Camping... or Glamping?

Camping isn't everybody's cup of tea, I know. But me? I have to admit that I rather love it.
Of course I wouldn't have said the same thing back in the days when kids were young and sleepless, days and nights were endless and every waking moment was spent trying to keep your curious toddler from exploring the neighbours' tents / drowning in the sea / keeping the whole campground awake with their wailing.
Oh no, camping was not my favourite thing back in those days.

But now that our kids have grown to a sensible age and can be left to wander, play, make friends and swim a good ole Kiwi camping holiday can be very enjoyable.

[Our three-room+gazebo tent palace, waterproofed with heavy duty tarp and secured with jumbo tent pegs] 

It helps that we have also learnt a few tricks to help make life under canvas nice and comfortable. I mean I wouldn't go as far as some people do but the days when cold water showers and long drop loos held any appeal are long gone. Getting back to nature and roughing it a little is one thing; sleeping for a week (with a bad back) on a 5mm thick bedroll with sand in your sleeping bag is quite another.

The campground we go to each year is great for families. It has a safe swimming beach, a games room and a couple of playgrounds, sparkling clean toilet blocks and kitchen facilities... and power.

[Inside our tent palace is a home-from-home: might as well be comfortable aye?]

 When we go camping we can take a mini fridge, a stereo, twinkle lights and an electric kettle. We line our floors with woven mats which filters the sand (around $20 from traders), we take the elephant foam mattress from our pull-out couch, camp stretchers, cushions and moon chairs.
Some might call it "Glamping" - I call it comfy.

Glamping is having Sky TV in your caravan or backing up the furniture truck and unloading your bed from home and your 42" plasma. It's happens. (A friend of a friend saw the truck, witnessed unloading of the full sized fridge and couch into the tent - I kid you not).

So while my bunting and cushions add style and prettiness to our week under canvas, and while the cider gets served chilled, I still like to wash the dishes in a bucket outside the tent and cook our food on the portable BBQ. Not once did I step foot inside the camp kitchen - that would be too much like normalcy.
When I'm camping I like to know it.

The beauty of camping when your kids are old enough and you find a great place to return to each year, is they way the kids can roam free like we did in the glory days of our Kiwi childhood. They make friends and swim all day, dig in the sand and play spotlight when it gets dark. Ipods are forgotten, memories are made and adventures had.

Meanwhile mum and dad can alternate between reading in the shade and swimming in the sun. Kayaking, sipping a cold one with friends. There are no clocks, nothing scheduled. Lunchtime is when you're hungry, dinner time is when it's ready and bedtime is when it's too dark to see.

It was awesome to see Dash and his two buddies compete in the campground's annual kids beach tryathlon and witness just how far our boy has come with both his water confidence and his kayaking skills.




Surely there is nothing more thrilling than watching your child compete and come away proud of his efforts?

Just this weekend we returned to our favourite spot, an hour out of Auckland, to introduce Grandma from England to our little slice of Kiwi camping paradise.

We hired an on-site caravan for the two nights (I still prefer tenting - see, I'm not really a glamper) and met up with our good friends who have a permanent site there.
While we were sitting on the beach, just chillin, we realised that dolphins (dolphins!!!) had come into the bay. Eek!

What a magical afternoon as this pod of five dolphins swam and played with any who could swim/kayak/jetski out to where they were. I was one of the the lucky ones who was able to swim all the way out, where I joined Mr G on his kayak and Dash and his pals on their boogie boards.
For over an hour the dolphins teased and delighted us with their antics, coming almost close enough for me to touch.
It was thrilling.
People pay hundreds of dollars to swim with the dolphins and here I was, a hands breadth away from them, four big dolphins and a baby who dived under us and swam around us and gave us an afternoon to remember.

I guess when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter if you're glamping in a caravan, roughing it in a tent or something in between... as long as you're there beside the sea, enjoying summer with your family by the beach... and if you're lucky enough you might even get to be there when the dolphins turn up.

