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!

Tween in the house

My big girl is now a tween.. I had a little cry - a crazy happy can hardly believe it type cry. Her birth was an absolute stand out incomparable moment in my life, so many emotions and sensations crammed into seconds and then the mothering began..

 

So last Saturday, about an hour short of exactly 11 years since I first heard her voice, I raised a glass full of fine Australian Sparkling, met her daddy's eyes, took a sip and smiled.

 Happy birthday sweetheart. x

Aromadough

It finally dawned on me today that the wee girl is of playdough age - big enough to knead and create but not so small she would just eat it up... With a bit of encouragement from my big girl I hunted through my collection of recipes and found the basic one I was looking for.

I have adapted this recipe and method to make it my own but it was originally written out for me on a scrap of cardboard by one of my homebirth clients at an antenatal visit. She had three children then, plus one growing. She homeschooled; I remember their big long table full of the children's daily work, our visits were always a little noisy and full of fun - I made a point of bringing my big girl (who was then quite wee) with me to those visits because their home was so welcoming and my client had a daughter of the same age with the same name... on the day in question they were playing with playdough; I had never made the stuff so she shared her recipe* with me; with my adaptaions it is so simple the little ones can help make it too.

You will need:
1 cup fine salt
2 cups plain flour
2 tbs oil
4 tsp cream of tartar
2 cups boiling water
food colourings as you fancy (we used yellow, pink, purple and blue to make those colours plus red to make orange)
essential oils (we used lemon, orange, rose geranium, lavender and jasmine)
air tight storage containers with lids

Put the salt, flour and cream of tartar in a bowl and use a whisk to combine them;

Add the oil and the boiling water (adult bit) and stir to bring together - as it cools, use your hands and begin kneading it in the bowl.

Tip it out onto your bench top and knead it a bit more then roll it into a log and divide it evenlyish into the number of colours you intend to make; roll them into rough balls.

Now the little ones can join in. Flatten out one of your balls to a disk and put a few drops of food colouring and a few drops of essential oil into the middle. Fold the edges in and give it a quick knead to bury the worst of the colouring - then pass it along the bench to some keen little hands whose job it is to knead/blend the colour through the dough. Add your colouring carefully, if you need to you can always add a few more drops of colouring... but you can't take it out!

Continue adding colour and essential oils and kneading with the rest of the plain dough balls til you are heady with the divine scents. It stores pretty well, if I remember rightly, and when your aromadough loses its scent add a few more drops of essentail oil, knead it again.

Fish out the bag of playdough implements that haven't see the light of day in about six years (brush off the dried clumps and powder of ancient play dough and chuck out the dodgy looking stuff still in tubs) sit your wee ones down to create whatever their hearts desire and make yourself a cup of tea - you will get to drink the whole cup, hot and undisturbed and you will feel marvellously relaxed which might have something to do with the lavender, rose geranium and jasmine...

*the original recipe did not contain any essential oils and made only one colour. To convert it back; omit the essential oils and add your colouring to the boiling water, stir and then knead.

I skipped craft and went on an excursion to Samford Museum instead

It was a fabulous morning, the volunteer staff are all dressed in period costume, have all lived in Samford since their youth and have an average age of about 80.

Class four (and a few mums - we ferried them forth and back again) learned a little local history and a little more besides.

First up we heard about tools, good old fashioned hard work and the bullock trains.

We met the Blacksmith

I did a little poking around in a relocated original house - wonderful treasures!

 

The children filed into the old school house after first pledging their allegiance to the Queen! and sat obediently at the old desks, hands on heads, slate pencils between and began 'metal arithmetic' followed by times tables and phonetics.

The general store held some delightful relics 

~ this thing (he is holding)  is a fly spray contraption!

They have a wonderful colection of bikes, scooters and the like and didn't mind at all when the wee ones rode them around on the veranda.

I took many more pictures but if you are local or local ish you should go see it for yourselves it is only $4 entry, $1 for school children, and an absolute delight.

Reas some more at the Samford Museum Website

Gifts cast off the needles and a whole lotta tulle

My sister calls the months of June and July the birthday tusnami; there are eight immediate family members in those two months and at least as many friends... July 30 brings a break for us, for a week. Ha!

In my cleverness I finished a milo vest for the wee girl some weeks before her birthday and forgot to give it to her! I woke in the middle of the night a few days later thinking "where did I put it?"

Found it! and this afternoon had just enough chill in the air.

My mum (who is beyond clever) knitted her a delightful turtle; she has named him Ollie.

 

He is everso snuggly, I think she loves him. The pattern is from the fabulously fun book Knit and Purl Pets by Claire Garland (I am quite keen on the chamelon; I think my
sister is too).

July 30 is a friend's little girl's fourth birthday. I was her midwife and I remember the day her sweet baby girl chose to make her grand entrance so well; it is magic that birthing business.

Anyway her mum tells me these days she is quite a fairy princess and loves to twirl and preen. I bought tulle (a couple of metres of it) and spun it into a skirt interlaced with satin ribbon and stars.

 

Every fairy needs a wand right? I gave it a little wave before packaging it to post. When she touches it it will bless her with joyful birthday wishes and have someone plant four little kisses.

Sixteen Years ago today

We frolicked in the park, said "I do", drank champagne, and danced...to this song~



(excuse the dodgy video clip; I guess it is because it was side two of the Jessie single so it didn't really rate in the charts)

Good bye summer

Images of my big girl by Tanya Love of Love Bytes Photography.

Black and White ~ still time to enter my giveaway too

Here is my Southern Hemisphere Thursday to me still Wednesday to many ~ Black and White Wednesday. Today Linda has posted a wonderful pictures of her little ones washing the car and it reminded me of this picture I took in 2002..The big girl had just turned one, or was about to ~ she is so tiny...and her daddy is so young!

and there is still time to enter my giveaway if you fancy - put your name in the hat here

Black and White

It has occured to me that while it is Thursday here it is still Wednesday all over the place somewhere else, so I am contributing to Black and White Wednesday by borrowing yesterday from someone today.

Black and White

This is my big girl and her dad in 2005 - 'tis important for a girl to know stuff about cars.

Joining in again, albeit sporadically, with Linda and her wonderful idea black and white Wednesdays.

Black and White

Lovely Linda over at Natural Suburbia has been posting some of her favourite black and white pictures on Wednesdays for a few weeks now - I can't 'do' Wednesdays them being crafty day and all but I do like to join in... (that comment reminds me of one of my old school report cards - "Shannon likes to be involved") anyway I'm moving off the subject.

Here is one of my all time favourite pictures of my beautiful big girl when she was just three. She was no longer breastfed herself, and she didn't have any siblings then, but she was the child of a homebirth midwife and spent a large part of her week visiting new mothers and babies; so feeding her babies came very naturally (I think several of her wee dolls are still breastfed now and she is nine)

And because this picture has sent me whirling joyfully down memory lane I thought i would post one of the colour versions too

Thank you Linda :)