This Growing Life

This weekend I'm grateful for... happy endings

2011-05-21T08:03:00.002+10:00

Lousy blogger that I am, I forgot the update to the Protect Medical Research campaign.

This fortnight I've been grateful for good sense prevailing, and the medical research budget being maintained. Good news. I will hang up my activist pants for now...

Brought to you by Maxabella Loves.

This weekend I was grateful for a familiar face

2011-05-07T12:23:00.003+10:00

Oh, that's right, I have a blog. Fortunately it's safe to leave your blog alone for a bit while you're busy doing other things.

It's not quite the same as leaving your 4-ish month old baby asleep in your car at the local shopping carpark while you nip around the corner to do.... who knows what... for at least 10 minutes. 10 minutes being the length of time I stood there wondering whether you would be coming before the police arrived.

Fortunately for me, most of those minutes were in the presence of Andrea, a mum I often see around the area. We agreed that this had moved out of reasonable behaviour and called 000. Just as the police were dispatched, the mum turned up, was fairly uncooperative about the 000 operator's request that we check the baby was ok (fortunately bub wiggled for the first time just then), and rapidly drove off in tears.

It was an odd situation that I hadn't been in before- calling 000 is definitely an unfavourable judgement on someone else's parenting decision. I was really grateful that Andrea turned up when she did- I was never going to leave the baby alone, but knowing the point at which I could say "there is no reasonable explanation for this" was definitely a 'problem shared is a problem halved' situation.

Part of Maxabella's Grateful linky.

Image: ALEF.net

Cures not cuts: protect medical research for children's health

2011-04-17T21:55:00.002+10:00

Rest in peace, little Elliot- who was only a few weeks younger than Big Bro when he died from a brain tumour in February.

"Without medical research there is no hope for the families of sick children."

This weekend I am grateful for... humour

2011-04-16T08:59:00.004+10:00

This week has been busy in the research world, and not finding cures- trying to get the government to listen. Rallies and all! And work itself has been hectic. When things are hard in the office, I love that release when suddenly it all gets too much and we collapse into giggles. Maybe that's how these reseachers felt at the prospect of losing their jobs? (One is my friend.)

So this weekend, inspired by Maxabella, I'm grateful for humour.

Learning about... medical research funding

2011-04-12T22:10:00.003+10:00

I took the boys down to the Melbourne Rally for Research today, and tweeted in the twitter version at the same time. It was pretty exhilarating. We stood with 3 ladies who'd come down from the country, a KPMG health economist and a heart transplant recipient- and 4000 other supporters of research.

Big Bro had, unprompted, been talking about his version of the issue at Kinder on Monday- "Big Julia needs to STOP and start respecting doctors who want to make sick people better"- so much so that the teacher asked me for more information! She also asked me to discuss the rally with him in terms of "togetherness", a topic that they're starting to cover as a class. It was an interesting thinking point for me, too- the togetherness of researchers, clinicians, patients and patients' friends and families.

There has been a heap of coverage today about the issue of why medical research needs funding by the Australian government. The whole issue was addressed pretty well in this piece from 7pm project (which I have never actually watched in person, 7pm being prime bed-preparation time); it's from about 3-7 minutes (unless you want to see the QLD infomercial!)

Discoveries Need Dollars: don't cut the cures.

2011-04-11T18:46:00.000+10:00

This Weekend I am grateful for... playdates

2011-04-10T21:27:00.005+10:00

This week my Maxabella-inspired Grateful post is for that wonderful currency of parents- the unaccompanied playdate. We've just started them this year, and that whole "it takes a village" mentality of sharing the occasional kindy pickup has been fantastic, both as dumper and host. One child down on Thursday, and when Little Bro took a nap I slept. And when Little Friends come here, they nick off to Big Bro's room and apart from the occasional update on where "dads and babies" is up to (we've sung six songs and the baby won't sleep) I feel like I'm juggling half a child less. Long live the playdate!

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On a separate note relevant to a previous Grateful post, the medical research funding cuts were on the news tonight. Still on :( There are rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Twitter on Tuesday at 1-2pm AEST (12-2 for Twitter). If you're around any of those then, why not make some noise for a healthy future for your family?

Image: http://giovanniworld.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/iou.jpg

If you'd had breast cancer, would you want the government to help you?

2011-04-05T16:18:00.002+10:00

So it's real: the Federal Government thinks that "ordinary Australians" won't care if 1600 medical research jobs are cut, research programs are terminated and clinical trials of lifesaving treatments are cancelled.

I bet ordinary Australians would care if medical research had helped their family survive a five generation history of breast cancer.

Discoveries Need Dollars. Protect Medical Research.

The weekend I am grateful for... my job, my outlet and some answers

2011-03-26T09:48:00.008+11:00

Oh that's right- I have a blog.

I was reminded by this email from my kind cousin -which will be addressed in another post (promise)- and realised that it has been more than a week since I have looked at my blog, let alone two weeks since I have posted.

The reason, and subject of this week's Maxabella-inspired, MultipleMum-hosted Grateful Post is my new job. It's awesome and it's wonderful and it's super crazy BUSY!! B asked last week, "would you have imagined that there was a job out there for you where you can claim reading newspapers and books, and using Facebook and Twitter* were all part of a day's work?" And best of all, it was what I needed (but my blog didn't)- an outlet to write.

So, dear readers, I'd be grateful for a couple of answers-

is writing juice a finite resource? I feel like my reserves are low once I've fueled the work words. Or is that just my energy reserves?
do your colleagues know that you blog? And do they read your blog? Mine know- because it came up in my interview- and it's been mentioned broadly, but (I think) they haven't seen my blog. Partly because I know it's got lots of unedited (in a bad way), rambly writing and isn't beautiful or highly successful or anything. Not that I'm ashamed of it... but it's just not that... professional. Is that just me, or do other bloggers feel like that?

*Yes, as of a couple of weeks ago, I tweet. @_vTg_ but so far it's been more about me than children and gardening, hence my lack of connections between here and there.

This weekend I am grateful for... medical research

2011-03-11T16:16:00.010+11:00

I heard a rumour this week that the Federal Government is planning to cut medical research funding in the May federal budget, as part of the broader savings agenda needed to pay for flood rebuilding and other spending commitments like the NBN. While I have no problem with paying for these important projects, I do have a BIG problem with the apparent presumption that Australia can afford to cut medical research funding. Facebook and Twitter campaigns have already started to spread the word about why medical research needs ongoing funding- and as of Sunday there is a website! Things are moving quickly!! I thought it was worth using this week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post to say why I'm grateful for medical research:

1. Medical research improves our health and saves lives.

Case in point: this is Little Bro.

Born in 2008, saved in 1928. 100 years ago I don't know if Little Bro or I would still be around. When I was 37 weeks pregnant I had bacterial pneumonia and spend a few nights in hospital being pumped full of penicillin and other antibiotics. If it hadn't been for medical researchers who developed penicillin as an antibiotic, including the Australian Howard Florey , who knows how Little Bro and I would have fared. There's so much that we take for granted in our lives- immunizations, lying babies on their backs to reduce SIDS deaths, cardiac pacemakers, humidicribs, taking folate while pregnant, IVF- which are the result of medical research.

2. Medical research is good for the economy.

I'm not an economist, but those in the know (like Access Economics) say that for every $1 that the government puts into medical research, $1.17 is returned to the economy. Medical research improves the health of the country, reduces medicare costs and decreases hospital stays.

Medical research is the best investment in your life.

Are you grateful for medical research?

Disclaimer: my entire career has been paid for one way or another in large part by the Australian and US research budgets. But I'm grateful. Very grateful.

PS. And I'm top of Maxabella's linky list!! Howzat?!

PPS on Saturday. Thanks for your supportive comments. The Discoveries Need Dollars Facebook page has just posted a touching story about Ava, a little girl given the gift of hearing with the Australian-invented Bionic Ear.

Is medical research funding small change?

2011-03-09T07:27:00.006+11:00

I guess every mum has their moments of minor indulgence: for me it's 15 blissful, uninterrupted minutes of News Radio in the bathroom every morning (10 if the natives are restless). This morning it was very nearly my last 15 minutes as I choked in the shower hearing that the budget for promoting the Coalition's failed Work Choices legislation had been a cool $100 million.

One hundred million dollars. And what did that achieve? An electoral rout and a "never again" tag (for what it's worth). And I guess there were some jobs and profits made at advertising agencies and the media outlets that ran the ads as a silver lining.

The obvious question is, what else could the government do with $100mil?

I'm no economist, but I can spout what I know about: the cost of medical research. You know, that thing that saves lives...
Yesterday it was announced that the federal government would invest $107million over the next five years on nine largescale Australian research programs addressing complex research problems like how to improve the health outcomes of Australians with developmental disabilities or who have suffered strokes and developing new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Maybe workplace reform is about as complex a problem as any of these... But is advertising a failed campaign worth five years of medical research?

Image from http://www.vectorstock.com/assets/preview/203801/dollar-cash-injection-vector.jpg

Justine Clarke for the Senate?

2011-03-03T09:11:00.004+11:00

I am normally a believer in the procedure of the Australian parliament, but yesterday's efforts at a ~~speech~~ performance by South Australian Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher (below) really did verge on the bizarre. I thought politicians' staffers were meant to prevent massive gaffes like this... Fortunately in the twelve overnight hours they have woken up enough to remove the following from Senator Fisher's wikipedia entry:

"Fisher proved herself to be mentally deficient when she decided it was an effective debating technique to do the Hokey-Pokey and the Time Warp in the senate during a discussion about a carbon tax." (You can still see it in the "View History" tab)

If this is how the senate operates these days, may I make some nominations for the next election?

This works best if you can run the two videos simultaneously :)

Candidate 1:

versus

Candidate 2:

Let's leave performing to the professionals, Senator Fisher. Your predecessor, Amanda Vanstone, could have told you that.

Beauty in biology

2011-03-01T08:53:00.001+11:00

And now for something a bit different: beauty in biology, from the Wellcome Trust Image Awards. If only I lived in London so I could see the exhibition for real; half a world away I'll settle for sharing the real pixels with you.

First, for my neglected gardening followers, a garden friend:

Honeybee

DAVID MCCARTHY AND ANNIE CAVANAGH

Next, a guess what...

Mouse retina

FREYA MOWAT, UCL

(Isn't it beautiful?)

Speaking of beautiful:

Ruby-tailed wasp

SPIKE WALKER

And finally, my favourite:

Blood clot on a plaster

ANNE WESTON, LONDON RESEARCH INSTITUTE, CANCER RESEARCH UK

Who would have ever thought there was beauty in a used bandaid?!

PS. Does any clever person out there know how to make my columns wider? I'm sick of good pictures being chopped off! In Blogger I tried Design>Template Designer>adjust column widths and got "this is not possible for this template".

Book of the week: Marvin K Mooney will you please go now

2011-02-28T18:32:00.002+11:00

I don't have a consistent rationale or criteria for selecting a Suburban Sonnet-inspired Book of the Week, so this week it started with this:

Which is of course a Zike-Bike to anyone who knows Marvin K Mooney by heart.

This "just" another rollicking, rhyming, nonsensical Dr Seuss- in this case the theme being:

the time has come, the time is now, Marvin K Mooney will you please GO NOW.

Marvin is then offered a series of suggestions, including:

"you may go on a Zike-Bike if you like". Big Bro often pores over the picture, trying to work out how the Zike-Bike works. Must say, I never had the heart to say that it was just made up- which is fortunate, given there is a real-life one out there in the world!

This weekend I'm grateful for peace and calm

2011-02-25T20:57:00.003+11:00

Hello, strangers- yes, I've been MIA in the Real World. Funny how three weeks of "not working" was harder work than "working". I was actually quite looking forward to starting The New Job. And, I'm pleased to say, I really enjoyed the week!

The Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post brings me back to the Blogosphere. It's certainly been a week- and month- in which I've been counting my blessings. So this weekend, as they say in the classic blogs, I'm grateful for:

Peace: my friend T writes about living as an expat in Bahrain on her blog From Melbourne to Manama. Check out her posts this week about living through the protests there.

Calm: of the seismologic variety, in this part of the world. Christchurch, I am thinking of you. Again, but much more.

Should relatives attend a baby's funeral?

2011-02-16T09:01:00.003+11:00

Should family members attend the funerals of a 3 month old and an 8 month old baby?

Should family members be able to choose where the funeral is held?

If the family had no money to cover the costs associated with the funerals, should the taxpayer pay some costs associated with a funeral?

These were some of the questions that have been raised by certain politicians in the last 24 hours, most prominently Tony Abbott and the opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrisson. Of course, their view has been influenced by the fact that the funerals were for Zahra El Ibrahimy and Sam Husseini who were drowned, along with their mothers (whose bodies were never recovered) and about 30 other people while scenes like this were underway:

It disgusts me that this debate had to be a debate at all. We are in a country that already provides bereavement payments to the poorer members of our society; why does this even have to be a question? Let the families grieve.

I am relieved that some members of the Coalition have come out against this dirty piece of politics, and that the mood in the mainstream media (and even The Australian!) seems to be one of compassion (and common sense and decency).

Rest in peace with your mothers, Zahra and Sam.

Image from news.com.au

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Postscript- there is a much more thorough discussion and a lot of insightful comments at the only politically-skewed blog I read, Grog's Gamut. One anonymous comment I found particularly pertinent was:

I understand the Defence department paid travel costs for 60+ soldier colleagues to come from Darwin to Launceston for the memorial service for Corporal Richard Atkinson on Monday. Two of his closest mates were flown back from Afghanistan to be there. This seems as appropriate to me as flying seven people from Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of their families.

Hardly accurate to suggest there is something strange about the Australian Government paying for funeral travel costs in such cases.

FEBRUARY 16, 2011 9:13 AM

This weekend I'm grateful for.... freebies and almost freebies

2011-02-11T20:53:00.003+11:00

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post comes after a week in which my wallet was left a bit plumper than usual. So I'm grateful for:

- freebies: the postman came knocking twice this week, leaving a frequent shopper reward bottle of wine and a lucky winning of three recipe books (thank you Expatriate Chef, for whom the postage to Australia wasn't so free). Both are good things to have in the house once the kiddos are in bed.

- almost-freebies: it was the week that I rediscovered my old student hangout, Thresherman's Bakehouse in Carlton. A $5 slice of quiche was massive enough to feed two hungry boys, and $7 gave me a loaf of bread, four Turkish rolls and four mini-quiches for the freezer from the baked-today bargain table. Then, this morning we happened across a "megagarage" sale, and for the princely sum of $7.10, walked away with two "never hung" Maisy prints, a Captain Feathersword outfit and a My Little Pony coveted by Big Bro, who has already had his 10c-worth brushing out its Rapunzelesque mane.

Image from http://www.ahajokes.com/

Book of the week: The Cable Car and the Dragon

2011-02-07T21:18:00.006+11:00

The Cable Car and the Dragon- Herb Caen.

Big Bro and I brought this book out in honour of Chinese New Year; it's the tale of two exotic creatures who both wanted a taste of a a different life. Charlie, a San Francisco cable car, is on the top of Nob Hill late one Chinese New Year's night realises that after "running up and down San Francisco for sixty years, (he) has NEVER seen a Chinese New Year's Parade or a Chinese Dragon". So instead of turning left towards Russian Hill, for the first time in his life he turns right, and ventures off the tracks into Chinatown. There he meets the dragon Chu Chin Chow, who for sixty years has lived a reclusive life in the hills across the bay, emerging once a year to head the Chinese New Year Parade through Chinatown.

