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Exercising in the era of COVID-19

In recent weeks, our COVID19 new normal has seen our opportunities to indulge in fitness-related activities dwindle faster than my early enthusiasm for a low-carb diet.

Unsurprisingly, gyms were the first to close, representing as they did a unique petri-dish of warm bodily secretions and bare hands that would rotate their way through equipment made of hard surfaces that are scientifically proven to keep the coronavirus alive for days. Notwithstanding the clear medical guidance not to touch anything above your neck, something about setting foot in a gym makes it fine to lay a small towel over the handlebars of an infrequently disinfected spin bike then use it to wipe your face.

Our running group was also eventually dismantled. One of the pillars of running group was the social aspect of sharing stories about inept colleagues, family fallouts and disastrous date nights – and shouting these pleasantries the requisite 1.5m didn’t  have the same ‘what’s shared in run group stays in run group’ vibe.  Everyone had forgotten about my regularly-exhibited exercise-induced-asthma that results in a hacky cough reminiscent of a two-pack-a-day smoker and I started to look conspicuously-covid in cool-down.

Personal training outside was gradually reduced from small groups to 1:1 training until it wasn’t OK, becoming on par with eating a kebab on a park bench.

Golf was cancelled, triggering my husband to dust off the Wii-fit and tackle the conundrum that is connecting up another tech device while our only techno-knowledgable teenager was sheltering in place with his mother, and challenge me to shots off a virtual driving range.

The interwebs are awash with new options to exercise whilst social distancing. I was not immune to the urgency to find alternatives. About one minute after I had finished hoarding toilet-paper, sauvignon blanc and pet supplies, I hit up Sportsmart for a clutch of kettlebells, dumbbells, an exercise mat and a bench, creating a makeshift indoor gym in my study. Mentally trawling the vast investment I’ve made in personal training over the years, I smugly documented a series of snappy little routines that could be safely executed in-house, without co-mingling with covid.  After overcoming the initial terror presented by a flat-pack bench that required me to wield both an allan-key and a spanner, my little haven for resistance training has been used exactly twice in the last three weeks of home detention and its most enthusiastic patron has been Lily the cat who has added the cushioned part of the weight bench to her collection of personal cat-scratching posts.

But I am not coming into this period unprepared.

Even before the current-era zoom yoga classes and subscription-based wellness programs, I was well-primed for exercising at home.

This goes WAY WAY WAY  back to the period when I was remotely-leveraging-lycra, crucifying quads and hammering hamstrings before social distancing was even a thing.

May I present:

Aerobics Oz-Style.

I’m personally sad for anyone who didn’t get a chance to rock fat socks, high top sneakers, nude tights and high-cut fluoro.

Fast forward to the current era where you may, like me, be battling a declining metabolism, an increasing interest in day-drinking on weekends and a passion for carbs.

Here is my unsponsored, non-affiliated view of a few of the fitness apps that I’ve trialled.

Myfitnesspal

My love affair with myfitnesspal was red-hot.

Track your exercise. Check.

Link in with your exercising pals. Check.

Scare the crap out of your overindulgent eating by making you fess up to everything that went in your mouth. Check.

The sheer efficiently of scanning the barcodes of the stuff that you are eating. Check.

What you don’t want is to incur the wrath of a scorned myfitnesspal. It has every gaslighting, snarky, scorned-Tinder-guy vitriol that you don’t need in your life.

Leave your myfitnesspal unattended for a bit it gets really resentful about your lack of response and you will get this:

No one needs that kind of negativity.

Strava

I can’t help it, but I associate Strava with Lycra-clad middle aged cycling dudes who are usually interrupting my Beach Road runs with their unexpected shouty-ness, their non-compliance with traffic lights and their obsession with coffee shops en-route.  

When our running group was forced to go virtual, we all agreed to converge on Strava as our app to co-mingle.

When I rustled up my logon, I found that I had last used Strava on our honeymoon in 2015. I think my Garmin had packed it in back then, so in an attempt to try to track calories-out vs the high cocktail-calories-in undertaking that is a honeymoon peppered by mojitos and wedding-cake-as-breakfast-dessert I’d hooked up with Strava.

As it turns out, my outdoor activity was terminated abruptly by a category 3 cyclone that hit the idyllic marina-fronted resort that I’d chosen as our honeymoon escape and caused us to bunker down in a dodgy concrete walled 3-star motel. No power, the freight-train sound of an impending cyclone, muddy water pouring in through the air conditioner and instructions to huddle in a festy bathroom away from the windows.

Between category-3 cyclones and covid19, unfortunately Strava has become my calamity app.

Dietbet

Dietbet is an intoxicating thing. You bet on your ability to lose 4% of your body weight in a 4 week period. Everyone coughs up an agreed dollar figure into the pool to start. If you win, you share in the pool that is subsidised by the losers. You weigh in initially, knowing that the more that your co-contestants fail, the greater the pool you share in if you win. It appeals to every slightly unpleasant part of my nature – my desire to beat people I don’t even know, my love of the punt, my drive to be a winner.

Unfortunately , my timing is off.  I didn’t bet on my ability to lose weight in the period where I joined a ‘lose 9kgs in 6 weeks’ cult and actually freaking nailed it due to the existential angst I felt about being fat and turning 50. Instead I signed up in March, one week before a period where I’d be confined by a virus to home-cooked meals and the kind of scared-carb-scarfing that results from feeling nudged into an age bracket with higher covid19 mortality than the 40-49s.

My takeout?

I can still run, even if it means staying away from my favourite beach trails that seem awash with people who could be aerolising their covid19.

I’m now running uninspired laps of a suburban airport.

And I secretly know, that if I run without my watch, Strava need never know if I’m having an off day.

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The Rookie Stepmother’s Guide to the Nacho Method

Skulk around Facebook Stepmother groups for long enough and you’ll likely encounter a very simple hashtag, usually in response to a very complex stepfamily scenario.

