I really like our house but it feels all mismatched and unfinished. When we bought it we decided it was our 10-year house, it’s big enough to fit us for that long (except for not having any land) and that sort of time frame suits us because we’re so lazy filled with inertia it’ll take us that long to get around to doing everything. Plus, this way my cheap ass frugal self can imagine affording it all without having a heart attack. But, sometimes I look around and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get stuck in and decorate? Our furniture is nice–well, some of it is, some of it’s been hanging around for 15 years and is the sort of stuff you can afford when you’re just out of uni–but it doesn’t really hang together in this house. We need to hang pictures and think about paint colours and new cushions, and give ourselves permission to get rid of things that don’t fit.

A girlfriend warned me this would happen. She said, “You will go stir crazy being cooped up in the house all the time and you’ll suddenly decide you need to throw out the curtains or buy a dozen wicker baskets.” And I thought Aha, this may well be the case but you do not understand, I am on a budget, I am frugal, I do not do these things! Well, it’s happening. I even bought a wicker basket, for heaven’s sake, without any real idea what I’d do with it (I keep paperwork in it for now). And a laundry basket, to contain the ironing, and a foam underlay for my ironing board, and some over-the-door coat hooks so we can hang up our winter coats. And that’s not the end of it, I want another wicker basket, and a new front door mat, and a lazy susan for the condiments in the fridge and about a billion other things, and we haven’t even got to the decorating bit yet. And I am finding it hard, because the frugal part of me says, are you kidding? Those vertical blinds work perfectly well. So what if they’re pink and ugly and don’t actually block out much light, you are taking a pay cut and have to think of the future! And what if you move and the furniture doesn’t fit in the new place? Even though we have no intention of moving, we might. I can’t get rid of the rental mentality.

Dave says I should go for it. He says I should pick one room at a time and work all out. And that sounds fine if you ignore the fact that I don’t really know where I want to start or what I want in each room, and if I do know what I want (eg a leather couch like the one in Dave’s apartment in London for the TV room) then I can’t find it anywhere. Also he’s not the one who runs the budget and so he doesn’t realise how the idea of frittering away money on things makes my heart palpitate. And finally, does he realise what he’s suggesting? Does he not remember the months of searching for the baby’s room paint colour, which I wanted to be soft and neutral but not beige or white, maybe a yellow, but not a bright yellow and how I kept finding yellows that were perfect, absolutely it, only not quite so green/orange/bright/yellow. Does he remember how I bought that really expensive shampoo just because the bottle looked to be the right colour? Our bedroom badly needs painting, there are gouges on the walls, but I want to paint it a sort of mushroomy/beige/latte colour, only not too pink and not too brown or mushroom or beige. DOES HE REALLY WANT TO GO THROUGH THAT AGAIN?

Look, I know this is silly. I should just give myself a small allowance and permission to enjoy the process, and do each little bit as I think of it. So, go get that pretty lampshade for the bedroom and then keep an eye out for the right paint and bedhead while getting on with something else. It’s just, that seems so higgledy-piggledy, you know? How will I keep track of everything? How will I know what I’ve achieved? You know what I need, I need a list, and a scrapbook of ideas, and probably a spreadsheet so I can prioritise all the different things I want to do. Ooh, I can see a lot of browsing on Etsy and Apartment Therapy in my future.

How did you decorate? Did you have trouble letting yourself do it? Do you have any tips for me?

So it’s all about mindfulness and just starting to work out where that $50 you took out 3 days ago has gone. I started keeping a spending diary too for moral support and to be a good example, so it’s a bit ironic that suddenly I’ve gone on a bit of a spending bender. It’s not a lot, just things like $40 at Kmart on some organisational things (a coat rack, a new foam underlay for my ironing board, a laundry basket) that I’ve been wanting for ages and make me feel happy and organised, and they all come out of my budget, but if you look through my notebook it looks like I’m spending on fripperies. Plus I keep forgetting to write stuff down. I suppose it goes to show it’s a habit that takes time for anyone to get into but I don’t like spending money willy nilly!

Anyway, my worst spending was when I was up in Ballarat. I took my laptop along with the idea that I’d get to do some writing up there (hah!) and I also took my little USB keyfob thingy that gives me 3G internet connectivity. Except once I connected up and started surfing it told me I didn’t have enough data to continue, because Ballarat is not in a 3G area, it’s only 2G, and to connect to that I needed to buy a separate block of “roaming” data, which cost $7.50. Not much, right? So I did, and wasted a happy half hour or so checking people’s Facebook statuses and stuff.

