Cherry Pop

My name is Steph.

I only decided to start a blog because 140 characters on Twitter isn’t nearly enough for me to say what I want to. That and my Mum has been harrassing me about writing stuff down because she likes my emails. I think that’s because there’s always a drama in my life and things go wrong a lot in my house. A mixture of the two usually make for entertaining reading she says. She’ll be thrilled I’ve dedicated a blog about my misfortunes in her honour.

I am from Sydney, but have been living in London for five and a half years. I’m married to the worlds most patient man, who loves me even though I have a massive online shopping problem. We have four crazy children. Holly (8), Luca (5), Charlie (3) and Jude (1). We were only supposed to have three but sometimes vasectomies just don’t work like they should. We also have a very old deaf King Charles Spaniel called Peanut and a neurotic cat who I wish I’d called Duchess, but he’s a boy so we called him Jersey. He’s a Ragdoll cat and thinks he’s human.

I like my life. I’m very blessed with what I have but things haven’t always been peachy. I suffered the loss of our first-born twin daughters. They had a disease called Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), were both born prematurely and sadly died. It’s okay, it was 10 years ago now and I’ve had a shitload of therapy and now have four lovely living children. But it’s the worst thing I’ve ever had happen to me. Yet.

I love living in London and still after all these years I get excited when I visit somewhere from the Monopoly board. I love Sydney too, but at the moment I love London a bit more. I like that some of our families come to visit us, and that some of them don’t. Nothing wrong with 17,000km’s between families. I can’t stand family squabbles and England is about as far away from Australia as we can get to avoid that without actually leaving Earth.

I can’t stand wanky school Mums who think because of what their husbands do makes them better than other Mums. There’s isn’t a much nicer personality attribute in my view than being humble. 

I never imagined myself as the Mother of four children. I find parenting small children difficult and I go to bed most nights thinking I’m a shit parent. I lie there going over the things I should or shouldn’t have done and then wake up and do it all over again. I am the ultimate self criticiser. 

I shout a lot, but I’m working on that.

S.