I am humbled, proud, excited and just a tad braggish to announce three huge milestones in my previously unacknowledged career as a parent.
First, our oldest child, who is six, started school this week, and kicked so many goals in doing so that it left a small, permanent tear in the corner of my eye. Truly, I could not have got through the past six years without her. Every day she teaches me how to survive on this crazy planet.
Second, our middle child, who is about to turn four, has now transitioned to being the elder sibling at his daycare, nailing it so brilliantly it leaves me dumbfounded. How do small, fragile persons handle change in such dignified, humourous and hopeful ways? His strength and sensitivity floor me daily.
Third, our youngest child, who is one, started daycare too. Oh boy, did he bring all the feels to that challenging task. But it took him just three days to sleep on an unfamiliar mattress, throw food at whoever was within range, and generally act like a hooligan (the carer’s word, not mine).
So today, rather than criticize myself because parenting isn’t a real career, I’m celebrating my three awesome ‘colleagues’, their amazing achievements, and my own small part in helping them realize their goals.
#parenting #children #career #proud
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Anyone who’s known me for longer than five minutes might want to sit down for this post.
Today I ran a 10-kilometre race for the first time in my 49 years on this mortal coil.
I’m now collapsed on the couch having applied a full bag of peas to my right knee, imbibed an ibuprofen-paracetamol cocktail and cracked a packet of S&V chips, shortly to be washed down with a crisp ginger beer courtesy of Coop.
You may call this living the dream.
I call it a midlife crisis dressed up as a cry for help.
For reasons of modesty, I’ll leave it to your imagination to calculate my new personal-best time.
Feel free to AMA.
Anyone who’s known me for longer than five minutes might want to sit down for this post.
Today I ran a 10klm race for the first time in my 49 years on this mortal coil.
I’m now collapsed on the couch having applied a full bag of peas to my right knee, imbibed an ibuprofen-paracetamol cocktail and cracked a packet of S&V chips, shortly to be washed down with a crisp ginger beer courtesy of Coop.
You may call this living the dream. I call it a midlife crisis dressed up as a cry for help.
For reasons of modesty, I’ll leave it to your imagination to calculate my new personal-best time.
Feel free to AMA.
I’m really proud to have played a small part in helping the International Forum for the Challenges of Peace Operations put together the second edition of its groundbreaking study on leadership in UN peace operations, Considerations for Mission Leadership in UN Peace Operations.
My role in the project entailed editing and bringing together six chapters written and reviewed by multiple authors into a coherent whole, adapting an existing InDesign template to produce web- and print-ready versions, and then uploading and publishing the entire report on PressBooks.
It’s probably one of the most complex projects I’ve worked on as a freelancer, and it gave me a whole bunch of insights into the pros and cons of desktop publishing using standard tools versus more agile (yet in other aspects limited) single-source publishing software.
I’d like to write more about that soon but for now, thanks to Sharon Wiharta and the Challenges Forum team for taking me on, and I trust the report will prove useful to its target audiences in the peace operations community worldwide.
Scene: The Sheldonian Theatre at the University of Oxford, Tuesday 30 May 1961. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, is the guest of honour.
Dressed in academic garb, Hammarskjöld remains seated while the Vice Chancellor recites a text in Latin conferring on him an honorary doctorate in civil law. An arcane set of gestures follows: cap dipping, presentations, more Latin.
At the end of the ceremony, Hammarskjöld delivers a lecture (in English, thankfully), entitled ‘The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact’. While the true history of the lecture, which the Foundation has just reissued, could fill a book, in this post I’d like to focus on the untold stories behind three known versions of the text.
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