This is another of my childhood books, probably bought when we visited my aunt in San Francisco when I was three (or else sent from there later). It's quite a wordy book- the recommended age of 4-8 years seems quite appropriate- and goes into details of the history and mechanics of cable cars, which Big Bro enjoys. It couldn't be set anywhere else- it's very much a San Francisco tale, with mentions of Nob and Russian Hills and particular streets. If When we take the boys to San Francisco I'll be making sure we take the Cable Car over the same tracks, looking down over Chinatown. Who knows, we might even ride Charlie.

One of my favourite bits of the book, which I always make sure I read, is the dedication:

For my son Christopher, who, having had the taste and judgement to be born in San Francisco in 1965, knows quite a bit about cable cars and dragons. He also knows enough about his father to listen to the following tale with an air of polite disbelief.

Book of the Week was devised by Suburban Sonnet

This weekend I am grateful for.... handymen

2011-02-05T10:16:00.002+11:00

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post is about that wonderful species, Handy humanis, the common handyman. B and I are not at all handy when it comes to home repairs, and we are quite happy to contract out. It's definitely worth the cash, cuppa (always, always white with one) and two biscuits.

This week we decided it was time to have our front door trimmed to fit our house's La Niña dimensions (which evidently have a different lean from the El Niño version). This was all achieved, and I was grateful for Jon the Handyman's handiness. Even more so, as I swept away the wood shavings and collected the offcuts I realised that I am even more grateful when I encounter that rare subspecies Handy humanis cleanupafterwards. Even so, it's nice to have a front door that opens.

Image from http://find-a-handyman.com.au/, which I didn't use to find a handyman.

This weekend I was grateful for... Happy endings and beginnings

2011-02-02T21:51:00.002+11:00

Better late than never to get in my Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post? ~~Ten~~Twelve busy days went by, but somehow blogging (much) wasn't part of my busy schedule. I'm was left with lots to be grateful for, like:

- happy endings: my long awaited "out with the old" part of my career change finally came, and I was surprisingly calm. I realised I had been subconsciously preparing for it long before it was decided. When you leave a research lab, you are definitely expected to have your affairs in order. (for reasons explained by Lady Science, whom I'm still laughing about). I made lists, sublists and lists of lists, and when my last day came, somehow I was able to calmly stroll down for lunch with a bunch of lovely colleagues, and head out the door on time. And it was all good.

- happy beginnings. Not coincidentally, my end of old job coincided with Big Bro starting at "Big Boy Kinder". He had been looking forward to it since the open day last August, when he discovered they provided scissors for the pupils' use (big plus point for Big Bro). I had been looking forward to it for, oh, almost two years when I visited it and decided it was THE kinder for us. (Because, y'know, attend the wrong kinder and your life goes down the toilet... Not). So I was very grateful for Big Bro having a happy- if tiring- first day.

- oldie-but-goodie recipes. We ended up hosting two lunches last weekend so I happily applied myself to the oven, stovetop and drinks cabinet. I'd forgotten how much of a doddle pavlova is, and also got round to making a Pimms cocktail, which went down very easily in 38 degree weather (fortunately I realised this would happen and went half strength). Good food, good company: it's the Good Life :)

- time to cross some items off the never-ending list. I'm currently in-between jobs (!) and discovering that even without children there are only so many things you can fit into the day. And the internet hasn't been one of them- I've barely been home! It's nice to feel productive, but at this rate I'll need a holiday from my not-quite-holiday!

Learning about.... space travel

2011-02-01T03:08:00.000+11:00

Better late than never to post about our third "learning about" topic. Big Bro's choice again, space travel. It ended up mostly being an internet-based project, with us printing pictures to paste together to make a book about space travel, and watching movies on YouTube. The text of the book went like this:

The first rockets did not carry people.

Sputnik was the first satellite to fly around the earth.

Animals like Laika the dog went into space before people did.

Before people had flown in rocket to space, Joe Kittinger flew to the edge of space in huge balloons called Excelsior. To get back to earth he had to jump with a parachute.

Yuri Gagarin was the first person to go into space in a rocket.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to go to the moon in a rocket.

Space shuttles are spaceships that take off with a rocket

and land on earth like a plane.

There is an International Space Station

for people to live in space. To get there you need to go in a rocket or a space shuttle.

Some spaceships have flown to other planets

to take pictures for us to see.

Some people think aliens come to earth

in flying saucers from other planets.

One day people might be able to have holidays in space.

Book of the Week: Wynken, Blynken and Nod

2011-01-31T20:57:00.004+11:00

I've mentioned before that I've been lucky that my mother has kept many of my picture books which are now gradually relocating themselves here. Eugene Field's Wynken, Blynken and Nod has been one of these, which I often bring out when the boys are in need of a calming book.

Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night

Sailed off in a wooden shoe

Sailed on a river of crystal light

Into a sea of dew....

It's a dreamy verse about three boys sailing into the sky, and I love its rhythm and quiet tones. Our edition is illustrated by Barbara Cooney, with beautiful monochrome scenes which match the quietness of the verse.

---------------------------------

The internet is a wonderful place, and in writing this I discovered a Denver link to Eugene Field, who was a journalist there for two years and managed to leave his house. The statue in the picture at the top, of the Fishermen Three, Wynken, Blynken and Nod, turns out to be located in Denver's Washington Park near Field's house. Of course I never saw it while we lived there.....

An insight into my former life?

2011-01-26T09:27:00.001+11:00

I ~~doubt~~ am not sure whether I have any readers with a science background, and if I do, ~~she~~ they have probably already seen this Lady Gaga sendup from an Alzheimers Lab at a prestigious research institute in Texas, which has "gone viral". There are a lot of "in lab" jokes, but it's too good to not share.

(Warning- a few bad words)

The golden rules of childhood- according to the parents

2011-01-25T08:26:00.000+11:00

A comment I made on Facebook, and some funny comments I received back led me to collate what I think are the only things about children you can count on- the golden rules.

1. The only time children sleep in is when an early start is required. Adapted by babies the "s/he never naps thing long" rule when parents base their day's activity around a certain wake-time.

2. A baby's first all night sleep will invariable coincide with the insomnia of another family member.

3. The penultimate five minute rule: groups of children play most happily and cooperatively five minutes before departure from the scene is required. Mothers have adapted this rule in the playdate setting to the "time for one more cuppa" rule.

4. Food always tastes better at someone else's house, or especially at childcare. Especially especially when the same recipe or product brand is used. Or an extra-large box of said product has been purchased.

5. The whiter the clothes, the darker the stain. Stain tenacity is also proportional to cost, parental fondness and intended use of the outfit.

6. The likelihood of a vomit is inversely proportional to the ease of cleaning the target surface. In a similar vein, toilet training accidents only happen on sofas and carpets, preferably those belonging to childless adults.

7. Telephones and doorbells are programmed to ring in the five minutes following a child settling to sleep. When of course they're not really asleep. Those annoying "sign up your credit card for a charity so I get my commission" doorknockers also sit on your front lawn waiting for this critical moment at which to strike.

8. Inappropriate words, body noises and non-verbal communication (read screeches) sound best at loud volume in churches (ideally funerals), restaurants and critical work functions when the babysitter falls through.

9. The likelihood of a contagious illness striking a home on a particular day is related to the urgency of the parents' work appointments, or desirability of their social commitments. Needless to say, children are always in the best of health to support parents through times of boring seminars, avoidable deadlines and OH&S reviews.

10. Spontaneous kisses and cute smiles always precede the discovery of a huge mess, either in the front hall or the last nappy in the house.

Am I right- are these the truths as we know them? Or have I forgotten the truest of the true?

Book of the Week: The Snail and the Whale

2011-01-24T21:51:00.002+11:00

I’ve started this post several times on the screen, and more than that in my head, wondering what I should pick as my second Book of the Week (courtesy of Suburban Sonnet). After too much mind-changing I’ve finally settled on….

on….

(Yes, I HAVE settled on it. No more changes now.)

We have all become big Julia Donaldson fans here. First there was The Gruffalo and Toddle Waddle. Thanks to his birthday and Christmas, Little Bro now has an expanded and very popular collection filed in the “D” section. (No, not really.) Big Bro is also a fan, but Little Bro is obsessed. And B and I don’t mind the books, so they keep getting read ~~, and not lost under the couch. No don't admit to that.~~.

All our favourite Julia Donaldsons have catching rhyming text, and a clever story, mostly starring humbler animals becoming unlikely heroes. The Snail and the Whale fits this exactly- a snail on a rock with an “itchy foot” hitches a ride on the tail of a helpful whale who shows him the world. Diaster strikes when the whale is beached (as I write that Little Bro's high pitched, dramatic "Oh no!" comes into my mind), and only the snail can save the day.

The illustrations by Axel Scheffler, who has illustrated many of the Julia Donaldson books, are bright and detailed, and it was no wonder that The Snail and the Whale repeatedly receives Little Bro’s highest honour- “read it again!”

Currently harvesting- sweeeeet corn

2011-01-19T07:23:00.001+11:00

Learning about.... New York

2011-01-18T08:53:00.000+11:00

Big Bro and I finished reading James and the Giant Peach last week, and with the finale of the peach's skewering on the Empire State Building and the seed ending up in Central Park as James' house. I suggested we learnt a bit more about New York this week. We managed a bit less than I had planned as Big Bro wasn't well in the middle of the week, but still learnt a bit- certainly enough for Little Bro-the-parrot to exclaim "wook, Empire State Building" as we walked through the (Melbourne) city.

To learn about New York landmarks we looked at photos B and I had taken on trips to New York, and watched a few YouTube clips, including:

This sight-seeing montage set to New York, New York - the boys enjoyed the limousines and black town cars.

The Wiggles' Central Park

New York State of Mind by Alicia Keys

We also watched clips of On the Town, which for whatever reason can't be embedded- but it did bring back memories of the D-Gen's Late Show spoof of the song (which is embeddable)

We also located some New York coloring pages and downloaded paper models of New York landmarks from a cool free site called Paper Toys- including the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. These four structures, plus Central Park seem to be the top five recognizable New York landmarks.

We were going to make a few New York foods, but illness and time got in the way. In the end we used the leftover frankfurters from last week to make hot dogs in honour of the ubiquitous street hot dog carts, and didn't make Waldorf salad or a New York cheesecake, or have a bagel at the New York Bagelry. I got stuck with New York picture books- any recommendations?

It certainly wasn't an exhaustive study- which isn't the idea- but more a hope that in the future if Big Bro hears mention of New York he'll have an idea of what's there. B is off to New York later in the year so it will be a good test of what has stuck.

Book of the Week: A few good first chapter books

2011-01-17T08:19:00.001+11:00

Suburban Sonnet has started a Book of the Week segment with the invitation to join in- which has inspired me to finally put fingers to keys and tell you about our recent favourites (ok, so it's Books of the Week... you'll survive)

Big Bro's ability to follow stories has steadily increased over the past year, meaning that we've been able to venture into longer picture books like the Tim series, The Velveteen Rabbit, fairy tales and Aesop's Fables, and also into chapter books. Moving into chapter books has been an exciting development for me, as I have lots of fond memories from my childhood as a voracious reader (I wish could say that I read as much these days...)

It started with Enid Blyton's The Wishing Chair, which I couldn't pass by when I spotted it at the local library. It was a good place to start as most of the stories are self-contained, the edition we were reading had pictures on most of the pages, and I think Big Bro enjoyed the general theme of a flying chair. They're pretty simple good-versus-evil stories, with the occasional unfortunate mishap thrown in. I wasn't quite sure how well it was being received until he made this origami wishing chair (either origami or wishing chair is a slightly steep claim, I admit).

Our next adventure was Joan Robinson's About Teddy Robinson. It's a collection of short stories about the adventures of a girl and her apparently-alive bear. They're nice mundane real-life adventures like going to a party or shopping, which children can relate to. Teddy Robinson was a big success, but unfortunately it seems to be out of print so I am still stalking eBay looking for copies that aren't priced for the "collectors' edition" market.

Next on the menu was a return to Enid Blyton- The Enchanted Wood, which is the first of the Faraway Tree series. Jo, Bessie and F(r)anny (the "r" is a post-1980s inclusion) and their friends Moon Face and Silkie have adventures in a magical tree that is a bridge to other lands. It's the same formula as The Wishing Chair, but often the adventures span several chapters. Big Bro initially lost track of some stories, but by the time we launched into books 2 and 3 he had the idea of the multi-chapter story, and was disappointed when it finished. There are heaps of other Enid Blytons I think he'd enjoy- and from my childhood collection and second hand bookshops I've accumulated a queue that includes Mr Pinkwhistle, Bimbo and Topsy and the various Tales... short stories. However, I've been trying to mix them up with other authors so we don't turn into exclusively Enid readers (which is tempting given how many of her books I loved!)

After The Enchanted Wood we tested the Winnie the Pooh water. The first couple of chapters were alright, but even I got a bit lost in the subtleties of the next chapters and it remains half read next to Big Bro's bed. A.A.Milne's children's poetry was much more of a success, and thanks to Lines and Squares Big Bro is "ever so careful to watch (his) feet" whenever he walks on a Melbourne street.

More successful have been a few "real world" classics- My Naughty Little Sister was very popular, as was Milly Molly Mandy. They're opposite ends of the slightly moralistic spectrum- I never realised as a child that My Naughty Little Sister uses the protagonist to illustrate what not to do, while Milly Molly Mandy is unbelievably virtuous- the closest to sin that she ever reached was to briefly consider ignoring the "trespassers will be prosecuted" sign that protected someone else's blackberries before realised that was wrong. That being said, MMM is a very sweet picture of 1920s village life- horses and carts, the occasional excursion to a market town.

By this point I was aware that our repertoire was completely based around books I read as a child, which even then weren't that modern, so to try to get Big Bro a few post-1950s literary experiences I ventured into The Hill of Content bookshop in the city. There I came across Lucy (subject of a Grateful Post) who reassured me that there haven't been a lot of post-1980s classics in the early-chapter book department. Between Lucy and responses to a Facebook enquiry I came up with a few more modern books to try: the Tashi series, which has gone down well so far, and Madame Pampelmousse and Aussie Nibbles which are on the to-read list.

I like the routine of reading a chapter book over several evenings, but part of me wonders what we've forgotten to read in the picture book department- and we're certainly including plenty of picture books in the mix. While I never seem to manage to read enough books to myself, I'm relieved that we have plenty of time to work through the children's section. What are- or were- your favourite first chapter books?

The Chinese Mother Theory

2011-01-16T21:16:00.004+11:00

Maxabella beat me- and very eloquently- to raise a fascinating article, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, an excerpt from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's about a style of parenting- and the Chinese-American author, Amy Chua, points out it isn't exclusively a Chinese style- whereby parents expect the utmost from their children. As I commented to Maxabella (excuse my laziness in the cut-and-paste department), I'm half-interested to read the book and I couldn't decide how much of the article was tongue-in-cheek. I agree with the "assume strength, not fragility" strategy, but there were points at which it went too far (Lulu's Piano Saga, for one). Pick your battles, and live your own life. Certainly children need parents' time invested in them, but maybe they also need to see their parents have a sense of perspective.

Postscript: there is a great response, also in the WSJ.

This weekend I'm grateful for the basics

2011-01-15T11:13:00.000+11:00

Feeling winded after a particularly punch-in-the-gut week, it's good to have a focus on the positive with my regular Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post.

With mention of deaths of friends and husbands in the blogosphere, and the shock of the Queensland floods, by Thursday I was definitely feeling grateful for the basics- a dry house and a loving and healthy circle of family and friends. On Friday I was grateful that the two personal stories of the Brishbane floods that I had been following ended- in both cases- about 2cm on the side of relief. One of the stories was via The House That A-M Built- I felt terrible on Friday to be checking a blog that is supposed to be about building beautiful homes, expecting mention of the destruction of a home. It was a little ray of sunshine through a dark cloud to read about a near miss.