Are you a true-blue roughing-it Camper, a comfort-loving Glamper or something in between? (Or is camping still in the too-hard basket?)

EARLIER CAMPING ADVENTURES

• A-camping We Will Go (2009)
• Clown Camping (2010)
• We Survived Nine Days Camping (2013)
• Under Canvas (Backyard Camping)

Gravity Strikes Again

This morning I thought I'd be virtuous and walk Scrag to school. He's been begging me all week as it's just him and me, with Miss Fab off at camp and Dash leaving the house before the birds are up to catch his bus. Other days there had always been a reason not to, but today for once we were running early and I ran out of excuses.

Of course he insisted on taking his scooter. He got the MGP for Christmas and had been bursting to ride it to school. Just one problem: I hadn't got round to getting him a lock yet, which meant I was looking at lugging the jolly thing home on my shoulder.
(Have you picked one of those things up before? They are HEAVY.)

Scrag was not to be dissuaded, his heart was set on scooter-riding so I resigned myself to a bit of weights-and-cardio on the return journey.

See those pretty pink Chucks in the picture? I wasn't wearing those. They are a new addition to my shoe collection and I'm still getting used to them. Walking in them to school may have resulted in blisters so my Kiwi feet were slopping along in my comfy jandals* ... (*a.k.a. flipflops)

My footwear should have given me pause when the scooter got heavy on my shoulder on the way home and that gently sloping downward hill looked so inviting (since everyone knows you don't wear jandals on a scooter).

There I was on a quiet side street with that gentle slope calling to me and my shoulder aching.
I knew the MGP could take my weight so I threw caution and dignity to the wind and hopped on board...

Wheeeee! This was fun! I was grinning as I passed an old man crossing the road who stared in astonishment at the sight of this middleaged mama whizzing by on a scooter.

"Better to ride it than carry it!" I called out blithely as the scooter picked up speed...

Suddenly there loomed in front of me a bump in the pavement, an uneven join, a veritable mountain... could I take it?
My new-found inner daredevil skatergirl told me yes.
So I hit that bump at full speed, all 80kgs of me and gravity did the rest.

As I rolled spectacularly across the pavement, landing heavily on my hip and scraping my hands and bare jandal-wearing toes I was dimly aware of a car pulling out of the driveway right next to me... ouch, there goes my pride as well as the skin on my palms. I took care not to meet the driver's eye, or to look back and see if the old gent had seen my acrobatic tumble.

I picked myself up, slung the darned scooter over my shoulder and limped the rest of the way home, not even bothering to squeeze out a self-pitying tear. After all what did I expect? MGPs are not for MiddleAge Mamas.
And obviously Gravity is still out to get me. Darn you Gravity!

..............................

Some More of my Adventures with Gravity

• Darn You Gravity
• Falling Down Escalators
• Simone Jones: the Movie of My Life

Rambling and Raving on Life and Blogging

I wonder if you've noticed I'm not posting as often here on my blog? The reduced frequency of my stories popping up in your inbox or on your reader may have you asking, Hey what gives?
Or, more likely, you didn't even realise because you are actually out there living your life, instead of waiting with baited breath for something new from me to materialise.
Almost certainly.

My husband says this to me quite regularly: "You know Simoney nobody will die if you don't post something on your blog today. it's not like people are sitting there at their computers, holding on, waiting for you to write something."

I know this, I do. At least I thought I did.
In my head I knew this was true, but deep down something was pushing me from the inside as if the fate of the world rested upon me updating my blog on a daily basis.

Towards the end of last year things were starting to get to me. Facebook was the trigger. Anyone with a fanpage will know what I'm talking about - the frustration of trying to increase your "reach" after Facebook changed the rules of engagement. Now only 4% of your fans get to see your post unless enough of that 4% engage with said post.
I got sucked in there briefly as madly, obsessively I tried to "up my reach" all to no avail. Even if one post did well, the next post was back to square one. I was fighting a losing battle which seemed to me to be just one symptom of everything that had gone wrong with blogging in the last few years.

