Mariet

"Regular exercise can lift your mood, boost your mental health, help you sleep better, helps you achieve and maintain a healthy body weight, and reduce your risk of chronic disease." Hmmm.  Sounds good - let's go! Wait, doesn't it take effort? I don't like effort. It makes me tired. And that sums up my inner dialogue about exercise. I've been trying to take better care of my physical health lately... one of the main reasons being for my mental health. For a whole year after having my second daughter (who is now 1.5 years old) I consistently exercised. I ran 5km 3 or 4 times a week most weeks. I'd do my run, then straight away do 200 bicycle crunches, followed by a 3kg (6kg total) weight exercise. I think I missed one or 2 weeks due to sickness, but I got on with it the rest of the time. Even got up to 9.5km at one point! Then this last winter hit. It hit me like a brick. The bugs went round and round. I generally got lazier and lazier for what

Hello again! My posts seem to be getting further and further apart. I haven’t made the time to ponder and stew over things. Not in a useful way at least. I do plenty of stewing – believe me! Life just gets insane sometimes. I know you know what I mean. My husband and I have been trying and trying to find a free weekend on our calendar to get away to the family beach house (owned by my parents) and it’s just not happening! Things just keep popping up and they seem sort of impossible to side-step or even delay. Not all bad things. Mostly good things, actually! But, I’m finding myself getting tired. It’s not that the WHOLE weekend is getting filled up, just a thing or two – but a thing or two too many for getting outta here! Speaking of craziness - I’m still on my anxiety adventure, as I like to call it.   What a thrill!  And while things have improved bucket-loads, I still have my moments……or days…... And always, in hindsight, I realize why those times I let my head g

Hi, my name is Mariet. It's been 3 days since my last decent sleep. I have a pounding headache and while we're on the subject, I feel a bit nauseous, actually. Sometimes you try everything, but the kids still wake up during the night. I've gone through phases of frustration, acceptance...... mostly frustration..... Last night it was a bottle for Little D at about 2am, then she woke up screaming blue murder an hour later for who knows what reason. Then big sister started whining about her sheets. Then later on she needed the toilet, slammed the door and woke up little D. Then the blasted birds started chirping like it was Christmas morning and I knew that was it. No more sleep. Sometimes I just want to scream.  Mums and Dads - please say I'm not the only one? Have you ever felt like you are grasping for control over situations even though you know it's out of your hands? You know you have to just go with it and handle it with grace (snort!) because reall

Noise. Supermarket ques. Blaring TV. Road rage. The racket and clatter of motherhood. Stress. When did life get so noisy? I’ve started a study by Priscilla Shirer called ‘Breathe’, which is about making room for God to speak and for us to hear what He is saying to us. It doesn’t take long to realize that busyness is actually such a problem. Like, huge . Read that last word again. Busyness seems to be a measure of success. A person with a crammed schedule is successful. Nobody wants to be less than successful, so we keep going and going, saying “yes” to everything until we end up in a miserable, burnt-out heap on the floor. I’m not a working mum, but I have become a slave to busyness. It’s come to the point where if I’m not completely pooped by the end of the day, I feel like a failure. If I get a morning or afternoon free (have to work around little D’s midday nap) I’m immediately thinking, “How can I fill the day? Where can we go? We can’t just sit here at home!” The discont

WOW it's been ages!  Where have I been?  I don't know! Life just happens sometimes and engulfs you rather unexpectedly. I suspect that's what happened here... a lot has happened. But, I've still been pondering life, as I tend to do. So much time has passed since my last post and there's so many things I want to say (as always), and I think I'm probably going to just start and let it lead to wherever it's going to go... What floats into my head first is this quote a while back and it has stayed with me since. “The older I get, the more I understand that it’s okay to live a life others don’t understand.” Truer every day of my life. Some people don't understand why I choose God. They don't understand the choices I make – the ones I make that will bring me closer to Him, rather than take me further away. Sometimes people don't understand why I consistently sacrifice certain things. They tell me I’m missing out. The truth

Today has been a reflective day. Motherhood, life. faith.  I often think about the sweetest moments with my girls. They stay with me. The other day... It was that typical young child/toddler thing where you’re busy with something, then all of a sudden it occurs to you that the house is eerily quiet.  Then I heard ear-piercing squeals of delight! I went looking for my two girls and found them in the shower box together, where they were rubbing each others’ foamy, goopy hair, sporting mischievous grins on their faces. It would appear that they had located the shampoo bottle! I couldn’t be angry about it. It just meant a much earlier bath than I had planned. They were just so  cute  together .  My mum always said it was the loveliest thing ever when my sisters and I were kids and all she could hear was laughter and chatter. It’s certainly true for me. Although motherhood in itself is incredibly rewarding, a few months ago I decided to do some volunteering for a couple of organi

