KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

We had grand plans to paint baby's nursery a cute colour or paint a feature wall like in our bedroom but we never got around to it. Instead, we went with quick and easy wall decals. Boyfriend Pham wanted an Australiana-themed nursery for Baby Pham because he'll grow up surrounded by Americanisms in pop culture. It took us about 8 months after Baby was born to decorate his room because we had other things to worry about. Namely, how the hell to parent so baby boy thrives.

Somewhat ironically, we got our Australian-themed wall decals from Spain. DecoDeCoco is a small, independent business that sells their designs on Etsy. Once I stumbled upon the design, I couldn't imagine another decal set in Baby's room. This is perfectly cute. Baby animals that aren't too cartoonish or creepily realistic. And it hasn't given Baby nightmares like the giraffe soft toy a friend gifted. Baby Pham has definitely been a cuddly koala this year so his room decorations are very fitting. 

Since this photo was taken we've installed blockout blinds and replaced his ceiling fan with something newer, smaller and quieter. Seems like 9 months old is when life got easier and we were able to do nice things instead of focussing on the bare minimum. 

There are so many wonderful things about pregnancy. I wish I had experienced some of them. Unfortunately, I don't carry pregnancy well. In addition to sciatica and gestational diabetes, I started getting cankles at the end of Trimester 1 when a lot of women only start to experience it towards the end of their pregnancy.

I have lived in compression socks for nearly half a year. Doesn't sound so bad until you realise I'm in sunny and humid Brisbane and am having a summer baby and 2023 decided to end the year with a heatwave followed by wild summer storms and 90-something percent humidity day and night. The end of my pregnancy has been a form of heat torture due to the raging hormones and excess blood in my system.

On the upside, I got some really good quality compression socks from a local company on the Gold Coast called Funky Sock Co. I got a 3-pack of funky designs for fun, and then a 3-pack of neutrals (black, white, nude) for work.

I got a cheap pack of socks before finding Funky Sock Co, and they were OK but weren't as firm as I needed. You get what you pay for. Funky Sock Co has an excellent compression progression from the top to the bottom of the sock. On my bloatier days, I need Boyfriend Pham to help remove my Funky Socks at the end of the day and miraculously, my ankles have not become cankles.

I highly recommend Funky Sock Co to any mummas-to-be. https://www.funkysockco.com.au/

Our fertility and pregnancy experience

Let's take a break from my IVF and pregnancy experience to talk about stupid home automation. We have lights and hub from the Phillips Hue range on a tech friend's recommendation. The Phillips Hue Bridge connects to and controls the Phillips smart bulbs - there are more advanced options with motion sensors, but we wanted to start with the basics.

I love the idea of home automation in theory. The reality is, that you probably need programming skills to set up actually smart home automation. The current settings and rule options in our "smart" lights remind me of clunky eCommerce store sales rules logic where a programmer built what they could and not what they should, limiting the options to end users like me.

We wanted to set up smart lights that would:

1. Turn on at sunset each day. Tick.
2. Fade and turn off by a certain time of night. Took 5 routines to set this fading effect up, but - tick.
3. Turn on when one of us comes home after dark. No tick.

I didn't think it'd be impossible to set the lights to only turn on when it's dark / after a certain time but apparently, it is. The option was to turn on the lights regardless of the time of day whenever one of us arrived home, or nothing at all. Our house is bright and we don't use lights during the day so we opted for nothing at all. Otherwise, we'd end up turning the lights off multiple times a day instead of turning the lights on occasionally when we arrive home after the fade and turnoff routines have run at night.

Hopefully, the software will improve over time. For now, we've settled with having dumb smart lights with limited usage and Boyfriend Pham just yells at Google to turn the lights on. I'm waiting for maternity leave to remove work apps from my personal phone so I can enable Google Assistant voice activation - currently, they're disabled for work security reasons and I'm too lazy to carry around two mobile devices so I sacrifice my right to Google voice. Dumb, smart me.

When I finally got COVID-19 and home quarantined for the first time last year, I signed up for a month of free Woolworths online grocery shopping. I have not unsubscribed. The $15 monthly subscription for unlimited, free deliveries (when you spend over a certain amount) is worth the 60-90 minutes I save every Sunday morning.

It means more time with Boyfriend Pham to start my day and more time with Dad Pham who I used to visit after the grocery shop. Also, no longer walking around the car park to find an available shopping cart in Inala Shopping Centre has been a dream come true. The poor Woolies trolley team cannot keep up with demand there.

The convenience of adding items to the cart in the mobile or web app as we use them up during the week is great for people with short-term memory brain fart symptoms. You add it as items run out and it saves your cart, then when you go back later to complete your order everything you ran out of during the week is ready to go. Woo!