But here’s the thing. It was *only* $7.50, but it expires in a month. I’m not likely to be back in Ballarat in that time, and I don’t go anywhere anymore that I need the connectivity. (It’s true that our house is annoyingly in some sort of 3G dead area so I could use it here, but our home network works fine.) I was only in Ballarat for two days, I could have gone without internet for that time. Wasn’t getting away from everything one of the reasons I went up? Plus my phone has (annoying, clunky) internet connectivity so if I really wanted to check my email I could have done it on that.

So I’m a bit annoyed at myself. Yes, it’s only $7.50 and I used to spend more than that on lunch every day, so in the scheme of things it’s not much. It’s just annoying that I made this sort of beginner’s slip-up and it’s going to expire without being used. Plus, right now I only give myself $25 a week spending money, so there’s a huge chunk taken out of what I was saving up for more organisation stuff, or maybe even some jeans that fit.

On the other hand, I was at my Aunt’s house and when I was sitting on the floor playing with Bianca I noticed that on her shelf she has 20 DVDs (I counted) and every single one of them is of Andre Rieu. Every single one! Now, maybe she keeps her other DVDs somewhere else, but how is there even that many ways to look at that man?

It’s not been quite all I pictured. For a start Bianca’s a little unsettled being in a strange place with her routines all mixed up — not too bad, but a little. Neither of us are sleeping well. And Mum’s a little bit weird. She wants us to visit, she likes us being here, but then she just potters around doing her own thing. It drives Dave crazy. I don’t want a big production but you’d think she’d want to sit with me in the evening to have a chat and, I don’t know, learn a bit about what’s going on with me since she always complains I don’t tell her. Or plan some outings. I found it a bit strange that she didn’t mention seeing anyone when one of the reasons she asked me to visit was so one of my aunts could meet the baby. So on the Tuesday morning I asked if we’d be going to visit, say, Auntie Jess or anyone else today.

“Oh I normally go see Auntie Jessie on a Wednesday,” she said and I thought okay, fine, I know you like your routines so I’ll come along then if there’s time before I go home.

Then later that night when she was cooking dinner and I was breastfeeding she yelled from the kitchen, “And we haven’t been to see Auntie Helen yet.”

This, by the way, is one of my pet peeves, the way she’ll talk to you form another room (or even in the same room but facing the other way) when she has no hope in hell of hearing your reply, so she just sort of assumes what you said and goes on with her conversation. And guess how many times she gets it right. So you have to rush in from wherever you are to stand in front of her to make her stop and wind back. It’s like she doesn’t think being deaf has any effect at all. Anyway, I was stuck under the baby so I didn’t rush in to answer so I waited till she brought it up again and asked (calmly!) how she thought that would work since it was almost the baby’s bedtime, I’d told her I was catching up with a friend the next morning, and I’d want to leave for home by 3 at the absolute latest.

She just looked at me all shocked. It turns out all the times we’d talked about me coming up, from the first time she mentioned it to when I phoned her Monday morning to say I was about to leave, all the times that I’d said I’d be coming for two days, I was arriving Monday and leaving Wednesday, I couldn’t stay any longer because I had an appointment Thursday morning, so that’s why it would be FOR TWO DAYS ARRIVING MONDAY AND LEAVING WEDNESDAY, that had all gone completely over her head. I still don’t know how. She says she thought I said I was leaving Thursday, and all I can think is everytime I started telling her, she’d talk over the top of me saying how nice it would be. But, hey. I don’t feel guilty, I tried really hard to get her to understand, the only thing I didn’t do is give her a quiz at the end of the phonecall, and she gets mad when I say, “And what did I say?” and ask her to repeat it back to me.

Anyway, two days is just about enough, I really miss Dave and I miss my house and I’m really looking forward to going home. It has been nice though. I’m glad I’ve done it, it was nice seeing her, it made her happy and Bianca is fascinated by the mad old bat so it’s all turned out okay in the end.

Oh look, I’m writing about the baby.

Anyway – my point is, getting structure to my day is hard. And it annoys me, because I was convinced I was going to have my entire life organised by now, but it’s all I can do to keep up with the laundry. (The washing of it; folding and putting away is a lost art and Dave makes a nudie trek to the dining table every morning for undies.) If we have a good day with a couple of naps I can pick up a bit and maybe do some dishes and I feel ten feet tall, but it’s all fighting fires and making any sort of headway is difficult. Not to mention making time for things for me, like yoga, or blog writing, or reading even. So you see, the structure is very important.

