The (real) reason I am not a “proper” food blogger

People say that social media is responsible for creating an imbalance in the lives we see portrayed on line, that people who use social media are responsible for showing the “feature reel”, only the good, glossy and perfect bits of our lives. I don’t agree with that, I see an awful lot of the gritty bits of life in my feeds, the unhappy people, the strung out parents, the heartbroken, the grief-struck, the lonely, the annoyed, the angry and the frustrated.

But sometimes I actively seek out a bit of the glossy, because who doesn’t want to get away from the gritty every once in a while? And so it was last Friday I was looking through Facebook when I saw this post on the page of the wonderful Katie 180

https://www.facebook.com/KatieOneEighty/posts/929324647124504

[Read more…]

The contents of my head

contents of my brain

I think (and talk) a lot about how much of our children’s lives we should be sharing on social media and with other people. I am all for respect and boundaries. I have chosen to share carefully. Often I make mistakes.

I don’t think some “bad” person is going to steal my son’s image or but I do worry about exposing him to the world from my vantage point, without his adult consent and the understanding of all that it encompasses.
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Knowing stuff doesn’t make you smart. Or does it?

My husband is the smartest person I know. Not just because he knows a lot of facts (and boy does he know a lot of facts) but also because he’s compassionate and kind and generous and he has the second best sense of humour in the marriage.

I forgot to mention him in the video I made with Kerri yesterday because I am not as smart as he is.  But I hope I get across the real difference between knowing facts and being someone as brilliant as my husband.

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What do you think? Does knowing facts make you smart? Did you catch the bit right at the end of the video where we let you know the capital of Estonia (which I have already forgotten)?

I am reminded of this every day but there seems little I can do

“The voices that he hears are processed in the same part of the brain that processes the sounds you hear” said the man from the Schizophrenia Fellowship to me on the phone. “They are as real to him as my voice is to you”.

I knew this already but somehow hearing it from this kind man makes me remember it, resets my empathy. Again.
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I cannot believe this woman suffers from Imposter Syndrome

Screen Shot 2015-05-07 at 8.49.39 pmI had been experiencing a bit of a reading drought until late last year, I had become so absorbed in candy crush studying and so used to getting myself lost in an actual web of hyperlinks while I surfed the net for too many hours a day that I felt like I didn’t have time to read.

But then apropos of nothing I picked up a book, and as so often happens when you read something you love, I got stuck right in. As I turned the final pages I got that familiar addictive fear that I wouldn’t be able to find another book that transported me in quite that way from everything normal and ordinary in my life. That’s what I love most about a good book – the ability to transport myself completely to another time and place. To utterly lose myself

I was lucky, I found the books. I have been reading, and reading, and reading. I cannot explain how happy this has made me.

But then something happened which threatened to topple the weekly voyages I was taking into other people’s lives. My best friend Kerri Sackville sent me the manuscript that she has just submitted to her agent. That’s a good thing, right?

Not necessarily.

I love Kerri’s writing, I’m sure you know she is a brilliant, expressive, often laugh out loud and enthralling writer. I love her columns, her blog posts, I devoured her last two books, hell, I even love her tweets. But this was her first novel and I’d never read fiction from her. I am very fussy about my fiction.

The manuscript arrived as a Word document. No e-book, no proof copy, no bound pages. Just a 229 page Word document. Saved as a PDF file. I balked. How was I even going to read that? It’s a very unfriendly format for someone whose favourite place to read is the bath.

I thought I’d use that as an excuse not to read it. “Sorry I can’t read it angel” I would say to her “I can only read in the bath and I can’t take my laptop into the bath, I’m sure it’s a brilliant book and I can’t wait to read it when it’s published in water-proof material”. I needed an excuse. What if I hated the book? What if I thought it was badly written, the story line weak, the characters limp? I wouldn’t be able to actually read it and how on earth would I tell her that she wrote a shit book?

I’d just have to tell her that I loved it. That’s what I would do. I would skim it and get an idea of some of the characters in case she asked questions and then I’d tell her it was “really lovely”.

