#4 Sunday ABC

I had so many thoughts for blogging this week and now that I’m finally sitting in front of the computer, it’s sadly quite a chore. But writing posts in my head is therapeutic, reading others words often inspires and connecting can turn a day around, so here’s Round 4.

Please feel free to join in with your own responses either in the comments or as your own post 🙂

My week in a nutshell – I’ve been flat and then productive and now tired and worried. My husband  has injured his foot just as we start harvest and I’m fairly well the worst nurse-wife ever.

A is for Affirmation

My motto for the week is to ride it out…..maybe not quite like this fella :p

B is for Best, Worst and OMM

Best – Coming through a fog of flatness and the gratitude of feeling energetic again. enjoying some favourite episodes of Grey’s

Worst – Seeing jobs that need doing and having no desire to do them

OMM – (On my mind) How I will cope doing all the cooking and supporting my husband who will understandably get frustrated as he heals.

C is for Community

Katie from How I Killed Betty wrote two blogs this week that really hit home for me.

Attacking Life, or Running Away

and, What do you do to combat depression and/or anxiety?

She describes her blog as a diary on how to tackle depression and anxiety and it definitely helps me to have others share their journeys, ideas and challenges. Sometimes it can all feel hopeless or just hard work but when the skies clear…..

You know it’s worth pulling through and that you can do it, time and time again.

 

 

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#3 Sunday ABC

Welcome to Round 3 of my new-ish regular feature, please feel free to join in with your own responses either in the comments or as your own post 🙂

A is for Affirmation

B is for Best, Worst and OMM

Best – Staying at the world’s best B&B aka my sister and brother-in-laws. They let me sleep in and serve bacon and egg muffins!

Worst – Feeling fatigued all week

OMM – (On my mind) I think I’ve been too tired to think this week :p but we do have our council elections voting slips to send back so have been thinking about some of the candidates and local issues.

C is for Community – this is normally when I share a favourite post or two from the last week. Today however I’m sharing today’s experience of worship. Our congregation was invited to attend a destination 2+hours away in another rural community. I love the feeling of being amongst family in whatever church we worship in. Today felt extra special being Reformation Sunday.

I’m sorry it’s short today. I debated not posting but I think it’s a fair reflection of my last week!

Ooops need to add a p.s. A shout out to OT’s and OT week, a profession I’m so proud and privileged to be a part of and special thanks to the amazing people we work with.

Your Sunday ABC

I’m contemplating starting a regular (most likely irregular) feature on my blog, and would love your feedback.

I’ve always been a fan of blogs which give you a chance to share an update on your life. I first experienced this on Mamamia an Australian women’s website which started small and intimate and has grown big and commercial. I admire the creator Mia Freedman and all she has achieved but sincerely miss the days of the Best and Worst. It was a true God-send in my early parenting days, keeping me in touch with the world and other people.

More recently I have been following Sammy Hope whose blog covers her three big passions of beauty, mental health, and self-improvement, including a weekly Friday check-in. Sammy, I most certainly leave your blog feeling encouraged – thank you.

I’ve also been reflecting on my new years goals (yes mostly forgotten lol) and remembered that I’d talked about how community is super important to me. To build on this my new feature is going to be the Sunday ABC (along with continuing my spotlights)

So how I think this may work (did I mention anything about feedback?!?):

A is for Affirmation

(from a church hymn this morning)

B is for Best, Worst and OMM

Best – I’ve had a great weekend (finishing a book, starting another, out for tea with friends, games with the kids and a nap with hubby) PLUS school’s back tomorrow

Worst – I think this week it goes to the refugees in particular the children on Nauru kept there by the Australian Government despite diagnosed mental and physical illnesses.

OMM – (On my mind) Mental Health – I’ve just been link following from http://samentalhealthcommission.com.au and a guest post by Matt Ball 2017 Mental Health Nurse of the Year who has experienced psychosis. I’ve also thinking about finances as I’ve started Scott Page’s The Barefoot Investor and hoping I can convince my hubby to book in a Barefoot Date Night 🙂

Lastly….I did have something for C before I had something for A but unfortunately somewhere in the tea, bath, bed routine I lost it…ahhh wait

C is for Community – where we can share a favourite post or two from the last week.