Bianca is nine weeks old now. I’m amazed that some people go back to work when their baby’s just 12 weeks old – in fact, did I read somewhere that in the US some people go back after just 6 weeks? Because at that point it was all I could do to get dressed every day. If that was you, even at 12 weeks – I’m in awe. Truly.

Anyway, this is turning out to be a bit of a non-update so I’ll try to give a quick summary of where we are on Things What Are Important To Me:

Bianca – 9 weeks old. Smiling. Saying “Gah.” Gorgeous.
Weight – plummetted in the first few weeks after birth but now sort of stagnant. Much helped by the fact that if I eat anything with chocolate or dairy in it the baby gets contorted with wind so they’re out of bounds(although I still slip up), but I’m going to have to start working on being healthier soon.
Exercise – non-existent. I managed some yoga stretches the other day. That felt nice.
Money – sadly neglected, but we’re managing okay. I think. I miss my spreadsheets!
Housework – the bare minimum.
Organisation – I have so many things I want to do, I don’t know what to do first. Maybe this is somewhere that Flylady’s “you can do anything for 15 minutes” would come in handy. Also, I need a list of everything so I can cycle through. Ooh, a list! I love lists.
My Mother – amazingly enough, she’s been really good lately. She’s besotted with Bianca and even came down once to visit. Some of the antagonism has gone, which is probably all on my side. We are getting along better. I have been thinking about this a lot lately and am feeling very hopeful.

See? Lots is going on that I can write about. I just need to make the time to do so. I’ll put it on my list :-)

Baby Bianca was born at 10:50pm on Sunday 4th April (Easter Sunday) after 36 hours, 3 induction attempts, 2 epidurals and a Caesarian. Not at all thebirth wehad in mind but I don’t care. She is healthy and beautiful.

She is my world.

All is well here. We leave hospital tomorrow and I’ll write more when I don’t have to type with my pinky finger.

- Bianca’s mum.

So I am now in my fourth week of maternity leave and I’m amazed at how fast the days have gone and how little I’ve done with them. Before I went on leave I had big plans. I made a list of all the rooms in the house plus some extra things like pantry and filing. There were about 12, maybe 13 things. The plan was to spend a day on each – if it was a room, it would get a really deep clean and a bit of an organise, however much I could do in the time – so I’d be nice and caught up before the baby came. I even wrote at the bottom that not all of the things on the list would take a whole day, so if I finished early I could take the rest of the day off. And then I was happy for the baby to come, two weeks early, because I’d be ready, you see?

Hahahahahaha!

I’m moving that much more slowly these days that it took me most of that first week just to fold the baby’s clothes and put them way. I get tired so much more easily, if I go out for groceries or to run errands it can wipe me out for the rest of the day. Or the next. Sunday I was feeling pretty good and got a fair amount of chores done as well as a trip to the supermarket, then yesterday all I could do was lie on the couch for the entire day. It’s so frustrating, because if I feel good, I want to do stuff, you know? Not just lie around watching tv. I’ve got a couple of workmates and friends who deal with chronic illnesses like lupus and CFS, and I thought I understood what they went through each day but I really didn’t. Not that I’m at all equating my late-pregnancy blahs with what they go through at all, it’s just, after a day like yesterday and the Saturday before last, I got a little bit of an idea. And it bloody sucks.

But mostly, I’ve been ok. I’m tired, and my legs and feet are swollen and sore, and my hands feel stiff and arthritic during the day and like little wooden paddles at night, oh and the floor is as far away as the moon so every day when Dave comes home he has to go around picking up tupperware lids and tissues and anything else I’ve dropped, but otherwise I’m surprisingly ok. The days I manage to not overdo it, I spend pottering. A little bit of housework, a bit of a sit, maybe a bit more of something else. The budgie [parakeet] keeps me company; right now he’s flying around me trying to get me to hold him up to the top of my metal desk lamp so he can talk to the beautiful birdy in there, and soon he’ll try to hog my laptop keyboard for a nap. It’s nice, really nice. I could happily spend every day like this, though I’m sure Dave would have something to say about that.