I'm also grateful for 24 Hour Viruses- not that seeing your child go from healthy to listless and a 40 degree fever in 2 hours is anything good, but to see him pull out as suddenly the next day is something to be grateful for. I just don't know how parents of chronically ill children cope.

Coming up next week (whether I blog about them or not is another matter): the end if a career-era and a childcare era, the attack if the mystery seeds, how rockets make fire, and perhaps even a ripe tomato. And Lego Brickventures- bring it on!!

Geeky/cool- electronic clothes, jet lagged mosquitos and why blogging helps

2011-01-14T14:27:00.004+11:00

One of my favourite things about my current job is that I'm expected to read scientific journals. There are a lot of tedious technical articles (and more than enough crappy ones) but there are a few diamonds in the rough, which I enjoy finding. More often than not, they're unrelated to my field, so reading them is a bit of an indulgence, but I tell myself that I'm expected to have a broad general knowledge. (Too bad blogging isn't part of my job description...)

This week's crop of interesting stories was especially bountiful, and worthy of sharing. (I think!) They're all from, or mentioned in, the highly competitive- and thus high-powered and very reputable- journals Science and Nature, which unfortunately require a paid subscription for the full-text for most articles. (And no, it wasn't me who paid. It's called a fringe benefit, 'kay?)

This week's cool stories

1. Jet-lag protects mice from malaria (free text): researchers in Edinburgh had two groups of mice, one living a "day shift"- with lights on during the day- and the others living a "night shift", with lights on during the night, and off during the day (so opposite to the day shift mice). The mice on either shift were infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium, and their infected blood was transferred to other mice to transmit the malaria parasite to them (sort-of like a mosquito usually does). Parasites transferred out of one mouse into another of the opposite shift (so day-shift to night-shift or vice versa) didn't grow as quickly as those that stayed on the same shift. For a parasite that lives inside a mouse and can't see, it's pretty nifty! Whatever that means for humans- and whether people working night-shifts in malaria-affected countries are protected from malaria- is a whole new question.

2. Could electronic clothes be a reality? This story is way out of my league, but the outcome is way cool- scientists in Texas have used teeny-weeny pipes of carbon- "nanotubes"- to make teeny-weeny flexible threads or yarns that can carry electrically conductive materials. They can tie them in a knot, plait them, sew with them or weave them- and show how they can make a teeny-weeny thread-like battery. It's tempting to imagine a whole industry of electronics built into clothes- neon lights, body odour sensors and alarmed toilet-training undies, but to be fair I suspect the developers have they eyes firmly set on the bright lights of highly-technical applications that we'll never see. I'll hedge my optimistic bets on a foldable fabric iPad. But not too soon...

3. Why writing (hence blogging) helps us: something to store in my memory bank for about 14 years from now- that there is research showing that if students who are about to take a high-pressure exam are told to write about their anxieties before they sit the exam, they do better than students who didn't do the pre-exam debrief. "Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores". Expect more steam to be let off by this blogger.

Am I just a geek, or are any of those ideas cool?

Learning about... The New Year

2011-01-08T19:39:00.002+11:00

Big Bro and I launched into the New Year full of enthusiasm for a new project, perhaps even a new resolution: to learn about something each week. The idea for this came from Little Garden Helpers' "Teach Your Toddler" series, where the Little Garden Helpers spent six weeks of their summer focussed on a different garden creepy-crawly. I haven't decided whether ours will be a summer activity or last longer- Big Bro starts at his new pre-school in February, so if he seems to be full to the brim with learning from there, we will slacken off at home. But I hope not- we've already had lots of ideas of things we'd like to immerse ourselves in for a week, including:

- caterpillars

- slaters

- Australia Day, Chinese New Year, St Patrick's Day, and other festivals/holidays when possible (takes up about half the weeks!)

- New York

- how houses are built

- sharks, or more specifically, "why sharks don't have bones" (I'll stick with the broader topic I think!)

This week I suggested we learn about the New Year. It's nothing fancy, and mostly just comes from the internet, but by the end of the week we learnt:

- this year is 2011, so is (about) two thousand and eleven years after the time we think Jesus was born (the Christmas Story stuck this year)

- we say the New Year starts on the first of January, but other people around the world think it starts at different times, like Chinese New Year, or the start of Spring

- there are lots of ways to celebrate the New Year, including by saying "happy new year", with fireworks, and singing Auld Lang Syne (Little Bro thought this was the worst song ever!). Our family celebrates by having lunch with Auntie R.

- lots of people like to make New Year's Resolutions to say things they'd like to learn or do in the coming year. Big Bro didn't quite get this, but he did take much more to the idea that the New Year is a time that we can say "bye" to the bad things that happened- or we did- in the old year. There were lots of descriptions of traditions to do with farewelling the previous year with a fire, which I condensed for simplicity into us burning a small twig of our Christmas tree to "say bye to all the bad things from 2010". Big Bro took this to heart, and since then has, several times, either told me/Little Bro that we can't be crabby/rough (respectively, I point out!!) because we said bye to those bad traits over the fire.

- there are lots of New Year food traditions. We made Sesame-Honey cookies, where the sweetness symbolises the good things of the year to come, and the seeds symbolise fecundity, growth and all that (not fertility in our family, thanks!!) and were going to make Nigella's lentil and sausage soup until the weather turned hot, and we substituted pasta with pea and corn (fecundity and all that) and chopped up sausages (which look like coins). We also ate "the twelve grapes of luck" for the coming year (not at midnight on New Year's Eve), though Little Bro spat out several of his grapes, and I'm wondering what that symbolises.....

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Incidentally, did you know that 2011 is the UN Year of Forests? I didn't until pre-school sent Big Bro a letter telling him to bring a photo of his favourite tree on the first day. Bless his little heart- he's decided his favourite trees are the silver birches he helped us plant. Eco-credits to us?! I see 2012 is the UN Year of Cooperatives- I wonder what that class will be invited to bring? $20 to invest in the class pyramid scheme?

This weekend I'm grateful for.... small milestones, and their makers!

2011-01-08T09:29:00.001+11:00

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post, and it starts with an Maxabella-inspired phenomenon: I'm grateful for new followers after this lovely plug from the lovely Maxabella. Hello to all of you- it was a thrill to suddenly see my followers number jump, and enough to jolt me out of my summer torpor!

I'm also grateful for cool changes- to feel the temperature drop from 34 to 24 degrees in less than an hour this afternoon was a relief! Phew... now we just need some rain to top up the tanks.

Everybody needs good neighbours

2011-01-05T07:35:00.001+11:00

I'm not a fan of the soapie, but I am a big fan of neighbours. I love our house and garden, but what money couldn't buy was landing in an altogether friendly pocket of suburbia. As well as lovely adults, there is a bunch of kids around our boys' ages with whom I'm looking forward to them growing up. And it's the sort of street, without us being overly chummy and all over each other, that there's no shame in asking a neighbour to collect your mail or feed the chooks.

The patriarch of the block is an elderly Sicilian gentleman (any lesser descriptor wouldn't be appropriate) who has been in the neighborhood for years (and spread his loquat seeds) who knows everything there is about everything. He's our real estate sales reporter, neighborhood watch and voluntary handyman, sometimes to the point of embarrassment: he ended up showing up, goods in hand, to fix our fence, then wouldn't accept a bottle of wine (he makes his own), or a cake (no good for his cholesterol).

Our next door neighbours were away for a few days after Christmas and asked us to put their bins out, and help ourselves to their ripe tomatoes. Good deal... until their bins migrated to the street without our input. Ok, we were too slow. Then, early the next morning as the boys and I waved to the garbage truck we caught a glimpse of the Sicilian rocket whiz out his gate in the truck's wake and return our neighbours' bins to their yard, still warm from the garbage truck's exhaust. With a small splutter I wondered, who needs good neighbors when you've got the Super Neighbour?

A couple of book memes

2011-01-04T19:04:00.001+11:00

Holidays for me used to mean time to read. School holidays were my time for indulgent reads, like starting The Famous Five at book number one, and aiming for book 21. These days my hopes are a lot more sedate- like "read an entire book"- but I like to imagine that one day holidays will again be "time to read".

I'm not really one for memes, but these two came up in Facebook and I felt enthused about responding (apologies to those for whom I'm double dipping!)

Fifteen Authors in Fifteen minutes

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1 Enid Blyton (anyone want to discuss the intricate plot details of the Famous Five? I am still excited to find an original Blyton I hadn't read- though not the crummy spin-offs!)

2 Alexander McCall Smith (I live from one Scotland Street instalment to the next)

3 Jane Austen

4 Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Vegetable Miracle)

5 Neil Campbell (Biology)

6 Nigella Lawson

7 Vikram Seth (I could read all 1000 pages of A Suitable Boy any day)

8 Bill Bryson (lots are good, but Made in America especially)

9 Cynthia Voigt

10 Thomas Hardy

11 Lewis Carrol (esp the Jabberwocky, Hit your baby when he sneezes)

12 DH Lawrence (Snake)

13 Samuel Shem (The House of God- B said "read this and you'll understand what I've been through")

14 Laura Ingals Wilder

15 Three way tie between CS Lewis or EB White or JK Rowling... not convinced which should be here and I am sure I have forgotten someone else!!!)

100 Books

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. (I add that if you like Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and/or Jane Austen you get immediate bonus points as they're represented at a high frequency.)

I've bolded the books I've read in their entirety, and italicized the ones I started but didn't finish, or read an excerpt.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (and just read them all to Big Bro!)

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I'm at a bit of a loss to single out particular books- lots of great ones in the list, and lots that I wish I'd read!

This fortnight I've been grateful for...

2010-12-28T22:54:00.003+11:00

I'm still on holiday but felt like a Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post- and aren't holidays the time to do what you want? :)

No surprises here, but I'm grateful for the kindness of family who've opened their houses, curried 4 kilos of prawns, served awesome homemade mustard, given the boys (and us) lovely presents (who've thought a toy checkout could bring so many hours of entertainment?), passed on outgrown books, and done all those family things that make Christmas special. And let us do a load of washing here and there, while we wait till January for a repair to ours!

And roses- surely the most forgiving of flowers? I finally got onto my Project to deadhead them, but if I hadn't then, sure, they'd have looked a bit scrappy, but come back good as new whenever I remembered to provide a bit of lovin'.

And I'm grateful for kind neighbours who, for the umpteenth time, have dropped by to let us know that our car battery is being drained by a light somewhere.

And I'm grateful for a bit of a rest from blogging- somehow when the pressure's off the juices start to flow.

A few interesting snippets

2010-12-28T22:30:00.004+11:00

I'm still on blog holidays, but wanted to share a couple of things I read elsewhere:

1. Further on the problems faced by Indigenous Australians came this stark story from the World Today, with depressing bits of information like

- The average 10 year old Indigenous child in Alice Springs has attended 100 funerals.

- Alice Springs, population 27000, has two taverns which are amongst the largest purchasers of beer from Fosters. These taverns are open for 4 hours a day- from 10am to 2pm (the time after which alcohol can be consumed outdoors in Alice Springs).

2. On a lighter note- three articles to interest readers with an academic background (direct from my Facebook friends to you):

- the academic heirachy as a pyramid scheme from The Economist

- how Barclays tried to silence a PhD thesis.

- and why scientists deserve more sex and other rewards from the LA Times.

3. In the last 20 years there has been a lunch box revolution. I am trying not to get overly excited, but behold the plastic containers with built-in cooling gel. In today's forecast 40 degrees we're trying one out!

Holiday time

2010-12-19T13:58:00.003+11:00

I didn't get ahead enough on blog posts to cover me while we were away- or even up until that point- and while the Projects A Day kept happening, as you can see the blogging about them didn't- and suddenly for every item I checked off the list, I was adding another on which to procrastinate.

While I was away I started reading the excellent Grog's Gamut (his Christmas letter post was my launching-in point, and worth a read on its own). It was there I struck his rationale for having a bloggy break over Christmas:

I reached the "I don't give a stuff" point.... "meh" overtook me.

And I realised I was at that point too. I usually look forward to posting, but at the moment there are a heap of other things I'd rather do- and I'm a bit sick of staring at my list of half-completed posts that I've lost momentum on. I blog for fun, so when I'm not having fun it's time to scale back. Consider it a sabbatical- I've just decided that for the time being I'd rather read other people's writing than write my own. Or maybe that's a holiday?

So, I'll see you when I see you!

This weekend I am grateful for... a beach holiday

2010-12-18T23:17:00.002+11:00

Another Maxabella-inspired grateful post, and this week I've been grateful for the chance to have a few days with B and the boys on the Mornington Penninsula. Good weather, child-friendly beaches, pick-your-own cherries and strawberries, a few mazes to solve, dolphins to swim by the Queenscliff ferry, some great places to eat and eat (and when all else fails, it's hard to go wrong with the occasional fish and chips), a back yard with a play structure, and those wonderful people at information offices and taking the tour of Cape Shanck Lighthouse who are genuinely enthusiastic about answering questions they probably face fourteen times a day: yes, I'm grateful!

And refreshed!

And very overdue with APrADa posts!! It's still happening!!

Day 15: small item, large procrastination

2010-12-15T14:46:00.001+11:00

Before:

After:

A Project A Day doesn't have to be about large and grand projects. I am ashamed to say it has truly been several years that I have been too lazy to get a power board from upstairs and tidy up those cords! I'm very pleased that it's done!!

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A $690 donation to World Vision will help a village in the Solomon Islands to buy a solar panel- and improve their lives.

Days 9-10: home activities

2010-12-14T21:38:00.002+11:00

I'm behind on posting my Project-A-Days so just a couple of quickies to show I'm still on the game:

Days 9-10 were sick days for Little Bro- a high fever and cough kept him velcroed to my side. It was going to be a carers' leave day from work but being stuck on the couch with him turned out to have a small silver lining- it was pretty easy to do heaps of uninterrupted computer tasks- enough to convince myself I was working from home. And, with a couple of quick nips to the shops, I was able to tick a few items off my to-do list:
- order the last Christmas book gifts from The Book Depository
- research and order personalized Christmas baubles (from Christmas 4 You) for Little Bro and my nephew (Little Bro's bauble has only taken me two years to order....)
- research and buy a ByK for Big Bro in response to his Christmas letter
- set up personalized Santa video messages for the boys from portablenorthpole.tv (winner!)
- buy Christmas chocolates for the Childcare carers (and ignore the fact that they probably get buried in chocolate at Christmas...)

Im pretty pleased with that haul! Little Bro is on the mend now, but I must say I didn't mind my few days of cuddles and "seatwork".

And yep, IOU a Christmas unwrapped gift idea... Coming soon...

This weekend I'm grateful for... excursions, Wiggles and Santa

2010-12-12T23:07:00.000+11:00

I'm away from my photos so you'll have to be grateful for a Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post without illustrations. Little Bro would not be impressed- he flicks through my books asking "where's'a pictures?"

So this week I've been grateful for...

1. An excursion into the corporate world, if only for two hours. I'm sure the grass is always greener and the cubicles are probably smaller, and academics like to think the work is boring, but having a waitress for your meetings and a staircase between floors 18 and 19... not something i've seen in my blue-stockinged existence! When the coffee shop at the bottom offered me a frequent-shopper card I didn't say no.

2. The Wiggles- not only did they get my kids ready in record time last Saturday, they put on a fab concert! For performers who must sing Hot Potato more than 365 times a year, they put on a good show of still enjoying it! Three little boys and two mums had an awesome hour of bopping, twinkling and the rest.

