of depression.

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

This is hard to say. I think I had all the scripts finished in about five months, but art production wasn't complete until 10 months.

7. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My wonderful husband Ben, who is also a depression sufferer.

8. What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

The work of many of the artists is just gorgeous and served to bring out the nuances of each story really well.

Kinds of Blue is available in both print and e-book format. We are fast running out of print copies, so don't miss out. We ship worldwide!

9. Is your book self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday, February 27th are:

• Paul Caggegi
• Jessica White

Anyway, they had an opportunity to ask Neil questions via writing them on slips on paper and putting them in the box in the foyer before the readings began, and then after intermission he answered some of them. Most fortuitously he answered mine (which was written with The Divided Heart in mind). (NB I didn't phrase it quite like this, but you get the gist.)

Dear Neil,

How did you cope with being a parent and a full-time writer?

Relatively well. But mostly because when I was a parent of seriously small children, I was incredibly nocturnal as a writer. So I mostly coped by being the sort of parent who did the faffing around and making dinner—I would make the dinner and I would do all that kind of stuff, and put the kids to bed. And then, once the kids were in bed—I'd read to them or whatever—then, really, my work day would probably start about 9. And then it would go until about 5—6 o'clock in the morning, and then my wife would get up and do the morning part of being a parent—take the kids to school and stuff. So that was how we did it. I'm not sure how that would work for anybody else. But that was how I did it.

You can listen to Neil's reading of the first two chapters of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, plus the question time on SoundCloud. It's about an hour and 16 minutes long.

I did take pictures but they are not anywhere convenient for me to drop in this post. Ah well …

(Little incidentals about the night that I wish to record before I forget: the Hive Mind, Bec W and I had dinner beforehand, then went to a pharmacy to get a few things for people, and then after we crossed the road and entered the laneway that leads to City Recital Hall, we spotted Neil walking in the opposite direction with his handler/assistant, and Guan and I grinned at him, and I waved like an idiot and he waved back. Later that night after the performance was over, Bec W and I went for drinks with Paul and his friends in a pub very close by, but the rest of the Hive Mind went home. It was getting rather late, so Bec W and I said goodbyes and headed home, and in that same area as before, we found Neil surrounded by fans and members of FourPlay, signing things and answering random questions from people. He was kind enough to sign the copy of Chu's Day I'd bought for Astrid [which doesn't get released here until March]. That totally made my night and I went home on cloud nine, sorely tempted to stay up all night writing—only to be brought back down to earth with the remembrance that it was my turn to do breakfast duties the following morning.)

• I finished the Monster Editing Project. It looked like this:
  
  The internals looked like this:
  
  And to give you a sense of scale, here it is compared to a Macbook:
  
  The final page count came to 492 (hence the “Monster” in Monster Editing Project). I was pretty pleased with the result, even though the dimensions were a little bigger than expected. It's the first book that I have designed, laid out and edited, and while I obviously still don't know all the tricks of InDesign, my familiarity with this piece of software is definitely a lot higher than it was before.
• I organised the music for my church's carols service. This meant choosing songs, asking people to be in the band, organising rehearsals (which was tricky; ever tried to find four dates in a one-and-a-half-month period that suit nine people?), sending reminders about rehearsals, coordinating rehearsals and keeping them moving, designing (and correcting) the carols booklet (because I had to cross-check lyrics and make sure the singers were singing the right words), making decisions about music arrangements, liaising with sound and tech people, and so on. It was manageable, but pretty exhausting.
• On top of that, I ended up designing the flyer for my church's Christmas events. That kind of happened by accident, and it was sort of because …
• … I agreed to handle the promotions for the church's Twilight Markets. So that meant (in the end) doing the flyer, putting stuff on the website, doing some letter box drops (fortunately I did not have to coordinate the drops!), asking various organisations and shops if we could leave the flyers for people to take (or if we could put some up in the windows to inform locals that these things were happening), emailing various websites asking if they would list our events, coordinating announcements at both the morning and evening services, putting blurbs on the back of service outlines, making slides to go with the announcements, attending meetings, creating Facebook events, and shuttling the roster in between morning and evening services.
• I also had a stall at the Twilight Markets to sell Kinds of Blue, and Guan kindly came to help me out. Fortunately all the admin for the markets was done by the actual day, so all we had to do was hang out that afternoon, hand out postcards and sell books.
  
  It did rain a bit, but despite the rains, we had a steady flow of people coming through and some good conversations with people. I even ran into a girl I used to go to school with who said that Kinds of Blue would be really helpful to her work.
• Oh! I missed a bit. I was also asked to do some back-up vocals on a friend's album, so I spent an afternoon (which was actually the day of the carols) learning stuff and doing a bit of recording at the home of my friend's recording techie. It was fun! I've never done anything like that before, and not only was it supremely cool to be asked to be involved in someone else's creative project, I really enjoyed the process of recording. It felt like a bit of a sing-a-long because I would stand there with these massive headphones on, listening for where I had to come in to sing my part. We might do a couple of takes, but then it would be over. I guess if I had had to do it for hours, it would not have been as much fun, but my responsibilities were pretty minimal and I was only there for about four or five hours. I only sang on two tracks and the album's not out until Easter, but my friend did send me four demo tracks that I've been listening to a lot lately. It's not the sort of music I gravitate to (it's kind of rock opera metal), but for some reason I'm really into it! (And then I went straight from recording to the carols service, and then the following day I had the Twilight Markets, so I was pretty stuffed by the time the weekend was over.)
• Then came Christmas and the craziness that surrounded it. I did the bulk of my Christmas shopping in October, but there were still bits and pieces to get. I was also making things for two people, and unfortunately those two projects took longer than expected. One was this tunic for my mum with a pattern I sort of made up, based on something I made her last year:
  
  The other was a shawl made from silk/stainless steel yarn that was basically the shawl version of the Knitty Tin Roof Scarf, which was for my stepmother:
  
  I didn't actually finish that one in time for when we saw her and my dad, so I ended up finishing it at the dinner table with them waiting patiently. I felt bad, but as I'd stayed up until 4 am the night before trying to finish it, I was determined that she walk out with it on her as they were flying out of the control in the next couple of days and wouldn't be back for about three months. (If you're on Ravelry and are interested in what I've made over the last six months, visit my project page.)
• Christmas also involved me trying to make it a bit more special for Astrid. So I put up our tree, I put up some lights and I took out the Mexican nativity set and arranged it on the kitchen counter. One evening we took Astrid out to see the lights in the neighbouring suburb—just for an hour or so. She also came to carols (but I don't know if she enjoyed it.) She's a lot more aware of things now, and I think she enjoyed Christmas overall, even though four family events made it a bit full-on.
• Following Christmas, we had something of a family break for a couple of weeks while Ben was on leave. We caught up with friends and family, we visited the zoo and we hung out, just the three of us, a fair bit, which Astrid loved because normally Ben goes off to work and she doesn't get to see him as much as she sees me. One of the highlights was having yum cha with some friends and then going to see the entrance of the giant rubber duck as part of the Sydney Festival. It was a stinking hot day and we were lucky that one of us was able to go for umbrellas and things to shield us from the sun, and at one point, we were wondering if something had gone wrong because the band and acrobats were forced to repeat one section of their act, but finally the duck came through Pyrmont Bridge and we found the wait had been worth it: it was pretty cool!
• After Ben returned to work, it took a little while for the rhythm of the week to return to normal as things like Swim School didn't start up again for a little while. I organised play dates and tried to keep myself sane. I was so proud of myself: I even scheduled four date nights—with babysitting!—on which Ben and I visited the Moonlight Cinema to enjoy a light dinner and a movie.
• I was keen to return to writing, but I had made a commitment to do a bunch of things for church that happened to coincide with the start of the year. One of them involved a lot of admin for the church's play group: working out what we needed in terms of databases, adding contacts to the church's database, coordinating a mailout and bulk email, designing and producing flyers and posters, and re-doing the registration form.
• The other major area of church volunteer work involved the women's ministry and the start-of-year event: I did the design work for the flyer, created a slide to go with service announcements, scheduled the service announcements, organised for a blurb to go on the back of the service outlines, updated the website, created a mailing list, designed and created an email to be sent to the list, designed and laid out the booklet for the actual day, worked out (in conjunction with one of the other committee members) what was going to happen in the afternoon workshop (and who was going to do what), wrote (well, am writing; I've hit the editing stage) a slideshow presentation for the workshop that's kind of a Bible overview, plus I've got a few blurbs and things to write for the bits of the workshop I'm in charge of.

So volunteer church work is kind of dominating things at the moment. I've got one more major thing to do for them, and then I'd like to take a break from this intense one-off activity for a little while. I remember Phillip Jensen (Dean of Sydney at St Andrew's Cathedral) once saying at some Christian convention or other that if Christian ministry is taking up more and more of your time, you should seriously consider it as a vocation. Church stuff is filling up my time, but I don't think that this is what he meant. (And I never ever want to become a church administrator. I'm good at admin and various related things, but I never want to do that.) It is a privilege and a pleasure to serve my local church in this capacity (and it's interesting to keep on learning new skills [like more InDesign skillz] and bits of software), but at the same time, I am mindful of the fact that I need to keep my activities for them contained somewhat, otherwise the writing won't happen, and I'd really like to make the writing happen more this year.

The other thing I'd like to note just to finish is just how much volunteers at church do. I'm only one small cog in the wheels that make things happen at church, and seeing what goes on behind the scenes and how much time and effort people put in is marvellous to me: it really makes me appreciate how much wonderful and diverse the people in God's family are in a 1 Corinthians 12 sense. We truly are a blessing to each other.

(P.S. I thought of something else. If you're interested in what Ben and I have to say occasionally about music, follow us on Twitter at @iheargoodthings.)

• When I was young (as in primary school young), I wanted to be a writer. I didn't have dreams about growing up and getting married; the only thing I ever wanted to do with my life was to write books. When I said this to other adults, they told me, “Authors don't make much money.” (They weren't lying to me; that's the reality of the business. It's even worse if you're in comics.) However, the thing those adults forgot about was that some people do make money—and sometimes a lot of money. (Not that [of course] money is the object of writing; it's just that people have this idea that you cannot support yourself through writing alone—that it's some kind of impossible feat. It's not impossible; it's just difficult, and only the few manage it.)
• When I was in high school, the administration made us all take a subject called “Careers”. It basically consisted of looking up the University Admissions Guide, figuring out which degrees looked interesting at which universities and then looking at what you needed to do to get into them. It had very little to do with the concept of a “career”. (That could be because the teacher had no idea about careers himself; his personal life seemed to be something of a train wreck—or at least the bits he shared with us.) It did not give us any idea of the trajectory of someone's working life and how it can change. At 17, I somehow had this naïve notion that people chose their careers following high school and stuck to them for the rest of their lives. In reality, people do all sorts of things and end up in the unlikeliest of places—often by pure chance. Take, for example, the author of the Monster Editing Project: when he finished high school, World War II had just finished and all the university places were going to ex-servicemen to help them reintegrate into normal life. His only ambition was to see the world, but he thought he could only do that by joining the marines or the airforce (both of which rejected him). Because he had good grades in science, he was given an apprenticeship at a factory that made ship engines. From there, he got a job as an engineer on an oil tanker (which allowed him to see much of the world in his early 20s). Then he worked as an engineer on a cruise ship liner (hence more travelling). When he and his wife married, they moved from England to Canada, and his engineering experience landed him a job with a telecommunications company (which involved more travelling but all over Canada instead of all over the world). Later, he decided he wanted to go work in Australia, so he got a job with the Australian government on a missile launch site. He and his wife didn't like living in Australia, so they moved back to Canada, where he started working for a company that helped factories automate their processes with computers, and he pretty much stayed in that industry for the rest of his professional life. I wonder now whether you are the anomaly if you've managed to stay in the same sort of job for the whole of your career.
• If I was teaching Careers now, I would set my students the following assignment:

  Think of someone whose job you'd love to have and tell me about that person: how did this person get this job? What does his or her job entail? What appeals to you about this job?

