Well, the tables have turned, and I’m not a person of leisure any more. I have bid farewell to my life as a lady who lunches, a stay-at-home-mum, a kept woman (he he he) and any other snappy little label you can think of.

That’s right, I have re-entered the corporate world. I’m a full time working mum.

So far, it hasn’t been too difficult. The one thing I absolutely hate, though, is having to bolt out of the office at 5:00pm on the dot in order to pick up Le Sproglette from day care before they shut their doors at 5:30pm. There is no room for procrastination in my working life anymore, and that was previously my modus operandi.

I am very surprised at how comfortable I am with leaving the Sproglette in full time child care. She seems to really enjoy her time there, and luckily I don’t have to drop her off (that’s Mr Moi’s job, and that’s when the tears happen). I have the occasional twitch of guilt about abandonning my child as soon as she turned one (which was just how things worked out, rather than an actual plan to do so).

But I disregard those twitchings as soon as they surface… Because I haven’t felt better than I do now, for months – even years. I never thought I was much of a career girl, but I really thrive on my work, on being a bit ballsy when required, and really stretching my intelligence (I’ve realised that when it comes to myself, I’m a bit of an intelligence snob, that I love sounding like I’m a clever clogs) on a daily basis. I love having interesting conversations with my colleagues, I love having an argument and sticking up for my work and my profession (communications = the great misunderstood).

I especially love working in an office. Freelancing, for me, just didn’t turn me on. I don’t think I could write a book, because I just couldn’t fathom those endless months of sitting in a room by myself and typing typing typing, even if an editor or mentor is at the other end of a phone line. I need the discipline of working in an office, I’m just hopeless by myself.

I wrote a comment on one of my favourite blogs, Girls Gone Child, and it sums up how I’m feeling at the moment:

Dear rebecca. I’m *sort of* having that experience. I’ve just gone back to work full time after living abroad for 2.5 years, .5 of that time with a baby, and the entire of that time being professionally stifled/frustrated/unable.

Now, at work, I’ve seemingly slipped seamlessly back into the work me – I finally feel whole again! I sort of forget that I have this whole other life involving t-shirt covered in mashed sweet potato and pasta, and dirty teething nappies at 4am.

In fact, after feeling like I was living in a haze of lethargy for the entire first post-natal year, I am working full time, sleeping less, thinking clearer and feeling wonderfully alive.

I really feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds at the moment. I hope it doesn’t come crashing down.

I found the first year of babyhood a total rollercoaster, as many mums do. I felt tired, exhausted, worried, anxious, sad, depressed, frustrated, bored, angry and hopeless on more occasions than I care to remember. I love my little Sproglette, but after a year of just me and her, I think I needed to get back to work, to do my thing, in order for me to be a better mum to her.

Now, every hug I give her feels like it counts ten time more.

Now, I never begrudge a cuddle, or a song, or a story book.

Now, I have a chance to miss her smell, and I appreciate it more when we’re together.

Now, I’m happy with myself, with what I’m doing, and feel like I’m a better mum.

And it’s all because I’ve finally figured out that I need to make myself happy in order to bring up a happy little Sproglette.

And thanks to Bex from Bex, Perplexed, for leaving such a lovely comment.

PS I wonder now that I’m back in the office environment, if I’ll stop having those crazy dreams where I’m about to graduate from high school/university, only to realise that I haven’t completed all the subjects and must start all over again. It’s a recurring nightmare.

Those who know me know that I am a serial language learner. I am, however, fluent in none but English, unless I am drunk, then I am totally fluent in Russian and, previously, Japanese. (But strangely, when I’m drunk, the one language I’m not fluent in, is English).

One language that I started to learn and just didn’t get, was Spanish. Don’t know why, it just didn’t really stick, so I quit before the course finished.

And the language I am currently learning is French. Classes are held at the university, and during the break in my first class, I ventured into the toilets. While I was sitting on the loo, I read the back of the toilet door. Fond memories of my five years at QUT came flooding back to me: I reminisced about how I used to go to one particular cubicle in the ladies refectory toilets, because the graffiti on the back of the door was just out of control funny. It was so memorable that I can’t remember what it actually said, but it was humorous. Or maybe I’d just drunk too much beer at the pub.

Anyhoo, my French classes have reminded me of this other type of toilet humour.

Here are some of the stickers, comments and ads on the back of the door at Charles Darwin University (not as entertaining as QUT days, but hey, there’s only about 400 people on campus up here per day, so one can’t expect much):

Can you see the ad for 'green' tampon alternatives? Ick!

