The construction and rocket birthday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...