Michelle Tant

I saw a blog prompt courtesy of @socialmoms "what's the one thing you couldn't live without for a week and why" and it captured my interest. My first thought was my phone. Like most people now, its not just a phone, its my access to the world... email, Facebook, Twitterland, texting, talking, calendar, note taking, blogging, internet... I even have my daily Bible reading program on it as well as the mini games like Angry Birds and Sudoku I play in the middle of the night while breastfeeding. Not forgetting that its my camera too; I het to instantly share gorgeous pics of my beautiful children with my family who don't live close. So not really an inconsequential thing in my life if truth be told. I immediately felt terrible about that. Surely there's more to me than my Android phone! I could live without it, I know I could. And why am I left with the nagging suspicion I sound like some kind of addict?! Is being surgically attached to my phone an addiction...

Today, 3 years after making the decision, I took the plunge, put my money where my mouth is and signed up to a writing course. There are a couple of reasons it took this long, one major one being I was already on a course which required me to write and I really find that writing uses lot of my creative energy and I didn't have 'enough left of me' after the essays I've been writing, to devote to creative writing. So here I am. The essays are done, I am well and truly set on that road that the course put me on and I'm happy with it. So happy in fact that I felt now was the right time to do this. I know that there is a school of thought that says if you want to write, then write. You don't need to do a course, but for me, the structure will be helpful so that is behind my reasoning for signing up... that and the fact I have no idea if I'm really any good or not at this! Another reason for going for it is that I turned 30 last year and I feel that if I ...

A blog a day keeps the stalemate away. That's what I'm hoping anyway. Suspect that while I'm trying to capture inspiration, the best thing to do is keep writing. So what today? Saw a friends newly decorated lounge: very stylish. Took the kids to the park: freezing. Currently cooking pizza for them: unimaginative. So my accumulated adjectives for the day are stylish, freezing and unimaginative. Now use them in a sentence. Lordy. Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.9

I have a year of changes coming up and I find I am wandering aimlessly around the internet looking for that elusive magical opportunity that will immediately strike me as being possible and interesting enough to motivate me. First major life change is having the baby. This brings the total to three. At the time she is born, I will have 3 under 5 years old and while we planned it to be so, it brings up certain challenges about childcare etc, life balance, why did we have children etc. We love being a family and so what we really want it to be able to spend more time with said family. I also enjoy working. That is, I love interacting with people, the stimulation is necessary for my emotional wellbeing and stability. I don't rely on them for my happiness but I do rely on adult interaction for a well rounded sanity level to be maintained. So while I don't RELY on them, people make me happy (and sad, but thats another rambling for another posted blog). So my other major change is th...

No-one can make you feel anything. When I first heard that I was inclined to disagree, afterall I can think of a dozen instances off the top of my head where I was made to feel mad, glad, sad, angry etc. Then think a moment longer. Can anyone make me do anything I don't want to? Short of threatening my loved ones or holding a gun to my head, no-one can make me do a single thing that I don't want to do. No-one that is, except for myself of course. So it naturally follows that if I can't be made to do a thing, then I can't be made to feel a feeling. So do I allow myself to feel things? Or is a feeling something which just happens to me without my control? And do I like that thought? Are my feelings just carrying on without my authority so to speak? Or do I have a decision in the direction my feelings take? If I initially feel angry about a situation, do I then have a choice to continue feeling that way or decide to feel something else. If I do decide to feel something els...

Clare bit her pencil and she read back her list of New Years Resolutions. The usual suspects appeared, as expected, year after year, flowing unprovoked from her pencil tip and of course year after year, here she was, writing the same list again. She broke off to get herself a cuppa and stood staring out of the kitchen window. On this clear Saturday morning there was a slight mist and a glaze of frost on the grass, transforming the garden into a sparkly winter wonderland. Of course the garden was on the list again, ‘keep garden tidy’ was up there with ‘buy a composter’. Like it was every year, no surprise there then. Likewise, ‘eat less biscuits’, ‘keep on top of housework’, ‘stop biting nails’, ‘do more arty things with the kids’. The latter had actually made a valiant attempt at sticking power, the potato prints and homemade cards lasting well into March but even that had trailed off into leaving them to it with the posterpaints, albeit with a brief foray into toilet tube rockets in O...