(Title borrowed from Supergrass’s “Alright”)*

On Saturday night I was very keen to get Le Sprog to bed. I was planning to go to the shops to purchase a bottle of fizz, which I had a hankering for. (No, I’m not an alcoholic. Yet).

On the dot of 7pm, I put her in the cot, all warm from her bath and full from her dinner and milk. Then I grabbed the keys and the iPod and headed out the door to the carpark.

I was exaltant. Yay! I’m Free!

Sadly, it had been a couple of weeks since I’d been anywhere without the baby. So I literally felt the shackles drop off. I was a different person: I was GOING OUT on a SATURDAY NIGHT.

In reality, of course, it was only 7pm and I was heading to Woolworths, which is about a two minute drive away, and slightly less exciting than a dental checkup. But I’m never one to let distance (or lack thereof) rule out an opportunity to listen to music, so I selected The Magic Numbers and drove to Woolworths.

Now the beauty of the iPod is that you can disconnect it from the car, plug earphones straight into it and continue your listening pleasure. Which, of course, is what I did. And music adds a spring to my step and makes me feel happy and young and carefree. So, I walked into Woolworths feeling… maybe not like a million bucks… but at least like a hundred.

Now, Woolworths is in the middle of the city, in very close proximity to backpacker and budget accommodation, so I wasn’t surprised to see it was absolutely pumping at 7:15pm on a Saturday night. There were lots of beautiful, tanned, foreign backpackers walking around buying food and alcohol, contributing to my rather misguided fantasy that I was once again young and beautiful myself.

As I was walking through the Woolies freezer section, bopping away to The Magic Numbers, feeling like one of the Young, Beautiful people, I caught my reflection in the door of the freezer, and straight away I noticed a big black mole on my leg. I stopped in my tracks.

Now, I’m pretty careful about being sun smart, so I couldn’t believe this slipped my notice. I bent down to take a closer look at the mole, and was horrified. It wasn’t a mole, after all.

It was a steamed sultana. And right next to it, smeared all over my black pants, was a huge lump of smushed up apple.

I’m sure anyone who was subscribing to the fantasy of me, the Young and Beautiful, would have seen the sultanta as a mole and the apple as a giant lump of snot. I just saw myself for what I was – a mum on a mission, free of the child for half an hour.

Now, I’ve imagined myself in a lot of exciting and romatic situations in my life, and I’ve often need a rather harsh reality check. But I never expected that reality check to come from a sultana.

So, to cut a potentially long trip short, I headed straight for the bottle shop, bought a bottle of fizz, went home and drowned my sorrows. And every hour or so, I peeked in at the cutest baby in the world. Which makes for a pretty good night out, after all.

*The Supergrass tour of early 2000 (I think) is a gig I truly regret missing.

The biggest positive is:

Le Sproglette has started to sleep through the night!

And the second biggest positive is:

Le Sproglette has started to sleep through the night!

As all parents who have been sleep deprived know, the kid sleeping through the night is a fucking fantastic thing.

I was talking to my mother on the phone the other day, and I mused that, perhaps had she not slept in something like 25 different beds in her first eight months (I kid you not), perhaps she’d have been the calmest baby ever in existence. And my mother, bless her for being so generous, pointed out that perhaps the reason she’s such a chilled out baby is because we did drag her from pillar to post. She learnt to be adaptable. Maybe. But she didn’t learn to sleep through the night until she got a proper cot in her own room and slept in that room for more than six consecutive weeks.

As soon as I hit publish, I’m sure I will jinx myself, and she’ll wake up 20 times tonight.

Mr Moi and I are already getting itchy feet*. Being back in Oz, albeit in a town that’s not ‘home’, isn’t making us as content as we thought we’d be.

Not that it’s likely we’ll travel again any time soon (when I say travel, I mean move to another country. I’m sure we’ll go abroad for a few weeks here and there in the interim).

When next we make a long haul flight, it will be for the long haul, so it’s likely we’ll be living in Darwin for the forseeable future (at least two years? I don’t know). After that, we’re not sure. There’s the UK, where we can go any time, or another expat posting, potentially in South East Asia. (Three years ago, I loved the idea of SE Asia and abhorred the mere idea of Europe. But I’ve changed my tune). An expat posting is contingent on Mr Moi finding the work, having a far more internationally adaptable profession than I do.

