CFF - Child Free Friends!!! Making Guilt Worse!!!

"Oh I can't wait to see you all...... I miss the kids so much...... you can relax a little, I will help with the kids, it will be fun....."

All the things my girlfriends said to me BEFORE we made an 8 hour family trek to catch up with them.....

To be honest, I was really looking forward to the time..... hubby isn't known as the best child care assistant when we are out and about in a group of people, so having girlfriends who know this and make a little effort to ease your load is so overwhelmingly welcome!!!!

The fascination lasted a whole couple of hours and then I just felt like my kids were an invasion of their relaxation time!!!

Not sure if it's my own self induced Mother Guilt coming to haunt me, but I really feel inadequate when I am around childless friends.... You can see them judging you, your children and every wrong move that is made.......!!!!!

Kids are kids in my opinion.... mine aren't perfect, and I am not the perfect mother, but I really don't expect my girlfriends, ESPECIALLY ones without children to point such details out to me!!!!

Smoke Signals!!!!

Sorry for the bore with the previous post........ Just a way to jog my memory about the many things I want to scream about!!!! Our muddy, middle of nowhere trip to visit friends was NOTHING on the trip to visit hubby's grandparents!!

Picture this: Small living room, All windows closed because its cold outside and a chain smoking grandma sitting in a lounge chair in the middle of the room...... This is the environment I have to take my children to each time they visit their great grandma!!!

IT STINKS
IT is SUFFOCATING not to mention
CANCEROUS!!!!!

Needless to say we don't stay there long..... It's impossible to really, it starts to make you feel sick just being stuck in the house........

Mr 4 politely told his great grandma that smoking is for bad people and its yucky and would kill her!!!! And believe me I didn't correct him. Fine she's old school and all but who could possibly miss all of the "SMOKE KILLS" ads on tv in newspapers, plastered everywhere.... yet when we visit she still sits and smokes around the children!!!!

The mother in me can't stand it, I didn't bring children into the world to have them subjected to harmful smoke by their own great grandma... not that this woman is particularly the maternal type and I guess that shows............

And we brought the rain!!!!

So it continues..... No rain in Moree for 3 months and of course it follows us there.... Bad thing for us, Great news for the town and their farm crops.... But call me selfish, what a wonderful start to our trip....NOT!!!

Don't get me wrong, I had been dying to see my friend who moved away a few months ago but 3 kids trapped in a house for 2 days and having your car literally "skate and slide" up the driveway to get to the house with a huge risk of getting stuck is a real test of my dedication :) Thank god hubby is a great driver on dirt roads because if it was me, we'd been bogged and trapped in knee deep mud within minutes!!!

We stayed for 2 days, on the second day the kids were released into the mud pit!! Miss 2 found great joy getting "stuck in muddy puddles".... This was after they were dressed to head into town to go to dinner mind you!!!

Its amazing when you are living out of a suitcase and you have dressed the kids in their only set of decent clothes that are clean and CLEARLY said to hubby "make sure they don't get dirty, we are leaving to go to dinner soon" and he replies, "yep ok" that he later tells you "You never told me that!!!" - Men and selective hearing!!!

That night we tackled the driveway again to head into dinner at one of the local pubs... Of course this was the idea of my childless friends. Travelling with children and visiting friends without them sometimes has many interesting insights...... We all ordered good hearty meals and even Mr 4 ate some of his dinner, which for him is a huge deal.

I thought they were really well behaved. Mr 5 months sat in a highchair and had a great time sucking on a potato chip..... Even though Mr 4 and Ms 2 kept themselves fairly well entertained without destroying anything I could still feel the disapproval of the childless parties at the table..... I am definately going to chat about this topic soon, its a really hard one to deal with sometimes!!!

Another trip up the driveway after dinner and we headed home..... Another problem with my kids is that they are night owls, they stay up often until after 10pm, and I am yet to find a way to alter their behaviour... This is fine at home where we do our own thing, but put them in a house with other adults who need to "get sleep" to go to work and fly home the next day and I start to feel Motherhood guilt again about raising obviously feral children whom I appear to have very little control over!!!!!

Thats exactly what happened straight after dinner when we got home, and it had happened the night before. I love my girlfriends, but I was just longing to be at home where ferals can be ferals (even though in my opinion they were doing really well considering they were locked inside a strange house and hadn't yet broken anything) and I can relax.......

After a big tidy up the next morning we left back down the muddy driveway along and even worse dirt road that took 40 minutes to drive along onto our next adventure to see hubby's grandparents!!!!!!

So How Busy AM I???

Welcome to my blog and welcome to my life.....

To give you a quick background I have 3 children aged 4 years, 2 years and 5 months, so life around our home is what you would call chaotic... really chaotic.....

I am not a super mother, I am not a great housewife...... Walk into my house at any time and you will more often then not see a huge chaotic mess.... :)

I love my kids.... I am hoping to raise them to be good people, teach them manners, and like most parents shelter them from the most dangerous horrible parts of the world at least for a little while. This being said you can almost guarantee I:

Let them watch too much TV
Give in too often and don't follow through on discipline
Let them stay up too late
Bribe them with lollies and chocolate at any given time to make my own life easier
Sometimes break down and cry because being a mother just does that to you sometimes.

I really love my life, I really love my kids. I love the chaos, I love being surrounded with them every day, I am frustrated at my own lack of housekeeping skills, but I would rather have happy kids than a clean house, and most of all, I know that all too soon they will be grown up and there are so many things to learn, experience and do together along the way that I cherish each and every moment.