Amidst the push to grow readership, interpret stats, work with partners and promote your blog on social media I had all-but lost the simple joy of blogging. And in the meantime the obsessive anxious media-holic that I had become was disengaged from life and family as - wait for it - the need to succeed drove me onwards on the performance treadmill to the detriment of all else.

One day I woke up to the fact that I was disatisfied, unhappy and over it. I needed to make some changes and I needed to face facts. This whole blogging thing was way out of kilter.
I committed myself to a blogging go-slow, promising myself (and my counsellor and my husband) that through December I would blog just once a week.
I made no announcements, I declared no blog-holiday. I just... pulled back.
There was no December Christmas Linky, no Christmas craft tutorials, no mad Christmas blog-fest here. Once a week I checked in and shared a story, some photos, some thoughts.

Meanwhile I started trying to re-engage with my real life again.
By the time January rolled around, things were different. I felt differently about blogging and social media than I had for a while. I felt... free. That awful inner drive to prove myself and find a sense of significance through blogging has loosened its grip.

That inner drive has always been there; it didn't start with blogging. My life has been dogged by a deep-seated sense of inadequacy which created an unquenchable desire for approval that saw me pushing myself to all kinds of extremes throughout my working life. Blogging is just the latest manifestation.
"Keep going, keep going, when you get there you can finally relax and know you're enough..." Or so I believed deep down.

But I will never "arrive" at that mythical place where I can rest and be satisfied and just be... unless I deliberately get off the performance treadmill and change the record.

So this isn't really about the blogging. It's about me being enough just as I am. Recognising what was driving me and not yielding to it anymore.

The main thing with me blogging now is that my motivation needs to be different. I need to just do it because I love it, not because I'm trying to keep my pageviews up or build a famous blog so I feel significant or worthwhile.
So what if I never write a post that goes viral? As long as one person gets something out of what I write, it's worth it.

My blog doesn't need to be Big to be worth reading, right? I don't need a gazillion random pageviews, just loyal readers who think it's worthwhile coming back because they like what I have to share.

As for Social Media, it can be an endless treadmill of self promotion and anxious blog-pushing if I let it. A trap for young players, a quicksand of trying to get ahead. Enough already.

Facebook you can have your reach, I'm done with trying to beat you. If only 40 people see my posts in their feed, so be it. I am not going to lose any sleep over it any more.

I'm just going to write my stories when the inspiration strikes, I'll share my heart and my ideas and my life with my readers in the hopes that they find encouragement, inspiration or just get a good laugh and know they're not alone on this crazy journey of life.
That's why I blog. Come read me who may.

Unhealthy obsession, YOU'RE OVER. Back to the basics of writing cos I love it? YOU'RE ON.

................

Do you ever find yourself stuck on a performance treadmill? If you blog, have you battled with this issue at all? 

A Very Big Week

Writing from the trenches, in the midst of a VERY BIG WEEK. This is the week when the summer holidays end, new school terms begin and Grandma arrives from England all in one breath.

You'll be glad to know that somehow I managed to complete everything on my list. I navigated the minefield of Britomart (for the Bus Pass), ordered the new CHEAP specs from SpecSavers (woop), visited Circus school (and decided it was NOT for us), heard from the Cheerleading team (and booked in a free trial day), contacted the rugby club and found out about Scrag's upcoming season... all in one mad day.

[On Sunday Dash and I went for Starbucks together. I had a big lump in my throat]

D-Day arrived at last, Dash headed off to Intermediate, Bus Pass in hand. He's a wonder, that boy. makes his lunchbox at night, sets his alarm early and has figured out which bus to catch to get him there nice and early. He loves his new school, and his enthusiasm is endearing and (dare I say?) CUTE. It's almost like being back in Year Two where everything The Teacher says GOES. Bless.

(Miss Fab and Scrag's school goes back on Friday, of all things. Counting down the days)

[Miss Fab's room all ready for Grandma's arrival yesterday]

Now Grandma has arrived from England, bringing with her... onesies. I must point out that it's mid-summer. But my lot are so enraptured with their onesies they wore them to bed. Yes they did. Aren't they cute?

