Flatulence is the funny fodder for Zoe Foster Blake’s first children’s book No One Likes a Fart

FLATULENCE is the funny fodder for Zoe Foster Blake’s latest venture. The author and mum of two says she’s too busy to fart around with boring projects — so she wrote a kids’ book.

IT’S not in many interviews you get to legitimately ask: “Who farts the most at your place?” Zoe Foster Blake blames the baby first, then the child, then the husband. “I’m a lady and ladies don’t do that,” she says.

“It’s funny. For someone who doesn’t like farts, I’ve now got myself into a place where I’m talking about them constantly.”

Flatulence is the funny fodder for Foster Blake’s first children’s book No One Likes a Fart, a sentence she often finds herself saying to her radio funnyman and Gold Logie-winning hubby Hamish Blake, their son Sonny, 3, and baby daughter Rudy.

Aimed at three-to-six-year-olds, it’s her debut drop into the throng of kids’ books with celebrity authors, names that include A-listers Madonna and Julianne Moore, English comedian David Walliams, as well as homegrown stars such as Isla Fisher, Peter Helliar, Shaun Micallef, Blake’s radio partner-in-crime Andy Lee, and Dave Hughes, whose recently released Excuse Me! — written with wife Holly Ife — is also about bottom burps.

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“I wanted the book to be fun for adults, too, because they’re the ones who end up reading it 40 times,” Foster Blake, 37, says.

“Also, when you’re doing a fart book, people immediately think it’s going to be crass and vulgar, so we deliberately wanted the pictures to be lush and beautiful. The story’s very sweet, too.”

Don’t be surprised if this fart story with heart is the first of several kids’ books by Foster Blake. She has a lot more yarns in her, as well as a bevy of other projects, on top of running To-Go skin care, which employs 20 people, and raising Sonny and Rudy.

“I get bored quickly,” she says. “There’s a deep-seated creative ADD in me that has to be satisfied with new projects all the time. But now I have children, I’m much more efficient and specific and intolerant of ideas that take away my time with them.

“There are a few ideas bubbling. I’m waiting for my fiction muse to come back. I haven’t written any fiction for a while — apart from this — but after you’ve had a baby, you’ve got no brain for a while.”

Known for her warm and witty writing, Foster Blake has penned four chick-lit novels, including 2010’s Playing the Field, centred on a long-suffering WAG (drawn from her decade dating former rugby pin-up Craig Wing), and The Wrong Girl, which was turned into a TV series on Channel 10 starring Jessica Marais.

Building on her decade working for women’s magazines, she’s also written a beauty tips and tricks guide named Amazing Face (and its sequel Amazinger Face), and co-authored dating guide A Textbook Romance in 2009 with Blake.

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Foster Blake’s Instagram post of hubby Hamish Blake as Batman with their kids for Halloween.

The pair began dating the following year and wed in 2012 in the Blue Mountains. Foster Blake grew up in Bundanoon, a small town in the NSW Southern Highlands, the youngest of a blended family of eight children.

She moved to Sydney at 18 and worked as a telemarketer, a supermarket night packer and a promo girl selling cigarettes in nightclubs before starting a beauty blog and working in mags.

Today, she and Blake live in a $4.5 million house in Richmond that was featured on Grand Designs Australia. Her Insta feed is filled with their seemingly charmed life, though she admits to pulling back on the posts of late. She cites laziness and being conscious of “baby-spamming” her 620,000-strong following.

Perhaps it’s also because just about every post from her social media accounts ends up repackaged as news.

She also uses the platform to recommend products, but unlike influencers paid to spruik wares, she shuns the post-for-pay model these days.

“I just find s--- that I like and talk about it. Especially in baby land, you’re so tired and lost, you just need things that work,” she says.

No One Likes a Fart, by Zoe Foster Blake

“I like sharing that stuff. If I was ever to do a paid partnership, I’d make it very explicit.

“I get my back up so bad when people are like, ‘That’s obviously been paid for’. I have to bite my tongue. I’m so evangelical if I find something that works. It might be a bottle of colic stuff I bought for $30.

“It’s of no value for me to get $10,000 to talk about it …. I take my followers’ trust very seriously. It’s important to have integrity. You only get so much goodwill.”

Like most people on social media, Foster Blake puts her best face forward. But she admits having a second child has been gruelling.

“You can’t prepare for it,” she says. “Now (Rudy’s) in a bit more of a routine we’re managing a bit better. I feel that in my life I’m pretty autonomous and OK at what I do, but I felt so deeply unqualified and out of my depth because they both need you at the same time.

“That's the pull. Trying to settle her in a dark room while trying to keep a three-year-old quiet next door or the number of times he’s doing a poo on the toilet and I’m breastfeeding — all on no sleep obviously. Those first 12 weeks were brutal.

“Every day that goes by I have so much more respect for mothers. I sent Mum a bunch of flowers the other day, saying, ‘Mum, you did a big, hard thing’. She had five kids and we had no TV. How did she do it?”

Zoe Foster Blake has written her first children’s book No One Likes a Fart.

Having her own business and being a confessed control freak, Foster Blake returned to work soon after Rudy’s birth in July. She has a nanny three days a week and employed a night nanny in those early days.

“It sounds lavish but it’s probably the best money spent because we were both working and needed to sleep,” she says. “There were some dark days there and I make no apologies for getting someone in to help me get a three-hour block of sleep — a proper shut-door sleep.

“I didn’t have that with Sonny and I’ve learnt this time to get that help. We’re great outsourcers in our family.”

Happily, Blake will be at home more with his weekday radio drive show winding up this year, though Foster Blake is not sure how long that will last.

“He’s so good at radio and they enjoy it so much, (so) to my mind, I think they’re just taking a break. I wouldn’t put it past them to come back eventually.”

— No One Likes a Fart, by Zoe Foster Blake and illustrated by Adam Nickel, (Penguin Random House), RRP $20, out Monday.

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