  (“Job” is probably the wrong word to use, but “career” doesn't seem quite right either. Anyway, I hope you understand what I mean. Also, I would have totally done the assignment on Neil Gaiman had I known about him when I was 17.)
• Neil Gaiman gives the best advice to would-be writers. (See, for example, his commencement speech at the University of the Arts [19:55 min], which I wish I had heard when I graduated from university. If you don't have time to watch that, read this comic illustrating what he said.) Here's some of his advice (via David Mack at Supanova Sydney):

  In order to produce art, you have to do three things:

  1. Start (for many people will talk about starting and never do)
  2. Finish (for many people will start and talk about their current project when the reality is they haven't touched it in several weeks, and many people will never finish what they've started)
  3. Once you've finished, show it to someone.

  I think Gaiman also says that when he says this to people, they think he's nuts—as if, “That's all?!!” But it's harder than it sounds. Starting is hard—being confronted with that blank page with all its possibilities—even when you have an idea and/or something to say. Finishing is hard because life gets in the way, your enthusiasm and/or motivation wanes, the work gets frustrating, and so on. And showing you work to others requires allowing yourself to be vulnerable—to open yourself up to the possibility of rejection and/or criticism (although learning to take criticism well is a good skill to acquire—particularly criticism that will help you grow as a creator).
• While taking Careers in high school, I noted the places where I could study writing at a tertiary level (because I didn't know what else to do. [FYI my alternative options were a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Architecture. Yeah, I know: architecture. I thought it would be interesting because I like looking at houses.]). Studying the University Admissions Guide brought it down to two choices: a Bachelor of Creative Arts majoring in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong (UOW) or a Bachelor of Arts in Communication majoring in Writing at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I ended at UOW. (They liked my portfolio and they offered me a scholarship.) I don't regret the choice or the experience I gained from UOW. But I do think that it was deficient in many ways. This post on Neil Gaiman's blog captures much of what it was like to do a university-level writing course (you'll have to scroll down halfway)—particularly this bit:

  You can expect to learn a lot about craft in a creative writing program—how to develop characters, work on elements of narration, and, possibly, get some good feedback from other writers about your work. The dominant model for a writing program is the workshop where you distribute your story to everyone in your class, they read it, and come back the next week to critique it. Depending on the professor, this can be a valuable experience or it can be devastating. If you get class members who want to destroy any writer they see as competition for the title of “best in class,” the workshop can be quite destructive to a young writer who is just beginning to develop a sense of him or herself. Regardless of whether it's a good workshop or not, you will be in a class with a lot of other writers who want to create ART and will scoff at anything that doesn't have literary aspirations.

  Creative writing programs will not teach you how to be a published writer. Talking about the business aspects of writing seems to be taboo in most programs. You will not learn how to assess writers' guidelines, find publications that are looking for what you write, find an agent or, in anyway, make money from your writing. Though most writers do not make a living by writing, creative writing programs don't see themselves as needing to teach job skills. I think it's because of this taboo most creative writing programs have a very strong bias against genre writing. Science fiction, fantasy, historical, romance, young adult (although there are starting to be programs specifically geared toward YA now) any writing you would not find in the “literature” section of the bookstore will be actively discouraged and, in some cases, forbidden in your classes.

  Looking back on my degree, I think it taught me the following:
  • How to look at creative work critically
  • (Following on from the above) how to edit and also give feedback to others (even though the classroom model could have been better; personally, I like following the Rules of Good Banking: 1. Deposit before you withdraw [i.e. say something nice before you say something critical] and 2. Make more deposits than withdrawals)
  • How not to run a writing workshop
  That's it from four years of study.
• As mentioned above, my degree didn't teach me anything about the publishing industry and the business aspects of writing. I feel like I'm learning that now through Kinds of Blue and the whole self-publishing process, plus occasionally I learn things through the internet about things like agents, publishing contracts, e-books, rights and so on. However, it is a massive field, and one thing that people seem to mention over and over again is that people only know about their corner of the industry, which means that it doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the industry.
• Before you can publish, however, you need to write something worth publishing. Here's the other key thing that my writing degree didn't teach me: discipline. They kind of assumed that their students would develop it on their own. They did tell us to write every day—to keep a journal and carry it around everywhere (which I did obediently for years until I realised my bookshelves were filling up with very nice hardcover journals filled with my scribbles that I would not necessarily look at again). But there was no acknowledgement of the difficulties involved in writing everyday—in keeping focused on your project despite the turmoils of everyday life—in pushing on even when you don't want to—in making successes out of the ashes of repeated failures. (Writing is often compared to exercise for good reason.) So many writers talk about how the important thing is just turning up and doing it (see, for example, the words of these 13 writers on writers block. Note how many of them refuse to acknowledge that writers block exists.) Their words make me think of another activity that requires discipline: Bible reading. I like to think that before I had Astrid, I was “good” at Bible reading: the habit was tied with an activity I usually did daily (i.e. eating my breakfast). So if I ate breakfast, I usually read my Bible and prayed too. But then I had a baby and that routine went completely out the window, and I had to find other ways of fitting it in. (At the moment, I listen to the Bible on MP3 through my iPhone while preparing lunch or doing housework, and I pray in little grabs throughout the day, though I do neither activity as thoroughly as I used to.) For me, writing is a different thing altogether in that it is important to me, but it is not as important as the other activities I must fit into my day as a Christian, a wife and a mother. Which leads me to my next point …
• To write, you need to make time to write. I said that writing wasn't as important to me as my responsibilities as a Christian, a wife and a mother, however, I still try and fit it in around those things. To me, being a Christian means that I prioritise the following activities: reading the Bible, prayer, going to church, and serving my church. (At the moment, I've become a little over-committed to church things because I'm helping out at play group, I play and sing in the band twice a month [and I usually pick the songs for the weeks I'm on], I occasionally lead Bible study [well, that's happened once this term], I'm on the women's ministry committee, and recently I agreed to organise the music for our church's carols service as well as handle the publicity for the Twilight Markets, which also meant doing the design work for the Christmas flyer.) Being a wife and mother means loving and caring for my husband and child, doing stuff to ensure our household keeps running (i.e. housework—boring!), and ensuring that I can continue to do these things (i.e. by making sure that I also make time to rest). Not everyone is in the same situation as me, and that could easily lead me to think that other people have more time. But that's not true: we all have as much time as each other; we just choose to spend it in different ways. However, the relationships we find ourselves in mean that for some of us, there are more non-negotiable demands on our time. Being a wife means not neglecting your husband; being a mother means not neglecting your child. That does not mean giving up everything for their sake, but nor does it mean refusing to fulfill those responsibilities. (If I did refuse, that would make me a bad wife and mother.) In my early 20s post-university, I wasn't single, but I did have more negotiable time. Yes, I was working in a full-time job and commuting roughly an hour each way (thanks to Sydney's wonderful public transport system!) I was involved with my church, but I still had evenings that were free and weekends that weren't filled with much. So now, looking back, I wish I had used it better. I wish I had used more of it for writing. I wish I had known what I know now about writing and publishing (specifically: 1. Start, 2. Finish, 3. Show someone, and 4. Be disciplined enough to make 1 and 2 happen). If I could talk to my younger self, I would tell her to start small—to set aside an hour each work to write something. I remember I did have projects I could have worked on (for example, I envisaged a novel around the story of Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Balthasar. [Yes, this was around the time Baz Luhrmann's movie was released.]) An hour isn't much, but it's a start, and perhaps in time, that hour could have become three. Or more. I would have told my younger self that it's all about limits—that once your time becomes finite (and with children, it becomes ever so finite—which means, you can see its limits more clearly), you become more productive because you can only use what you've been given. When the possibilities are infinite, creativity gets stymied. So say to yourself, “I am going to write from 3 to 4:30 pm and I am going to work on Project X” and go do it. If you get something done, FANTASTIC! If not, kudos to you anyway for turning up and giving it a go. Don't give up; try it again. And again. And again—until it's done.
• To write, you have to make time to write. As a mother, it's harder, but as Susannah Morgan Freeman writes in The Busy Mom's Guide to Writing, there is always a way. For me, I decided to make writing my part-time “job” and have used childcare and other babysitting help to do it. It hasn't been that way for the entire year; almost three months have been devoted to the Monster Editing Project, plus I did a lot of volunteer work for church recently, and of course there was stuff I needed to do for Kinds of Blue and Supanova. But even so, I've managed to write 53 pages of the script of my graphic novel. (And the other day, I was inspired by Supanova to write a six-page script that may never become an actual comic.) I'd like to finish it before the end of the year (and I realise that the end of the year is fast approaching, so it may not happen). But that's okay; if I don't meet that goal, it's not the end of the world. I'll push on. Next year will be much the same, I hope; I've squirrelled away part of my tax return to pay for childcare so that I can continue. I realise I'm in a very fortunate position: not many have the opportunity to do what I'm doing. So I'm very grateful that I can. And it could be that the graphic novel will never eventuate. Nevertheless, nothing is wasted; I still would have learned and grown creatively from the experience. And I would have gotten it out of my system and (hopefully) I'll be able to move onto something else.
• Now, all this is very well if you have an idea for a project. If you don't, I probably can't help you because I've never struggled with that; I always have more ideas than I have time to work on. Which means I have very little understanding of people who don't have ideas. I guess if you're not an ideas person, you can do the following:
  • Get commissioned to carry out someone else's idea. This is particularly good if they also have an avenue for publishing and are willing/able to pay you for your work.
  • Collaborate with someone else who has ideas.
  • Learn to look for ideas. They're everywhere; they just need to be caught. Pursue your passions and interests. Put two things together that have never been combined before. Put yourself in situations where you'll get bored and be forced to think of something interesting. Daydream.

Given what had happened in Melbourne with Tiger Airways and our luggage allowance, I mailed 30 books and 2000 postcards to Kathleen in Brisbane. (Kathleen was the artist on “Nihilo” and “Knitting therapy”) The original plan was that I was going to stay with her. Then she got nominated for a World Fantasy Award, so of course she had to go to Toronto! She very kindly offered her place for accommodation and her car for transport, and even her flatmate (Aimee) as a table helper (with Aimee's agreement, mind you!) But then several things happened: firstly, friends of ours from our Wollongong days moved to Brisbane for work and invited us to come stay, and secondly, because of that, Ben thought he'd like to come too and take Astrid as well. Thirdly, Tiger had a sale on flights, so I ended up booking for the three of us to fly together. (However, I didn't realise that stuff happens at Supanova on the Friday in Brisbane. I couldn't change my flight so I just left it and told the others that we would not be selling books on that day.) I was excited that we were all going away together for the weekend (well, sort of; I would be engaged for most of that time), but I was also nervous about taking Astrid on a plane for the first time. I also took the precaution of pre-booking the maximum amount of luggage allowance (i.e. 40kg each way) just in case we needed it. And then I told Kathleen who graciously made time to drop off the books to Dan (who was the artist on “Toward the waves”).

Anyway, here is how it all unfolded:

Friday 9th November

I did most of the packing for all of us the previous day, but there were still bits and pieces to finish off. (Being the control freak that I am, I had multiple packing lists to make sure nothing we left behind—not even the bits and pieces I needed to cosplay. I even painted my nails blue several days beforehand.) We went to my mum's in the morning because Friday is normally the day we see her and Peter (though we normally go in the afternoon) and I don't like to miss a week. (Neither do they.) On the way there, my car engine started smoking because it was out of coolant, which was pretty scary! So Peter helped me fix it.

