Parenting – Tara’s thoughts

Another story about poo.

You’re walking, your long adult legs eating up the distance and she’s jogging alongside you

Content warning: Poos. Like really, so much poos. There’s a wonderland just five minutes walk from our house, a special place of reading and quiet, where the kiddie section often has a slide set up or a few ride-on toys bumping around, just because. A place with kindly people, chilled drinking water, comfy sofas, aContinue reading “Library”

Balloons

I watch my mother tie the end of the balloon shut in a practiced movement of her small, strong fingers. She wants to teach me how but I am too scared to try.

Birth Story

After dinner that night I took a pill for the surgery then went nil-by-mouth. On Friday we woke at five, I fought through the morning sickness that still plagued me at 38 weeks pregnant to take a shower, and we got in the car and drove to Wellington hospital.

Having twins

“Do twins run in your family?” asks the ultrasound technician out of the blue. He barely gives us time to shake our heads before finishing with a practiced “…because they do now!”

How are you? Really?

Parenting has its good weeks and its bad weeks. This week was rough.

Twin pregnancy / newborns shopping guide!

So you are expecting twins? Congratulations! How are you doing? I hope you’re keeping well. I hope you’re here in a state of calmness. But it’s okay if you are not. Being pregnant with twins is scary. Are you perhaps worried, squinting at lists on the internet at four in the morning when you can’t sleep because the kids are fighting each other in your uterus and then your brain starts working and you need to do something to get ready because god knows you don’t know what you’re doing and you get googling and are led, perhaps, here, hoping for some sane suggestions?

Those People

Warning: poos. The other day I was on the loo and the kids wandered into the bathroom to see what I was doing. I used to shut the bathroom door as a line-in-the-sand type move, figuring I was at the very least owed a few minutes of privacy. But these days they hit each otherContinue reading “Those People”

A-holes

I never thought my kids would become a-holes so young. I mean, I know that a lot of people say that toddlers are a-holes but I thought that was kind of, you know, they are always needing and wanting things and they are really noisy about it, a-holes in that kind of way. But no,Continue reading “A-holes”

Apricots

SCENE: We are all in the kitchen. I am trying to start the chocolate custard for the Christmas trifle while Barns makes the kids’ afternoon tea. Nora and June (both 2) are tootling around underfoot. Me: I’m not really feeling the Christmas spirit this year. It’s like I just don’t have room in my brainContinue reading “Apricots”