Book art

Found this link out of the blue.  Dioramas.  Dames.  Deadpan.

What more could you ask for on a Sunday afternoon?

Show offs

1.  New haircuts for little girl, big girl and very very big girl (but no need to show off about that last one).  Little girl about to turn three, makes her way to the hair salon with handbag, sunnies and hat for this special milestone.  She squeals:  “Mamma, I so excited!”  Rat’s tales from babyhood are finally cut off.  Big girl loves the whole process just like her little sister.  She now looks like a child of the 30s with her new bob.  Very cute.  She celebrated by making pretend ’stew’ all afternoon.

It's a fine bob, Ginger

Let go of me

Ingredients for stew

2.  Little girl turns big girl 3 on Anzac Day and smiles all day.

3.  I bake my first real birthday cake for little girl turning big girl 3.   It’s a lion cake.  Both little girls pretend to be scared of the lion.  It’s the best reaction I could have had.

My first real birthday cake

Giggles, not tears, this time

More birthday afternoon tea treats

Blowing out number three

They are actually scared of lions.  Once, at the zoo, we were watching the lion pride.  The lions were sort of lolling about when a zoo official made a public announcement on the PA system.  One of the males stood up with arched back and fanned mane, and roared a ginormous roar.  RAAAAAAAAAAAA!  Impressive.

I commented out loud on the thrill of it all.   Problem was there was no one there beside me to respond to my harmless banter.  The two little girls who had been beside me were about 500m away crying effusively and screaming about lions coming to eat them up, refusing to go anywhere near the lion enclosure.  It took about 20 minutes to calm them down.

They don’t like lions.  Who would have thought it?

Life’s Riches

I love a surprise.

Especially musical surprises.

Last Wednesday was warm. The night before I had unexpectedly been offered a ticket to see Lucinda Williams (thank you B—).  It was still warm on the night of her concert at Hamer Hall in Melbourne.   J—- and the girls took me out to pizza and then dropped me off in town.  I walked a few streets and met a friend.  We trammed it to the Arts Centre  among a middle aged crowd of concert goers. We waited for other friends and family while sipping cold beers.

Lucinda’s songs, in that venue, with her band Buick 6, and her voice, all evidence of life’s riches,  lifted me into a couple of hours of  enjoyable and distractionless fun.

I’ve always been familiar with Lucinda’s songs but wouldn’t call myself a huge fan.  That fact isn’t really out of  informed choice, just the lucky-dip of what hits your turntable when you can only discover so much. Or maybe I thought she was a contrived Nashville cowgirl.   I wish I’d followed through on the search for Townes Van Zandt’s and Gram Parsons’ contemporary lineage.  I would have uncovered her body of work earlier, especially her earlier songs.

The gig was a surprise on so many levels.  I have hardly ever listened to lyrics.  J—- and many of my friends can retell song lyrics with the most extraordinary precision.  The words, for them, make the song.  I have always been hit harder by the the way a song ‘feels’: its music, its arrangement, and the tone of the singing.  In short, the way a song makes me feel viscerally through its sound.  At this concert, I listened to the lyrics, even those of  some of the earlier country-folky songs I’d heard many times before, and it made a difference.  Hard to explain.

I also loved how far removed the whole experience was from my daily existence as a mother immersed in pre-school life.  Hard to explain this too. Perhaps it was the way Lucinda’s voice acted like a shape-shifter for each song. Perhaps it was Lucinda’s banter with references to all sorts of musical connections I don’t hear much about anymore.  Perhaps it was the songwriting, almost coming from another time and place.  Yeah, it was definitely the singing and songwriting.

I learned that Drunken Angel was about her friend and poet Blaze Foley.  I learned of Lucinda’s own favourite songs (or at least ones that she liked to perform in her own way at encore): Disgusted by Lil’ Son Jackson, I lived my Life by Fats Domino, Things I Used To Do by Guitar Slim, Every Picture Tells a Story by Faces, and Long Way to The Top by ACDC.  It’s not a collection I’d think to put on my playlist everyday but it was fun.  It was cool and foot-tapping without being intense. Confused anecdotes about EmmyLou Harris might have been due to jet-lag but I loved the overly-familiar referencing of Harris and the likes of Willie Nelson.

