Out of print baby

My gorgeous friend Sonya sent Harry this onesie in the mail last week. It makes me so happy. I can't wait until he's big enough and chubby enough to wear it! The folks at Out of Print Clothing say they "scour library stacks and dusty bookstores" to find the "classics and curiosities" that end up on their clothing. And they have a conscience, too: every purchase makes possible a donation of one book to a community in need, via their charity partner Books for Africa.

What book would you most like to see on a T-shirt?

I'd wear this edition of I Capture the Castle with pride. And of course we need to find Madeleine something with this. And then, well I just can't help myself...

Favourite things - life hacks

What ho! Here are five little "life hacks" to take you into the weekend and make 2014 that little bit easier for you. Happy Friday, friends. 1. Your very own in-house / at-home IT help desk

(And nobody will tell you to turn it off and then on again). I came across Tweaky while trying to decipher the technical mumbo-jumbo being fed me by both my spam-filter people and my web-hosting people in relation to getting rid of a spam problem on this blog (93,000+ spammy comments "pending approval," and more every day!). Tweaky is a "no job too big or too small" mob, and fixed my six-month-old problem for me in 24 hours, for just $39. They were so fast, friendly and helpful that I've already used them again since. If you want to give them a try, be sure to use this link to get a $10 discount on your first project, just because you're my friend!

{Photo of tech support dude via tyle_r, licensed under Creative Commons)

2. Odd jobs, on call

Another "no job too small," totally-affordable group is Occasional Butler. Need a couple of pictures hung on your wall? Waiters for your next posh party? Heck, I don't know... someone to clean the old coffee cups, odd socks, McDonald's wrappers and dead moths (this is so embarrassing) out of your car? Occasional Butler is a website linking 'butlers' with 'customers' for either one-off or ongoing work, pretty much whatever you need. You set the job and the budget, and hopeful 'butlers' apply, including their own budget response. All the finances are safely managed through the website (via PayPal if you like). I'm meeting the person who will hopefully become my new house cleaner on Monday.

{Photo of Dick the Butler via Qsimple, licensed under Creative Commons}

3. Stop replying to emails...

Yep, just take the pressure off yourself... and off of others likewise. Read this via Swiss Miss and maybe, just maybe, it will lighten your e-load for 2014.

... 4. But if you can't stop yourself, unroll yourself

I got so excited about discovering Unroll.me recently that I dedicated a whole blog post to them, here. In short, here's what they can do:

* Unsubscribe you from all those email lists you somehow got yourself on and can't seem to shake * Gather up all the emails from lists you do want to stay on but don't want to have cluttering your inbox, by bundling them up into one 'digest' email per day

5. Organise your workspace

I'm not really one for making resolutions at the start of the year (too many disappointments as a child when, by April, I was still no closer to becoming a professional ballerina / never getting in trouble / only eating healthy). But I do like to start the year out fresh, with a good clean-out of my workspace, and a shiny new planner and stationery on my newly decluttered desk. So I loved this list of 7 ways to get organised from the Creative Women's Circle. What are your top tips?

As I grow...

Do you remember the scene in Sleeping Beauty when the fairies bestow their 'gifts' on the not-yet-doomed baby princess? Gifts like beauty, wit, grace and song? Those are all nice things, I'm sure. But at Christmas, my brother and sister-in-law gave Madeleine a beautifully-illustrated book called Amazing Babes, and inside it are the kinds of gifts I would like the fairies to give my princess.

Gifts like heart. And commitment. And conviction.

Bravery. Dedication. Curiosity.

And more.

The book celebrates inspirational women from around the world. Women who changed the world they lived in. Women like human-rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi, author and early feminist Miles Franklin, peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and passionate artist Frida Kahlo.

"As I grow," it begins, "I want..."

Since there were no fairies present at either Madeleine's or Harry's births (that I know of), I will have to do my best to foster these 'gifts' in my children myself. It might be time to visit Nanna.

Love multiplied

I have been writing this post for a long time, in my head. In the shower, mostly, because there just hasn't been time to sit down at the computer before now, and sometimes during the small, dark hours of the night while I nurse the hungry miracle in my arms and try to keep my head from nodding forward onto my chest. I have been struggling to come to terms with the great, weighty bundle of hormone-laden emotions that settled like wet cement over my head and shoulders the night Harry was born.