3. Santa- ok, I'm a bad mum, but the Santa-is-watching threat has been used this week. I even taught Big Bro Santa Claus is coming to town so he could hear for himself "he sees you when you're sleeping/he knows when you're awake/he knows if you've been bad or good". And there's nothing like a reminder that Santa likes helpers to get some focus in a four year old. Am I bad or bad? ;-)

Days 7-8: Christmas Decorations

2010-12-11T06:54:00.007+11:00

Before we had children, B and I never bothered about Christmas decorations. Our two US Christmases were spent away from home, so we enjoyed other peoples' decorations. Or, in 2005, we enjoyed Mother Nature's:

Maroon Bells, from Aspen Highlands (if you look closely there is a ski sign in the bottom right corner). It was an awesome day for skiing- and apart from a few probably-Jewish families, we had the ski fields almost to ourselves. Who needs turkey?

Now that we share our family with certain people with a vested interest in Christmas, we've started to decorate a bit. Of course there are important receptacles to be hung by the chimney with care:

And the all-important tree. Last year we had a plastic one (with built in fibre optic lights, no less!) given to us which, amongst post-Sweden craziness I decided "would do". But... it wasn't quite me. I had grown up with a living Christmas tree- the perennial sort, in a pot- so I had been keen to go down that path. After realising Sunday afternoons in December aren't a good time to look for a tree any bigger than your hand, we found a specimen about a metre tall- just right for little people to decorate.

As we decorated, Big Bro enthusiastically wanted "more!" but thankfully listened to the principle of "less is more". I managed to keep the tree to our meaningful ornaments- mostly things we've collected on our travels.

There are a few Swedish mementos, like the Dalarna horses, the glass balls we saw being blown at Skansen, and the stockings, and a gold Aspen leaf, to remind us of our Aspen Christmas.

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On the topic of trees, you can donate a tree to the Murray Darling through Carbon Catchers. For $8.80 you receive GPS coordinates for your tree, and can follow its progress for the next 30 years.

Day 6: Letter to Santa

2010-12-08T13:23:00.003+11:00

No, I haven't been consumed by the voracious locusts: just trying to shake off a chesty bug, so rest has had a higher priority than reporting on A Project A Day. This was one of the items on my list:

Getting Big Bro to write his first Santa letter (we discussed what he wanted to say, then I dictated the letters which he wrote). It wasn't too hard- he likes both the idea of Santa and he likes writing letters- especially with a purpose! I feel a little bad that I suggested he say "I have tried hard to be a big helper" rather than the more positive "I have been a big helper"- I was feeling rather frazzled at the time- but there we are. So now "new bike research" is on the list!

We posted a photocopy of the letter (well, Big Bro thinks the original went...) to Santa, North Pole 9999 so we're looking forward to a reply...

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Today I wanted to mention children in Australia whose family situations are such that Santa may miss their house- with a $40 donation, the Wesley Mission can provide provide these children with a gifts to make their Christmas brighter.

Hungry locusts descending on Melbourne?

2010-12-06T10:45:00.004+11:00

Hungry locusts are descending on Melbourne, "migrating south by the trillions" according to The Age today. It includes this picture from 730am..... eww!

There is not a lot available about small-scale destruction of locusts- from what I've gleaned
- they don't like chilli or garlic (so I will be drenching my garden in Beat-a-bug spray)
- chooks and boots are the best defence
- they're attracted to green, so protecting vulnerable plants with green shadecloth or netting shouldn't be green (could you temporarily paint vulnerable plants a different colour?)
- they're attracted to yellow, so that's a good colour for traps. Or yellow objects floating in swimming pools is a good way to drown them (cancel that pool party...)

Days 4 and 5: changing seasons

2010-12-05T21:02:00.002+11:00

It was a hectic weekend with lots to do that didn't quite fit with my Project a Day rules: Wiggles concert (watching excited kids=heaps of fun!), play group Christmas barbecue (watching excited kids=heaps of fun!), plus the usual run around of weekend activites. But in between all that I managed to pull out the broad beans, salvaging 1.5kg of pods.

I haven't yet found broad beans in shops or markets that look as good as the home grown version, so it was definitely a sad farewell to an old friend- the broad beans had been planted way back in autumn, so for an annual plant they have stuck around for ages, touching every season. But as Pen said about her broad bean crop, its demise is bittersweet- they need to move on to make room for the summer crops. And certainly we did seize that opportunity- today Little Bro and I started to plant out our tomatoes that have been patiently waiting in the seed house. Welcome, summer.

Images to come...

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Providing the training and resources for a community to establish a vegetable garden to supply its own needs and sell the surplus can lift that community out of poverty. A donation of $45 to World Vision can do this, or for $125, a community can establish a market garden as well as receive the skills and tools to maintain their environment for future generations.

This weekend I'm grateful for.... choosing my own path

2010-12-04T07:48:00.000+11:00

I'm back! The double-header party last week left me without the energy for a Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post, but believe me that I was grateful for lovely people- minor and major- who helped the party run smoothly. Aren't friends great?

I sometimes get the guilts about skipping posts I was planning to do. But you know what? It's my blog and I can choose when and what I write... I just can't choose who reads it! :)

The other thing I'm grateful for this week are real bookshops. Y'know, the ones you have to walk into? I thought I was a complete online convert, but Lucy at The Hill of Content Bookshop on Bourke Street made me realise that when I don't know exactly what I want, having someone in the children's section who apparently remembers the details of every book is worth the extra cost of the book , plus the extra books I was incited to buy. ("Apparently" not referring to her memory, but the fact that I can only judge on the basis of the 4 or so books she suggested that I had read) And she knew the difference between the real Enid Blytons and the modern spin offs.

Oh, and I'm grateful to the Wiggles, whose 930am concert was enough incentive for the boys to eat and get dressed with enough time to spare that I had time for an early Grateful Post!

Day 3: moving on

2010-12-03T21:30:00.003+11:00

Today's Project was to prepare our high chair, folding change table and solid (unfolding? fixture?) change tables for passing on to a pregnant colleague. It wasn't really one of those tasks I have been procrastinating about for ages, because it came about because the recipient was passing by this way. Either way, it was a project in itself to get things looking a bit less used with only a day's notice.

Fortunately, my cleaning assistants were as willing as ever.

The change table is a bit of a Melbourne Research Institute heirloom, requiring a quick modern history lesson to explain its genealogy. When I started my PhD I took over the desk of a former student, L, sharing my bay with a scientist, H. H played soccer with another scientist, C, who had worked next door to us. When I started in my current position, C and his wife both worked with me. Where this all relates to the change table is that it was made by L about 20 years ago then passed to H, who passed it to C, who passed it to me, who now passes it to the next link in the chain. I told her that the only deal in receiving the change table was that it has to be passed to another researcher!

Somewhere on blog.crojack.org (sorry, can't find the specific post) is the observation that economics courses always cite blood donation as the only completely altruistic industries of modern society*- meaning the donor receives no benefit- yet the hand-me-down system of baby clothes and equipment is just as altruistic. Except that, in this case, the donor (=me) received the double benefit of decluttering and a topic for APrADa!

*except if you live in the USA where in places like Denver homeless people queue for $20 to donate their blood plasma....

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While there are plenty of things we "need" to get during pregnancy, pre-natal education is one of the few which is positively correlated with improving outcomes for mothers and children. A $55 donation to Oxfam can support the training of community members who will provide pre- and post-natal education for women living in rural Cambodia.

Day 2: Christmas cards

2010-12-02T22:36:00.003+11:00

Today's project was one of those Christmas tasks I always procrastinate about... but not this year!! A Project a Day reaps rewards!! I polished off about 90% of my Christmas card list with an evening home alone with Nigella and two sleeping boys. As you can see from my stocks of last-year's 50c Christmas stamps (and even a good stash of 45c stamps from who-knows-when), I don't normally live up to my card hopes. I'm sure there will be a few last minute remembers, but I'm definitely over the hump.

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Thinking of writing links up with thinking of families who can't afford to buy writing materials for their children- and how can you learn to read and write without having the basic tools?

A $5 donation to World Vision can buy pencils for a family, while $15 will add books to the package. Closer to home, with $20 the Wesley Mission will provide children with a stationery set so they can complete their schoolwork like everyone else.

Thanks for your comments so far! I will be donating $1 for each comment in December to a gift that will help another family.

A plug for Suburban Sonnet

2010-12-02T15:48:00.003+11:00

I have been quietly enjoying my cousin's private blog on babies, gardens and miscellany for quite a few months now so I'm pleased that she has gone public with A Suburban Sonnet, and I can finally mention things she is saying!

Advent Calendar

2010-12-01T20:41:00.003+11:00

As well as being Day 1 of A Project A Day, it's the first of December, which means the first day of our Advent Calendar- a beautiful Made in Germany creation from J. (Thanks!)

Big Bro quickly got the idea- today we open Door Number 1, tomorrow it's Door Number 2. We only open the door for today. Door 1 was the little girl at bottom right- who is now holding a drum. Yep, holding a drum, not a chocolate. The way it should be on an Advent calendar.

Cute post script: Big Bro was especially difficult to rouse the next day- not even the usual subtle tricks like hollering "breakfast time- who's having cereal?" 5 cm from his ear were enough to wake him. I decided he must really need his sleep and left him. Three seconds later, out raced a little pyjama clad fellow. "It's time to open the number 2 door!!" Advent Calendar AND alarm clock!

Day 1: make a bed

2010-12-01T19:19:00.008+11:00

Day 1 of A Project A Day, and I made a bed. At this stage, folks, let's establish two things:

1. I may be lame on the motivation front, but pulling up some sheets with a hospital crease does not a project make.
2. I don't mind a nicely made bed, but it's not actually one of my high priorities in the house cleaning schedule. So don't expect that sheets and hospital creases will be on my APrADay List.

My making a bed was the real deal- from flat-packed bits to the finished product, ta-da!

Big Bro had been happily sleeping in his side-less cot for ages, at least for the first part of the night. He claims that it's lonely in the dark, and has perfected the art of sneaking into a vacant patch of our bed without waking us... until sometime later we receive a heel in the eye socket from our slumbering firstborn. With a two-and-a-half year record of fighting Big Bro on the sleep front, B and I have both run out of energy for that battle. So do we think the comfy new bed (king-single, no less) with its spiffy Target linen will solve Big Bro's desire for midnight company? Not at all. The idea is that it can be a refuge for whichever parent cops the most heels to the eyesocket in one night... Lame, I know, but like I said, we're battle-weary.

This whole evolution to co-sleeping is quite bizarre for me. As a good disciple of Robin Barker's Baby Love, four years ago I was quite certain that I didn't want a co-sleeping baby. Bed-sharing was restricted to moments of extreme illness or desperation, and there was no reason to change, given that Big Bro wasn't the sort of kid to snuggle down for a cuddle and a snooze. I'm sure I had the occasional secret- and superior- snigger at people who shared beds with their kids. Something changed for all of us in the last year, and all of a sudden we have a co-sleeper. One thing parenting teaches has taught me is to never judge other parents (well, I try...), because I'll be doing whatever they're doing the next week...

The whole co-sleeping thing is a one of those middle-class dilemmas, though. I finally got around to reading the completely depressing Angela's Ashes a few months ago, and the fact of four boys sharing a bed was certainly not a novelty for Ireland of 70 years ago. Even a former colleague, now in her mid-40s, had told us that in her childhood in Scotland, she shared a bed with her sister until she was 16. So what's the big deal now?

Anyway, back to the bed upgrade, seeing the old cot empty was a little bittersweet.

Sure, it's great to see Big Bro growing up, but it's yet another step away from my little bundle at the end of the cot...

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Pen and I were keen to think up sone fundraising aspect to our Project a Day Projects. Here's my version: I'll donate $1 for every comment posted in December, towards a charitable gift along the lines of Oxfam Unwrapped or World Vision's Smiles Catalogue's Donate-a-Goat.

Sticking with the theme of today's post, a $30 donation to World Vision would buy a blanket for someone affected by a natural disaster, illness, or just ("just") cold nights.

A Project A Day

2010-12-01T08:06:00.001+11:00

Ilipilli is running "A Project a Day" for December, so I decided to hang out my procrastination in public and sign up.

Hello, I'm V and I am a serial procrastinator.

So the deal is that every day in December I tick something off my "to do" list. My very long "to do" list. For me it's about clearing up the house and garden (I'm not as crafty as Pen), with the incentive that I might feel mentally clearer when I launch into Career #2 next year. My goal is to have 30 minutes a day doing something I might otherwise put off. So far the list includes:

- clearing out a few dumping-ground cupboards around the house

- weeding or clearing various bits of the garden that I have been ignoring

- deadheading the roses

- creating albums from our zillion photos from the last four years

- putting up pictures after only 3 and a half years here

- sorting out Little Bro's outgrown clothes. And his outgrown baby equipment. And all the other remnants of having had two babies in the house.

- doing my long-promised eBay selling of this, that and the other. I buy on eBay but I've never sold... until now...

- clearing out the garage

- clearing out the freezer. There are babyfood purees somewhere in there. I know. I pretend not to, but they're there. And I'm sure I am not saving them for the grandkids.

If you have a few unfinished jobs hanging over your head, why not join in with Ilipilli's Project a Day? We're also trying to work out how to tie it in with a bit of fundraising- will have to ponder this a bit more. If nothing else, drop by to keep us honest and keep the accountability pressure on us!

The construction and rocket birthday

2010-11-30T21:34:00.006+11:00

November's birthday festivities peaked last Saturday with The Party. 24 kiddies plus associates, in a local park. Not too hard... until the weather set in.

On the bright side, it was a pretty clear decision to relocate the party to our house. It was loud, but everyone stayed happy and ate lots. What more could I ask for?

In the planning side of things, I realise that I made the mistake of heading for a double-theme. Big Bro wanted a rocket cake (and so did I after seeing one with "blast off" sparklers in Donna Hay), whereas for Little Bro, a construction-site cake seemed the most appropriate. It was a bit messy, but these were the centrepieces.

A bit hard to see here, but the candles on the construction cake were these witches hat/construction cone candles from It's All About Kids. They sneakily pointed out to me that they had construction-theme section, where I picked up a few hanging decorations, and bought a bit of yellow cardboard to make some "warning" signs (and forgot to take photos. Just think of the pictograms for "balloons ahead" and "party hat zone".) Didn't go as far as to get yellow and black balloons.

Rockets lend themselves a bit more to themed food, so out came the Biskart star cutters and the star-shaped foil containers from Aldi ages ago. Add jelly or mango pudding (made with agar agar for the vegetarian guests) and there are plenty of stars to go around.

The best moment of the day was of course singing happy birthday to my two little fellows- their official graduation into their next year, and the best thing about the day was that lovely sense of "I am so lucky to be surrounded by so many wonderful friends". (Oops, I missed my Grateful post this week...)

The funniest moment was busting Big Bro and two little friends tipping out the party bags. It was too cute, and too much a sense of disaster-averted, given they were only onto bag number 4, to be cross.

I'm still catching up on a bit of sleep from a week of late nights cooking, but all in all we had fun. More importantly, I'll do it again next year!

A quick plug- Sticky Mosaics

2010-11-24T18:06:00.002+11:00

The lucky Bros received lots of cool presents for their birthdays, and in the interests of easy posts (rather than no posts) I'll try to mention a few. Like Sticky Mosaics, for Big Bro. This came from the awesome Entropy online toy store (for those in the know, their slogan is "it's all about energy"- how cool!).

Entropy is based in Townsville, but don't let that put you off (no offence to Townsville, but I never realised it was a mecca of educational toy shoppers!). It's full of "different" toys- not what you find around Melbourne shopping centres and the website has an easy to ~~spend~~ use layout with gift ideas sorted by price or age. And heaps of cool toys!

