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© Naomi Madelin

Is Motherhood Worthy of Your CV?

At a party tonight I introduced a friend to a colleague.  When my colleague asked my friend what she did, she told her she was 'taking some time out at the moment.'  I interjected and explained that this busy, brilliant lady was currently the full-time mother of two energetic under-fives. "But it's not something you put on your CV," was the response.

Why down play motherhood?  If we were really 'taking time out;, we'd be on our back soaking up the sun in Rarotanga or the Maldives, or climbing Ben Nevis just for the hell of it, wouldn't we? Why the hell shouldn't we put 'Full Time Mother' on our CV?

Later on I mentioned this comment to my husband, who immediately agreed that Full Time Mother wasn't something that was relevant to a CV.

Well, as a pretty much full-time mother myself, this met with short shrift.  I was, frankly, shocked.

His argument was that if you're, say, an engineer, then putting motherhood on your CV isn't relevant.  In fact his words were something along the lines of "You don't put down that you've only been a mother for the past few years... Most mothers are dreadful."

Yes, and most marriages end in divorce, if you get my drift...

But seriously and without plunging off into a furious rant, should Full Time Mother appear on a CV, and if so, why?

What does it mean to be a full-time mum?

1/ Commitment
You are someone who can show full commitment.  One hundred per cent. You know what it is to give your all, and when the moment calls for it, you can be counted on.

2/ Nurturing
You care about others. You are prepared to sit and listen. You notice strengths and encourage them, you notice weakness and help others overcome them.

3/ Support
You are the backbone of your family. When the paycheck is small, you budget to feed your family and make ends meet. When someone is sad you comfort them. When help is needed, you find and ask for it.

4/ Discipline
If you don't discipline, your world comes tumbling around you. You understand the value of a strong, fair hand.

5/ Sacrifice
You have given up your personal dreams outside of having children to care for and nurture them, to support your partner if you have one, and to hold the family together through thick and thin.  When someone has to get up in the night, it's usually you.  You cook the meals, make the packed lunches and let your partner fulfil his or her career dreams while yours wait in the sidelines.

6/ Compromise
Closely linked to sacrifice.  You compromise your wants for your childrens' needs.  You compromise your dreams for your partner's career. You give up all thoughts of a 50/50 childcare split when your partner's career takes off and tell yourself 'my time will come.'

etc

So why put Full Time Mother on your CV. Clearly being a Full Time Mum has no bearing on any other walk of life you may choose to be involved in.  Does it?

I think the one clear and outstanding reason for putting Full Time Mother on your CV and expecting an employer to respect you for it, and take it into serious consideration, is point 5 -Sacrifice.  Why, after being a Full-Time-Mum, are you now looking for a job?  Because it's time for YOU again.  Because you don't want to scrimp and save for your gym membership or that new pair of shoes.  Because you'd like to meet some adults who aren't your friends AFTER your children met their children.  What does this mean to an employer?  It means you are COMMITTED. It means your heart and your soul and a good deal of your sense of self worth will be enmeshed in this job, and in the way you do it.  It means that you ARE NOT going to waste a single minute of your precious, precious time farting about on Facebook, but will spend every moment proving yourself to you and anyone else who cares to notice. You will do a damned good job and will be worth every penny (which is why they should damned well pay you a fair wage).

Yes, it might mean you have to rush off every once in a while to tend a sick child. But bet your bottom dollar you'll be giving more than most for every minute you're at work.

Motherhood. Put it on your CV.

---

Here are some handy links to articles on this very subject, including tips on exactly how to play The Motherhood Element when applying for a job.

Check out this quote from this brilliant article:
"My son is dyslexic and required  educational support when younger, but my business/family stress was finally reduced  when he discovered as a teenager,  that dyslexia is an anagram for “daily sex”. That helped with his learning difficulty more than anything I ever did."

This one talks about HOW and WHEN it's appropriate to include our parenting skills on a CV. I love the part where she talks about the coaching she gave to female artists to re-frame their descriptions of themselves.  I absolutely do this - "I'm a mother to two under fives, but three days I work part-time...."    
She also says:
"A small (but related) digression: In my search for images to illustrate this column, “working mothers with children” yielded numerous photos of mothers with babies, a few mothers with toddlers, and mothers with young children – at a laptop or on the phone, but always in a home office. The images were even labeled as such, specifying “home office.” 
YES! In my own search for a photo for this blog post, I was struck by all the photos of mothers holding children while working on a laptop - doing both, or neither - or looking completely frazzled. I opted for a photo I found googling "working women" and not "working mother" at all.  