#nacho

It’s not about the soothing balm of corn chips awash in salsa and mozzarella in the face of a life challenge. Much as this concoction might have served you well as the perfect couch-snack in the face of heartache, buoyed by its natural life-partner Tequila, Stepmotherly nacho has nothing to do with a convenient Tex-Mex treat.

Simply put, the philosophy is ‘Nacho Kids. Nacho Problem’.

Underlying principles include:

Reminding everyone involved that this is not actually your child

This allows you to extract yourself from some of the more onerous responsibilities including:

  • Finding AWOL sports uniform components in the last 10 minutes before commencement of said sport
  • Taking responsibility for the craft project the night before the craft project is due when you are in fact the least crafty person you know
  • Trying to patrol gaming hours and screen time
  • Adjusting your entire household’s dietary patterns when the child decides to be a pescetarian

This also means you can treat the stepchild as if they were the child of a friend, or of a sibling. This allows you to dabble at will in their lives, taking them to movies you are keen on, on spinny rides at an amusement park or filling them with simple sugars then relinquishing all subsequent responsibilities.

Refraining from expressing criticism about the stepchild

Stepping back in this fashion involves being less invested in expressing your suggestions about how this child might behave in order to best position themselves as a valued contributor to society. This is useful in two ways:

  • Your suggestions are very unlikely to ever be acknowledged. In a world already full of frustrations like ineffective public transport, talentless social media influencers who earn four times what you do and those people who block your access to the deli number dispenser by taking their ticket and not moving, you hardly need to expend energy on an opinion that will be ignored by a child.
  • If you, as I do, often lack an appropriate level of filtering when it comes to expressing your opinion to a loved one about their first-born child, it will be useful to retrain yourself to say nothing. I’ve learned that comments such as ‘I feel like you are just facilitating his path to mediocrity’ or ‘don’t let him end up being the person I’d put on a Performance Improvement Plan’ in retrospect would have been better left as ‘inside thoughts’ rather than those that came out aloud.

Understand your triggers, and don’t engage

As the ultimate nerd-child who was driven to academic pursuits, my head wants to actually explode at the concept that a child would not complete their homework and hand it in.

As the daughter of a nurse who only accepted projectile vomiting and / or febrile seizures as a reason to stay home from school, I’m sorely triggered by someone who expects to stay home from school due to a sore stomach (which seems suspiciously proximate to eating 500g of Cheetos)

The Nacho method involves understanding that this is not about you and your triggers.

Step back from the chaos

Unless there has been an unseemly tiny period between your partner disconnecting with their ex and your coupling, they’ve been perfectly able to manage all the twin-household carnage without you. Patterns have been established. Boundaries, regardless of how porous, exist. Feeding, housing, educating and most of Maslow’s priorities were maintained before you rocked up.

Even if you have, as almost every rookie does, inserted yourself enthusiastically in the everyday of this fractured household in an earnest attempt to make everyone feel whole, if you now take a stiletto-step back, no one is going to keel over.

If you are writhing in angst over unfair distribution of household tasks, if the hashtag of your life has become #ididntsignupforthis, it’s not too late to politely retreat a little.

Have no involvement with your partner’s ex

Enough said.

Whether its a 1am snack to soak up a tummy full of sauv blanc or a legit strategy for stepfamily sanity, its always OK to embrace the nacho.

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Sharing All the Tips – Stepmom Magazine

I love being a contributor to Stepmom Magazine. Every month is packed with articles – from rookies like me through to family relationship specialists, all coming from a place of love and support.

Check out my last articles on https://www.stepmommag.com/

Here’s a list:

Are you a Stepmom Warrior or Diplomat? November 2019 issue.

Stepmother Taboos: Things You Can’t Say or Do – In Mixed Company. October 2019 issue.

Stepfamily Logistics: Strategies for Staying Sane in Split Households. September 2019 issue.

Stepmom Secrets: 6 Important Things No-one Told You. January 2019 issue.

From Corporate to Cupcakes: 5 Career Lessons for New Stepmoms. Feature article, December 2018 issue.

The Rookie Stepmom: 4 Things I Wish I Knew From the Start, November 2018 issue.

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Dear Grandad. Re: the rats.

Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin – Robert Browning

Dear Grandad,

There’s a family of rats living in the branches of a tropical fern-like plant in our garden. Had I been blessed with a greater interest in matters horticultural I would have been able to specify for you the plant in question, but as I’m shamefully agriculturally-ignorant I’m unable to elaborate.

A burst of unexpected warmth and torrential rain on rampantly fertile bayside soil has seen this tree sprout branches and foliage that just apparently screamed ‘multi-storey coastal living’ through whatever real estate network supports the rat community. A rat family of five has moved in, unperturbed by the proximity to a couple of retirement-age Australian Terriers who relinquished the chasey-terrier part of their nature some time back and are now embracing more of the Aussie bean-bag lifestyle and an inclination to simply observe.

I’ve been contemplating ways to have these rats removed from my backyard locale. Tomorrow, a chap who has oriented his career towards relieving hapless office folks from the need to tend gardens is coming to raze unkempt trees, trim untamed shrubs and remove all evidence of unfettered gall wasp on a beloved lemon tree. He’s not had the presence of a rat family in the ferny tree specifically outlined, but he’s been advised of the need to cut that sucker back, hopefully prompting the rat family to move elsewhere.

Much as I hate rats, as my running buddy will attest, having been shoved sacrificially into a drain as a protective instinct when I unexpected encountered one in a morning training session, I don’t want to actually poison them with chemicals that will Chernobyl their insides.

I’d like a softer exit for my rodent family. I’d like them to somewhat-voluntarily relocate. Preferably to Hampton.

This humdrum conundrum was just another reminder of you Grandad. It never stops. Although you’ve been gone for eight years, you are still present.

I’d made it habit to send you a post card each time I travelled to a new country. Last month, I was in India for the first time. Habit made me pick up a post card to send to you.  I put it down again, but sent you a mental message to say hi.