My only (small) criticism would be that the band was somewhat over-polished at times.  Guitar solos aren’t my thing.  Neither are drum solos (did I clap?).  No matter; it was still alot of fun.

Summer gone

I love autumn.  The mornings are cold but the afternoons warm up so brilliantly.  So how come I feel  sad about summer winding up?

This summer gone, Peta and Ginger grew into little girls with their own passions.   The clincher was the local open air pool and the occasional trip to the beach.  New bathers were purchased as chlorine bit into the older bathers.  Splashes, kicks and full-face submersions, with and without noodles, were rampant.

The back garden and its endless potting and digging opportunities was favoured a great deal especially when friends or cousins arrived for home-made pizza or barbecue. Favourite kooky songs like “Don’t Sit Down”,  “Howdy Hooty Sapper Ticker”  and “Purple People Eater”were played over and over on a  specially bought boom-box with old fashioned cassette deck, CD/MP3 player and radio with wonderfully large wind -up dials.  This is heaven for a four year old that likes to sort out her own playlist.  All the control switches, keypads and buttons have been memorised.

Other excursions included a piggy-back on nonna’s back through Williamstown Cemetary followed by a visit to a great-great-aunt;  cupcakes and galleries in town; dinner at a hodge-podge selection of Melbourne restaurants; monkey watching at the Zoo; and long walks through the golf course.

The chooks ran riot and the vegetable garden took off.  Beans, lettuce, ruby coloured carrots,  kale and a solitary sunflower made us happy and added flavour to our salads.  The 45 degree days that visited us managed to slow cook our tomatoes but a few were salvaged.  J—- decided to learn how to bottle tomato sauce (passata) given the abundant supply from my brother’s garden patch. He spent a whole Saturday at my folks’ place and learnt how to handle crates of tomatoes , big gas-fired cookers and bulk glass bottles.  He then repeated the whole process at our house, assisted by mum, and used the functioning 50s copper int he laundry to do the job. I call it guerilla-style sauce making. Figs and peaches were also bucketed over to us as my brother’s trees morhped into pure summer fruit paradise.

My own personal summer highlight was the cocktail indulgence at the tiki bar in tropical East Melbourne.

We signed summer off with a short holiday to Barwon Heads.  Peta and J—- spent a nonchalant half hour with a young dolphin that had found a frolicking good time in the river estuary and decided to stay for a few months.  J—- was bemused at how casual the children were as if they just bumped into dolphins every weekend.

It was a perfect summer break with walks at the Heads, vanilla slices at Queenscliff, lamb roast with our wonderful friend and hostess, milkshakes and mixed lollies at Ocean Grove, larking about at a big pirate-themed waterpark, and buying old stuff from a big vintage market.

I love autumn though.

She’s crazy. Well yes, she is.

Ginger and Peta heard two very different guitarists play their stuff on the radio yesterday afternoon.  (Thank you Dave Graney and Elizabeth McCarthy.)  They asked me to turn it up loud.

The first was the frenetic Marnie Stern.

Ok, once I found her stuff on youtube, I thought it mostly noise (not that I mind nosiy guitar in principle) , but I do like the song we initially heard on the radio, Ruler.  The rest might take a while to get used to and that’s ok. I’m not sure if she fits in the metal or punk straitjacket but, either way, her fingers are fast and she has piqued the interest of this kinder mum.  I look forward to hearing more.

Ruler is from an album called This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That.   Ginger and Peta’s critical review of the song was this constant summation over and over:  She’s crazeeeeee!

Marnie’s interview technique, as a respondent obviously, is pretty interesting too.  A very excitable person as evident in a Pitchfork interview.