Oh gosh there were too many good ones this week, stop being such good, interesting writers y’all :p

I’ve chosen this one though by Max The Confidence Problem , which included this great quote “Confidence comes from being okay with being imperfect. “

I hope you all have a perfectly imperfect week and of course please feel feel to join in with all or any of the ABC’s

God Bless

GJ

So Much More than Just a Sport

I’ve wanted to write for quite a while about a topic very close to my heart. despite the fact I can easily imagine others looking at it as a complete non-issue. I’d like to start therefore by proclaiming that I am a strong believer in the concept that it takes a village to raise a child. Indeed I am very fortunate to be among wonderful supportive ‘villages’ that both make my parenting life easier and also enrich the lives of my children. A predominant one of these villages is my sporting community. My husband is an avid aussie rules and cricket player, so year long our saturdays are taken up by sport, our sundays by recuperation and the week for preparation. I also play and love netball but this year made the BIG decision not to play for the same club as my husband but another local club which plays in a different league.

It was an incredibly hard decision to make, especially when at the start of the season I was basing the decision most pressingly on a memory I had that I wanted to change clubs next year. At the start of the season I couldn’t precisely remember why I’d been feeling that way but I decided to trust that memory and try out for another club.

Things that made the decision difficult:

• I love the club I was leaving behind – the people and the sense of community
• They were struggling for netball numbers – actually I thought they would only have one team instead of the usual two which meant I’d be ok
• Friends not understanding why I was making the decision

One thing that would have changed my mind:

• My husband was very against the idea. He’d said so and yet (and yet) he didn’t (wouldn’t) discuss it with me. He wouldn’t give me his reasons and he didn’t (wouldn’t) ask for mine.

My husband won his grand final yesterday, I am so happy for him and proud BUT I am also now sitting here in bed reflecting (crying involved) on why I want to make the same decision again next year. I’ve decided to put finger to keyboard and communicate some of these reflections.

Reasons I made the decision:

• The lifestyle/culture – the only way to celebrate a grand final is to drink all night and all day, or at least that’s how it feels to me. I’m not good at this. I get tired and grumpy and unsociable. I’m more a stay home, read a book, cuddle up kinda girl.
  • I don’t think my husband minds this about me but I feel like I miss out. I want to be apart of his victory, I want to celebrate with him but it just doesn’t work that way.
  • There are other wives/girlfriends who seem to be able to do this and I’m jealous.
• As I’ve said I LOVE so many people part of this sporting club. My children have so much fun with friends there. I decided though that there’s a difference between loving people and wanting to spend majority of your time with them. They are my family but they are not the people I would sit down and chat with for 4+ hours on a weekly basis. We are different and that’s ok.*
• I started to hate particularly after training nights walking in and waiting to find someone to sit with. It was a weekly decision/agony and why should I put myself through that?
• Training nights were the same for both me and my husband making child care difficult. Also due to tea and socializing they were late.
• Relationship/family stuff – I would always feel like as soon as we arrived at the footy oval my husband would clock off. Now was his time to prepare for the game while I was responsible for the childcare even though involved in my own sporting game. He would often be last out of the change rooms and sometimes I would feel that even after he did arrive out he would not look to acknowledge or come see me. This was his domain.

It was the right decision to make, for me. Not so much our family, we missed out on travelling together for games and the kids missed out on seeing as much of their friends. I would still often head out to club rooms after my games, which would be nice but not great. I enjoyed playing netball with a different group of girls. I enjoyed that the focus was solely on netball and not working on maintaining a whole community. I also appreciated the flexibility of training on a different night.

But now we are at the end of the season (actually I still get to play in a grand final next weekend!) and I still feel the same way about many of these issues. I believe it’s important to my husband for me to be there as a sign of support but I want to be wanted for my company.

There is no conclusion to this story, it’s a work in progress. In good news for me though my husband and I are starting to see a counselor so maybe just maybe by the start of next season we will be making a decision together.

*I’d like to note that some of these people I would happily spend endless hours with and that some of my feelings are likely overly swayed by my moods. I also want to say how supportive many of these people have been – a number will be there to watch me at my grand final next week and an even larger number asked me yesterday how my team went.

Three Thoughts

My first personal memory of a community in mourning was when a woman was murdered from a previous workplace of mine. Even when you may not be closely associated with a person, the magnitude of the loss of their life can still floor you. I guess that is how it is for some people with celebrity deaths.

In recent times my local community has been struck by tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. As I watched footage tonight of six young pall bearers I reflected on the honour that no person wants but that I was so blessed to have for My Friend. Thought One.

Secondly I’ve finally had the ‘holiday’ experience I’ve been dreaming of this week – ending the day with episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. But (spoiler alert) I’m watching the episodes about Keppner and Avery’s baby and reflecting on the choice I was once given to terminate my pregnancy. Mostly I consider the blessing I had to continue to carry him in my womb, for which I will forever be grateful. Thought Two.

