Recent Posts

From the Blog

anxiety

How to Help your Anxious Child When you Yourself are Anxious

Had you walked past our house earlier last week, say sometime between the hours of around seven and eight a.m., you would have been forgiven for wondering if you were witnessing some sort of suburban crime scene. Beyond the gently tossing heads of flowers that the kids planted with their father, Dr M, only weeks earlier, through the friendly painted blue door, and down the stretch of newly carpeted stairs, came a sound so harrowing it was enough to startle the heavy fronds of the palm trees. Perhaps it was a reenactment of some sort, a rehearsal for a Shakespearean tragedy?

Read More
campus living

The Time-Machine of Grief

Change, the action of moving forward, does not always bid the past farewell. Perhaps this is because some things, like grief, just don’t have an expiration date.

Read More
pregnancy and parenting

To the Self-Critical Parent: You’ve come so Far

I was leaving the bathroom of a busy cafe, waving my watery hands in the air rather than pausing to insert them into the dryer, when I brushed past her. Actually, knocked into her, elbowed her, buffeted by her, are probably more accurate descriptions of what took place. She was standing to the side of the toilet doorway, the generic white plastic change table extended from the wall, wrestling a tiny, red, mid-air-bicycle-pumping footed newborn out of one nappy and into another. Basically she was trying to dress a young wild bear.

Read More
Amazing Grace

Words for the Overwhelmed

A giant clock fell off our wall the other day. That’s right. You heard me correctly. I was very nearly squashed beneath the weight of time.

There I was, walking down our narrow hallway, the one always scattered with an obstacle course worth of toys, the hallway we continuously play domestic bumper cars in, the one with the school word-lists hanging precariously from the white rental walls with perspiring balls of blu tack (our kids call it ‘glue tack’) when boom! The shabby-chic aqua clock, bought for an irresistible bargain on Gumtree, fell with a thunderous bang from its single nail, narrowly missing my recently broken little toe.

Read More
Faith

On Sea Changes and Souls at Sea

We recently made a sea-change. Sounds exciting doesn’t it, the stuff of reality TV and life adventures. Actually, it was more like a series of hiccupy jumps, gulping for air, rather than a seemless transition. Together with our three children under eight, we moved from the deep inner-city surrounds of Sydney and the bustling communal environment of Bible college, to Toowong, a Queensland suburb close to the bush, where it was rumoured a giant python regularly sunned himself on the street, and finally to the very outer-edges of Brisbane, where land bumps up against water, and every sunset demands a camera. And if you think that sentence was long to read, imagine travelling all that distance.

Read More
writing

Some Exciting News

The sad news is, it’s the end of an era. My firstborn baby-blog, the one I called Spilled Milk and Sunsets, the one I dreamt of, nurtured, and birthed with trembling, awkward hope into the online world, has grown-up, left home, or whatever it is that firstborn blogs do when they are no longer with us.

The good and very exciting news is that it has a sibling, a big sister if you will!

Read More
Seasonal

Adding up to 40

I am not a ‘numbers’ person. I failed my Year Twelve maths half-yearly because I preferred to read the examples rather than practice them. Then my parents hired a handsome, exceptionally tall swiss math’s tutor called Kris, and I sat down and worked. Sort of. And yet, despite my arithmetic deficiencies, for the last few weeks, I’ve found myself circling equations in my head, drawing different pathways and combinations, all with one terminus. Forty.

Read More
anxiety

How to Help your Anxious Child When you Yourself are Anxious

Had you walked past our house earlier last week, say sometime between the hours of around seven and eight a.m., you would have been forgiven for wondering if you were witnessing some sort of suburban crime scene. Beyond the gently tossing heads of flowers that the kids planted with their father, Dr M, only weeks earlier, through the friendly painted blue door, and down the stretch of newly carpeted stairs, came a sound so harrowing it was enough to startle the heavy fronds of the palm trees. Perhaps it was a reenactment of some sort, a rehearsal for a Shakespearean tragedy?

Read More
anxiety

Dear Anxious World

Dear Anxious World, Firstly, I want to ask you how you are doing? And to let you know I’m not expecting an easy answer.  Clearly,

Read More
campus living

The Time-Machine of Grief

Change, the action of moving forward, does not always bid the past farewell. Perhaps this is because some things, like grief, just don’t have an expiration date.

Read More
pregnancy and parenting

So this is Parenthood

Ma-maa…Ma-maa, where are you Ma-maa? A little voice piped down the night-time corridor, like a small, fragile bell, incessantly ringing. The sweet, husky call of

Read More
pregnancy and parenting

To the Self-Critical Parent: You’ve come so Far

I was leaving the bathroom of a busy cafe, waving my watery hands in the air rather than pausing to insert them into the dryer, when I brushed past her. Actually, knocked into her, elbowed her, buffeted by her, are probably more accurate descriptions of what took place. She was standing to the side of the toilet doorway, the generic white plastic change table extended from the wall, wrestling a tiny, red, mid-air-bicycle-pumping footed newborn out of one nappy and into another. Basically she was trying to dress a young wild bear.

Read More
Amazing Grace

Words for the Overwhelmed

A giant clock fell off our wall the other day. That’s right. You heard me correctly. I was very nearly squashed beneath the weight of time.

There I was, walking down our narrow hallway, the one always scattered with an obstacle course worth of toys, the hallway we continuously play domestic bumper cars in, the one with the school word-lists hanging precariously from the white rental walls with perspiring balls of blu tack (our kids call it ‘glue tack’) when boom! The shabby-chic aqua clock, bought for an irresistible bargain on Gumtree, fell with a thunderous bang from its single nail, narrowly missing my recently broken little toe.

Read More
Faith

On Sea Changes and Souls at Sea

We recently made a sea-change. Sounds exciting doesn’t it, the stuff of reality TV and life adventures. Actually, it was more like a series of hiccupy jumps, gulping for air, rather than a seemless transition. Together with our three children under eight, we moved from the deep inner-city surrounds of Sydney and the bustling communal environment of Bible college, to Toowong, a Queensland suburb close to the bush, where it was rumoured a giant python regularly sunned himself on the street, and finally to the very outer-edges of Brisbane, where land bumps up against water, and every sunset demands a camera. And if you think that sentence was long to read, imagine travelling all that distance.

Read More
writing

Some Exciting News

The sad news is, it’s the end of an era. My firstborn baby-blog, the one I called Spilled Milk and Sunsets, the one I dreamt of, nurtured, and birthed with trembling, awkward hope into the online world, has grown-up, left home, or whatever it is that firstborn blogs do when they are no longer with us.

The good and very exciting news is that it has a sibling, a big sister if you will!

Read More
Seasonal

Adding up to 40

I am not a ‘numbers’ person. I failed my Year Twelve maths half-yearly because I preferred to read the examples rather than practice them. Then my parents hired a handsome, exceptionally tall swiss math’s tutor called Kris, and I sat down and worked. Sort of. And yet, despite my arithmetic deficiencies, for the last few weeks, I’ve found myself circling equations in my head, drawing different pathways and combinations, all with one terminus. Forty.

Read More