My Week That Was.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to shut out the world. I’m not an ear-bud fan. They hurt. I like my headphones big and squishy.

The wall

When we first started being organised about Mamamia and we moved out of home and into an office and began to accumulate a small editorial team, we tried a few different ways of planning the posts for the day and the week. When I was working by myself at home, I had a system of coloured post-it notes and when Lana first saw it, she laughed at me. Then when Nicky joined us, she also joined in the laughing at my post-its with Lana. Well, WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, BITCHES?

I love my post-its. The colour coding has gone out the window but I love looking at our wall of all the posts we have ready or are planning. I’m a visual person and I really need to see the day and the week laid out and I need to be able to physically move stories around.

Maybe it’s from my magazine days. If you’ve seen The September Issue you’ll know that the editor and art director paginate the magazine exactly like that. Old habits die hard.

The decoration

This was Lana’s suggestion. I found the letters in a kids’ shop. So many Ms….

The soundtrack

Can’t get enough of this album….or Adele.

The EEEEEEEk moment

So I’m reading a column by one of my favourite writers, Annabel Crabb. And she’s writing about how privacy is being privatised and how the law and the business world are struggling to catch up with technology and the myriad ways our privacy is blowing away like smoke.

She mentioned how if you take a photo with your smart phone / iphone and post it, the location it was taken in is embedded in the photo. REALLY? So I found myself on a site that explains how you disable that feature. If you’re interested, you may want to go here.

The clothes

Do you like how I’m trying to be all arty in these shots and not look at the camera?

I have this amazing girlfriend Kirsten who every so often, lobs a bag of clothes she doesn’t want over my fence. The last batch was a dooozy. There was a Diane Von Furstenburg dress that I wore to the Ultimate Girly High Tea a couple of weekends ago, the purple frock I wore for the first Sky show and also this dress (on the right). I don’t usually buy navy but it got lots of nice comments when I wore it. I love passing clothes around. Whether it’s to friends or charity…..clothes must be worn. Better than sitting idle in a drawer for ‘one day’ that never comes.

The lipstick

I got quite into bright lipsticks last summer and I’m not sure at all whether they transition into winter. But I’m giving it a whirl. I have a few that I like (Mac Morange and a Sportsgirl chubby stick in bright orange) but this Napoleon one is my favourite. I’m wearing it in the shot above with the scarf. Co-incidentally, MM Writer, Nicky bought the same one last weekend. Looks totally different with her colouring but I love it on her.

The video that made me cry – not in a bad way

Oh how this moved me. What a mother will do for her child….and look at how the little boy laughs at the end…..just beautiful.

Fred Hollows Foundation video:

The car-seat cover I wore on TV

That’s what Ben Fordham called it when I walked on the set of the Today Show this week for my regular What’s Making News segment with Karl which has now been moved to Monday mornings at 7:50am.

Here’s what happened next:

The website

The Tumblr toobigforstroller.com is dedicated to pictures of kids that are too big for their strollers. From Salon:

There’s something hilarious and deeply grating about a child who can walk– and, for that matter, do his multiplication tables — being chauffeured via Bugaboo. It hits so many cultural hot buttons at once: a sense that we’re overindulging a younger generation, the eyeroll-inducing eccentricities of parenting culture, an American tendency to take the escalator rather than the stairs. Maybe fellow parents see kids like these and feel sympathy. As someone without kids, I’m baffled and irritated — and I was a nanny for two years.That’s why Too Big for Stroller is so gratifying. Its creator, Laura Miller (not the Salon book critic, by the way), was working in Manhattan’s crowded Herald Square when the constant presence of huge tots in strollers inspired her to start the blog, which documents the trend in its own simple and snarky way.

Go here to read the full article.

Made me think. With your first child, you’re so keen for them to reach every new milestone. Hurry up and smile! Sit up! Eat solids! Crawl! Walk! Get out of your pram! Stop wearing nappies! Drive a bloody car already!

But with other children, there’s not that incessant rush. What’s the hurry? To me, the accoutrements of baby-hood are no big deal, assuming they’re gone by, you know, high school. Also, prams are handy.

When we recently went overseas, we totally forgot a pram. Our youngest kids are 5 and 2 so prams aren’t a given anymore, even though we still have one or two. The only problem was that we forgot we’d be travelling through the night. Try carrying two sleeping children through miles and miles of airports, changing terminals and waiting in passport queues without a pram. NOT EASY. We tried to put them in a luggage trolley but they kept falling out. It was a debacle.

I recall another time, my friend and I had to run miles from the train station to a Yo Gabba Gabba concert we were late for. Our girls were 3 and HEAVY. At one point, my friend, panting, said “What if we just put them in those wheelie bins and pulled?”

The show

We didn’t do a show this week, due to the budget and Sky New’s disinterest in my offer to analyse it. Instead, they chose to suspend normal programming and go with EXPERTS. If you can believe that.

So we busied ourselves with planning next week’s show and booking guests Kristina Keneally (former NSW Premier and current opposition back bencher), Deb Thomas (magazine maven and former editor-in-chief of Cleo, Women’s Weekly, Elle and others) and Caroline Overington (author and Walkley Award winning journalist for The Australian). It’s going to be fun. Check it out Tues 8pm on Sky News.

The books

When I was sick over Easter, I did a lot of online shopping. From bed. Since then, a number of delightful surprise parcels have been arriving. Surprising because I was so sick I’ve forgotten half of what I bought. Here is my delivery from Booktopia, two books that couldn’t be more different: Socialnomics and Batavia; – Peter Fitzsimons’ rollicking new historical book that he says is his best yet and is selling a MOTZA.