All posts filed under: Education

Waiting

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I associate waiting with bad things. Waiting for the train unnerves me. Waiting rooms are a waste of time. Waiting for hubby past the time he said he would be ready? Annoying! Waiting for news, a torture. I have been waiting for a long time for my professional life to kick off. I have been writing about this before, about my feelings of unfulfillment and dissatisfaction. My life is great except for this one thing: my work. I have a great hubby and a beautiful child. My parents are still alive and relatively well for their age. I have travelled the world. I have great friends. But I have no steady work and more aggravating, no life vision and this has started to get to me lately. You see, I am in my 30s and I feel this is the time to work and make a future for myself and my wee one. If I don’t work now, when I have all my capacities, when will I work?? I also feel that I can do …

International Day of the Girl

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I feel very honoured to be part of the very first ever International Day of the Girl. I heard of International Day of the Girl for the first time this morning. One of my friends on Facebook put up this link for a new website Too Young to Wed and it caught my attention as it had the picture of two eight-year old girls and their 29-year old husbands on its landing page. The subject stirs me every time, as you might already know if you have been following my blog for a while and read my review on a Thousand Splendid Suns and Harmattan. So when an email came in shortly after from Mumsnet Bloggers regarding the International Day of the Girl I knew I had to tie these two separate events and write a post about girls who don’t have a voice or a choice. I did a bit of research and found a lot on the subject. I would like to mention here the very interesting project of 10×10  “a feature film, Girl …

Parenting with less grace. Remedies

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I have been struggling with some of Emma’s behaviour lately. Or maybe not only lately but my reactions have become more dramatic and anything to be proud of. I shout and I smack. There, I said it. I do it in certain circumstances and I thought I might be brave and share them with you just in case other mothers struggle with the same things. 1. My number one trigger is TIREDNESS. Both mine and hers. When we’re both tired and short-fused and when I expect Emma to sleep and she plays up(quite expertly lately, I must add!) I lose it. And it’s not a pretty sight. Remedy: stick to a sleeping routine even if it’s painstakingly difficult to do it. Reinforce your words and actions(thank you, Supernanny!) until the child understands you mean business. Even if that means putting her back into her bed 100 times until she’s dead tired of playing the same boring game. AVOID sleepover with relatives less aware of routine/unwilling/unsupportive. 2. BOREDOM. Yeap, we’re all guilty of it as mothers. …

Moving on

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Okay, one more week and we’ll be leaving this house. Although located in an ideal location and an enviable neighbourhood,  it proved to be more an in-between station for me and less of a home.We knew we were going to move on eventually and I never managed to accept it as more than what it was, a temporary stop. I also found the transition from having our own home to renting especially tough since I come from a family that never rented. It’s a Romanian thing, a legacy from the Communist times when everybody had to have a job and an apartment they would have usually payed during their working years. That goes to show you that ideas we were raised with and that were drummed into us as children stay with us for a lifetime and influence our happiness. It’s been some very interesting eight months with loads of ups and downs and many epiphanies. We lost what we both held dearest on the day we moved: my home and hubby’s successful business. We …

The miracle of raising a toddler

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….is that they develop so fast that you can hardly keep up with them. In the last three weeks or so we noticed  Emms taking giant leaps in her speech and her imaginative play development. She has moved from two-three word sentences like “Mummy, water, peeease” to full-blown speech and coherent thoughts. It started with daddy getting it all in stereo: “Alex, can you hurry up, please?”… “Daaaaaaddyyy, hurry up!!!” If you find that amusing try imagining two women raging and stomping their feet at you in the same time… poor guy. It went on to Emms trying to put words together on her own, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so and sounding like a slurred drunk: “Mummy, me go shopping…take bag…need money..okay???” Today I was washing the dishes after breakfast when I heard her say: “Mummy, there’s a big dinosaur.” I thought she was just imagining it. Daddy has been playing this “Peppa Pig living in a castle” game with her and her imagination sparks like fireworks when you least expect it. Daddy stepped in …