My Top 5 Tips for Staying Cool with Kids in Summer

1. Waterfight!  With cups, water pistols, watering cans whatever your weapon get wet and let evaporation cool you down.

2. Cool baths. Having a play in the bathtub with some penguin/water animal toys, add some food colouring or pebbles to make it a sensory experience.

3. I just made this banana ice-cream!!! and it is SOOOO delicious and pretty healthy. It cools you down from the inside http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-creamy-ice-cream-with-just-one-ingredient-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-93414

4. Freeze grapes in little containers and you've got a quick snack to hand out that is nutritious and cooling

5. A spray bottle from the $2 shop is entertaining and can be used to spray each other and water the plants. You can  even clean something like the windows or the car in the shade so you're doing something constructive and staying cool.

Snow Day on Mt Donna Buang

Only an hour from where I live I can go up a mountain and see SNOW! This is the first real snow I've seen (once having been to Mt Dandenong to see a sprinkling of snow which was very exciting at the time). To be able to do it with Mum, Dad, and Lucia was amazing since none of them have seen snow either. Matt is an old hand, but he enjoyed himself too.

Community Builder

A person I admire, Kath Holton, told me that some people community builders who work to improve the community they live in. I aspire to be a community builder so that the community that my family lives in is vibrant and active.

To that end I've been working as a member of the Healesville 150 steering committee to develop and encourage celebrations of the strength and diversity of the last 150 years of Healesville's history.  I'm working on the website www.healesville150.org and managing the twitter and facebook pages as well as getting involve in events and trying to make some memorable moments happen for the children in our community.

Matt, Lucia and I have had great new experiences that have come along with this community building experience. Some of the H150 events that we've attended are the Winter Solstice celebration at the
Healesville Labyrinth http://mountainviews.starcommunity.com.au/mail/2014-06-24/seekers-of-the-solstice/  and the Healesville 150 Midwinter Ball which was awesome. There was an amazing band and the chance to get dressed up. I went a bit Frida Khalo inspired and Matt went as Mattman.

Crafting - Drawing on Sandpaper

Firstly, I love libraries! You can request them to deliver any book you choose right to your local library. So I had Art Lab for Little Kids sent to the Healesville Library and Lucia and I launched straight into some new creative time.

I have always found crayons a bit useless, they're waxy and the colour doesn't transfer well to paper. We have always used pastels, oil pastels, markers and chalk instead and then voila the great idea of drawing with crayons onto sandpaper. It grates the colour right in, which means you get good colour transfer.  Then you can flip it over and iron onto a fabric! I had some bags left from an embroidery project that we did a test run on and it worked a treat (other than my drawing the y in lucy backwards)!

A year later... wtf where did that go :)

I love Matt: Why he's the best man in the universe

I love Matt. He is smart, kind, funny and loves me even when I'm crazy or stupid.

I'm watching you :)

Happy Valentine's Day Matty

I know I'm a little bit early but Matt is going to be away for Valentine's Day so I wanted to do something nice for him before he went. So I made these handsewn tea bags filled with his favourite organic peppermint tea! I used unbleached coffee filters and normal sewing cotton and a little cardboard, all things that we had lying around the house.



This idea came from Home Shoppe :) so thanks to them for thinking up something sweet for my valentine.

Knitting: Citrusy Citron

This is Citron by Hilary Smith Callis. This was in the Knitty in Winter 09 and has been very popular on Ravelry. You can knit it in any weight yarn and I am still mentally damaged from my last lace weight shawl so I decided to knit it in 4 ply. The yarn is Knit Picks Chroma Fingering, since Knit Picks still don't post to Australia (I know crazy isn't it what a market they're missing out on) a bunch of us knitters went in and did a big mega order and sent it via a mail forwarding company. I found the Chroma a little sticky as it's a single rather than a plied yarn and frankly I found the 30% acrylic in it made it feel awfully squeaky to me after being spoiled by all the lovely natural yarns I have used.

I didn't hard block this shawlette because I don't want to lose the ruffley bits as I have heard can happen if you pin too severely.