And finally, just a few good, practical tips.



© Naomi Madelin 2013

Cold April - A Poem

Way back when I was still at school I had a bit of a thing for iambic pentameter for a while, and sonnets.

This isn't a sonnet, nor is it completely faithfully in iambic pentameter wither.  However, I remember well when I wrote it - another cold April, snow among other things...

bland white moments of loneliness i ponder

a concentrated mind allowed to wander

wings its way to far, distorted scenes -

mere creations of these frightened dreams?

tired eyes pursue each short mortality

imagination lost and reaching for reality

the sweet snow falls, these reveries to take -

your face reflected in each transient flake

© Naomi Madelin 1989 


(1989?!?!)

Haiku with parsnips

parents for lunch - 
Dad avoiding the parsnips

among other things

with thanks to the brilliant Michael Dylan Welch  and the introduction to  "Fifty-Seven Damn Good Haiku by a Bunch of Our Friends"

© Naomi Madelin 2013

Haiku Tea II - Linked Verse

I've had a great few weeks getting involved with a Haiku group over on Google Plus.

I watched and waited for a while, then thought "hey, I may as well plunge in and see what happens." Well, what happened was, I wrote some haiku!  It's been a while and this was a great way to get me thinking creatively again, paying attention to the small things and taking my time.

I was pleased to take part in the second of a now-ongoing series of linked poetry collaborations. In a given order we were each to write a haiku using the last line of the previous poem as our first.

This was the result of Haiku Tea II:

life has scattered seeds
waits for the memories to
grow into longing                                         Shashi

grow into longing
to relive past victories
to feel youth's passion                               Bob Hartwig

to feel youth's passion
to bring back things lost, many
many like flowers                                       Craig Volney

many like flowers
tap muddy feet, delighting
one crimson petal                                      Carolyn St Charles

one crimson petal
open wide, drink up the sun
now, tis time for fun                                   Jamer Nicolls

now, tis time for fun
and profound reflections with
tender threnodies...                                    Berteena Gaines

tender threnodies --
life's strewn seeds yielded thorns
will hope succumb?                                   Gracy Dsouza

will hope succumb?
your freedom starts at dry grounds
take it, keep walking!                                  Anna Liniacka & http://web.ift.uib.no/~lipniack/

take it keep walking...
it is about the journey
the road less travelled                                A.M. Frasier

the road less travelle
to where it stands, Singular,
calling the Walker                                       Gabri Rigotti & http://www.greenit.org.za/green-poetry.html

calling the Walker...
waiting for the memories
to help me forget                                         Jim Williams

to help me forget
greener grasses, purple haze
colour yesterday                                          John Belchamber & http://JRBHaiku.wordpress.com

colour yesterday
thoughts so haunting
travelling through the air                            Tammy Wright

travelling through the air
my soul searches for love, peace
savouring the view                                      Steve Yagyagan

savouring the view
I pretend the clouds are hills
on the horizon                                              Jessica Baehr

on the horizon
dawn births the egg of fire
to sear the sky pink                                     Joe Nicholas & http://joecrowpoe.wordpress.com/

to sear the sky pink
with reflections of tall birds
flaming with bright love                              Francis JA

flaming with bright love -
gazing at strangers
in this familiar photograph                        Naomi Madelin

in this familiar photograph
memories lap at your feet :
a forever flow of holy green                      Omuhuvah Otido & http://www.omukuvah.org/literature/poetry



all writers retain copyright of their work

The Mr Chompy Incident

If you're looking for the name for a band, you could do worse than "Mr Chompy", or "The Mr Chompy Incident" if you fancy.

