Halloween food

So I got a bit ... well... enthusiastic at Halloween this year.

Not posting pictures of the 12 kids under 6 years old that came to my house, in case one of them wants to be police commissioner in some future where halloween is a moral outrage. Or photos of my giant sparkly fake eyelashes, which were fun! but if electronically public they might stymie my own ambitions to be a police commissioner in the future (or something). Or the bit where the lizard kid tried to wrap the skeleton kid in toilet paper to make him a mummy. That was fun. Although I should have supplied cheaper toilet paper. The supersoft paper just kept breaking.
There were monster drawing games, much screaming and running and hide and seek and BOO!, but all my other game plans dwindled when the little boys (and my daughter) started chasing the chooks around the block screaming, and the other little girls sat in their princess outfits and asked politely for some textas and started drawing butterflies and writing long words like "because".


I shall post pictures of my WATERMELON BRAIN
complete with hemispheres, the main lobes - OK not enough sulci and the gyri are too fat but it's not bad for 20mins from an engineer not a neurosurgeon.
I challenge any neurosurgeons reading this to make a better one. And post a comment.

Not my idea. I googled Halloween Food and found this. In the spectrum of brains posted in the comments, mine comes out pretty nice looking. 

 

Am I being too competitive? Is competitive brain carving in the Mummy Olympics?

Here is all the food.
Brain top right.
Dragon dropping cream puffs with chocolate top left.
Banana chips supposed to look like sliced vertebrae
Eyeball eggs - which were very tasty but nobody was game to eat them at first
Ghost bananas - how cute!
Mandarin pumpkins,
Slices of apple cut into mouths with teeth made of almond flakes
Fish fingers with almond flake fingernails

And there were also baby frankfurts wrapped like tiny mummies, instructions here,
which disappeared between putting them out and getting my camera. (I think the lizard boy ate them.)
Although if you are making them don't cut the puff pastry into strips. Cut it into one continuous spiral, Wrap each frankfurt, making sure there's a spot for the eyes later, and break it off. Much less fiddly than all those little strips.


What fun.

I shall have to do it again next year.

Acclimatising him to not belonging

It was my eldest's first 'footy day' today. This means the whole school dresses up in football supporters' gear. Where we live, that implicitly means Aussie Rules, but if you have another religion, just picture your own junior sports day of football/rugby/Irish football/American football/whatever.
This is kindof what the other kids looked like - although in order not to have to chase permission from parents, I've ganked this photo from somewhere else that already got permission:

Football t-shirts, hats, scarves, shorts, all in their own teams, all items of clothing approximately the right size, some signed by football players, many very well used from AusKick on the weekends.

This is what my son ended up wearing:

A Korean soccer t-shirt in Mens XL, numbered with the 2006 world cup team captain.
Were there any other soccer/rugby/Irish football/American football supporters at the school?
No.
I did try to get him a football t-shirt in roughly his size in time for footy day, but I didn't try very hard, ie. I didn't see any in the windows of the op shops (read: thrift stores) I happened to walk past in the week before.
But then my husband and I discussed it, and we figured that it is actually may not be a good thing to spare our son the feeling of being different. He is a bit unusual. We are all a bit unusual. He might as well get used to it.

Nevertheless, I found myself fretting a bit. Had I sent him into the proverbial bear pit? Would he get teased, taunted and ostracised because it didn't fit?

He was just fine. He said he had to explain his t-shirt a bit, but then his friend Jack found a small logo with a tiger on the front of it and told him he was definitely a Tigers fan, and he ended up the captain of the Tigers team in the 5-on-5 games the school ran on the oval.
Just goes to show, if you're a confident enough 5 yr old, you can be a (Caucasian) Korean team captain of an Aussie Rules team.

Lexski's Rules of Professional Corporate Ambition for Mums of Young Kids in Male-Structured Professions

So you took maternity leave and watched the grads you trained go past you. You suspect your boss or company is taking advantage of you but you don't necessarily know who to confront, what to say, how to negotiate the raise you deserve. And then you pick up the kids at daycare where tireless, brilliant women being substitute mums are being paid less than half your hourly wage, and that your mother or grandmothers never got to go back to work after marriage, or only after 10 or 15 years looking after you and your siblings, or threw away their university training and professional ambition to support their man, and ran the school council.