And here's Michael Jackson - oh no, that's Scrag. Another gift from Grandma. Hehe.

Before the dawning of this epic week, we squeezed in some fun at Rainbow's End (theme park), so before I rush off to play hostess and do all the things on my list today (buy birthday present, drop forgotten hat money into school for anxious tween, see shrink, look after jetlagged granny) I thought I'd share with you these fun photos....

It's been years since we've been, and in the meantime, Scrag has grown so tall

 he can go on every ride... and Dash can even drive the race cars.

[Dodgems; big brother took little brother on them for a second go. When I went to check on them I caught him out at being super a responsible, lovely big brother when he didn't know I was looking. A proud moment.]

Dash challenged his Dad to go on the "Power Surge" with these words and a cheeky grin: If you were a real man you'd go on it. Words no Dad can resist.
Mr G felt like puking for hours afterwards as the ride is one of those "everything is spinning in every direction" horror shows.

[On the PowerSurge everything spins *shudder* My worst nightmare - but I loved the Invader]

Miss Fab, meanwhile (that adrenaline junkie who cartwheels everywhere) lined up for that ride three times straight... and came off (you guessed it) turning cartwheels.
There's all these grownups staggering off disorientated and green, while this crazy girl spins and grins, "I wanna do that AGAIN!"
(Her dad and I are wondering where on earth she got that gene from. Not from either of us, that's for sure!)

I personally went on every ride but the horror show (I know my limits). While waiting for my personal fave - the gentle log flume - a kind bystander snapped this lovely family pic. Here we all are, Team G, in all our glory.

The year has begun, the holidays are over and I am still smiling. Cheese!
xx

Have your kids gone back to school yet? How has the start of the year been for your lot?

I am Completely Crap at Juggling

Have you ever tried it? Juggling, I mean.
Keeping more than one ball up in the air. It's next-to-impossible for the less than dexterous (like me) when it comes to actual balls, and when it comes to life, I'm completely crap at juggling that too.

Managing more than one thing at a time seems to be beyond my skill set. Multi-tasking is supposed to be something women are good at, but not me. I suck at it, truly.

I have friends who are genius at juggling life. They have multiple children enrolled in multiple activities. They manage to ferry their offspring from soccer to swimming to brownies to piano to language class without breaking into a sweat, all while holding down a fulltime job and baking their own bread.
How do they do that????

I am breaking out in a rash at the mere thought of registering my poor deprived bunch in one activity each. Here's an example of how extreme my juggle-crapness is. I've been procrastinating all summer on sorting out Dash's bus pass for Intermediate School which starts on Monday (Where do I start? Where do I even get one? It all seems so difficult to me).

So here we are in the final week of holidays with no bus pass. Apparently they can be found at certain dairies (but which one?? And how can I be sure I'll get the right thing? Do we need to test it out and actually catch the bus at 7.25am so he knows what to expect and where to get off? Am I pathetic because I am bamboozled by a bus?).

Meantime we need to decide about the other two and their after school activities. (Did I mention it's the last week of the summer holidays? term starts next week and I have enrolled them in ZIP).

My acrobatic daughter is desperate to learn tumbling and stunts this year. She's over netball (sniff) and wants to try cheerleading, of all things. Eek! So American! I am rather ambivalent about it. She has her heart set on it but I'd prefer her to try circus school (Less of the makeup and ra-ra skirts and little divas).

While the clock ticks on this one and we dither back and forth, poor Scrag is left to languish on the sidelines. Last year he did no sport at all.
This year he wants to try Rippa Rugby, but have I even looked up the website? Found out where and when?
Calculated coordinating these many activities with bus arrival times for eldest son (who will of course be doing football, and has also been nominated to trial for the AFA 12th grade rep team)...?? The answer is of course NO.