So I've run a lovely bubbly bath for the two little Miss Madelins, and Miss 5 has stripped off and I'm about to help her in when she throws a completely unexpected and totally genuine fit because, apparently, Mr Chompy - the invisible chomping monster, is in there. It's true, she says, because she dreamt it. Seriously - this is a child who is not known for her tantrums. In fact, in Helensville, New Zealand, where she was born, she was famous for NOT throwing tantrums. (Oh boy, were my friends smug when number two came along - the chubby loud one!) Eventually, after many Mr Chompy checks in which my hand WAS NOT EATEN OFF. Including one check in which I pretented that Mr Chompy had got me and was trying to pull my arm down the plug hole (did NOT go down well - sense of humour failure on the part of my usually-humourful daughter), I persuaded Miss 5 into her bath.

Now for Miss 3. OH HO! She will throw a tantrum at the best of times, but with the introduction of MR CHOMPY (thanks a lot, Miss 5) she was going to throw a doozy.

In short, I got very wet. The bathroom got very wet. Miss 3 got very swiftly washed and hauled out of her bath, un-chomped, and Miss 5 gloomily 'enjoyed' having the tub to herself for five minutes. Naturally having taken ten minutes to get into the bath, she then did not wish to leave and it was, allegedly, "NOT FAIR" that I wouldn't pretend that she was a dolphin...

Never a dull day.

So - it's me on vocals, who's on keyboard?

(c) Naomi Madelin

A Compelling Reason to Stop

I don't know what you're like, but I've noticed that with any 'menial' task, there's a point of no return.  A point at which I am so close to having done a perfect job that I don't want to stop.  However mucky, fiddly or annoying the job is.

There's a recognised form of meditation where you completely immerse yourself in doing something, and do it absolutely as well as you can.  I think some of the pleasure I get, if that's what it is, in absolutely completing a job is the process itself.

I noticed it a few years ago when I was raking grass on our lawn.  I say lawn, but in fact it was about three quarters of an acre of rural grass.  More-or-less flat, but 'lawn' is flattering it.  The grass would start to get out of control, someone would come by on a ride-on and mow it.  Most of the grass would be gathered up by the ride-on and dumped in piles on the compost (which was quite big, as you can imagine), but there 
would always be quite a lot scattered around and in need of raking.

I developed a process.  I'd stand on a spot, rake at the ready and pull the grass toward me while turning in a circle.  Once I'd completed that section, reaching as far as I could stretch in all directions, I'd move to another prime position and start again.

This wasn't necessary across the entirety of our land. There were always large patches where there was very little scattered grass to rake, and I'd go over those bits easily, adding any grass gathered to an existing pile. 

When I had a few smallish piles in one area, I'd pull them together into a slightly larger pile, so that I had piles of more-or-less the same size all across the garden.  This worked well for when I brought the wheel barrow around to take the piles away.  I'd perfected the pile size so that I knew I could fit three piles in the barrow and, though it was piled pretty high, I had a technique for squishing it down so that it didn't fall out en route to the compost heap.  Most satisfying. I could even balance a small child on top for an occassional ride.

The trouble was, moving onto the next area.  It's a really effective process, my raking process, and I had this great rake (dirt cheap plastic one - light and easy to manage and so so good) which got nearly all the grass in the first pass.  I'd rake up absolutely as much as I could and then look around me and see more little clumps, so I'd rake those.  Then I'd see little bits here and there that had escpaed and tidy those up.  I'd think "I can stop now, this patch is raked.  But..." because there'd always be just a little bit more here and there.  I really had to force myself to say "It's good enough" and move on.  Good enough? None of our neighbours mowed their grass, let alone raked it!  (Well, they did have horses, sheep and the like so technically it was being mowed all the time).

I think there's a point of no return with this sort of job. If you give the bathroom a quick once-over, fine. But once you start scrubbing around the taps with a brush - you'll be there for hours.  I am the same with floor washing,  cleaning the sieve and things like that.  If I choose to do a quick job, that's fine - it's done and dusted in no time. But if I think, "I can do better," and go a bit further, then I'm likely to think "I'll just...." and that's it, I'm lost to the job.  Once it's nearly right, why stop before it's perfect?

But there's always some way to make it better.  So I've washed my hairbrush (the task that prompted this post) and picked all the hair out, then found a pair of small scissors to cut away the annoying fluff that gathers at the base of the bristles (where DOES that come from?) and washed it again, snipped some more, found tweezers to pull the last endy bits of fluff off.  At some point I have to stop.  I have to think "This hairbrush is pretty damn clean, and I have other things to do with my time - like write a blog post".

