I've tried vitamin supplements to no avail. I've changed my diet. Still hasn't given me any energy. So I am going to trial the MaxGXL product for the next month and report back to you on how I feel.

Today was day one. I woke up, completely flat & had to get a friend to take my son to school and organised a taxi so our nanny (who can't drive (!)) could take my daughter to day-care. I had a meeting scheduled for 10.15 way out west and so we tried to arrange a conference call but it turned out that the lady we were meeting had forgotten about it anyway.

Which is a great initiative isn't it? In Australia (for our readers overseas - which I am stoked to say that there are a lot), our Government Health System keeps track of when you had your last Pap Smear and sends you reminders when you are due for your next one. They recommend one every year to two years. About 10 years ago, I had a dodgy result and had to have some dangerous cells lasered off my cervix. I went through a few years of having to have Pap Smears every six months. Now I'm due again and having been sick for so long, I am pretty apprehensive to get my Pap Smear done again, in case there is a problem. The last thing I need right now is another 'sick' thing to deal with. Really. I feel like it could tip me over the edge. Anyway, being a responsible person in training, I will go and have it done next week. It's the right thing to do.

Anyway, this blog entry was not meant to be about my personal issues but I've ranted again. When I received the letter, I had been thinking about the Sri Lankan asylum seekers who have NOTHING. The sheer desperation of their situation has me in tears. The contrast between us is breathtaking. Here we are in our beautiful, amazing and well functioning country where opportunity abounds and where our Government cares enough about its citizens that they send us letters to remind us to get a Pap Smear (!) No wonder they risk their lives and those of their children (that's the bit that gets me, that there are children involved - as a mother, I know how desperate the parents must be to put their children in this situation), in order to get to this Country.

An obvious statement - I know. What I'm talking about though is the way boys and girls are so different to raise. My son Jonah, is almost seven and my daughter Saskia is only two and a half. I remember Jonah being two and a half quite vividly. He was a really complacent child. Totally compliant with our plans - take him out to a nice restaurant, no worries. Take him over to friends places and he'd fit in perfectly. No trouble. Didn't care what you dressed him in. He wasn't really interested in what I was doing. He was interested in me, as his mother and provider of everything he needed, but he wasn't interested in what was going on around me (which is going to annoy him when he's older and realises that he spent a good year in and out of my model agency with beautiful girls taking turns at holding and playing with him!).

Now take Saskia. She is not only interested in everything going on around me, she wants to be me. She is infinitely more clingy than Jonah ever was. I have been at home with her for almost all of her life because I chose to work from home for the majority of the time so that I could be with her.I went straight back to work after having Jonah and wanted a different experience of motherhood with my second. When I am in the shower, she'll come in and start to get undressed to hop in with me, when I am doing my hair or makeup, she wants to do the same thing (which I totally discourage & which is confusing for her because she sees me having fun with this) and when I am writing, she has to sit on my lap while I try to type on my computer around her. Then there is the dressing.

OK, so following on from my earlier post, I promised to work out the history of the Golliwog dolls to see what racial implications were attached to them. You see, when I saw them for sale in two toy stores in Sydney, I felt that they were entirely inappropriate and I was offended. But why? We have dolls that represent white people, was it ok to have dolls that represented black people? Why not? Sounds rational but I intuitively felt that there was more to the story. So as promised below are some interesting pieces of information I have gathered - and yes, they are a hot pot of racial controversy. So it's interesting then that they are on-sale in toy stores in Sydney. Is it true what some media from the States are reporting about Australia being so far behind in gauging appropriateness? The US Website 'Gawker' reported on the 'Hey Hey It's Saturday! Red Faces' stunt where they were dressed as the Jackson 5 (but looked like Golliwogs) - "Wow, and American is being the voice of cultural sensitivity? Australia must be really messed up."

So, the Golliwog is a character of children's literature created by Florence Kate Upton in the late 19th Century which is depicted as a rag doll, inspired by the black face minstrels. Since then it has been reproduced as a children's toy. There are, according to the Wikipedia page, two schools of thought "The image of the doll has become the subject of heated debate.

to Blog about something that happened to me at a toy store a couple of weeks ago. Seeing the fallout of the Hey Hey It's Saturday Red Faces skit involving that group dressed up to do the Jackson 5 number - if you missed it, a group who first performed this 20 years ago, came back last night for a rendition - they are a group of Doctors who blackened their faces, with black 'gollywog' inspired hair, and a front man with a white painted face singing in the front who was supposed to be Michael Jackson - do you get the picture? Anyway, they had Harry Connick Jnr on judging the performances and he said that he was really disturbed and would not have come on the show had he known that they were using this kind of content. He found it racist and said that in the States they had moved so far on from this kind of behavior. It has ingnited some debate. Which brings me back to the toy store and my experience there that I have been waiting to blog about. I was buying a birthday present for my son Jonah's friend, whose party he was attending that night. The lady who worked there asked me to give my opinion on a new toy they had in - they were gollywog dolls. She said "what do you think about these?".