I don’t have the best relationship with my body; I tried very hard at the end of last year and the beginning of this year with Julie Parker from Beautiful You to work on this and realise that it doesn’t matter what size I am just as long as I am happy with me.

I have my good and great days and then I have days that are on the complete opposite and I feel very crappy and down about myself, and my body. You hear people talking about their bodies in their thirties, forties and even later in their lives and they wonder why they spent their twenties analysing every lump, bump and line; and being very honest with you my body isn’t that bad, but it is my perception of my body that sucks.

It is so skewed from the media and being told by those that I consider being very close to that it is not good enough, or that I need to lose a few kilograms, or that I don’t exercise and move enough. That I am lazy. That it  is my fault. I look at women as they pass me in the street and I am slowly stopping myself from looking at their bodies and wishing I had their body shape; rather I am beginning to look at their clothes and have shopping envy, however that is another post in itself.

So how does one change a perception that you have been told from five, or possibly even younger?

It scares me because I don’t know. Exercising and eating right while it helps me feel healthy, it doesn’t change my ideas and thoughts about this body of mine.

Slowly and over time I will break these stupid habits that I have had inbuilt into me; and I just hope that when I have children and specifically a little girl, that she doesn’t grow up with these ideas and thoughts on what an ideal body is.

[Originally published on The Girl Behind The Dress, March 2012.]

The other night I was attempting to back up my iPhone [didn't have a lot of luck] because as I took a photo I got a warning I was about to use up the last of my free space. So I decided to download some of the images onto my MacBook since I have over 2500 on my iPhone.

But I didn’t want to delete them all. I wanted to select the ones I wanted to delete, and I had no idea how to do this but then to do it individually, which would just take too long.

Then I found a quick trick; there is a button you can press to select how many ever images you want!

Here are the steps:

Do you ever feel like life is a checklist? That each decision is made in order to fulfil an unwritten life goal? That you are simply going through the motions until you reach the next big achievement?

A couple of weeks ago I found out that one of my friends from high school is pregnant. She is the first of my friends to reach this milestone. The rest of us are still worrying about how we are going to pass the classes leading up to graduation and what to wear out on a Saturday night. At only 21 I feel that these are quite appropriate concerns, however my friends sudden progression in life had me wondering.

How much of what I am doing with my life have I planned because it’s what I want and how much is because it’s what society expects?

I felt from early on in my life that university was the only option for me in finishing school. My parents always said they wouldn’t mind either way, but I thought that society felt differently about people who had a university education and I wanted to be one of those people. The teachers at school always expected that I was headed for higher education and other options were never discussed or put forward by the school’s career advisor. And so, here I am at university.

I’ve been working hard for the past three years to get the grades needed to get myself a teaching job next year, constantly working towards the one socially acceptable goal, to get a job. When I land that job next year, what I will aim for next? A boyfriend, a husband, a baby, a house with a white picket fence? Will my lifelong happiness be dependent on how many of these goals I can tick of the checklist? And how will I feel when one happens before the other? A baby without a husband? A family without a job?

I can’t even stand to think about it…. So I’m not anymore. I’m throwing away the checklist. I’m ignoring society’s unspoken plans for me. I’m living my way, however that may be, determined each and every day by whatever is thrown at me. I am strong and independent and my life will happen in time, just as it’s supposed to.

[This post was submitted by Rinniez from Momentary Lapse of Reality; Image Credit]

Sometimes I will sit and stare at the computer screen for hours on end before I think of a decent post to write, and sometimes it just never happens. I find that I have thousands of ideas but I just can never remember them, because I think of them at times when I cannot write them down.

So, to assist myself and all the other bloggers out there I developed a guide in prompting your brain with multiple suggestions. It works best if you say allocate thirty minutes of your weekend to inspiring yourself.

One. Revise Photographs.
For me, I love Instagram and love taking photographs on my iPhone with it, and now Android users can jump on the bandwagon too. I snap photographs randomly when something catches my eye.

So take ten minutes of your thirty minutes to go through your photographs that you have taken throughout the week and examine if you could do a blog post about any of them. I usually do this for dates with my boyfriend, and outfit/fashion-esq posts; save the picture with the date and brief note or two. Just to jog your memory.