Here are my working theories about how to get ahead despite it all, achieving professional success during this really tough period.

1) Get your head straight. 

Own your professional territory. Be clear on what you are good at. If you're the expert on writing project bids for wastewater treatment plant upgrades (hi K), or a very slick MRI radiographry team leader (hi D) or the senior associate who specialises in medical malpractice suits (hi B), then that's your turf. Defend your turf. Don't let some uppity manager who is actually in a position to show up 5 days a week, and routinely operates on 8 hours sleep, and has time to regularly go to the gym, swan in and pretend to be an expert in your territory if it is your territory in the organisation.

Don't let the little voice in your head tell you that you're a fake, that you don't deserve to work, that you can't do it. I keep a couple of my best project outputs floating around my desk, and when I hear that little voice, I pick up a particularly fabulous track layout and remind myself that I am indeed very good, and this is something I did when I was really good. Everyone has bad days, even aforesaid well-rested gym-going uppity manager. Own your talents and your outputs and don't lose heart.

2) Always be well groomed, but pitch it to your context.

• Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. 
• Always have nice hair. 
• Take care of your shape and complexion. 
• If you decide to wear makeup, don't overstate it - no tacky blue fake eyelashes, no bright eyeshadow, strong lipstick only if it matches your clothes.
• Don't dress sexy. It not only distracts the 90% male employees from hearing what you are actually saying, it can create the impression that you are too lightweight to deserve a more important position, and you may have to peel off the admirers later on. 

Having said that, cultural standards are important. In Australia, a very talented part-time woman can be promoted - a bit - despite being very scruffy and somewhat rude. In France, she can be occasionally rude but she must be impeccably groomed. In Germany, she can be plainly dressed but must always conduct herself properly. In South East Asia, she must cover her upper legs and wear a modest neckline, but sleeveless tops are fine, upper arms can show. In West Coast USA, legs - good legs - are a promotion advantage.
And having said that too, dressing just a little sexy in a marketing or client-facing role can help subconsciously persuade clients to choose you or your product over someone else. But if you're applying for a technical managerial role, sexy will mostly backfire.

3) Make it look easy. Don't tell them how hard it really is.

Firstly, accept that this is the biggest injustice of all. You're hiking up a mountain in lead-lined boots while your male colleagues are taking a stroll along a tropical beach in the sunset. And you can't let them see it.

Never ever complain about lack of sleep, child waste or bodily fluid emissions, all the things you had to organise, all the picking up of objects, cleaning, laundry, mum's taxi driving that you do all day, every day that you're not in at work. Never ever complain about how you haven't been out to dinner since your second child was born, and that it has been so long since you went to a cinema that you suspect they've all turned into crumbled Parthenon-like ruins. Never ever let them know your childcare woes. Talk about your kids, but only charming, funny, nice stories. Never puke stories or sibling-inflicted injury stories. and never ever ever let your colleagues know how you lost the plot and yelled at your kids, or retreated to the toilet for a cry.

Men can stand around telling stories about their young kids' digestive tracts and bad behaviour, and how they couldn't cope. For some reason, it's a monstrous career-limiting move for mothers. If you want to be in charge, you don't want your colleagues to have enough information to imagine you doing your mum-work.

Be super-organised, to avoid family or professional catastrophe. Use all the backups you have, because you will need them. Find corners to cut, and rest in the tiny spaces in between. 

And re-frame. Remind yourself that you are good, you are ambitious, and you are among the first generations of women to have the opportunity to have kids and a career. Don't look at the injustice. Relish the opportunity to sit in one spot and have a hot cup of tea, uninterrupted. And then think how nice it is to go to the toilet by yourself.

4) Career progression is nonlinear. Being a mother now will make you a rocket-propelled professional woman later on.

You are not missing out. You are not being passed over. You are laying the foundation for a career which will take off when your kids are finishing primary school. Just remember to:

Develop a reputation in your territory. 

Meet people, make contacts, and try to maintain them a bit. It's hard. Don't worry too much - most men aren't that much driven by contacts, and frequently let them lapse for a decade or more.

