Like mother, like son?

My son made lunch for me yesterday.  Not a monumental act normally.  But he volunteered to make it.  Today he made breafast.  A full on, hot, cooked breakfast.  Again, not monumental, but totally unsolicited.  He asked if he could make a steamed pudding for dessert this evening.  The traditional burnt sugar type.  Lord help me the child is barely twelve.  Many amongst us would claim this is 'great'!  And I definitely dont disagree.  But I am raising a young man, and I am slightly worried.

I love that he loves to cook, and given the size and height he is currently, he will definitely need to learn how to cook to keep up with the monstrous appetite I am anticipating will hit at any moment now.  He is the most ordered of my children and prefers his life to be very structured.  He sticks close to those he knows and loves, especially me.  He is pretty reserved but does have a wicked sense of humour.  He is an excellent and very caring big brother to his little brother, the baby of our whanau.  And while he fights non-stop with his three sisters (which drives me nuts), nothing makes me smile more than to see him rolling on the ground laughing hysterically with them.  Most of the time I let him get on with his life, he's twelve!

But I have fears.  Some solo mums agonise (I googled) over the young men they are raising.  Appropriate role models, boy issues, sports stuff, man stuff, the inside scoop on the male gender stuff.  How would I know about that?!  I'm a 'dumb girl', as my son would say.  Sure, my son has great men around him.  Awesome teachers, an awesome big brother, awesome uncles.  Great men, great role models.  That is supposed to be enough, by all measures on Google and the two books I read on the topic.  And to be fair, my son still has his father, who he sees most school holidays for a week.  I cant tell his story here, but in brief my children have a great father that they love very much. 

One of the most persistent themes I have come across on my solo mum journey is the need for consistency and constancy (I know that's not a word) in his world.  If I want my son to be strong, then I have to model strong.  If I want him to be caring, then its me that has to model that.  I have to be the absolute epitome of everything that I want my son - and indeed all my children to become.  Am I scared?  Hell yes. Friggn petrified.   Am I capable of doing it.   Hell yes!  The rock.  That's me.  It has to be!  I know many solo women who have raised great men.  My sister.  My friends.  My aunties.  My personal role models.  My children's grandmother raised a great man too.  I hope I can do as good a job! 

Fake it till ya make it!

Blogging about blogging?  Not very original I know.  But I'm going to do it anyway.  You may recall back at this blog Here come the disclaimers! I wanted to build a series of blogs so that I could link them all yahda yahda.  Well this is the Amateur Blogger blog.


Did you notice that I have a link in here!  What about the share this with Facebook gadget?  I'm too cool :D.  Seriously though I Googled all of this info first 'how to do...' and after three or four weeks of adding HTML scripts that didn't work to various editing places on my blog, I went to the actual help options on Blogspot and it blinkn had 'click here' options for everything I wanted.  Doh.  Should've known that!  The point is, Blogspot appears to be a good place to randomly decide to create your own blog.  So far.


I'll explore more and get my blog on and the posts will get more sophisticated and flashed up - if I do say so myself!  And just because I want to maintain my whanau4life theme, I am going to grow a blogging whanau.  It wont happen overnight but, well don't wanna get fined by that shampoo company for stealing their mad lines now either!  But I expect it will happen.  Haha!    

House of cards

So holiday time has been and gone and we had a house full of kids on the not so sunny North Shore.  The humble deck of cards, believe it or not, actually featured prominently in most of our holidays.  There are card games for all age ranges in the house, and at two bucks a pop from the two-dollar shop, its a winner!!


My youngest son is currently 'King' of Fish, Memory and Snap.  He has all his older siblings and his older cousins to play with.  And occasionally I will go a round or two with him.  Its pretty special really, you get to see the older, eldest kids letting him win, allowing a little bit of cheating.  And then you get to see the older, youngest kids who play and wont let him get away with any cheating at all.  All in the name of fun but always the rules of life at play.


The older youngest kids are into Last Card, Speed and Donkey.  Man.  Some pretty vicious encounters ensue!!  Cousin vs cousin, sister vs sister, sister vs brother.  Tense times.  Every now and then I get down on the floor and challenge someone to a game of speed.  There is not much that seperates me and the kids anymore!  I used to adjust my speed to allow them to win, but they are at the outer edge of this age group so they're pretty damn skilled now.  Its just sheer luck if I win a game these days!  Awesome to see their competitive spirits.


Last card is such an eternal game and I like to play the kids at this too.  They keep inventing new rules.  I know what the ten, the ace, the five and the two mean, but the king, the jack and the three are millenium kid rules I think.  I never know what they mean!!  Never count me out though, I have some tricks still, and I do emerge the winner every now and then.  My sister out of necessity has invented 'silent' Donkey.  I dont know how its played but I like the sound of silence aspect!


The eldest kids are stepping up to the pre-Adults table and are currently being schooled in President, and Black Lady (B*tch when its all adults playing!), by their parents/aunties/uncles.  We have a beginner and mid-skilled teens and pre-teens.  They are surprisingly holding their own.  There is a degree of coaching there but its no holds barred in terms of tactics and strategy!  The winners and losers shift regularly so its pretty interesting.  I am looking forward to the big games (well big in our household).  Euchre and 500.  Maybe this Christmas they'll get their first lessons.  That's when the real card playing begins, and a whole 'nother level of whanau becomes theirs to experience.  Playing against the real old schools.  All their training leads to that. Haha, call me old skool but back in the day, that's what kept our whanau4life connections strong!!