The other guitar virtuoso that impressed me is Kaki King.  Ginger and Peta, those fine rock connoisseurs, giggled at the sound of her name and repeated it over and over for tongue-twisting effect.  That in itself gains immediate stars on our praise chart. She was raised in Atlanta, Georgia; she is in town this week and she played some music live to air and handled Mr Graney’s questions with finesse.   I like the following number.

The omelette machines

These things……

just made these things….

We’ve been complaining for weeks about the lack of eggs and wanted those feathery chooks to work for their supper.  J found four teeny eggs nestled into the straw potato patch this afternoon where the chickens have free rein.  In fact, today Nellie and Ivy were encroaching Peta and Ginger’s porch space which created a lot of angst in Peta especially.  There was a lot of shooing and shouting.  I realise now the two girls (of the poultry variety) were just trying to tell the other two girls (of the pig-tailed variety) about their  eggs.

We’ve also  started to complain about the low yield from our garden.  We want maximum harvest, thank you very much, out of this plot.  Two tomatoes today. I’m still waiting on beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, capsicums.  The kale and celery have come through and the lettuce has now gone to seed.  Beetroot and carrots are getting vibrant.  Watermelon looks ill. The blood orange and lemon tree look so-so but there are small unripened green fruit.

The rock connoisseur

Me:  “This has great rhythm, don’t you think?”

Peta: “I think the Beatles’ rhythm is gooder.”  Smarty pants two year old.

Check for yourself.  I Admit My Faults by Eddy Current Suppression Ring.  I must buy their albums; it’s been years since I (an old lady) have bought a CD, let alone one that takes me back 20 years.  Lovely stuff.

I’ll add this number too, purely for gratuitous pleasure.

Big smiles

Perfect days are those where we have big smiles.  Yesterday, Peta and Ginger woke up late (8.30am).  Some smiles right there from babbo and mamma.  After breakfast Peta and Ginger ink stamped just about everything in sight and Peta drew her first figurative image.  It was a black texta picture of babbo.  I’ll have to photograph it. Then we spent the morning at the Children’s Garden at the Botanic Gardens.  We picked up R who took her place in the backseat of the car between Ginger the bunny rabbit and Peta the possum.  There were lots of giggles and Peta pretended that R was her mum.

The Children’s Garden has finally grown into a dense rainforest, market garden, lush lavender field,  and waterway sanctuary.  The water features have finally been activated following approval by the water authority and it is enticing to little feet as well as captivating big folk.  There is a living bamboo house, dense bamboo forest, light and shade, bumps and flats, rocks and grass,  and texture and colour.

Dirty and smiley monkeys

Ginger the talker (it never stops)

Ginger the runner

Peta the eater

Peta the smiler

Our stomachs rumbled so off we went in search of food as peaches, nectarines and strawberries didn’t do the job.  We found a solitary place open in Smith Street and enjoyed Japanese noodles, gyoza, tempura and beer (ahem, me only). R was dropped off at home and we resumed the search for wine barrels as tree pots.  Mission accomplished, we spent the rest of the day sorting out the vegie garden and edible pot plants.  Have I mentioned that we also have two bantam silkies named Nellie and Ivy?  Don’t you love the way chooks have old lady names.  I wanted to name them Patti and Debbie but was vetoed by the dirty monkeys. J did most of the hard work and was rewarded by children sticking out their bottoms to him.  They were paid back by having some water dumped on them.  Smiley faces were aghast at the nerve of him. And guess who ate all their dinner of roast lamb and three veg.  Ginger and Peta, that’s who.  More smiles.

Beards, boots and gingerbread

I never liked Christmas.  The build up has always stretched my nerves especially when it was just me, with the expectation of attending a family lunch (extending to dinner) that always made me feel lonely and exasperated.  I also didn’t understand the hysteria of gift-buying but admit it’s mostly my inner-Scrooge speaking out loud.  I also resented the hypocrisy I thought existed.  Extravagance and good cheer for one day of the year but grimness and judgement and selfishness every other day. Then I met J and had children and my nonsensical under-graduate anti-Christmas tirade bit me in the bum. So there.