While they had Astrid, I went for a walk down to the local mall just to wander around and window shop child-free. Then when I came back, Astrid was just finishing her lunch, so we packed up and headed home. But foolishly I forgot my purse! So Ben had to come get it later.

Back at home, I put Astrid down for her nap and finished the rest of the packing. She woke up just before we had to leave (most fortunately!) Bec W arrived then (she was very kindly giving us a lift to the airport!), so we were just waiting on Ben. And then we all piled in Ben's car and drove to the airport, arriving with only a bit of time to spare as check-in was going to close very soon.

We needn't have worried; our flight time got pushed back. The gate for our flight changed three times—from one end of the airport to the other—so we ended up walking back and forth, Ben carrying Astrid most of the way as she wanted to be carried or was tired of walking. That really made me wish that we hadn't had to check in our stroller. Ah well.

Time passed. Our flight, which was supposed to leave at 5:15 pm, was rescheduled for 6:00 pm because the plane was late coming back from Brisbane due to wild weather. We decided to have something to eat in the food court (Sumo salad—which Astrid refused to eat, so I thought to myself, “Stuff it!” and bought her chicken nuggets from McDonald's because I just wanted her to eat something and I knew she'd eat them). I'm glad we did because we wouldn't have had another opportunity to do so. Finally Tiger started boarding us at around 6:10 pm. I don't think we got in the air until 7 pm, and then we were airborne for about two hours. I must say Astrid coped marvellously well, given the tediousness of it all, the late hour of the day (it got well past her bedtime) and the confines of the plane. (Also, I knew Tiger was a budget airline and so wasn't expecting much from them, however I was still surprised at how little allowance was made for us, given that we had a child with us.) I was prepared: George had advised bringing some non-electronic entertainment/activities for Astrid for the times when we couldn't use the iPad, so I had packed her nappy bag full of coloured pencils and paper, and books of various kinds. We resorted to the iPad close to the very end when she was getting really restless and complaining, “I want to get off!” (to which I mentally replied, “I know, honey, we all want to get off.” We were in the air for two hours and finally landed in Brisbane at around 9 pm. (I am proud of myself for being so well-prepared: I brought some of those lollipops made of fruit juice that Artisse make, and I gave one to Astrid during take-off and one during landing to help with the changing cabin pressure and its effect on her ears.)

Here's Ben and Astrid on the plane before take-off:

Simon met us at the gate after we landed and helped us with our luggage. Fortunately he had a spare carseat, which meant we didn't have to bring one for Astrid. We drove for another hour to get to his and Amanda's place—which is located as far out of Brisbane that can be still called Brisbane. (Their back windows overlook paddocks and bush.) Of course, we stopped for McDonalds on the way as we were all hungry again (which meant more nuggets for both me and Astrid!) Amanda was still up to greet us and get us settled, but obviously their kids had long since gone to bed.

I got stuff ready for the following day (I was bringing the table cloths, signs, display copies and float), and then we all went to bed at around midnight, exhausted.

Saturday 10th November

I got up at 6:30 am or so because I knew I had an hour-long train ride into Brisbane to get to the RNA Showgrounds on time. The other kids were already awake and making noise, so of course Astrid woke too. I dressed her and took her out to meet them. (Before we had left Sydney, I had tried to show Astrid photos of the family we were staying with so that she would have a bit of familiarity before meeting them.) They were all wary with one another, the way kids are. Amanda kept them all busy so I could go have a shower. Then we headed downstairs for breakfast, where Simon made us French toast. He dropped me off at the station (which was a 15-minute drive away), and I just managed to catch my train. I had been hoping to get one of TransLink's go cards, but that station didn't sell them. (If I had been more organised, I would have arranged to have one sent to me earlier.) There were Supanova attendees on the train already; you could tell by their costumes!

The train had a series of ads about train etiquette up on its walls. This was one of them:

I've since been told that the ads have become a meme (warning: some humour in that link may offend).

I got off at Bowen Hills and then tried to figure out where to go. Thankfully, Maps on my iPhone showed me the way. (I probably should have gotten off at Fortitude Valley but I didn't know any better.) It was sprinkling, so I walked along, juggling umbrella, iPhone and wheely suitcase. There were a couple of other Supanova attendees walking along too, so I kind of half-followed them, and came in the back way. Dan had picked up the exhibitor passes the previous day because he wanted to go to Friday's seminars, so I didn't actually have one. The staff let me in anyway; I guess they figured who else would be dragging around a wheely suitcase! I got a bit lost, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be as the con was spread out between a number of buildings and there were two areas for Artists Alley, but I eventually figured it out. RNA Showgrounds was being renovated, so we were in halls like these:

Showing the right paperwork got me into the right building eventually, and I went and set everything up and did the finishing touches on my Coraline costume. I ended up looking like this:

I modified the costume a little for what I thought was going to be Brisbane head—T-shirt instead of jumper, shorts instead of jeans, sandals instead of gumboots. (Turns out gumboots plus raincoat would have been perfect for that sort of day!)

Then I called Dan to find out where he was. He arrived not long after. Then Aimee (who was with Caitlene, our other helper) called to say where she was. I didn't have much familiarity with the site, but I went out anyway and had a look for them. Foolishly I should have brought my umbrella as it was raining, but the raincoat kept me mostly dry. I finally managed to locate Aimee and Caitlene and give them their exhibitor badges, and then we ran and tried to dodge the rain all the way back to the hall where the table was. Here's Dan at the table:

Here's Caitlene and Aimee:

Notice Caitlene's catbus hat!

The con had opened by this stage and there were already people milling around. I gave everyone some garbled instructions about everything, then sent Aimee and Caitlene off to explore while I took the first shift handing out postcards. We also met our neighbours on the left—Meg of Pirate Dragon, who makes the most amazing steampunk jewellery out of old watch parts and the like:

(Unfortunately there's only a couple of pictures of it up on her site, but believe me, it was gorgeous!) Also, her tablemate Janet, who knows both Kathleen and Aimee and who became our first customer:

The rest of the day was pretty straightforward: we took it in shifts to hand out postcards and walk around the con floor/go to stuff. As usual, there were people everywhere. And as usual, there were a LOT of cosplayers everywhere. This time, I was a lot bolder about asking them to pose for photos as I realised that that's partly the point and also that cosplayers rather like the attention: it's rather flattering when someone wants to take your picture because they recognise who you're dressed as and they think it's cool. (I got photographed four times as Coraline and it tickled me pink!) Here's a Vulpix:

(The ears on her head measure her brainwaves via the things on her ear and forehead, and move the ears accordingly. Pretty cool, eh!)

My Little Pony:

Halo Kitty:

Dalek girl:

A couple of steampunk pirate wenches:

A steampunk wind-up girl (she actually had a key in her back):

(We got quite a lot of steampunk passersby because of Meg's table.)

The Mad Hatter:

Minecraft guy:

A lovely trio of Lokis:

Deadpool:

Spider-Man:

Leela and Nibbler:

Death (the non-Gaiman kind):

Spartan from 300:

Batman and Robin:

Tardis girl:

I got to have a bit of a walk around during the afternoon, and I met Sorab Del Rio, creator of Zombie Cities. I also got James Brouwer to sign a copy of The Deep Vol 1: Here Be Dragons (which he did with Tom Taylor; the book won an Aurealis award this year). Here's a model of a hobbit hole that the people across from us had brought:

Later, I queued with hundreds of other people to hear John DiMaggio and Billy West, two of the voice actors from Futurama.

Even though I was quite far back and could barely see the stage, it didn't matter because hearing them do all the voices was enough. Their panel gave me a healthy respect for voice acting.

Some of the Supanova volunteers acted as gophers for us and got us lunch, which was very nice of them. Cons always seem friendlier and nicer when you feel like the managing powers are looking out for you!

Dan disappeared for part of the afternoon to hang out with a friend of his who is an entertainment journalist—which meant he got to hang out in the green room with some of the big-name celebrities (Tom Felton, anyone?) (He did the same thing the following day and got to play Scrabble with Elvira. I don't know who won.)

The con closed at 6 pm. I took the books in my wheely suitcase but left everything else. We bade farewell to Dan, and then Aimee, Caitlene and I walked towards Fortitude Valley station. Aimee even lent me her go card for the train as once again, I was cutting it fine and only just caught it. I spent the train trip painting my nails black for the following day's cosplay. Of course, doing it on public transport meant I did quite a shoddy job:

While I had been gone, Ben, Simon and Amanda had taken the kids to the free council zoo and then home for a sleep. The kids had also been playing a video game and building stuff with the Duplo we had brought them (which they had really loved—yay!)

Amanda met me at the station and drove to wear the drive-in was. She even had dinner for me in the car. Simon, Ben and the kids were already there. We sprinted through the rain over the wet grass to where they were—me with an umbrella and Amanda wearing my Coraline raincoat. We were seeing a double bill—Brave and The Avengers. Apparently Astrid had been watching the screen intently ever since Brave had begun. I was worried that it would be a little too scary for her—especially the bits with Mordu—but she sat on my lap while I whispered things in her ear like, “This bit might be a bit scary. It's okay, you don't have to watch it,” and “Now the bear is chasing the girl” and other plot explanations. I'm not sure how much she understood but she seemed to enjoy the film.

When the movie finished, we tried to get the kids to sleep. They were already a bit narky because it was past their bedtime, but I think it was quite distracting being able to see the screen and having stuff going on around them. Amanda and I ended up stringing up our jumpers to block their view of the screen. The other two kids fell asleep pretty quick, but Astrid took longer and kept trying to peek around the side of what was obstructing her vision—until I finally took the blanket she had had on her lap and put it up to obstruct the screen and put my jumper on her as a blanket. Then they all were quiet and happy while we watched The Avengers.

We got home at around midnight. Astrid settled back to sleep pretty quickly. I packed and prepared for the following day, and then went to bed.

Sunday 11th November

Fortunately I didn't have to wake up as early to catch the train because setup was done. So I got to sleep in and leave a bit later. All the kids were up around the same time, which worked well. Simon dropped me at the station again—in plenty of time for the train. Fortunately it was a gorgeous day and there was no need for umbrellas.

Aimee got on the train part of the way there, looking fabulous in the steampunk corset she had purchased the day before, plus this gorgeous jacket she had bought in England:

(I got another photo of her once we reached the showgrounds and she had laced the corset properly.)

Unfortunately Caitlene missed the train and had to catch the next one, which was half an hour later.

Aimee hadn't eaten, so we went in search of coffee (for her) and breakfast. A little street market was being set up on the closed off part of Brunswick Street. Amazingly, I found an ankh necklace! I had one but the ankh was really small, and I'd always been on the lookout for a bigger one. So of course I bought it!

(You can see it a bit in this photo. For those who don't know [though why wouldn't you if you're a regular reader of this blog ;P], I'm dressed as Death of the Endless from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I threw together the costume pretty much at the last minute: I only bought the belt and skirt the Monday before. The parasol I'd had for ages though.)

(Here's another one—this time with a hat that I bought in Japan when I was 15 [I think].)

Aimee and I found coffee (well, a chai latte for me) in Gloria Jeans, and breakfast for Aimee at a cafe further up the street. Then we walked to the showgrounds with all the other attendees (but unlike them, were able to go straight in, of course, because we had exhibitor passes). Caitlene showed up not much later. Dan, unfortunately, was delayed because of circumstances beyond his control, but the beauty of having four people on the table was that his lateness didn't matter much. (Indeed, I felt like I was a lot more relaxed about everything because we had four people on the table. Even during the occasional times when I was looking after the table by myself, it felt manageable because I knew the time was contained and that I would get relieved by someone who would be fresh later.)

I didn't take as many photos on this day because I lent my phone to Meg for most of the time so she could do PayPal transactions. But here are a few more cosplayers: another Dalek girl:

Ramona Flowers (whom I had wanted to photograph the previous day):

The Black Widow:

And then later Dream and another Death turned up:

(I initially didn't notice Dream because I was talking to someone, and then Dan went, “Karen. KAREN! Look.” Dream came back later with his son to get a photo of the two of us with his camera.)

