Ashleigh is gone for two weeks to the 2007 Scout Jamboree. That’s an awful long time for our little girl to be gone, but it will seem like just a few moments to her I guess. There’s some awesome activities, shows and stuff, she is gonna be exhausted when she gets back. Lucky we’ve all taken that week off so she can sleep!
We love making exciting cakes for the kids birthdays. This year, Melbourne Storm cake for Connor :
Click here for full size. This was made with soft icing, rolled out and cut into shape, and loads of agggravation on my part when I thought it didn’t look as good in real life as it did in my imagination. Sorry for the tantrum, Mon…
Ash had a scrapbooking party. Bernie is a Creative Memories consultant, (email me and I can send you her contact details) and ran the party for Ash. Between me, Mon and Jacq we designed and came up with this scrapbook page decorated cake :
Big version here. Instructions for making the scrapbooking cake, after the jump.
Ever have that thing where you really feel like cooking something that has certain ingredients in it, but your recipe books are only indexed by name or main ingredient? Or you only have a few random things left in the fridge/pantry, and don’t know what you can cook with them?
For ages I’ve wanted to set up a website that allowed you to enter a few main ingredients, and you could find recipes that had them. True to the maxim ‘If you leave it long enough, someone else will do it’, someone else has done it. Quite a number of someones in fact.
Mark emailed us the other day to point out Cooking By Numbers, which reminded me that I’d seen some others on Lifehacker, so I went back and searched them out.
Snacksby is ‘Like MacGyver, but for food’, (which I assume means, ‘does cool stuff with very little’, rather than ‘uses a lot of gaff tape’) but also a bit confusing and hard to find what you want. It’s more of a recipe sharing site than a dedicated ‘ingredients search’.
AllRecipes is the best one functionally, you can search by ingredients you want and ingredients you don’t want, as well as any keywords you’d like. You can also select from a variety of recipe types and sources.
The last one is FoodieView, also a recipe sharing site but the search is good, and courtesy of which we will tonight be eating Maple Chicken with Cream de Brie Sauce, minus the brie…
Ash broke her left arm on Friday. Mucking about at school, tripped over a friend and landed on her hand. Greenstick fracture of one bone, clean break on another, cast to just below her shoulder for four weeks at least. She’s sore but dealing with it OK. While we were waiting in casualty, she did say “I should’ve broken the other arm, then I couldn’t do schoolwork”
But in good news, Connor went to the ENT this morning and doesn’t need to have his tonsils out!
Connor lost his first tooth :
That’s the most concrete reminder that he is growing up. I don’t want to let him grow. Things like going to kinder, or going to school, and such things as these, these are all flexible markers of growth, placed arbitrarily by society and not necessarily indicative of anything particular. But when your children’s baby teeth fall out, there’s no arguing or rationalisation. His body is changing inexorably, from our little guy, into a big kid.
Luckily, as one of my Mum’s pointed out, I have a Peter Pan gene, and with the right nurture to go with his nature, Connor may also be lucky enough to keep a part of him that will never have to grow up.
Yesterday the kids and I took a school holiday excursion to the National Gallery of Victoria. It’s free admission to the permanent displays and most of the temporary exhibits, so I figured if they got bored after half an hour it wouldn’t matter.
Wasn’t a problem though, they were fascinated and really enjoyed it. We went pretty quick, not really stopping to look at things in much depth, but that was ok - rather than bore them with trying to appreciate things on an adult level, it worked really well for them to get the idea of what the gallery was, have a look at a few things in each area and move on before Connor got bored. After two and a half hours we left only because Connor’s orthotics were hurting him, and the kids are keen to go back again.
It’s also across the road from Queen Victoria Gardens, so we think we could make a day of it, doing some of the gallery in the morning, having a picnic lunch in the middle, and a bit of a run around if necessary, then go back and do more in the afternoon.
I was really proud that they were so interested. We read to our kids from an early age, and encouraged them to work answers out their maths like questions. Not to push them to achieve, just to expose them to things like that before they hit school - so many people just put their kids in front of TV and then expect them to learn at school, but by the time they turn 5 kids brains are already starting to set, and the less exercise they have had early on, the worse that is. If you expose them to a wider world when they are young, they get to have flexible brains for longer.
They are both good at school stuff like English and maths, but it’s far more important to grow whole people - a lot of kids good at basic academic stuff like that either get pushed into more academic achievement, or left to their own devices and stick to what they learn at school. It’s hard then later in life to get interested in the wealth of other experiences the world has for you.
Went for a hearing test today. Apparently my hearing is within normal range. Which is weird cos I was sure my right ear was a little rock affected, even before the spate of infections that ruptured my left. So clearly I am not hearing impaired, but listening impaired.
Also had a CT scan on my sinuses, to see why I keep getting so many colds, sinusitus, ear infections etc, which keep descending into coughs and lung business every winter. Cos seriously, the way I have been the last couple of years, I was this bad when I used to smoke full time, it’s just not right that I had to go through the fun of giving up and still feel this bad!!!
You have to love some of the cliche Dad things. I’ll admit to feeling really sleepy on a Sunday afternoon about 2:30. Peej was so looking forward to fatherhood that he was practicing Dad jokes before his wife was even pregnant.
One thing that I didn’t even realise was a Dad thing is the pile of broken toys and bits at our house that just need a bit of superglue or a screw or something. There’s the odd household object, but they are mostly the kids’ things, shoddily constructed or well loved, that they come to Dad all upset and say “this came off can you fix it?” You don’t have time to fix it right there, and it probably isn’t even worth fixing, but you love your kids too much to say “nah, just chuck it”. So it goes on top of the microwave or in the shed with a bunch of similar stuff that you never get around to.
Talking to a friend of Mark D’s before his wedding, I learned that this is, in fact, another Dad thing. Suddenly a load of guilt at unfixed things is off my shoulders, I’m not a bad father and husband for never getting around to this stuff, because all good Dad’s have a “Fixin’ Pile”!
“Daddy, the flux capacitor fell of my Delorean!”
“No worries, chuck it on the fixin’ pile.”
The truth is that the fixin’ pile is an oubliette, where things go to be forgotten, because a lot of the things that break we really do have no intention of fixing. Every now and then, you can go through the fixin’ pile without the kids around, and get rid of the Happy Meal toys and other crap that they’ve forgotten, and just fix the stuff that’s worth fixing.
It’s also not technically a pile. Items on my fixing pile at the moment include several leaky taps, the back door, the mailbox AGAIN, and the armrests in my car. Unfortunately, these aren’t things I can just leave until Monique forgets about them and then throw out!
Ashleigh said to me the other day that she hates having to sleep, because it seems like wasted time when you could be doing something interesting. I swear I didn’t put those words in her mouth, but it does make you proud to hear one of your children discovering for themselves something that you have often felt.
Last week she had a 3 day school camp, and they no doubt stayed awake till all hours. Over Easter, she is on a 4 night Scout camp. The week after that, they are sleeping over at the Scout Hall, ready to wake up at 4am to attend the Anzac Day Dawn Service.
Ashleigh is getting the most out of her days this month!
Ashleigh’s school year 6 are on camp at Phillip Island starting today
This map is so you can see them relative to where I’ll show you next. These pictures are all nicked from Trigger Bros just a few minutes ago. Here’s the webcam at Suicide Pt, the closest one to them :
Nice huh? To be fair, it may look a little worse cos the webcam appears to be completely drenched. Gunnamatta a bit further around the coast isn’t quite as frightening :
It’s supposed to be like this for the next few days. Poor teachers having to keep them busy inside, but also poor kids. Hopefully they can still have a memorable Year 6 Camp.
