The afternoon walk to the waterfall.

Every afternoon I have to exorcise exercise my children in order to make witching hour as pleasant as possible for all of us. We either ride our bikes around the "wetlands" ( a nearby nature reserve) or walk to the waterfall. The pathway to the falls is just down the road from our street:


The little one insists on bringing his pooh bear and blankie:


After a few minutes of walking the pathway is so enveloped by ferns and palms that you can imagine you are in the lush tropics (not in the middle of suburbia!):



Until suddenly the darkness of the rainforest abruptly ends and you discover the magic of the falls.

                                                               It is a little boys paradise!






One of Sydney's secret gems (and one of my best parenting tools, begone witching hour!!!)

Warning: those squeamish about earthworms look away now!

This morning we made a worm farm....

There has recently been some unhelpful digging in the garden. We have read the brilliant Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach several times now and I have some suspicions that the Captain might be planning to try and catch some seagulls. So in order to prevent any further garden destruction,unnecessary worm slaughter and to put a quick end to any harebrained schemes, I have purchased a worm farm for him to observe a handful of worms under supervised conditions.

Simply sifting the dirt to remove large lumps kept him occupied for ages. Thank you worm farm! (note to self: must go back and purchase ant farm):


Layering the dirt and sand levels:

His favourite bit:

If you look closely you will see a worm tunneling to safety on the left. Smart worm! You will thank me in the long run worm, for many worm lives have been saved!

A Garden Swing

Ever since childhood I have had a hankering for a swing in the garden. As a child living in India I was kindly given a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. My imagination was promptly inspired by this lovely verse:


The Swing

How do you like to go up in a Swing?
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

As soon as we saw the garden at this house, R and I both knew that this was going to be our next home. We were so enamoured with the house and the garden that we actually made an offer to the agent at that first open house and had it accepted the following day! Thank you to my lovely dad for making me the swing and to my wonderful husband for risking his life to get it into the tree! Two wonderful Fathers! Happy Father's Day to all!

This child...

Every night before I go to sleep I go and check on my sleeping babies. The slightly damp curls and the soft peacefulness of their faces and breathing normally generates surges of love that overwhelm. Often I even feel guilty for whatever punishments have been actioned during the course of the day. Last night at the bedtime check I found him like this:

Yes. Completely. Naked. Apart from his muslin blankie that he had somehow managed to artfully drape in order to preserve dignity. Oh he looks like an angel, but the mischief of this child!

Street Shopping

I adore Council Clean Up! Truly someone else's trash is often my treasure! I know how much my street scavenging irritates my husband though, so in the car as we make our way through a neighbourhood that is having Council Clean Up, I very discreetly move my eyes over the piles of inviting treasure rubbish until I spot something that has potential. I am then forced to abandon reserve and screech "STOP THE CAR!!!" at my husband. A mad dash follows, incase one of the dodgy old men in trucks gets to the must-have item before I do. Then there is either joy (from me) as I lug the item back to the car and insist we take it home and excessive eye rolling (from husband) as he futilely attempts to prevent me from taking my treasure home! Or there is disappointment (from me) when I approach the item and discover it is damaged beyond repair or not actually what I thought it was, and annoying smug looks (from husband) as he is delighted that the item truly was rubbish. As much as my love for Street Shopping annoys my husband, he is forced to admit that I have found some gems over the years and this is my most recent wonderful find:

I love it!

NB. Please disregard ugly 1980s fabric on the cane lounges. These are yet to be re-upholstered and I have decided to wait until after we finish renovating to have them done. Researching outdoor fabrics in the meantime though!

The SNOW!

We have just got back from 4 days away! Best snow that I have seen in NSW since I was a little tacker learning to ski and I can't begin to describe how adorable the Captain looked rugged up like the Michelin man and snow ploughing (or pizza slicing as he called it) with his mates in ski school. Too divine!

Conversations with the Captain...

This child, amuses and exasperates me simultaneously!!!

Driving home after dropping his Father at work:

Captain: Can I have car lessons?

Me: What do you mean? (Distracted and concentrating on annoying Sydney peak hour traffic)

Captain: You know, to drive the car.

Me: Driving lessons? What! No, certainly not! Not until you are 16 and 9 months.

Captain: Why?

Me: Because the people that make the decisions about who drives cars and when have decided that that is the safest time to learn how to drive.

Captain: How many years until I am 16 and 9 months?

Me: Umm, a lot of them.

Captain: Can I have two birthdays this year?

Me: What? No!

Captain: But then I can go in the Tour de France sooner and learn to drive cars!

Project Organise (also known as Operation get son to school on time!)

Look what I found to store all my cleaning products in!!! (Yes, I made sure to thoroughly sterilise it first!) I have been looking for a container to put all the cleaning items in for a while now and was thrilled with this find! I loathe plastic, (particularly in relation to storage), and so when I came across this lovely old chamber pot at our local antique shop it had to come home with me as a housekeepers pot!


And yes... that is a flatscreen stuck to my back deck window.... my husband is trialling sticky tapes for a project he is doing for a big fast-food chain. He figured if the sticky tape could survive the rigours of small children it would be fine in the drive through window!

Missing the daffodils and jonquils of cooler climates.

Despite no gorgeous cool climate spring bulbs, the garden still looks spectacular. Kangaroo Paw have been flowering all winter, including this beauty called Bush Pizzazz.

White irises are popping up everywhere and look like dainty little ballerinas amongst all the natives in our garden. I suspect that these are equally as hardy though!

We are just about to make a big investment in some Grass Trees, fingers and toes crossed that they transplant successfully! Anyone have any tips?