Later, I met Porco Russo at the train station:

Oh, also during the course of the day, a guy in a black T-shirt with the word “LIFE” written across it gave us a lemon:

(I said, “I guess that means we have to make lemonade.”)

Here is a photo of Aimee, Caitlene (wearing her Tardis tights) and me:

(If I had been thinking straight, I would have gotten one of the four of us together on the table. Ah well!)

There were no Supanova volunteer gophers today, so Aimee and Dan went to get lunch for us, walking back to the Fortitude Valley station area to do so as the options around the con were somewhat limited. I didn't attend any panels, but I did get to have a little walk around. I bought this print of Death of the Endless from Michelle Delecki, which I had seen the day before, I joined the HarperCollins Voyager mailing list and was given a copy of Kim Westwood's book, The Courier's New Bicycle (which won both an Aurealis Award and a Ditmar Award, and which I started reading on the plane home, and I think I'm going to like it because it deals with things like reproductive technology and sexual ethics), I chatted briefly to the people at the Penguin booth (who were selling Emma Vieceli's Vampire Academy graphic novels), and I said hi to Scott from Kings Comics who had also flown up from Sydney.

Other things that were great about Supanova Brisbane:

• People being genuinely interested in Kinds of Blue. We still had a few people who laughed when we gave them our postcards and who thought it funny that we had made comics about depression, but we also had a lot of people who flicked through our display copies, asked us more about the project and said they'd look it up when they got home.
• People who shared with us their stories about depression. Even though it's sad (though not surprising) that depression is so widespread, affecting everyone regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic circumstances, I always find it so encouraging when people tell me about their struggles, because it takes so much courage to do so. Some were sufferers and had been for many years. (One was also a sufferer of post-traumatic stress—brought about by years of treating people who had been in the army.) Some were carers—or friends or family. One dad told us about his teenage daughter, who was quite comfortable coming to Supanova, cosplaying and hanging out with her friends, but who couldn't go to the shops and buy a litre of milk because of her anxiety about social interaction with strangers. Some, despite their suffering, had taken action and had started organisations or grassroots movements of their own for particular related causes—for example, women in IT, or helping people in the geek community to fulfill their dreams, and so on. I felt like in each story, I was receiving some sort of treasure.
• Hanging out with Dan, Aimee and Caitlene and having good conversations with each of them about various stuff related to work, career, art, writing, comics and life generally. I'm so pleased that we got on so well—especially given that I hadn't met Aimee and Caitlene before and didn't really know much about them.
• Meeting other creators. Dan introduced me to a few comic creators in the Brisbane scene—including Zach, the guy behind Ashcan Comics, and some others whose business cards are not within reach at the moment. I also got to catch up with Matthew Carey-Gorey (who had been at the next table to us in Melbourne) and Mori Kamolvutana, who had also been in Melbourne and Sydney, and who is a member of the Sydney Comics Guild. (I bought a couple of prints off Mori.)
• Revelling in the general madness and mayhem that is Supanova. I think I didn't fully appreciate the con in the first couple of years I attended. But I've come to see that its greatness is not in any one thing—not solely in the celebrities or the panels or the shopping or Artists Alley or the cosplayers—but in the combination of all of those things. Also, it doesn't matter that I'm not into certain anime or comics or TV shows or whatever (I confess I have never seen a complete episode of Dr Who); it's totally fine. Everyone seems to mix together and accept each other's obsessions—and even appreciate the cool things about each other's obsessions (e.g. animatronic fluffy cat ears).
• Giving out around 1300 postcards to con-goers and selling out of every single copy of Kinds of Blue that we had brought with us. The last one sold five minutes before the con closed on the Sunday! That didn't happen in Melbourne or Sydney. (Since then, we've had a couple of follow-up orders too—something that also didn't happen after Melbourne and Sydney.)

Pack-up was pretty straightforward and quick. Aimee took most of the surplus postcards home with her for Kathleen, and Dan took some as well for promotion at future comic meet-ups. To leave, we had to walk the long way around to the station as something was happening in the auditorium. I said goodbye and thanks to Dan, and then at the station, I said goodbye and thanks to both Aimee and Caitlene, who were having dinner at Brunswick St again.

Unfortunately I just missed my train and had to wait about half an hour for the next one, but that gave me some time to just rest a bit—catch up on Twitter, post photos, take stock, etc. Simon picked me up at the station and took me back to their house where I was given the dinner they saved for me. (The day had been pretty quiet for them, I think—church and then playing in the backyard.) Then I packed as much as I could into our suitcases. The rest of the evening was spent chatting and watching a bit of TV, and then we all went to bed because we had to get up super early the next day.

Monday 12 November

It would have been nice to stay longer, however Ben had to back at work because he couldn't really take leave. We were up at 5:30 am or something ridiculous like that to finish packing. We had to wake poor Astrid up. The other kids got up not long after, and when told that we were leaving, one said, “No! Want you to stay forever!”, which was really cute. We loaded the car and said our goodbyes, and then Simon drove us to the airport, skilfully avoiding the morning traffic.

Again, we were cutting it fine: we got there just before check-in closed, and were actually bumped ahead in the queue so that we could do it in time. Going through security was tedious: there was only two lines and even to my sleep-addled brain, the staff seemed to be particularly slow with getting everyone through. None of us had eaten (though Astrid was coping pretty well), so we grabbed breakfast wraps as takeaway, which we ate on the plane. (Astrid didn't eat much, and I supplemented what she had with biscuits and fruit bars from our stash.)

The flight went pretty well, I think. Astrid was tired, but she didn't have a meltdown. We kept her occupied with reading books, drawing and playing on the iPad. Ben and I spelled each other as we were both pretty tired. Fortunately the weather was great, we landed on schedule, retrieving our check-in luggage didn't take long (and Astrid was excited about getting the stroller back), and there was no queue at the taxi rank, plus there was no problem catching a cab with Astrid because apparently kids over 12 months don't need a carseat to sit in a cab (?!!) So we both sat in the backseat with her and she sort of fell asleep just as we reached home.

Then it was a quick turnaround: we got our luggage upstairs, I packed Astrid's bag for childcare and changed her pull-up, then Ben left for work and I dropped Astrid at childcare, I went home, ate some lunch and then crashed and slept for one and a half to two hours.

(The craziest thing is that that night, Ben and I went to see Radiohead in concert at the Entertainment Centre. We had bought tickets months ago because we'd never seen Radiohead and they hadn't been here in eight years. So it was another late night and yet more sleep deprivation, but it was totally worth it!)

The thing about planning holidays with kids (well, toddlers) is that you have to pick somewhere that will be enjoyable for both the adults and the little people (well, person). It couldn't be too far away because little people cannot travel that well for long periods of time. (I think the only reason Astrid coped so well with the six-hour car trip to and from beach mission was because there were other people in the backseat with her, otherwise she would have gotten very bored and whiny.) At the same time, it had to be far enough away to make us feel like we were having a decent escape from the city.

I ended up choosing the Hunter Valley. As I said in my earlier post, I went there with George three years ago in the summer, and even though we were only there for a short time, it was wonderful and I swore I would come back and bring Ben with me. From my online research, it seemed like there were enough child-friendly things to do up there—for example, the Hunter Valley Gardens, the Hunter Valley Zoo (yes, there is a zoo!), and I figured she could run between the vines the wineries. (Is it irresponsible to visit a winery with a toddler even if one of the parents doesn't drink???) I thought Ben would enjoy the wineries, and I would enjoy the cheese shops. Given what had happened on our previous family holiday and the daily routine of Astrid's awake/nap times, I thought that things would be slightly easier in that we could do something as a family in the morning, then go eat lunch together somewhere (and try to stretch Astrid out a little), then go back to our accommodations for Astrid's afternoon nap. In the afternoons, us parents could spend time together, but also have some alone time apart to recharge (which we didn't do during our first holiday, but which I the introvert really needed), and then in the evenings, we could eat dinner together (either out or at our accommodations because we found somewhere self-contained—Bergerac Villa, which is located in the Cypress Lakes Resort but is actually privately owned), and then Ben and I could spend the evenings watching something together after Astrid went down for her night sleep. I hoped that that would give us the right proportion of family time, rest time and alone/non-child time.

Fortunately as it turned out, things worked more or less according to how I had envisaged them. The week went something like this:

Monday

I'd done the majority of the packing, but of course there were all the little fiddly bits, which meant that we didn't get away as early as I'd have liked. But that was okay: Astrid was pretty tired (especially coming off a rather busy weekend—most of which was spent in Jamberoo for Peter's birthday), so we stopped briefly for morning tea at the edge of Sydney, then she fell asleep for most of the rest of the trip.

We stopped for groceries in Cessnock, then for lunch in Pokolbin Village (which I didn't find that village-like) and had some of the worst service I've ever encountered; the staff ignored us for a full ten minutes and served other people before us. Afterwards, we checked out the cheese shop there and bought some cheese and crackers (Gromit!) Then we drove on to our accommodations, which wasn't very far away.

The cleaners were still there, so we went out onto the back deck and blew bubbles for Astrid to catch. Then we did a quick unpack, set up the portacot (which, it turned out, we didn't need to bring because there was one in the wardrobe), and showed Astrid around so she could get familiar with the place. It was a very nice house: I highly recommend it if you're looking for somewhere to stay. Upstairs there are two bedrooms—each with their own ensuite. One of the bedrooms had two single beds that could be combined into a larger bed; the other had a king-sized bed. Both had air conditioning/heating units installed—but up high where they would be no danger to little people. Downstairs, there was a little kitchen, laundry, dining area, lounge room and a deck with a barbecue—again, with adequate heating as the nights did quite cold. There was also a flatscreen TV, DVD player (with a very interesting selection of movies), a speaker with an iPod dock (which made Ben very happy) and this amazing kettle that boils water to just the right temperature for green and oolong tea.

We decided to head out again because it was still early, and of the list of wineries recommended to us, Ben chose Mount Pleasant, which was quite a lovely property.

The vines were quite dead, of course, this being winter (but silly me didn't think of that).

Ben did a little wine tasting while I chased around after Astrid, who, of course, wanted to go everywhere and see everything.

Then we headed over to Tempus Two, which has, among other things, a Japanese/Thai restaurant called Oishi. Again, this was another beautiful property, and the sun was setting over the land. (I think the summer they have concerts there.)

The barrel room:

The opening time on the website we had looked at was wrong, so we had to wait around a little while before the restaurant opened. So we wandered around a little (Astrid loved the fountains, but it was getting really cold and I didn't want her to get wet.) Then we resorted to electronic devices to placate the toddler before we were able to get a table. (Ben wanted to sit outside, which would have been lovely, but it was good cold and too dark by this stage.)

I was really nervous about eating out with Astrid as we haven't done it much before—especially for dinner. But she went okay. I would have liked her to eat more, however, given that everything was new (I mean, she ate sashimi for the first time, for goodness sake!), she did quite well. We finished pretty quickly, then headed home, put her to bed and spent the evening watching Fringe (starting from the beginning as I had never seen it and had wanted to), eating cheese and crackers, and (Ben) drinking wine.

Tuesday

Surprisingly Astrid slept in later than expected (which was good because we got to sleep in a little too!) I thought she was rather getting the hang of being on holidays. Still, even though we were on holidays, the division of labour still mimicked normal life, so Ben was the one who got up for her and gave her breakfast, while I lay in for a while and took my time.

Then we headed out to the Hunter Valley Gardens. Obviously, this being winter, it wasn't as spectacular, but we still enjoyed wandering around. Here's some Korean velvet grass (which is probably my favourite kind of grass):

I think Astrid quite liked wandering around, though she got annoyed with us when we tried to move her along because we wanted to see the rest of the gardens.