When I was small enough that I was still sharing a room with my sister, which left a spare room that was yours and Grandma’s when you made the 350km visit to our family home, I vividly recall being tucked up on a Sunday morning, with you telling me the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. You were able to recite, verbatim, the 2000-odd words of Browning’s poem.  Only now do I realise how amazing this was. At the time, I was struck by the skills of the piper, his command over the rats, the concept of guilders as currency and the cautionary tale about the local government shafting the rat-removal contractor and losing all the town kiddos in the process.

I didn’t comprehend the love of words and embrace of poetry that led you to memorise Browning’s words.

Now I do.

I’ve learned so much from you.

I’ll keep you posted on the rat family relocation.

Love Kylie

xx

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Greetings from Heidelberg

I’m in Heidelberg. Not Melbourne’s Heidelberg, home of The Greenery which taunts me on every long run along the Yarra Flats and whose fence I became entangled in when I was resting an knee injury by substituting some inexpertly executed cycling for running. They say you never forget how to ride a bike. I’m here to tell you that you can. 

No, the German Heidelberg.

A work trip deposited me in the home of sausage and strudel. It was an uneventful trip, blessed as I was to enjoy the hospitality of Emirates business class. In these times, where zealots can turn even your most luxurious flat-bed, Bulgari-in-flight-accessorised aircraft into a weapon of destruction, there are several moments of relief to be enjoyed.

1 – when your plane lands safely.

2- when your luggage has made it through the myriad possible points of failure and arrives on the baggage carousel.

3 – when the person who is picking you up after a 24-hour journey is there with his little sign.

Clearly, I breathed out too deeply, too early. I’d not travelled on a German Autobahn since my 1993 Contiki tour, and for reasons not confined to the passage of time I don’t remember one moment of that.

My driver relished the left lane and applied himself to winning the autobahn with all the verve of vintage Schumacher. I’m routinely predisposed to passing unsolicited advisory commentary on my husband’s driving when I feel like he’s applying himself more aggressively than required on Nepean Highway on the way home from Sunday golf, notwithstanding we are barely peaking 70kmh.

I’ll never do that again.

Seated as I am in the Euro back-passenger-side I’m unfortunately in prime position to observe my driver’s intent to maintain an average autobahn speed of 170kmh.  Now these are excellent roads with wide lanes and very focused drivers. My driver is in his 60s, which suggests he’s been navigating these roads skilfully and safely almost to retirement age (unless he’s a high powered financier who is indulging a late in life career change) I do feel like he is pretty loose with his calculations on the braking distance required when one travels at 170kmh, but who am I to argue. I’m in a large German-built car, whose every anti-skid-braking, side-airbag, crumple-zone molecule would surely strain towards keeping its passenger safe, purely from the perspective of nationalistic pride. Nevertheless, I Google the road toll stats.

I make it to the hotel, more woozy from the white-knuckle-clenching that has re-distributed my bloodflow in abnormal patterns than I was as a result of travelling more than 16,000 kilometres and numerous time zones in 24 hours.

From there it gets better and I invest my Sunday recovery time ahead of the working week in exploring the lovely town of Heidelberg, and lovely it is.

I exercise off some jet lag and in-flight Veuve Cliquot with a stroll on the Philosophenweg which apparently back in the day was the path trod by students and philosophers in the backblocks behind Heidelberg’s universities. Today it is the path trod by Instagrammers who have seen this trail in the top 10 must-do’s on Trip Advisor. It’s also popular with serious runners who are using the fairly epic hill to do the training I SHOULD be doing in preparation for an imminent half-marathon but seems a little out of reach given my jet lag and a solid winter of over-indulgence.

From the top of the hill are epic views of the old bridge and old town, which in my case are best enjoyed by standing still instead of trying to simultaneously sight-see and navigate cobblestones downwards in leisure shoes that lack suitable grip, imperiled as I am by motor skills that have let me down since high school.

I then embarked on a tour of Heidelberg Castle. I love a castle, and given Australia lacks anything castle-ish beyond about 100 years old, I’m all over a European Castle tour like white on rice. This may have been triggered by my parents’ early efforts to instil a sense of history into my interests, hampered as they were by the only local offering being Kryal Castle. Looking back now, it’s fine if you want your castle constructed in Western Districts’ bluestone, positioned ready to aggressively defend vulnerable sheep paddocks near Ballarat, with staff wearing loosely accurate historical garb, relishing the opportunity to use the term ‘wench’ at will. But it’s got nothing on Heidelberg Castle, sporting as it does an impressive gallery of statues of former rulers, vintage ballrooms, solid staircases – and the highlight – a wine barrel capable of holding 220,000 litres of vino. Despite no shortage of real estate, the top of the wine barrel does double duty by providing a large dance floor space which appeals to that part of me that will never hit a dancefloor without some proximity to alcohol. It was built to hold the tax collected from local winegrowers who paid in the currency of wine, but somewhat loses its cachet when you realise they co-mingled the wine regardless of grape variety, colour or vintage, resulting an almost undrinkable brew that just reinforces everything I’ve always believed about cask wine.

Having ticked the key Trip Advisor boxes, I strolled the delightful old-town precinct. I managed to walk on past take-away joint Mr Currywurst despite the obvious charms of a corporation that had the creativity to put curry sauce on German sausages.

I settled into a café in a quiet corner of the old town for some traditional European café people watching. 

Here’s a rapid-fire list of my observations:

Wine is cheap and good. I will eternally cherish any geography that serves up a very nice chardonnay for the equivalent of $6. Best chance of a similar price point at home is the subsidised bar at the local kids’ footy club and even then for that money you are probably going to be drinking Yellow Tail.

Dogs are stylish. Dogs of all shapes and sizes happily stroll the streets in bandanas, coats and ponchos. Even Bondy, the most metrosexual of my pair of Australian Terriers, and who always gains a little extra swagger when venturing out in a new item of apparel would probably come over a little sheepish if he took to the streets in a dog poncho.