An artist friend of mine was talking to me once about knowing when to stop in the creative process. Understanding when the painting is finished.  There can be a temptation to add just a daub of paint here, a dash there, but an artist has to decide, or know, when a piece is done, and leave it.

Writers have to decide when editing is over and their writing can stand as it is.  We are probably never one hundred percent sure that we've done everything we should, but it's time to trust in ourselves and move on.

All jobs are like that. You have to close them, and move on.

I guess what I'm thinking is that once you get stuck in far enough to something you feel compelled to see it through. Looking at my own track record of successes, or near successes, or even failures, I think the key is to have in your mind the finishing point.  When you decide to see something through, you need to know where, exactly, the end is.  Is the end point of your evening classes the point at which you can speak fluent Spanish, or is it the point at which you have a degree in Spanish? Are you writing a book to write it, and when it's written you're done, or do you want it published? Is three rejections the end point, or an acceptance? Are you really going to rake every last bit of grass from the lawn, or do you, in fact, just enjoy being out in the garden on your own? It's the perfect excuse to be out here, after all, listening to the horses munching over the fence, sheep making the occasional 'baa', the repetitive action of rake out, rake in and the sun going slowly down.

Isn't it just nice, sometimes, to keep doing the same thing over and over until there's a compelling reason to stop and move on?


(c) Naomi Madelin

Just as an aside, I actually looked up how to get fluff out of a plastic hairbrush and came across this post. I am rather impressed by the author and contributors' dedication to their theme!

http://ask.metafilter.com/41565/Help-me-get-the-lint-out-of-my-hairbrush

Published

Back in January I wrote this post:

http://jumpingoffbooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/i-am-no-ones-wife.html

When I saw an alumni of my University was looking for submissions for a poetry book, I sent in some of my haiku, and this:

I am no one’s wife.  I am me.

I am someone’s wife.  But that is not who I am.

I am someone’s mother.  But that is not who I am.

I am someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend.

Even taken all together that is not who I am.

I am me.

When you meet me, please remember this.

It has just been published in the poetry anthology "The Poetic Bond II" as "When You Meet Me".

I received a copy of the book a couple of weeks ago - it may not look flashy but there is some wonderful work in it.  A really great, honest anthology of thoughtful, skillful work and I'm really proud to have been included in it.

***
The un-netted tree
Rotting peaches fall
Into sunset

***

i could trust
the silent mountain -
you?

(c) Naomi Madelin

Autumn Poems

For ten years I missed Autumn.  My favourite season.  Even the damp English days bring me some kind of nonspecific peace.  Something to do with the freedom of nature. Being out in chill air.  The honest smell of mulching leaves. Memories of chilly walks to school when I was small, innocent and unencumbered.

To be honest there are a few too many of these damp days for my liking! Returning to England I realise how much I have become accustomed to the warmer climate of northern New Zealand this past decade.  But in that largely evergreen place I missed the leaves turning, the colours that warm you even when the air is near freezing, the comforting sound of the leaves underfoot and the sheer joy of kicking through them in wellies and warm socks.

I thought I'd gather together a Autumn few poems that resonate with me and share them.  There is one that I found years ago and had taped inside my filofax (that's some pre-iPhone tech!) for a few years, but I can't find it.  I think the poet's name was Mark something... Clues anyone? I'll keep hunting and post it when I find it.

Being a lover of haiku, I had to include Matsuo Basho's delicious little nut at the end.

Enjoy.



Autumn Valentine 

In May my heart was breaking-
Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
And bitter it beat at waking,
And sore it split in sleep.

And when it came November,
I sought my heart, and sighed,
"Poor thing, do you remember?"
"What heart was that?" it cried. 

Dorothy Parker 

Song of an Autumn Night

Under the crescent moon a light autumn dew
Has chilled the robe she will not change --
And she touches a silver lute all night,
Afraid to go back to her empty room. 

Wang Wei






Autumn

Laden Autumn here I stand
Worn of heart, and weak of hand:
Nought but rest seems good to me,
Speak the word that sets me free.

William Morris 



 Autumn
 
October's bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown, 
The burden of your wrongs is on my head. 

