Just photos

Just a couple of photos for this post.



And these lovely masks are from Venice. My sister-in-law brought them back from a recent holiday and gave them to the girls who thought they were just magical



It's a lovely rainy day where I am. The only thing is I threw all the sheets and the towels in the wash and have no dryer. Might be a good time to go home to my mother for a visit.

A new chapter

One of the highlights of the school holidays for me was catching up with my oldest best friend who was visiting from Sweden with her family. It's wonderful for us to sit and chat while our four little girls (who have only met a handful of times over the years) hang out together, playing, reading and giggling. Makes me very happy. Funnily enough, our two oldest girls are quite similar in nature and so are our two youngest scamps. I guess it's maybe something to do with where you come in the family. It's comforting to know that big sister/little sister angst is not just happening at our place. And of course, we know how much they love each other really (Isn't that right, girls?)

Now we are into week 4 of the school term. I already feel like a different person - I am really benefitting from a big dose of peace and quiet five days a week. I feel very lucky to have a year off work to get myself together, get things around the house organised, cook more evening meals and iron more shirts for my hardworking husband who does so much more than his fair share around the house. And taking the girls to school and picking them up every afternoon without the added stress of rushing to and from work twice a week makes life so much easier. As everyone predicted, the hours when they are at school go very quickly and there isn't always time to do some quilting or have a nap. But I have already been to the movies a couple of times, caught up with my school mum friends and done a bit of reading/meditating so I am feeling really recharged.

I hope you are all having a happy and relaxing week.

2012

Well...finally 2012 has arrived. The year in which my youngest child starts school and I will have some time that is officially "mine" for the first time in some nine years or so.  I have a long list of lovely things I want to do like have naps, make more quilts, enjoy having coffee with girlfriends without being interrupted, browse peacefully in book/antique shops. I also have a longer list of things I need to do like housework, writing a history with Scott of the girls' school for its 50th anniversary, paperwork, selling things on ebay, getting a new laundry tap etc etc etc. Still.....I can feel the excitement bubbling up at the thought of only a week to go. I am on long service leave for a year which is a lovely gift from the universe. My new year's resolution this year is not to take any rubbish from anyone and to say "no" to anything I don't want to do. Sounds selfish but I need to do it.

Christmas was lovely. I hope yours was too. Like everyone I spoke to, the fortnight which preceded it was a mad rush but I tried not to get too carried away with trying to make it perfect. I bought the presents late but wrapped them early and managed to stick to our budget. I let the girls do the Christmas decorating of the tree and the mantelpiece and then enjoyed looking at their efforts. (I am still looking at them as my children NEVER want to take the decorations down). I was slightly stressed about the prospect of fitting in the usual morning presents and ham and eggs for breakfast, lunch with my family at my sister's, and then the afternoon and dinner with Scott's family at our place but I did all my cooking the day before and the day was a really happy and relaxed one. Fewer presents this year (cousins getting older and budgets getting tighter) but just as much love and food and music as ever.



I have been trying to eat healthily for the last few months but in the post-Christmas recovery felt the urge to eat one of my favourite comfort desserts from my childhood days. We had an elderly lady called "Mrs Nutting" (It was the 1960s-70s.... we didn't call adults by their first names) for a babysitter and she used to make us this chocolate blancmange and meringue pudding that we all loved. The chocolate part is made from bread, sugar, milk and I forget what else and you simmer it in a saucepan for a while before baking it until it is firm and then whacking on the meringue mixture and baking it for another hour or so. I can't be bothered posting the recipe right this minute but if you are tempted, let me know and I will stop being lazy and type it up.

While Scott was on holidays we just relaxed and did simple things. We went to beautiful Shorncliffe once or twice and let the girls run around like crazy things on the mudflats and fly their kites.

I thought Gret was going to break a rib she laughed and squealed so much with the joy of all that freedom. She ended up soaked in water with sand in her knickers and had to be completely rinsed and changed into dry clothes. She has an ink stamp on her forehead which adds to her general air of craziness.

It's nearly always incredibly windy at Shorncliffe so perfect for flying kites. All you have to do is hold the string and stand still and away they go.

Best wishes to all my bloggy friends for a lovely year in 2012. May life bring you many many happy moments.

Thankful for....

I am a bit in survival mode this month. A much loved young mother, wife and friend in our street has passed away and she has left a very big hole in our lives. I know if she were here she would want me to pass on this really important message. WEAR YOUR SUNSCREEN!!! And have your skin checked. Queensland has the world's highest death rate from melanoma so be aware of our hot hot sun.

So....I am trying to live in the moment and suck up all of life's goodness because that is how Helen lived and she has inspired me to try and do the same.

So...here are some of my favourite things from the last week or so.....

Glorious glorious jacarandas. This is my favourite time of year and always makes me high.

Coming home from lunch with my old nursing buddies and finding these three laughing on the trampoline

My little girl finally getting the hula hoop moves

My wondrous hollyhocks finally flowering

To get some idea of their height (over 2 metres), the wire fence is about as high as my chest.

My new petunias. I have a tendency to be morose in the mornings so I go and open the front door and drink in these colours in the morning sunshine. They always put a smile on my face.

The flower garden outside our study. I tried to get Kip to pose for this photo but he had a fat juicy new bone and wouldn't cooperate.

I hope everyone is having a lovely week.

Joy pockets

For many months, I have read just my favourite 4 or 5 blogs - the ones that feel like old familiar friends that I miss when I don't drop in to see what's been happening. Tonight I rediscovered the delights of just hopping from blog to blog via the favourites of my favourite bloggers, attracted by a name such as "milkmoon" or "dreamfarm girl". What an amazing thing blogging is - to be able to peek into the lives of other women (for I never seem to end up at a man's blog, with the exception of "Quilt Dad"!) and read their thoughts about life, love, mothering and the rest of the universe. Sometimes, I check out a blogger's profile and read their lists of favourites books and music and think "Ooh....she loves "Room With A View" AND "Cold Mountain" AND "The English Patient" AND Fleet Foxes!!! Will I send her an email to say I love them too? No....that is like stalking my inner shy blogger says to herself.

Anyway....I know lots of my favourite bloggers like to list what they are grateful for, and I do mean to do it, and sometimes do it the old fashioned way with a pen in a little notebook my big sister gave me earlier this year, but often I forget to do it for weeks at a time. I should definitely be at least thinking of what I am grateful for as I tend to be a glass half empty person and dwell on life's little and big difficulties. I came across a thing called "joy pockets" which is a lovely idea, but trying to do the links and copy the html code thingy etc was all too hard so I shall just make my own little list of things I am grateful for today.

- Watching "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" on DVD with my two girls who love Narnia as much as I do and letting them stay up late to see the ending. (And then having a quick, painless bedtime as it was an hour past their usual time for lights out).

- Having my husband rub cream into the knots in my back and shoulders while I watched "Grand Designs Revisited" on the TV in our bedroom instead of on iview on the computer when I get a spare few minutes.

- Making biscuits with the girls and cutting out all sorts of shapes and then icing them with pink and white icing and hundreds and thousands.

- Watching my hollyhocks grow taller every day and their spires of buds uncurling. Oh...the anticipation!

- Living in a street with lovely neighbours who look out for each other and happy children who like to chat over the fence.

- Waking up this morning and feeling spring in the air and not needing to wear slippers on my feet.

Time with my big girl

My big Squidgy Girl and I have been trying to get some special time together for weeks. Finally, on Sunday morning we headed off to the Petrie Markets, just the two of us. The Petrie Markets are a happy place for me. I used to go them with my big sister when they were the rough and ready Closeburn Markets near Samford and we would scoff home made ginger beer and dutch pofertjies (sorry - can normally spell quite well but that has defeated me) and buy little antique blue and green bottles from the "bottle man". Later in the 1980s, when the markets moved to Petrie, my sister and I were both renting rooms with a guy in a lovely cottage at Clayfield and on Sunday mornings we loved to head to Petrie and buy ourselves a second hand book to read, a few avocados, a bunch of roses, some fudge, some strawberries and maybe a bottle from the Bottle Man. Then we would go home, enjoy our flowers and food and lie around reading our new books for the rest of the day. When my sister married and had a little boy, I used to steal him and take him to the markets and return him asleep at lunchtime, thinking she was such a generous sister to share him with me. Now I realise it was probably a gift to a tired mother.

I have gone to the Petrie Markets with so many friends, a boyfriend or two, and now I take my own family. Once, I was there with my close friend, Suz, our little girls and a pregnant belly when I ran into my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. We chatted under the sunshiney blue sky and enjoyed seeing each other happy. Gee....that wasn't what this post was going to be about.

Anyway, big girl and I needed some time together and we made the most of every moment. When we arrived we were in awe of this amazing bougainvillia.

Then we spent some time at an artisan's shop with a man doing traditional Japanese weaving. I forget what it was called but he said it was a traditional pastime of Samurai warriers waiting for battle (or something like that). My girl was entranced and wanted to try it. I said I didn't think she could but on our return visit a bit later, the nice man must have noticed her longing glances as he offered to let her have a go. She LOVED it! One of the things I love about this girl is her zest for life, for meeting new people and bonding with them, for trying new things and having new adventures. She sucks up life like a little anteater devouring ants.

There used to be pony rides (and sometimes camel rides) at the Petrie Markets years ago and then they disappeared. I was told the insurance cost became too high. So we were delighted to see a lovely horse and two gorgeous tiny Shetland ponies giving rides for just $5. Can you see the tiny white dog watching the horse and girl go by?

For some reason (they said it was the gorgeous weather) there were heaps of lovely stall holders with antiques, vintage wares, collectables etc so we had a lovely browse. My Squidge spotted this lovely painted parasol for $10 at the stalls of Julie and Pam. After the price was kindly knocked down to $8, she parted with some of her pocket money and was a very happy customer. Apart from looking beautiful, the parasol was very handy for balancing on tree roots.

Julie and Pam had some fantastic things for sale. I had only $20 of my housekeeping left and had already bought food and some vintage tablecloths so was being very strong. I loved this wooden box full of old pegs and lace.

I also fell in love with this funky red china jug which I think looks sort of '50s and would go in our '50s house but, even after it was knocked down a couple of dollars to a very affordable price, I still didn't have enough cash. Do you take layby, Julie? You can't quite tell from my photo but it doesn't have a handle. Cool, hey?

Here are the two secondhand tablecloths I found at another shop selling oodles of old linen. They were in the "seconds" basket as they had some small stains. They were $2 each! I really love the pink and white one. It was all beautifully ironed so I put it on our table when we got home and my little girl promptly splashed chocolate milk on it. C'est la vie! Now I know why my mother got annoyed with us every night at teatime and said "All over my clean tablecloth!!!" when we spilt our milk. Sorry Mum!

So, that was our lovely mother-and-daughter morning. Weren't we lucky? And the weather was extra gorgeous. Blue sky and sunshine after a freezing, windy Saturday. We think we should have some special time together once a month.

(Photo by Squidgy Girl)

Special love to all the mothers and daughters out there, especially to my wonderful friends who help me mother my girls and to the amazing woman who has changed my life and is soon to leave this life behind. You are an awesome mother, my sweet friend, and have made me a better one than I was before.

This and that

Life has been marching on as it does since I last made a post, several weeks ago. Things are pretty much back to normal as we don't have to have my girl reviewed by our various medical teams now until September/October. It has been lovely getting up in the morning and not having to keep medical appointments.

I still think a lot about our experience in hospital and what it has taught me and how it has changed us. I feel more like a grown up - finally - at 45 going on 46. One change has been a superficial but symbolic one. I had been talking about letting my hair go grey for months and months. I was finding it really hard to let go of my inner twenty-something self who had thick long dark hair which made me feel feminine, and on a good day, pretty. Since I turned 40, it has been shorter but still dark - thanks to regular dyeing. When I was in hospital with my girl, I stopped caring about what colour my hair was. I was actually glad it was short as I didn't have a comb for a week. I finally felt good about letting my hair be the colour it actually is. I still didn't like the idea of grey regrowth, so I have just been cutting it shorter and shorter with each haircut. When I went to the hairdresser last week, she suggested going really short - "If it's grey, you want it to be edgy, not mumsy" she said. So here I am with short grey hair. I like it - it feels liberating and my husband loves it, but I did shed one last little tear the other night (when feeling fragile about other more important things that are going on) as I bade farewell to my youth and said hello to the next chapter of my life.

I also learnt how important it is to be truthful with my children, especially about really important things like pain and love and fear and sadness.

When coping with a sick little girl, Scott and I learnt that truest of all truths - the importance of living in the moment and sucking up all the love and joy you can. So...I decided to take extended leave from my historian's job so that one of us can be home with the children instead of both of us juggling work and home like a crazy circus act. Even though I only worked two days a week, those two days were so rushed and busy and I felt like I was always thinking ahead to whether there was a clean school uniform ready and enough bread to make a vegemite sandwich for a school lunch. And we both had less patience, less energy and less time to do fun things, or even to do nothing occasionally. The universe has kindly stepped in and made my job disappear in a work place restructure so I may not even have a job to go back to anyway. Normally, this situation would have caused me considerable stress, but in the light of what has happened, I have been content to go with the flow and look for the good in however things turn out. I took G into the city this week to attend a the launch of a website I was working on for the year before G got sick. I had noone to leave her with so she came along and was beautifully behaved. I felt proud of her for sitting quietly on my lap during the two speeches and letting me catch up with my colleagues and other people from the heritage field that I hadn't seen for ages. She was a bit disappointed though that there was no game of Pass the Parcel. It was nice to pop into my work world for an hour and then nice to leave it again. Then we went and said hello to the kangaroo sculptures in King George Square.

My big girl just gets bigger every day. I swear her legs grow longer every night while she is sleeping. Here she is dressed up for "book week" at school. She is dressed up as Lucy from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" as we have been reading the Narnia books at bedtime together. Is there anything more lovely to do than to reread your favourite books with your children? She is holding her magic cordial that Aslan gave her to heal the wounded in battles. I was stuck for a suitable potion bottle but then we found the bubble bath the girls gave me for Mothers' Day and added a few drops of red food colouring.

Not working has given me the time and energy to get more involved with our local school. We love hanging out and getting to know the other families and helping out with fundraising etc. I have met such lovely parents who have a real sense of community. Every day when G and I arrive to meet E after school, there is always a mum who is keeping an eye on someone else's children because they are running half an hour late. I love that. The kids play on the playground and the parents sit around and talk and then we wander off home. One of nicest things is that I have met some crafty mums who meet regularly for what they call "Yarn Night". I went along this week and we sat around, drinking tea and eating cake and knitting, sewing or crocheting and talking about life, school, birth and who bought some of those ruby grapefruit that were on special at the local fruit and vege shop last week. It may sound a bit boring but it was just lovely - very relaxing and nice to feel like I belong. I really want to spend more time with the women I know who I can relate to, who feel the way I feel - that we are meant to live in villages and share our food and our sewing machines and our childcare. I hope that doesn't sound really po faced.

Obviously, not working means a tight budget but I'm hoping we'll manage ok and can find ways to spend less money. I have resolved not to buy any new clothes for six months (except maybe at fetes or thrift shops!). And I think having more time will make up for having less money. Well...that's the theory. And if I can cook more meals and iron the odd shirt, that makes Scott's life less stressful and busy. He has cooked the majority of our meals for years (I cook most of the children's as he gets home from work late) but I think it's time I relieved him of some of his duties.

Our dog pog was sadly neglected for the last few months and had become very very shaggy. He had a dreadlock in his tail and big knots under his colour. I finally got myself organised and took him to the vet as I was tired of sweeping up dog hair from the floor. He now looks so tidy and puppylike that I have a whole new love for him and don't mind him snuggling up to me for some cuddles. He came home with a smart red scarf tied around his neck and looked like a doggy pirate.

I hope all my bloggy friends are well and happy. I haven't been posting but I have still been peeking at your lives as always.