Twelve times round the sun....

 Wow, just wow ...she is TWELVE!

She is so grown up and beautiful, clever, bright, silly, funny, quirky, fit, healthy, fun, loving, tall! and deliciously wonderfully herself. I do love her so.

She put it a request for a Ferrero Rocher Croquembouche cake... I think I may have actually had a panic attack just before construction began but you know what? Melted chocolate is my friend - it didn't hurt that we are deep into autumn and the weather was quite cool.

I made dozens of little 'roses' out of the chocolate wrappers and added some thin toffee shards to make it pretty - She was delighted, I was pretty pleased. It tasted divine!

I made a dozen little cupcakes too - one can never have too much chocolate cake.

Some kind of wrap up catch-up...

We spent a couple of days of the Easter long weekend at our 'own but can't live in' old/new house. The bunny with the eggs found the girls even tho we were not at "we're other home" and they delighted in the early morning hunt through the dew and native violets.

We did lots of tidying up. First we un-bogged the tractor which has been patiently waiting for some dry, not quite so slippery ground since our rain sodden last visit. The big girl got in plenty more practice on the ride-on mower; first actually mowing the couple of flat acres around the house and then later driving about doing pick ups with the trailor on the back.

We hunted about and made lots of new discoveries, especially in the very overgrown vegie patch. The wee girl filled her easter basket with loads of bright red cherry tomatos which we added to our inside dinner of 'campside' beans (I'd give you a recipe but it is different everytime!).

The girls and I found a tiny nest with four abandoned teeny tiny eggs and the prettiest little feather. I am not sure what kind of bird built and later left the nest, I will have to do some more investigating.

We have found a tenant, so there will be no more trips south to our little hinterland hidehole until we can call it home. So we left a new letterbox with gnome type personality to stand guard til we get back.

* Rabbit pattern is one from the talented Linda of Mamma-4-Earth Molly Bunny

Mouse house... fat cat

Yesterday the girls discovered a little mouse house under the mock orange hedge. A little grey mouse with a cute little twitchy nose poked its head out. The wee girl sat for hours waiting to see the little fellow again, she asked me for food to tempt it out. I told her it was getting plenty of food from the chook grains.

My beloved states that where you have chooks you have mice, where you have mice you have snakes. I've never seen any snakes but we have a couple of fat cats.

Last night we had friends round for dinner. Late in the evening while we sat in the breeze on the lower deck a cat shot past with 'something' dangling from her mouth (something furry and grey with a long tail).

The wee girl was quite distressed, the cat had 'her mouse'. A mummy mouse coming out to get food for all its babies! We followed the cat, she dropped the mouse in the lounge room and patted it playfully - it was clearly dead. Poor wee thing (clever cat). I turned to my wee girl and told her so, said there was nothing I could do for the little mouse... I was sorry but that is what cats do.

She accepted my words and walked away. Five minutes later she sobbed, distraught - I had to do something! I did the only thing I could, wrapped it gently in a paper towel, stroking its little warm body and remarking how soft and pretty it was as we did. Then we went downstairs to the back garden (one adult and four little girls) dug up some soil from under a border rock and gently laid the mouse to rest. She picked a frangipani and cried a little.



She cried some more a bit later and again this morning. Her little three year old mind is so busy. In her short life we have burried our 18 year old cat and two very nice chooks - she was facinated by the process - daddy digs a hole we put a creature in, plant something on top and then she skips off to play - not this time. This time something died and it was sad, her tiny little heart broke a little.

A final visit from her tooth fairy...

Children have 20 baby teeth. I know this now, tho I hadn't really thought about it until a wee toothfairy began visiting five years ago.

My big girl and I read a story way back when that first little tooth wiggled out. The story was by Shirley Barber, the pictures were beautiful. The story was ok but what I love is that it planted a seed that baby teeth become stars. From there our own story emerged.

I think money for teeth is meaningless. At least for my own child, who when her teeth started to fall and new ones bud was only 6. Instead her fairy left her little beads she could thread onto a bracelet, each bead came with a sprinkling of pink fairy 'dust'. (How cute was she?)

