We are not amused

Just kidding :) It's all good!

Helping Mum out in the Kitchen

I said to her, can you help Mumma by popping this into the bowl and she proceeded to put each piece into the bowl going 'pop, pop, pop'. Things are pretty literal when you're almost two. It looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, but she did proceed to throw the majority of the rest of those veggies on the floor when I ducked to the loo. I couldn't be mad though, she was just entertaining herself and it did look pretty. 

Two steps forward, one step back.

At 12.25am (that's right in the middle of the night) the Queensland parliament passed a law that diminished the rights of Gay and Lesbian couples. The original aim was to scrap civil partnerships but instead they were watered down by being renamed as registered relationships and having the state-sanctioned ceremony option revoked.  It was said that the 'state-sanctioned ceremony' was considered threatening to religious groups because it was trying to emulate marriage. OF COURSE IT WAS TRYING TO EMULATE MARRIAGE! It is marriage. People who love each other want to make that official in front of their friends, the state and their god (if they have one).

I feel the deepest sense of outrage that in this day and age that Gay and Lesbian people are having their rights as human diminished due to the fact that they love someone of the same sex. If the same laws were being applied to people based on height or race then everyone would have their righteous indignation hats on and it just wouldn't be allowed to occur.

My friends who are in same sex relationships are just the same as my friends who are in hetero relationships. They work, they play, they fall in love,they are community minded, they struggle to pay their bills, to be fitter, to make the right life decisions. My gay friends make my life better, they are the some of the kindest, funniest, loving, friendliest and delightful people that I know and it saddens me greatly that their rights are downgraded by the government, that they should be made to feel lesser because they love someone with the same bits that they have.

It embarrasses me, as a Queenslander, as an Australian and as a human.

I hope that in my lifetime I get to see every Australian share the same rights with regards to marriage. I would see that as a great advancement for humanity.

Making Playdough with Mum and Nanna

Warm Feet Mumma

This will tickle the fancy of handknit lovers and baby lovers alike. Lucia is learning so fast, in a learning curve that you can't believe until you are in close proximity to a child and can observe it for yourself. She has a plethora of words and adds new ones every day. At least two or three that I hear her say and who knows how many others that she uses to other people. Today she was looking at my hand knit jitterbug socks and I said aren't they soft and squishy and we were squishing them for awhile and she said "Warm Feet Mumma". Truer words could not be said, because there is nothing as nice as slipping a pair of handknitted socks on to your feet for warm toasty toes (okay okay ugg boots are pretty warm too, but not as pretty).

Knitting: Magic magicball hitchiker

Firstly I would like to say that Schoppel-Wolle Zauberball is so delicious to knit with. It is squishy and interesting and really soft. I expected it to be a bit harder after knitting with Effektgarn. This is the Rainbow colourway.

I knitted the Hitchiker which is a wildfire knit on ravelry.com. If knitted in wollemise you get 42 'teeth', hence the Hitchiker name (if you haven't read Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything) however in zauberball I only got 35 'teeth'. Still as you can see it is certainly long enough.

This is a great knit, the pattern is easy to memorise, it's oh so squishy because it's just garter stitch and you can do it front of the TV.

Bunnies, Bees and Chocolate Frogs

We didn't want to have Lucy OD on her first easter with solids so we decided to mostly give chocolate a miss and we have been putting together some cute presents for Lucy to recieve from the easter bunny.

Firstly I knitted a gnome baby and a little blankie and pillow and Matt whipped up the cutest slopey legged gnome bed that you have ever seen. After a childhood obsession with David the gnome (which is a cartoon) I find myself returning to them again and again.

Then I knitted some bees because Lucy really likes 'The Hive' on TV and she will ask to watch it every day. We have a few eps saved on the Tivo and as it only goes for five minutes sometimes it's a nice time out.



I knitted some tiny bunnies, it is Easter/Ēostre after all and putting aside my nonreligiousness I'm quite excited to have an easter egg hunt with my bubba. I attached a bobby pin to a flower I knitted a little while ago in the hopes that some day Lucy might actually let me do something with her hair.