Americans have still not moved on from Seinfeld. Look I’m all about comfort when it comes to being a tourist out for a big day of walking in a new town. But sneakers with jeans are just not OK and could NEVER EVER be OK anywhere in Europe. By comparison, a chap looking a lot more local strolls past in a linen jacket and crisp white shirt toting a pink notebook, a citrus gelato and a scooter.

Boots on cobblestones. Having made several references in this blog to my challenged motor skills and general co-ordination, you’d be unsurprised to find me in rapt admiration of a lady who is commanding the cobblestones in spiky heeled boots of impressive height. Every part of me wants to rush over and express this admiration with all the fervour of those late night bestie ‘Oi Love Yous’ that are generally sparked by overconsumption of Ouzo. I resist.

Smoking is still a thing. Having not been in Europe for a few years I had forgotten about the proportion of Europeans that still love a cigarette. From the smoking room at the airport through to the cigarette-company ashtray on my table, its clear that its still a thing.

RHOH There should totally be a Real Housewives of Heidelberg. I could have cast it from my café table in the space of two hours. Boots-on-cobblestones lady would be first on the list. Second on the list is a 60-ish year old lady who appears to be an uncanny merger of one of my close friends and I, fast-forwarded by a decade or so. I’ve long maintained my position that I won’t be cutting my long hair short in any kind of deference to older age until Elle MacPherson does (long hair and an obsession with aviator sunglasses being the ONLY area where our worlds collide)  My close friend has an equally fierce commitment to an animal print. This lady was rocking both long locks and a leopard-print. Had there been any way to do it surreptitiously I would have taken a pic and ‘grammed it for keeps.

European street entertainment is serene. Somewhere nearby, a violin was quietly serenading the courtyard with classical music. If this were Southbank in Melbourne, the peace would be interrupted by parkour enthusiasts and that rowdy fire-eater with an obsession for crowd participation.

Violin and chardonnay on cobblestone streets – a perfect antidote to jetlag and autobahn angst.

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Hiking and camping.

I’m fine with hiking. Day hiking, The kind where you need only schlepp some water, snacks that you are blissfully ignorant constitute more than double the calories you will burn in a day hike and the Wet Ones that you have carried as a precaution ever since a hiking mate suffered a bowel blowout on the Masons Falls trail in 2015. I’m also fine with camping, however it tends to err on the glamping side and is somewhat dicey given I lumber around like a graceless yak in confined spaces. Hiking and camping?

Nope.

A friend had suggested a two day hike to Beeripmo in the Mount Cole State Forest – a 22ish km hike in and out of a bush camp.

Inaccessible by road means carrying all food and lodgings on your back. If I wanted to do that I’d be a turtle.

However I was in a state of physical breakdown and somehow thought that a day or two of fresh air and bush scenery would blow out some cobwebs. A floating skerrick of meniscus freeballing  around my kneecap had slowed down my running training to a distance and pace that was less than a six year old would clock at school during morning recess. Some kind of weird virus had been rolling through my body for several days unleashing alternating bouts of sweats and chills. Somehow I thought that operating at this sub-par level was the ideal foundation for a fairly brutal two day hike.

So next minute we’re arriving in Beaufort which I last remember as a breakfast stop on a road trip to the Barossa Valley in those heady early days of a new relationship. I suspected that nothing in the next 36 hours would resemble anything like that trip. We found ourselves hoe-ing into a steak, bacon and cheese pie at the bakery, having made a pact before we’d even cleared the West Gate bridge that nothing short of a country baked pie would do as prep for this shindig. A charming older chap on a bowls club excursion looked a little askance at our breakfast until I pointed at my fresh-off-the-shelf Kathmandu hiking pants and justified this pastry indulgence as the LAST SUPPER before two days in the bush.

The most blessed thing about this whole arrangement was that we were going with a guided group. A guided group that would loan you the back-pack, tent and sleeping mat, to avoid me investing in ANOTHER bunch of gear. Gear that would likely prove short-lived and result in more expensive stuff joining my 1990s ski gear (used one season), my 2000s wet suit (used one water skiing weekend)  and the obsolete hiking backpack (used for one weekend) back in the era where backpacks had clunky aluminium stabilising parts. When it comes to outdoor activities, I’m the ultimate Tinder-style commitment-phobe – short term invested, long term uninterested.

We met our guide Sarah (not her real name) in a Beaufort car park where I surveyed the loaned gear and sized up the ability of a rucksack already packing a tent and sleeping mat to accommodate my other stuff. I was IMMENSELY proud of how lightly I’d packed. Bare minimum clothing layers. Bamboo eating utensils I’d swiped from a lunch venue the day before. Only one mobile phone. A bottle of Rose that had been decanted into a lightweight plastic bottle. 340 grams of Jaffas. My only issue was my sleeping bag. Sometime, many years ago, in that age of over-investing in outdoor activities, my innate fear of cold had prompted me to purchase a sleeping bag that would hold its own in the Antarctic, but had not seen the benefit of modern day research into more lightweight thermal components. It was not a hiking sleeping bag, but it was my only option. From the moment I tried to get it into the backpack, it was dubbed ‘The Wombat’ as it appeared to behave exactly like a robust struggling marsupial when trying to be inserted into a confined space.

With The Wombat eventually wrangled into submission, we drove to the Richards campsite and car park which is the starting point for the Beeripmo walk. Clever people had elected to go no further and were happily relaxing in campsites within strolling distance of their vehicles and within 20 minutes of the pie shop.

Apparently we were not those people.

I don’t know how to describe the first day of hiking, except to say it was uphill. Relentlessly uphill.  Zig-zagging because only mountain goats could go straight-up, uphill. Meniscus-searing, sweat into your hairline, trudgingly uphill. Sarah encouraged all of us to take moments to stop to observe the stunning forest scenery which was the most beautiful code for ‘if you think you might cry about the uphill-ness, just stop and look at the ferns’

Of course, views are GREAT when you go uphill. Uphill also means that unless you are departing by helicopter, there will at some point be some downhill.

