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2019 Was About Receiving Stability

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Receive. This was my chosen word of the year for 2019. I set the intention that I would be open to receiving and allowing this year, and my oh my it has been an incredible year.

In 2019…

We bought our very own house!

We Bought a House!

This is the very first time I’ve ever owned a house, and the sense of stability and permanence it has brought with me is incredible. Just to know that we don’t have to vacate in six months, or that we can change the house around and add nails into walls if we choose, and paint, has been so freeing. We bought a house that is within our means, with plenty of space, in a tight knit community, walking distance to school for my oldest son who is starting kindergarten, it’s a reasonable commute time for my husband to go into the office, and it has expansive views.

Citizenship is Granted

I was granted citizenship in Australia after being in the country for nine years and ten months, being married here, having children here, owning a business here, owning a home here, graduating from university here, essentially creating my entire world to be here in Australia. The day I shook hands with the Mayor and accepted my citizenship was full of joy and relief. I applied for my passport and received it a couple of weeks later, and I feel so official. Having the right to stay in the country where my life is based is beyond measure for a sense of security for me.

Stepping Up

This year I also gave a presentation about Customer Marketing to a Mums in Business Group and LOVED being up there guiding and sharing with the business women effective, easy ways to connect and appreciate their customers. That was a huge shift for me, and I would love to do more of that, be on stage with authority sharing something that benefits everyone so that we all rise together. I am such a supporter of women supporting women, and I feel so happy that I got to do it in such an influential way. Prior to that I had done stopped in with a few businesses and discussed marketing tactics that they might use and that felt great to use my problem solving skills, business knowledge, and pattern matching skills to help them, it was highly fun for me.

Appreciation and Self Love Habits

I kept a nightly appreciation journal all year which felt so good. At the end of each night I would take the time to write out a page of the highlights of my day, a little habit that makes a huge impact.

Earlier in the year I did a 40 day challenge with myself and two other women that involved a nightly mirror work session of saying “I Love You’ to myself, which also felt so nourishing.

Entertainment

Had the absolute pleasure of seeing Tash Sultana perform live and I LOVED dancing so freely!

Loved laughing at a Comedy Show with my good friend.

Travel

We enjoyed an awesome holiday at Jervis Bay with it’s crystal clear water and white sand. We also enjoyed a holiday in Ballina with the gentle Shaw’s Bay. We had our very first family solo camping trip in the South Coast of New South Wales in a tiny coastal village called Gerroa where Abraham looked under rocks for crabs and Ari monkey crawled all over!

Lots of Great Books!

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg was an eye opener for me. The understanding that we do so much of what we do without thinking about it, and reading that backed up with evidence was mind blowing.

Atomic Habits by James Clear was an excellent practical follow on from Duhigg’s book, and I appreciated the notion that it takes just one tiny step right now to create the change. I appreciated how he explained the cue/trigger, craving, routine, reward loop so well and that what is rewarded is repeated. To create change in habits make things obvious, attractive, and rewarded, and to minimise a habit make things obscure, unattractive, and without reward.

Influence by Robert Cialdini

 

 

 

Rekindling a Sense of a Freer Version of Myself

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Recently I was listening to Dave Matthews Band after a huge hiatus of hearing them. The feelings that arose were those of freedom, ease, happiness, romance, and fully living. It was unexpected and it felt so very good. I realised that I haven’t had much room for those feelings in the last stretch of time. I wouldn’t change where I am as I know I left all those other places, people and times in search of something more, or better, however, I do miss the nights where I danced with reckless abandon under the stars of the Sierra Nevadas in Yosemite National Park and just lived life as I wanted to. It’s been so long since I’ve felt so expansive and easy go lucky.

The years that I have been in Australia have been intense and full in a completely different way. Having a head on collision, a stalking highly emotional stalking ex partner, the restriction of going through the very long immigration process, the near death experience of giving birth and the trauma the ensued after, all the while moving from an area that was progressive, free thinking, open, and inviting, to Western Sydney which is nearly the opposite of those things I value, caused me slowly but surely to close myself in more and more and more. Then choosing for various reasons to stay at home full time with our child just compounded this. Thank goodness for my Mother’s Group because they have well and truly been the support that I have needed in a time when I needed community, connection, and a feeling of having people around me who understood me in some way and what I was going through.