Big Bro has been busy in the last week sticking up his five vehicle mosaics. With a bit of guidance, Little Bro has managed to help, and the results are not too bad. They're certainly worthy of the kitchen art collection. And more importantly, Big Bro needed minimal parental assistance to get started and get going- a gift for the parents as well as him!

This weekend I'm grateful for... just about everything

2010-11-20T08:36:00.004+11:00

Cartoon by Nicholson, originally published in The Australian: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au.

For this weekend's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post, I had started building a list early in the week. Then on Thursday and my list was blown apart by a seminar by Professor Jonathan Carapetis from the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin. He presented a lot of facts to describe the challenges faced by Indigenous Australians, especially those living in remote communities in the Northern Territory. In some ways I knew the rough gist of the facts, but to have them presented in a clear, single package in a format I understood, and without obvious political undertones, was sobering.

Completely sobering, and depressing. Especially because the problems are so big that it's hard to see many immediate fixes.

To think about how being a mother with two small children in suburban Melbourne differs from being a mother in a remote Northern Territory community makes me extremely grateful for just about everything. And I suspect that anyone with the means to be reading blogs can feel the same. Not preaching, just suggesting...

I was most affected by one of the first pictures- small children, like my kids, joyfully playing in water in a remote Northern Territory community. All very nice, until we realised that the water was an open sewer. And the hard facts weren't any easier to take.

I've had trouble finding a single source for all the facts I remember from the seminar, so I'm just going to repeat what I remember- with an apology if there are glaring inaccuracies- and refer you to the ABC Indigenous Health site and the Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet for more information.

How can I be anything but grateful for what I have when there are Indigenous families facing:

- a child death rate TWICE that of non-Indigenous children (and not much better than adults). And a sobering fact that in any Australian population, the less education a mother has had, the higher her children's risk of dying. Completely scary fact.

- overcrowded housing where in some communities the average number of people sleeping in a two bedroom house each night is SEVENTEEN.

- diseases like rheumatic fever and parasitic infections which have been eliminated from non-Indigenous populations.

- a substantial proportion of babies being born to already-malnourished teenagers, resulting in long-term health problems for both the mothers and the babies.

- the standard growth curve for children in remote communities being fairly normal growth to around 6 months, and then weight gain in the average child STALLS until around one year, presumably because of the inavailability of appropriate infant food. Forget about worrying about when to introduce wheat or dairy, or whether you're feeding your kids organic or not- it'd be insignificant if you had to decide whether you have any food suitable for your baby.

What can be done? Good question- Closing the Gap is a start, but the message I got from Prof Carapetis was that there is no doubt that even more money is needed (even though we are already spending huge amounts of money), and this money needs be spent in carefully considered and monitored ways to ensure the most benefit per buck rather than political gain per buck. More than that, it's too easy for all of us in the comfortable suburban blog-belt (and our neighbours) to forget what's happening in other parts of our country, making it easy for the inequities to persist.

Inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes

2010-11-17T23:09:00.004+11:00

If I were a good blogger I'd do NaBloPoMo and post every day in November, but two Novembers in and I've fallen into the same black hole both times where life catches up with me and sucks out my blogging impetus. It's birthday parties, it's Christmas, it's the garden picking up speed, last year it was our Swedish trip, this year it is the whole career change bizzo. November just doesn't leave much room in my head.

So excuse me if I do the occasional (or more) cheaty post, which tonight is just showing you something I bought, not even looking any better than when I opened the box.

Cookie Cutters from Bisk-Art.

The three sisters garden

2010-11-14T22:14:00.001+11:00

I've been meaning to post for ages about my crop rotation system- and hopefully writing this will give me the ~~guilt~~ impetus to put fingers to keyboard- but for the meantime accept that a lot of my vegetable garden design is based on the principles of companion planting. This means putting plants together by matching their needs (eg, acid-lovers), where possible putting two plants with complementary features together (eg, basil and tomatoes), and also considering the order in which plants occupy a bed (eg, putting nitrogen-hungry brassicas after nitrogen-fixing ("making") legumes).

For a couple of years I have been reading about the idea of a Three Sisters Garden, most recently at My Little Vegetable Garden. It's a great example of companion planting, and has its origins in Native American farming. The three elements, squash, corn (maize) and climbing beans were the three major crops of cultures such as the Anasazi. These were not the nomadic "Indians" of the "Cowboys and..." stereotype, but in fact had sophisticated villages, some of which still exist, like these cliffside constructions in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.

Mesa Verde is a plateau, and is it thought that the Anasazi inhabitants who lived there between 1400-700 years ago (before the majority of European historic buildings were built) made their homes on the cliff sides to maximise the use of the arable land on the top of the plateau for farming. Up there they even had irrigation systems, and the remains of squash, beans and corn have been found in the ruins. It appears that Mesa Verde was abandoned suddenly- in the space of 1 to 2 generations- and its people migrated south, perhaps because of drought.

Anyway, coming back to the Three Sisters, the traditional view is that the three plants- corn, squash and beans- are the sisters, each bringing something into the garden to support the other plants:

- the corn stands tall, and provides a scaffold for the beans to climb on

- the squash cover the ground, shading the ground to keep it cool and smothering weeds

- the beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil where all the plants' roots can use it

(I read somewhere that sometimes a fourth sister, a flower to attract pollinators, was included)

As you cruise the Three Sisters literature online you'll find various designs of how to lay out the plot. I think a lot of the design has to come from trial and error. I half tried last year, and my corn ended up being smothered by the rampant zucchinis. This year, in the hopes of a more harmonious sorority, I have curbed the enthusiasm of the "squash" sister by demoting it from zucchini to weaker cucurbits like melons and cucumbers (which are not without their own trials). The corn are Digger's Dwarf (so may fail on the tall front, hence the frame below) and the beans so far are Purple Dragon and Sex-without-strings (what a name!) that I picked up from a local school fair. The vibrant green shoots in the background are logan berries which believe that they should be the fourth sister.

So far things are looking ok- though I won't count my sisters until they've fruited!

This weekend I am grateful for.... opportunities

2010-11-13T21:43:00.003+11:00

Another week gone (and phew! What a week!) and time for another Maxabella-inspired grateful post. And this week I have a heap to be grateful for, much coming under the heading of

Opportunities.

Being able to work (the paid flavour).

Having the option to work or not work.

A funding system that believes in me more than I do.

Friends and friends of friends who have the kindness to help me brainstorm.

Having enough momentum to formulate plans that get me out of my career crisis.

People who believe in me enough to give me a chance at my dream job.

How could I be anything less than grateful?

(And you readers may be grateful that this should draw an end to all my cryptic career-crisis-centred grateful posts!)

Kids say the darndest things

2010-11-12T22:25:00.002+11:00

What a week! In good ways. Lots to be grateful for, which I'll save for tomorrow's Grateful Post, but in the meantime I will relay a few things I had recorded for time immemorial in Facebook

I only have kindy ~~inmates~~ classmates to blame for items 1-3 of Big Bro's latest quotable statements:

1. This is going to hurt a bit (said when prodding Little Bro)

2. Here's my business card. This is Alex- she's a nice girl. You can make an appointment

3. I'm so cool I'm 20 degrees.

4. Little Bro, can I flush your head please?

5. (When we were leaving for our lovely dentist) You can go, but leave the alarm off so I can stay here and do some work (like father, like son...)

Meanwhile, Little Bro has discovered the joys of questions: Whassat? Where's...? Where we goin'? What you doin'? What music is this? And the utility of "don't want to..."

This evening he also came up with two statements you don't want to hear from a nearly-2-year-old:

1. (holding a USB thumb drive) Puttit inna dishwasha?

2. (Standing at the top of the stairs) Humpty Dumpty had a great fall! Big jump!!

The best of all was our discussion of where to go on holiday.

Little Bro: go in Dada's car!

Big Bro: to crison!

Us: to Brisbane?

Big Bro: no, to crison, where bad guys go!

There may still be jobs for travel agents in 20 years time, I suspect...

Cross-cultural anecdotes #2: bon hau/ni jour?

2010-11-09T08:26:00.000+11:00

Big Bro (in an approximately correct pronunciation- let's be realistic!): un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq.... I can speak Chinese!!

And this is the education we are paying for? ;-)

Cross-cultural anecdotes #1: Anglo-Indian Breakfast

2010-11-08T22:20:00.003+11:00

A soft boiled egg and last night's garlic naan (cooked on the barbecue, no less).

Cut the naan into fingers and dunk.

I had added some salt to the butter-garlic topping for the naan, and it blended perfectly with the egg.

And yes, we have an egg cup shortage (and yes, Christmas is coming, hint hint)

Cup Week in the Garden 2010

2010-11-07T21:48:00.007+11:00

Melbourne Cup Day is one of those points in the gardening calendar that has mystical properties- it's meant to be the time to plant out summer crops. It also reminds me to take stock of the roses, and compare their blooms to those at the Flemington Race Track.

The columbines aren't shy, either.

With all the lovely rain (did everyone else realise we're into a La Nina weather pattern? I only just did...) there has been plenty of chance for plants to grow. Including weeds, like this persistent ground cover (not sure of its name).

I thought this was a weed- and maybe it is- but it's turning into something interesting.

We had a Cup Day feast of broad beans and carrots- not huge, but my largest yet!

Not wanting to count my berries before they ripen (last year I lost the entire harvest to a heat wave) but if nothing else, I have a great crop of green loganberries.....

One of my goals is to have a daisy border around the lawn. This was one of those satisfying views where you suddenly think "I can see my plans working".

The night of the long pincers, or Double Standards

2010-11-04T21:20:00.006+11:00

Funny how I try not to let the boys watch anything involving physical violence on the tv, yet I am happy to step outside for some murderous vengeance after their bedtime.

*smash*

*squelch*

Very clever of you to climb into the plastic bottle shielding the melon...

*stab*

It was actually earwigs I was after- the little blighters are voracious!

There was no shortage :(

*crunch*

*squish*

Hasta la vista, little insect....

Bean round the full circle

2010-11-03T12:59:00.006+11:00

Just as Chez Ilipilli have finished their broadbean harvest, ours has started. Over a month after last year's, I note- why? Did I plant later? Maybe; must get better at keeping records... Because the weather has been cooler- definitely a possibility. Because I planted different varieties- perhaps: last year was Coles Dwarf and Early Long Pod. This year was Coles Dwarf and Aquadulce*, thus removing the "early" element, and so far just the Coles Dwarf have produced. Looking around the plot, there are plants at all stages from flowering through to harvest-ready:

First harvest: 350g total weight, 100g of edible beans. (About the same as last year's first harvest)

Like last year, I can't think of a better recipe to start the season than Consuming Passions' Bean Feast (recipe here). The first taste was sublime :) Hello spring!

*there's a prize for anyone who remembered that last year I considered getting crimson flowering broad beans this year. They turned out to be way more expensive than Aquadulce, so I stuck with frugal white. Maybe next year...

Oat cuisine: how much would you pay for muesli?

2010-11-01T08:20:00.000+11:00

Not long ago, a friend posted on Facebook that she had just spent $90 buying 3kg of muesli (granola) online. I was more than a bit stunned- why did she need to buy muesli online when there are heaps of mueslis on the shelves at the supermarket? And what did they put in $30-a-kilo muesli that wasn't in my apparently adequate under-$5-a-kilo muesli from Aldi?

After a quick Google, I discovered that in Australia there are almost as many muesli varieties available online as there are on a given supermarket's shelves. There are even companies that make custom muesli mixes to order (eg here, here and here...). Evidently many Australians take their breakfast seriously!

It got me thinking- what makes muesli taste good? And more importantly, does muesli become better the more you spend on it? And so my Great Muesli Taste Test evolved.

A few tentative enquiries to friends and cousins revealed that I could assemble a crew of curious tasters (Thanks!). A trip to the supermarket got me a range of mueslis that all fitted the "natural muesli" description, and a few enquiries brought me three donations of gourmet muesli (This Growing Life's budget doesn't stretch to minimum-spend-$75 purchases!) And an evening in front of Four Corners game me time to de-identify my ten candidates into ziplock bags.

The tasters were asked to give each muesli a rating from a standardised scale where, for example, 0= "This was so bad I couldn't eat it" , 4="I didn't really like this muesli but I would buy it if the price were right", 9="this muesli is great and I would definitely buy it", etc. They were also asked to specify anything they particularly liked or disliked about the mueslis. The tasters ranked their anonymous muesli samples, and the results between tasters were surprisingly consistent.

Budget mueslis: Under $2/500g

Coles Smart Buy Muesli- this no-name, no-fuss muesli with sultanas, dried pineapple and banana chips didn't do much to arouse the tasters. One commented that it was surprisingly fruity for something that looked grey, while the "evil banana" sealed its fate for two of the five tasters. Average score 5.2.

Golden Vale (Aldi) Fruit and Nut Muesli- this is my every day muesli, but the tasters found it bland, boring, and were unconvinced by its "tropical theme". Average score 4.2.

Low cost mueslis: $2-3/500g

The Muesli Company Premium Muesli- the consensus on this muesli was summed up in the comment "lots of fruit and seeds- a nicely balanced blend". Its average score 6.8 belies its popularity, and it would have scored 7.75 (and been outright winner) if we ignore the date-hating taster's big thumbs down to its sliced dates.

Lowan Swiss Muesli- this was described as a "good basic muesli", though some objected that it was too sweet or had a strange taste. Average score 6.

Mid-range mueslis All $4.99/500g

Carman's Natural Bircher Muesli- Carman's is a brand that seems to get a lot of word of mouth promotion- I was put onto it by several enthusiasts. The tasters all enjoyed its cinnamonny flavours- a trademark Carman's aroma- though there were comments that it was too rich for every day and a bit goopy in the mouth from all its sesame seeds (denture-wearers beware!). With an average score of 7.5, it was equal most popular.

Just Organic (Aldi) Cranberry and Almond Muesli- this muesli uses finer oats than most of the others, and also stands out with a large volume of puffed wheat. The tasters' consensus was that while there was a large volume of additives, they were very limited in variety. Average score 5.8.

Specially Selected (Aldi) Continental Natural Muesli- the third competitor from the Aldi stables was the most popular with "heaps of fruit, nuts and seeds", and was only criticised for containing whole almonds ("a bit of a mouthful") and too much banana for a banana-hater. Average score 7.5.

"Premium mueslis" $10-11/500g

Whisk and Pin Leura Natural Muesli- this was easily the most visually appealing muesli, with a range of oversized chunks of dried fruit and nuts, including mango slices, whole wild figs, dried oranges and cashews. However, these impressive elements were also this muesli's downfall, with it being declared a mouthful, tough and too chewy. Our tasters were certainly keeping breakfast time practicalities in mind, and with an average score of 4.2, Whisk and Pin's muesli was the shock loser of the night (equal with Golden Vale).

Willow and Stick Natural Muesli- this gourmet muesli was repeatedly praised for its fruit and nut mix, and cinnamon flavour, though there were less favourable comments related to its fruit being a mouthful and it being a bit rich. Still, with an average score of 7.2, it was joint runner up in the popularity stakes.

Brookfarm Natural Macadamia Muesli- our tasters liked the macadamias and cranberries, but criticised this muesli for being soft, flaky, sweet and rich. With an average score of 7.2, it was a close second-favourite.

Putting this information graphically to show the spread of scores for each sample:

The budget mueslis were the worst performing category, but mueslis from the other price ranges fared equivalently. The two most popular mueslis overall were the mid-range Carman's and Specially Selected, ranking just ahead of Willow and Stick and Brookfarm, all of which received universally positive rankings. Interestingly, though, Carman's and Brookfarm both received comments along the lines of "nice, but too rich for every day". The rest of the mueslis had their scores split between the "like and dislike".