This is a nice little bit of summer to carry me through the rest of the season and into Autumn. It was a fun knit and easy to memorise which made it perfect for braindead end of the day and car knitting.

New Blog for Lucia

We got Lucia a camera for Christmas and I started a new blog for her pics. It's cute, well I think it's amazing to see from a child's perspective and if you want to see some random pics then go to www.luciascamera.blogspot.com. If you like the concept then check out Cooper the photographer cat, you can get his link from my Sites Made of Awesome sidebar.

Why I Love Food Dye: Six Ways To Entertain Kids With a Few Simple Ingredients

I have discovered a new and abiding love for the extensive use that you can put food dye to in your house when you have little kids.

Playdough 

I had a lot of food dye around from dyeing yarn when Lucy was born and when she got old enough I thought it was great that we could make our own coloured playdough. Home made playdough lasts so much longer than shopbought and I use this recipe and it feels great and lasts for a couple of months if sealed up between plays.

Coloured Baths

At some point Lucy was protesting about getting in the bath and so I added some colour to the water, just a half cap is enough to colour the whole bath and it did not dye her skin at all. We experiment in the bath by adding a colour at either end and seeing what happens when they mix, so we are learning through play. Also a coloured bath can make an enchanting setting for some water play with underwater animal toys etc. 

Coloured Bath Soap for Kids  

I have looked around for bath soap pens so Lucy could draw on the expanse of white tiles next to our bath without luck and at the suggestion of a friend I added some corn flour (starch) to some baby soap (you could use liquid handsoap for older kids), split the mix in half and added some food dye and voila! bath soap that you can paint on the walls or tub with the added benefit of getting a clean baby. Special note that I did dye my grout but it came out after a few scrubs

Pavement Paint for Kids

We made paint by mixing one cup of water with one cup of cornflour and spliting it into four bowls and mixing in some food colouring. BRILLIANT! This is my favourite thing to do with food colouring and Lucy loved it too. We got the idea from the Tend website. The colours blend together brilliantly when wet and then change colour to a more opaque/chalky texture as they dry and you can just sweep/hose off the results. We didn't have any residual dyeing on our cement pavers.

Ice Cube Painting

On a hot day you can freeze some water that has been dyed with food colouring and then pop it out and let your kids use it like a paintbrush. This is another great chance to see colours combine and observe the result. Something simple and cheap that can keep kids entertained and cool on a hot day. 

Finger Paints

We did make home made fingerpaints which I posted about here, but they were no where near as fun as the pavement paints, which you could use as fingerpaints if you wanted to, but not for paintings you wanted to keep.

Stuff I Wish I Knew Before Having a Baby

1. A good water bottle that you can open one handed is a great thing for a breast feeding Mum
2. Shower curtains make excellent drop sheets for craft, saves getting glitter, paint and anything else all over your floors
3. Swimming nappies are just for catching poop, do not let your baby wear them in the car
4. When a bubba says I have a tummy ache or I have a sore back it can mean I want to poo or wee
5. Art with kids is about the process not the finished product, learn not to be a perfectionist
6. A great way to stop a kid from tantrumming is just to ask them lots of questions "What's over there, who is coming home later, what should we have for dinner, what toy should we take to bed". They get so interested in the answers they forget that they were upset
7. The words "It's going to be ok, everything is going to be alright" when taught to a loving partner can stop you from going crazazy
8. There is 24 hour nurse on call, 24 GP on call and also a 24 Maternal & Child Health Nurse on call in Australia provided by various state and federal governments. They can be a comforting when you're concerned about something but not so concerned that you think you need to go to a GP
9. Black food dye in cake icing can make poo go fluorescent green (see point seven). In fact anything that kids eat can make their poo change colour and as long as they're doing poos easily and regularly there is generally no problem
10. More about poos, when babies are breastfed they don't need to poo as often because it's such a complete and amazing baby food for them. When they start to eat solids or have formula then they poo more often.
11. Pawpaw makes babies poo smell nice
12. Read widely but take what everyone says with a grain of salt and do what works for you, all kids are different and need different things

Disclaimer: This stuff is true for me but may not be true for you so don't spam me because you don't agree, you're welcome to your opinion.

Our Christmas Day

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).