They are not all bad emotions. Not even close. There is wonder, all over again, despite the chaos. The second child misses out on all those months of pregnancy during which you stop and think "Oh my goodness, there is something alive in me!" because most of the time you are too busy running around after the first child to even remember you are pregnant. (Seriously, more than once I stopped in the street and thought "Gee my stomach is upset" before I remembered I was pregnant and that was the baby kicking.) But when you push and sweat and strain and sob and laugh that child into Planet Earth and life itself, and you hold him on your chest and he looks you smack bang in the eyes with his own big blue eyes that are so much like his father's, well, there is no emotion other than WOW. Wow, which is shorthand for love and pride and wonder.

But strange to say there is grief as well, and guilt over the grief.

Let's visit Day Two of Harry's little life. The perfume of hothouse lilies is heavy in the air of our hospital room and as my perfect boy sleeps blissfully, peacefully, arms above his head and tiny fingers curled into tiny little fists, I hold my still-swollen belly and sob. I am grieving the loss of my other baby, my baby girl who, it seemed, got big the instant Harry was born. I mourn the loss of our special little twosome, that exclusive team we built and nurtured between ourselves during the past 18 months. We will never be this tight little unit again, me and Madeleine, and already I miss her.

The next morning when Madeleine comes to visit us in the hospital, she positively bounces through the door, gloriously resilient. All my fears of her being jealous of her little brother, or anxious and confused at the absence of her mother, dissipate. Madeleine's internal world is healthy and well, while mine spirals into sadness and guilt.

Guilt because of course the emotion of grief is phenomenally unfair on Harry. Harry was wanted, longed for, dreamed of, and is and will be joyously celebrated. He is so quiet, sleeping beside me in that lonely hospital room. Unaware, thankfully, that his mother is quietly weeping into her pillow.

About a month before Harry was born my friend Ingrid sent me a cartoon of a mother with a hoard of little children around her legs. Another woman asked, "How do you divide your love among so many?" And the mother replied "I don't divide my love, it multiplies." I held on to that concept. How beautiful it was! Love, multiplied! And it did a lot to allay the fears I had secretly nurtured: "How will it ever be possible to love anyone as much as I love Madeleine?"

The night Harry was born I learned the truth of that cartoon. MY CHILD. MY OWN LITTLE MAN. Instantly, my love doubled. Just like that. It was so easy to love him, with his little old man Grandpa Smurf face and his snub nose and the way he loved nothing more to snuggle right under my chin.

Back to me in the hospital the next day. I'm physically depleted. I'm drenched in hormones. I'm in love with my new son. I'm grieving the loss of one-on-one time with Madeleine. I'm feeling guilty about the grief I have over Madeleine, on behalf of Harry, who deserves not only my love but my joy. So there is grief causing guilt and guilt feeding grief. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza. It's exhausting! The nurses call it Day Three Blues. In my case, it lasted about three weeks.

A few days after we get home from hospital, Mr B minds Harry for an hour while Madeleine and I go up to a cafe by ourselves for a drink and a little bit of cake. It's a bit of a big deal. We brush our hair and I put on lip gloss. She cuddles on my lap and we share a vanilla slice, and I simply cannot stop smelling the top of her head and kissing her. We laugh, take selfies, sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. That hour is a tonic. When we return home I am in tears again, but they are happy tears, and I gather my boy into my arms and smell the too-delicious top of his head and kiss him, too.

The December days steamroll into Christmas and New Year and guests in our home every day and nights of nursing and hiccups and back-patting and floor-pacing, and somewhere, amid the yawns and tears and presents and feasts, Madeleine and I inch our way back to our very special us while Harry and I begin to build our own unique and beautiful us.

Then one summer's afternoon, Madeleine toddles over to a sleeping Harry and rests her cheek on his, smiling. And just like that, we are the family I had always wanted to be. We are the "love multiplied" family. Turns out we always had been.

The hormones remain. The sleep deprivation continues. I still have no idea how to keep both of my children happy in practical terms, especially at meal and bath times. But that will come, with time. And in that moment as Madeleine holds her little brother gently in her arms, my grief and guilt melt away.