Listening to Dave Matthews Band rekindled something inside of me, something that makes me realise that as I continue to grow this second child inside of me and expand our family, that I must make myself a priority. I must make room for me to feel like I have some freedom and choice in my life. I must make room so that I can  feel alive and expansive, and independent, and strong, and capable. When I feel those things then I feel sexy, I feel accomplished, I feel intelligent, I feel invincible, and that is what I want in my life on the regular. I want to feel all of these things because when I do, I live in my full expression of who I am, and who I am becoming.

I know I needed these last years to go inward, to restrict myself so intensely so that I would know the feeling of breaking out of it. I MUST incorporate ways in my every day daily life where I feel more free and easy go lucky, and healthy, and smart, and strong. It is essential to my personal well being. It is essential and it is something that I MUST cultivate because I am reminded now that it is a part of me. I may not be the free dancing young Jennifer that I used to be, and I don’t want to be that person again as I’ll never be again and I understand that I left those places, those people, those experiences for a reason, and I’m not looking back in the sense that I want to recapture that youth, or that way of life, I just want to cultivate those feelings again and let them fly high and in every direction!! I want to be that force of life, that joyous force of life that brings light and energy to every experience and don’t apologise for it, but completely one hundred percent owns who I am and what I want and need in such an easy manner.

This is what I need. This is my intention. This will happen. This is happening.

Job?

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What happens when you look at the variety of roles available on job sites and still feel none of them are really for you? What happens when I scroll through them and think that each would be fun for a day or maybe a week, but that would be it? Is it because I’m looking at these jobs that other people are needing, that I’m just going to fill a need for them rather than filling a need for myself? Am I looking at this from the wrong perspective? How can so many other people just say, okay there’s a role, and I am willing to spend my time, energy, and creativity in that role? None of them I want to do full time either. I fundamentally don’t believe in working 5 out of 7 days, where is the time for leisure? Where is the time for personal growth? Where is the time for leading a healthy life? Where is the time for maintaining friendships and being a part of community? What about any time for developing or exploring your faith? Of course, also, where is the time to build and maintain a romantic relationship, and of course, a parental one? I don’t see how that is possible to do successfully, how it’s possible to balance all of those needs and do them at your very best when there are only 3 hours after a long day five days a week, and two weekend days to focus on being a whole person.

So what do I do? I’m in a job that I feel is very constricting and limiting because I have to be at a desk on certain days for this business, I feel chained to it. There isn’t flexibility in the days I get to do this, even though I’ve asked from the beginning. I’ve made it clear that I want more flexibility. I want a job that’s completely flexible. One where I don’t have to be at any one place at any one time with other people relying on me being there, I already have that kind of pressure at home being a mum and a wife, I don’t need it anywhere else in my life, I need the opposite. That’s it, because I already have such responsibilities that I have taken up willingly, I want a job to be the opposite of that, i want it to have flexibility, freedom, movement, change, the ability to not do it if I choose, the ability to ride my own waves of energy rather than force my energy to fit into a schedule.

So again, what do I do? What do I do about this? Clearly the option is to do something online. Clearly it is to stop looking at these jobs that will put me at a desk just in another business location. Ideally I would like to either totally work with people, or not though. I want the money from this job too, because now that I am remembering how nice it is to have money, I like it, and like to see my bank account rising each week. I like this. To replace my current job, I just need to make $350 for a two day workweek. I can do this. I will do this. I will go beyond this.

