Rocket science

I have just spent a perfect hour with the lad. The twins were asleep, the husband is at Bunnings (NZ answer to B&Q) so the lad and I sat outside in the morning sunshine and painted each other's nails. He asked me to sit still and said that the pearlised pink nail polish he had chosen made him feel like we had rainbows in our hands. I damn near folded over inside with love for the little boy. A few months ago before I went back to England for nine weeks he was getting seriously difficult to deal with. The time at home with my parents was perfect as I got to spend lots of time with each of the children individually. My parents offer such an vast amount of support, never get annoyed with crying babies or toddlers and do such interesting things with them all as well as constant cuddling and chatting. Predictably this benefited the lad enormously so by the time we came back to NZ he had calmed down quite a bit. Recently he has been more tricky again. He is hard to discipline as he has an answer for everything (any of my close friends reading this will be scoffing in recognition of this clearly hereditary trait) and is unafraid of standing up for himself even in the face of a puce, boggled eyed, raging mother. Two days ago I spent a good hour making jigsaws with him, yesterday he helped me cook all morning and today we had more time together in the garden. There is no doubt that when I find time to direct all my attention at him he is miles happier and more amenable. It's not rocket science, we all know how it works.

The picture isn't relevant to the post - just one of me on Christmas Day. I love a bit of puerile humour.

I am against change, even if it is for the better

"I am opposed to change, even if it is for the better". The octogenarian, blazer wearing, moustache toting chap who exclaimed this to cheers of "hear, hear" at a dinner for a gentleman's club one of my friends belongs to clearly has no experience (or maybe memory) of raising a little tribe of children. This week I have banished all bottles from the house - not those containing such elixirs as wine and beer but rather those fiddly, hard to wash and put together ones into which you are constantly sloshing milk. Luckily the twins are only 15 months old so have barely registered their absence. The lad however has become something of a milk fiend over the past year or so sending our dairy bill sky high so he hasn't been quite so enamoured with this particular change. I have other motives for getting rid of the things too. When the twins start toilet training in a year or so it will be I hope a faster process as they won't be drinking half a pint of liquid before they go to sleep each night. For a year I was changing three sets of nappies. Now I'm down to just two I'm keen to make it none. The early years of your children's lives are deeply precious and I feel strange at cheering on these miniscule movements towards the blessed day that they can all walk on their own (I gaze open mouthed in envy at people walking down the street with their children easily keeping the same pace beside them and with no double Mountain Buggy carving the way). I'm also aware though that I will look back at changing their nappies and sitting down three times a day to feed them all with nostalgia and winsome fondness and possible even miss pushing the chariot around which, rather impressively takes all three of the children (twins in the pushchair and the lad sitting on the foot bar).

The children's independence will, I hope, mark a period of less pain in my arm. Because of the nerve damage in my arm it is painful all the time. As this has been a constant for nine years now, the pain registers in my brain as more of a 'different' sensation rather than anything which makes me feel uncomfortable. Having children and especially twins has exacerbated the pain as the lad either slings his arms round my neck (where the nerve damage starts - the trunk of nerves called the brachial plexus comes from the spine and splits up to feed various muscles in the arm and hand) or as I try to use my hand on the bad side to do jobs it really can't do while I'm lugging a baby round on my hip. The worst thing about the state of my arm is the way it affects the children. Because of the pain and also frustration I feel at my ineffectiveness at some tasks, I get irritable and snappy. The inevitable result being that my special little children bare the brunt of it. This upsets me terribly and I try hard to keep it in check.

Because of this and so much more, I can say I am happily pro change, whatever the reason.

Roll on next Christmas

Yesterday the husband went over to a friend's house with twin2 and the lad. I stayed at home with twin1 while she had a nap. When they all came home the husband was rosy cheeked and full of vim. "Next Christmas, my darling, will be in England" he announced.

Now I know thay we have only just pulled down the Christmas decorations and found places for the myriad multicoloured plastic gadgets Father Christmas lobbed down the chimney but I am now sooooooooo excited about next Christmas. The last cold Christmas I had was in 2005 and it was an awesome one. It was the first Christmas with the husband (who was then 'the boyfriend') and we got engaged that New Year's Eve in Austria under the falling snow and sparkling fireworks.

All I can think of is wearing boots and coats and scarves, walking to the pub and stomping your feet in front of an open fire clutching a mug of steaming mulled wine. Spending Christmas with my parents in their lovely family home with my own little family will be fantastic. My brother and his wife won't be there as they will be running their cosy, beautiful chalet in Chamonix (if you fancy a holiday go to http://www.ice-break.co.uk/). Having them there really would be the icing on the cake but it's a good excuse to go over and ski. Ooh yeah baby roll on next Christmas.