Ginger and Peta made one request each of Father Christmas:  a unicorn for Ginger to be named Maraposa (originally there was a wish for a Barbie doll with the same name but some wires were crossed) and a caterpillar for Peta.  J and I planned on giving the girls a couple of goldfish but decided to put them on hold.  I also purchased myself them a Swedish moderne doll’s house but that too will have to wait for another time as my anti-consumerist Christmas tirade bit me on the bum again. Stories about the meaning of Christmas were requested over and over so Peta spoke of little baby Jesus for many weeks beforehand.  Gingerbread biscuits in the shape of trees, deer, angels, gingerbread were made lovingly with of  treacle-laden spoon licking.  Small gifts were made or purchased for the wonderful carers at our childcare centre.  Plans for a big barbecue at my brother and sister-in-laws’ house were made.  Naturally those plans involved a lot of excess.  Father Christmas was duly visited at the City Square.  Confusion spread as he made another appearance at the end of year party for our kindy and care centre.  (Let’s just say he looked and sounded very familiar.)   Biscuits and milk were left in front of the fireplace for Mr Claus/St Nicholas/Babbo Natale and stockings that resembled very merry pillowcases were hung.  Little girls awoke early on Christmas morning with grins and cuddles as they descended the stairs.  There was excitement and hyperactivity and loads of chocolate and berries the whole day (as well as snags, barbecued chicken, fish, smoked trout nicoise salad, potato salad, sago Christmas pudding, and chocolate canoli).

Christmas cuties

Family shot

Peta and Babbo Natale

Peta, the Christmas cutie

Ginger and Babbo Natale

The confusing Father Christmas with mamma

What we do

I’m here to report that I, yes, little old I, can make some things. Admittedly it’s not the fast-paced juggernaut of knitting (I’m looking at you Kelley Deal) or the cool crafty salt-of-the-earth retro sewing gig that a lot of mums have going on. I need to find a tutor who will will teach me knitting and sewing.

Mum has been whipping up some outfits for Ginger. There is one cord pants and vest number that makes her look like a dancer in the video for Moskau, Moskau by Genghis Khan.  Not that I know what that video looks like.  Oh heck, of course, I do.  I just YouTubed- not very handsome men.  Too much shiny fabric and fluffy hair. Check out the translation. I just imagine Ginger squatting and jumping with Ruski verve every time she wears it. It has a certain ethnic flair to it.

I shouldn’t josh like that. Really, mum is a master of thread and fabric. If only I could make her sit down long enough to teach me how to sew with flair. My ideas and her technical expertise would make a great combination. I’m so keen to make a garden dress for Ginger with foliage and buds. I’d like to make a more demented version too with toadstools and bugs and delicate moss.

So what have our fingers racked up this winter gone?

I have made short crust pastry, puff pastry, pies, chocolate cakes (hard as rock though), lemon delicious pudding, pizzas from scratch including dough.  Ginger and Peta have helped with kneading and mixing.  Of course, they have also tasted.

I have created a craft box for Ginger’s birthday full of lovingly cut our pictures from mags and cards, sparkles, ribbons, buttons, transfers and stickers from gorgeous friends, curios, gluesticks, craft idea books, cookbook recipes for children.

I have helped mum establish our vegetable garden with lots of good food for our kitchen table.  We never buy lettuce or silverbeet or peas from the market anymore.  I have weeded and fed scraps to our worms in their clever little farm.  I have composted and trudged out with bucket loads of water form our rinses to feed seedlings and trees in pots.

J—- has made a small water tank from a derelict wheelie bin to hydrate the soil around the perimeter of the house.  He has set up a chicken coop, fenced of the vegie patch and allowed for future chooks to free range throughout the rest of the backyard.  He has set up the girls’ room with sea creatures hanging from teh ceiling and all their momentoes from our trip to Japan.  It’s only taken a year but that’s what winter is for: catching up with the things we must do.

Now we can sit under the neighbour’s palm tree which straddles our backyard and watch all the spring growth.