She started to write little letters and her fairy wrote back. Their friendship grew and the big girl asked questions like how the beads were made and how she got the gems for them, what happens to the teeth, why she was sometimes late....

 

Just so you know, Gnomes make the pretty beads that grace her bracelet and they live deep under the ground among the roots where they dig for gems. A few years ago I got a little fairy door to sit at the trunk of the tree her aunt painted on her wall– to make it safe for her fairy to get in and out, stay out of the rain (because fairies cannot fly with wet wings) and also so she could avoid the cats in our house.

 

Teeth seemed to fall in pairs or clusters with sometimes long stretches of months between fairy visits. A few months ago the last lonely one wobbled its way out, a little note was written and she waited.... Pandora (her fairy) visited one night and left a little note asking her to be patient, she had not been forgotten but she needed more time.

Five years of creative story telling wove a beautiful blanket of joy around me and my girl. Her bracelet was full to bursting with 19 beads and no room for one more.

Lindy Longhurst is a localish artist, her imagery is full of colour and whimsy; perfect for a fairy tale. Pandora visited Lindy and together they created a final gift for my big girl in trade for her last tooth.

 

Lindy's attention to the details of our story is exquiste. Here is my big girl and her final tooth, on her wrist is her beaded tooth fairy bracelet. She is wrapped in the quilt I made her for her 10th birthday.

Here is Mia, her cat, who sleeps quite regularly on her quilt and is sitting patiently by the little fairy door. In the sky are 19 bright stars, one for each of her baby teeth Pandora has already collected.

This is Pandora flying in to collect the 20th tooth, trailing behind her is her magic pink fairy dust

and here are the gnomes, deep in the ground amongst the roots with the gems.

Thank you Lindy from the bottom of my silly, sentimental, fairy tale heart.

You can go meet Lindy in person, every Saturday & Wednesday she is at the Eumundi Markets on the Sunshine Coast. Failing that, visit her website Serpent Mandalas, her blog or like her on Facebook and best of all you can go shopping at her etsy shop!

Oi! No eating in the patch!

Tis strawberry season... the girls and I took my mum (who is visiting) for a little drive up the coast to some lovely ripe strawberry fields... we skipped a little though the rows and picked big fat, ripe berries and plonked them into our tubs. Loads and loads of them, there was some overflow - they were sweet and warm from the sun... they made our tastebuds tingle

It really was a delightful way to spend an hour - cause it just doesn't take that long to pick a couple of kilos of strawberries.. and I am only feeling a little guilty that we all ate one (or two) in the patch because a quarter of us can't read signs anyway.

and another quarter of us (me) paid $16 a kilo for the rest! Eeek! Ah well there are worse things to spend money on.

Happy holidays.

Broken flipper repair shop

I went prepared for a long day of waiting.. to get the cast off, for xrays, for specalists to check all was good to go...

 And then, quick as a flash (two hours) AH! The big girl can stretch her toes, scratch the itchy bits and WASH! I am here to tell you that after five weeks inside a cast that foot was ripe!

Pyjama Party

A week or two ago the big girl's piano teacher had piles of quality clothes all over her music room, she said she was clearing cupboard space and was asking just $2 an item. We found four beautiful little cardigans that fit nicely, a pretty skirt and a pair of funky PJs.. think we spent $12.

Now the big girl is not as long in the leg as a ladies size extra small and the shirt from the PJ's was never going to fit (besides a t-shirt is much more comfy to wear to bed than a shirt) so I hemmed the pants for her - draw string waist so no problem there.

I grabbed a pair of PJ pants from the wee one's drawer and set about making a matching sister pair.

I think it took less than an hour from inception to done. No hems either because I used the bottom of the shirt for the bottom of the pants!

They are cute yes?

When the pants were done, I still had two sleeves of fabric left... hmmmm

A bedtime sleeping companion of 10 years deserves a new pair of PJs every now and then too don't you think? (I made some for the wee one's doll too but she won't get the doll or its pants til her birthday)

Bit a bling for a broken limb

The big girl broke her foot.

The big girl's mother took two days to take her to the hospital.

The big girl's mother felt a bit bad.

The big girl's mother is seriously back in the good books!

