Three wheels down, one wheel up

Last night I had a chance to practice my powers of calm and clear thinking when I had a small but humiliating accident in the car while at my darling daughter's school. Last weekend Coffs Harbour celebrated Harmony Day, which promotes peace and understanding between the many different cultures represented in the local community. E's school decided to bring together its own Autumn Festival with Harmony Day celebrations yesterday after school and so parents and students enjoyed the harmonies of the children's and adults' choirs, African drumming (hmmm...) and excellent didgeridoo playing among other delights in between very heavy rain showers.

M and I left early to meet some friends and I went back to the school to pick E up at 5:30pm, after a lot of rain. Well that's my excuse, anyway, for the fact that as we left the muddy field that serves as the school's over-flow car park, I reversed to let someone else out and... the back wheels of the car slid off the 'path' and into a small ditch, leaving us stranded with one front wheel in the air and absolutely no possibility of getting ourselves out of the situation without considerable assistance. What to do...? The only option (well, apart from screaming in frustration at my own stupidity or bursting into tears I guess) was to go back into the celebrations, round up some assistance and hope that better minds than mine would be able to work out what to do next, so thanking myself profusely for having put waterproof shoes and my rain jacket in the car I left E where she was and went in to beg for help. I'm ashamed to say, though, that I lost it with my husband. He's the one person in the world with whom I feel comfortable admitting that I don't know what to do and that I'm a step away from sheer panic, so what did I do? I shouted at him! Luckily he's a very forgiving man (although he did put petrol on the fire by telling me to calm down).

I have to say that I love the Steiner School. While I have no doubt that other schools would be possessed of parents who would willingly have helped me, the Steiner School has a particularly generous and creative group. Unbeknownst to me, while I was asking for assistance among the parents - and getting many offers of help from people whose names I don't know - someone I did know, Wendy, had spotted E in the back of our car, stopped, and asked E if she'd like to play with her children in their car while she got out in the pouring rain to see what she could do to help. And the father of one of E's classmates had, by the time I got back, already stopped, got out a webbed strap, established that he couldn't get the thick end of the strap through the tow-loop under the car and was thinking up other solutions to the problem. In the end, after three goes, we managed to pull my car out because another helpful father stopped by and proferred a D-ring shackle that successfully united the webbing strap with the tow-loop, et voila! All of us were absolutely soaked by the time we'd finished and I am SOOOO grateful. What a lovely group of people!

By the time I got back to where my husband was waiting I was cold, wet, tired and very annoyed with myself. The annoyance has diminished into resigned humour and a determination to ensure that we carry a tow rope, webbing straps and a couple of D-ring shackles in the boot for future creative uses. I have managed not to sink into a pit of despair about my inadequacies as a parent and a driver, but still, it is a little embarrassing... and I feel especially embarrassed by the fact that the rear bumper does now have a dent (and my husband cleared out a fair amount of field from the exhaust pipe!).

In terms of my search for happiness this has been an illustrative process for me. I would have done a lot better if I'd managed to keep myself a little calmer after it had just happened. Wendy saved the day for my daughter by successfully distracting her with other children which meant that she didn't feel too traumatised by it all. I did what I needed to do, but ended up beating myself up about it a little bit, and while it's good that I managed to restrict it to only a little bit, I recognise that a bit more calm and a sense of humour in the initial stages would have carried me a long way. I will store that knowledge up for next time, while simultaneously praying that there isn't a next time!

Mother and daughter time

I love making things with my darling daughter and I've found the best way to stop stressing about not doing enough of that sort of thing with her is to get my head out of my navel and DO something with her... to whit, she came home a week or so ago and asked if we could make a rag doll together. It turned out that her Steiner school teacher had said children can come to class with toys etc if they had made them, which is wholly unreasonable in the real world but completely in tune with the school's Steiner ethos! So we had extensive discussions about size, skin colour, hair colour, face and clothes which resulted in some beautiful drawings, and I found an old sheet that I've been saving for rags. We had fun dying it to a more natural skin tone using tea bags. I knew it could be done but feared it might be complicated, but it was so simple!

Dunk your material in a bucket in which you have poured lots of very strong tea (don't forget to strain out the tea leaves or remove the tea bags first or they could produce strange patches or spots if they rest against your material). Leave for 20 minutes and then check the fabric, remembering that the shade will look darker on wet fabric, and take it out when ready. Drip dry and then iron to set the colour. Voila!