                                                           Siegfried Sassoon



Autumn moonlight

Autumn moonlight -
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut


Matsuo Basho




post by Naomi Madelin

Ring up my plea - Guilty As Charged

Something my husband said the other morning, I forget what, annoyed me just a wee bit - which broke a dream I'd been having just before waking.

He'd bought me an engagement ring.

WOW!  We got engaged in 2005 and married a few months later. I didn't have a ring. We were married with cheap 'greenstone' rings partly due to budget, partly timing. The idea was to get wedding rings when we worked out exactly what we wanted - at some relevant time like our wedding anniversary. Time went on....

Anyway, in this dream, he gave me a ring.

I hated it!

In fact, thinking about it, it was pretty cool. But it was diamond and sapphires and I have no especial love for sapphires.

This was like a ring of smooth polished diamond with circles of different coloured sapphires kind of piled onto it.  Very modern. Very architectural. But it was glued with Uhu or something and it all fell to bits. Which left me with just this asymmetrical smooth carved diamond ring, that didn't glitter.

WHAT?

I felt awful.  Here he was giving me this ring, finally, that he'd had carefully made (only not carefully - he was muttering something about it being just a test one...), but I just couldn't like it. I knew I should love it, whatever it was, but in my dream I was saying "I just don't like it. Why would you get me sapphires?  I kind of get that it's cool, but, I dunno, I just.... I kind of think why bother having diamonds if they're not sparkly."  And I felt really mean and ungrateful, but also invisible. How could this man think I would like sapphires and unsparkly diamonds?  Now I'm not a 'crazy about diamonds' kind of woman. When we got married I wasn't into them at all and was quite happy to have a single ring. We talked about having one beautiful ring each, with some kind of design to them. Rings we each liked, that were individual but somehow similar.  We talked about it for a while, then the subject got dropped.  Right around the time the word Love disappeared from our house.

Better or worse?!

Maybe that was why,  as time went on, I thought perhaps a single ring but something with some little diamonds in it, for a bit of sparkly bling.  And then more time passed, and stuff happened, and I started to think "Sod it, I'll have a big fat sparkly not-blood diamond thank you. Well, a smallish one anyway."  And why not make it an engagement ring all by its self, after all!  So I showed him the odd pic, dropped the odd hint...  Things turned in a different direction and well, I haven't bought him a wedding ring (though in my defence I did get him a rather gorgeous greenstone pendant as a wedding present.  He got me... erm... let me think... erm... I'll get back to you on that one...)

Anyway, here was my 'dream' husband presenting me with this engagement ring that was nothing like anything I'd shown him, or talked about. It was like a ring he thought his wife should like, the wife he imagined he had, or maybe wished he had, but not one made with the actual me in mind at all. So it almost felt like an insult rather than a gift. So in my dream I felt rejected and sad.

Now, if I had a ring like that made out of glass, I sure as hell would wear it, for fun, to dinner, to a party. But as an engagement ring? I don't see an engagement ring as a gimmick, as something to show off how 'different' you can be. Of all the jewellery I ever wear I guess I kind of think of wedding and engagement rings as being something more understated, private, personal, discreet.

Funny, I never thought about it before.

Hint

But the main thing I'll take from that dream is to make damned sure that next time I buy something for my husband I make sure it's the thing HE wants, not the thing I think he ought to have...

Thinking of past gifts, I'm guilty as charged.

(c) Naomi Madelin 2012


Thanks to http://boards.weddingbee.com/topic/ugly-engagement-rings-post-em

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Apart From The Weather

Apart from the weather, everything is fine.

We moved to a new city. It seems nice. It's pretty amazing actually, so far.

When I first drove here I was on my own with the kids, so I just drove in the direction of the city centre and as soon as the suburbs started looking more central-like and kind of okay, I pulled over and dropped into a real estate agents'.  Seemed like the way to go. It was fine.  Nice enough area, nice enough people.

I didn't get us a house there in the end, as the school I wanted to get my eldest into was further away and they have this thing called 'catchment area', which, as I see it, basically means you need to live in a flying castle right over the top of the school to have a hope in hell of getting in.  Well, that's how it seemed when I read about London, anyway.  I didn't move to London.

The place I found in the smaller city I did choose to move to, is a twelve minute walk to the school, which apparently was just fine cos they rang a few days after we all kissed the application form and posted it, to tell me that there was a place at the school for my girl.  Hooray.