Fostering a Feline

This is Tia, she has moved in with us. She arrived a little over two weeks ago via the cargo hold of a big aeroplane; her family have a posting Thailand for the next three years so she has come to stay with us for a bit.

She broke through a screen and scampered off into the darkness of the wee small hours after only, oh maybe...14 hours in the house - the guilt nearly made me sick and the full scale search and rescue mission took some serious energy BUT three days later a very hungry girl puss was lured into my arms by the smell from a tin of tuna bought specially for her.

She now has free range of the house and garden in the day time and seems content enough to watch the night scenes through a window.

The boy cat of the house barely twitched a whisker when he discovered her lurking under a chair, she on the other hand was quite rude!

She is quite pretty, the girls love her and she has a beautiful, full, loud purr... tis nice to have another little girl in the house.

She is back...

My unaccompanied minor is back. She talked non-stop all the way home in the car... mostly so fast we couldn't understand a word of it!
Letting her jump on a plane and stay with friends and family was so worth my own little bit of heartache ~ Thank you my dear friend M and your big girl J and to my big sister and her beloved, words cannot express my gratitude.
Xx

letting go

My little girl is not so little anymore.

This week the tooth fairy lost a little glitter from her tiny wings - and today my girl took flight with wings of a whole other dimension.

On Tuesday morning she showed me a gap in her teeth...fresh lost tooth, all jelly meat underneath (ewww).. I got a bit excited (as you do) and said "ohh! it has come out!" she says "yes, last night, the tooth fairy didn't come!"

me "you didn't tell anyone?"

"no"...

"oh well perhaps it fell out too late and she had already worked out her visit schedule? and it was raining, fairys don't like to fly in the rain it makes their wings too heavy" 

(...the voice in my head was running along the lines of you cunning little sneak!.. and I was trying very hard to hide my smile, bit clever really isn't she?)

Pandora (that is the tooth fairys name) came Tuesday night, she left a note it said something about the cat sitting by the magic fairy door all night and her not being able to make a safe dash for it.

Another milestone this week, my big girl has been sewing, machine style. For Christmas she was given a voucher for a couple of sewing classes at Sewco. Now I would be perfectly capable of teaching my child to sew BUT (and I really don't know how homeschooling parents do it) she won't, for the most part, listen to a word say. It drives me bonkers. Rather than pull my hair out and bang my head against a wall I took her to some children's sewing classes where she and about seven other girls, learned machine basics, measured themselves, cut patterns and sewed handkerchief skirts. She loved it so much that she made another and then one for her friend too!

Today my baby boarded a plane on her own for the first time; first stop is Canberra to visit her friend who is going to live in Bangkok for the next three years (the skirt is for her). Then Sydney to visit her aunt and uncle and to see the Harry Potter exhibition at the Powerhouse, then home to me.

There was a wee bit of drama because we didn't actually look at the flight details and kinda thought the flight left at 9am.. turns out it left at 8:45. If you saw some mad dashing, paper waving lunatics flapping their arms and running like crazy people through the Brisbane domestic airport terminal this morning it is a good chance it was us. There was literally no time for tears and much more that a squeeze the life outa her cuddle before throwing her into the care of a flight attendant and waving her down the tunnel. I pulled out my camera almost too late, she turned and gave me a wave.

A couple of hours later I got this next picture in a text message

don'tcha just love modern technology?

Thoughts on breastfeeding and vineyards

Tonight I am flying to Canberra to help celebrate a friend's 40th birthday, we are having lunch at Lambert's vineyard tomorrow; just grown ups, just girls...

My wee girl still has one breastfeed a day; actually she pretty much demands that one and then tries out her luck a dozen or so more times during the day ~ assuming the 'position' during a cuddle or just asking straight up; almost always with a sly grin.

To be honest I am so over the morning thing. I have been greeted with "mummy I want boobie" since she learned how to talk (before it was a sentence it was just "boobie" screamed at me on waking, from down the hall). Every morning I rephrase it adding a please, sometimes clarifying "you would like some milk please?"; she agrees, adds please and then clamps down ferociously.