Keep your professional development current. Work out how to take refresher courses where you can. Consider part-time higher degrees.

Remember that you are kung-fu training in stamina and all kinds of management skills, Every time you have a meeting with clients on 3 hours sleep, with a trail of spew down the back of your shirt, you are training yourself to accomplish magnificent things in those lead-lined boots. When you take the weights off - when your slightly older kids sleep every night, make their own lunches, and organise a lift with James's mum to tennis practice - your extra capacity will give you an edge.

I am not making this up. I have been reading some biographies of extremely accomplished professional mothers, and this is a common theme. Many felt like they were struggling to tread professional water, and then their kids got to secondary school, and their own careers dramatically - and often unexpectedly - exploded.

5) Surprise, Fear, and Ruthless Efficiency.

Being a woman in a male-dominated area means you are often a surprise. The first time I showed up on a construction site, the very surprised men very politely tore down some girly posters before they invited me into the depot. You can use the surprise to your advantage, to gain exposure or boost your reputation or just stand out from the crowd. Another time on that same worksite, I had pink bows in my pigtails when I borrowed an angle grinder from some civil contractors, and I rapidly got a reputation of 'don't mess with her, she works like a man, she can use an angle grinder'. Even these days, when I introduce myself, sometimes a man asks "Hey, did you really once borrow an angle grinder?"

I know you are sometimes scared. You are scared for some very good reasons, including quite simly post-pregnancy prolactin making you more vulnerable to anxiety and fear for some years after a birth. But the men - particularly the real misogynists - are often more scared of you than you are of them.
You know your stuff really well. Determined female professionals almost always do.
You have all these strange powers, like asking people how they are, and listening to the answer.
You have not been put off your career after years, maybe decades, of other men trying to put you off. Not even having kids can put you off. You're like a doberman.
You don't even want their job. You want their boss's job, at a minimum. And you know you can do it, because after running a successful client meeting now with a vomit trail down your jacket, you will be able to do their boss's job better than they could.

There is no option but ruthless efficiency, because you don't have time to faff about discussing redundant design options when you know you have 12 hours to finish the project requirements analysis and system architecture, buy a badminton racket, sew a dance costume, do last year's tax return, find an appropriate present for a cousin's 6th birthday, and take someone to a medical appointment in some hard-to-get-to outer suburb.
Many of my male colleagues find this in and of itself, quite surprising and quite scary.

6) Know the limits of your body, mind, and spirit, and look after yourself.

• Watch carefully for signs of vitamin and mineral deficiency (D, calcium etc), have your blood tested, and take supplements if the doctor says. Watch for things with a family history (eg. thyroid problems, heart disease, skin/breast cancer etc.) and have regular checkups.
• Watch carefully for the early stages of a viral illness, and find a way to back off a bit, have a large one-off dose of Vitamin B & C, eat lots of turmeric and garlic (both antivirals), get more sleep until you feel better.
• Watch your mental health. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks can creep up on a person. If you're doing it tough, ask your loved ones to keep an eye on you and to help you seek help if they think you're floundering.
• Bearing children is brutal on the pelvic floor. Do your exercises, wear liners, and take a change of undies in your handbag if you might need it.
• Take care of your feet, back, wrists, knees, neck. You might schedule regular physio or massage.
• Eat well. Plan meals ahead of time, and consider bringing a packed lunch rather than getting takeaway. Stop eating leftovers off your kids' plates. Avoid foods that you notice make you less alert at work (eg. a sugary soft drink at 3PM is generally a bad plan). Snack on apples, carrots, boiled eggs - not chips, donuts, chocolate brownies. It will help your shape, your self-image, your professional abilities, and your mood. And it will help how your male colleagues see you too. It's weird and very unfair - they might not notice Darren drinking four liters of Coke a day and getting a pot belly, but they can be scathing of Lynne's second chocolate biscuit and drop comments about her fat arse. 
• Try to find a way to get exercise in. Go for a brisk walk around the office every lunchtime (bring sneakers). Or wake up earlier than the kids (haha!) and go for a run, go to a morning yoga session (helps the pelvic floor too), or set up your bike on the trainer and get a precious half hour in before real life kicks in. You might set yourself a fitness challenge, like training for an ocean swim or a long ride. 
• Do stuff that makes you happy. I knit and garden and read and type things like this, it makes me happy.
• Notice when you're tired, switch the computer or TV off, and get enough sleep.

