Must chill out........

I really have to work out how to chill out and relax. I always begin to, but before I know it i'm back to doing 90 things at once, and none of them well. Cooking and gardening work well, even better when you combine them. Forrest going off to bed early has certainly helped tonight-I can actually feel myself relaxing, with the aid of a bit of JBT as background music.

The girls are obsessed with 'the olden days', and have wanted to make bread by hand for a while. As i'm still working my way back up to full bread production even with the assistance of the breadmaker we used it for the dough and did the final kneading, rising and shaping by hand. They had a ball bashing the bread around and seeing how much it puffed up.

The final result-a spinach and parmesan bloomer, made with malabar spinach from the backyard. A bit burnt on the outside but that's the oven-I hate scabby landlords who think a $500 oven will be great for their rental. They suck!

Tomorrows chill out can be to help the kids plant their flowers out-the seedlings are starting to outgrow the tray.

Fluffy mail time (oh how I hate that phrase!)

These started winging (trucking?) their way to Cairns today. They've been excruciatingly painful to make so you better all enjoy them!

Pockets

Covers

And here's one of our covers on Shorty at nearly three years (next week!) and around 13kgs, with a trim fitted under.
And Frosty, at 10 weeks and about 6kgs, with a big fat terry flat under.
Can't believe no-one chose the rainbow print, it's awesome!

Wow, my kids are getting big

Birthdays galore here ATM-my eldest is five, my twins are four and Shorty is three in a couple of weeks. So we've been getting sugared up-luckily breastfeeding is working as a no-work weight loss plan! So after gawking at aqua's cake blog I decided to blog mine-i'm not sure why either, they look pathetic in comparison!

G wanted a fairy party, so we did the house up with garish pink everywhere. She adored it. This was the best I could do cake-wise with a four week old babe-a simple butter cake with coloured sugar for the fairy. As it was it nearly caused a sleep-deprived stress overload meltdown, it wasn't taking much at that stage.

Sparkles and Lols decided on an under the sea theme, and picked a whale and a frog (yeah, I know, you don't find many frogs at the beach. But try telling that to a three year old, water is water!) Butter cakes again, with butter cream icing. The whale was much neater, until A fell on it and squished his tail and smeared icing everywhere *sigh*

I've convinced Shorty he would like a pirate ship-it looks very impressive and dead easy, i'll leave it until next year before volunteering for something complex again!

Christmas in March?

Well, my belated Christmas post anyway. I have lotsa kids (they're great for blaming procrastination and absent-mindedness on). We decided to do a craft each day in December and i'm proud to say we actually out-crafted them! They'd stopped asking by the 17th so we didn't do any more after that-these are the children who nagged me to 'do craft' everyday before that! I didn't get pics of all the crafty stuff, and we ate the shortbread and white truffles too quickly for pics. The best bit was I didn't go into labour and miss Christmas (my due date). That was a big worry.

These took two days and glittered the entire house.

They girls found the angels tricky and Shorty found them totally impossible, but they did pretty well for 2-4 year olds.

Christmas crackers, with a homemade paper crown in each one (and other stuff which i've totally forgotten). Typically, the crowns were the hit of the day, better than any presents.

The Santas, and the hands and feet reindeer. Shorty's are especially cool :P

The masses of paper chain that I spent all December ducking around-it continued up the hallway.
Little ornaments from pipe cleaners and lace.


My contributions to the handmade gifts-fairy skirts for the girls, a cape for Shorty and wands all round. The husband made a funky dolls house but would probably kill me if I stuck up pics of it.



My favourite-that messy Santa trekked snow everywhere AGAIN! I love Christmas with kids.

Why TV is good for kids

So, who's had a heart attack at me writing that title? It's actually a book, I thought i'd get it to see if it would change my mind, and started it with an open mind, really I did. Let's just say that I haven't been convinced I should race out to Harvey Norman.

The holes in the arguments are the type you could fall into and never return. For example, they seem to feel that Madonna only manages to not have a TV because she has masses of money and therefore an army of employees to help with her children. Yep, they're trotting out the tired old martyred cry of 'But the only time I get to myself is when they're watching TV!' I mean, all those poor people who raised children more than 50 years ago, it must have been terrible! The kids running around feral, constantly nagging you to entertain them, never a moment to sit down and have a cuppa........hey, wait a minute, revelation here-maybe kids could entertain themselves back then, and still could if they didn't learn to fall back on television the instant they're bored?

Or by stating that TV is a passive activity, but so is reading and a number of other things. Obviously they've never seen (or ignored) any of the number of studies that show that your body runs at the lowest pace while watching TV. While reading you actually burn more kilojoules than by watching TV. I think sleeping is the only activity that comes in under TV, but not by much.

Or by saying that BMI is totally unreliable because it can't be applied to all people in the population, using George Gregan and his 'overweight' BMI as example. When anyone who has a clue about BMI ranking knows it can't be and isn't applied to super-fit body-builder types or some ethnic groups. But if they admitted that they wouldn't be able to write off BMI as an indicator and therefore also write off the increase of overweight and obese children would they?

And my favourite, deliberately interpreting the well-documented correlational link between TV watching and attention disorders as a direct cause-effect link. As in, watch x amount of hours of TV per week and you WILL get ADD. Well, it's easier to refute something that is obviously wrong, isn't it? Morons.

And that's only one chapter. I don't think i'll bother with the rest (except the education chapter, that should be fun), as books that choose their POV then selectively search out information that supports it while leaving glaring omissions frustrate my husband-yes, I argue out loud with books ;P Pity, I agree with a lot of it, like TV is not too bad if used properly (I use the guns analogy, it's not the thing it's how you use it), but the rest is just too crap.

SNAKE!!!

This picture was taken from my back door on Wednesday. Even freakier when you consider that my back door is 15 steps off the ground!

D saw it an hour or so before this, he went downstairs and made it halfway down before he saw the snake wrapped around the handrail, then throw itself down into the grass and slither off-he made it back up pretty quickly! It was pretty cool though, we watched it come the last two metres up and ended up shooing it away with the broom when it appeared it wanted to come inside.

Nowhere near as scary as this picture taken a few years back in Lilydale, Tasmania-yes, that's a juvenile tiger snake in between us and the kids. Still makes my blood run cold.

Phew.

My best friend from high school grew up in Kinglake, and moved back with her husband after they got married. And I hadn't heard a thing from her since the fires until tonight, I was starting to freak out big time. Luckily, I found out her, her house and all her family are fine, but unfortunately her parents lost their house and every single thing in it. It's made me resolve to keep in touch better, we had a falling out a while back and were just starting to get back in contact, but i'm so scatterbrained I don't hold up my end anywhere near as well as I should.

I spent the end of high school in Yea, so know many people in the fire area. So many parents of friends have lost everything, there have been some injuries but so far (fingers crossed) no-one I know lost their life. It's been so strange to see newspapers with pictures of people I recognise, to know the areas the radio reports are talking about. News is normally so arms length, you get desensitised to it, but this has really brought home the fact that it's all real and affecting many people.