There is a moment of peace and I feel her little body relax and mine does too... sometimes I hold my breath hoping against hope that I might just slip back to sleep. The spell is broken, the acrobatics begin. It is seriously like I am some piece of trapeze equipment; she swivels, and jerks, stands on her head (and mine) her feet start kneading like cat...usually into her daddy's spine at which point he gets a little irritated too. Her fingers find my hair and start twisting it into dreads. The acts reaches some kinds of crescendo her head pops up and she announces "other one"

... back to act one.

Lately I am done well before she is and I say "finished!", she shakes her head and mutters - still sucking madly, I insist, she protests, teeth are bared and clamp down and I extract her from me by wedging my little finger between her back gums. She wails, her dad gives up on the idea of sleep and gets up, she looks at me and asks "breakfast now?"

It is horrible!

I accepted the invitation for a weekend away about a month ago with encouragement from my beloved; last week I stopped and thought "but what about breastfeeds?"... I have been sitting with it since, even occassionally bursting into tears and giving her some when she asks at random times during the day... the day time feeds don't involve gymnastics and I do cherish them.

BUT two nights and days away might just be the end of that particular relationship and in my heart I am not sure I am ready for the end. I will have no more babies; they are far too hard to make and pregnancy and I are not on speaking terms; breastfeeding and I however have always been pretty good friends and I will be very, very sad to see her go.

A silly story

When I was a youngish adult my parents went away somewhere for a bit and I went back home to look after the cats (and the house). Mum told me a story when they got back.

Dad was freting about the cats, were they ok? were they being fed? He announced that he would ring my sister, let's call her 'Lucy', to see if they were ok:

Mum said "Lucy? why would you call Lucy?"
Dad ~ "because she is looking after them!"
Mum ~ "No she is not"
Dad ~ "Oh! well, I'll call the other one then"

Hence forth I have been known as 'the other one'

I have had laryngitis for the past couple of days, my voice is barely an audible whisper (and unfortunately not at all husky and sexy). This evening I called my mum.

Me ~ "Hi Mum"
Mum ~ "Hello darling, what is wrong?"
Me ~ "I have laryngitis"
Mum ~ "Again?"
Me ~ "I've had it before?"
Mum ~ "Yes, I think so, a few months ago"
Me ~ "Oh? (feeling rather foolish to have forgotten such a thing), well then, yes"
Mum ~ "Are you at work?"
Me ~ "No, why would I be at work?"
Mum ~ "Well you were earlier"
Me ~ "Mum, it is me, the other one"

Happy Father's Day

To Mine, and theirs.

We are off to eat pizza (his favourite food, not mine or even theirs) at Arriverderci Pizzeria (I noticed they have a gelati bar...)

Grammar Grafitti

Several times a day I go past this sign, it makes me cranky.

I saw the man 'planting' it in the ground. I said to him, said I "that's gramatically incorrect". He looked at my blankly, looked back at the sign and delared that it was not.
"Yes it is, it should read houses"
"no it shouldn't"
"but there are many houses, not just a house"
"but house five is this way" (he waved an arm in the general direction)
"yes but so are houses six through to 17"

He muttered something and went back to planting.

I began to doubt my grammar, I am a terrible speller so I could be wrong here too. I asked my mum, she knows about this kind of thing. Mum assured me I was right and he was a twit (I doubt very much that she used the word twit).

So....

It was a bit of a squeeze and VERY difficult to write with the silly little brush thing but I think I have made my point.

(Now, no picking up poor grammar in this post please!)

The 'Space' has new inhabiants!

Remember when I told you that I was watching this space? WELL... with a bit of paint applied by a couple of enthuastic 10 year olds (It will not always be black...you might need to watch this space for a bit longer...) A bit more drilling and fiddling by someone who at least looks like he knows exactly what he is doing...

an arched window...

a bit of hay ...

A couple of very excited children and a mamma who is fit to burst with glee...

 

Here are our new little girls!

Miss Fern and,

Lavender.

They are Aracunas and will be laying eggs with pretty blue/green shells by mid/late September! OOOooooo, it has been so long between chickens for this little family; my beloved really does love me.

And look, my wee one has learnt to perch already!