Santa's coffee run

After a big night visiting approximately 132 million homes worldwide (according to these calculations), nobody needed a caffeine hit on Christmas morning more than Santa. Who knew Santa was a teenaged girl? Or that she lived in Carlton North, Melbourne? Now you do.

ps. Dancing Santa

Joy

On Christmas Eve, just as we climbed into bed, church bells rang out across the sleepy neighbourhood. Midnight Mass on Lygon Street, we realised, and wished one another a drowsy "Happy Christmas" before resting our weary heads. Two hours later we were awake again, changing and feeding a hungry baby. Then again another two hours after that. When Harry woke and fed a third time only another two hours later, it was time to admit defeat. We carried both wide-awake-though-we-wished-they-weren't babies downstairs, woke our big baby Emily, and by half past six in the morning, everyone was sitting on the carpet in the lounge room in their pyjamas, surrounded by a sea of wrapping paper and witnessing the steady depletion of the satisfyingly fat Santa sacks that Father Christmas had filled overnight.

Weary, weary bones aside, yesterday was filled with joy.

Joy in waking up with Madeleine, Harry and Emily all in our house together, the first time we'd had the children with us on Christmas morning EVER. Joy in children's faces when they opened their presents (Madeleine saying "Wowwww" at everything, just because it was fun to say). Mr B's favourite Elvis Christmas album playing in the background. Friends and Meg joining us for breakfast: croissants, muesli, summer fruits, shimmering glasses of prosecco.

Sweet, plump Harry, not featured in any of these photographs because he slept through the entire breakfast, upstairs, catching up after a busy night of baby gluttony.

Later, Emily dressed up in an inflatable Santa costume and walked up to a local cafe to buy coffees for us all, in the process bringing joy and laughter to every passer-by. (This adventure will warrant a post of its own so stay tuned). And in the afternoon, more friends and extended family came by for wine and cheese and fruit and leftovers, and the house was awash with excited, overtired children, toys and pieces of toys, pets, paper, tinsel and laughter.

By the time everyone went home and our babies were in bed, Mr B and I were about ready to collapse. So we did, on the couch, watching Notting Hill on DVD. As we climbed into bed that night there were no church bells, but we whispered "Thank you" to each other, because it had been such a good day.

Two hours later, we were awake again to change and feed a hungry baby...

Bunkering down

Christmas is just around the corner and summer has finally put in an appearance (40 degrees yesterday, folks). Today is the last day of work for most people and everywhere you go, crowds are spilling out of trams and onto cafe tables and beaches and shopping centres and parks. But we are staying home. Or at least we are keeping very local. Neither the double pram nor the newborn Ergo insert I ordered online quite some time back have arrived, so getting out and about with a toddler and a newborn baby is pretty tricky. Add to that the Christmas rush: last thing I want is to be caught in the city with a million other people and a crying toddler at her nap time, with a hungry baby and leaking breasts and a line-up for a chair in the Myer nursing room!

Instead, our days are taken up with quiet cuddles, making Anzac biscuits (we are not slaves to the season), playing with water in the courtyard. I cut out paper snowflakes to decorate the house, and Madeleine chose silver and red sleigh-bells to hang from each one. We wrapped Christmas presents while watching Harry Potter movies for an entire afternoon.

But while we have been bunkering down, friends have come to us, with visitors and house-guests almost every day. So we've served up simple meals of antipasto or sandwich fillings eaten outside in the sun, delicious beef stroganoff courtesy of the one and only Deb, and one night I made another giant batch of Mr B's favourite (and incredibly easy to cook) pork ragu.

Harry has been pudging up beautifully, like a little champion. Madeleine is paying him lots of loving attention; holding his hand, smiling when he smiles (ok I tell her it's a smile), and solicitously placing wet-wipes over his legs like blankets if I don't stop her. She is adjusting to this big sister gig incredibly well, being (mostly) very patient with all the time I need to give him, and releasing all that pent-up energy that used to go in trips to the park by racing up and down the house pushing her own baby in its own pram, playing with her big sister, and dancing in her nappy like a whirling dervish when her cousins come to visit.

I read this book in the middle of the night for a week while nursing Harry, and it left me feeling a little strange and unsettled. Empty, expectant, like its post-Soviet Ukraine setting. Have you read it? I'd love to know how others felt about it. Now I have turned my nocturnal attention to this book. I'm only just starting it and so far it's kind of lovely, but I have a prickling foreboding that things might get sad. I'm nervous.

What are you reading? What are you doing? Are you getting out or bunkering down?

Spring clean your inbox

Have you heard of Unroll.me?* It's a simple (free!) service that instantly unsubscribes you from all those spammy newsletter emails you can't seem to shake. You know the ones? They are super annoying but they want you to jump through hoops to unsubscribe from them. Or you can't remember the password you made up that one time two years ago when you made a one-off purchase and didn't tick the opt-out box...