So anyway, that’s where I’ve been. Sorry about the lack of posts, but there’s been nothing much to say. Although <cue ominous music> that is all about to change…

The reason we’ve been so busy is that my baby shower was on Sunday, and we wanted to get the baby’s room finished beforehand. So we worked hard sorting that out, and then we did a whole bunch of other little jobs we’d been procrastinating on like unpacking all the books in the family room (or rather, putting the piles of unpacked books on the shelves); putting up shelves in the study and sorting out all the papers etc which had exploded in there. Seriously, it was our dumping ground and it was disgusting. I would have taken a before photo to show you, but I couldn’t find the camera. That’s how bad it was.

Anyway, it all got done and now the house looks awesome. It’s amazing how much nicer a place looks when it’s tidy and all the half-unpacked boxes are removed. And I’m amazed at how much we can achieve if we stop procrastinating and just do stuff. Dave’s moaning about not having had a proper weekend for ages but I don’t care, the house is lovely and he can play computer games every night this week if he wants.

So the baby shower was wonderful. Dave’s sisters G and C did a great job. I was so touched when they offered to organise it, and also that everybody came. There were about 20 of us altogether and I was a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing. I’m not all that comfortable being the centre of attention, I never feel I deserve it so I get all shy. But I looked around the room and it was filled with my friends, women that I love, who were all excited for me. And I got teary. And the baby got some wonderful gifts and I feel so loved and blessed by everyone.

Oh and get this – three of the people at the party were my mum and two of my aunts. My mum came. Given that our last big fight started (she’s not one to stay on topic in a fight) because she didn’t want to come down to visit after the baby was born and because I was a horrible person for saying I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable bringing a newborn on a four-hour round trip to visit her so she might have to wait a month or so before that happened, I really didn’t expect her to come. I mean, she barely made it to my wedding for fuck’s sake, why would she show for a couple of hours of afternoon tea? So when we were organising this six or eight weeks ago I told her she’d be getting an invite because it would look odd if she didn’t but not to worry about it. And there she was, they came down on the train and she’d arranged with Cath to be collected at our local station.

I do not understand her.

Oh, and there was absolutely no mention of our argument. She just phoned a week or so ago, out of the blue, and asked me what I still needed for the baby, so she could tell my aunts what to get me. And that some of them were coming down, and they were all put out because they hadn’t gotten invites to the shower, but she’d “smoothed it over” (my mother has no internal editor; everything you tell her will be repeated to everyone she knows without thinking about whether it’s appropriate or not, so beware). I told her honestly that since none of them came to our wedding and that had been far more important to me I hadn’t even thought of inviting them to this (it’s not like the baby’s here yet) and she said that they still liked to have the opportunity to say no. And I didn’t know what to say to that.

Sometimes I think I’m a changeling.

And it’s only going to get worse once the baby comes and I go back to work at the end of the year. I’ll only be going back part time but from what I’ve heard kidlets are time sinks and I’m under no illusions that those extra couple of days off each week will result in any extra free time. That’s why I decided that I have to spend this year getting my home life in order, simplifying everything and getting routines in place so that when I do go back to work the wheels don’t fall off. 

The only problem is, I’m not really sure how to do that. So I was really excited to have the chance to read an advance copy of Simplify, a new ebook by Joshua Becker of Becoming Minimalist. Simplify is subtitled 7 guiding principles to help anyone declutter their home and life and details the principles he and his family learned while making their transition to rational minimalism, and he delivers exactly that. 

Rational Minimalism. I’m loving that term. As I’ve started reading more minimalism blogs I’m struck by stories of people who want to cut down to less than 100 possessions, and I find that lifestyle as unappealing as that of people adopting ultrafrugality. Rational minimalism isn’t about that. It’s about getting rid of the things that really aren’t important to you so you have time and space for the things that are. Whether they are physical belongings or time to spend on people and activities you love, the prinicples are the same. 

So I’ve been spending the last couple of months deciphering the policies of both of our employers, trying to work out what we can do. It’s not helped that neither of our jobs has a visible HR presence anymore. There’s got to be someone, outside of the outsourced helplines*, but neither of our “people leaders” (bosses) could give us any names. So we do our best to follow the procedures, and convince our bosses that we’re doing what we need. All fun.