In the meantime, being the perennial language collector I am, I am signing up to learn my fourth language, French. I’ve searched in vain for Russian teachers in Darwin, there seem to be none, and I’m not ready to dredge my long lost Japanese to the surface just yet. I have to fall back in love with Japan first (nothing that a quick trip there won’t accomplish, I’m sure). The other choices were Indonesian, Greek (because of the ridiculously large diaspora living here), or Chinese. Chinese – meh. I’m stupid for having that attitude, but Japanese and Russian have four alphabets between them, and two languages with funny writings is enough for me to cope with.

Mr Moi is trying to convince me to holiday to East Timor. I’d love to go, but (not so?) strangely, I’m far more cautious about where we go, now that Le Sproglette will be tagging along. I want to be somewhere with a decent hospital or clinic in case of an emergency. The closest hospital to Dili is…. Darwin.

(This is totally opposite to my rather blithe attitude when we travelled to Laos after we got ‘bored’ with Thailand. Only a few months before we’d been there, tourists had been shot dead along the main highway by bandits who still though the Vietnam war was raging, or something. Oh, and the only clinic in the country was in the Australian Embassy, and they were only really equipped to evacuate people to Thailand in an ambulance. And we saw the ambulance evacuating to Thailand when we were crossing the border. Being held up for an hour, along with the rest of the traffic. Nevertheless, I loved the country and would go back for a holiday in a heartbeat).

I mentioned I need to fall back in love with Japan, and another holiday there is on the cards. We spent Christmas 2004 there. It was Mr Moi’s first visit, and my second. I’d love to take Mr Moi to Tokyo; I myself only spent four days there. I’d also love to go back to Hokkaido during the winter, especially as Le Sproglette has proved herself to be quite hardy when it comes to sub-zero temperatures.

It’s likely that our first trip will be to Ho Chi Minh City, probably early next year. Not that we’ve started planning yet. But it’s only a couple of hours flight from the Top End, and if we can’t have Europe, we’ll take VietNam, eating lots of pho along the way. yum yum.

*OK I am getting itchy feet and projecting onto Mr Moi

And when I say ‘we’, I don’t mean me.

Yesterday, while Le Sproglette was playing on the floor, I noticed her breath was coming in gasps, and then she started crying. I racked my brain to think of why she’d spontaneously cry for no reason, and realised she hadn’t done a poo in about three days.

So we trotted off to Coles to buy come Sunraysia Prune Juice. As soon as we left the store, I put some in her cup. By the time we got home, she’d finished it all. So I put a little more in, and she finished that. Today, I put the rest of the bottle in her cup, and she’s just finished all that.

Of course, I’m very worried that in a short period of time, her cup… er… nappy… will runneth over.

We had a deadline to buy electronics when we moved into our new apartment. It was a Saturday and Mr Moi wanted to watch the footy that night. So, before we even set up our bed, we went to JB Hi-Fi to purchase a television (a big one, so Mr Moi’s favourite AFL games look BIG), a set-top box with HD recorder (to tape Mr Moi’s AFL games. No joke), and a stereo/DVD player with an iPod dock so we could both listen to the wireless and lots of music, which is something we didn’t do in Ukraine.

[Quick aside: we couldn't listen to the radio because a) we couldn't understand it and b) Ukrainian's taste in music was absolutely tragic. There is no other word for it. So we never bothered buying a radio].

We still don’t have a TV stand, so the TV is currently sitting on top of two suitcases full of all our CDs (which have been in storage for three years), which means that, despite the new stereo, I haven’t been able to sit in front of it, as is my habit, and play CD after CD for hours on end, and generally create a big messy pile of CDs seperated from their covers, which never gets cleaned up.

I have, however, been sitting in front of it with the iPod, playing song after song after song, reliving the bygone years. I’m having a true musical renaissance, and wanted to share some of my favourite songs. So, it’s a lazy You Tube post today for me.

I would first like to present ‘Hole in Your Roof’ by my favourite Australian band, Augie March. This is from their first album, Sunset Studies, and is the first track on the album. It was literally, love at first listen.

Here’s ‘Baby Bitch’ by my favourite band, Ween. I’m still very pissed off I missed their 2008 tour of Australia, being that I was in Ukraine and all. They hadn’t toured since 1997, when I saw them play at the Livid Festival, and seriously, it was one of the best gigs I’ve seen, ever. I gave up seeing Devo to see Ween play, that’s how much I love them. They gave up seeing Devo to play their headline slot, which I think they were pissed off about.

