I heard an ad on the radio the other day that spoke about enrolling for prep next year at school, and my mind instantly rewound a few years. It seems like yesterday that I was struggling to accept the fact that my baby, my little girl was going to be ripped from my arms to start her school life, under someone else’s supervision, to say the least! How were we ever going to cope with that? Maybe the real question was, “How was I ever going to cope with that?” (more…)

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the words, “Mum, I can’t sleep!”, I would be able to finish work, buy a boat and sail the seas of the Caribbean!
My son went through many years of having trouble sleeping. It started just after his bullying experience began. (more…)

We recently had an accident in our car. We were all fine, nothing major, but some lady thought she could squeeze past us on Flinders Lane in the city, with our big, fat arse four wheel drive, stopped at the traffic lights waiting for people to cross the road, so we could turn left! Yep, she failed! It was an accident, we all make mistakes, but it took my son and I, half an hour to stop shaking! The noise and the shaking of the car, did give us a bit of a fright! (more…)

Recently my son’s footy team made it to the semifinals. Yeah, good job boys! We had an awesome season and deserved to be there. We were super proud of our boys who had worked really hard to make it this far. But when we discovered the team we would be playing, we were horrified. We had played them in the last week of the rounds and we were totally appalled at what our kids had to endure during that game. In fact, so was the league which made the decision to move the game to a different ground to the rest of the finals being played, so that there could be more officials present to oversee it. Why? Because the team we were playing were a bunch of thugs. I have never witnessed such atrocious behaviour from not only the kids, but from the parents. (more…)

Resilience seems to be a magic word these days. Everyone is talking about how important it is to be resilient, and yes it is, not only for our kids in the school yard and online, but also in general, in our relationships and in everyday life. I’ve heard so many people say that they wish they could be more resilient but they are just not built that way. So, can resilience be taught? The answer is very simple, yes it can. We are all born with some degree of innate resilience, the difference however, is how we choose to exercise it. (more…)

“Is it ok for kids to be bored on the school holidays?” I heard this question being thrown around the other day, and it made me think. Well, is it ok? I think the answer is “Yes!” Yes, because it forces kids to use their imagination to entertain themselves. Is that such a bad thing? (more…)

“What kind of a mother lets her son do this?”, was the question I asked myself over and over again as I sat in my warm car and watched, as my son battled it out on the rain drenched footy field. The weather was atrocious! I had never before seen a game where the kids actually got cleaner as the game went on, thanks to the pounding, relentless rain which washed their arms and legs but made sure that the mud that would stain their white shorts for days, got thicker and thicker!  (more…)