I am so very crap at juggling that I am frozen into immobility at the very thought, with the result being my default position - Procrastination.

I woke up this morning knowing that I need to request Dash's prescription from the optometrist so we can go to Specsavers and (hopefully) find a cheap pair of glasses to replace the ones he has lost  before school starts (grrrr), find a dairy that sells the HOP card and take Miss fab to check out Circus School in the hopes of diverting her from Cheerleading...
Well, I buried my head under the blankets and thought about writing this post. Confessing my absolute crapness at juggling my life. Baring the truth of my horror of after school activities and playing taxi. And my general reluctance for Summer to end.

If only I could live my life at a Summer pace, I am sure I'd be a nicer person.
No anxiety, no stress, no bursts of high blood pressure.

Am I looking forward to school being back? The answer is a resounding NO.
I like living my life with no outside interference. I'm quite happy mooching along and taking each day as it comes. I don't look forward to decent bedtimes and homework and alarm clock mornings at all.

Oh Summer, I may not like your humidity but I sure do love your pace of life. I will miss you when you're over. Truly.

Are you like me (a procrastinator) or are you one of those lucky people who can juggle life and manage to multi-task? Tell me I'm not alone in this??!

...............................

PHOTOS THIS POST: On Saturday night Dash was away at a sleepover and Mr G had the brilliant idea of putting up the little tents in the backyard and doing a spot of backyard camping. We cooked on the brazier, toasted marshmallows, told stories and played Monopoly Empire in the tent (Scrag whipped us all). It was brilliant, and the chicken skewers were the best I've ever tasted. Mmmmm. I highly recommend backyard camping. Just one more reason to love Summer.

Of Garden Parties, Girls and Great Expectations

This is not exactly the post I imagined when we planned our Garden Tea Party, Miss Fab and I. In our minds this would be an echo of the day we had two summers ago. Mosquito nets hanging from trees, sunlight filtering through leaves, girls lounging on cushions nibbling cupcakes, sipping grapejuice.

It would be pretty, it would be pinnable, it would be the perfect way to spend a summer's day.

Just one problem: nobody told the weatherman.

The day that had been promised was sunny and warm.

The morning that dawned was grey, windy, unappealing.

Not what we had in mind at all.

But heigh ho, right? Roll with it, revise the plans, enjoy the day anyway.

Since we are now veteran party planners, you'd be forgiven for thinking a certain creative nine-year-old would be an expert at flexibility, and going with Plan B.

But no.

A grey windy day when "sunny and summery" was envisioned would not cut it AT ALL.

There was wailing. There were tears.

"Cancel it! Tell them not to come!" sobbed a dramatically perfectionistic young Miss.

Daddy had a great idea for Plan B. Under the grapevine. We could still string up mosquito nets and scatter cushions. It could still be lovely, it could still be fun.
But the young hostess was not buying it. Time was running out til the guests were due and action must be taken so I tried my best to ignore her misery and plowed ahead with the preperations. I stoically pegged up mozzie nets and bunting, spread camp mats and scattered cushions, all the time thinking: I need to help her learn this Lesson. Things in life don't always go to plan and flexibility is a skill she will need.

My daughter is very creative. She has always had brilliant ideas and bold plans aplenty, but sometimes reality can be just so very disappointing. All the way back to our very first Indian theme dinner which ended in tears because her "Sari girl costume" was not beautiful enough (she was four) the difference between what she imagines and what can be achieved has been causing us grief. Hmmmmm. We really need to help her deal with disappointment better. Manage her expectations better. 

She needs to learn that sometimes Plan B can turn out brilliant too. Life will be full of these moments, and if she doesn't learn to roll with it and bounce back, well... she'll end up always disappointed, never satisfied. Not a good way to be.

As you can see, Plan B did turn out to be brilliant. By the time the first guest arrived, the tears evaporated and the young hostess remembered the most important thing about parties: Having fun with your friends.

It doesn't matter if it's cloudy or if the decor is thrown together, or if sunlight-through-leaves might have been prettier in the photographs - what really matters is enjoying yourself with your pals (balancing cushions on your head while you eat, drink and spill stuff)...

