Bliss and Mayhem

 By nature I’m not shy. I’m not afraid to go up to strangers and strike up a conversation. I can stand up and talk in front of many people without freaking out. I love a chat and am a bit of an extravert. However, driving into the Melbourne CBD at 7am last Saturday morning, I had knots in my stomach, full of nervousness and apprehension. I was on my way to attend the Empowering Women Conference 2015 . I wasn’t going with anyone,  I didn’t know any the other 200 odd women that were attending and I was quietly pooping my pants. I live about an hours drive from the CBD and driving into Melbourne always brings on anxiety for me. Those bloody hook turns and all {seriously, who invented those!!} cars, trams and taxis everywhere, not my ideal driving environment. Safely arriving at the Rydges Hotel – I quietly stood out the front chugging down a cigarette before heading in. Here’s me keeping my cool {on the outside but not really} – first time attending a conference as a blogger.  { S

 We hit the 7-year mark over the weekend since we got married. There were no roses, breakfast in bed as, you know, married and all! But we did venture out to our local Chinese Restaurant for some dumplings and Yum Cha because… Dumplings. I’m in love with Dumplings.   image via Pinterest - because i scoffed my dumplings down before i could take a photo!   My sister Angie came over the day before our Yum Cha feast for a visit and I got big cuddles and some playtime with my gorgeous niece. Angie is a super organised, a planner and with her background in drafting engineering she is brilliant with all things squares, shapes and layouts. So while I dished out pumpkin soup and had cuddle times with my little niece Bonnie, Angie shared with me the secrets of the Ikea website ! Little #Bonnie The brilliance with Ikea {which I didn’t know} is that they have planners’ people! And not just kitchen ones. I was looking at updating our entertainment unit area to create more storage and Angie

  image via Pinterest   Dear sweet lord Jesus, if there is one thing that brings me close to a toddler meltdown, every time, it is the most mundane of activity that needs to done as an adult. Grocery shopping . I loathe this excursion weekly, and the mind numbing process of doing this with 2 kids in tow a toddler and an Autistic boy that countdowns every single item that gets put into the trolley and then questions you when you put something “extra” in, drives me to drink, coffee . I was so desperate to “get out” of this thing that I need to do every week that a few weeks ago –I didn’t do it. I bought 3 hours of extra time over that weekend, not struggling with parking, trolleys, feral kids and pandemonium in the shopping centre – coz really, everyone needs to be hounding the centres like a wolf pack just incase the world ends and we can’t get food the next day right? Admittedly, I had to be creative with meals for a couple of days. This also gave me a chance to really go throug

 I never really thought I was the marrying type. Marriage, the whole husband and wife thing, was not really ever on my list to do. Sure, looking at photos of wedding dresses, cakes and the like was nice and going to weddings and seeing how happy those two people on the day were was beautiful to see, but I truly never thought that I would ever be walking down an aisle in all white and stuff. Then this guy came along - We met in the most un-romantic of places, AutoBarn nearly 10 years ago. He was the installer there and I needed a CD player fitted into my car. You can check out the story of how it all happened here . 7 years ago next week we said the “I do”. It’s been a ride my friends. Up and down, good and bad, really, really hard and also so so easy. I’ve made a life with my best friend, I even said to Steve the other night that I love how comfortable I feel with us. I think it’s a pretty rare thing to find. So in honour of the 7 year itch, lets go down memory lane of the day t

       Ever since I can remember I have always been quite a vivid dreamer. Even as a child my dreams would be so real and I would even sleep talk in different languages. Places that I had never been to, and words that sounded so foreign, but to me, in my sleep talk, they came out so easily. As I got older – the dreams remained but instead of nice dreams, most of them were apocalyptic style. So graphic and scary that I would wake in a pool of my own sweat with it taking a good few minutes to realise that I was back in reality and it was just a dream. And, I always felt SO tired. I would complain about the tiredness all the time where even my family would say, “Come on Cheryl, stop saying you’re tired all the time”. That restful sleep had been eluding me for years. Big dreams. Life or death dreams. Shit dreams. Nightmares really. Last year I went to see a homeopathy therapist, out of curiosity mainly to see what I could do about my sleep, anxiety and feeling overwhelmed 99% of t

  This is NOT a sponsored post Just a feel good share, about a way that you could change the world.       Is the world getting more fucked up? Or is it that because we can hear about it straight away that we are more aware of how fucked up it has always been? I don’t know. It’s like the chicken and the egg conundrum… I try not to think about it too much, because when I do, it hurts, I get really sad and angry, and it makes me feel so little and insignificant in the scheme of the world. How can one little person like me in Melbourne, Australia make any change? And while I’m strolling through my Instagram feed or pinning inspirational “go get em” quotes on Pinterest – in my ducted heated home sipping on a glass of wine, there are people out there, right now, doing it so hard. Like really struggling with life, with money, with making ends meet, with supporting their family, with wondering whether tomorrow is going to happen. You know, survival. And I sip on wine, arse. I wante

     My mantra is that I am the ever working progress and the older I get the more I realise that life is short and to make the most of all there is. I am a sponge and love to soak in new things, new ideals, outlooks and forms of self- improvement. My strike rate record for committing to extra-curricular things is quite low. The idea of a hobby is always so tantalizing but in practice my attention span for it mostly lasts a couple of months and then I give up. I have had countless gym memberships, yoga groups, online courses and the like, where it seems like a good idea at the time, to only close the door on those “me time” things due to time constraints, working full-time and basically being a mum with not enough hours in the day. So over a year ago now, I got thinking about “what can I do for me?” and the first thing that popped into my head was to start a blog. “But what on earth would I write about?” “Would anyone actually read it?” The immediate reaction was doubt. In mys