The surprising dropout of the day was the premium muesli from Whisk and Pin. It was certainly the best looking product, with large chunks of dried mango, whole dried figs and wedges of dried orange. But these impressive inclusions were Whisk and Pin's downfall, with the consensus being that it was too hard to eat.

So what do I conclude about muesli?

Firstly, if our results are anything to go by, while budget (<$2/500g) mueslis skimp on taste, above this price range there is little to be gained in the pure taste by paying more. The two mueslis topping the overall scores were from the mid-range Carman's and Specially Selected, scraping ahead of two of the three premium mueslis, Willow and Stick and Brookfarm.

Of course, average scores don't show whether a muesli was liked by all but one of the tasters (as was the case for The Muesli Company's Premium Muesli). The highest individual score of 9, meaning "this muesli is great and I would definitely buy it" was awarded by two different testers, to two mueslis- Willow and Stick Natural Muesli and The Muesli Company's Premium Muesli.

Of course, our results also don't say anything about the value of factors other than taste, like organic ingredients or appearance. But at the end of the day, I don't feel inclined to rush out to shop online for gourmet muesli. The mix-your-own mueslis sound like a fun gift, and I may yet venture into the mid-range priced mueslis, but that will do me.

What about you? What is your favourite muesli, and would you shell out online for breakfast?

Declaration: mueslis from Whisk and Pin, Willow and Stick and Brookfarm were generously donated by the companies on request.

Hallowe'en in Australia- harmless fun or the forces of evil?

2010-10-31T14:50:00.008+11:00

I wrote most of this then ran out of energy that evening to upload photos and press the final "publish post" button then saw that "everyone" in the blogosphere was writing about Hallowe'en then decided to press publish leaving the date stamp intact. Better late than never...

Has anyone else in Australia- or at least Melbourne- been surprised by how much exposure Hallowe'en is getting this year? The supermarkets and department stores seem full of "stuff" (mostly plastic and/or brightly coloured) and my Facebook updates are going wild with indignation about it. There was pumpkin carving at kindy (supplied by a Canadian dad, to be fair) and they had a dress-up day. I even caught onto the spirit by helping the boys indulge their passion for safety scissors and paste, and we made orange paper lanterns and drew faces on pumpkin shaped cutouts. And I've coordinated the laundry so that the boys can wear their Gymboree glow-in-the-dark skeleton pyjamas tonight- bought not with Halloween in mind but rather as a vague anatomy lesson (they have loved them for several months- picture adapted from the Gymboree website because my glow in the dark photos never worked)
The boys won't be trick-or-treating because ~~I am too lazy and they don't know what they're missing~~ they are too little to take out, but in future years I would consider using an idea from Maxabella of doing a pre-Hallowe'en letterboxing with a subtle "opt-in" sign for houses to put out to show they are welcoming to cute and ghoulish visitors. And if any trick or treaters show up at the door we have something to offer (other than boxes of sultanas which I discovered last year were definitely not considered treats!)

Our Halloween activities have all been very harmless- or have they? With all the complaints my friends have been registering I started to feel guilty that I was falling into some greater social trap. The major arguments against Halloween are:

- "it's American" Well, actually, at lot of the traditions originate in Britain and Ireland, and looking at posts like Little Garden Helpers and hearing from a few Scottish friends I think that the Brits and Celts are underrecognised in these parts for their Hallowe'en contributions. While the US has certaibly built Halloween up into a huge secular event (which it isn't, see below) with Halloween specials on the telly, Hallmark cards and the rest, plenty of people elsewhere celebrate Hallowe'en or similar occasions like The Days of the Dead in Latin America. I also note (with respect to my friends!) that a number of the naysayers apparently have little problem with Glee, Hawaiian holidays, Thanksgiving, many of the other good things that come from the US...

- "it's promoting devil worship" So witches, evil ghosts and other anti-Christian scaries are central to Hallowe'en, and certainly it has its roots in Celtic festivals. However the early Church were happy with (and had their own motives for) including elements of pagan festivals into the religious festival- just like they did for Christmas and Easter (holly and bunnies, anyone). Hallowe'en- All Hallows Eve- is the leadup to All Saints (Hallows) and All Souls days. In darker and more superstitious times, getting scared silly by seeing the spooks and scaries coming out was probably a great way to make the congregation thankful for the good guy saints, and also think about the saving of their own souls. Classic good cop-bad cop.

- "it's commercial exploitation of kids and a money making exercise" This is, to my mind, the most valid criticism and one to which I half subscribe. I have no doubt that a lot of the increased interest in Hallowe'en this year stems from the increased exposure we have through the shops. Carvable pumpkins for $25 and all manner of plastic crap down to purple and black tinsel are all pretty clearly intended for us to spend money- before they get us to spend money on chopped down trees, all manner of plastic crap and red and green tinsel. But I think kids can get the spirit of Hallowe'en without the big spend. Maxabella's awesome $2-shop-with-modification costumes are a good example, and the internet has a zillion more home made costumes that aren't at all difficult. And correct me if I'm wrong, but most kids have something along the lines of a dress-up box. It's not whether your child looks like their character (who's ever seen a person in a white sheet and thought it was a ghost?) but whether they feel like it. Our decorations cost a few cents for the paper and glue, and about 10 fun minutes to make all of them (I know it was no longer because my kids wouldn't sit still longer than that). If parents are feeling pressured to spend more than they want on Hallowe'en, then- like the Christmas pony- they can just draw limits. And as for pressuring the neighbours, the opt-in system for receiving trick-or-treaters I mentioned is a great way to only include those who want visitors. I'm actually looking forward to meeting some of the older kids in the neighbourhood if they want to stop by our house tonight.

To me, Hallowe'en isn't a big deal either way- it's one of those minor days on the calendar, like St Patrick's Day or Bastille Day. It's fun to celebrate, and to learn about why and how other people celebrate it, but- like St Patrick's Day or Bastille Day- it's not a threat to our way of life or our culture, but just an excuse for fun, however you prefer (or don't prefer) it.

That's my take on Hallowe'en- what's yours?

This weekend I am grateful for... the kindness of friends and strangers

2010-10-30T07:57:00.000+11:00

Time for another Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post. This week I've been struck by people who have gone beyond my expectations, in the best ways.

First, I am grateful for the person who found my purse on the street and delivered it to the local police station before I realised that it was lost rather than misplaced.

Second, I am beyond grateful to friends who have gone beyond the call of duty. I am plotting some career adjustments at the moment and, without intending to, I have discovered the power of networking. Suddenly going from "oh dear, not sure what I'll do" to "wow, that might be a good option" has been empowering. So I am grateful to people who tell me "you can..." rather than "you shouldn't..." (even if the latter are saying it with the best intentions.)

Dusting off the Franciscus Henri archives

2010-10-29T12:41:00.002+11:00

Thanks to the local library, we discovered Franciscus Henri through his final children's album, The Best of Franciscus Henri (2002). His website shows he's subsequently switched to adult music which is a shame for us as the boys loved his music. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube we've located music videos. This is Big Bro's favourite song:

Today we browsed a bit further, and discovered Franciscus Henri's alter ego, Mister Whiskers. Seven watches later and the boys were still in hysterics over this clip.

It's all very well for Franciscus Henri finding a new direction, but I think he's got a great aptitude for kids' entertainment. I can only hope he might consider a retrospective concert tour....

Edward Ardizzone

2010-10-28T08:38:00.001+11:00

Big Bro has been getting into longer books with more writing and fewer pictures. This has opened up a whole new range of authors, including Edward Ardizzone, who I also enjoyed as a child- and still do.

Ardizzone wrote and illustrated many children's books including the Tim series, Diana and her Rhinoceros and Johnny the Clockmaker, all of which have been very popular with Big Bro. There is a "boys own" theme running through the books, of children-versus-adults, where the brave and spunky children are constantly held back by the majority of adults who think that the children are not up to the task at hand. Usually there is one adult who understands the capacities of children and allows them to enact their adventures in an adult world. In the Tim series, this is the boatman and the Captain, who let little Tim sail ships and defend lighthouses against wreckers; in Johnny the Clockmaker it is the blacksmith who is the only adult who believes Johnny really can make a grandfather clock, whilst in Diana and her Rhinoceros, it is the very pragmatic Diana versus the adult world as to whether a refugee rhino should live in the garden.

Ardizzone's illustrations are wonderful, and his sparing use of speech bubbles to accentuate certain actions or sentiments- like Tim's father responding to being woken up with "go away you horrid boy", or mundane comments from the mundane adults like "but is it wise?"- is very effective in bringing the pictures to life.

Ardizzone builds the same sort of exciting world as that in which the Famous Five and Hal and Roger live, where children who know no bounds, and it's completely appealing to children, young and old.

New Kutz on the Block

2010-10-27T08:20:00.001+11:00

My boys are not keen on haircuts- so much so that after a few attempts with Big Bro (in the last of which, the hairdresser snipped her finger in her valiant effort to give Big Bro a decent cut) we struck a deal- he would sit still for me to cut his hair, but if he couldn't do that then we would return to a professional. With the help of online tutorials like this, I managed a few passable cuts- never great, but not too bad. Then Little Bro's hair got to the "is she a girl?" stage, and I faced having to cut the hair of a wriggly one year old, which looked pretty terrible as Little Bro's hair is sparser than Big Bro's so my poor cutting skills resulted in a style somewhere between moth-eaten and horribly ill. Fortunately a friend had mentioned a hairdressers, Tabi's Kidz Kutz in Thornbury, which specialises in children.

They were certainly set up for the job- toys everywhere,DVDs on tap, and the choice of an adult-size barber seat, a child-size seat or a toy car for the kids to sit in while having their hair cut.

And the hairdressers were fantastic- they were able to get Big Bro chatting within a few minutes, which is no mean feat for a stranger, and managed a great cut on Little Bro, despite his initial apprehension. Even more amazingly, Big Bro decided that he might even let his hair be cut- as long as he could sit on my lap. Hooray!

Relieved of my tonsorial duties, I felt that $18 for each child was very reasonable for good cuts and a great atmosphere.

Tabi's Kidz Kutz, 58 Wales St, Thornbury- Tel 9416 9411- open 7 days.

The mango ad that heralded hope for our species?

2010-10-26T07:51:00.001+11:00

I catch the train several times a week, and as I gaze out the window I am often struck by the near-universal junk food theme in station advertising for food. Chocolate, pies, chips, caffeinated drinks of various persuasion and a bit more chocolate- it's easy to know what the advertisers want people to feel like eating when they get to their destination.

So I was impressed today when I spotted this bright sign in a prominent location at Jolimont:

I love it: it tells you that a good mango is something special, and worth waiting for the season. And now that it's mango season, there are plenty to go around. Let's all go to ~~Woolies~~ Safeway and eat mangoes.

Some spring inspiration....

2010-10-25T06:46:00.000+11:00

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now get YouTube through our telly. I am an utter believer that this has redeemed the television set from obsolescence in the shadows of the PC- our TV is now the communications hub of the house, where we can watch YouTube, use iTunes and iPhoto, visit FaceBook, and if we had a webcam, we could Skype from it.

Having YouTube on the TV makes it much easier to watch clips with the boys- no keyboards to press, wires to pull or printers to plunder. Out of the blue, the other night B asked whether they wanted to see giant pumpkins. We then started looking for other vegies and realised that- like everything in life- if it exists it's on YouTube. My favourite were the jungles of 8m (24 feet)- tall corn. I wish I could beam the inspiration out to the garden!

The genetics of garden peas- with credit to Gregor Mendel

2010-10-24T16:43:00.008+11:00

This year we are growing two varieties of pea (Pisum sativum) in our garden:

Early crop Massey (which I now find are also called Melbourne Market)

And Golden Podded Snow Peas

As I watched the two plants grow, I started to remember snippets of biology lessons: pea flower colour, dwarf or tall, Mendel's Garden... I looked up my favourite biology text, Neil Campbell's Biology (now Campbell and Reece- RIP Neil Campbell) and sure enough, I was observing the same differences between my pea plants as Gregor Mendel did, in an Austrian monastry 150 years ago.

If you don't know Mendel: he was an Augustinian monk, and I suspect he is one of the few monks who can lay legitimate and honourable claim to fatherhood? (Are there others?) Mendel is considered "the father of modern genetics" because of his studies of the inheritance of pea characteristics.

This was a fifty years before anyone had shown that it is DNA that carries traits between generations (thank you Oswald Avery), and a hundred years before anyone could see how DNA could specify different characteristics (thank you James Watson and Francis Crick). Gregor Mendel meticulously studied the characteristics of peas, and controlled pollination (peas normally self-pollinate) to study the effect of interbreeding different characteristics. From this he realised that there was something that was transmitted between generations that enabled the features of a parent plant to be transmitted to its offspring. More importantly, he realised that this something was independently inherited for each feature of the plant- for example, whether a plant had purple or white flowers didn't influence whether it had yellow or green seeds.

Mendel's genius came when he applied mathematical techniques to analyse the offspring of parents with different features, and realised that for each feature in a plant (eg flower colour), a plant inherits information from both parents, yet some versions are "dominant" so mask the effect of the "recessive" ("not dominant" version). So, for example, the offspring of a purple flowering and a white flowering pea plant will have purple flowers (purple is dominant over white). However, these offspring still contain the "white" information, because their offspring (grandchildren of the original white- and purple-flowering plants) can show the white flowering trait.

The characteristics Mendel studied included flower colour (purple/white), flower position (on a side shoot/at the top of the main shoot), seed colour (yellow/green), seed shape (round/wrinkled), pod shape (inflated/constricted), pod colour (yellow/green), and height (tall (2m)/dwarf (0.5m)) (the illustration to the left is taken from Campbell and Reece's Biology.)

This whole thought process about Mendel came about because the two pea varieties I have differ in five of these Mendelian characteristics:

Flower colour: Early Crop Massey- white, Golden Podded- purple

Seed colour: Early Crop Massey- green, Golden Podded- yellow

Pod shape: Early Crop Massey- inflated, Golden Podded- constricted

Pod colour: Early Crop Massey- green, Golden Podded- yellow

Height: Early Crop Massey- 0.5m (dwarf), Golden Podded- 2m (tall)

I have no plans to do the intercrosses to re-prove Mendel's findings, but it's pretty cool to think that peas haven't changed much in 150 years!

This week I'm grateful... that I knew Jean Panton

2010-10-23T10:58:00.000+11:00

Another Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post. This week I wanted to write about Jean Panton, a wonderful woman who died last weekend. I feel a bit odd about writing a obituary, but all week I have felt in that awkward position of feeling very sad about Jean's death despite the feeling that I didn't know her really well, and a blog entry seemed to be appropriate (I would be happy to modify or remove it at the request of people who knew Jean better than I- contact details in the right column).

Jean grew up in Hobart, trained as a journalist, and was employed for a period within the University of Tasmania. With no formal scientific training she recognized that there were families in Tasmania that were prone to leukemia and with little support from the scientific community she took it upon herself to trace the family trees of these families for over 30 years- all on an unpaid basis- believing that one day the data she had collected would enable the discovery of the genetic causes of leukemia susceptibility.

Only recently, scientific technology has advanced enough to allow scientists to start using the data that Jean collected to start to discover new leukemia susceptibility genes. Jean was also passionate about the Tasmanian community and environment, and- even as an 80 year old grandmother- was a an unlikely campaigner for the Tasmanian Greens party and other environmental, heritage and community causes in Hobart. Her commitment to these causes was recognised by awards including a Medal of the Order of Australia, and Hobart Senior Citizen of the Year.