We had lunch in the café there (and discovered the dreadful state of children's menus while Astrid discovered pretty fast how much she liked chips. On the plus side, chips could be used as a bargaining tool to get her to eat other parts of her meal). Then I asked if Ben would take Astrid to the playground for half an hour while I wandered around the shops there. I bought some fudge and Turkish Delight at the chocolate shop, and found these self-help picture books for children in the bookshop that looked like they were published by a Pentecostal church:

Then we headed back to the villa for afternoon naps—during which I drove back into Cessnock and bought some food to make for dinner for that night and another night. I also stopped at the information centre to get some brochures and maps. (And also discovered too late that there was an app for the Hunter Valley that was too big to download via 3G. But it's free!) Then, after bathing Astrid and putting her to bed, we settled in for another evening of Fringe.

Wednesday

I had thought we could go to the zoo on this day, however the zoo wasn't open. So Ben suggested we find some lookouts so we could see over the valley. There were a couple marked on the map so I navigated us to them. They weren't really proper lookouts, though could see a fairly decent view from each of them:

As you can probably tell, we were fortunate to have such glorious weather while we were there; it was like that pretty much every day!

I noticed that Wyndham Estate (which was another winery that had been recommended to us) had a nice restaurant on its property and suggested we go there for lunch—even though it was quite a drive away. Silly me did not notice that the restaurant was only open on weekends, which was a bit of a shock when we arrived. It was a pity: Wyndham Estate was beautiful: It's the oldest winery in the region, and I would have liked to do the walk among the vines that one of the staff pointed out. Instead, I took Astrid around the property a bit while Ben had another tasting.

Hopefully I'll get to go there again one day—to both eat at the restaurant and do the walk!

We were starving by this stage, but we drove back into Dalwood and had lunch at this place above the local pub. It was better than I had been expecting. Then we drove back to the villa for afternoon naps.

Dinner was supermarket-brand lasagne with vegetables. Then we put Astrid to bed and watched more Fringe with cheese, crackers and wine.

Thursday

This was the day we visited the Hunter Valley Zoo, which ended up being quite a fun outing. Obviously it's not as big as Taronga, but it had a good variety of animals (cockatoos, peacocks, rainbow lorikeets, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, ostriches, swans, lemurs, farm animals and miscellaneous reptiles), and you could buy feeding cones with pellets so the animals could eat out of your hands.

There was also this rather awesome roundabout made of a Hills Hoist:

It amazed me how quickly Astrid took to the kangaroos. She even lay down next to them on the grass at one stage.

We stayed until Astrid started getting cranky, then went to the Hunter Valley Steakhouse (located in the Mercure Resort near the Hunter Valley Gardens) for lunch. There was only us and one other table. I loved that many of the places provided highchairs and also colouring pages and crayons for Astrid to use (though she was always more interested in the iPad). We ordered off the children's menu for her, though she wasn't that interested in the steak, and we fed her other things from our plates.

Then in the afternoon, it was back to the villa for naps. I decided to take some introvert time and go exploring. I was hoping to find a café I could just sit in and read, but a lot of places were closing early. So I ended up exploring a fair bit. Of course, I had to visit the Australian Alpaca Barn at Peppers Creek Village and buy yarn:

(Yes, that's a baby alpaca/wool blend, and it was a good price compared to what you normally pay for that.) I eventually made it into this:

and this:

There was a very pretty chapel there too; I think the property gets used for weddings a fair as there's an associated reception venue plus accommodation.

I also drove around the local area, passing lots of wineries, and wandered around the Mistletoe Wines sculpture garden:

When I arrived back and Ben and Astrid were awake, we went out again to visit yet another cheese shop (because I was conscious that it was our last night there) and bought some more cheese and crackers, then drove to a restaurant called Amanda's on the Edge, which is located on the grounds of Windsor's Edge. Again, we were early so we wandered around the grounds a bit, but the sun was setting and it was getting very dark, so we walked up and down the porch until they opened. Again, this was another fast meal (with spaghetti for Astrid off the children's menu), but it was delicious. (That's another place I'd like to return to one day to have a three course meal at my leisure.)

Then it was back to the villa for Astrid's bathtime and bedtime, plus Fringe over cheese, crackers and Wyndham Estate wine.

Friday

This was the day we were due to leave. We disposed of all the rubbish and leftover food we couldn't take with us, packed up everything (and made sure we didn't leave any toys behind), loaded the car and were on the road in good time. (I did have to ring the property owners to let them know their oven was on the blink; I was glad that we hadn't needed to use it when it wasn't working.)

We drove over to Morpeth, which was one of Jess G's recommendations. It's a little town that used to be a major port along the Hunter River, but now it's more of a tourist attraction—a bit like Berry, though probably not as swish.

We walked around for a bit and I was worried that I had made a bad suggestion in coming here as Ben doesn't much like shopping and I wasn't sure how much Astrid could take of that sort of thing. But it turned out to be quite interesting because of the variety of shops (e.g. there was a sweet shop, a gift shop, a nut shop, a teapot shop) and because there was a toy museum upstairs that had vintage teddybears and golliwogs:

Barbie Catwoman:

Coffee machine-shaped teapot (?!!):

I took a photo of these because even though I kind of like the idea of these, I would never buy them: they are Hello Kitty-themed Momijis and the one with the white hair is called “Astrid” and has a Hello Kitty electric guitar:

When Astrid and Ben became sick of poking around shops, I sent them to the playground across the road from where we parked and then met them a bit later when I had finished poking around. (And yes, I went into the other Australian Alpaca Barn shop and bought yet more yarn:)

Then we went to have lunch. We chose Arnott's Bakehouse because it looked pretty good. It turned out to be a most excellent choice: one of the best meals of my life was consumed there. We sat upstairs on the balcony (unfortunately this is my only photo from while we were there):

I had the pork belly. Ben, I think, had the duck. We ordered greens for sides, as well as an extra plate for Astrid, then shared everything with her—including dessert. Amazingly she ate almost all of it (it was that good!) I remember this lunch being particularly lovely because it was a beautiful day, we didn't feel rushed, Astrid was happy (especially when she was allowed to play on the iPad), the other guests weren't annoyed at us for having a young child around for fine dining, and the food was spectacular (I don't think I've ever had zucchinis that good). So even though it was quite an expensive meal, I think it was worth every penny just for that wonderful moment.

After that, we hit the road—this time with me driving and the others napping. We arrived back in Sydney in the late afternoon and got takeaway for dinner (and all ate together, which was lovely as normally we don't get to do that as sometimes it's too difficult).

So yes, all in all, it was a very good holiday!

Things that worked well

I realise that as Astrid grows, family holidays will look different (and those of you who are more experienced parents will have to tell me how it goes when your kids are primary schoolers and high schoolers). This is what I think worked well this time:

• Arranging travel time around nap times. This made things less boring for Astrid, and fortunately the Hunter wasn't too far away from Sydney for her to get sick of being in the car.
• Making sure that there were enough kid-friendly things to do. (Although, obviously, not every place we visited was kid-friendly, it was nice to have things that Astrid could do—places she could explore, things she could see, and so on.)
• Making sure we didn't ever do more than one major thing per day as a family. I liked how the rhythm of the days worked, with us going out together in the morning and then having very restful afternoons and evenings.
• Working things around Astrid's sleep so that she did get adequate rest, and then also maximising parental sleep while she was asleep.
• Making the most of the time Ben and I had together in enjoying each other's company, enjoying something together and hanging out when Astrid was sleeping.
• Parents giving each other space during the more restful times (which the introvert in me appreciated).
• Enjoying really good food together. (I've realised lately that that's just one of the things we enjoy doing together.) And as I said, the three of us eating together was really nice as we don't always get to do that normally.
• At the same time, not eating out every single meal. I brought cereal and muesli and longlife milk for us to have for breakfast, and we certainly had lunch out every day, but it was nice to have two evenings with dinner at the villa where we didn't have to worry about whether Astrid would eat what was put in front of her. (Hopefully as she grows out of the toddler years, she will learn to appreciate new foods [*fingers crossed*].)

What we could have done better

• It probably would have been more helpful to have collected all the tourist brochures earlier in the trip (or at least downloaded the app). The maps in particular were useful, even though we have Maps on our phones, because they marked things that Google wouldn't have necessarily thought were important.
• The day we went to all the lookouts was a bit frustrating for Astrid because there was so much driving around, plus the visit to Wyndham Estate was a bit sad because we couldn't eat there as expected. I should have read the brochure about dining more closely because I realised later there was actually a very helpful table on one of the pages that listed things like opening hours and whether there was a kids' menu and highchairs. I would have liked it if there had been an app that would have brought up dining options close by; perhaps the Hunter Valley app would have done that, but of course, I didn't even think to look for one until we were there and noticed it advertised on one of the tourist brochures.
• I wish there had been some better food options for Astrid on the kids' menus apart from fish and chips, chicken and chips, burgers and chips, pasta dishes and so on—something with more vegetables. I realise they assume that kids won't eat their vegetables and so are unlikely to include them (as it would be a waste), but if kids aren't offered the option of vegetables, they are even less likely to eat them. Perhaps we should have ordered other sides and shared more with Astrid instead of ordering off the kids' menu. But it was hard to judge the portion sizes and also usually the greens provided were salad greens, which she doesn't eat (yet).
• Unfortunately Ben didn't sleep that well at night—usually due to temperature issues as the doona on our bed was way too warm. It was hard to judge how much to turn the thermostat down. He made up for it by napping in the afternoon.
• Perhaps winter and mid-week was not the best time to go as the vines were dead and therefore not as pretty. But it did mean that we didn't have a problem with crowds and traffic.

• I heard back from Varuna about my application for their Writer-in-Residence Mentor Program and it seems my application was unsuccessful—both for the CAL scholarship and for the program itself. But based on my previous conversation with Varuna, I'm not sure if it was just unsuccessful because the program with Tohby Riddle didn't run; surely they would have said so if that had been the case. The email implied that the program still ran. Anyway, disappointing as it is, finding out the truth of the matter doesn't change anything, so it's best to just leave it.
• I also learned recently that a project I submitted last year is still sitting in the slush pile 12 months on. *Big sigh*. (I know that things tend to sit in slush piles for a while in the publishing world—particularly when you submit unsolicited manuscripts—however, this was a special case.) Yet another thing for me to leave alone; I am unlikely to send it elsewhere as it was done to suit something specially.
• Much as I would like to keep on working on the script of my graphic novel, much of my time has been spent on what I've been calling the Monster Editing Project (or #MEP if you follow me on Twitter). It's the autobiography of a family friend who died a couple of years ago. The family want to self-publish the book using on print-on-demand, and my job is to both edit it and lay it out. So I'm learning a lot about how to use InDesign, which is extremely cool, and I'm gaining a bit of experience in book design and typesetting as the book is around 170,000 words with photos. The photos aren't all of a good resolution as I don't have the original files he used, plus most of them had to be converted to black and white and then trimmed as the cost of getting the book printed in colour is prohibitive. Including the photos, the book is almost 500 pages at 8.25 x 10.75 inches (i.e. 20.955 x 27.31 cm). I've just started the second editing pass after around 60 hours of work. After this, I'll do a pass to check the tracking and then we'll go to print using Lulu—hopefully in time for Christmas. I'm keen to get the whole thing done and off my plate as I've set the rule for myself that I can't go back to the graphic novel until it's done (as an extra incentive!)
• Working on MEP has been interesting—not just because of the content (which is mostly interesting, unless he is talking about engineering or long road trips), but also because it's giving me insight into what people's lives are like—people's lives where depression is not a major factor. (Those of you who enjoy a similar depression-free existence are, in my humble opinion, very very lucky!) The other interesting thing (for me) is seeing the shape and trajectory of his life and how it changes from childhood to adulthood to marriage to family to retirement years. I've been reflecting recently that I have no perspective on how to live during the years we have upon this earth—not the “how” in the Christian sense (as in one's manner/attitude/purpose, etc.)—but the “how” as in what people do from day to day, living quietly, raising families, earning enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, taking holidays every now and then to rest and recharge, enjoying trips with friends. These things fascinate me for some reason—perhaps because I never would have conceived of what was possible to do with one's life until I saw someone else do it. Anyway, I feel I am explaining myself badly so I will stop.
• Supanova Brisbane is coming up in November. I've already booked an Artists Alley table plus flights, plus I mailed stock plus postcards up north, so all that's left to organise is logistics. We won't be there on the Friday, but we will be on the weekend, so if you're around, please stop by and say hi!
• On the subject of Kinds of Blue, if you're in Sydney and would like to check out a copy, Kings Comics now stock it (and you can also order it from them online). We're down to our last 100 copies, so grab one while you can!
• On the parenting front, things are stable and somewhat sustainable (with me making sure that I take a least one child-free afternoon off to do nothing but watch TV, knit or read comics [although some of those activities can be combined]), I feel myself getting a bit rundown. The back-to-back colds Astrid contracts from childcare (and passes onto the rest of us) don't help much, but thankfully a product like Vicks First Defence exists (even though it's a little hard to find), and I've found it does tend to lessen the duration and severity of the colds somewhat. Nevertheless, friends have been encouraging me to arrange another Mommy Holiday—perhaps one when where I actually go away without my family for a couple of days (what a novel thought!)
• On the subject of rest, over lunch on my child-free days, I have been watching TED talks, Kapow! (the comic book show) and At the Movies (which I like to download via iTunes through its feed), but one thing I would like to draw your attention to, which I occasionally listen to, is Kieron Gillen's DECOMPRESSED podcast about comics craft, in which he interviews artists and writers about particular issues they have worked on. He's up to episode 10. (I am woefully behind and have only reached episode 7). If you're interested in making comics, it's well worth a listen.