Today was about tax, work notes, Telstra and chores. Thought Three – I hate end of year time as part of my in-laws family business. I hate what I feel to be judgement and a complete misunderstanding of who I am and my values. But on the bright side hubby and I have been communicating well and that is something I wish I could hang onto for all time.

Any thoughts you care to get off you chest?

God bless

Small Communities

I may be biased, but country towns rock. I am so very fortunate and blessed to be part of a number of small country communities and this week I was inspired by another community to write about just how wonderful they are.

My Communities (in an attempted nutshell)

• Family – immediate, extended and in-laws
• Church Family – immediate, parish, state, country, world and heaven wide
• Sporting community (for us football and cricket)
• Town Community (state and country)
• Various other small group/club communities
  • (think I may be pushing the definition of communities out a bit on this one)

Yesterday I attended a wedding for a beautiful couple from one of my communities. I love weddings and that feeling of looking around at your people and knowing just how blessed you are.

A seemingly common theme in my blog, death, is also a time for reflecting on those in your community and often it brings out and shows the strength of a community. From my cousins family…

“Thank you seems such a small word to say as we reflect on the enormous amount of love and support given to our family in the days that followed our beloved’s passing. We know as we write this letter that we are still not fully aware of all that was done for us during that time, as many of you acted anonymously or in a “behind the scenes” manner.
Your kindness, love, hugs, gifts of food, flowers, words of support and encouragement, warm presence and heartfelt sympathy embraced and comforted us. We were humbled by the magnitude of grace this amazing community possesses.
Your protective assistance with the unwelcome media attention was also very much appreciated.
His funeral service made us all incredibly proud of the man he was and the life he lived. Seeing thousands of people behind us, some of whom had travelled from all over the country, made us realise just how many lives he has touched. His larger than life personality stuck with every person he met and his memory lives on within each and every one of you.
The beauty of memory is that we hold it in our hearts forever. We will never forget the kindness and compassion you have shown us.”

 

A community is a place you belong, another family, a village for your children – in my experience a group of people you can rely on through thick and thin.

 

And lastly changing the tone a little and thinking about a community way out of my realm

To the Syrian regime,

Listen to the echo of my voice.

In my eyes this world has become lifeless.

In one moment I lost my country.

But these are your people too.

My heart’s broken because you’ve betrayed my country

And the life of this generation is destroyed.

 

To my people,

Be patient.

This crisis has shown you that your country is a treasure

But you see that it is only now that you have lost it.

 

(from The Lutheran vol. 50 no.2)

Getting to know me – and you (Liebster Award)

Myzania nominated me for a  pass-it-along question and answer thing – I would love to get to know some of my followers/readers better so please join in! (Thank you Myznia 🙂

1. What is your favourite book/ movie? Favourite Book = Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Movie = Pretty Woman
2. Do you prefer to read books or watch movies/T.V.? Reading without a doubt,but some nights require a movie and I do love getting into a good tv show – unfortunately they seem a rarity these days
3. What song or songs bring out the most emotion in you and why? I really like listening to music but am not very good at following it (as in knowing artists and their songs). Recently I have enjoyed listening to Backstreet Boys (reminds me of my primary school days) and Taylor Swift but my all-time favourite is At the beginning from the movie Anastacia
4. What makes you laugh? my children
5. What gets you angry – and how do you deal with that? (‘That’ being the situation and /or the anger itself.) My husband most often! I try to deal with this by taking a step back – I can generally then see other influences ie tiredness, lack of communication on my behalf etc which lessens the anger. I also try and pray for him/us
6. What are you passionate about? Social justice and making a difference in small ways ie shopping local
7. What is your earliest memory? Hmmm – my childhood home in QLD, my best friend lived across the road and the backyard where I played with my brothers.
8. Do you have/ want a pet? My pet dog now lives with my parents and I should never get another pet as I am not a particularly responsible owner. My husband has a pet dog who shares our home though and he is an important part of our lives
9. What is your favourite time of year? (Holiday, season, etc.) I’m loving January at the moment – we tend to have family holidays this time of year and I also seem to mange to make headway on goals around the home
10. What is your favourite type of weather? A nice warm day, 30 degrees is perfect
11. How long have you been blogging and what made you start? Less than a year, was something I had been thinking about for awhile.

I’ve had a lovely week away at the beach with my family and some friends. Only one more week until my oldest starts school for the first time – lots happening at the moment.

Now my questions for you – would love it if you joined in the conversation in the comments.

1. What is your favourite weekend activity?
2. What was your favourite year level at school and why?
3. What is something you are passionate about?
4. Do you have a day job – what is it?
5. What do you enjoy reading most – a favourite blog/book/magazine/genre…..?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend