Book week and conference.

Time to get the cloaks out again. Book Week parade was Thursday at school, and the boys, as usual, chose characters who needed cloaks, which is fine with me as they are cheap and easy to make. Both went as people from the Deltora Quest series of books. Ruby chose to be Laura Ingalls, as we are reading through the series of books again. The last time I reads them she was only a todder, now she is the perfect age to enjoy them. I have the perfect "Laura" dress, as you can see in the pictures. My grandma made it for me when I was 8 or 9 and I thought it extremely fancy. So I got that out of the cupboard and made an oldfashioned cap with some material and a bit of ribbon and hey presto, costume done. The kids wore their dress-ups all day at school, which they loved. The teachers get dressed up too, some quite elaborately. One of the kindergarten teachers, who is actually the husband of Ruby's teacher, dressed up as a Smurf, complete with blue face makeup.

Yesterday I spent the day at Luna Park in Sydney, at the function centre there for the annual NSW College of Midwives State Conference. Myself and several other students were speaking about the student experience. A very entertaining, informative and uplifting day. Our 20 minute presentation went very well and we had a lot of people coming up to us afterwards and congratulating us. Mostly though it is so nice to be in a room full of 250 other midwives, knowing that we all want the same thing- the best care for women and babies. The key note speaker was Dr Andrew Bisset, who is absolutely inspiring. He's an obstetrician who is extremely active in the skill of vaginal breech birth, something that has come under a lot of scrutiny in the past 10 years and was more or less stopped at most hospitals, with all breech babies delivered by c section. So listening to Dr Bisset was amazing, he is passionate about birth and believes 100% in a woman's ability to birth her baby naturally. I came away from the day feeling revived and refreshed and re-energised, which is a good thing as I have been feeling so flat lately. This year has been hard, hard, hard. The assignments are heavy in topic (I'm in the middle of a dificult newborn resuscitation essay), and I think we have all run out of steam. So the conference was exactly what I needed.