Join me as I share my personal experience with postnatal depletion. This heartfelt blog post delves into the challenges faced by new mums and the importance of self-care during the postnatal period. Gain insights and find solace in knowing you are not alone on this journey. Read on to connect and heal together.

My daughter has a large compound infantile hemangioma on her neck at the base of her skull. Two and a half years ago I didn’t know what that was, and it's possible you might not either. As it happens, Infantile Hemangiomas are the most common type of vascular lesions, more commonly known as birthmarks, in children. You've probably seen them before and didn't know what they were called, though you might have heard them referred to as strawberry marks just like I had. Despite how common they are, I feel like calling them a birthmark is actually an anomaly because this kind of lesion is not present at birth, but appears within the first two weeks of life…

… I spent a couple of weeks slowly working on the mobiles, all the while wondering if I would finish in time before my baby arrived. It probably took me a total of about twelve hours, and although it was a bit tedious at times trying to ensure that each piece was balanced correctly, I enjoyed the creative process. I was excited to work so carefully on something that my new baby would be able to enjoy just a short time later and it gave me a sense of satisfaction to feel like I was doing something purposeful whilst waiting for her/his arrival. It’s interesting to reflect on this now as one of the things that I most liked about using the mobiles with her over the following months was similarly the purpose it gave her when I put her down to play/work on the floor. As mentioned above, Montessori materials are designed to help infants engage purposefully with materials that suit their developmental ability and this engagement is referred to as work. Observing my baby engaging in this work it was clear how much she enjoyed it.

If you’re in Australia and you’re trying to raise children to be truly bilingual or multilingual, you might think this will have purely by osmosis but this is rarely the case. In most instances, for children to acquire similar competency in the community language as they will eventually have in the dominant language (English, in this instance) it requires a consistent and intentional approach on behalf of the parents. Here I talk about some of the approaches you might consider trying on the long journey of raising children to be bilingual and multilingual.