Oak Ridge Atomic Bomb Secret City

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While in Tennessee visiting my family over the holidays, we went to the town of Oak Ridge. The only reference I have of Oak Ridge in my mind is of a country band named the Oak Ridge Boys, and I don’t even know what they sing. It’s a town that isn’t very far from Knoxville in the Eastern part of Tennessee with it’s beautiful rolling hills and deciduous trees. Oak Ridge was formed as a secret city during World War II to build the Atomic Bomb. It was kept off maps, and grew to a population of 70,000 people. It now houses the American Museum of Science and Energy to showcase it’s past. My uneasy feeling that a government can do major things in massive secrecy was only confirmed in this trip. How do we ever know anything is actually true unless we go there ourselves? It might be more transparent now than it was before because we have technology weaved into every part of our lives, but even then, how do we know.

America and Slavery

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We’ve just returned from a trip overseas, to my home country of America. This time we were situated near the nation’s capital of Washington, DC, and spent some time exploring through Virginia, and Tennessee as well. Virginia and Tennessee are considered the South, and although Washington borders Virginia, it isn’t considered the south, even though it has benefited greatly from slavery. I wasn’t expecting to have the experiences or to have the illumination of America’s past, but there it was in full glory, obviously something I needed to know about.

A trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello which is the plantation house on every nickel in the currency, proved to be very eye opening. Being from California, we have been removed quite a bit from the black slavery past in America’s beginnings. So heading into the Monticello was like stepping right into it. Thomas Jefferson was an early president of the USA and although he apparently had strong views about slavery being wrong, he inherited slaves like property, and only ended up freeing a small handful which historians now have put together that they were his illegitimate children with one of his slaves. Even for someone with wealth, power, and influence, he still wasn’t able to abolish slavery, could he have tried harder? Could he have changed it within his own plantation? The marketing material touched on how the slaves did have “good” lives all things considered, and had houses built that were as good, or better than the poor white people at the time. The houses were all aligned in a row so they were able to form a community within themselves. Over the course of Jefferson’s life he had a couple hundred slaves, and all I could think when I saw the bells down in the cellar area, was that they had been beaten into submission to spring up to a bell and ensure that the Jefferson household was always taken care of. The feels that swelled up in me when I read that they had better lives than most, made my stomach turn. These poor people who were captured and held against their will in order to serve their masters. They were separated from their families, they had not stability in that sense at all, and that makes me incredibly sad.

I was reading after that Sally Hemmings chose to return to Monticello after Jefferson had taken her to Paris as a slave nurse to his daughter, because in France slavery had already been abolished, because of the promise to free her children, children which she would bear later from Jefferson, and I find that to be a long stretch. I don’t know what it must have been like for Sally Hemmings but I can imagine that her will had been broken like so many other slaves, held against their will, and possibly her ideas of freedom had been distorted due to this. It’s all so sad to me.

After visiting the Monticello, with all it’s beauty and grandeur, I was left with the unmistakable grossness within me that realised all of it was possible because of the slaves, his status and wealth was only perpetuated because of that horrible system. I feel this in Washington as well after I became privy to the fact that the slaves were the ones who erected most of the monuments. They were forced to erect these monuments cherishing their oppressors. Gut wrenching.

White guilt came flooding into me, and I started to realise all of the broken families, all of the heaviness that the African Americans carry with them. Not knowing their origins, not knowing even which country in Africa they really came from, and having the pattern of slavery, even if just at a subconscious level that perpetuates from generation to generation.

 

Immigration: The Waiting Place

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Dr. Suess talks about the dreaded Waiting Place in his book “Oh the Places You’ll Go.” I’ve read this book so many times and it really is one of my favourites. I follows the young protagonist through life where the hometown is left behind, where you soar to great heights, and also have the times when you are in a slump but overall, you always get back up and keep going. It’s a great story and one that my therapist gave me after dealing with the head on collision. She even read it out loud to me while I sat on the couch with her chair pulled up closely to me. It was special and I still think fondly about it.

The Waiting Place is this place where you don’t want to be. It’s the place where life is put on hold because you have to wait for something or someone. For the past almost two years, I have been in that dreaded waiting place. It sucks. Honestly it really sucks. Due to being rather independent, and by the advice given through the Immigration hotline, we didn’t apply for a Partner Visa, and subsequent Permanent Residency because if we waited until after the 3 year anniversary of us being exclusive, then the application would pass right through and I’d be granted the PR straight away. So we waited until after that date, which happens to be August, and applied in September, in between my hospital stays just before bub came. Like we didn’t need another thing to go askew at that time, really? It still makes me mad even though I try to let it go.