I went out and bought embroidery cottons for the face, skeins of thread for hair and some fabric with a small pattern for clothes and we started... I downloaded a pattern for $3 from an American website but on reflection could have drawn one myself just as well (although the buying/downloading process was very easy), and I embroidered most of the face although darling daughter did also do some embroidery. For a small person of only just 7 years she is very dextrous with her fingers and understood completely what she was trying to achieve. All in all we had a lot of fun, and I'll post some more pictures in due course.





She doesn't have a name yet but she'' have reddish hair and a blue dress!









... and she has very big eyes...

Now you see it, now maybe you don't...

I really hate the whole ageing thing. In the old days I could rest easy, knowing that my blood pressure was incredibly low and that I was fit, fit, fit! Now I'm suffering from stress, I'm a little bit overweight, distinctly less fit than I used to be AND it seems that the pressure inside my eyeballs is increasing, putting me at greater risk of glaucoma. I went to the optometrist in Coffs Harbour recommended to me by my optometrist brother-in-law, Tony, and was told that I'd got high pressure readings in my eyes. This isn't good news. Ten years ago I lost the sight in my left eye for nine months and had various other episodes of unexplained bleeding into both eyes so I already know what losing my eyesight is like... Since the first bleed I have spent many hours in the optometrist's chair and this is the very first time that my eye pressure has been elevated, and it marks a distinct change from the situation two years ago when I last had my eyes checked. The days when my doctor used to tell me to start smoking and drinking in order to increase my blood pressure are clearly long gone!

What does this tell me? Well things have clearly changed! I'm older, probably fatter, probably a bit less fit than I was two years ago. I've experienced a lot of stress - possibly no more than usual in my up-and-down sort of life, but still lots of stress. I've started drinking a cup of real coffee most days, but I don't drink as much alcohol as I used to. I've been on the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet for most of the last twelve months.

I think it also tells me that I should be taking my efforts to change unhelpful aspects of my life seriously. I've been following the CSIRO with great results, but I still eat too much meat and I haven't put great emphasis on the low fat part of the plan because I shifted a lot of weight by just dropping carbohydrates. I eat too much chocolate. I probably don't eat enough potassium, magnesium and calcium, mainly because I'm lazy about ensuring that I eat bananas every day and/or take a supplement. This is particularly short-sighted of me as I'm on HRT and need to ensure I ingest enough calcium to avoid osteoporosis. I have started taking more exercise, so we'll see if I can keep up with two Pilates classes per week and two gym sessions per week, and I will need to increase the length of gym sessions and the variety of weight training and cardio work I do.

In the spirit of taking responsibility for both the good and the bad in what I do, I think I've made a start, which is good, and now I need to stick at it. I need to recognise that what was true when I was in my twenties and thirties is out of date now I'm in my early forties, and adapt accordingly. I need not to slide into a pit of depression about how wrong everything is and focus instead on being calm, reducing my stress levels, getting my chocolate cravings under control and improving my overall health. Cheers!

Mood Manager

I subscribe to The Happiness Institute's newsletter and was intrigued to read over the weekend about a new tool aimed at helping people gain some insight about and control over how they feel called 'Mood Manager'. Well there's a 30-day free trial and what can I say..? I signed up. It isn't downloadable software, instead you sign in to it over the web.

Everyone loves a quiz, especially about themselves, and getting started with Mood Manager involves taking a DASS 21 test (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale). This rates your levels of depression, anxiety and stress over the preceding week and allows you to monitor your responses. There are lots of things Mood Manager doesn't do, and it isn't a replacement for professional treatment if that's what you need, but I'm interested to see whether the process of logging unhelpful thoughts, regularly retaking the DASS 21 test and using the software's tools to analyse some of my thoughts and behaviours will identify issues I haven't previously thought about.

One thing has already come up: on the first DASS 21 test I took my scores were 1 for Anxiety, 10 for Depression and 14 for Stress! Perhaps I've got so used to thinking of myself as being depressed I ignore the possibility that I'm actually more stressed? I wonder if I was to do something about feeling stressed I might feel better all around?

I decided to take advantage of the 30 day trial and use the software to its fullest so every day I'll note how much sleep and exercise I got and how I felt, I'll pay attention to those 'unhelpful thoughts' that drill into my thoughts so frequently, and I'll try to think about what I'm doing. At the end of the month it will be interesting to see if the process has helped me, and whether pulling that information together is something for which I need an on-line programme or whether I can actually do it for myself. And in terms of reducing my stress levels, which I think is important but which I've been putting at the bottom of my list of priorities, I'm going to sort out a schedule for my week that includes at least one thing I really enjoy doing and also fences off time for exercise. I know I feel better when I exercise, but since M was ill last year and I had to stay home with him I have completely abandoned it, and that's silly and something I should sort out.