Category Archives: Family

My One Month Social Media Detox

January 15, 2014 By in Blogging, Family Tags: , , , , 28 Comments

social media diet

For all the years that we have known each other, DorkyDad and I have done a January detox. It is usually much needed. Like most people, we fill our cupboards even fuller than usual over the Christmas holidays, with booze, biscuits and other unnecessaries.

Come the New Year, our bodies are practically begging us for a break. So we both give up alcohol for the month, step up our exercise regimes, and cut back as far as we can on carbs and candy.

After a grumpy, jumpy first week, we tend to find that we are sleeping much better, feeling more clear-headed and starting to lose our little festive potbellies. We finish the month feeling refreshed and energetic, ready to face the rest of the year.

We are doing all that again this January, but two weeks in I don’t feel like it is enough. My body is definitely feeling much better. But my brain? Meh. Not so much. It still feels overloaded. I am not in the calm and relaxed place that I should be. I am craving peace, and space, and silence.

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Nearly Five

January 14, 2014 By in Family Tags: , , 21 Comments

peekaboo

DorkySon is absolute magic just now. He is a real joy to be around. I can’t remember ever seeing him so calm and settled, and that is really reflected in how he’s behaving.

A large part of that is testament to the kindness of our family and friends who, even from afar, have worked so hard to let him know that he is loved. Barely a day passes without another postcard, book, or CBeebies DVD being popped into our mailbox.

The wardrobe in DorkySon’s room is plastered with many of those postcards, and also with photos of all the important people in his life – friends, grandparents, cousins and the like. There are so many happy memories recorded there, and DorkySon likes to chat about them often. He talks very openly sometimes about who he is missing, but he also talks with absolute confidence about when he will visit those people, or when they will come and see us. He knows already, because of the regular travelling we have done to the States, that not all your friends can live in one place and sometimes you have to make a big effort to see them. He says that the sadness you feel when you miss people is a good sadness because it means you have people you care about.

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Festive Reflections

December 20, 2013 By in Family, Tasmania Tags: , , , 29 Comments

Fresh garden peas

Christmas, like pretty much everything else, feels a lot mellower over here. Perhaps it’s because it falls mid-summer rather than mid-winter, so we’re all busy enjoying ourselves outdoors rather than clinging desperately onto the tiny glimmer of warmth and sparkle that tinsel and fairy lights can provide in the depths of a dark British winter.

Whatever the reason, this year feels like we are building a Christmas that fits our life, rather building our life around Christmas. It feels like it might be fun. Maybe even relaxing…

I really hope so. Recently I think we’ve all been feeling like our brains are being stretched in a few too many different directions at once. Continue reading →

Moving Across Town

November 14, 2013 By in Family, Tasmania Tags: , , , , , 12 Comments

red brick church Sandy Bay Road Hobart

You might have guessed from the silence on here that we have been mid-move again.

Believe it or not, the short move across town has been a lot more challenging than the move across the world was.

In part, that’s because of the physical scale of what we’ve been doing. Rather than walking into a dinky little furnished cottage where we needed to do little more than empty three suitcases into the cupboards, we have been unpacking the contents of a forty-foot container, some of which we only packed up nine weeks ago, but some of which we haven’t seen in over two years. (Hello DorkySon’s old playpen, and random wooden medicine cabinet that I don’t remember ever buying…). We have been trying to fit nearly forty large boxes of books into a house with just one built in bookcase. And for the first time ever, we are in a house with a flight of stairs, which is helping me discover all sorts of new muscles I didn’t even know I had. Continue reading →