So this might not have been the pinworthy post I'd envisioned when we called up Miss fab's friends and invited them over for an impromptu garden tea party... but it turned out to be better. Valuable life lessons learned. Perfectionism pushed aside. Disappointment discarded. Plan B embraced.

In the end the weather didn't matter; though the rain held off. There was plenty of giggling and silliness and great fun was had by all. Which is what really matters after all.

Our Easy Impromptu Garden Tea Party Menu

• easy vanilla cupcakes (my go-to cupcake recipe here)
• in-season strawberries, plums, cherries (and marshmallows)
• chips and dip
• club sandwiches (made by my friend Linda, who came to keep me company; I made her Nespresso)
• to drink: water coloured with a few drops of pink colouring or orange juice mixed with soda water
• fancy sliced apples (cut across-ways and then remove core with mini cookie cutter; dip in lemon juice to prevent browning. Too cute and easy and gobbled up in minutes)

Serve it all up on your prettiest china; serve juice in goblets, sit on cushions, laugh loudly and long. 

More Garden Tea Party Posts

• The Original (Perfect) Impromptu Garden Party that we were hoping to replicate
• The very first Garden Tea Party (and the green eyed monster)
• The Indian Theme Dinner that should have warned me
• My Party Page

Summer Lovin (starring my Pumpkin Patch models)

Who doesn't love the lazy hazy days of summer? A Summer Christmas may seem weird to our northern hemisphere friends, but after the corks have popped on the the New Year's champagne they have to face the drear of winter while we southern folk turn to the bliss of beaches, backyard BBQs and brilliant sunshine. Ahhh yes, starting out the year with summer makes much more sense to us down here.

Which all goes to explain where I have been for the past umpteen days. The lure of the beach, the sunshine, endless books and tenting by the beach all succeeded to to distract me from blogging.

So successful has this diversion been that I am completely loathe to return - something which has not happened ever before.
It's not that I have run out of things to say or stories to tell. I haven't gotten sick of capturing moments and sharing them with you all, dear readers. Oh no.
It's just that hunching over a computer is the very opposite of enjoying summer.

On the day that Blogger invents a decent blogging app and I can blog on my phone without frustration, that will be the year that I blog regularly in January. From the beach, in my hammock whilst sipping my pina colada... (haha, as if).

Until then, I will simply offer you tidbits of our summer, on days when rain keeps us indoors or the buildup of ideas threatens to leak from my ears or the photos have filled my computer and I simply can't restrain myself any more.

You can always follow me on Instagram - it's much more summer friendly than sitting at a computer. (If you did, you would have seen my delicious photos of our lunch at Little and Friday, today or our dinner under the grapevine tonight), among other fun things.

Summer has been good to us, I must say.
I am enjoying it far too much and keep finding myself saying to anyone who passes me by muttering about stationery lists, back-to-school specials and sports teams... "I'm just not ready for the year to start!"
Too bad, Simoney. It already has.
Gah.
Why can't somebody invent a pause button for time?
That would be really really useful.
I'd buy that app.

 

Pause it on summer.
Overlay vignettes of my kids playing happily in the backyard with some cello music and have myself a whimsical life. Soft focussed. Unhurried. Sunlit.
Ha.

We interrupt this fantasy to bring you back to reality.

Which is still pretty nice. After all, we live in New Zealand. And it's SUMMER. Bliss.
What a nice way to start the year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU!
(How's it going so far?)

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This post features my young models wearing super-cute Pumpkin Patch gear kindly supplied by Pumpkin Patch. The models all love their new PP clothes and were happy to pose for my backyard photo shoot. Miss Fab wears the roller skate denim dress (now $20 online); The boys wear shorts with cord belt (now also $20); Scrag wears a blue paisley shirt (his new favourite) and Dash wears a blue stripe t-shirt. Both boys declared the shorts to be "awesome" and "comfy".