Giveaway... Help For Your Pelvic Floor

art. house. mum.

Now, I've got to be honest here, I haven't tried this product.  But pharmacies are selling it, so I'm guessing that it is what it says it is and does what it says it does.  

I'm guessing that most women are aware of the need to exercise their pelvic muscles... I'm all fine until I try bouncing on the kids' trampoline with anything in my bladder...

But it's more serious than that... and I am finding that this is quite hard to write.  I probably don't know much more on the subject than anyone my age and stage, but they say that exercising your pelvic floor muscles can help with bladder control after pregnancy; giving birth; sexual satisfaction; and bladder control with ageing.

I was approached recently to offer this giveaway of a product which is being released in Australia to readers of Art House Mum and initially I turned the offer down mostly because I thought that no one would want to publicly enter the giveaway.  But then, it is an important topic to talk about... and this product could be worth more than gold to the right person... so I'm testing a new way of hosting competitions and I'm hoping that it is a little more private than the old "leave a comment" system...  

And anyway, it got us talking about something that most of us are either dealing with already or will have to deal with in the future...  


So here's some information (taken from the media release I was sent) about the Intimina Kegel Exercisers which you have the chance to win in the next few days...

Fortunately, just like any other muscle group, they [the pelvic floor muscles] too can be trained and strengthened with the best solution being Kegel Exercisers from Intimina - helping you to effectively gain pelvic strength in a comfortable, easy, and convenient way.

Kegel Exercisers are made from safe, smooth silicone and you simply start by selecting one of three weighted balls depending on your level of current pelvic strength. Its is worn discreetly during your usual daily activities. By using this, you will be able to have a solid object to contract around making strengthening more effective. You will also be able to locate and know your pelvic floor muscles, to ensure everything is being done efficiently and correctly. As your body strengthens over time, you can use a heavier ball to provide more resistance and keep training your muscles.

The Kegel Exerciser ball responds to your bodies movements and almost forces pelvic floor

muscle contraction and release at times. Within each exerciser is a weighted ball that responds to your body’s movements, causing gentle kinetic vibrations to help prompt your pelvic floor muscles to respond as you walk around.

Kegel Exercisers are available in 3 different weights which can be used singly or combined to provide different levels of resistance.

A regular pelvic floor workout offers a range of benefits to women of all ages:

• Prevent and treat continence problems
• Build muscles used in childbirth for easier delivery
• Help speed recovery after labour
• Increase sensation during intimate activities for both you and your partner
• Ease the symptoms of menopause

Kegel Exercisers are easy to insert and remove, and they naturally position themselves to target the correct muscle set.

Pelvic floor exercises can be performed before problems arise as a preventative exercise. In support of this, research indicates that Kegel exercises are 66% effective at correcting pelvic floor problems without the need for additional medical treatment.

(Cammu et al., 2000).

May you have great bladder control your whole life long!  (Must remember to write that on the next wedding card I send...) 

**The competition will run until Wednesday the 4th July (Brisbane time) at roughly 2pm.  And I will notify the winner within a day... I won't put your name on the blog or Facebook this time...  


** To enter, DON'T leave a comment, but follow the instructions in the box below.  It should all make itself obvious... All the best!

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

PS.  I do my PF exercises when I'm reading...

Keeping it Postitive with a Mummycation...

art. house. mum.

Last week my good blogging friend, Ainsley, from its the little things, wrote a great post about her family's recent Daddycation when she went away for a night or two, leaving the kids to have fun with their dad.  It got me thinking... and then before I could book a trip away by myself the awful reality of life kicked in.  Matt told me that he would need to work on Saturday...  Our precious family plan-nothing do-next-to-nothing day. 

So, determined to take a leaf from this great mum's book, I coloured it in differently and adjusted the idea to suit... we would have a Mummycation instead.  Nothing spectacular.  Just a day when Cranky Mum was banished and Interested Mum was allowed to block out the piles of washing, stop counting exactly the number of mouthfuls of veges that the kids were munching on, and get involved in things happening in their funny little world.