The other eggs have matchbox cars, superballs and one Kennedy and Wilson chocolate frog (an homage to Harry Potter).

Staying Cool on a Hot Hot Day

Environmentalists please look away. I know that this is a waste of water but it was so hot! It was so much fun!!! It reminded me of the fantastic days of home made slip and slides and running under the sprinkler for hours. Beautiful hot summer days, where it was so exciting when your friends Mum came out of the house with a tray full of cut up watermelon when you were exhausted from making wirlpools in the above ground pool.

DIY Washing Powder Review

In my earlier post I said that I was going to try using the DIY Washing Powder for awhile. The recipe is from the Debt Free Cashed Up and Laughing blog and I thought I would let you know how it's going. The washing powder is a success, it's saving us about $13 a fortnight but you know every cent counts when you have to tighten your belt. The washing powder does leave behind particularly bad tomato stains and you might have to use a little elbow grease and some soap for those, but everything else comes out a treat.

If you're looking for the ingredients they are readily available at my local grocery store. The borax is in the cleaning section on the bottom shelf and the washing soda is in the laundry section.

I also made and trialled the dishwashing machine powder and it was CRAP! You heard it here :)

Australia Day Makes Me Sad

I feel too guilty about the sadness suffered by the indigenous people of Australia to be able to celebrate the happiness that I feel about being an Australian on Australia Day. This seems like a sad state of affairs. Not to mention that Australia Day has been taken over by feral redneck nationalist inbred scum as some kind of rallying point for pointless racism and cruelty. It gives me the worst type of cultural cringe.

Australia Day is held on January 26th which commemorates the arrival of the first fleet. The percentage of Australians that have a link to the First Fleet is minimal. At the time of the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006 census 23.8% of Australian citizens were born overseas. Then there is the 2.5% of Australians who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander (ATSI), for which the day that Cook landed in Botany Bay is hardly something to be celebrated as it commenced an era of illness, removal from land, violence and death.

My neighbour who is Aboriginal said to me on the morning of Australia day, when he was lending me his whipper snipper that he 'only became an Australian in '67' which is the year that Australians resoundingly voted to include Aboriginal people in the census. He was very quiet and subdued. I want my fellow Australians regardless of race to be able to be happy and celebrate what a great country we live in. At the very least I think we could move Australia Day, move it to another day where we could all rejoice about the country which we are sharing regardless of improvements that we could make and leave January 26th as a day of remembrance or a day for reconciliation where we acknowledge the wrong done and being done to our indigenous population

If you take ethnicity out of the picture and you just paid attention to the statistics of the huge gap between ATSI Australians and the rest of the Australian population I'm sure that there would be much more of an outcry about the situation. Indigenous Australians die much younger than the rest of us, infant mortality is much higher and they constitute a disproportionate amount of those in jail... Elizabeth McKenzie Hatton wrote "The position of the remnant of the original owners of this land... is a blot on State and Church alike. The fact that certain aborigines are camped under petrol tins and without certain knowledge of where their next meal is coming from is a reflection of our boastful civilisation. We may claim that we are not responsible for the actions of the original British invaders who violated their homes, shot, poisoned, burned and mutilated the natives; but we can not claim immunity from the conditions existing at the present time, and what should not be tolerated for one moment longer than it will take to rectify matters." Those words were written in 1926!!!! but they could have been written yesterday for the relevance that they have to our current position.

I hope that in my lifetime I find it possible to celebrate Australia Day again because I love my country and I want to be proud of it.

P.S. I sent a more concise version of this to Julia Gillard :) and I think that the attack on her person on Australia Day was really reprehensible and didn't achieve anything for the cause.

Our Happy Rainbow Christmas

We had a beautiful bright Christmas full of happiness. Our house was full of friends and family which is a recipe for joy. Matt and I got matching tie dyed shirts from our neices which I LOVE LOVE LOVE and I will be wearing on high rotation. We spent the New Year with many friends under the giant oak tree in our backyard, with candles hanging from the branches. It was magical. I send my best wishes for your friends and families to have a fantastic 2012 full of all the good things and none of the bad things.