Other places we can walk to are: A huge 'Downs' area where there will shortly be a glut of blackberries, that is fabulous for walking dogs, children and old people, flying kites, and suffering from hay fever:  The zoo.  Which is currently also home to about a dozen animatronic dinosaurs - the first of which threw my dino-loving four-year-old into screams of utter terror, for about fifteen minutes, non-stop:  A cool suspension bridge that we've been over once in the car, by accident (once you're on the approach road there's no going back): A gazzillion cafés all serving mediocre coffee and no cheese scones. Bring back the cheese scone.  When did England get such a sweet tooth? And such a crisp fetish (that's chips to much of the planet). I guess it was always like this… But we are enjoying the challenge of finding the best mediocre coffee - good excuse to go out for coffee!

A week after I found the flat there was a Harbour Festival in my new city all weekend.  It was cool. The husband hadn't arrived from our prior home in New Zealand yet, so I went with my girls and my parents.  I loved the harbour area - very cool.  The festival seemed amazing.  All sorts of arts, dance, food, circus, boaty stuff, music etc.  The weather, in a weird glitch, turned summery, and we ate dribbling ice creams and felt the need to stay in the shade.

The rain and cold (for supposed summer) soon returned, but the new city still shines.

I took a train the other day.  Wow.  Last time I took a train was in Auckland, New Zealand.  A friend and I took the train with our children, just to show them what a train was like.  It wasn't going anywhere we needed to be - we just went for a ride.  When I did need to be somewhere, there was generally no train.  Actually in a decade of living there I didn't once take a train as a transport choice.  The one time I tried to, it was laid off and I was redirected to a bus.  When I was still quite new to New Zealand I thought it would be romantic to take the train from Auckland to the capital city of Wellington for a weekend.  Leave on Friday, come back Sunday night sort of thing.  Turns out they don't run that train every day, and when they do, it takes twelve hours to get there.  TWELVE HOURS!!!!  To go under 400 miles!!! Intercity, anyone?! (It's about an 8-hour drive)

So we took the train from near our new flat to near my parents house.  Dead easy. And it passed through a inner suburban station that was covered, and I mean COVERED, in awesome graffiti art.  Bloody brilliant. Next time I am going to take the train just to there and get off to look at it.  There's graffiti art everywhere in this city. Anything dull and boring that needs a big of jazzing up is painted. I love it.

Shame about the weather.  But there you go.

I'd quite like a comfy chair to sit on.  Something that squashes down when you sit on it, with cushions.  That's the trouble with moving to the other side of the world.  You either sell everything, then buy everything, or you pack it all up, put it on a ship and wait.  Meanwhile you go to Ikea and the Sofa Workshop and think you need to buy all sorts of things that you already own. So you don't. And you sit on the floor and borrow a couple of plates here, a knife and fork there, and an air bed, and wait for your ship to come in.

And while this is happening, and your tv is on a boat on the ocean somewhere, and you're new to this city and have yet to find a babysitter or three, the Olympics is on and you're missing most of it, right when you'd told your four-year-old all about it and how much she was going to love seeing all these interesting sports.  Which is frustrating.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking 'Internet you ninny.' Well, send me the phone engineer who's not over-booked due to…. "The Olympics" and I'll give you a fiver.  We didn't get our land line or broadband until the Olympics round one was well and truly done. But we're up and running for the Paralympics - Hoorah!

Apart from the weather, everything is fine.

And aside from an initial glitch, the man and I seem to be getting on ok. It would be nice to find a babysitter and go on a date, but I'm onto that one now, so who knows.

Perhaps even the weather might rally. I bought one of those round-and-round umbrella-style washing lines. The husband said "There's no point, you'll never use it, it only rains here," or something very much like that.  I said "I have lived in this country before, you know, it doesn't rain ALL the time."  It a week and a half ago. I put it up today because I suddenly realised that not only was it not raining, but it felt warm out and I couldn't see many dark clouds.  It's out there now, with washing on it. In the absence of a mallet I found a small lump of wood and a garden spade and banged the spike for the washing line into the lawn with that, and felt most capable and just a little bit Kiwi.

So right now - just this minute, I'd have to say simply, everything is fine.


(c) Naomi Madelin

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