I knew Jean through my mother, who had worked with her occasionally and had formed a long friendship. I remember coming along to Jean's house as a child, and listening in on conversations, often about Jean's excitement at having scoured the newspapers and connecting two leukemia-prone families (the larger the family, the easier it is to find the leukemia-susceptibility genes) and her modesty about winning prizes- I recall one in the late 80s or early 90s, when few people would think about recycling, Jean won a prize for her strategy of covering cardboard boxes with used wrapping paper to make blocks for her grandchildren.

I also have a vivid recollection of another occasion when I went to my mother's office and the talk was all indignity about how a thoughtless researcher had been allocated an office that Jean had used while it was vacant. He had found boxes of records related to her research- irreplaceable medical records and notes collated over years- and had sent them for disposal. At the time that I walked in, Jean had driven up to Hobart Tip in the hope of locating the papers.

This incident was a perfect illustration of two sides of Jean- the dismissive contempt with which too many in the research community treated her because she was not a traditionally trained researcher, and the data she was fervently collecting were not immediately yielding results (because the requisite technology was not powerful enough), but more impressively, the dedication that Jean showed to her voluntary cause- at this stage she would have easily been in her 60s, yet believed in the importance of her work so much that she would dig through the tip rubbish to salvage the data. I didn't know so much about Jean's involvement in the Tasmanian Greens, and the Hobart Community Centre, but I have no doubt she showed the same zeal and vigour in every cause she believed in.

As a person, Jean was intelligent, modest and thoughtful. I saw her several times on visits to Hobart, because she had heard I would be around and mentioned that if we had any time would we like to drop by. When my mother told me of her death, she added that she had been her usual active self up until then. A notice from her school- another community she actively supported- sums up what I want to say about Jean:

Jean's untiring, active commitment to the Tasmanian community, the environment and her School made a difference and will remain an inspiration and example for girls who follow her.

Rest in peace, Jean. You made many differences.

Wordless Wednesday: Discovery

2010-10-20T07:43:00.000+11:00

This weekend I am grateful for... rain

2010-10-16T07:51:00.003+11:00

This week's Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post, and (beyond the usual family and friends) the easy answer was that this weekend I am grateful for:

Rain.

Lots of lovely, deep, soaking rain, undoing the effects of the drought here. (With apologies to people for whom the last 36 hours has had too much rain...) I tried to grab some pictures from the Melbourne Water site to show how Melbourne Water storages are their fullest since Big Bro was born. Of course this is great for gardeners, but also means that every sports ground can be watered rather than the 1-in-4 of last year.

A friend commented to me last year, "do you ever think- one day we will have to explain to our children that we used to use drinking water on the garden?"

More on online shopping

2010-10-14T09:22:00.003+11:00

My mention of online shopping last week spurred a few off-blog comments from other people about their favourite online retailers. I am clearly not alone, judging from this article in The Age yesterday. I like to support local businesses on the truly local level, but when I'm choosing between purchasing from two large companies that both use developing world labour forces, economics and quality are my major deciding factors.

Does that make me a bad Australian?

The highs and lows of a vegie patch

2010-10-13T08:16:00.004+11:00

It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny weekend- well, gorgeous if you were human, not so gorgeous if you were one of three tomato seedling that had been potted out on Friday and neglected.

I felt a bit bummed to see their withered corpses when we got home on Sunday evening. Even more bummed when I found Minnesota Melon #2 with a broken neck and bite marks within 24 hours of being potted out. Bummed enough to not take any photos- that's bummed! Melon #1 had withered unexpectedly when I had potted it up, so I was feeling pretty down about my prospects of getting a melon this year -continuing my failures from previous years.

More generally I was wondering why I bother trying to grow vegies from seed when I could just roll down to Bunnings and pick up some fruiting beefsteak tomato plant

Then yesterday I pulled up two thumb-size carrots and picked three pods of peas.Not much at all, so I popped them in a bowl for my no-raw-vegetable boys to ~~eat~~ stare at. Little Bro sampled a pea and a carrot, and rejected them as usual. But Big Bro declared the peas delicious and snaffled them up.

Then, wonder of wonders, one long carrot became this:

And suddenly I remembered why I have a vegie patch.

The Not-Quite-Fridge Chronicles

2010-10-10T07:27:00.000+11:00

Maxabella, Queen of Linkies (by my estimation), has been running The Fridge Chronicles for several months, which I excused myself from on the basis that we have a non-magnetic and therefore barren fridge door. I have been granted an exemption from the letter of the linky law, so I'll show a couple of pictures of what might be on my fridge if it were stickable... the fact that I don't blutac anything onto it probably suggests I'm not a fridge door type personality... and besides, the kitchen cupboards have way more surface area for covering...

Most of what we post is kiddie art work. I put up my favourites of the reams that come home from kindy (do us parents reduce their recycling costs?)

First up, "My weekend" and Untitled, both by Big Bro, and which I liked in a Picasso-esque way. They demonstrate two stages of Big Bro's artistic evolution: Untitled is his abstract style, which explores the textures and melding of the media (ie, he evidently spends a lot of time testing of mixing colours and different ways to colour, as well as creating abstract masterpieces like "Blue Pencil Line on Recycled White Invoice Sheet"). "My weekend" is a response to the demands of institutionalization for normalcy and representative art (ie, when I complimented him on the people in the middle, Big Bro replied "the teacher told me I had to to draw pictures, not scribble any more". Fair call, I thought.)

Next, a bit of ancient and modern: the top are Big Bro's pre-2 art, while the bottom was fairly recent. I thought it was a digger and a truck, but apparently the purple is a rainbow, yellow is rain, the green is a house and the blue is water running off the roof into a rainwater tank. Atta boy!

A bit more art, in a picture of Dada- glasses and all, drawn in one line by my experimental artist (he needs an etcha-sketch?), plus the most exciting things we get in our letter box- the occasional post card, in this case all from my mum. Big Bro still doesn't understand the postal system, and wonders why she dropped them off without saying hi.

Then there are recipes around the place. Ilipilli's sourdough bread is on a postit elsewhere for quick reference, while this caramel slice recipe from the side of the condensed milk tin was intended for a guest who hasn't yet come back... And the (few) birthday invitations Big Bro receives take months to remove. I only removed last year's version of this invitation a couple of weeks ago.... did I mention this will probably be my only Fridge Chronicles, as things won't change for ages?

Finally, odd little notes and aide-memoires, again without expiry dates. This book recommendation- Cinnamon Gardens- is from a Sri-Lankan-Canadian visitor in early 2009. I have actually bought it for B's parents who didn't say whether it was any good so I suspect it wasn't... (hmm, must read it myself?) Evidently the stick of the postit ran out so rather than discard such a vital piece of paper, for some reason I used extra sticking. Y- why- indeed?

I think by this point you're seeing why a non-magnetised fridge is a good thing for clutterbugs like us?

This weekend I am grateful for... freesias and technology

2010-10-09T06:19:00.001+11:00

Time for another Maxabella-inspired grateful post. This week I'm grateful for:

1. Freesias, with their brilliant colours and amazing scent, heavy in the morning air. They could nearly convert me to an ornamental gardener.

2. Among many things I am grateful for in B is that he is a technology adopter. It's a nice wake to follow it. What makes this week special? He's set up AppleTV, which means that these days our tv is not just a tv. It YouTubes. It iTunes. It iPhotos. It rocks.

What are you grateful for this weekend?

Mysterious pinks

2010-10-06T20:59:00.005+11:00

One of the things about having a camera phone is that it's an easy way to make visual memos of interesting things you spot out and about. In the past week I see that I've noted two unusual pink plants. Not sure of the names, but they're both pretty stunning.

This is a bush that was grown as a rough hedge, covered in these ribbonny pink flowers:

And this tree was sprouting new pink leaves, which have me stuck even after scouring Google Images....

Any ideas?

Update: the bush may be Loropetalum (Chinese Fringe Flower)

Who says boys don't like dolls?

2010-10-06T06:15:00.001+11:00

Having got started on feminist rants, may I introduce you to two important members of our household:

the creatively named Baby Dolly and Noddy.

Baby Dolly joined us two years ago, inspired by the widespread advice that a "baby" of their own is a good toy for siblings-to-be. Big Bro had plenty of stuffed toys, but no baby dolls, so I made my first venture into the doll market, and quickly discovered that the vast majority of baby dolls are (a) clearly baby girls, (b) intended for little girls and (c) blonde haired and smiley. Given that we knew Little Bro was going to be (a) a baby boy, (b) sibling to a little boy and (c) likely to look like Big Bro, who was most definitely not blonde haired or smiley initially:

(I love his myopic "whacha lookin' at?" expression)

Fancy toy shops had "ethnic" dolls of various racial backgrounds, but they all seemed to be pretty expensive for a toy that may well be consigned to the back of the cupboard, so when I spotted the rack of non-feminine, non-blonde dolls at ten bucks apiece at the (otherwise) awful Toys'R'Us, I forgave them their flaws and grabbed one. Big Bro was interested, and a few days later I had one of those irrational moments of relief, realising that yes, Little Bro-to-be might even be Big Bro's friend one day, when Big Bro offered Baby Dolly a prized toy train.

Baby Dolly soon became an important part of Big Bro's life. We took him on adventures in the pram, showed him toys, dressed him, undressed him, dressed him, undressed him... And once Little Bro was on the scene, there were all sorts of other ideas Big Bro came up with- breastfeeding ("mipple, Ba'y Do'y?"), patting, sitting in baby seats, carrying in a sling (brilliant idea by my mum), and offering Ba'y Do'y to Little Bro for a cuddle. These days Baby Dolly comes and goes a bit more, but when he's in-da-house, he gets plenty of attention from both boys. Little Bro is especially interested in those self-shutting eyes; Big Bro likes wardrobe changes (and let me add, finding new clothes for a baby boy doll is even more difficult than finding the baby boy doll in the first place!)

Noddy, on the other hand, has one job- guardian of the cot, keeper of the nocturnal peace. I think the Little Bro-Noddy duo are pretty cute together- if I were going to make a Little Bro doll, he would come out pretty much like Noddy- round face, button nose, big eyelashes and a cowlick. Bring on the Book Week Parade 2014!

Noddy is permitted the occasional wave or photo op, but Little Bro is very strict about him knowing his position. I must say I encourage it- the hoo-haa when Noddy absents himself from the cot really makes me think he may need a stage double...

Of course, when you have dolls in the house, they occasionally need visitors. Like Akeema, let out of a friend's kindy on weekend release. It's a clever idea they had- Abeena visits a different family each weekend with her diary, (parents slave away to live up to the previous weeks' efforts!) and then on Monday Abeena's adventures are the subject of show and tell.

Parity, parity, parity, oi oi oi! OR Be still my throbbing credit card

2010-10-05T22:14:00.001+11:00

I'm usually not that excited about economics and finance, but at the moment the Australian dollar's rise-and-rise (or the US dollar's fall-and-fall) has got me captivated. Will it cross the 1:1 "parity" exchange rate?

Why does this interest me? Pure self interest: you see, somehow in the last month or two, I've found that online shopping suits me. It's not that I haven't shopped online before, but suddenly I've found myself shopping online rather than going to a physical shop.

I think it started with discovering The Book Depository. Like Amazon in having way better prices than elsewhere, but with free worldwide shipping. Take the original Railway Series (aka Thomas the Tank Engine; the original Rev W. Awdry books are by far the best written)- I'm looking to get a few for Little Bro's birthday. Borders Online, which now I see has a price guarantee- meaning it should be the cheapest of Australian shops- stocks each of these books for $15.95. The Book Depository price is $7.61- half that. By the bye, while you're checking out The Book Depository, for some mindless entertainment for which the web is legendary, click onto the Live site, where you can watch people buying in real time. Complete time waster, but completely addictive!

Meanwhile, across the pond, The Little Aussie Battler's strength suddenly opens up the world of US online shopping. Never let anyone tell you otherwise: American retailers know how to make you spend. Offer excellent websites. Offer lots of sales. Offer incentives. Offer (almost) unlimited returns. Oh, and offer a huge range of "stuff". And from B's recent ~~shopping expeditions~~ work trips I know which children's brands I like. A friend was taking advantage of the Gymboree sale a month or two ago, and asked if I wanted to share postage. Why not? I thought, as I like Gymboree and I found a few cheap items and a few items that would make nice gifts (like girls' dresses in colours other than pink). All well and good, but then came the Gymbucks. $175 of them, to be used in the first two weeks of October. Suddenly I remembered all the cute Gymboree items I hadn't thought to get first time around, and with $25 off every $50 their value escalated.

And then I wondered whether Old Navy ship to Australia. Well, it turns out that, as of last week, all the Gap family of brands do. Suddenly there are a heap more nice clothes at good prices within my reach. The wonders of online...

Please don't overestimate my shopaholic tendencies. I'm not really that much of a shopper. I was surprised that in five years I've bought fewer than 20 things from eBay. I do what's needed, and that's enough. I certainly don't have the nous to buy clothes online for myself, but when it comes to children's clothes (or books for that matter), wherever I shop the deciding factors are going to be: style (what is it?), size (what format is it?) and price. If you give me a package with those criteria met, then I'll take it. And if it's online, all the better, and I'll spend the afternoon with my kids at the park rather than at the shops. Any day.

Go on, tempt me- I'm hooked: where's your favourite website for spending money?

10 things I love to do in the garden with my children

2010-10-03T22:18:00.001+11:00

Little Garden Helpers issued an open invitation to post about 10 things I love to do with my children in the garden:

1.Run, jump, roll and everything else you can do on a lawn. People might call it "green cancer", but by watering it with bath water it's not using too much water and it's worth the effort of mowing when we have a space to play.

2. Discover hideyholes. I love the idea of secret gardens, walled gardens and sunken gardens- that idea of your own secluded space to commune with nature. Growing up in a fairly free-range manner I would find spaces under bushes or up trees to hide. My boys live in a much more constrained garden complete with fences and gates. We don't have a permanent cubby house, but instead occasionally put up our beach tent (which has been used more in the garden than at the beach). Better still, I hope the boys can find their own spaces; at the moment they are enjoying crawling in and out of the Westringea hedge.

3. Planting out seedlings and seeds. Currently not the easiest activity, given Little Bro's quest for dominance in the shovel department, but we manage and I still enjoy being part of this cycle of plant life.

4. Pick fresh food. One day the boys might even eat a leaf...

5. Talk about how plants "work": the leaves breath and make food, the roots drink water and eat dirt, etc. Big Bro is fascinated by plants' favourite food being animal poop.

6. Find critters. Worms and earwigs seem to be appearing in droves. Yay for the former, boo for the latter; at least someone enjoys seeing them.

7. Watch birds. Even though most of the birds visiting our garden are mundane introduced species like Indian mynahs and blackbirds, there's something exciting about seeing them. The boys go quiet and stare; the awe in which we watch reminds me of D.H. Lawrence's "A snake came to my water trough..." poem, except we try not to scare the birds away. Once the boys are bigger, we'll take a torch out on summer nights and spotlight the ringtail possums that run along the fence and the flying foxes that plunder the fig tree.

8. Dig, dig, dig, and better still, find buried treasures from bygone eras. Well, I like the treasures best; I think the boys just like to dig...

9. Put a flower in my hair. The boys think this is hilarious; I find it quite charming that they will bring me flowers to wear.

