Tag Archives: House

Home invasion

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It was bound to happen. Fine weather can only hold out for so long. Our mother’s group has taken to meeting at a local park which has a conveniently located coffee shop across the road where we can go and get a good take away coffee. It’s a great spot, not too far from the river, which has shady trees and is cool even on a hot day. One of the mums even has a super-sized picnic blanket that can accommodate several mums and bubs. We were on to a good thing, until it rained.

We do have a wet weather plan, which involves going to the chocolate-themed coffee shop up the road from the park, but as the bubs get more mobile (Little Birdie is leading the vanguard by crawling), it is a less attractive option. So there was a little confusion on our Facebook group page as to what we should do.

I was pretty much the last person to log on to see what the plan was. It was the morning we were supposed to meet and it was raining. Some of the more organized mums had seen the weather reports the night before and flagged that there was a problem by posting to our shared Facebook page, but there was no general agreement on where to meet. In my usual last minute fashion, I logged on an hour and a half before we were supposed to leave and saw there was willingness by a couple of girls to meet up, but no agreed venue. One girl had offered her house, but it hadn’t been conformed. I knew one thing, however, I was looking forward to the catch-up. I knew what I had to do.

So I put my hand up for everyone to come around to our place. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, unless you are a parent. LB takes up a lot the majority of my time and I try to fit cleaning and everything else around that. Not to mention the fact that I am a pretty ordinary housekeeper at the best of times. It doesn’t come naturally to me and I’m always on the back foot with the house. Hubby and I had agreed to a program of spring-cleaning, but it fell by the wayside pretty quickly because our weekends always seem to be so full and we work very hard to preserve the structure of LB’s day so she can get some sleep. To compound matters, I had had food poisoning earlier in the week and decided to take things a little easier so I could recover faster. So, I really had no business offering up our house, but I did anyway. I really treasure my time with my mother’s group and I know I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen the girls.

Of course, the minute the invitation was out, I had to click into action. As soon as LB went down for her morning nap, I raced around cleaning toilets and basins, sweeping floors, tidying and getting dressed. It was a losing battle.

You have to turn off part of your brain when you are a perfectionist and a parent. My house was pretty untidy when the mums and bubs from mother’s group turned up but it wasn’t embarrassingly dirty. The babies had a lovely play on the mat in the lounge room, with access to all LB’s toys and the visitors got to see another side to LB, because she is a lot more confident in her own home. We also didn’t have to worry about ants, or the elements or parking. In fact, it was super good for me, because when LB started getting really tired, I put her down for a nap in her cot straight away and we went downstairs and continued our chatting. We have a coffee machine and I had bought some biscuits the day before to bring along anyway, so it was cheap and easy and comfortable.

As always, after the mums and bubs had gone home and I was thinking over our morning, I thought about how things had turned out better then I had expected. I refused to dwell on the fact that people had seen my imperfect house, instead choosing to focus on all the benefits of the day. One of the biggest plusses was that I had actually done a lot of housework in a short time while preparing for the visitors to arrive. I had sorted washing, put more washing on, cleaned, tidied, sorted and organized. It was very likely more than I would have done normally. I also had all afternoon to organize dinner.

As I am so often finding since becoming a mother, somehow you always get there in the end. So many times since LB was born I have wondered where all this was going to end up and yet we have just scraped through. I have also learnt that it is important to make the effort to get out and catch up with people, because it can be so lonely and depressing if you do not. That little bit of stress in the morning was worth it for the lovely time I had with the mums and bubs. It was also worthwhile because it lifted my mood and got me moving.

I don’t like having visitors when my house is messy, that will not ever change, but sometimes we have to accept that we cannot always be perfect and just move on. There’s also a little motivation to be gained from the experience. The wet weather was also a timely reminder to always be prepared for the unexpected. I think it’s time for hubby and I to get back to our program of spring-cleaning!