We didn’t get a pass because there wasn’t an official document, such as a real estate form, or a joint bank account opened literally from the day we declared our exclusivity to one another. I would be really suspicious if someone I was dating from another country did say something like “hey let’s be together AND let’s open a joint bank account today”. I would be so suspicious. I don’t think that normal people think of things like that, we certainly didn’t. So even though there is a huge record of everything else, including newspaper articles, lots of statutory declarations by friends and David’s family, we were still put on hold… and back to the Waiting Place for another year.

The 2 year mark of applying is coming up, so I am hopeful that PR will finally be granted. The thing is that, unless you’ve ever been in a situation like this, you have no idea how much stress it actually causes. Really, at this point because I am on a Partner Visa (which was only granted after a year of being on a Bridging Visa, that I can literally be asked to leave the country where my entire life is now, where my husband and my child are. I try not to get all doomsday about it, but it really sucks to not have that feeling of security in life. It makes me teary eyed just thinking about how fragile it all is. It also makes me angry, or upset rather, that we have done every single thing correctly, we truly are in love and committed to one another, we are married, we do have a child, I even went to University here so it’s not like I’m a fly by night person, and we still haven’t been granted the okay to permanently reside here, or rather I haven’t. The thing is that it does effect my husband too. We’ve had to have the conversation of what if… and if we would move to America, which would cause all kinds of upheaval. It’s such a challenge and it really feels unfair.

When looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, at the very bottom is your shelter, the place where you live. Now for the first few years here, I was here on a working holiday visa, and then a medical treatment visa and I accepted that I didn’t have that foundation set, and still worked with it, I mean I kind of had to since I needed to stay in the country to recover from the accident, which was a long and challenging process. My soon to be husband and I met during my medical treatment visa, and even when we decided to be exclusive, I knew that the foundation was still not there and didn’t want to apply for a partner visa straight away because unfortunately I have had relationships that have not worked out and I wanted our love to grow as it would with me being independent, and us not having to think about anything else like but to just be romantic, and enjoy one another. So when I was on a student visa for a couple of years, we continued to develop our relationship, became engaged, all of life was really starting to flourish, the way that true love does, organically, authentically, nicely, and without any pressure of government or any outside agency. I accepted at that time that I was still not setting my foundation in my hierarchy of needs, but I we were solid in our relationship and we knew the next steps would come.

After I graduated it was suggested time and again when I would call to immigration, and when i would look online, that for time and money sake, it would be most efficient to apply after that magical 3 year mark of our anniversary. So instead of applying for Partner Visa, I went for the Post Graduate Work Stream visa, and we had projected to apply for the PR in the next stage, again after the 3 years. Well during my Work Visa, we got married, fell pregnant on our wedding day, and then had a crazy difficult pregnancy. At the very beginning of the third trimester, I was in hospital, and it wasn’t looking so good. So in between hospital stays, we went and applied for PR. It had been after the 3 years, and it should just go on through, as it was suggested strongly by so many people from Immigration.

For the next almost 2 years, the lack of foundation has been so apparent and something I cannot help but think about, specifically because it isn’t just myself and my husband who we need to be concerned with, we have a child and that child is completely dependent upon the two of us, not just one if I have to leave. It’s such a horrible position to be in. The lack of foundation when I have a family to think about and care for, is really heavy on my heart, a lot, consistently. I try my best to not let it get to me and just trust that it will all be okay, I will get PR and my family and I can actually live life like we really do live here, all of us, all of us. This is making me cry right now as I type this. It really sucks. It’s so unnecessary to have to go through this, especially with a small child.

I am so ready to move out of the Waiting Place and move on with our lives. I don’t want this to continue taking up mental headspace. I want to really build my life with my husband and our child with a firm solid foundation in place.

What If I Documented My Process with LOA?

