Day in the Life of a Sydney Stay at Home Mum

Even in winter we're at the beach

OK, so while I wait for the Institute of Teachers to approve my teacher status, I am wiling away the hours at home with my little one. It's a sweet reminder of what the first year of her life was like, and now that she's just turned two, a hell of a lot more fun. It's also a welcome reprieve from what was a hellish year of huge challenges and changes as I trained as a teacher. I am now done! And I have a long hot happy summer stretched out before me.

Why Revenge is Changing the Way Women in TV Operate Forever

Emily and Victoria...

The hit TV drama series of 2012 Revenge is breaking all the rules.

Its two female protagonists, Victoria Grayson and Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke are carving a place for themselves in history as the first women to showcase both an abundance of talent and roles which snap the female mold in half. And it has proved so popular it is likely more TV dramas will go down the path of Revenge. Women will be finally allowed to kick, bite, fight, be slovenly and slatternly, be covetous and violent, take multiple lovers. Gays will get roles with real integrity and substance, not just as sexual vessels or playful accessories for pure comic relief.

Both Victoria and Emily have two love interests, both male. Victoria's two men are not her husband, the third man in her life. It is a coup for polyamorists everywhere and more audience friendly than Big Love. Even Victoria's affair and the resulting child, her only daughter, is no big deal for this taboo littered drama.

Emily is not only in love with two men simultaneously, she is shown in a bipolar existence, with two names and two very different personas: Emily, the belle of every Hampton ball; graceful, elegant and at the height of etiquette. Amanda on the other hand is the violent bad mannered juvie who beats up men. But so does Emily, when she has to 'defend the nest'.

It is a conflicted and fantastic departure from when television viewers have been fed for decades. These women are not just smart and feisty. They are bad. And the more bad they are, the more glamorous they are. It's a winning formula.

We see women behaving like animals in the wild, unrestrained, with multiple lovers and highly complicated desires. Their scheming sees them win over men every time and the sheer number of tools at their disposal makes them indomitable foes.

We see young Charlotte, the product of her mother's affair with falsely accused terrorist and Emily/ Amanda's father, David Clarke, getting addicted to Oxycontin and start kissing several men. As she falls into bed with her dealer, she follows the path of her mother Victoria and her half sister Emily/Amanda in getting active with more than one man.

It is just so refreshing to see women behaving badly, or naturally, on television and such a welcome departure from the tripe of the tired, sometimes slightly misogynistic dramas we get fed.

And like the rest of the world, I'm hooked.

Pregnant In Heels

Rosie Pope, WTF?

I watch a lot of television. This only started happening about 18m + 9m ago, when I became less mobile with a placenta and foetus inside me, swollen legs, and climaxing blood pressure making me feel like I weighed over 100 kilos. Oh wait, I did. Then, as is usually the case during a uncomplicated pregnancy, the huge belly transformed ineluctably into an alien baby.

Contrary to my hopes and desires, I became even less mobile, with obesity and major surgery recovery, and a four kilo baby to lug around. Add breastfeeding to the pile and I became a TV addict.

I turned to TV as my lifeline and my connection to the outside world. And baby, did she deliver. I ploughed through the entire 1st, 2nd and 3rd series of Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant, getting parenting tips and pitfalls from Farrah and Amber, learning how to deflect child service investigators and how to recover from breast enlargement surgery with a two year old. the extra expert support from Dr Drew was invaluable.

I was right there with Bentley's toilet training, Leah's parental separation confusion and Caitlin's "Woops I gave my baby away to a complete stranger and now I'll never see her again". I even got right into the second series featuring the hipster Chelsea, off her face Jenelle, workaholic Kailyn and southern belle of disabled twins Leah before getting a serious case of indigestion.

I then consumed entire series of old faves Californication, Dexter, the new Homeland, Revenge (patriotic to Rabbit Proof Phillip Noyce to the end) and Covert Affairs and ending up with half unfinished True Blood and Pregnant in Heels (PIH).

Pregnant in Heels stopped me in my obese tracks.

WTF is a Maternity Concierge? Who are these women? And where on earth did Rosie Pope, God bless her, pick up that bizarre bastardised accent?

And why does every chick show require a gay, preferably black, trickster?

Before exposure to PIH I thought women who had never cleaned, women who insisted on two nannies per baby and women who swore they would never change their new baby's nappy were urban myths. Or, fantasies. My fantasy, to be precise.

Then, lo and behold, I discover entire neighbourhoods in a small, anthropologically distinct island in the Atlantic are packed with women who never smell or even see their own baby's shit. You should have heard my whining. My husband was ready to pack me off to the meat packers district or Noho in an abattoir refuse box.

We watch reality TV to sneak into other people's lives. But watching PIH I was blasted into several truly bizarre scenarios every episode that made Jersey Shore and Real Housewives look like the nightly news. Or a mild case of chlamydia compared to the major herpes outbreak that was PIH.

Suffice to say, it had me on the edge of my seat and I'd give PIH a rating of 9/10 for pure madness. Only in America? I hope not! Give me two nannies any day!