10. Eat outside. Barbecue. The weather has warmed up in the last week and the temperatures have crossed my threshold for outdoor dining. We're lucky enough to have a covered deck meaning that you can enjoy the outdoors without the full blast of the elements. With Little Bro being an enthusiastically independent, and thus messy eater, I can't deny enjoying the easy cleanup outside via the hose. And the same goes for the barbecue- carbonizing the hotplate is much more relaxing than scrubbing pans. And there's also Famous Five motto, "food always tastes so much better outside".

What are your 10 favourite things to do in the garden?

This is part of the November AMB Blog Carnival.

This weekend I'm grateful for...

2010-10-02T10:14:00.000+10:00

Where is the year going? It's October, and already time for another Maxabella-inspired Grateful Saturday. So this weekend I am grateful for:

Spring weather- our week was split between cool, rainy days and sunny, warm days. I was going to just be grateful for the warmth that let the boys roll pasta and eat dinner outside, but I should put a plug in for rain. Do come again another day...
Friends- who go along with my quirky ideas, who share postage on mail orders, who listen to my minor crises and who arrange a catchup after 15 years (NB this load was spread amongst several friends. Just so you don't think I am a completely high maintenance friend.)
Tiny heartbeats- a just-pregnant friend whose family has had a ghastly year for health problems went along to an urgent ultrasound expecting the worst and messaged me afterwards to say she saw a tiny heartbeat. Grateful is an understatement :)

Where are all the women?

2010-09-30T23:31:00.003+10:00

After my gender stereotyping rant on Tuesday, I should say that this wasn't meant to be Feminist Week, but recently all sorts of gender gap issues seem to keep coming up in my mind.

There's a lot of talk around the blogosphere and beyond about "mummy guilt"- all to do with the awful consequences of not doling out to your children the right mix of proteins and fats, love and discipline, structure and unstructure, complex and simple carbohydrates, independence and support, socialisation and solitude....... Then there's the subspecialty, working mummy guilt, where you get to feel bad for not committing enough time to your paid work and not enough time to your children (and throw in neglect of your partner and friends for some extra side dishes of guilt). And within the working mummy guilt comes the feeling of "how can I do better?" which can morph its way to "what are women doing wrong?"

In my case I work in academia. Lots of well educated, reasonable, wonderful, enlightened people, lots of enthusiastic students and recent graduates- and a lot of people (half or more) at this early career stage are women. And then something happens and all the women stagnate or retreat or relocate or resign or die OR SOMETHING and beyond a certain point women become unusual and the ones that make it feel the need to run seminars and lunches about the issues women in academia face. I've attended plenty and read plenty on the topic, and have picked up some useful tips for success as a woman in academia:

- don't take maternity leave (from an Australian academic who brought her children to work from birth until they were old enough to attend daycare)
- don't have children (admittedly this is paraphrased by me, but from an interview with the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrum, aged 77, who said that in her youth she "had a clear decision and made a decision not to have a family because in earlier times that would have been a very, very difficult thing to accomplish.")
- learn to play poker (this is from a US academic who said she needed this skill to network via the weekly poker gatherings), or otherwise pretend to be a man (this from a NYT article on the topic)

Suffice to say, I fail in all areas.

So why is this getting to me today? Yesterday I attended a panel discussion seminar and there was an exclusively male panel. No big deal- I've been noticing this a lot recently at seminars and conferences. But the presenter wasn't so accepting and, slightly embarrassed, said "Oh... we didn't intend for it to be an all male panel given [the program in question] has more females than males in its intake." No need for embarrassment- it happens all the time without anyone realising....

Then on the way home I was listening to 774 ABC radio, and heard Stephen Mayne discussing the issue of gender inequity at upper levels of corporate life, which he has also written about in today's Age. He puts it down to "issues such as networking, perceived experience, blokey headhunters and the old boys' network." Perusal of the comments is fairly depressing- presumably in the potential anonymity plenty of people feel free to speak their mind, and I'm left with the feeling that whatever women lack to get to the higher levels of academia- whether it's intrinsic or extrinsic- is probably the same in many other professions.

And where does that leave me? Gloomy, I think. Resigned to my fate, whatever that is. I do what I can and at the end of the day I can hope people say about me, "she did well for a woman."

On a side note, on the topic of men-vs-women, I concur with Maxabella that very few blog readers are male, especially round here, and in the process of ~~procrastinating over~~ researching this I discovered that, at least in the field of entomology, women tend to blog anonymously (hell-o) much more than men.

Collingwood is for girls

2010-09-28T20:51:00.002+10:00

I felt a bit guilty on Saturday that I didn't have any inspiration for an AFL Grand Final-themed post, but evidently I should have realised that this was a premonition, given the game was drawn and will be replayed next week. And I am grateful for a bit of breathing space to think about whether I had something to say on the topic!

Before I moved to Melbourne, I wasn't a big AFL fan- and I'm still not- and I didn't realise how big a deal the Grand Final is in the home city of AFL. Even for those like me who don't seriously follow during the regular season, it's hard to avoid Grand Final week- the stats, the allegiances, the peripheral events, the predictions, the personal stories that occupy the first few pages of the newspapers. When it's two Melbourne teams, even the least interested Melbournian is compelled to back a team. And this year the choice was between Collingwood, the team everyone loves to hate, and St Kilda, the team that hasn't won since 1966. It was a perfect mix for an exciting leadup to the game.

We watched the Grand Final with friends, as we do most years, so in preparation on Saturday morning I pointed out supporters of both teams to Big Bro. "I know" he told me, "we painted their jumpers at kindy." Then he added, "Julia says Collingwood is for girls. Just girls." My eyebrows raised and I tried not to smirk. "Does Julia like Collingwood?" "Oh yes, that's her team." Surprise, surprise.

Dear little Julia. She's a very cute little kid with a cherubic round face framed by long blonde hair. She is one of Big Bro's Best Friends ForEVER, and evidently also his wisest friend judging by how many of her pronouncements he passes on to me.

"Julia says boys can't have pink" (and purple when Julia is being especially picky)

"Julia says only girls can like flowers or butterflies"

"Julia says that boys can't be pretty"

"I wish I could be a girl: Julia says only girls......"

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of energy refuting Julia's assertions. "Look at that man- he's wearing a pink shirt", "Look at that man on tv growing flowers".... I should just ignore it, but something about it really irks me- I think it's that I can see Julia as a product of so many gender stereotypes that, as the mother of two boys, really irritate me.

Clothes shops with three quarters of the shop devoted to girls, clearly by the pink, lace, flowers, and more pink. (When I was growing up, only prissy girls wore pink.) And boys seem to need skulls and crossbones, graffiti and punk rock guitar decorations.

Toys clearly branded for boys or girls- pink racetracks, pink lego, and the apparently obligatory fairy costumes. And even worse, the branding of books for boys or girls.

Comments like "girls sleep better (or insert other positive attributes)", "girls stay close to their mothers, boys don't."

Slogans on clothes like "little princess", "I love buying shoes", "spoilt rotten".

Of course there are gender differences, but I am sure the stereotypes are played up so much more these days that when I was growing up. And I guess Julia is just observant enough top notice them- and assertive enough to let Big Bro know what she's noticed.

For the record, during the game Big Bro accepted his host's invitation to dress up, and then engaged in a bit of drilling and chopping.

And I concluded that if Collingwood is for girls, then St Kilda must be for boys, and that was just another reason to cheer them on.

This weekend I am grateful for... the National Library of Australia

2010-09-25T08:31:00.001+10:00

Time for the next installment in the Maxabella-inspired Grateful Post, and this week I thought I'd put all my eggs in the one grateful basket and mention the National Library of Australia's Newspapers Service. Not that there weren't other things to be more grateful for this week, but when I discovered it I was swept up in how cool and simple a service it is. Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954 have been digitised and can be searched online. Obviously there are a whole heap of educational applications (did anyone else spend hours after school searching through old newspapers in the library to find "primary sources" to photocopy for school projects?) But my grateful stems from the fact that it's complete newspapers that can be searched. When I discovered it this week, I quite easily found:

- birth notices for my father and my great grandfather

- my grandparents' matriculation results

- my grandparents' wedding photo

- various mentions of my grandmother's social activities, back in the days when who-played-bridge-with-whom, who-attended-whose-hour-of-music and whatnot were newsworthy. It's hardly rivetting reading, but it's fun to imagine Granny aged 16 wearing a "taffeta dress embroidered with tiny blossoms".

- mention of my great uncle's later called-off engagement (which wasn't a family secret, but it's a half-interesting story)

I barely learnt anything new- though there is plenty to learn elsewhere in the newspapers- yet to see the way these little snippets of life were reported does make something a bit more real about the Before-Me Era.

The eyelashes have it

2010-09-23T06:44:00.001+10:00

One of the most frequent comments strangers make about Little Bro is how long his eyelashes are.

Big Bro has done better than average in the lash department, but Little Bro has hit the Maybelline jackpot. He hasn't always been blepharically* hirsute- during my mum's first meeting with her youngest grandson she observed "his eyelashes aren't as long as Big
Bro's were", and when i looked it was true- just a little stubble on each lid. But rather than start a fund for a future eyelash augmentation surgery (it exists- really!) we watched his lashes grow
longer and longer and l-o-n-g-e-r. I suspect as he grows they will come back towards the usual proportions to his face, but in the meantime I will sit back and enjoy watching Mr Luscious Lashes flutter his stuff.

*from blepharis

Class of 2011: first planting out

2010-09-22T07:38:00.001+10:00

Something in the air made me decide it was time.

Two zucchinis, a tricolour and a climbing tromboncino, looked like they were ready to stretch their roots indefinitely. And so out they went, dwarfed by the giant feral parsley.

Grow well, little zucchinis...

The Bunnings Trap

2010-09-21T09:40:00.000+10:00

I dropped into Bunnings with the boys to pick up some potting mix and dripper system fittings, and came out with a strawberry for each boy, a punnet of cos lettuce, chives, a silvan berry and a pack of Jiffy pots.... "oops".

Big Bro decided the strawberries were called Mr Strawberry and Mrs Strawberry. Mr Strawberry brings two developing fruit with him- maybe inspired by our recent library borrowing, Eric Carle's Mr Seahorse?

Up a wadder

2010-09-20T08:02:00.002+10:00

Little Bro's language is suddenly getting very adult-like, relatively speaking. He can tell you things from the immediate past; "Come on!", "Big Bro plane (etc)! See it!", "Big Bro pushed (etc) me", are three of his most common phrases. A couple of days ago while I was ~~reading blogs~~ not paying enough attention I suddenly heard a cheerful little voice saying:

"Up a wadder, up a wadder".

Which was of course exactly what was happening...

At least he hasn't yet learnt the art of secrecy...

This weekend I am grateful for....mentors, memories and history

2010-09-18T11:55:00.001+10:00

Maxabella has been writing a weekly "grateful" post which is a great structure for a positive post and I've joined her linky list. There are lots of things I am always grateful for- a loving and wonderful husband and family being top of the list, and a wonderful circle of friends being a close second. But rather that restate this every week, I'll try to think of single defined events to be grateful for.

I was going to write that I'm grateful for mentors, music and television, but that sounded rather too shallow for my maiden post.... hence the retitling , m
entors, memories and history. So here goes. This weekend I am grateful for:

Professional mentors- who will park their egos at the door and say the right thing when necessary. I am lucky to have several.

John Denver and his music (and I'm grateful to B for loading it onto iTunes!)- a loop of Rocky Mountain High and Take Me Home, Country Roads kept me going through a tedious manual exercise at work, and had me thinking about the incredible beauty of the United States.

We saw the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen, and that whole part of the Rockies would be an amazing place to live- as the song suggests. I've never been to the Appalachians, but from what I know they are similarly beautiful, in constrast to hard life of many West Viginians, depicted in fiction like The Bean Trees and The Memory Keeper's Daughter, and the real-life horror of events like the Sago mine disaster (and others; I just remember being transfixed by the unfolding Sago drama in January 2006). All very tangential to the music, but it was a great way to divert a flat mind for an hour or two!

A Digital Video Recorder- which let me watch the excellent Seven Ages of Britain weeks after it aired. And it was worth it- almost a potted tour of British historical artifacts. I wouldn't say I'm a history buff but I love books like Our Island Story and A Little History of the World which are full of facts presented in a concise, readable way. That they are both intended for children shows the depth of my interest in history!

Steamin' in Fitzroy Gardens

2010-09-17T08:57:00.000+10:00

A walk through Fitzroy Gardens a few days ago brought us past workers laying down mulch to summer-proof the massive trees. It was steaming away (hard to see in my picture) and reminded me that last year I topped off the beds with steaming mushroom compost. I'm still not sure whether to repeat this or go with some other topping for a bit of nutritional variety.

New Chooks on the Block

2010-09-16T20:29:00.002+10:00

Ok, so they're not exactly new, and they're not at our place, but we have scored *the best* neighbourhood favour: feeding our neighbour's two chickens for two weeks, and collecting their nicer byproduct, two eggs a day.

I've never kept chickens, but so far it seems they seem to have pretty straight-forward short-term needs. The information we were given by the owner was:

1. Chickens need a constant supply of water, which needs to be changed every few days as it tends to get dirty.

2. Feed the chickens layer pellets and a seed mix every day. These chickens seem to eat the seed mix in preference to everything else.

3. They can also be fed other kitchen scraps, apart from citrus and banana peel.

A quick check online and I can supplement with

4. Chickens are happy to eat anything humans eat, but avoid salty or sugary foods, and avocado. So far the favourite kitchen scraps have been yoghurt and lamb chops.

5. Chickens will also eat leafy plants like dandelions, oxalis and clover. These chickens seem to especially like salad greens.

They're certainly better recyclers than worm farms or compost!

Two weeks seems to be a great length of time as it's not long enough that we get lumped with the dirty jobs like cleaning or worming, yet it's long enough to get lots of eggs and get used to the chicken routine, and for the boys to get used to the idea that we'll get more eggs home by sharing the egg-carrying job than snatching the eggs away from each other!

Hence our egg carton in an egg bag... seems a bit excessive for two eggs, but better than broken eggs!

Learning to play cards

2010-09-13T18:22:00.000+10:00

Big Bro is gradually learning to play card games- so far he can play a fair game of Go Fish or Snap. I enjoy playing card games- my favourite was Racing Demon, best played with my mum, my grandmother, and several other aunts and uncles, around my grandmother's big dining table. Each player had their own pack of cards and the table was so big that it was hard to keep track of the common piles in the centre. Even the sorting out of each pack at the end of each game was cheerfully rowdy. As fun as that was, my mum would say that playing with her aunt's fiercely competitive family was even better. These days I lack card-playing partners, so I am very enthusiastic about Big Bro's interest!!

He hasn't mastered holding his cards in a fan- which brought back memories of my mum repeatedly helping me to arrange my card fan- so I used a shoebox to make a alternate confidential-card-holder.

Go Fish today, Racing Demon tomorrow? Not quite, but I can hope!!

If I were a boat...

2010-09-11T07:51:00.003+10:00

Big Bro: Mama, if you were a boat you would be a house boat.
Me (thinking of a house boat as cosy if a little odd-shaped, just right): that's nice- and what sort of boat would you be?
Big Bro: I would be a rescue boat, and Little Bro would be a life boat. And Dada would be a sinking boat that we are coming to save!

How's that for family dynamics?

Postscript, a few hours later: I should add that Dada is not the personification of a sinking boat!! I just thought it was cute that Big Bro wanted to help him.

Root Crops

2010-09-09T20:15:00.002+10:00

The radishes were ready to be pulled, but the carrots have a while to go... but thinly sliced they make a crunchy topping for a salad.

Big seedling, little seedling

2010-09-08T18:20:00.000+10:00

Two gifts from my mum: sunflower and strawberry seed raising packs from The Pocket Garden.