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It dawned on me today that I could show others how to action LOA for a lifestyle upgrade by actually documenting my own experience step by step, maybe even day by day at times. I know I have a very powerful way of manifesting and this way I can literally share all of what is happening. This way, other people can see how I am doing it, and in turn do it themselves and upgrade their own lifestyle. How incredible would it be if I was able to positively impact people, specifically women, to upgrade their lives and feel better along the way? How incredible would it be if I helped to raise the vibration amongst this group so they can be more productive and happy in their own lives? How incredible would this be?!

So many times in my life I have done things that later I read about by someone else and I’m always like, yeah, I did that like 10 years or 15 years ago, and I kind of chuckle at myself. I have intermittently written about my adventures or at least how I am feeling in journals, on scraps of paper, on coasters, on posters, here on my blog and online in social media posts. However, I have not consistently tracked what I have done when I am actually doing it. So maybe now is a great time for me to do this and serve as living proof about lifestyle upgrading and reinvention of oneself.

Wouldn’t that be so nice if I was able to simultaneously upgrade my own life, share my process with others, and they also do the same! Yes, this sounds like a great plan. How do I know? It makes me feel energised. How else do I know? My body feels a bit of butterflies in the stomach, but in a very good way, how exciting! How else do I know this is the right path for me? It’s something that I have been practicing for as long as I can remember, and I know it very well and have shared bits and pieces along the way with so many different people, and I enjoy the process of sharing it all. Cool. There it is, I will document my own process of using Law of Attraction to upgrade my own lifestyle and share it with others so they can also upgrade their own levels of happiness and lifestyle too!

On Holiday Every Day

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Recently a friend of mine commented that she had never thought of living in a place like the Northern Rivers because that is a place you go to on Holidays to get away from the city, that she hadn’t even considered it was an option. I hadn’t even thought that it wouldn’t be a consideration which is really telling about the differences between us. She commented that of course I consider this to be my normal and understands why I want to return and leave the city.

The thing is, that if I only have one life to live, why not spend it like I’m on holiday? Why not live in a destination location with beautiful scenery and spaciousness? Why not wake up and stretch and be good to my body? Why not make love in the morning or afternoon on a Tuesday if I want? Why not eat fresh healthy gourmet style foods? Why not have a live in helper? Why not live like a life of luxury every single day? It is an option, and it definitely is my Plan A.

In general, why not live the best way possible, have the nicest conveniences, and really enjoy life? I see no reason not to and every single reason to do it. That feeling of being on holiday shouldn’t be reserved for 2 weeks at a time, why not infuse it every day?

Block of Units

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Owning a block of units is the way to go. All of your tenants and responsibilities are in the same area, making it easier to visit, easier to maintain, and easier for marketing. Just casually looking I found a block of units that returns about 16% per annum, located in the Northern Rivers. How great is that. For eight hundred thousand I can buy a return of fifty thousand a year. I want this or something even better! Now… I just need the money to buy it in the first place to get me on my way!

Birthing a New World Part 1

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My son was conceived on a glorious day of love, a celebration of my marriage, which is also my birthday, specifically on our wedding day. We intentionally created him with love, had just weeks prior made a wish at a Shiva celebration asking for a healthy, fun, baby boy. We offered up our milk, ate some lovely Indian food, and made love each time with full intention and presence.

I started to get sick on the honeymoon, but didn’t think I was pregnant, just thought the circumstances of stress from the farm, getting over a flu, the exhale moment when the wedding is done and life moves along, and being out on an island in the Whitsundays taking trips out in the Great Barrier Reef.

By time we got back home, I knew I was pregnant. I still took a test to confirm at 4am with my first mornings urine which is supposed to have the best rate of truth, I wanted to be sure, and I was. I woke my husband up and told him excitedly, he smiled at me and then we went back to sleep. I was pregnant and it certainly didn’t take long, I had only taken my IUD out less than a month before hand. Everything was happening very quickly!