Holiday Mayhem

How do you holiday when you’re a solo Mum of five?  With great bloody difficulty!  The logistics alone in terms of juggling 20 days of Annual Leave and 84+ school holiday days - mind boggling.  We are about to head off for another ‘holiday’.  That means we travel to the other end of the country where the kids get to spend time with whanau they love and adore and I get to work from conveniently located offices nearby.  Solo parenting is all about making the most of what you have!  The fact that we travel cross country gives the kids a sense of going away.  And they can ‘holiday’ while I work.  Working in a different part of the country helps me to see my job from a different perspective, and meet people in our organisation I might otherwise never meet.  It helps that they’re a great group of people too.  Win-win?  So far.

I try to make sure of course that I do spend actual time with the kids doing proper holiday stuff.  There is the obligatory shopping trip with the daughters, while the boys carry the bags.  You would think!  ALL five of my kids LOVE shopping.  And they all have million dollar shopping lists that are grossly mismatched to their mother’s something thousand dollar salary.  Shopping with sons vs. shopping with daughters?  I swear there’s a whole ‘nother outblog waiting to be explored there!  And we have developed a movie day/night.  Day for the young ones with their young cousins.  And night for the older kids.  And one other big outing.  All about mixing it up!

I get a bit stressed taking the kids to ‘holiday attractions’.  Everything is about ‘whanau/family’ in the holidays.  Family meal deals, family concession passes, family specials.  You can feel pretty self-conscious of your reality when you see families all around you.  It is hard.  And sad.  I know I feel the loss more than the kids and I try to wo-man up and be brave so my kids see strength.  And I mostly get away with it.  But there are signals, shifts, nuances and my kids know my sadness.  They have learnt from my reactions, their reality and experience and smile politely at the nice hospitable people who speak as if ‘Dad’ is a part of the equation. 

And speaking of Dad.  I have accepted that I cannot say how holidays should look for him and the kids.  I spent a fair few sets of holidays planning and booking time for the kids to be with the Dad.  Pick them up here, on this day, at this time.  Do this, do that, none of this, none of that. Threats.  Emotional blackmail.  Not my finest moments.  Caused me nothing but stress.  In retrospect, I realise how much of that was me trying to maintain control.  Now I let him know the holiday dates and if there is an offer from him to spend time with the kids, I pack their bags, take them to the pick up point and wave them goodbye.  And if there is no offer, no worries.  I live and learn.  That goes for his whanau too.  I put the offer out there and if they want to see the kids, that gets worked into holidays too.  I cant be evil and keep my kids from them.  Only in my alternate world lol. 

Holidays should be all about whanau.  And there is one special whanau that no matter what, no matter how late the planning, how last minute the phonecall will always put us up every holiday.  The pot is always on when we get there, the beds are always made, and it always feel like home.  I hope everybody has a whanau like that.  What would we do without the Widdicombe Whanau - whanau4life.

Here come the disclaimers!

I do plan to have this blog be about my whanau4life.  And I hope by now you get a sense that whanau in our world is bigger than just my kids and I.  There are so many things that interweave in our immediate lives, and things that happen on the periphery that affect us all the time.  If I really intend to be a shameless capitalist and make gazillions off this blog then I have to post about as many of these connections as possible.

The hub of this blog is my kids and I, you'll meet them soon.  We are the centre of the network.    And yes, if you’ve noticed my blog-speak, I have been googling ‘how to blog’ and apparently I can have more than one blog and it should stem from the hub.  Kind of like the spokes of a wheel on a bike (that is directly ripped off of someone elses blog, I may have to pay for that!).  There will be a blog at the end of each spoke, an outblog.  Thus forming my own network of blogs.  Perhaps one of these outblogs can narrate the journey I’ve taken.  Who knows.

Now for the disclaimers.  This blog wont be a man-hate-fest aimed at the ex.  That will be reserved for one of my R-18 outblogs!  You will most definitely have to subscribe to that one because it will be worth the money haha.  It wont be a soul–searching hunt for the real me either.  Though I believe that is bloggable, the truth is every post will reveal something about the real me.  And my language.  I can gangsta it up if I have to,  but in my (second year) seventh form history class, my teacher taught me to embrace my knowledge of the language and not be ashamed to use my big words.  What can I say, I read so much as a kid that I’m just an out-and-out nerd.  So take me, take my language.

The last disclaimer?  The rawness.  I cant or wont change the way I write.  It has to be real.  Its who I am.  I did worry about the level of pain that my kids could read about, but they know I hide nothing from them.  They have seen me at my lowest and cried too.  But they wont let me stay there.  Nothing gets me out of a sook session faster than their need for me to get over myself and cook/clean/pay/play/drive...live.  They're quite simply the best kids - I cant wait to introduce them to you!

This blog will be about the things I have learnt, the fears I have faced and conquered, and the joys of being a mum, a solo mum.  Awww, cant get better than that!  It took me ages to accept that label.  Solo mum.  And I know my story isn’t unique, how many of us know a woman currently raising kids on her own?  I am not the first woman to do this, and sadly I wont be the last.  This blog is about acknowledging all the people I have met, and the people I will meet, who have helped shape my new life, my new look  whanau.  My strength is my whanau, whanau is my strength.  Ohh, maybe I can outblog about cheesy oneliners!