As I said before, I'm not an expert! I don't know everything. I may get it wrong, so it's important to check that what I say is right (or at least on the right track). Also, it's worth stressing that everyone's experience of babies is different; a lot of what's in this post is derived from watching Astrid, so it might not apply.

Also, even though I own The Wonder Weeks, I didn't read it all, and didn't really track the different developmental stages they talk about in my observations of Astrid. So a lot of what I'm going to say here has to do with physical development rather than mental and emotional stuff.

The other thing I should say up front is that when I talk about the “challenges” of each stage, I don't mean to say that they are “bad” things, just that they are challenging (or that some people might find them challenging). There are some parents who hold the sort of attitude towards other parents that goes “This is what you signed up for. Just suck it up, princess! It will be over soon enough, and then you'll miss these days and wish you'd made the most of them.” They have a point. However, challenges are still challenges, no matter what you call them. I want to be realistic about parenthood (well, as much as I can be!)

Okay, here we go.

Newborns

(To compile this bit, I re-read my post on Astrid's initial weeks.)

• What they're like:
  • Babies just after they're born are usually very sleepy. They don't do much—just feed, wee, poop, sleep and cry when something's wrong. They don't require much stimulation. (They can't see very well at this stage anyway.) They don't start waking up until about the sixth or eighth week.
  • They can maintain eye contact for a little while, but then it gets too intense for them, so they will look away.
  • But they know what faces are. They know that they also have a face. They know, for instance, that they have a mouth just like you have a mouth, so if you open their mouth at them and they can see it, they will open their mouths too.
  • They're usually not awake for longer than an hour; after that, they need to go to sleep, otherwise they get overtired and really really cranky.
  • They're used to life in their mother's womb, so they like being wrapped, they like being close to mum—hearing her voice, smelling her smell, being carried by her—because all of that reminds them of being in utero. They probably recognise dad's voice too since his would be the one they hear most often apart from mum's.
  • Their necks are floppy because they have no head control, so they need to be held in such a way so that their heads are always supported. (Head control comes later: the idea is that you start giving them tummy time [first on your chest, then on their tummies on the floor—perhaps supported by a rolled up wrap—and they learn to lift up their heads and strengthen those neck muscles. I think of it as the baby's version of exercise. Which is probably why they hate it! ;P)
  • Because they can't move much, SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a big issue: if they get stuck in any bedding, they can't get themselves out. (Good thing they then usually cry for help!)
  • Because they don't do much, they don't get very dirty, so you usually only have to give them a bath every other day. They don't like baths because they don't like being unclothed, so bath time can be accompanied by much crying.
  • Depending on their size, they wear 000-size clothing and up.
• Challenges:
  • Breastfeeding (if you choose to do this): It's supposed to be “natural” but it isn't; it takes a while for mum and baby to get the hang of it—if at all. Some women have found it's impossible for them to breastfeed. Some women end up getting mastitis—usually because of blocked ducts in the breast (ow!). Sometimes the problem is the flow: it's too little for the baby, it's too much for the baby. Or the baby gets reflux and can't keep it down, etc. etc. Unfortunately if your baby has feeding problems, that affects everything else (like nappies, sleep, your sleep, your mental health, etc.) I'm really grateful that Astrid and I didn't have any.
  • Learning to distinguish their different cries and what they mean (I'm hungry, I need a new nappy, I'm overtired)
  • Getting them to go to sleep (as babies have to be taught to do that). What helps: putting them in a dark room, removing all stimulation; wrapping them; making sure they're warm (but not too warm); helping them to feel safe and secure (i.e. familiar environment with familiar people); rocking them/putting on hand on them and gently moving them back and forth, etc. We found that music helped: I created several playlists of classical music to lull Astrid to sleep, and she gradually learned to associate the music with sleep.
  • Sleep deprivation: Newborns usually wake every two to three hours around the clock to feed as their little stomachs can't hold that much, which means they keep getting hungry. When they grow larger and their stomachs are able to hold more, they can sleep through the night better. (Theoretically! Other things then wake them up.) Also at this stage, feeds can take anywhere from 20-50 minutes, which makes the sleep deprivation worse, in my opinion.
  • Dealing with the relentlessness of it all. (You don't get a day off. There are no such things as weekends. Every day is the same. Any non-baby time you get has to be carved out, and is largely dependent on the help of others.)
  • Recovery from the birth (regardless of what kind of birth experience you had).
  • Limited mobility (for the mum): Going out can be a challenge—especially when you have to learn to use all the equipment (carseats, prams, etc.) and figure out what you need to bring with you in the nappy bag. I didn't leave the house for the first eight weeks, I think, and then initially only when Ben was able to come with me.
  • (For new mums:) adjustment to motherhood/parenthood and all that that entails—mourning the old life, learning to embrace the new life, trying to shake off other people's judgement, trying not to feel trapped by the 24-hour cycle, wondering what one ought to be doing with oneself. (Usually you can't do much else aside from tend to the baby, so housework falls by the wayside.) For me, this mental shift from childlessness to parenthood was the hardest thing of all.
  • (For already mums:) dealing with sibling rivalry, with the elder child(ren) often acting out on their feelings of being supplanted, having to share their parents' attention, etc.
  • Dealing with the impact of the baby on your marriage and all that entails. (This is ongoing.)
• Things that make it easier (believe it or not!)
  • If you're breastfeeding, the baby's food is already there. No preparation necessary! No need to have a microwave or stove on hand! No extra expense!
  • The baby sleeps most of the time (if you can get your baby to sleep), which gives you a bit of time and space to adjust to everything.
  • People tend to help out more when you've got a newborn because they understand that it's hard and that you're adjusting to everything.
  • The baby is way less mobile (compared to a toddler), which means that taking him or her places with you is relatively easy. Also, newborns don't weigh much, so carrying them around (for example, in a sling, if they will let you put them in a sling; sometimes it take them a while to take to slings) is not such a physical drain. If you are able to get your baby to sleep in the car or in the pram, this increases your mobility and allows you to do things that are good for your mental health (and therefore help you in the marathon that is parenting).

Four to six months (roughly)

(To compile this bit, I re-read my post on Astrid at six months.)

• What they're like:
  • They're more awake now, and are much more aware of the world and the people around them.
  • Their day nap times change—sometimes getting fewer or at least shorter. I think Astrid was up to three day sleeps—one mid-morning (except that often she wouldn't have woken up properly so it was kind of tacked onto the night sleep, which was good for me as it meant I could rest a bit longer before getting up proper), one in the middle of the day and one in the later afternoon. Her day naps were anywhere from half an hour to two hours long.
  • They may start sleeping through the night around this stage—because their tummies are now bigger and they may have started solids, which take longer to digest and therefore keep them full for longer. (Please note: the technical definition for “sleeping through” is sleeping for five consecutive hours or longer.) I remember Astrid went for a whole week of sleeping from 7pm to 7am every single night. That didn't last, of course, but it was a very nice reprieve!
  • They “play” by putting everything in their mouths, sucking on things, waving things around, etc.
  • Because of tummy time, their necks are stronger, and they can hold up their heads on their own.
  • Depending on where they're at physically, they might start learning how to roll over. (They usually master going from back to tummy before going from tummy to back.) Rolling over means that they can get tangled in their bedding. I was always very fortunate that Astrid liked being wrapped as it was one of the techniques we used to get her to sleep. But as soon as she learned to roll, I realised I couldn't do that any more and so had to start training her to sleep without her arms wrapped. Infant sleeping bags (like Grobags) are really helpful at this stage as it means they can move around their cot without kicking off their blankets, then getting cold and crying.
  • They start eating other things. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for at least six months, but those guidelines are for everyone—particularly mums in developing countries where the water quality isn't as good (and therefore formula isn't as helpful for babies). I have heard that experts now recommend starting babies on solids at around five months (or even four months) because breastmilk doesn't contain enough iron. Furthermore, some experts recommend that babies be given certain things early to ward off allergies. I have no idea if that works. Anyway, the thing about solids is that they take longer to digest, I think, which means that the baby feels fuller for longer, which means that the baby doesn't wake as much in the night (theoretically! There are other reasons why they might wake.) When introducing solids, the goal is to teach the baby to eat. (Yeah, babies have to be taught to eat too. Babies have to be taught how to do everything!) Most people start solids with rice cereal, but sometimes this doesn't agree with babies as it's high in iron, which means they get constipated. Babies usually reject everything new first off because it's unfamiliar. You usually have to offer new foods up to 10 times before they will accept them. Also, they cannot handle all foods at once; you usually introduce them in the following order:
    • Stage 1 (when the baby is 4-6 months old): Fruits and vegetables (cooked and puréed/mashed—with the exception of banana and avocado, which can be eaten raw), plus rice cereal.
    • Stage 2 (when the baby is 7-9 months old): Add meat (including fish and eggs) and cereals (bread, pasta, rice, cous cous)—again, mashed, but you can start introducing soft lumps because if your baby has got teeth, he or she can start using them to process the lumps (and even if there are no back teeth, they can masticate with their gums). Some even say you can introduce yoghurt at this stage.
    • Stage 3 (when the baby is around 10-12 months old): Add dairy and fats. Depending on where your baby is up to, he or she may be able to start handling finger food (which means you don't have to spoon feed them!)
    If your family has a history of certain food intolerances, experts recommend keeping a close watch on the baby when introducing those foods and ceasing to offer them if the baby displays any adverse reactions (there's a certain pattern they recommend—offer for the first couple of days, then stop, etc. Look it up.)
  • They may start developing teeth around here. This may mean more drooling, more irritability and whinging (because of the pain), fever, biting mum while breastfeeding (ouch!), more difficulties in settling, more waking in the night. When Astrid started teething, we started using teething rings (the kind you can keep in the fridge) a LOT—along with Bonjella and even baby Panadol. And breastfeeding, of course; amazingly, that also helps!
  • Teeth also mean you start brushing their teeth—first with a brush that fits on the end of your finger, then later with a proper toddler toothbrush.
  • If they've been sleeping in a bassinet or Moses basket up to this point, they may now be too big for it and will need to be moved into a cot. This takes a little time as you have to help your baby to get familiar with this new environment—familiar enough so that they feel safe enough to fall asleep in this new place. (A good tip someone told me was to put the baby in the bassinet in the cot for the first couple of nights, and then remove the bassinet.)
  • They wear size 00 clothes (or up, depending on their rate of growth). This means a whole new wardrobe. Fortunately you can often get other people's hand-me-downs, or find good stuff secondhand.
• Challenges:
  • Because they're awake more during the day and for longer, life may become draining for those mums who find constant baby contact draining.
  • Introducing solids opens up a whole new world of headaches, mess (which can be a challenge, depending on how you feel about mess) and extra labour. (I remember how much time I spent steaming/boiling/mashing/freezing little pods of food for Astrid.) It can be demoralising spending all this time preparing nice and healthy food, only to have your little bundle of joy vomit it up, spit it out at you, throw it halfway across the room, throw it at you, etc. Food was the most frustrating thing of all when it came to Astrid: I got her to eat rice cereal just fine, but then she started refusing it and other solid food, and then went back to newborn sleeping/waking/feeding habits, which really knocked me around. I later worked out that she wanted her own spoon (even though she didn't have the physical skill to use it). Once I gave her her own spoon, she was a lot more cooperative with the eating solids thing.
  • Ongoing fatigue from sleep deprivation.
  • Ongoing fatigue from the relentlessness of it all (particularly if you are still breastfeeding).
  • A moving baby means you need to start babyproofing your house (if you haven't already).
  • Teething babies mean cranky babies, which really test your patience (especially if you're already sleep-deprived). Teething babies may also wake more in the night.
• Things that make it easier:
  • Your baby sleeping through the night. Even though it's just five consecutive hours (or more), it will make a big difference to you—if you are able to take advantage of it!
  • Breastfeeding your teething baby: breast milk helps with their pain!
  • Breastfeeding doesn't take as long as it used to.
  • Depending on what you choose to do, you may start weaning your baby at this point—gradually replacing feeds during the day with solid meals, or offering solids first and then breastmilk. This may give you a bit more freedom because then it's not as essential for you to be around during feeding time as someone else (like daddy) can spoon feed your little one. (Those pouches of baby food that you can get that you can squeeze onto a spoon to feed to your baby are really useful when you're out and about. Most of them can be eaten hot or cold.)
  • Your baby still has about three day sleeps (which gives you three breaks. Don't use them for housework! Use them to rest.)
  • Your baby's mobility still being limited means that they are, in some ways, still quite portable. They have to go where you go; they can't go running off on their own. If you can time it right, it means that you may still have a bit of freedom in what you can do (in comparison to when they're older, that is). For example, mums and bubs sessions are still a possibility at this point; once they start crawling, it's harder because they don't want to be confined or kept still.
  • Watching your baby master physical stuff is pretty cool. (And also funny at times.)
  • Having a more alert and curious baby is also pretty cool; he or she may be up for more interaction before getting tired.