Just when I’d lost the will to live, a sign signalling ‘Beeripmo Camp – 500m’ came into view.

At this point I want to digress into how flagrantly loose this whole hiking gig is when it comes to distances. As a long distance runner, I worship at the altar of Garmin.  The Garmin boffins and their investment in satellites mean that I always know how far I’ve travelled and how fast. Knowing that a half marathon is 21.1km and a marathon 42.2km means there’s a really good sense of how much more torture is in store before it’s over. After each year’s Melbourne Marathon there is an outcry from a certain percentage of marathon participants who declare loudly on social media that ‘The Course Was Long’ because their Garmins clocked up 110 metres further than the regulation distance. The people in charge of hiking distances do not care for such accuracy. I guess they assume that if you’ve hiked relentlessly uphill, telling you that there’s 500m to camp when it could be more like 750 is just a matter of rounding.

Anyhow, 500 metres plus or minus (ie plus) 250m we were at camp. My friend with way more outdoors experience, coached me through the straightforward process of erecting a lightweight hiking tent. Amazingly, it was simpler, and there were fewer moving parts than operating my food processor. It was super-super cold and I piled on every layer I’d carted up the stupid hills, only wondering for a moment whether it was acceptable to romp around camp wearing The Wombat as an oversized poncho. Next priority was finding wood for the campfire. I operated at ‘kindling’ level, with some of camp-mates doing a far better job by venturing further afield and gathering actual logs.

At this point, Sarah the guide started to produce actual miracles from her backpack. She operates at ‘Magic Faraway Tree Land of Goodies’ level. .

This included two litres of red wine – at which point I felt inclined to applaud. On top of a cheese platter, sticky date pudding with caramel sauce, a vegie curry with cous-cous and S’Mores made of marshmallows wedged between chocolate wheatens pre-wrapped in foil for ease of campfire toasting,  I would have sold my first born child in appreciation (if I had one) to be able to keep Sarah on staff at my house.

I can’t go past this point without mentioning the gluten-free vegans. A husband and wife on our trek had declared themselves gluten-free vegans. I’m in awe of those whose beliefs are strong enough to endure a life without cheese. I’m genuinely sorrowful for those whose gut health denies them the joy of warm sourdough. However these two had beliefs and digestive systems that were apparently entirely discretionary based on how they relaxed their restrictions on this trip, devouring oozy brie, canned tuna and wraps rampantly riddled with gluten. Their box-ticking at the start of the trip meant that we collectively carted a slab of gluten free bread, a packet of gluten-cookies and an inordinate amount of chickpeas up that hill and back down again, a sad collective of ingredients that were about as desirable as my 2000s water-skiing wetsuit.

Night fell. The campfire was all out of fuel by 7:48pm which meant we all retired to our tents. I was incredibly fearful of being cold, but my investment in layers, my Antarctic-grade sleeping bag and my peri-menopausal body meant I was beyond toasty. When it comes to a vast-amount of tent-time before Sunday departure, my more experienced friend had invested in two things that, as a rookie, I had not. 1. A lightweight, yet suitably distracting Mills and Boons novel. 2. A miracle device you can use to charge your phone without power. This meant that while she had adequate distraction in the witching hours between sunrise and when everyone emerges from tents, I had nothing to look at except my sleeping bag washing instructions.

Sunday morning. We were subject to oppressive mist and the inefficiency of newbie hiker-campers who don’t understand that Sunday is about express consumption of muesli and getting the hell off the mountain.

My ‘what goes up must go down’ wish came true except for a short side trip to a lookout over Mt Langhi Ghiran. I knew all about Mt Langhi Ghiran, not geographically but via exposure to its rather excellent wine label.

Day two was boringly downhill. One of my 1990s hiking boots suffered the kind of blowout that keeps Daniel Riccardo off the podium.

The front sole unexpectedly dislocated itself and got so flappy that I had to walk like a pensioner with a hip replacement to keep the uncontrolled front bit from tripping me. Given I’m an inexpert hiker at best, I was eminently grateful to survive this equipment failure. Last time I was so challenged on a trail I fell, destroying a beautiful pair of Michael Kors sunglasses and enduring nine stitches to my forehead inserted under local anesthetic in an outback health clinic.

Thankfully, I was shortly back in the Richards car park, smugly marinating in hiking endorphins and drafting a triumphant Facebook post.

I want to declare that I will do this again, but the fact it took me till Wednesday to navigate stairs means maybe I won’t.

Post script: Made it down the mountain without damage, Followed those closely studied sleeping bag washing instructions. Whilst trying to hand-wash The Wombat in the bath, my forehead had a high-impact encounter with the bath tap, resulting in bruising, bleeding and loss of skin  – a nice little reminder of the risks of outdoor endeavours.

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Three Traits You Need As A Rookie Stepmother

Given the stubborn failure of even a skerrick of maternal instinct to kick in at any stage during my child-bearing years, the prospect of inheriting a child as the steak knives of shacking up with a Dad caused me to wonder what essential life experience I lacked as a result of not having brought one of my own into the world.

Thankfully, the role of stepmother has less breadth than full-blown parenthood. Even more thankfully, most of the essential attributes for the rookie stepmother were actually part of my experience, despite not having gained them through bio-kid-rearing. Here are the top three:

Care of a small being

I may not have a great track record when it comes to the care of living things. I had a regrettable experience with the baby lovebird for which I had custody as part of a high school science assignment. To be fair, the bird required four-hourly hand feeding and my only misstep was to sleep through what must have been one of the more pivotal ones timed in the wee hours. The back-room post mortem performed by my biology teacher confirmed neglect as the cause of death and although I was able to rescue my grades by pairing up with a more responsible student, it probably contributed to the perception that I lacked the requisite skills to shepherd a child successfully from foetus to functioning adult.