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I read and I read and I read.

A while later I found myself thinking “I must tell Kerri to read this book – she’ll love it.” That’s the kind of thing I do with books I love, I get lost in them, I forget my real life and I think how much I want my friends and everyone I know to read this book. I want to share the books I love, I want other people to read them so that the characters stay alive for me and I can talk to my friends about them long after I have turned the last page.

I called Kerri. But really it was only because I wanted to find out how Rachel (the main character in her book) was doing. I missed her already and I was still reading the book (believe me if it wasn’t in PDF format it would be finished now).

It’s so easy to read, I love the characters, I keep laughing out loud, I keep feeling ALL the feels, I am reading and falling away from my world, that’s my favourite feeling in the world.

It’s weird to think that this was written by my friend. Weirder even that she suffers from “imposter syndrome” when she just wrote my new favourite book.

Watch her and I talk about imposter syndrome here and get ready to buy an absolutely stunning book when it is published. If you’re luckier than me you’ll get to read it in an actual book. In the bath.

Do you suffer from Imposter Syndrome? How many copies of Kerri’s book will you buy?

Apparently people with servants cannot be “proper” mothers

Princess CharlotteI might be sounding like a Royal apologist or even a great lover and admirer of the Royal family soon, it seems I can’t stop writing about them or defending them. I wrote a piece recently for Kidspot in favour of the Duchess of Cambridge before she had her baby and I wrote a rant that I needed to get off my head on my Facebook page the day after she appeared on the steps of the hospital.

Here’s what I said in case you missed it [Read more…]

#5minutes with Kerri and Lana : The Ugly Child Edition

Recently there was a post on Reddit from a woman who wrote saying that she was aware that her child was ugly or, er not conventionally attractive. Kerri wrote a post about it on Essential Kids and caused a few people to say things that were quite ugly or, er not conventionally attractive.

We chatted about ugly kids here. But far and away the best part is how antsy Kerri gets at the end. And my facial reaction to her snippy farewell.
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#5minutes with Kerri and Lana: The Compassion Edition

Today felt sombre and heavy. It was a sad day. A day of mourning and compassion. Not just for Andrew Chan and Muyaran Sukumaran, not just for the people of Nepal.

Kerri and I chatted about Andrew, Muyaran, Nepal, Kerri’s knee, compassion and much more.

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Tell us what you think.

This is what they need to be learning at school

domestic violenceIt’s become almost just words now we hear it so often. 31 women killed in Australia this year, 32 women killed in Australia this year – and now we are at 33. April has not yet ended.

It’s not the total amount of women that have died in Australia, it’s not the number of people dead from freak accidents or hideous diseases. It’s the number of women killed as a result of violence inflicted on them by men, sometimes their partners, sometimes strangers.

It was in March of this year after Masa Vukotic was stabbed to death in suburban Melbourne that Victorian Homicide Squad Inspector, Mick Hughes told Fairfax “I suggest to people, particularly females, they shouldn’t be alone in parks.”

Of course there was an outcry. Why on earth should women have to live their lives any differently than men? And why is it their fault?
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Mentally ill or evil?

I am no Pollyanna, everyone who knows me knows that . I am the master of thinking of and fearing the worst possible scenario in my head, I am a nervous worrier and I often experience hideous anxiety. Especially when I watch the news. Or listen to people talk about the world.

Because of this lovely, sunny natural disposition of mine I have had to build up a few defence mechanism – ignoring people, changing the subject, crying to my husband and er, swallowing pills. Perhaps the way I perceive the world is another one of these defence mechanisms.

For instance when I hear that someone has done something heinous I assume (and I believe rightly) that they are mentally ill. Not in a “depressed” or “anxious” way but in a “completely out of touch with reality” way.

I never thought of it as a defence mechanism until I really spoke about it in some detail with Kerri.
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Take a look – Kerri feels very differently to me. For a change. Please watch the video so that you can see I REALLY don’t believe everyone with a mental illness commits evil acts (in fact I know that not to be true).

What do you think? Can people be evil or is it a mental illness?