Tree Hugger

I love this tree. It's in our front garden. I think it's a Robinia. The leaves range from deep mustard yellow to the creamiest, mint green. Wherever you are in the living room, dining room or sitting outside the front of the house you can see the gorgeous thing waving its branches in the breeze. Knowing that the tree belongs to us makes me feel very grown up. More grown up than being a Mum or a wife or paying a mortgage. Apart from the fact that it can stand alone as a thing of beauty it is quite special because the spit of land upon which Mount Maunganui resides is made entirely of sand so these sorts of trees are few and far between. There are more Norfolk Pines than you could shake a stick at and plenty of palm trees. My tree knocks the spots off all arboresque competition however and I adore it. It reminds me of home. I miss the countryside in Britain. I'm thinking of skinny, never ending, windy roads surrounded by ancient, leafy woods and fringed with cows parsley. Rambling old pubs with low ceilings, wooden beams and locals at the bar. Where we live in New Zealand is pretty distant from that picture. We live on a beautiful beach (see the pic at the top of my blog) in a town which boomed in the eighties. I think it would be fair to say that Mount Maunganui is not the jewel in New Zealand's architectural crown. During my first year here I could think of nothing but the gorgeous, chocolate box villages at home nestled into my beloved English countryside. I grew increasingly irritated looking at the houses here at the Mount and had no interest in the one we bought whatsoever. During a conversation with my cousin in England who is planning to move to Australia with her Aussie husband, she said that the one thing she would not do would be to compare Australia to England. I gulped and blushed as I realised that I had been doing exactly that for the last year. Coming back to NZ I found it so much easier to enjoy the place for what it really has to offer instead of what it lacked. When I walk through our streets now I am interested in why the houses were built as they were, think of the generations of families who have been here a long time and seen their sparsely populated idyll mushroom into the busy, tourist hotspot it is today. I'm becoming rather attached to the house we live in. The husband tore it back to a shell and lovingly built a new house house to cater for our growing brood.

I'm writing this today because I was looking at the title of Iota's blog which is called 'Not wrong, just different'. She moved to America as a Brit and was wary of her reactions to a new place. It seems that I could have benefited from reading that a couple of years ago. The other reason I'm writing it is because I'm really enjoying feeling positive about New Zealand and feeling lucky to love Blighty so much but be given an opportunity to enjoy a different country too. On the note of positivity I shall leave you with this little anecdote.

Not one hour before typing this I was trawling twin1 and twin2 round the supermarket. At the checkout the homely Farah Fawcett lovely told me how lucky I was to have twins. I agreed and asked her if she had any children. She said she had had four children, then her husband left her and ended up looking after 8 children as her oldest daughter had a baby at home and 2 cousins came to live with them plus a boyfriend as there was so much trouble in the cousins' families. She fed them all on $60 per week. Let me tell you she looked beautiful, perky and happy. She said "well it never did me any harm looking after them all'. I looked at her name badge and she's called Miel which means honey in French. What a legend of a lady.

Hallowed turf

Check out the pictures of the lush, beautiful lawn which now replaces the slope at the back of our house. The husband has many talents - one of which is that he is a 'finisher of projects'. Two weeks ago ready grown lawn was delivered to our doorstep and the husband painstakingly laid it. We were told to water it regularly and to wait 10 days before we walked on it. It all sounded fairly basic to me but the husband treated the grass with the kind of attentiveness a newborn baby affords. Every night for the last couple of weeks if he has woken up in the night he would go outside, check how wet the grass was and tinker with the rate at which the water came out of the sprinkler. His alarm was set for 5am every day and he has been out there, studiously watching the water pitter patter onto his pride and joy. When we drove to Taranaki for the weekend to see Fleetwood Mac his brother was drafted in to get up at 5am and turn the sprinkler on (luckily they are very close and the brother didn't think this was either odd or too much to ask). This was suplemented by several daily strolls round the perimeter watering the places the sprinkler couldn't reach with a hose. After 10 days I tentatively asked if we could walk on the hallowed turf. "One more day" I was told. Two days later I was informed it should only be a couple more days until we can use the garden. Today, 19 days after the lawn was laid, the lad ran riot and we moved the trampoline down there too. The obsession has paid off and we now have the most fantastic extra bit of garden. What a clever man you are, thank you oh husband of mine.