Two. Search Online.
Pinterest is amazing for inspiration; look at thousands of images to do with a particular topic [by searching for it] or just browse. I don’t recommend browsing for any longer then five minutes. Once you find something that takes your fancy, grab the URL and jot down a few notes along with it to prompt you when you are writing.

Three. eBook It.
So in your last fifteen minutes, I would flip through Fat Mum Slim‘s eBook, ‘Something To Blog About’. It has over thirty ideas. That is a months worth of posts; or why not turn one into a series? Just a thought.

Write down any that you could write about right this moment; and then add a list of ones that you could eventually write about with a bit of extra time.

So that’s how I spend thirty minutes of my weekend, searching for blog ideas. Writing them is another matter.

[Image Credit]

Who does not like a roast this time of year?

Personally, I don’t care if it is boiling hot, or bitterly cold, but I love the taste of falling apart pork, crispy crackling, baked sweet and normal potatoes, carrots, all topped with a delicious apple sauce.

This recipe would serve about four people. It depends on size of the pork really. This recipe used about a one kilo piece of pork belly. YUM!

But enough about that, lets start on the crackling!

First of all. preheat your oven to 220°C. This allows time for the oven to heat up enough to crisp-en the skin.

Take a sharp knife, and score the pork skin at about one centimetre intervals. Rub the skin with olive oil and a generous amount of sea salt. This helps the skin to crisp up and flavour and turn to that wonderful crackling that is so tasty!

Pop your pork into the oven for 30 minutes. At this high heat it allows the skin to crisp up before the pork meat cooks.

Reduce the heat to 200°C and cook for another 10 to 20 minutes, until the pork is just cooked through and the skin is golden, puffed and crispy.

As for your veggies, cut them up into equal size pieces, and put them into another tray. Drizzle some oil over them and a sprinkling of salt. Toss to coat, and bake for the last 20 to 30 minutes of the pork’s cooking time. Or to make an even more tasty lot of veggies, you can transfer the pork to your veggie tray for the remainder of the cooking!

To add some extra flavour to the dish, you could also throw in some garlic and rosemary. They work wonders!

So enjoy your melt in the mouth pork with crunchy crackling!

Today was a monumental day. I overcame a fear.

You are kind of coming in at the tail end of the story here. Don’t worry, I’ll share the rest. Eventually. It’s odd telling a story that I’m still in the middle of creating. In fifty words or less, I had a baby. Along with the arrival of my second son, arrived about 5 extra kilos. I wasn’t too worried. Then those five kilos became ten, and then 11, and then I was looking at photo’s unable to believe the person staring back at me. I got my ass into gear and I’ve dropped a significant amount of weight.

But that’s not the story here. The story is about the clothing that has joined me on the journey.

These jeans, I love. I picked them up for about $10 years ago. They’ve done really well. Two pregnancies, an up and down weight. They are comfortable and familiar. They give me a mom-butt and were hardly flattering, but I loved them. I’m almost certain that everyone in the world has a pair just like these.

They really don’t fit me now. I haven’t worn them in a few months. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them. Just in the way that women keep their skinny clothes in the back of their wardrobe in the hope they will fit back into them again some day, I keep my favourite ‘fat clothes’ in case I ever need them again. Because surely this weight loss thing won’t last. It’s a now thing, right? And one day I’ll put the weight back on and I’ll need those old favourites again.

I didn’t think it would be so hard to throw out a pair of jeans. But out they went. I expected to be excited about the new things I’d fit into and look great in, what I didn’t expect was to struggle letting go of the old, bigger things I hated.

Weight loss. Surprising on so many levels.

Tip; Stop aiming for skinny, aim for healthy.

[Image Credit]

I have ALWAYS said Never.

I’ll Never get married.

I’ll Never have children.

I’ll Never live far away from my family (again).

I’ll Never work in a job that means working after hours and weekends.

You know what? I did it all. I did it all and more. You want to know something else? I’m pretty damn happy. Let me explain a little about the Never in my life.

The marriage…as a kid who saw most of her family get divorced, I wondered why the hell anyone would bother. Since then quite a lot of them have gotten remarried. Happily. And I grew up. And I met Paul. It was just right.