Apart from this rookie error, I do in fact have a fairly consistent history of caring for small beings. Herbie the guinea pig thrived in my care, kept as he was in frequently cleaned housing, dining on balanced diet of fresh carrots and a an assortment of grains, and patiently enduring dress-ups. To be perfectly honest, his ability to thrive was probably based on the rampant amount of procreating he did with his soul-mate Fluffy, producing litter after litter of babies and cementing his lineage in suburban domestic rodent history.

I’ve also proven adept at ensuring the long life of more than one domestic cat – one of ordinary moggy breeding and even temperament and one pedigreed
tortoiseshell Persian . The latter lived for nearly eighteen years off the joy of terrorising all visitors and shedding long fur that clung very persistently to every carpeted surface and taunted those with sensitive nasal passages. Although I yearned for her affection, Sophie only loved one person in her life and it was not me.

So I did not need a small human to teach me the importance of feeding and nurturing. Fruitless pursuit of affection from a distant feline was perfectly adequate as to train me in the harsh reality of living with a stepchild not genetically obligated to return my affection.

Patience

I was not initially known for my innate patience. Midway through my career the universe recognised that this was not going to be resolved for me by the birthing and raising of small children and sought instead to gift me with a long stint working in Japan. Many will visualise Tokyo as an insanely overpopulated city that appears to vomit neon and is in a perpetually trembling state perched as it is on the combo of a subterranean network of rumbling trains and a major seismic fault-line. In reality it is driven by both ancient customs and modern norms that SLOW EVERYTHING DOWN. You only need to observe the tortuous process by which Mr Miyagi trains a young Daniel in the nuances of martial arts or the languorous coma-like procession of events in the movie Lost In Translation.

Being sent to a country to untangle complicated computer system implementations that appeared to have stalled a long way away from realising a single logon was the ultimate exercise in teaching patience. With a Japanese vocab that leaned more towards Midori and Sushi than the concepts required to unwind the actions of large project teams, the entire trouble-shooting exercise was conducted through an overwrought interpreter.  I could count the heartbeats of my draining lifeforce while a large committee conducted robust and lengthy dialog, accompanied by vigorous gesticulation before allowing my interpreter to respond back to my question with a simple ‘No.’

So I am generally unblinking in the face of the inordinate amount of time it takes to leave the house as a family, the torture involved in locating an elusive pair of shoes or the unfathomable need to perpetually find a bike pump given every item of inflatable sporting equipment appears to defiantly deflate when it enters our household.

Diplomacy

A corporate consulting career that involved trying to help companies navigate their way out of an IT environment laid waste by neglect or through a business process transformation that is far more ambitious than its current level of capability, is built on providing advice cloaked in a level of diplomacy. There’s a subtle art to helping a corporation move on from a lack of foresight or some clunky decision making and focus on the future. You may feel like an entire middle level of management needs to be sat down and given a good-and-shouty verbal shellacking but you will be required to provide advice couched in terms of ‘evolving the culture’ and ‘making step-change’. It’s only appropriate to suppress the instinctive level of outright scorn that demands to be leveled at corporation run by a rampant dictator or whose entire decision making capability hangs off a sketchy web of excel spreadsheets only understood by one person in the joint.

So step-life diplomacy was just another day in the office. It was initially challenging to find a way to respect ill-defined, porous boundaries when it came to my role in parenting, to remain unblinking in the face of new norms that appeared to defy all tenets of civilised behaviour and to navigate blatantly illogical arguments when they came from the other side of the custodial parent divide. The strategies of 1) never responding out loud with the first reaction that came to mind and 2) liberal use of wine as an aid to reflection on the day’s events proved as useful in stepmother life as they did among corporate mayhem.

Hang in there, you’ve already got all the skills.

You don’t have to have borne kids of your own to nail this.

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Tips for the First Stepfamily Vacay

If you’ve taken the gradual approach to offspring introductions and are party to the regulation alternate weekend structure of step-parenting, you may not have experienced the very special kind of immersion that is the school holidays.

As a non-maternal type, you will have rigorously avoided holidaying in school term breaks – smugly dodging inflated air fares and shuddering outwardly at the concept of theme parks overrun with children recklessly toting multi-coloured ice-creams near your white linen pants.  Inevitably, you WILL holiday as a newly blended family, high-season tariffs be-damned. This relentless period of consecutive exposure to a new stepchild will be a learning experience on both sides. Here’s a guide to planning for this momentous event.

Carefully select the venue

Your holiday venue selection criteria to date may have involved:

  • High expectations regarding the thread count of bedroom linen
  • A need to be walking distance to a local restaurant or within the range of Uber eats so that your afternoon drinks aren’t dampened by needing to pilot a vehicle to get fed
  • An in-house day spa
  • Proximity to wineries

None of these apply to the first accompanied-by-stepchild holiday.

The single most important factor? Activities. Lots of them. For avoidance of doubt, this does not mean guided wine flights, cheese tasting tours or the 3-hour spa indulgence package. It means distinctly different things like trampolines, an outdoor pool awash with like-minded ten year olds, a games room and proximity to any joint that serves nachos.

On holidays, kids expect a ridiculous amount of entertainment. During school terms, they know how their day pans out  – wake up, protest about having a shower, do six hours or seven hours of school, eat everything in sight, reject dinner, protest about bedtime and sleep. On holidays, a new timetable applies and it needs to be filled, and it needs to be understood. 

An actual conversation on my first step-vacay:

“after breakfast, after we go to the beach, then you get your coffee, then we ride the bikes, then we have lunch, then we go to the pool THEN WHAT WILL WE DO???”

Be aware that if you answer that question with a proposed activity, you are bound by it. If you fail to deliver on that, you are guaranteed to hear this

“BUT YOU SAID!?”

Ensure you pick a venue that is a veritable Disneyland of extracurricular activities unless you want to be subjected to a lot of a whining and even more Monopoly.