I shall take my own very good piece of advice. I am tired. I'm going to sleep.

Essays I would have liked to have written in high school

 I was cleaning up the laundry generated by 3 sick children and started thinking. Bad habit, thinking. It leads to questions and ideas and more questions and more ideas. I would have to lit search to see if anyone has answered these. I am sure somebody will have, somewhere. On a planet of 7bil, ideas must frequently strike in many different places.

Any IB student want an Extended Essay Topic? Any of these take your fancy? You can do the lit search & see if the topic is still open.

• Paying for Water - Soft-drink Companies and the Biggest Public Heist of All Time
• Hygiene and Democracy - How people who began to feel entitled to not die from infectious disease also started feeling entitled to choose their leader
• The Luck of the Gulag - What modern-day employees can learn from the stories of Polish prisoners in Sibera during WWII
  Change from unexpected places 1: How Superman comics undermined the power of the Klu Klux Klan
• Change from unexpected places 2: The impact of music recording and distribution technology on Cold War policies, specifically the period 1962 - 1989 (compact cassette tapes were first sold in 1962, and CDs started being distributed in 1983; Reagan & Gorbachev were both in power from 1985 and by then many historians argue it was all over bar the shouting from the trigger-happy military brass, I have a proposed mechanism too but not enough time or space to write here.)
• Change from unexpected places 3: the role of street lighting in the progress of the feminist movement
• Change from unexpected places 4: the internet and the dropping average age of political activists: is this ever going to drop the voting age in first-world nations?
• Micro-credit and its interaction with institutionalised corruption in developing nations - such as Bangladesh - or the USA?
• The effect of fixed-price trading (as opposed to an expectation of bargaining) on peoples' ability to evaluate object (or service) value and quality (I would love to come up with a quantitative study but am not in a position to.)
• Surviving London before the Fire and the Sewer Cleaned it Up - What did a life expectancy of 40 really mean, in the absence of child-soldier-recruiting African warlords?
• Examples of Genetic Adaptation of Humans to Specific Regional Diets, and the migrant (/invaded) population's health cost of deviating too far from those diets
• A proposal for educating members of the newspaper-writing and -reading public about the difference between correlation and causation
• A proposal for educating members of the scientific and legal communities on the importance of a timely, even if not-quite-right, statement from an educated authority

 Okay. Back to the spewy laundry. *sigh*.

The things i don't do.

I am a busy person.
I hang out with my 3 kids under 6 years old.  I am flat out with 14 loads of laundry a week, plus endless cooking, cleaning, picking up small plastic objects, fixing cuts and brusies, bathing kids, arbitrating, comforting, and inventing games. We pull off great feats of daring together: new garden beds, Ikea furniture, cakes, elaborate cubbyhouses, guests and parties, and we are bravely learning to ride bikes (mee tooo!), as well as growing & harvesting a nice edible garden and picking wild foods down the creek. Expeditions too. We don't flinch to take the kids overseas when the opportunity arises - since DS1 was born, we've gone with kids to North America three times, Hong Kong, Europe via Bangkok, plus dozens of domestic trips.Three kids to Europe was gutsy but extremely fun.

I also work, and love my work. It's only 20 hours a week at the moment (haha! only!), but when I had 2 kids and was pregnant with the third, I was working a 4/5 equivalent load in 3 days. A month before #3 was born, I was project engineering stuff. Including the commute, a 12 hour day in the office becomes a 15 hour day away from the kids. And then I often find myself finishing a technical document at home at 11PM and on the weekend.

And I love to knit, weave, spin, dye, sew, quilt. I need to make the kids new quilts this winter. I aim to knit 10km a year, spin 3kg - and for the last 3 years I've busted those goals by October. My kids are always dressed in handmade clothes, and my friends' new babies usually get handknit gifts.