The kids… I’m not sure where this Never started, but once I started preaching it I got kind of stubborn about it. I do have a vague early childhood memory of seeing a horse give birth, and making the connection that mummies push babies out of their bodies. And if babies had legs like that foal then NO WAY was I going to have babies. Then in my early teens I was told that I may never be able to have babies, and I used this Never as a protective barrier against the world, the unknown. Again, I grew up. I wanted to have a family. So I did. I am SO grateful that it turned out to be so much easier than we thought, too.

Living away from family… Paul and I came from opposite ends of the long stretch of metropolitan Adelaide. My parents live about 30kms and an hour away. It’s far, but it’s not THAT far. We make it work. I love where we live now, it’s just beautiful, surrounded by gum trees and koalas (and the odd ‘roo!) in the backyard. We’re making our own life, our own family, and I wouldn’t change a thing… unless that thing was to somehow crinkle up the Adelaide landscape so that the gap wasn’t quite so far.

The job. Nowhere in the shiny education degree brochure did it mention the work load, never ending drain on your head and heart, not to mention bank balance (did you know teachers buy most of their own resources?). Somehow, somewhere along the way my passion for this thing they call teaching took over, and the extra work load, the huge responsibility, it all became part and parcel of something that I love.

Four HUGE Nevers. Life changing decisions that have brought me, slowly but surely, to where I am and who I am today.

Have you ever said Never? Then changed your mind?

[Image Credit]

I am a chronic nail biter. I do it without thinking and it is usually when I taste blood or I hurt my finger that I notice that I am biting my nails.

I stopped for a while, a very short while; and then one nail broke and I may have decided that if I had one broken nails why not bite the other nine off.

You see it is really hard for me to stop biting my nails. Everyone suggest to use that awful tasting stuff; problem is I use my teeth to scrape it off [same way I do with nail polish] and then continue to chew. So something that may be easy for some doesn’t work for me.

But here are some things that have worked for me;

Let people know that you are trying to stop. Most of the girls at work tell me to stop biting my nails when they notice me doing it. It means that I am more mindful of when I have my fingernail in my mouth; and who is watching.

Use strengthening nail polish. I noticed that when my nails grew, I would put my teeth underneath the nail [not entirely sure why I do this] and then the nail would split because I would make it brittle. Not only that but I doubt my nails have that much strength to them anyway so using a strengthening nail polish meant that I was mindful of wanting my nails to grow and would attempt to let them.

Other peoples suggestions include:

~ Use that awful tasting nail polish
~ Rub chilli on your fingernails
~ Paint them a bright colour
~ Rub hand cream in when you feel the urge
~ Notice when you are biting, is it because you are hungry? Stressed? And work towards fixing those issues rather then biting

Any other tips?

[Image Credit]

I missed out on Mother’s Day last year.  Even though my baby was a day old somehow my husband ended up being the one who got breakfast in bed…in my hospital bed!

So I am planning on celebrating this year!
And honestly I want to spend my Mother’s Day not being a mother.
This Mother’s Day comes at a moment…one year in…when I am just craving some alone time.  I love my baby so, so much.  But I would love to spend a day without him.  I don’t think I have had more than eight hours to myself since he was born.  And that is generally how I like it.  But I must admit that I am ready for a bit of a break from being a mother.

This is my ideal Mother’s Day.
Our little family would go for our usual Sunday walk to the cafe but after our coffees I would return home and my husband and my baby and my dog would go off somewhere else.
And somehow upon my return home the house would be pristine, there would be no dirty dishes, no laundry, the grocery shopping would be done and a meal or two would be cooked for the week ahead.  Oh and the freezer would be stocked with my favourite flavours from Baskin Robbins and there would be a nice bottle of red around.
And I would relax.
I would probably climb back into bed and read for an hour or so.  Then I would likely go and get another coffee and sit in the sun on the verandah drinking my flat white and reading blogs.  Then I would probably lie on the couch for an hour or two and catch up on television shows that I have missed…hello there Revenge!  I might actually multi task and nap while the tv is on.
By late afternoon I would probably start to miss my husband and my baby.
But I am sure if my friends showed up with pizza and wine and we sat and ate and drank and laughed I could be distracted for another few hours.
And then my boys and my dog would come home.  I would give them all kisses.  And I would go to bed.

What are you doing for Mother’s Day?

[This was submitted by Caitlin from Mother Down Under; originally published Wednesday 9th May 2012.]

[Image Credit]