We’re Have I Been All This Time…

Longest break I’ve taken in a while…somehow, at the end of a week at the keyboard, it is kinda hard to make time to pop in here. Silly me. Weekends have taken on a new measure of quality family life now that our time all together is really limited to breakfast and dinner/bath/stories/bed. We ALL […]

Making Ourselves at Home

The weekend has finally arrived. It is time for a new look here at ‘Not Working’… As I mentioned earlier in the week, on Monday I enter the potentially crazy world of workinginsideandoutsidethehome. I am shying away from saying I am going back to work, since it is abundantly clear to me…and most people who […]

Transition Time

The Holmes and Rahe stress scale is a list of 43 stressful life events that can contribute to illness. Some years I have gathered a pretty impressive score on this scale…Making big changes to one’s life can either be rather liberating, or downright terrifying. Strangely, although I think I am a pretty stressy, nervy, risk-averse kinda girl, I […]

Mama Came Back

In younger days, when I contemplated parenthood, I had this idyllic dream of raising my children in community – surrounded by family and friends who loved and helped to nurture them. My children, I mused, would be confident and relaxed and outgoing…and happy to spend time with any caring adults who came their way. They would […]

Working…or not…

I began writing here a couple of years ago when we landed in the USA and I suddenly had no paid employment prospects on the near horizon. At the time I was searching for a new sense of worth…convincing myself that being at home/unemployable (for reasons of immigration policy, not a sudden lack of competence, […]

Working?

This week I got my work permit in the post. A month early – arrggh. Now I have to look for paid work. Yesterday I applied for a job running an after school programme in North City – quite the poorest part of the county and probably not even a real vacancy anymore (seems the […]

New Year

It seems a little silly to be recording my New Year’s Resolutions now, in February… But so far 2010 has kinda caught me by surprise and for a number of reasons, I have gotten off to a very slow start. So here I am, bearing in mind that it is also the start of a […]

Where Have the Last Ten Months Gone?

Today our wee pop is ten months old. I am still thinking about the passing of the nine-months mark, and suddenly another month has passed. Those first few weeks seem to last for ever in a fog of sleep deprivation and lack of any real structure to the day. But now, although the days are […]

Not Working Seems To Be Working…

…for now anyway. After reading my lovely friend Mandy’s comment on yesterday’s post, I have spent some time today reflecting on things I have put out into the blogosphere in the past year, and musing on how not working feels now, after more than 18mths of the habit. I have been inspired by, and feel […]

Gratitude

I am inspired at the moment by the thoughts of the everyday wonder of ordinary life, and of trying to make a habit of being a little more thankful. This was also brought home to me last night as we sat and discussed the Science on Tap event that Akira took our friend Christine to […]