Little Cookies

Ooo, all the wonderful things I could make with this material - a cute skirt for summer, a kimono style top, a nifty bag, blocks for a quilt, a headband, the ears of a bunny rabbit toy.
Alas I'm trying to curb my lustful fabric purchases. I have bundles of odd bits of material that I just had to have at the time or I would die. i'd truck home with the fabric under my arm and stacks of plans of what I was going to make out of it. Then I would step through the front door, get sidetracked, and discard the fabric on the nearest flat surface (including the floor).
So as much as I love love love this material, I'm going to impose a ban on myself. (And as we know all good self imposed bans are made to be broken, frequently.)

Home in one piece

Back from week's break. Instead of giving you every detail of the trip in all it's glory I'll go for a brief(ish) rundown.
Highlight/s of trip:Actually surviving the 12 hours in the car, catching Miles spewing in the bath on video, Jaxon doing a faceplant into the sand.
Lowlight/s of the trip: Rained more days than it didn't, both babies screaming lungs out in the car, sand in my bed.
Good thing/s about car trip:Ice-creams, entertaining babies with puppet, driving through one horse towns that probably wont exist in 5 years, seeing snow.
Bad thing/s about car trip: Only radio to speak of was crackely AM talkback, pulling over on random road to calm Miles down, getting charged way too much for petrol at one horse town which probably wont exist in 5 years.
So we made it. And actually had a really good trip. I was expecting hell, but it wasn't. Relaxing, sort of. As relaxing as it can be when there's two 6month old bubbies around. I am now over fear of travelling with Miles. Almost anyway.
Now I've got stacks of washing to do, but honestly, don't plan to touch it today. Having a week away means I've got other stuff to catch up on which is much more important: finish sewing skirt I started before I left, have (semi)long shower in own shower, bake something just because I can.
I've put the photos from the trip in an album for you to take a gander at. Over in the sidebar on the left. As you can see I didn't get anywhere close to getting a tan. In fact, I might be whiter than when I left due to hairy moments when Miles threatened to loose the plot.
Happy to be home. (Home was even clean when we got back thanks to some last minute shoving in cupboards by Amba.) Might take another trip somewhere in January. Any suggestions? Anyone what us to visit them?

Playing catch up

The next edition of Practical Parenting is out with my baby diary in it. It's always strange to see yourself in print. And it's strange in this case because I'm actually writing about my life. Usually I write newspaper articles or short fiction. Neither of which really reveal much about me personally (okay, the short fiction can be revealing, but I can hide behind a character, so it's a bit different). With the baby diary it's me, freckles and all.
I like the fact it's going to be a documentation of the first year with Miles. I always say I'm going to keep a diary which I can then keep and look back on and get all nostalgic about and peh peh about the sort of person I used to be. Now I'm doing it, it's getting published, and I'm getting paid for it. Bloody brilliant.

I'm off on another trip in the morning (6am in the morning to be precise). I'm going to Bega with a friend and her little baby. Why am I embarking on another trip so soon after the ordeal of travelling to Perth? Well, why the heck not really. Miles and I are hopping into my friend's car and are trekking across the country. Okay, that's a bit over the top, but it is an 8hr trip. I've packed toys galore to entertain the babies. I'm pretty worried Miles will loose the plot again. I'm pretty much convinced he is going to do just that in fact. But I've decided I can't let that stop me from going. Because if I bowed to my overbearing fear I wouldn't go anywhere. At all. Ever. And I read somewhere that being a hermit is not healthy. So with good health in mind, I'm off to Bega for a week.
See you when I get back. Hopefully not in too many shattered pieces. And if I'm lucky, with a tan.

Soggy lessons

Miles has started swimming lessons. He's mastered splashing about like a walrus, getting water in his eyes, and swalllowing half the pool. It's not really about actually teaching them to swim, but just water awareness. He's going to need that because it's shaping up to be a pumping hot summer and I plan to spend much of it beside the pool.
The best thing about it is that is totally buggers him out so he comes home, begs me to put him to bed, then sleeps for a couple of hours. It's a win/win situation.
This week Grandpa came along and took Miles for his lesson. After a bit of a shaky start they both got the hang of it. As you can see from the photos Miles loves spending time with his Grandpa, and loves being in the water. He's just as happy in the water as when he's just woken up from a nap and filled his nappy.
It's great he's a little water baby, but there's no way he's going to train as a swimmer when he's older. I've already told him ''there's NO WAY I'm getting up at 5am to drive you to a pool for swimming training''. He grinned at me - I think he got the message.

A picture says a thousand somethings

I've been using the gazillion photos of Miles to put into collages to give them a different dimension. I mean sure, he's cute all on his own, we all know that. But in a storyboard... whoa... too cute for words. (note: to all those who didn't note my sarcasm and think I'm a little too wonderstruck by my own child, i was being sarcastic.)

I'll be posting more as I make them.

''Cookie Monster thinks NappySan day spa is wonderful after going through the truama of being vomitted on by 6month old baby."