Another blog post? So soon! Yes, I've had some thoughts brewing and think it's time they came out! In my last post I talked a bit about how I’ve felt such a stirring from God to make each day count. Before, I didn’t really think much of getting to the end of the day without really helping anyone. Yeah, I helped people sometimes, but I didn’t seek out opportunities to help. If someone asked me for help, I would have happily obliged. But, that’s not enough, is it? I want to be proactive. I want to be a do-er. I don’t want to procrastinate or hide from what I feel God is asking me to do. If I feel a strong conviction about something, I want to get in there and do my bit. Some people go through life rather silently and fearfully and they never actually do anything to make a positive difference in the world. I feel like I’ve been one of those people. I feel like I’ve been asleep and have just woken up, as well as frozen in fear but it’s been melting around me the last few mon

Hello! It's been a little while, but I believe in pondering, and I have to do a sufficient amount of pondering before I can turn my tangled thoughts into something that makes sense to you all! So, for those of you who read my poetry post, you’ve probably gathered that I am a lover of words. When I’m listening to a song, I’m really listening to the words. My husband will testify to that… When we’re in the car and the music is playing, after a while he will say to me, “Are you in your faraway land again?” I’m transported to some other place, mulling over the words. And if the lyrics are awful, in my opinion, not even an amazing melody can save it! There are some songs (and their lyrics) that are really close to me and have a special place in my heart, and I’ve decided that I’ll tell you about one of them… After having my first daughter, I really felt a storm brewing. In fact, it was already raging in my head shortly after her birth. In those fragile first few days, I was

Another day, another epic battle with a three-year-old (nearly 4!). How hard is it to put socks on?? Agghhh.  Being a mum is hard. I never knew quite how hard it would be. I had no clue. When I was expecting Little Miss B, my first child, I knew there would be sleep deprivation and lots of it. As soon as she was born, I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t talk to her, I just held her, numb and unfeeling. The whole process was traumatic for me. Something in me had snapped. I just stared at her. She was beautiful. But there wasn’t the connection I thought there would be. This long-awaited baby was finally in my arms and I didn’t feel much. When we were home again, I had a lot of help from my family. They bathed her, burped her, changed her nappies, held her in the night so I could sleep between feeds. But sleep wouldn’t come. I had just gone through labour and birth and I was tired, so so tired. I tried to close my eyes and get some rest, but every little noise had me on hype

Tonight, I’ve found myself all alone at home and the introvert in me is having the best one-woman party! Evening run, nice hot bath with bath bomb, candle, a cheeky shot of baileys, and a good book. After a crazy week in which I was out all evening 6 out of the 7 days, I was craving some recharge time. Some of you, maybe many of you, may have cringed when I mentioned going for a run as part of my fun. I get it, I do! I only started running about 3 months before I became pregnant with my second daughter. I never thought I’d enjoy it. But when I started running after she was born (she was 4 months old) it was out of necessity. My medication for my anxiety/PND wasn’t right and it wasn’t helping. It was a few months before it got sorted out and I didn’t know how to cope, in limbo, waiting for counselling. I was desperate to get my head out of the haze, to ‘snap’ myself out of it somehow. And while running didn’t cure it, it sure did help. I was so low, feeling so helpless and hopeless.

It's a lovely, peaceful Sunday night and husband is out, the kids are in bed. Even more than that - they're asleep. Hoorah!  And so, I find myself able to think!  If I could high-five myself - I would.   I love my girls dearly, I do, but it's sooo nice to just sit down and unpack your thoughts, right? Life is busy when they're young. 'Stop the three-year-old from changing toddler's nappy', 'clean up the trail of toothpaste down the hallway', 'wind the 5km toilet paper back up again' kind of busy.  So I've been thinking about how my day looks these days, compared to not long ago, and even if it doesn't look a whole lot different, it feels different. I approach my day in a very different way now. I have to admit, until lately, I've been a lukewarm Christian. Living in apathy, hoping someone else would take one for the team and do something that counts. Every Sunday I'd promise myself I wouldn't just be a Sunday Christian

Hi! I've been blogging about my anxiety adventures, if you haven't been here before. A very warm welcome to you! This post, however is going to go down a slightly random path. Well, perhaps for you, but for me it is a well-trodden one! You see, I've been writing poems since I was a kid - on and off, through various chapters of my life. Sometimes I wrote a lot, sometimes not at all. But it's always been running in my veins. I've found that most of my poems are a bit sad, and I guess that's because it's how I express myself when I can't quite explain how I feel. Not a lot of happy poems! I've written probably at least a couple hundred or something, but I could count the happy ones on just one hand. Anyway, I was doing some spring cleaning (yeah, I know, bit late since we're in Autumn now) and I stumbled across some poems I wrote a while back, maybe a year ago if I was to guess. Wow. It really transported me back to where I was at during that time