Seven to nine months (roughly)

(To compile this bit, I re-read my post on Astrid at eight months.)

• What they're like:
  • Physically, they can do so much more. At eight months, Astrid could roll over (back to tummy and tummy to back), crawl (backwards only), sit up, pull herself into a sitting position from crawling, bear her own weight standing (if you held her up) and eat solid food without pushing it out with her tongue (the tongue extrusion reflex).
  • Sitting up meant that she was able to sit up in the bath, which meant bathing her was a bit easier as Ben didn't have to support her entire body with one hand anymore.
  • Playing at this stage is more about interacting with objects rather than imaginative stuff (that comes later). A lot of stuff still goes into the mouth first.
  • They may be able to fall asleep better—perhaps not quite by themselves yet, but they're on their way there.
  • They may start waking up and be raring to go earlier in the day. I remember this being very hard on me because in the past, I could get Astrid to sleep a bit longer so I could sleep a bit longer. Once she started waking proper, more parental sleep became impossible.
  • Their day sleeps may drop down to two and only go for 40 minutes each. Sometimes they may look like they need more, but won't resettle for more (very frustrating!)
  • Depending on where they're up to with solid food, they may be having less breastmilk/formula and more solids. You may be down to two or three feeds a day. You may also be starting them on different liquids—e.g. water or juice (diluted with water), if they're ready for it. This means they need to learn to drink in a different way to when they feed from the breast.
  • They may be crawling by now—first backwards, then forwards.
  • Crawling may mean they get dirtier and have to be bathed more.
  • According to The Wonder Weeks book, they go through a number of different developmental stages in this period where a lot of stuff is going on mentally. This may mean they start waking in the night again.
  • They may start wearing size 0 clothes (i.e. whole new wardrobe—*sigh*).
• Challenges:
  • 40-minute day sleeps may mean you don't really get a proper break during the day (because what can you do in 40 minutes?!!) I remember that drove me a bit batty. More awake time also means more baby contact, which means mums may find life even more draining.
  • Constant adjustment to a new schedule.
  • Dealing with a cranky baby who is cranky due to all sorts of seen/unseen factors—teething, growth spurts, night waking, etc.
  • Having a more mobile baby may mean that certain things are no longer possible (e.g. attending mums and bubs movie sessions).
  • Further babyproofing to accommodate your crawling baby. This may also mean more vacuuming too, as your baby may be the kind of kid who likes putting anything s/he finds on the floor in his/her mouth.
  • Ongoing fatigue from sleep deprivation—especially from unexpected night waking due to growth spurts/teething, etc.
  • Ongoing fatigue from the relentlessness of it all.
• Things that make it easier:
  • Your baby may continue to sleep through the night! (Or at least not wake as often in the night.)
  • Ongoing breastfeeding means you start losing the weight you gained during pregnancy.
  • Fewer breastfeeds due to more solids means more freedom for the breastfeeding mum: it is now physically possible to leave your baby with someone else and do non-baby things!
  • It's still really cool seeing your baby develop and learn new skills. Also, they're funny to watch.

10-12 months (roughly)

(To compile this bit, I re-read my post on Astrid at ten and a half months.)

• What they're like:
  • Physically, they may have mastered all sorts of new things. At 10 months, Astrid could crawl forward, stand up by herself (sometimes unassisted for very short periods of time), fall over without hurting herself, and move from a sitting position to a standing position and back again unassisted. She could also clap (which I thought was hugely cool as clapping requires a fair bit of coordination). At around 11 months, she started walking and talking. (NB: Girls tend to walk and talk sooner than boys.)
  • Standing means shoes—usually of the soft-soled variety. Once they start walking, they'll need shoes with proper soles.
  • Ongoing teething!
  • They may have intermittent grumpiness due to growth spurts. Here The Wonder Weeks was both helpful and frustrating as often I had no idea when the last growth spurt had ended and the new one had begun.
  • They may be shy around strangers and therefore more clingy.
  • At the same time, they demonstrate a great deal of curiosity about everything and a desire to explore everything. (Astrid hated being confined.)
  • They may sleep through most nights and only wake once. They may know how to fall asleep on their own as well. When Astrid got to 10 months, because we knew she could do that without us spending ages patting her, we tried to encourage that by implementing controlled comforting/crying. It was a painful process, but when she finally got it, it made the bedtime routine so much easier. Even now she goes to bed pretty easily.
  • They may be on yet more solids of different varieties, and therefore less breastmilk. They may also be having (full cream) cow's milk and other dairy products.
  • They may start having just one day sleep—but a longer one. Or they may still be on two short day sleeps. For Astrid, because she tended to wake later in the morning than other babies (i.e. 7 am instead of 6 am), her second day sleep tended to coincide with dinner, which meant that we usually only gave her one day sleep and then hurried to give her dinner before she was too tired to eat it. I don't know if that was the best way to maintain routine, but we didn't really know what we were doing at the time.
  • They may need more disciplining as they know what they should and shouldn't do, yet do what is forbidden anyway (e.g. you tell them they're not allowed to touch the television and you can tell they understand that, but they will touch the television anyway—and sometimes they will even look at you with a worried look on their face when they do it!) They're watching to see if you'll be consistent—testing and pushing those boundaries.
• Challenges:
  • More mobility means more babyproofing! Having a fully vertical baby means that s/he can reach so much more—which means moving things even higher out of arms reach. It also means removing things or blocking access to things that the baby could potentially pull down on top of himself/herself.
  • Ongoing fatigue from sleep deprivation and the relentlessness of everything. (Yes, parenting is still relentless!)
  • Frustration from your mental space constantly being full of baby things. (Though I guess this depends on the mum; I found it frustrating but you may not.)
  • Having to be consistent in discipline all the time. Sometimes it's tempting to turn a blind eye and not enforce the rules. But you're the parent: you have to. (Think long-term: you're training your baby to listen to you and respect your role as the parent.)
  • Dealing with clinginess, tantrums, etc. (My impression from talking to other mums is that boys are clingier than girls, but I don't know that's actually true.)
• Things that make it easier:
  • Your baby may be sleeping through the night! Your baby may also be good at settling in the evening so the bedtime routine is less of a chore. (Interestingly sleep tends to breed sleep, whereas delaying sleep tends to make for a cranky baby who won't settle. This is why sleep routines as so important.)
  • If your baby is down to one day sleep, it might be a long one (i.e. two hours or so), which means you can have a decent break/rest in the middle of the day.
  • Weaning/your baby being on more solids may mean more freedom for you as you don't have to be there all the time to breastfeed your baby.
  • They're still in size 0 clothes—at least for a bit longer!
  • It's still delightful seeing them master new things and become more of a person. Also, they're very cute. (I mean, they're always cute, but they seem to get cuter. A friend once told me that she thought 1-2 was the cutest age; they have to be that cute because you get so frustrated with them!)

Toddlerdom: One year old and up

Here things tend to be less clear for me, so I'm not even sure if I should be writing this bit, given I'm still in the middle of the toddler years. A lot seems to happen but it's hard to pinpoint when it does; I don't think there's any predictability. I know I haven't written an Astrid post in a while (so what I've put below is compiled from reading over Astrid at 12 months and Astrid at 18 months), and that makes it hard to remember what's happened since. Anyway, I'll give it a go and more experienced mums can correct me!