To boob or not too boob

I made up this pretend wine label to stick onto a bottle of vino and give to a friend. She's had to stop breastfeeding, and feels pretty ordinary about it.
I just thought I'd point out to her all the good things about not breastfeeding. Like most mothers, she really wanted to breastfeed her bub, but as it were the little sucker wasn't such a great little sucker so wasn't quite getting enough. Now she's on formula and loving it. Stacking on the weight like all good babies should. But that doesn't mean my friend doesn't feel pretty crappola about it.
I'm still breasfeeding Miles, and some days I really wish I wasn't. Mainly it's when I'm damn buggered and can't drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night to feed the screeching banchee. It would be golden if AA could feed him. I have asked why he hasn't got himself a pair of strap on boobs yet, but he just shrugs (and looks a little scared at the same time).
Formula, apparently, is the devil's drink. I say screw that- it's miracle stuff. There would be a lot of dead babies if it wasn't invented (sorry to be so blunt).
The only drawback about it that I can see is that babies on formula have the most vile and offensive nappies. It is nothing to be envied what so ever. Apart from that, formula v breastmilk? Who cares. As long as mum and bubba are healthy.

Note: I gave the bottle of wine to non-breastfeeding mum this afternoon and she loved it. She was heading home to let hubby feed the baby while she had a rest and a drink.

Roses are red(?)

The dozen rose bushes along my front fence have been begging me to take photos of them everytime I look out my front window. I can't take any credit for growing the roses because this is just a rental property, but someone has done an awesome job. The roses are amazing, and there are stacks of different colours. Nothing matching about this garden. I've even restrained myself from cutting too many and bringing them inside to put in vases. Usually I'm all for lopping them off and putting them all about the house, but they look really good altogether and all in bloom, so I've left most of them there.
I ducked out there just as the afternoon light was about to disappear. I live on a very busy street, and garnered some very strange looks from passers by as I was on my hands and knees trying to get the perfect shot. Flowers are pretty easy to photograph with the right light to help you out. You don't have to convince them to smile, just have to wait till the breeze stops moving them.
You can see the rest of the rose photos I took in the ''Bunch of Flowers'' photo album to the left. I'm just in the process of re-organising those photo albums. I've got truck loads of photos to sort out and up load so it might take me awhile. Plus, I get sidetracked really easily, so in all reality it could take some time.

Neighbourly trains

I've joined ''there goes ya neighbourhood'', a collection of photos from people's neighbourhood.
This is the pic I submitted. Nothing to exciting, it's certainly not going to knock anyone's socks off. I took it because I'm so sick of the trains taking their sweet time to shunt past my house. Not only do they make stacks of noise, but the traffic backs up for miles and I can't get my car out if I need to.
The group was started by 62cherry, one of the blogs I read in the few spare seconds of silence I have each day. Check it out at .... I'm not sure of the link. Just click on the 62cherry link over in the sidebar.
I thought of some other ''Shepp'' pics I could take that would be quintisential of this here town: vulgar painted cows, stinky cannery, pelicans at the lake who like to eat people. When the heat subsides (it was 35degrees today. Bluddy crazy!), I'll get out and about and take some more neighbourhood snaps.

Searching by streetlight

SHORT FICTION

My sister didn't call though.

After a month the police gave up their 'active search' but said they hadn't forgotten about her.

No-one in our house forgot about her either. My sister hadn't lives at home for three years, but when she went missing her absence was all of a sudden acutley noticed.

Little things changed. Mum stopped buying apple pir for Sunday night desert and the jokes about my father's waitline expanding stopped.

No on slept.

Dad took up driving the streets at night, looking. He would leave just as the last dinner dish was drying in the rack. He pulled the car out the driveway with hope in his pocket and his eyes peeled.

The streetlights would splash across the windscreen and Dad would squint his eyes, trying to make his daughter appear.

He would come home with heavy feet, long after I had gone to bed.

Every night it was the same: Mum would ask 'anything?' and Dad would reply by ignoring her and going out to his shed.

Sometimes Mum would go with Dad. She would slip beside him onto the vinyl seats of the old Valiant. Mum's eyes would look into every darkened laneway and every car that pulled up beside them. Someone stuck their finger up at Mum once because they thought she was straing at them.

But it was too much for her. When they came home Mum would be in tears. Dad would try and shush her gently as he led her into their bedroom, and eased her into bed.

I went out looking with Dad once. We drove from our home in Kialla Lakes across to Nagambie. He said he'd been there a few weeks ago and thought he'd seen her. Nagambie felt lucky, he said. he reckoned if he was going to find her, it was going to be in Nagambie. It just seemed like any other place to me. I didn't understand what was lucky about it, but I wasn't about to question Dad's steely resolve. If he thought driving around nagambie would help bring her home, who was I to tell him it wasn't?

I don't think I was the right company for him though.

I mistook the silence for uncomfortable, as opposed to being what Dad wanted. I kept trying to inflate them with observations about the double bricked houses, questions about the rowing course on the lake, and what I thought were soothing words about hopefully finding my sister.

When he turned to me as we pulled back into our driveway, and spoke, I know I wouldn't be going on any more night-time searches.

'I'm used to silence, Ginny.'