So anyway, this is what I’ve discovered for our situation:

• we don’t qualify for the Baby Bonus, or any governmental child assistance. No surprise there, Comrade Rudd’s policies are well known.
• both employers say we can have up to 52 weeks parental leave. Dave’s says we can overlap and be off at the same time, but mine does not (apart from a week after the birth) so no overlapping it is.
• when I go back to work, I have the option to request “parental part time” work; that is, to switch to part time for one or more periods up to when the baby is school aged. It means I have extra flexibility but don’t have to permanently switch to part time. But, my employer does not have to approve it and I do not necessarily get to stay the same grade as I am now, whereas if I return as full time, my grade and position must stay the same.
• I get 12 weeks paid leave, which I can take as 24 weeks at half pay. This is better for tax, so I’ll be doing it that way. (This is not standard across all companies in Australia, but I know many do it.)
• even better, Dave can also take 12 weeks fully paid parental leave, as long as I have gone back to work and he is the primary carer. (This is absolutely not standard, so they must be applauded for getting at least one thing right in a sea of wrong.) All he needs is a letter from my employer saying I will be returning to work when he is on leave.

I want Dave to be able to take the time to be with the baby if he can, so many men don’t get that chance and anyway, it’s free paid holiday (as far as he thinks, anyway), so why not? Good lord, if they offer it, take what you can. So it seemed pretty simple to say I’d take the first 40 weeks (with 24 paid at half pay and 16 unpaid), and then return in December as parental part time, while Dave did the final 12 weeks.

But we hit a snag: in Dave’s policy there’s no definition of what “primary carer” means. Is it enough for me to have returned to work part time, or must I be full time? What if I’d returned for 3 days/week, proportionally that makes Dave the primary carer. Finally Dave tracked down an HR person (in Australia) who said, no, it meant full time. Dave pointed out it didn’t SAY that and she said it didn’t matter, that’s how she would interpret it and that’s what counted. Which… okay. This is what they do at his work. You’d think it’d be easier to write a watertight policy, but no.

The problem with this is it’s not clear if my work will let me come back full time and then switch to part time after 3 months. In which case, bugger. We need a new plan. Luckily, our policies are a bit better written and say I can request it at any time. I just may not get it. That was also when I discovered I wouldn’t necessarily get to be the same grade or position. Okay, that’s a whole new layer of things to worry about.

Finally I wrote my boss a rambly email about this, and the next day when he was in he sat down and sketched out a timeline of what I’d like to do. And he said he’d never had to deal with parental leave stuff in his short time as a team leader but if the policy said he could do it, he had no problem with it and he’d be able to plan around it as long as he knew it was coming.

I guess I’m really lucky that I have a boss who’s got kids and a wife who worked part time. And that he’s not a stickler for policy and things are pretty relaxed around here right now. And hopefully that I’m seen as a reasonably good resource.

So right now, all we’re waiting for is for him to write a letter saying that he is my line manager and that I’m coming back to work full time on 6th December, so Dave can request his parental leave for the end of the year. Then once I’m back we start the process to switch to parental part time.

On the one hand, I’m a little disappointed about coming back full time rather than part time. I’m worried that all my carefully crafted routines will go out the window when Dave’s in charge of the little one. Which is silly because, these routines? They don’t even exist yet. Who’s to say I’ll get them done anyway when there’s so many infomercials to watch every day?

On the other hand, it will be nice to effectively get a little extra cash injection from us both being on full-time pay for those 12 weeks. It will make up for any shortfall we’ll have while I’m not working. And, who knows? Maybe Dave will love not-working so much it will help get him more on board with my frugality push!

Who knew it would be so difficult to sort all this out? I know I should be grateful that my work is so flexible, and I am really. But at the same time I feel like I’m trying to line up two pieces of snaky hose without holding either of them still, and I could really do with someone saying to me definitively, “Yes, that works. We agree we’ll do it that way.” Because even though there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t agree, I’m still a little bit nervous about it.

* (Yes, both our employers have outsourced most HR functions overseas. And no, I don’t blame the workers there for not being able to interpret the finer points of the policy for us. It’s tempting, but that’s not what they’ve been employed to do. When companies do this, they do it to move the grunt work, the data entry, the fixing of easy problems, and the workers have specific procedures and targets judged by metrics and are absolutely NOT encouraged to think creatively. They don’t know the business enough or get paid enough to make the calls. (Neither, for that matter, did the grunts who did the same job here before it was outsourced.) It was done in an area which I have to work with regularly and I don’t deny it has its frustrations for everyone involved but please let’s not get sidetracked into debating offshoring jobs. The invisible HR people we both needed to talk to are still in Australia.)