• What they're like:
  • Physically, they can do so much more! They can walk! They have better spatial awareness! They can run, jump, spin, climb, use playground equipment with less assistance from you (which means playgrounds suddenly become more fun!), and because they can do more, often they want to explore more and do other things.
  • Also, they're ticklish. And they don't know how to tickle back yet! (mwahahaha …)
  • They will often imitate others in their play. Playing seems to be their way of working out life.
  • Imaginative play starts becoming more of a thing. These days, Astrid will initiate her own imaginative play (e.g. making see saws out of apple slices), but a couple of months ago, she would just copy me. So I would do things like arrange the stuffed toys for a tea party, put the kettle on the play stove in the play kitchen, make play tea with play milk and play sugar, and get the stuffed toys to drink it. Sometimes we would also have dinner parties or picnics. I soon noticed Astrid copying what I did—e.g. putting things in the microwave of the toy kitchen and then exclaiming, “It's ready!” and taking them out again.
  • They start saying a lot more. Usually this starts with pointing (proto-declarative action). One of Astrid's first words was “that” because she would point to something and I would say, “What's that?” She would shortcut the process by pointing and saying “That!” and then I would say what it was. These days, she wants me to notice particular things when we are out and about, so she will point to the thing and say its name (e.g. “Astrid's pram!”) again and again until I acknowledge her. The number of words Astrid knows astounds me now. I have no idea how she learned some of them! She can string words together in a sentence. (Her first complete sentence was “That is a ball”. “Very Hemingway!” said a friend.) Sometimes her sentences are part babble-part intelligible. But I've noticed that I can understand most of what she says more often these days.
  • In tandem with the speaking is the singing. Well, that's the case for Astrid: she loves singing. (In fact, these days she will even shut me up and say, “Astrid sing!” if I try to sing with her!) I'm not sure if it's because I sing to her a lot or because it's something all toddlers do. She knows almost all the words to whole songs—the alphabet song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, etc. Sometimes when we put her to bed, we can hear her singing to herself as she falls asleep.
  • Related to the speaking thing, I wonder if her verboseness is linked with our reading to her. Now she wants to be read specific books at bedtime. Sometimes it's the same book every night for weeks at a time. The favourite book will change too: it used to be Where is the Green Sheep?, then it was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, then Outside Over There, then Shh! Little Mouse, Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks, and I'm sure I've missed a couple there and/or have lost count. There are some books that we have read to her so often, not only can she fill in the words at certain points when we pause, she can say whole sentences from them. At the moment, we are definitely deep into Dr Seuss territory, and I am bringing out old favourites of mine that still bear my childhood scribbles.
  • Again on the speaking front, Astrid knows certain things—like letters (probably because of the alphabet song, but she can also recognise individual letters), numbers (because I would count the stairs as we go up and down them, and also because of the Sesame Street videos I play her), animals, objects, sounds (she knows when a plane flies overhead), and even people. (She can recognise most of the people in our extended family as well as kids at church. Oh, also our cleaning lady. Some people she still has trouble with, but then that's a lot of names to remember!) The other thing worth noting here is that Astrid is proficient on the iPad: she's pretty much mastered tap and swipe, tap and drag, etc.
  • Her attention span is longer, which means we can read her longer books and she can follow a TV program for longer. For a while I would put on a DVD Minuscule when I was in the shower, and that would enthrall her because those clips don't go for longer than five minutes each. Now she can sit through a whole episode of Play School. (Though I suppose that's still broken up into five-minute segments, so maybe her attention span isn't increasing as much as I think it is.)
  • They can take simple instructions—e.g. “Put those things back in this box” or “Drink your milk” or “Give that to me, please”. Of course, they can choose to disobey or ignore you. The important point is that they can understand you and what you want them to do. This means you can start giving them simple chores to do to help around the house (for example, if I'm hanging out the laundry, I ask Astrid to pass me hangers. If I'm putting away the dry clothes, I ask her to pull out all the clothes that are hers and put them in a separate basket. She can't fold them herself, but once I've folded them, I try to get her to put them away herself.)
  • Unfortunately the toddler years are not all sweetness and cuteness; toddlers like to exercise their wills, and don't understand why they can't have their way sometimes. At around 18 months, I noticed that Astrid was having more tantrums, which meant that I had to be firmer with her and introduce more disciplinary measures (e.g. time out, counting to three before getting her to do something, withholding something good before she does something she doesn't like so much). Unfortunately this sort of behaviour also spills over into the way she socialises with others: she often will not share, and she will push, shove and hit other kids who get in her way. I guess this all comes from her thinking she's the most important person in the universe. Part of my role is to show her that she's not—that she must be kind to others and that it is unacceptable to treat other people like that, even if they have been unkind to her.
  • Clothing-wise, at 12 months, they may be into size 1, then at 18 months, in size 2 tops but size 1 bottoms, etc. Last year I knitted a whole bunch of cardigans for Astrid in size 2; this winter, most of them are too small in the arms, so I've had to knit more. I've been knitting the new ones in size 3-4, which means that the arms are long, but they generally fit (except for one that I knitted too big. Ah well, we'll have to wait a little while before she can wear that!) Amazingly, Astrid isn't that picky about her clothes. I expect that will change!
  • Growing means longer hair, which means haircuts. I think we gave Astrid her first haircut at around one year old. A friend of ours who works as a hairdresser did it. I've got a video of her cutting Astrid's fringe. Amazingly Astrid sat quite still for most of it, and then at a certain point, just burst into tears and was inconsolable. (She was really tired!) The video still makes me laugh
  • They have almost all their teeth! This means the teething period is almost over. It also means more tooth brushing, and teaching them how to brush. (Astrid hates that!) Often it's a fight to get them to brush. We have two toothbrushes: one for her, one for us. (We don't use toothpaste; just water.) She has a go, then we do it properly for her. If she resists, we bargain with her and say she can't have a bedtime story unless she lets us brush her teeth. She's probably due for her first dentist visit soon. It will be interesting to see how that goes! (My dentist friend says that usually they just sit in the chair and go up and down, and the dentist just checks out how their teeth are going.)
  • Their routines are way more regular. For Astrid, she wakes at around 7/7:30 am, she'll eat breakfast, then morning tea at around 9:30/10 am, lunch at 12 pm or so, then her one day sleep, which can go anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours, depending on how tired she is. (She is also a bit flexible with her day sleep, which means that we can put her down a little later in the day sometimes if we're doing something.) Depending on when she wakes, she may get afternoon tea, but most of the time she doesn't need it. She eats dinner at around 5:30/6 pm, then we try to get her in bed by 7/7:30 pm. She hardly ever wakes in the night now.
  • Eating-wise, most toddlers should just about be eating what you eat. Most of them have been weaned from breastmilk (though some mums choose to keep going for longer for the health benefits) and will be onto water, cow's milk, juice diluted with water, etc. Toddlers can be really picky about what they eat, and may reject much of what you offer them. Sometimes they won't eat much at all. (More than one parent has told me that toddlers sometimes seem to live on just air.) We had a few eating struggles with Astrid where she would refuse healthy stuff in favour of snacks (i.e. what we would give her for morning and afternoon tea). This meant we had to reduce or cut morning and afternoon tea, and try to build her appetite for main meals. Some toddlers refuse to eat foods that have been mixed together (e.g. fried rice), and prefer to have all their food segmented out. (Sometimes when Astrid refuses to eat, we do that—we take the bowl away from her, then pick out and offer the things we think she might eat if they weren't with everything out. So we will put all the carrot in a little pile, all the chicken in a little pile, all the peas, etc.) New foods are usually still rejected straight off, but sometimes they will take to them immediately (e.g. chips!)
  • Related to eating, toddler bowel movements may become more regular (e.g. occurring just after main meals). At a certain point, you can start toilet training them. (NB We haven't reached this stage yet so I will say no more on this subject!)
• Challenges:
  • Needing a never-ending reservoir of patience and not having it. Toddlers require so much of it! They don't do what you ask of them (even though they understand what it is you want them to do). They have tantrums—often over silly things (e.g. wanting to carry a carton of milk by themselves even though it's too heavy for them). They are picky about food and won't eat healthy. They will say “No” to everything. I once had this conversation with Astrid:

    “Astrid, are you hungry?”

    “Yes.”

    “Would you like some dinner?”

    “No.”

    “You must not be that hungry then!”

    We had that conversation about three times within half an hour. Finally because it was getting late, I was firm with her and insisted that she come and have her dinner. She cried and threw a tantrum, but then once dinner was in front of her, she ate it. You need patience to deal with the tantrums without losing your temper; to bargain with your toddler so that she/he will do what you ask; to discipline your toddler so that she/he won't hit that other kid; to toilet train (or so I've been told). More patience means more energy, which, of course, is harder when you're tired (especially if your toddler still wakes in the night!) The relentlessness of it all makes it harder. I don't know how mums who are at home every day with toddlers do it. I think if I didn't have childcare, I'd go crazy.
  • Toddlers babbling and saying the same thing. Furthermore, they often want your attention more. A friend of mine finds it challenging the way her toddlers fill up her mental space—to the point where they crowd out everything else.
  • Greater mobility means (you guessed it!) even more babyproofing! However, you want to give your child some freedom, so it may mean rearranging parts of your house so that they are more child-friendly instead of just banning your children from them. We still have a safety gate for the entrance to the kitchen, which we keep shut when the oven is on or when we're not around to supervise. But a couple of months ago, I rearranged the cupboards so that the main one is full of plastic stuff that Astrid can pull out and play with if she's in there when I'm chopping stuff. In the mornings, she now gets out her breakfast bowl and spoon. The other thing I did was buy a play pen. We'd gotten by so far without one, but I felt it would be useful for things like Time Out (which it is). I didn't foresee that it would also be useful for things like keeping Astrid away from the heater when it's on, from any knitting that I'm blocking on the floor, and at Christmas (presumably), the Christmas tree.
  • Greater mobility changes the activities that you do together. You start trying to find things that you can do together, or things that will suit the toddler's active little body. At around 18 months, I found we were going to the playground (or indoor play centre when it rained) so much more than we used to.
  • Playing with your toddler can be a challenge if play is not natural to you (and it isn't for many first time parents). There are a lot of blogs out there that are helpful for this. A friend pointed me in the direction of The Imagination Tree, which I quite like as it's a blog about play and different kinds of play activities. (I love her article on the central importance of play, which is about different kinds of play and what you can do with children of different ages.) Reading it doesn't take long and sparks all sorts of ideas of things I could do with Astrid. Before Astrid was capable of imaginative play, I found it much harder to play with her. Then I realised she needed me to get her started and that she liked to copy me. One thing that helped me was giving her my old toys—like my Hello Kitty tea set (yes, I am a bit of a tragic; I couldn't bear to part with Hello Kitty!) Then I started remembering what I used to do with them!
  • Sickness. I think this is more of an issue for me now because Astrid goes to childcare three times a week, and so is exposed to a lot more germs. Fortunately it's just been colds so far.
  • Toilet training (so I have been told!). I am not looking forward to doing this.
• Things that make it easier:
  • You are more used to your child and the routine is more predictable. Things don't change as much.
  • They can be more flexible. Astrid is, anyway! We are very lucky in that we can take her to a friend's house in the evening, put her to bed in a spare room, and then wake her later when we're ready to go home. I've taken her to a friend's house for an all-day playdate (the friend lived an hour away). I've also taken her on beach mission. Also, holidays away from home. And childcare.
  • Because your toddler usually doesn't need breastmilk now, this increases both their independence from you and your independence from them. It is now possible to spend an entire day apart from your child!
  • A long daytime nap means a proper break in the middle of the day for stay-at-home mums.
  • They eat what you eat (mostly). This means no more separate cooking. (Ben and I now split the cooking. We cook every other night and make five portions: two for us one night, two for us the second night, and a bigger one for Astrid that gets split into four for lunches and dinners for two days. But she gets fed at childcare too.)
  • Because they can eat what you eat, eating out is more of a possibility. When we were on holidays (which I must blog about), we ate out a fair bit, and Astrid soon got used to sitting in a high chair for extended periods of time (and the better restaurants would provide coloured pencils/crayons and activity sheets for her, and if she got bored with them, we would give her the iPad), and eating new foods. Sometimes she'd reject things. Sometimes she would take to things, which surprised us. It was just lovely for the three of us to sit and have a meal together in relative peace.
  • A longer attention span means that they can be engrossed in certain activities for longer—for example, play dough: instead of being bored after 15 minutes, Astrid can now be content with play dough for up to half an hour.
  • Some toddlers can even be trained in independent play, which means they don't need parents to entertain them, but will instead play happily on their own. Astrid will do this when I am doing chores.
  • It is really really cool to see them saying new things, mastering new tasks (e.g. climbing, going down the slide by themselves), learning new things, singing songs back to you, making observations about what is going on (e.g. “Daddy is in the shower!” or “It's too hot! I'll blow on it”) and so on. You really start to see them coming into their own as a person with their own preferences. Also, you can relate to them more as little people.

Congratulations if you've reached the end! I hope some of that was helpful. Please let me know if it was! And if I missed anything, please let me know in the comments.