The tide...

...is on the turn. It's an imperceptible shift. Things are changing slowly, like each wave receding with every break as the tide goes out. This shift fills me with hope and positivity. It's a shift in the way we live. It's a change in the way society thinks and acts. It's a nice change. I think society is finally changing out of it's serious business suit and into something a bit more casual and comfy...maybe some stretchy skinny legs and a hand knitted jumper.
I'm a bit of a voyeur of human nature. I'm fascinated by the way people chose to live their lives and what motivates them. For a long time I've been cringing at the ugliness of folks' lives. There are way too many big houses, big mortgages and miserable faces. Early wrinkles and strung out kids. There are tick the box holidays that are great for little more than comparing with other ambitious, high functioning families. Holidays to tourist brochure landmarks only reached by air, and often with a passport. The kind of holidays you need a holiday to recover from, if only you didn't have to get your bum back to work to pay for them.
Then there's the flow on to the kids. In this frantic, success driven world we live in babies are educated in high quality, early childcare, enriched with organized classes in everything from massage to music. They are wrestled into expensive three year old kinder if they need it or not. Then they take those first tentative steps into prep wearing a too big uniform to be faced with testing. Testing to determine, if they were a dot, where they might fall on the graph. Nothing like emphasising the importance of success and failure early on, hey?
Anyhoo, let me hop off my high horse, and let him have a rest. Good boy Horace, calm down, there's a good horsey. I can do this because I no longer feel like the only one putting child raising in high lights. I'm not alone in finding satisfaction in making our house a home. My choice to make play dough and cardboard dolls houses (cool isn't it, very proud of that engineering feat) with my son and daughter is no longer seen as indulgent laziness or an affront to the work of generations of feminists. After all, isn't equality about having the freedom of choice?
All those clever classes mean jack. Kids get far more from sitting down watching Playschool with Mum (or Dad) then going nuts with toilet rolls and sticky tape than they do from over produced, over priced deliveries of child centred tossery.
More families are choosing to set up camp in a caravan park for their holidays too. We no longer look like retro throwbacks amongst the grey nomads, because we are not alone in realizing this kind of fun is wholesome, low key and low stress. Not to mention it's cheap enough to pack up and head off rather frequently. Win win.
These days if your not growing massive zucchinis and collecting eggs from your own chooks, you're not cool. Getting handy with some felt and knitting needles is right up there in the cool stakes too. In fact, short of bee keeping and solar powered tellies, most of us have gone a bit self sufficient hippie in these modern times. I like it. Just keep the teepee and kaftan, thanks.
It all fills me with hope and excitement. I'm loving this life, we're learning that having it all doesn't necessarily mean doing it all. Just the bits we fancy. So, my kids get to do their trendy class. One each at a time. The rest of their lives are left open for being kids. Free play, mess making and driving me nuts. It's good for them, and so long as I get my cup of tea and quiet sit down, it's good for me too.




As buntyandsars heads into winter, I'm looking to invest a bit of time in putting together my super flash work space. A new drawing room on which to pin my little sign. I'm going to pare down the number of markets I do for a little while and get interior decorator busy. We've also got an almost completed renovation waiting patiently for soft furnishings and clever paint finishes, so i'll keep you updated with pics of the nifty things I'm doing. I'm hoping to get stuck into a bit more blogging, too, and keep you all Facebook updated with interesting bits from my life. Because when it boils down to it, I see buntyandsars as a brand encompassing all that is me, in all my shades of colour and crazy!
See you at Piccadilly market (www.piccadillymarket.blogspot.com) in Geelong this Sunday!