Let’s rewind a little. Before I knew any other music existed, I was in love with Simon and Garfunkel from ages 14 through to 17. They were pretty much all I listened to, besides Cat Stevens. It’s so hard to choose a favourite out of their amazing discography, but I love ‘Poem on the Underground Wall’ from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

And I am rather annoyed that their current tour of Australia didn’t make it to Darwin. The round trip down to Brisbane or Sydney was too expensive for me to even consider, so I live in hope that I’ll catch a gig of theirs some day, somewhere.

When I was an intern at the long-defunt tribe.com.au, I was given a CD called ‘Behind the Banana Curtain‘, released by the Brisbane community radio station, 4ZZZ. The Go-Betweens track on there, ‘Karen’, became my theme song for the year of the new millenium. I couldn’t find a You Tube clip for it, so I give you ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’

Robert Forster is so goddamn cool. I have a new place in my heart for The Go-Betweens – a Brisbane band – because my mum hit ‘play all songs’ on her iPod when I was in labour. Le Sprog was ultimately born in Brisbane to a sucession of songs by the best BrisBand ever.

Next up is a song by the late Elliott Smith from the Royal Tannenbaums Soundtrack. Not very imaginative of me to love a song from a soundtrack, but it was a great soundtrack, and this is a great song.

And we’ll end this little music retrospective with an absolute classic: ‘Sinnerman’ by Nina Simone (none of that remix rubbish here). You must turn up the volume to listen to this song. The clapping sequence has got to be one of the best moments of contemporary music, in my opinion (OK that’s a big call and I don’t think I really believe it, but the clapping is amazing).

And in the words of my grandpa after we spoke to him every Sunday, ‘Thanks for listening’.

I’ve been cheating on Mr Moi.

For the past week, I haven’t been able to think about anything else. You see, on Wednesday last week, I went into a bookstore in town, and that’s when I saw it. Twilight. On a whim, I bought it. And anyone who knows me, knows that when I get some frothy fiction, I just can’t put the book down. There’s no point fighting this compulsion to read until the book is finished. Resistance is futile. And so, I read it.

I had to be very evasive around Mr Moi, because he thinks I read books too quickly. And, when they’re getting up around $30 a pop in Australia (yes, that is right, $30 for one book), well, knocking it over in 20 hours doesn’t represent great value for money.

So, I waited two days until I let myself anywhere near the bookstore again. But when I did, I bought New Moon, and read that too. And so on, and so forth, until I finished the final book, Breakin Dawn, a couple of days ago. I sunk $120 on a series, and read it in six days.

From a purely technical writing perspective (cause that’s what I did, I was a comms peep), I don’t think the books are particularly well written, but it’s a hopelessly pathetic romantic yarn, and added to that, it’s set in high school and it’s a tale about a really good-looking guy who falls in love with an ordinary girl, and that, I think, resonates with a lot of people because really, who didn’t feel like a freak in high school?

(Although it’s not like the best looking guy could have fallen for me at high school because the best looking guy was still really ugly and probably in his 40s. And a teacher. I went to an all girls school).

So, I’ve finished the Twilight Saga and, to be truthful, I probably won’t re-read it, at least for a while. It’s an appealing story to my fat-ugly 16 year-old inner-self, but I didn’t feel like there were a lot of layers to it. And in some ways it bore similarities to a favourite series of mine, The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody, which is a truly complex story and extremely well written.

If you click on that above link to the Obernewtyn Chronicles, you’ll see the headline reads, “The Wait is Over”, and it is. I started reading Obernewtyn when I was 14. And the fifth book in the series has just been released, 10 years after the fourth! So before I was getting carried away with Twilight, I was engrossed in re-reading the Obernewtyn Chronicles (except for the second book in the series, which was mysteriously lost during all our moving).

So in order to revive all the braincells I killed by reading frothy fluffy fiction, I must now go and tackle some literature. Or essays. A quick glance at the bookshelf gives me some options: Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, or The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson (or if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll just pull out my all-time favourite of her books, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.)

Hmn. Food for thought indeed.

The red welts on her cheek were caused by an amorous nana, not the egg

I never wanted a child with an allergy. C’mon, who does? I was horrified when I found out my nephew has a peanut allergy, and I really felt sorry for my sister-in-law.

My first ‘proper’ job after finishing university, was working in corporate communications for a very popular Australian food brand. In my first year there, FSANZ brought in new relguations around how food companies must list allergens on food packs. The reason? Because allergies have become such a big issue, especially anaphylactic shock caused by, among other things, the tiniest traces of peanuts and fish products.

So, I’m very aware of allergies, what they do to people, how difficult they can make life become, and how just a sniff of peanut can cause a kid to almost die.