I had what seemed like a mini period after that, which caused concern, even though I was feeling nauseated. The GP suggested I go in to the radiologist to have a sonogram as soon as I could, so I booked the next appointment I could, and went in. As I laid on the table, I was scared, what if I had lost the baby? I was so new to all of this. My husband wasn’t available to come with me, so I was there alone, and I felt just that, all alone. Then all of a sudden there was a heartbeat, and I was both relieved that it was there and also sad that I couldn’t share this first heartbeat experience with my husband. I saw my insides on the monitor and baby looked like a little dot amongst it all, but alas baby was there. It turns out that was implantation bleeding, which can occur for some women when the egg plants itself into the lining of the uterus.

For the rest of the first trimester, I experienced the most nausea I have ever had in my life. I took ginger, I went to acupuncture, I ate small bites of food regularly, and it never subsided. I really pride myself in the fact that I can avoid puking if I want, every so often I just cannot handle it and I have to vomit, but in this case, for weeks, months actually I was so sick but never actually vomiting. I was hot, like burning up hot most of the time. The acupuncturist would try to lower my heat from my upper body into my legs, and it did work a bit, it at least gave me peace of mind and I was able to cope a little better. During that first trimester I had to really take it easy, but I couldn’t, not really.

Also during the first trimester, the climax of a big dispute of the processing plant tenants at the farm came, it had been building as they had not been taking care of the animals and we even had to intervene and feed the starving animals ourselves on the eve of our wedding night. The whole time during our honeymoon, we, more so my husband, had to deal with the issue, and it was intense. When we got back my husband had to get to work in Sydney, so I was there at the farm with his parents and a few woofers trying to make a presence and not let anything happen. They were hostile and very volatile and we did not trust them at all to leave peacefully. I was on edge and I know that certainly did not help my pregnancy. Along with that, the farmhouse upstairs has this incredible way of syphoning all of the cooking smell from downstairs to the upstairs where the rooms are. So every day I would have nausea and have to smell cooking flesh on the stove, it was almost more than I could bear. I had to ask the woofers to wear deodorant, but only a non fragrant kind. Nausea and farm life really don’t go so well together, with animals being slaughtered, carcases decomposing, and all of the chicken poop and animal smells that come along with a farm.

It was so hard for me to be away from my husband, but I did not want to move to Sydney. I did not want to raise our son in the city, I did not want to move away from the group of friends I had made in country, but I missed him so much, that eventually in the 2nd trimester, I made the move down with him full time. As soon as I was in Sydney, in our new penthouse apartment, I hardly had nausea or morning sickness. By the way, whomever called it morning sickness may have been thinking globally at the time, because it is certainly not contained to one morning in one hemisphere, mine lasted all day and night every day at the farm.

During all of this, I had many different projects going on. I had hired on a coaching team to help me build my own business from scratch, which was becoming harder and harder to manage with my fluctuating levels of energy, feeling unwell, and a totally spacey head. I had a very candid conversation with one of the coaches, and she told me to stop doing it, if there was any advice she would give it would be to stop and not do it, being a soon to be new mother and trying to start a business at the same time was a disaster recipe, and that the most important thing was my child and to not make the same mistake she made by trying to do it all. She also suggested getting a really comfortable reclining chair to live in with the baby. I took her suggestions on board and she was right, although I will get back to it and finish what I started, when the time is right.

We also had the closing of the abattoir at the farm, which was a very big deal. There was also an internet business that my husband and I were getting into, which long story short, over a year of being dragged along, paying out our noses and still not getting to the point where we could sell the internet to others, Telstra finally got back to my husband with the contract. It’s such bologna that any independent resellers have to go through the one company which owns all the lines in Australia that were actually paid fro by the people before they fave it over to this private corporation, who more or less has a monopoly over all the lines across the country. Of course they don’t want competition, there is no reason for them to help someone compete with them, it’s a very flawed system. We didn’t think it was going to be such a big issue, but it was, had we have known we wouldn’t have been stuck into it as long as we did with our finances draining by the month.