This year I have a goal. I can't really call it a resolution as such but something to work towards. A few months ago my brother married his lovely girlfriend. She has changed his life in the most profoundly positive way possible and has made him a very happy person. Although they live a mere 11,000 miles or so away from us (they are in Chamonix, France and we are in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand) I would like to spend more time with them and get to know my new sister in law better. A fairly fantastical wish but I have a few ideas up my sleeve. Unfortunately all the ideas need pots of cash to finance them and involve travelling the aforementioned 11,000 miles. We had talked about going to France for the winter season at the end of 2010 some time ago but a few other spanners have been thrown into the works since then. Anyway we can but try, can we not?

BA (Hons) Housewifery

How do you housewives out there rate your housewifery skills? When my mother was expertly running our house I barely noticed what an amazing job she was doing, raising two children while my dad was frequently away on business, holding down a full time job when we went to school and running the house all at the same time. I noticed in the sense that she was always there to pick us up and drop us off, I noticed that my brother and I always felt loved and happy and warm but I just assumed that running the house was something that everyone did to the same standard. Now I'm the housewife snd how differently I see the situation.

Housewifery is essentially an administrative job. There are additional skills needed which are too numerous to mention individually but are as wide ranging as being able to cook and negociate with either a six month old or an adult with equal tact. Some time ago after university I did a few adminstrative jobs and secretarial work. Little did I know how useful these skills would become. Not everyone relishes the role of running the household. I was on a plane a few years ago with a friend and her second baby. She is an impressive artist, runs a gallery and is fearfully intelligent. She told me she finds being a housewife extremely difficult and that the job does not come easily to her at all.

Being a housewife is rewarding in all sorts of ways and it is good to be your own boss. I love cooking and find it relaxing and fulfilling (which is lucky as I seem to spend an extraordinary time in the kitchen) but the rest of the work involved is so unchallenging mentally I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be able to properly engage my brain again for long periods of time or even if I can will what's left of it be useful in any kind of commercial capacity?. As with millions of Mums I'd like to work but am unwilling to allow someone else to bring up our children just so I can scratch my mental itch. In an ideal world I'd work 2 days a week doing an intense, mentally challenging, staggeringly well paid job 5 minutes walk from my house while my parents looked after the children. In the real world I'll wait until the twins are in some kind of regular childcare and try and get a job doing whatever is available at the time locally.

On a more entertaining note we have a friend staying with us from London. Last night he and I were talking about some of the people out there who he might be interested in romantically. I found his take on these matters highly amusing. I told him about a friend of our family who has a much younger girlfriend than him but that she is also pretty boring. "Ah, and there it is. You get youth but the pay off is dullness" he tells me. Another of his interesting 'pay off' theories is that of the women in his age range available for romance and fun (30's ish) the prettier ones tend to have a child in tow. I'm looking forward to more of these conversations with him over the next week or so.

Do bloggers take a 'holiday' from blogging on Christmas Day? As I am new on the scene I'm unaware of the etiquette. When I worked at Sporting Index in London there were quite a few furtive, whispered calls from blokes who had disappeared into the garden to call us on their mobiles in order to buy runs in some obscure cricket match taking place on the other side of the world. Clearly Christmas is no excuse for a holiday from a gambling addiction.

What's Father Christmas up to?

The house is clean. Spotless in fact. The lovely lady who has transformed it from a grubby, dusty mess into a serene space of clean light was on holiday last week so it was particularly bad after two weeks of neglect. The morale boost of a tidy house to an irritable mother cannot be underestimated. Years ago I used to have a girl called Magda help me in London. Although she made the place look gorgeous there were always a few incidents. I came home early one day to find her spraying my perfume liberally over herself. I would often get phone calls asking for her from overseas. Magda also cleaned the house of a friend of mine. His girlfriend came home to find Magda fully reclined on his la-z-boy chair enjoying a chat with one of her Polish compatriots on his landline. I liked the girl but she clearly needed to re-evaluate where her professional boundaries lay.

It's Christmas eve and our house is full of excitement. We have been discussing Father Christmas and what we think he's probably up to right at this very minute, wondering whether the snow and ice in England will impede his reindeer of if they'll feel it's a 'home from home' and speed them up. This evening we will be having roast chicken for dinner then after the children have all gone to bed the husband and I will wrap up their presents, drink sherry and listen to Christmas carols. The weather forecast for tomorrow is clear blue skies which would be glorious. Our Christmas Day will be spent with the husband's family which is always fun. I will miss my family terribly but they are coming in 4 weeks on my birthday so there is plenty to look forward to with them.