Pack wine

You will likely already know that a certain amount of wine creates a very lovely temporary shroud that will protect you all from all kinds of reality in the form of heartbreak, work stress and the guilt of a carb binge. Mothers know, that once past that pesky period involving breastfeeding, wine will also take the edge off dealing with toddler tantrums, primary school dramas, endless laundry and hair washing battles.

Your first step-holiday might sound like the perfect opportunity to abstain from drinking, to insert a bonus detox event into your calendar given that you should probably stay upright and alert whilst partially responsible for a dependent human.

No. Wrong.

Firstly, this is not your child. If someone needs to retain their ability to drive a child to an emergency room following a cycling accident, it certainly need not be you.

Secondly, you are going to need SOMETHING grown-up to look forward to after a relentless day of child-centred activity.

Be prepared for the intensity

Family holidays are intense. As pre-work, binge-watch all variations of the Griswold movies. Then try to imagine them without humour.

Be reminded that this involves MULTIPLE consecutive days of unfolding stepchild experiences with the added spice of

  • No intermission. You are three hours from home. You can’t take a day off part way through the event. The best you can do is head out to ‘get a coffee and the newspaper’ and try to stretch that to an hour. 
  • No personal space. If you make the rookie mistake of re-creating what you loved when you were a kid and booked a cabin in a family caravan park, you are going to be confined to an area smaller than a shoebox and filled with cheap furnishings.  You will be huddling around a 32 inch LED TV. You will not be able to sneak in a nana nap mid afternoon while some kind of robust father-son wrestling and screaming ensues on the other side of a wafer-thin wall. Although I’m going to now avidly lobby for its universal acceptance, it is currently unheard of to book an extra cabin across the other side of the park to allow you to read crime novels in peace accompanied by home-made espresso martinis.

Control the duration

As a new couple, luxuriously lengthy breaks in amazing locations will always adhere to the principle that more time is better than less.

For your first step-holiday, try to consider the way in which children start kindergarten. Gradually. They go for a couple of hours each day. They do a day here and there. Only after a carefully planned time do they try to string together five consecutive days. It’s very gradual. In the holiday scenario, its you that needs to be ever-so-slowly immersed.

Don’t lock yourself into a ten day break, regardless of your previous principle that amortising the airfare over a longer holiday duration makes everything more economical.

My empirical research suggests this:

  • If you are in a location that has a long documented history of excellent weather and a procession of theme parks use the formula of number of theme parks plus one day.
  • If there is any chance of rain, a three night maximum is best.

An even more-evolved strategy, which I feel I should almost stamp with a personal patent, is the blended holiday. The blended family holidays together for the first portion of the break, with you returning to work at the halfway point. Nearly genius, this allows some father-child bonding time and an opportunity for you to return to your couch and your cat. Not recommended for the first holiday, this an advanced strategy to be implemented when you are three or four years in.

This is about planning,  people. Fail to plan, plan to fail.

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The First Sleepover: A Childless Stepmother’s Guide

That honeymoon period with a new love is a blissful time. You are likely rocking your best-ever body courtesy of the divorce diet and that phase of unfamiliarity that stops you scarfing carbs in plain view of your new partner.  Everything is new, nothing is niggly and you are only one step short of having Snow White’s best life, surrounded by helpful woodland creatures and indulging in tuneful duets with baby birds.

You may have even met your potential stepchildren, and if its early days, spent time indulging in an array of joyous kiddie activities, with only the tiniest shot of vodka to take the edge of the meeting-the-kid nerves.

The point at which it becomes a whole new ballgame, or in fact a whole new ballpark, is the first sleepover where the stepkiddies are involved. Here are some tips.

Leave it for as long as possible

Have as many kid-free sleepovers as you like. This is something to be encouraged and practically mandatory in case the white-hot early days of a romance flames out, revealing a certain shallowness or long-term incompatibility amongst its smoking ashes. You want to know this before you share a sleepover with kiddies. If this is another relationship that will be rendered to the Nope File, you do not want to have been unnecessarily exposed to the wayward spitting involved in junior bedtime teeth brushing rituals or been anywhere remotely within the vicinity of an awkward bedwetting phase.

If you aren’t yet ready to commit to being friends on Facebook, give the stepkid sleepover the swerve.

Consider your attire

Sleepwear for the first blended sleepover requires some careful thought.

If you’ve made it through the worst of your singledom heartache, then you’ve likely buried every item of sleepwear that was the equivalent of comfort food during your periods of darkest despair. The polarfleece bathrobe that kept you alive while your bloodflow tried to warm the daggers of ice where your heart used to be. The forgiving snuggie that accommodated that period of time on the couch where you lived off Netflix and sauv blanc, helpfully providing oversized pockets for stashing snacks that were reassuring in their sky-high percentage of saturated fats. The tracksuit that sheltered you from the cold hell of sleeping alone, then conveniently doubled as daywear.

If you’ve carved out a #revengebody through a diet of clear spirits and tears during your being-single phase, you’ve likely revitalised your bedroom wardrobe by rocketing to the VIP list on Victoria’s Secret. You’ve purchased garments of immense fragility at a gigantic cost per gram of fabric which now make you look all shimmery and svelte.

These are not the outfits for the first sleepover where children are present. You do not want to greet a child in a hallway in something skimpy, since these nuggets of childhood experience are invariably the first to be conveyed in graphic detail to the biological mother. As fab as you might feel, all juiced up on early-days oxytocin, you do not want to make a teenage step-kid feel like they have woken up in the playboy mansion.

The desirable state is somewhere vaguely in between. Leave the French lace at home, but equally don’t try to rescusitate your despair-encrusted snuggie. Go for some respectable PJs with good coverage, skipping flannelette versions involving cartoon characters if you fear regressing into frumpsville.

Talk about the arrangements

As pedestrian as it may seem, it’s very wise to have a pretty frank discussion about the bedtime rituals that are about to unfold. Shared time between two households and a desire on the part of a split bio parent to appease a child can make for some fairly loose bedtime boundaries.