There are some downsides to online groceries. Sometimes, your items are out of stock by the time the team picks up your order. Other times, they may pick your order but the bag/s do not make it to you. Whether they were given to someone else or left at the store, I never quite know. I've only had one major mix-up where half my order was missing. Other times it has been only 1-3 items. The good news is Olive, their chatbot can pull up your order and automatically refund any missing items. No need to call customer service and wait in a phone queue. But the vast majority of the time, my order arrives as expected so I rarely chat to Olive.

There's also the choice of fresh produce. I personally prefer smaller bananas but I suppose because the app charges per banana instead of by weight, the picker feels obliged to pick the ginormous bananas that I eat in two sittings. But, you know, if that was a dealbreaker then I could just shop in-store or at markets for my fresh produce. I take giant bananas for the convenience.

I've online grocery shopped for over a year and can think of only two times when I had to dash to the shops as an out-of-stock item was critical for meal prep that day.

Another online shopping fail will only affect dopey folks like me who don't pay close enough attention and buy items based on photos. You see, an image of tinned goods doesn't give you perspective. For example, a 125g tin of corn looks the same as a 370g tin of corn unless you read the description or zoom in on the photo of the label. I've had a couple of laughs when I accidentally ordered mini-corn and mini-cheese and giant freezer bags.

Overall, I cannot recommend online grocery shopping enough to save you logistics and time!

Boyfriend Pham and I don't have much in common in our daily lives. We share core principles and values though how we enact them is worlds apart, we share a love of food though mostly different foods; and our favourite colour is green - I've never asked for details but I'd assume different greens based on our history of not having much in common.

Boyfriend Pham is not one to do things by halves so when we painted our downstairs feature wall midnight blue-purple, he also painted a feature wall in our bedroom. We've binged quite a few Never Too Small videos on YouTube during the 2020-2021 lockdowns when we started to think smarter about how we use our space. He ended up buying the Never Too Small book by Joel Beath and found inspo in a tiny apartment that had a dark green wall framing balcony doors. It framed the jungle beyond the glass doors and made the view pop.

We own a mortgage debt for a humble townhouse in Brisbane and, well, let's say the previous owners or original builders did a bit of a hack job with paint colour combos. Our bedroom has four different shades of cream and beige across the walls, door, frames and skirting boards. Why?!

Boyfriend Pham plans to repaint the whole house room by room but first, he wanted to learn how to paint by doing small feature walls. His first attempt was the desk feature wall downstairs. Our bedroom was attempt two. We used a grey paint base under the forest green. The dark feature wall instantly changed the feel of the space. It's now cosy and warm and snug as we fall asleep; not beige, boring and bright.

We got new curtains that look nice... so long as you don't look down and see how we hemmed them with double-sided tape. Regrets. We wish we'd sewn the hem instead because ironing the tape ruined our rug by getting bits of glue on it, and also made the curtain hem permanently wrinkled. We did not research curtains at all compared to the weeks and months of pondering the feature wall colour and painting. Oops. We'll replace the curtains in a decade or so, I guess. How long do curtains last? I might know if I researched them. 

I adore Steve Carell. The Office kept me good company while I worked in government and realised The Office jokes were very much based on reality. But one of my favourite Steve Carell moments is from Anchorman - the I love lamp scene. This post isn't actually about my love for Steve Carell. It's about how much I love the new desk lamp that Boyfriend Pham bought for me.

I work from home 2-3 days a week and my desk nook is quite dark. It's not near the one window that would have shed light on it except for the part where it's west facing, doesn't get morning sun and the afternoon sun is blocked by our neighbours' generous garden trees. It keeps the house nice and cool through summer but also keeps the desk nook quite dark. Too dark for Zoom meetings because you can see my silhouette against a bright background and not my facial expressions.

For some reason, the downlights in the room are wired so that if I turn on the light over the desk, it turns on 3 downlights. It seemed excessive and wasteful to have them on all day while I worked on and off in Zoom. In my last role, I had a work Macbook that isn't a decade old so the camera was OK in low light. In the new and not improved Windows environment, the laptop camera and Logitech camera couldn't agree with Zoom to show my face in low light.

I mentioned this to Boyfriend Pham in passing one day and he went and found the Vivo vesa mount desk lamp that mounts to the back of the screen (instead of the cumbersome clip-on that blocks part of the screen or one that grips the desk). This means I can set and forget the lamp - it adjusts with the screen when I move the screen up and down, and doesn't block my view at all. Unlike the cat, who constantly gets in my way.