The plan looked like this;

Make jelly early in the morning so that it would be set by lunch

Drop Matt up to work

Then go and buy some fresh bread and juice

Spend the morning doing puzzles, colouring-ins (to be downloaded form the net), make playdough creations together, read books, play outside

Go for a walk

Have a picnic party lunch of fairy bread, cheerios, and juice

Have a good rest,

Then head out for a play with the cousins.

The reality was even less glamorous, with a feverish two year old passing out well before lunch, and with the important inclusion of one of the girls' ideas... a trip to the bike track park.

Our Mummycation really didn't measure up to Ainsley's (or Scott's) Daddycation.  But! It did pull this Cranky Mum up and give me the ideas that I needed to allow myself to have (another) attitude check and turn what was sure to have been a misderable day fuelled by me feeling sorry for myself, cranky, trapped and like I was missing out on something, into a day of enjoying the company of our dear little people.  We even had a few adventures of our own with the mandatory visit to the public toilet in the local park giving me the chance to introduce the important words "pyromaniacs" and "vandalism" into these ever increasing vocabularies...

By the end of the day when we picked Matt up we were all exhausted, and it was firm in all our minds that he was the one we needed to be nice to to make up for the day that he had to miss out on having with his favourite little people.

Thanks Ainsley (and Scott)!

g

Making Tracks...

art. house. mum.

Okay, so this hardly constitutes a craft project, but it kept me busy for one evening after the kids had gone to sleep and I've been pleasantly surprised that my gut instinct that it was a worthwhile project seems to have been spot on.

You see, I'm not good at putting train tracks together, and no matter what experts say, I reckon that it would take a pretty gifted pre-schooler to set up a track of any interest that actually joins to itself in a loop.  And besides, I get just as frustrated as the big kids when Little Hands comes a destroys our hard work.  In short, despite having collected plenty of tracks and carriages, train play at our house has been very minimal until now.

But last week I finally tackled it.  I sat down (in absolute humility... not my strong area, train tracks...) and built the best track that I could with the pieces that we had.  Doesn't sound like a prize-worthy achievement, but I did manage to use all the bridges and interesting bits that we had.  I even glued a few of the trees on and had to improvise with structural support for under the bridge where those pieces were missing.

I have heard that it is best to use liquid nails for sticking down track (I'm having Better Homes flashbacks) and I think that that is probably right.  But my philosophy is always better to do it with what you have rather than wait until everything is perfect  so I used the craft glue which I had from another craft activity.

And you know what?  Any of the pieces which were of interest to Little Hands have since been wrestled free... and wedged back in by me or the girls.  And while there are very few trees still attached, the rail, though wobbly in areas is still passable in its entirety.

And the greatest thing of all?  The numerous sessions since then of all sorts of train-related play.  We've seen train marriages, train fights, train races, trains meeting and becoming friends, trains working, trains having emergencies... Thomas, eat your heart out! 

Do you like putting the train tracks together, or is it just me?

g

Old Gum Tree Sketch Painting...

art. house. mum.

There's something almost sculptural about some gum trees. 

I thought that I had the chance to get up to the studio on my own this afternoon to start a warm-up sketch painting or two... but this is how I worked for most of the time... with a feverish little boy in my arms.  If there's one thing about being the mum of little kids, you soon find out just how many things you can do one-handed...

Poor little fella.

And then there was stage two... adding the background mountains.  I just love the way the two closest mountains seem to act like a curtain opening and letting us glimpse the amazing things going on behind them.  Very theatrical.

Anyone else been painting lately?

g

Winter Embrace...

art. house. mum.

Gotta tell you, this winter's already been stretching the friendship.  With a flu doing the  rounds that's a bit clingy and cold nights that mean we have a few too many heaters running for my liking, I've been struggling a bit with keeping the positive momentum flowing. 

So in defiance of all the hard bits, I'd like to celebrate the things about this winter which are making me feel that I will certainly mourn its passing in a few short months.