Silence is Golden

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I have never appreciated silence more than since the birth of Little Birdie (LB). Background noise has never really bothered me, I’m always listening to music and my jobs have always been in noisy places. In fact, when I was reading the news on commercial radio, I got very used to listening to two different things at once, with one earphone on and the other off. In more recent times, I’ve gotten used to the constant rumble of voices in the background while I’m teaching (not from my class of course!?..).

So, I didn’t think twice about noise when we bought our house. Our home is quite close to the city and perches on a long thin block, flanked by houses on either side. You look straight out of our windows into our neighbours’ windows. In fact, we are so close you can reach out the window and touch each other. However, that didn’t seem to matter when we bought, because our house is almost eighty years old and has beautiful waffle glass windows and gorgeous high ceilings. You can’t see the neighbours at all when you are inside … but you can hear them. In recent times, I’m finding you can hear them more and more, because their families are growing. We now have families with three children on either side. There’s a certain level of noise that co-exists with a big family. I know it all too well, as there were three children in my family growing up. Normally, I would find all the noise nostalgic and charming, but that’s all changed since the arrival of LB. Now I’m consumed with concern that she will be woken from her nap by the ruckus.

Meanwhile, it is not just the noise of the neighbourhood children that concerns me. Our house is a unique-fixer-upper. Actually, so is nearly every other house in the street. It’s a beautiful area and as the older residents move on, young families are buying the houses and renovating them. It’s one of the big attractions of the area. The suburb is filled with beautiful old houses brimming with character, good-sized backyards and excellent proximity to services, while being only a few kilometres from the city. It’s a great place to live, but all those renovations make a lot of noise and noise is the enemy of the sleeping baby.

My concern about noise is exacerbated by the fact that our house is noisy. There are breezeways above the bedroom doors which are beautiful, but let in all the noise. We have lovely polished wooden floors, but they echo and the floorboards creak as you move around. To make matters worse, the door handle of LB’s bedroom has broken and the door is slightly warped, so I can’t close it completely. It has led to the ridiculous situation of me hiding downstairs trying to keep quiet while she is sleeping. In the meantime, the housework is piling up around me. I’ve tried playing the radio so that is blocks out the background noise for LB, but that doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve now resorted to replacing the door handles and temporarily covering the breezeways in an attempt to give LB a chance to sleep and me a chance to move around while she’s doing so. However, it’s breaking my heart to cover the breezeways, as the ornate features are one of the principal reasons we bought the house.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this entry. I hadn’t realized how much I had come to crave silence until yesterday. Yesterday was a lovely day. For once, LB was sleeping well, she was in a good mood when she was awake and she was eating well. I used my time during her nap to sort the washing and I was really enjoying the morning. Then it happened. I heard a loud, thundering, enthusiastic knock to the front door. I was downstairs but I could practically feel the reverberations. My heart sunk, my stomach did a flip-flop. I was terrified that it was the end of my perfect morning and bubby was about to wake. I scampered up the stairs, trying to make as little sound as possible and practically floating to the door, ready the shush whomever was on the other side. I peeked through the stained glass and … no one was there. Puzzled, I concluded that it must have been the kids next door playing and the noise had travelled through. However, the mystery was solved later that afternoon when a very loud and overly enthusiastic girl knocked on our door asking for a charitable donation. It turns out she had knocked on the neighbour’s door earlier in the day and it had been so loud, it sounded like she had knocked on my door. She mentioned how the neighbour had told her to be quiet because there were babies sleeping. However, the information didn’t seem to sink in, because she was very loud while she was at my door. Luckily, LB was awake. I did give her a donation in the end but she’ll never know the panic she had caused me!

The moral to this story is that all other considerations go by the wayside when you have a baby. Their needs just have to come first. Since the birth of LB, I have learned to love the quiet. Overall, this is probably a good thing, as it’s important to take some time out from the rat race that is modern living. So many good things happen in the silence, like meditation, relaxation, contemplation and restful sleep. In LB’s world, silence is golden and now it is is golden in my world too.