Along with this I was still contemplating whether or not to take up the offer for Honours at University and to teach the Digital Marketing class part time. It would have to be all out of pocket as I didn’t have PR, and was considered an international student. The next question was whether or not I would be able to handle having a newborn, living in the Northern Rivers while my husband was in Sydney and trying to do it all. This had to wait as well.

I also started up a mini little network marketing business to help generate some income, which ended up me just spending a lot of money in the way of their products, which while the dollar was one to one, it wasn’t so bad. I sent out heaps of greeting cards and that felt really good, until the realisation that the only way you make money is not by having others buy your greeting cards, but they have to be distributors as well, it felt a bit strange, and I found that it didn’t work as well in Australia, especially as the US dollar increased in value, it became really expensive to keep this going. Eventually I stopped paying and my account has just enough to send a few more cards and then its done.

So there were all of these projects happening, lots of stress, and then a move, to a place I didn’t really want to live, but did because I wanted, err, needed, to be with my husband.

I started trying to figure out where to do antenatal classes that fit in with my husbands rotating schedule, I didn’t get into this alone and I didn’t want to do it alone. I found a birthing from within program in the Northern Rivers and it fit the dates in my 3rd trimester, and I felt better. I had luckily gotten in to the caseload midwife program at the local hospital near the farm where I could have a water birth and be assisted by lovely experienced women with the security of having the hospital as well just in case anything went awry.

There was still a lot of stress regarding the projects we had going on, but I was getting everything sorted one by one. Then at one of the ultrasound appointments, I was told that my placenta was low lying, and that if it didn’t move up, then I would have to have to have a cesarian. This was the opposite of the midwife assisted water birth I had planned to do without any kind of medication. I kept hoping it was wrong and was misdiagnosed due to me not drinking enough water so they could see inside properly with their machine. At the 20 week scan, we saw that my son was not shy at all and was showing his parts in full glory. I was going to have a boy. It was all pretty surreal and was happening.

After a quick trip back to the farm, I got back on the plane to Sydney and was required to show my letter stating I was okay to fly. I honestly didn’t feel very good at all. The day before I had spent a little time in the healing waters of Lake Ainsworth, a nearby tea tree oil infused lake, which happens to be my favourite lake in the world. I was told later that it was an aboriginal birthing lake, which maybe somehow my body knew that.

We landed in Sydney, I met up with a Uni friend and strolled the open gardens on a lovely spring day at Westmeade hospital, and I was tired, very very tired. I had only just finished my 2nd trimester, the baby wasn’t due for another almost three months, but I was so exhausted. That evening, I went to the toilet and found that I was bleeding, a lot of blood. Interestingly only a week or so before, as a precaution I booked into the local Nepean Hospital just in case I needed anything while I was in Sydney related to my pregnancy. We called and they said to come in, and this was the first of many experiences I had with the birthing suite. They wanted to monitor the baby’s heartbeat and to make sure everything was okay. Turns out everything was okay, and that bleeding was par for the course when it came to having a low lying placenta. After a couple of days they let me go home after it was clear that I wasn’t bleeding anymore. I was relieved and very tired.

Since we lived in penthouse apartment that was a walkup, that meant I had to somehow make it up 4 flights of stairs to my bedroom. It was horrendous. We had to move. We had to move for other reasons as well. We had these two older Sri Lankans who totally leached off of us for more months than I care to admit. My husband didn’t want to deal with it as he had his plate absolutely full, and they kept promising they would pay rent. We took on two additional housemates on top of them to help pay the rent, so there was a full house on top of it all. We started looking intently for another place to live that was clean, nice, and not too expensive. I had been looking when I would come to Sydney from the farm and just couldn’t find anything that would work, the one place that did was then pulled last minute and rented to a friend of the owner. By chance, we were directed by a real estate agent to a place we hadn’t even noticed online, and it was the right one, so we signed on, things were looking up. It was a ground level, stand alone two storied town house with three bedrooms and three bathrooms with a a cute backyard. Perfect for what we needed and it was brand new.

I had another bout of bleeding a week later and again, we rushed to hospital, this time there was more blood than I’ve ever seen rushing out of my body.

To be continued.