Right now I'm loving

• Citrus fruit being handed out from people's backyard abundance (thanks, friends!)
• The first batch of my second season of marmalade... I'm a rough old cook, but it still tastes brilliant.
• Later sleep-ins at least once a week.
• More date-nights in as the nights fall so quickly (for this part of the world) and the urge to go out is absolutely nil.
• A string of sunny days after a wet spell.
• The joy of my increasingly fashion-aware girls at their first pair of "fancy" boots.
• Seeing our little boy and others in knitted vests.
• Only having to mow the grass once in nearly six weeks... more weekend time with Matt.
• Learning to slow cook good red meat dishes (I'm a steak-a-phob) and seeing how much Matt appreciates them.

The seasons do come and go, I've figured that out by now, so it feels good to pully myself up and start embracing this one for what it has to offer.

What are you enjoying about this season?

g

Dressing Up Some Bed Drawers... Or What Was I Thinking?

art. house. mum.

In my head it sounded like a great chance to include the kids in some home improvement craft.  In reality What Was I Thinking.  Note to self: two-year-old boys do NOT mix with house paint.  Or maybe they mix a little too well...

We started by lining the drawers of two captians' beds up on a painting sheet outside the shed.  It was the first glorious sunny day after a long weekend of rain... any excuse to be outside...

The kids did a great job of giving the drawer faces a light sand. I have found that painting the face of drawers of an item of furniture (nothing too prescious, naturally) is a fun, easy, quick way to brighten things up.

The paint colour got the seal of approval from the bedroom owners...

And then I remebered why it has been a while since I've done painting with the boy around...  Let's just say that I envisaged the painting happening with a brush.  The handpainting made me nervous. 

And it didn't deliver a particularly even coat...

But there's not much that a dunking under a cold hose can't clean... and not much that can't be mended when the kids are having nap.  I'm laughing now, so I'm sure that that proves that it was worth including the kids... they couldn't understand how I could get so tense so quickly...  I just didn't like the prospect of explaining to Matt why our house, his ute, the concrete... was suddenly half pink!

Three In A Boat

art. house. mum.

Recently a friend asked me to do a painting for their children's playroom.  

She wanted something large, stylised and celebrating children.  After coming across a beautiful photo in an old Country Style magazine of a picnic spot on a lake under willow trees I was inspired to paint this for her.  Today it got the final okay from her.  So after a few coats of varnish it'll be leaving my old easel to watch carefully over children playing...

I'll see you back here in a few days... I've decided to slow down on the old blog posts for a while because I've been needing to spend extra time on my art... what a nice problem to have!

g

Three Things... Sleep-Space Improvements

art. house. mum.

A rainy long weekend meant some home projects were tackled.  Some had waited longer for attention than others...

• Some Wheatie Bags (filled with rice... too easy) to keep our kids warm in their beds at night.

• Some new curtains for our bedroom (fabric from Ikea... so cheerful and relaxing all at once).

• And our baby moved into a big bed... so much earlier than the girls did...

Oh So Good... Beetroot

art. house. mum.

 

Today I tried something I've been wanting to do for ages.  I preserved some of my old season beetroots.  I've been leaving them in the ground until I was ready to cook with them, but because I am the only one in the family who truelly loves beetroot, it's been a good few months that these gems have been sitting in the ground and I want to start planting that patch again soon.

I used this recipe (roughly, of course) and found it easy to do while I got a bit of planning done for the week.

The smell was amazing...for a beetroot lover.  And it got me thinking about why I love beetroot.  When I was a kid I didn't know about fresh beetroot.  But I did love the tinned variety.  Dad and I used to both love drinking the vinegary (probably sugary) fluid that the beetroots came in.  Strangely, no one else liked it...  I loved the flavour and texture (and colour, I suspect) of those beetroot.  But when I stumbled on growing my own fresh beetroot a few years back my love of beetroot reached a new level.  That fresh earthy flavour!