Yo ho ho Merry Christmas to one and all love from Jenny Jane Rudd

a perfect, brand new baby

For the first year of the twins' little lives I held their first birthday up as some kind of summit towards which I was clawing myself. As the big day got closer I realised that it was fairly niaive hoping on that particular day the sun would shine out from behind the clouds, my three children would turn into cherubic routine lovers and everything would be rosy and shiny. Amazingly, it sort of has happened like that although not in quite the Enid Blyton illustrated fashion I had held in my brain. The babies can amuse themselves for long periods of time tooling round the house together, playing with toys and ransacking cupboards. The boy's language took an almighty leap forward while we were in England during September and October so he is easier to comminicate with although he does also find it easier to impart his extreme distaste in fairly colourful language so I suppose it's a double edged sword. Also the sun did, quite literally, come out. It's summer here in NZ and it is very easy to cart everyone off to the beach in the morning and have a massive run around and swim in the ocean which is a great way to start anyone's day.

Yesterday evening I took the twins down to see a friend on my road who has just had her third baby. As I walked down I thought about what it would be like to have a fourth baby in our little family. I love the idea of a big family with lots of noise and chaos. The husband is one of four and I am one of two. His family are very social and we always have fun all together. I have loved the closeness of being just my brother and I with our parents. There were always plenty of people to play with growing up (we went to boarding school from a young age and also had the benefit of living on a base as my father was in the Forces) and we went on some excellent, adventurous holidays. Now we are grown up we get to see lots of our parents as they only have to share their time between the two of us. When I saw the gorgeous little face of my friend's brand new, perfect little boy I must admit I felt great happiness for her and equally great gratitude for having completely the first year.

It definitely is easier now the babies are one. I am only cooking one meal in the evening, the children can all shower together, they can hold their own bottles of milk and are sleeping less frequently in the day and rather more importantly they slumber peacefully all night. As it gets easier am I going to forget how hard it is and wonder in a year or so if we should have another? I'm not sure. Other things have got easier too. The huge, hollow space inside where my homesickness likes to reside has reduced somewhat. The husband is paving his way to where he wants to be in his career having suddenly taken huge steps at work and I have some ideas of how to start easing my way back into the workforce whilst still looking after the children. As one friend said to me a while ago "why on earth would you consider having another when you have found it so hard?". Let's hope I can remember that in a year or two.

more west coast capers

After the show
Looking down at the band

Stevie Nicks you rock

Fellow funsters

A stroll into the park where Fleetwood Mac were playing

Looking up at the Wind Wand

Len Lye's Wind Wand

This weekend has rejuvenated my mind and and all the little molecules in my body have been filled with energy. The husband, two friends and I drove to New Plymouth on Friday to see Fleetwood Mac. What an opportunity to see one of the greatest bands of all time. New Plymouth is a farely remote town which sits further south than us on the west coast and is overshadowed by the beautiful, magnetic Mount Taranaki, the mountain after which the region is named. I was excited about going to a part of New Zealand I had never visited. What a fascinating town it is too. There has clearly been quite some investment in the town in recent years. Art Deco style buildings sit nestled in against newer, more industrial style constructions. There is a respect for art and creative thinking in the town which in turn leant it an intelligent, open minded feel. The New Zealand born artist Len Lye had an exhibition in the art gallery as well as an amazing sculpture situated right on the boardwalk on the sea front - the 'Wind Wand'. The tall, red wand bent whichever way the wind blew it and also reflected the force of the wind with its bowed stemn. We wondered if the bulbous end ever touched the ground in really violent weather.

On Friday evening we drank delicious champagne cocktails in the sunshine at the bar outside the museum, gazing out to sea past the wind wand. It was just after 5pm and I felt truly relaxed and grateful to be enjoying the company of my husband and our lovely friends. I managed to cast my thoughts eastward towards the twins' generous grandparents who were looking after them for the weekend and towards the husband's brother and our neighbours who were sharing care of the lad until Sunday. The thoughts were fleeting though as it is a rare day to be drinking champagne at 5pm.

Fleetwood Mac were mind blowing. What a deeply talented group of musicians. The real star of the show was Lyndsey Buckingham. A phenomenal guitarist and singer. We stood under a vast tree in the Brooklands Bowl and looked down towards the stage which was sitting on an island surrounded by a moat. A magical venue for music and even though there were a few drops of rain we were kept dry by our tree.

We spent all weekend laughing, chatting, marvelling at the cool town of New Plymouth and feeling happy. Usually these sorts of weekends leave you feeling exhausted but instead I feel excited about this week with Christmas at the end of it and pleased to be reunited with our chiddlers.