That’s why I really really didn’t want a kid with an allergy.

Earlier this year, back in Brisbane, I was enjoying some time with family friends. Le Sprog had been on solids for a while and everyone was keen to give her something to nibble on. A peice of bread, a stick of carrot, a chicken bone… Of course, this freaked me out, as I’m convinced she’s going to choke. (Notice I wrote the last part of that sentence in present tense. This is because I’m still convinced).

I’d come to the lunch well stocked with some ’safe’ foods – mashed pumpkin and spinach and mashed apple. After she’d eaten these, I was sure no one would try any other silly food bizzo. I handed her over to my mum and started on my own lunch.

Now Mr Moi tells me I’m turning into my mum, and he tells ME that I’m stubborn, so I guess that means mum is too. So when Nana Moi was eating her lemon meringue pie dessert and decided to give Le Sprog a taste, I yelled at her. “MUM. NO. NO EGGS YOLKS UNTIL THEY’RE NINE MONTHS. NO EGG WHITES UNTIL THEY’RE ONE.”

Now, I love my mum to bits, but I guess this is where the stubborness kicked in. “Ohhhhh, she’ll be right. I fed you kids a three course meal starting with steak tartare and finishing with eggs cracked straight from the shell by the time you were eight months old,” she said.

It was futile anyway, because by the time this exchange had taken place, Le Sproglette had launched herself on the spoon and happily ate the teeny, tiny, sugar-filled scraping of barely cooked eggwhite and egg yolk.

The situation rattled me, so I took control and put the baby to bed. Except she wouldn’t go to sleep. And when she finally did, she only slept for 30 minutes before waking up. And on waking up, she couldn’t stop rubbing her eyes. And after about 15 minutes of her doing that, her nose started dripping and her eyes started running. And we realised that perhaps she wasn’t rubbing her eyes because she was still tired. So I looked at her belly and she was covered in red welts.

An hour later, we were at the hospital. Her face was red, her ears were swollen to the point they no longer had any definition, her body was one huge big red lump. She was given an antihistamine and a steroid, and we stayed at the hospital for four hours under observation. Thankfully, it wasn’t an anaphylactic reaction. And thankfully, she calmed down after the initial outbreak. She was positively beaming at the hospital. The nurses loved her.

I felt terrible. Like a bad mum. Annoyed that we now have an allergy to deal with. And I really felt sorry for this tiny little human being that was swollen to almost twice her size, all because of something we were silly enough to put in her mouth.

And, of course, I felt completely, 100 per cent guilty.

When the clock hit 9pm, the doctor was happy for us to leave. So we walked past the front desk, waved goodbye. We walked past the full waiting room.

And as we were walking out the door, the triage nurse leaned out of her room and yelled, “And no more lemon meringue pie!”

Every parent in the waiting room turned to stare at stupid mother who feeds her baby evil foods.

Guiltguiltguiltguiltguiltguiltguiltetc.

I open our most recently delivered batch of boxes (the shipment from Ukraine), sneezing at the dust and trying not to get my white shirt dirty (much easier to handle things gingerly than to go get changed, no?)

I’ve previously touched on the little moments of homesickness I feel for Kyiv. It was my home for 2.5 years. But, as I unpack the few belongings we had in our apartment there that ‘made it feel like home’, I’m overcome with another wave of Ukr-sickness.

Me pregnant. No, I can't believe I am pining for this furniture either.

It’s the smell. I unpack the clothes and linen that we practically wore thin (we didn’t buy much because we knew we’d just ‘have to ship it all home’), and the smell wafts up: the smell of a life that I loved to complain about, but was pretty cool actually (especially now that I’m back in Australia and a min. $2000 flight away from Europe).

The smell of Tide washing powder, mixed with hard water tinged with heavy metal from old pipes. The smell of 24/7 central heating that was created miles away in a huge furnace on the outskirts of the city and beamed into my apartment. The smell of wooden parquet floors, built after WWII (and if you listen to the gossip, built by the hands of German POWs).

The smell of a group of wonderful friends, of being pregnant, of lovely summer days and miserable winter ones, of watching my tiny baby grow a little every day. The smell of a different life, just for a while.

It was my everday smell for over two years. And those wonderful movers managed to pack it into a box, and ship it all the way to Australia.

ETA: Holy moley I became unglamorous when pregnant. Sure haven’t reclaim any glamour. I think I will have to launch project “get glamour mojo back”. At least I’ve finally had a haircut.