And then I heard about how purple vegetables have valuable natural chemicals which may help prevent some cancers... Too good!

And then Matt got a bit sick of me sneaking beetroot into... well most things really.  And he politely asked if I wouldn't mind keeping my beetroot to myself.  Oh.  Our beetroot consumption slowed dramatically, but I did find that Matt and the kids started eating my lasange again... and my risotto... and the pizzas... and...

But now I am hopeful that I can eat my lovely beetroot again with ease and without impinging on anyone else's right to beetroot-free dining. But the recipe says that you should wait two weeks before eating the pickles.  And you know how I love to stick to a recipe...

 

I'll tell you how they taste in a few days ;-)

g



Agave Event Update

art. house. mum.

The photos really just don't do justice to this collosal flower. When I stand under the arch which this beautiful plant has made I feel almost that it is wasted on our little deck.  Really it should be the centrepiece of someone's wedding.

The blossom is moving up the arch with little ado, and while the colour's not wild, the journey is amazing in its length and detail.  Much like life, No?

And then there's the punchline which one of my visiting friends told me.  The plant will die when the flowering ends.  It gives its all into this show... or is it a pre-emptive wake?  Then it will die leaving the pups at its base to grow and mature. Oh are you  loving the poetry of nature as much as I am?

I promise to bore you with this again soon.

g

One Last Chook... And How to Win Another

art. house. mum.

Well, here's the last chook of the series. 

And I thought that I should let you know that the chook below is the chook you could win if you want to enter a raffle (sorry, I got it wrong... not an auction as I said last week).

The raffle is being organised as part of the anual musical theatre fundraising event run by the Helen Earley Ensemble and is raising money for the Fresh Hope program.  Fresh Hope is an unique program which is helping women get out of bad places in their lives.  What sets it apart is that it is one of the only drug and alcohol rehab programs around which allows mothers to bring their children with them as they set out on one of the hardest journeys they will ever face.  As a mum, I feel that this is such an important thing for a mother and her children.  Not glamorous or easy, but important.

 

So anyway, if you'd like to support Fresh Hope and buy a ticket or two for your chance to win the lovely chook below you can flick Helen Earley an email before Friday 15th June 2012.  Apparently tickets for the event have sold out, but tickets for the raffle should still be available.

The painting is acrylic on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.  It measures roughly 41cm x 31cm (roughly, because I forgot to measure it before I sent it on its adventurous way).

Also, why not take a minute to check out Fresh Hope's site.  Start the week with a breath of inspiration from people working hard to make hope real for families who really need it.

g

Cluck Cluck!

art. house. mum.

I got a few small paintings completed last week.  Some are for a group show later in the year and one is destined for a fundraising auction later this month.  When I know which one it is I'll give you details...

But for now, here's a  couple of little chooks to get your end-of-week off to a clucking good start!

Have a good weekend.

g



Three Things... Birthday Boy

art. house. mum.

I get it now.  The baby will never grow up... we said a big Thank You for him this week on his second birthday... but in my heart he is still a newborn...


He showed no interest in unwrapping his presents...

Plenty of interest in the "cake"...

And had the most fun with... a balloon. 

Sam we love you.  What a treat to watch you grow.  Just like money doesn't buy the best presents, money can't buy the kind of cuddles you give...

g

Row Row Row...

art. house. mum.

This perfect little princess kept our little monsters entertained for hours this weekend with endless requests for the second verse of "Row Row Row Your Boat"... did you know it had one?

Row row row your boat

Gently down the stream.

If you see a crocodile

Don't forget to sceam. Argh!

And now it's stuck in your head too.  Sorry about that...

g

The Eyes Have It...

art. house. mum.

I love how this little side-table with drawers looks a bit like a face...

Okay, not quite, but it has eyes at least?...

Have a great day.

g

A Sketchbook Somewhere...

art. house. mum.

I've just gotten myself a new sketchbook.  So, from here at this rainy beach, to wherever you are, greetings and sketches!

g