I hosted my first girls night in January 2018, and that first girls night changed my life. It was such a great night that I hosted another one in February. I guess you could say the rest is history.
Relationships were a major focus for me in 2018, one of the main ones was with my friends. I wanted to catch up with them more often and know more about their day to day lives. We all get busy with work, family, and other commitments. We often don’t make time to catch up with those that have been there for us. Life just gets away from you sometimes.
To me, a girls night is a night with my girlfriends. No Partners. No Children. Just food, drinks, and great company. It’s a little bit of ‘me time’ which is much needed since most of my friends are also new mums. It’s a great chance to get away from everything, just for the night.
I am so much closer to my friends. I’ve learned things about them that I never knew. Like, one of my friends wears contacts, and I never knew!
But our snapchat group keeps us really up to date with each other. I’ve actually had to turn all the notifications off because I am so distracted by it. It gives us a place to have a quick vent, share a funny moment of our day and have some company, often in the middle of the night.
Like most friends, we tag each other in memes and other random things we can relate to. I will admit that most of those memes are Baby Shark related.
And of course, we still catch up as a group almost once a month.
After a total of four nights in the hospital, I was I was finally discharged. Armed with my birth notes, and a referral for a colorectal surgeon, we left the hospital. And boy, was I surprised at how hard the walk to the car was. All up it was about 100 metres but felt more like a 5k!
After being discharged I kept an eye on my stitches so I could see how things were improving. Ten days after the birth of my daughter it didn’t look right down there. My mum is a nurse so I asked her to take look. She agreed, it didn’t look right. And I managed to get an appointment with my new GP for the next day.
It was a very slow physical healing process. I needed to go to the doctors daily to have a dressing changed. Eventually, it dropped down to even second, then the third day before finally only once a week. Needless to say in that time I became really good at leaving the house with a newborn.
At about eight months postpartum I had physical healed completely.
My daughter’s six-week maternal health nurse appointment was a few days before my six weeks check up. At the maternal health nurse, I completed a quiz known as the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. I scored high and agreed to ask my GP for help at my visit in a few days time. I also scheduled a few more appointments with the maternal health nurse. My GP also asked me to complete a similar quiz when I suggested that I would like to talk to someone. I received referrals to two different doctors, Unfortunately, I was unable to secure an appointment until the new year.
I was no stranger to seeing a psychologist, I had seen one a few times in high school as well as a few appointments during IVF.
I’ve had a total of seven sessions and found things got a lot better around my daughter’s first birthday when she was able to do more things on her own.
I’m not adding anything here. It was too funny not to include though. But if you are really interested, Our Mama Village has a great post on sex therapist approved tips.
I first learned about the one minute rule while listening to the first episode of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast. Since implementing the one minute rule into my life it turns out that I usually spend more time thinking about it than it task to actually do it.
If something will only take one minute to do, you should probably do it straight away.
But I’ve been adding something else to the one minute rule to make cleaning up a breeze. When I am putting something away in another room, I will look around for something else to take with me. So rather than spending one minute putting away one thing, I spend one minute putting away two or more things. It’s the same amount of effort in much less time.
So if you’ve got something that needs to be done, and it will only take a minute or less, just get it done.
A while ago I caught a snippet from a morning show on Facebook where it was mentioned that it is not necessary to use the recommended amount when doing laundry. So I followed the advice and experimented a bit on my own. And the result was that I cut my laundry costs in half.
Secret confession: Laundry is my favourite household chore. I put the machine on then get to do something else for almost an hour before I have to worry about it again. It takes me 10-15 minutes to hang it up (the right way), and it’s done!
I use the scoop from a tin of baby formula to measure the amount of powder that I use. To properly compare, I weighed the amount of powder that fills the scoop that came with it, 50g. Then I weighed a formula scoop worth, 17g. That’s less than half! So instead of getting 80 loads of washing from the 4kg of powder, I now get 235!
I’ve been buying the cheap fabric softener concentrate for years. I add the concentrate to 2 litres of water and that was that. But I had a brainwave to see what would happen if I watered it down with 3 litres of water. And all that happened was that I got more washes out of the fabric softener concentrate. On top of watering it down, I also add less to the fabric softener compartment of the machine. So instead of 26 washes, I now get 80.
We don’t actually own a dryer. We inherited one when we first moved into our house but it lived in the garage and we never used it. I grew up in a house with a dryer but I only ever remember it being used a handful of times. So I never felt the need to use it, so we put it on the nature strip, and someone took it. I use the clothesline or a clothes horse to dry everything.
The sun is an amazing stain remover. Just leave freshly washed clothes in full sun, with the stain visible. I like to peg my clothes so they lay flat on the top of the clothes horse. Or if it’s not such a nice day outside, I lay them out on my kitchen table. My kitchen table gets a lot of afternoon sun.
It’s been suggested to just use vinegar instead of fabric softener. But when it comes to cost, the fabric softener concentrate is much more cost effective. The white vinegar is $ /L and the fabric softener concentrate is $ /L
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Laundry Powder | $0.1211 | $0.0412 |
| Fabric Softener | $0.0244 | $0.0081 |
| Cost per Load | $0.1455 | $0.0493 |
Kathleen (noun), newly 30, bustling employee, inventive house wife & wannabe creative, just wanting to share the favourable parts of my life.