You want to know if there is a tendency towards night terrors that is going to cause you to wake suddenly to unearthly screams.  It’s worth knowing that there will be a full-blown tanty involved as toothbrushing time looms. You need to know if there is a well-established door-knocking protocol or if a kiddie could just bust into the bedroom without warning.

From personal experience, you absolutely need to know  that a six year old will shimmy into a pair of pull-ups and plant himself on your side of the bed, given that’s been the way this household has rolled since the split. You need to have a strategy in advance for that one.

Don’t be setting any breakfast precedents

During the first sleepover event, aim to be a background person. Now is not the time to indulge any long-repressed desire to be a Gwyneth-style earth mother. Regardless of your horror at the dietary damage being wrought on a miniature human, do NOT try to wrest the box of Coco-pops from their grasp and aim to explain the virtues of a green smoothie. If you are truly determined to create a nutritionally balanced haven in the wasteland of Disney-dad indulgence, it’s a game of stealth and subtlety and a long game at that. It’s not something that you should leap into immediately after the first overnighter.

Don’t try to demonstrate your extensive research into the realm of the mummy blogger and make buttermilk pancakes complete with human features in the form of blueberry eyes and a smeary raspberry coulis mouth. If it turns out well, you’ve created a precedent that you will needed to replicate, which will become immensely tedious. If it goes awry, you’ll have created something that invokes that particular child’s fear of clowns.

Don’t expect that the child has the first clue about the joy of a bircher muesli involving steel-cut oats that have meditatively bathed overnight in organic cloudy apple juice. That is like sharing a glass of fabulous prosecco with a cask-wine drinker – unmitigated wastage.

Be prepared to just roll with the brekky traditions that already exist.

Save your energy for the battle to ensure your side of the bed remains free of small humans that are yet to master full continence.

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Surviving Kid Swimming Lessons: The Childless Stepmother’s Guide

If, as a formerly childless woman, you’ve survived the stepmother duties of school pickups, cake stalls and a work from home day that coincided with a stepkid riddled with spatter-vomit, now, and only now, are you adequately qualified to oversee stepchild swimming lessons.

Personally, you may have nothing but fond memories of swimming lessons. A weekday morning where you toddled off to school with your bathers already on under your school clothes. An escape from the smugness of your peers  that, unlike your numerically inept self, were good with unforgiving fractions.  School swimming day held no fear other than the vague risk that, having headed to school all pool-ready, you’d forgotten spare undies and would have to go invisibly but possibly mortifyingly commando for the remainder of the day. There were no major hurdles to cross, success being represented by simple achievements like picking up a rubber ring off the tiled floor of the shallow end, or a doggy paddle for 20 metres, none of which really represent serious life skills.

Modern day parents, paralysed by the knowledge that they’ve borne spawn in an island nation, and even more terrifying, ensconced themselves in middle class suburbs riddled with loosely patrolled  backyard pools, are deeply invested in ensuring their kiddies can swim. If you are a participant in a blended family, at some point, despite your best efforts, you will find yourself responsible for a child in a municipal pool. Here are some pointers;

The environment

If you receive any early heads-up that you might need to do Saturday morning pool duties, then you MUST give Friday night happy hour a big-ol swerve.

What you must not, ever, never, ever do? Take a hangover to the pool. Why?

Your hungover self requires a careful protocol of nurturing in order to achieve full restoration. You will not achieve this at your local pool.

Cast your mind back to a recent hangover and consider how you would react to the following:

  • A warm, moist environment where the air is oppressive with chemicals. Your over-worked liver is in a hard-fought battle with last night’s unlimited vino. This key organ has endured a night totally parched, in desperate search of hydration, and now all you’ve done is venture out into an overheated environment where a local government entity intensely averse to claims of hypothermia wants to keep every kid toasty. Consider how you’ll feel when you get those hungover nausea sweats and you are stuck in a place devoid of any fresh air.
  • A scene of screams. Kids who are normally gratifying low-key, once immersed in water, will let loose with a special kind of wailing unmatched by the most bereft of Greek widows. Recreational pools are almost always high-roofed, which just allows the kiddie-cries to echo without restriction.
  • A fair portion of the other mothers at the pool will be fully decked out in the latest Lululemon activewear, having engineered that special kind of timetable wizardry that allows them to complete a session of yin yoga and still arrive at for pool duties in an earthy state of zen. Whether real or not, you are going to feel like these fitness queens are throwing all kind of judgey stares if you are in the pool café trying to tame your hangover with an egg and bacon sandwich with double fake cheese and a side of fat chips.

The change room conundrum

This my friends, is an unexpected nightmare.

If you are the step parent of a boy, there are no good choices. No one wants to subject any boy over about five years old into the female change rooms and next level awkwardness. Nor are you going to feel great about letting him wander unsupervised amongst the unseen, unvetted occupants of the male change rooms. The time it takes for a pre-teen boy to shower and apply hair product will be equivalent in your mind to the time it takes for him to be sneakily drugged and ushered out the back door into a life of child sex slavery. Before you know if you are shouting the kids name from the entrance door like an unhinged banshee.

Better to skip the change rooms, throw him into one of those undignified full-body towelling ponchos and create a dribbling chlorinated trail back to your car, despite the fact that chemical dampness will forever taint your beloved leather seats.

Level of attention required

Biological parents are apparently unimpressed by the qualifications of pool lifeguards when it comes to preventing their children from near or actual drowning. Although the teen by the pool is certificate-level qualified, definitely a better swimmer than you and heavily insured, it is apparently taboo to relinquish all control and while away your kiddo-supervisory time on Instagram. You won’t be able to use this dead-ass time to catch up on work emails, your backlog of cat-videos or finding a fab outfit on ASOS.

You will be expected to summon the sustained attention of a special-forces sniper with laser-sharp focus on the kiddie in question. You do not want to be wandering back from the pool canteen, chowing down on a fried dimmy at that moment your step-kiddo has been dragged from the pool after inhaling a more-than-recommended dose of chlorinated water.

This is a tough gig.  Be prepared.