Lamingtons and the Garbage Truck

This morning we made Lamingtons. It was a first for all of us. I have a very clear memory of watching a lamington drive as a little girl. I watched mesmerised as a group of familiar mums worked at unfamiliar speed in a factory line baking what seemed to be enough lamingtons to feed the population of a country town or in this case a school fete.


There is a reason why people do it in drives... it is quite a messy and fiddly exercise. However, for two tactile little boys... they loved it.

CWA standard they definitely were not! Nevertheless, we had fun and I even had 5 minutes peace and quiet to enjoy mine with a coffee whilst they were busy eating theirs!

Sadly said peace and quiet was suprisingly short lived. Today is garbage day and, as is a long standing tradition, the boys kept an ear out for the noise of the truck winding it's way up our street. As soon as they can hear it they both race out of the house, screeching like banshees "garbage truck, garbage truck" and then stand at the top of our driveway in relatively quiet anticipation. Normally, the driver waves at them and he and I exchange a "boys will be boys with their obsessions with large machines" glance and then he continues on his way around the neighbourhood. Today was different though... maybe he smelt the lamingtons baking? He stopped and asked if the boys wanted to have a sit in the cab?

They loved it... he let them press the buttons, move the seats up and down, and the highlight of the experience was a demonstration of the bin collecting arm grabbing our recycling bin off the nature strip and "emptying" it several times!

That driver made their day with this small act of kindness!

Seriously... my parents actually were awesome!

I love this site, there is something very special about it. In particular, the reminder that lives were lived before children. Every photo that I have of my husband and I (pre-boys) I have examined closely, wondering if one day it will be selected to be uploaded!



Here are my parents... looking young and fabulous on holidays in PNG (I think?)!






Another photo of my mother (and baby me!) looking glamourous. We were on posting in Cambodia then and I have to remind myself that she had servants, and thus had the time and energy to look glamourous in every photograph!

Home organisation Chez Pirate

As this little guy starts school next year and we are about to renovate our house, I spent this weekend thinking about what I needed to do to get as organised as possible. Currently the Captain goes to pre-school 2 days a week and I rarely drop him off before 9.30am, next year he has to be at school at 8.30am... clearly, our morning routine needs a bit of streamlining! So whilst child in question lay around reading Tintin comics, I set to work and began a major overhaul inside the house.





I am trying to work out the best place to store art and craft items. I had lots of jars and bits and pieces in various spot so I collated all items used daily into a vintage (literally) harvest basket! I will pull it out whenever they need something and hopefully they will pop whatever is used straight back in, which will make for quick and easy clean up! Positive thinking people!!!


Recently our hall stand has gathered bags of items I have been planning to pass on and just have never got around to doing. As part of "Operation get the Captain to school on time" I decided to deal with it all immediately. The cloth nappies have found a home with a friend who is planning to use cloth on her new little one and the books are off to South Africa with a flight attendant friend who will pass them onto the "Our Kid Project" a charity that supports children with HIV/AIDS.

Look at my hallstand now! Hooray!!! Further tales from "Operation get child to school on time" to follow. In the meantime, if anyone has any brilliant ideas about how to get small children ready quickly in the morning I would welcome any tips or suggestions!

Nicasso and the Avant-Garde art movement

Captain Nicasso has entered his Cubism phase, aged 4 years! He has spent roughly a week creating this and is so proud of it that he took it to pre-school with him this morning for show and tell. R and I are very pleased that the realism phase seems to be over and can only hope that there is no further disgracing of the family at Pre-School.

Ping Karrots and Bumbaids...

My little one just turned 2... and I am heartbroken! The baby years are over... he is thinning out everywhere and I miss those rubberband wrists and baby legs. He is playing actively with his brother rather than just following him around (this is good I know). Most of all I miss his baby language. He used to mispronounce so many words in the most adorable ways, my favourites would have to be bumbaids (bandaids) and Ping Karrots (King Parrots). Happy Birthday my gentle little one!

His birthday present? A teepee with the most divine cowboy print!

The school holidays so far...

We have had a fairly quiet holiday. R (husband/dad) has started up his own business so we don't anticipate travelling anywhere anytime soon. Instead we have had lots of play dates and pottered about at home.

The pond yachts in these photos are family heirlooms! We were in London in the early 1980s on a family holiday and my father bought them for me and my brother at the most extraordinary and amazing toy shop...Hamleys! It was basically a toy department store, I think there were 7 different floors of toys. I can't remember what else we bought but these little pond yachts have lasted well and are now close to 30 years old! The boys have been playing with them in our almost empty pool (it is about to be resurfaced) every day.

The Captain is growing up so quickly. We have completed his school enrolment for next year. It hardly seems to be possible that he could be heading off to big school in six months time! We have chosen a very small (120 students in K - 6), slightly alternative private school that I am confident is perfect for him. They teach meditation (perfect for his somewhat volatile temper!) and provide a hot lunch (hooray no school lunches to pack and ideal for his endless appetite!) and teach classical languages and literature! The whole school even performs in an annual Shakespeare festival, including the lower first , as they call kinder! So looking forward to that!

To assist with entertaining the boys these holidays, R built the boys a fabulous sand pit. In the centre of which is a lovely old wooden row boat that was destined for the tip. It now has a new life as a pirate ship, police boat, naval aircraft carrier, submarine and even occasionally fills in for the Manly ferry! We have all sorts of sand pit toys and endless trucks but the Captain's favourite sand pit toy? Some old wood off cuts that we made into a wooden version of the northern beaches!

Ah yes, Manly Hospital... been there a few times with my rascally boys!