If you want to, you can also use the service to bundle all the newsletter-style emails you DO want into a once-a-day email. I joined up this weekend. I bunched 20 newsletters into one daily rollup, and managed to unsubscribe from 70 annoying and unwanted newsletters and ads. So refreshing!

*Not a sponsored post. Promise.

Where I live

I live in a quiet neighbourhood, half an hour's walk from the city centre of Melbourne. It is zoned under a historic overlay, which means almost all the houses are more than a century old, and people aren't allowed to change the facades when they renovate. At night from our bedroom window upstairs, we look out over all the tin and shingle rooftops and cobbled laneways and think about how that view has been essentially unchanged for more than 100 years. We talk about how children in 1880 would have held hands and skipped along the very same footpaths on their way to school that Madeleine and Harry will skip, on their way to the very same school.

The streets are quiet, and everyone has teeny, tiny little gardens at the front of their homes. Yet only a few minutes' walk away we can be in the midst of all the wonderful hustle and bustle and culture of some of Melbourne's best streets and villages: Brunswick Street, Nicholson Village, Rathdowne Village and Lygon Street, for example.

Our own street is divided by a wide, grassy area in the middle, dotted with palm trees that inspire hyperbole-loving real estate agents to dub it "The Plantation" when advertising homes. In summer, everything happens on this grass. People read books, sun-bake, hold yard sales. Last Christmas one family set up a marquee with tables and chairs enough to host a Christmas lunch for more than 20 people. The day we moved into this area was a stinker: 38 degrees. As I drove by, two men in their 20s had dragged a hose from their house across the road onto the grass and filled up a toddler's wading pool. They were sitting happily in the pool, drinking beers.

Last week on a warm but wet evening, four of my neighbours brought out a little round table and some chairs, poured glasses of wine, and sat under umbrellas enjoying a mini garden party in the rain.

The night we brought Harry home from hospital (the Tuesday just gone), someone rang the doorbell just as Mr B and I were about to sit down for dinner. It was the Salvation Army Band, to let us know they were caroling outside. We carried our dinner and a celebratory glass of champagne out onto the front stoop and sat in the fading sun side by side, listening to carols played gloriously badly, while our two babies slept. It was all kinds of just right.

(Top photo is the rainy garden party. The one above is the Salvation Army band. Sorry about the dodgy, blurry quality. These were quick iPhone snaps and for some reason they came out extra-low res when I emailed them to myself. Tech fail.)

Harry

Our sweet little boy Harry was born last Friday, and already my heart has doubled. He has a duck-down fuzz of hair covering his little head, and a scrunched-up, little-old-man expression that just melts me. (Everyone who knows Mr B says, "Now we know what you will look like when you're 90). Harry came into the world so quickly, and in such calm, that we barely had time to adjust. I went from five centimetres dilated to 10 in half an hour, and there was only another half-hour from the time they said "start pushing" to the time he was in my arms. In between pushing, I was laughing! Mostly from delirium: we'd been so busy this year that I'd hardly had a moment in my pregnancy to come to terms with what that meant. Maybe I'd been sub-consciously relying on a drawn-out delivery to get my head around what was happening to our lives.

It almost felt unfair to Harry. As if something as momentous as his birth should be accompanied by more build-up, more drama, more fanfare, than slightly hysterical giggles and a few big pushes. But before I knew it there he was, head and shoulders, and the midwives were saying, "You pull him out." And I thought "You must be joking" but it wasn't the moment to split hairs so I did as I was told, and the next moment he was snuggled onto my chest, pink and perfect with barely a whimper.

Madeleine, by contrast, had entered the world like a tempest. She cost me every last ounce of energy I had inside me to bring her to us, and months of pain in the aftermath (though I know others have had it far worse), and she was NOT happy about this birth gig. Eyes wide open, bottom lip protruding, she bawled her dissatisfaction at everyone in the room. And she has been stormy ever since, frequently swinging from delight to despair and back again in the space of a minute.

I've barely heard Harry cry yet, though only time will tell if that's his temperament or just an adjustment period. The most he has given me so far is a squeaky kind of grizzle, one that's easily fixed by milk or a cuddle (or both).

And that is where both my children are the same: they love to snuggle. Don't all babies? But it is just the BEST THING for a mother to feel her babies go calm as soon as they are in her arms, to smell their perfect little heads, to breathe in and fill her soul with love.

To anticipate life with Madeleine AND Harry in it... well, I know it's a cliche but I'm pretty sure that makes me just about the luckiest person in the whole world.