People whinge to me: "It's not fair. How do you do so much? I never have time and I only have (3-n) kids." 

So here is a list of things I don't do, in order to get the above things done.

1) I don't go to the supermarket. Ever, if I can help it. My husband bakes. We get vegies delivered, meat comes in bulk and gets frozen, and as for the rest, I pick it up whatever I can wherever I am (eg. toilet paper was selling for a good price at the Korean grocer last week. So as I walked past from the station, I picked up 36 rolls of white gold, and a 25kg bag of rice, and loaded them into the pram and made the 1 yr old walk the last 500m back to the car.)

2) I don't keep track of fashion. I don't know what colour is hot this season, whether tiger print leggings are still cool, or how high my heels should be. I stick to classic cuts of clothes and make a feature of being a little bit retro, and I wear the colours and shoes that I like. Always neat and elegant, though. I don't usually shop for clothes either - I have a collection of female relatives (mum, MIL, grandmother, aunt, SIL) who have great taste in clothes and I love wearing their cast-offs.

3) I don't preen much. My nails are short and never painted. (Nails would get in the way!)  I wear little makeup (except at work) and typically only put lippie on in the carpark when I've arrived right before I hop out. I get a haircut every 6 to 8 months, and I choose a cut that will look just fine straight out of the shower. I have hairy legs for 6 months of the year and just wear long pants or dark stockings. My husband loves me anyway.

4) I don't go hungry and I don't eat crap food. If I want to change my shape, I do it with exercise not starvation. As for donuts or chips: a sugar flat or indigestion can ruin the rest of an afternoon's activities, they're just not worth it. I don't have much processed food in the house (cos I never go to the supermarket) and I don't choose it when I eat out. We fly with a couple of bags of raw carrots (the first time they were confiscated at San Francisco Airport quarantine I was highly indignant!) and before a long trip I pack a snack box of something like leftover pasta, cucumber salad, cheese slices, a couple of sandwiches and a banana.

5) I don't consider housework to be my job. I have a cleaner once a fortnight - a privilege of a professional career. If the house gets really feral, I set up miniature cleaning competitions to share the load: we race to see if Dad can vacuum the lounge room faster than the boys can put all their clothes away in drawers or Mum can pick up all the puzzle pieces. We clean up for guests, but mostly we keep a habit of putting 5 things away every time we go past somewhere (even the 3 year old!) and this manages the clutter. Broken objects get fixed or chucked out. I am hard-nosed about not keeping things "just in case": that's what op shops are for!And because I avoid shopping, we don't have the usual trail of small plastic toy bits associated with three kids under 6.

6) I don't watch TV. Or if I do, it's no more than one episode a night, and I knit or work at the same time, and DH marks papers and we're not really watching. I don't bother downloading - I never get to it. I have no idea where any sitcom is up to, and I don't get a twinge if i miss out on the latest sci-fi masterpiece at the cinema. It will be on sale at JB Hi-Fi sometime next year and I can buy it and watch it in instalments.We have an analog TV and are considering not upgrading.

7) I don't waste an opportunity. If I hear about a book I really want to read, I reserve the talking-book from the library and listen to it up and back to work instead of music or talkback. If we can organise leave and flight bookings, we all travel with my husband on a work trip. If it's raining and we want to go walking and won't have a chance for weeks, we put raincoats on and go anyway.

8) I don't have coffee with friends very much. My kids don't do babycinos - they can't sit still for very long - so I don't try. We invite friends on a train ride, or to join us at the beach, or to come over for an afternoon of painting and playdoh. I would love to go for coffee but our lives are too full and too fun.

9) I don't kid myself about what is needed to be good at something. Ten thousand hours. If I am serious about it, I find a way to throw time at it (like knitting). If I can't give it time anymore, I don't expect to be that good (like rockclimbing). Same with the kids. Either they do regular guitar practice, or they can skip the lessons.

10) I don't punish myself. If things don't work out, I don't get caught feeling like a failure. I re-frame my thoughts - what worked well, or what was I really in my heart of hearts trying to do, or how can I learn from this and do better next time? Most things will have another opportunity coming around again. When things do work out, i let myself be totally stoked.