inner pickle

notes from cockatoo island

1. It wouldn't be a Walmsley family outing if we didn't eat lunch on the way there. (At morning tea time.) Vegemite sandwich anyone? On the ferry from Circular Quay to Cockatoo Island.

2. It's the Biennale of Sydney. Installation art all over the island. A jumping castle that is art? that you can't jump on? Whose bright idea was that? *stomp stomp stomp*

3. Some of the installations are really quite fabulous (a.k.a alarming).

4. A roomful of tin roofs. Pussy cat in her element.

5. Bit of alfresco breastfeeding. La la la. 

6. Does anything bother this little person? Ah, no. 

7. All kinds of fabulous industrial spaces. Adam-heaven. (He dreams of our family moving to an enormous re-fitted old warehouse one day. In fact, I have the ripped out real estate pages in front of me to prove it.)

 8. Home again, home again, jiggedy jig. Ivy in her little chair in the corner of the kitchen. Making trouble, as usual.

9. Favourite unphotographed moment of the day: Henry licking Adam's face, seeing if olive skin tasted like olives. 

xxx
      

 

school holidays

Turns out I've carried my love of school holidays into adulthood, now that I have a school-aged person in the house.

There's something about the rhythm of term-time receding into a break that is good for everyone. Gives us a sense of re-charging. 

It has been totally wonderful having Adam off work for these holidays, because if my energy flags, he's all go go go - let's get out and do stuff! And so we are. 

The kids fall into bed at night and Ivy is still only waking up every three or four hours so our eyes aren't falling out of our heads as those of parents of newborns often are. Very grateful for this break.

Sydney Park today, one of the coolest parks in Sydney (and damn you've got to love a park that has a kiosk making good coffee!!) 

xxx  
 

stuff I learnt this week

: Turns out some newborns do just eat and sleep. I thought that was something people just claimed. We're not naive enough to know this may not all change tomorrow, but we're super grateful for Ivy being so chilled out right now. (And not feeding two-hourly through the night like her sister used to!)

: Having a newborn makes your older kids look ridiculously big and grown up.

(Henry and I having some downtime in a cafe this week over hot chocolate and gingerbread men. Gamer-boy preoccupied while I was breastfeeding.)

: Friends are awesome. This week ours took our older kids away and sent Ad and I out for lunch, they brought cake, they brought/sent/made amazingly thoughtful gifts and came around with champagne and lots of laughing. 

: Sydney Aquarium rocks.  

: It's a bit of a shame to go to the aquarium with a flat camera battery. (The iPhone doesn't really cut it.)

: Sydney Aquarium has a pretty proficient lost child procedure.

: Note to self: dress Matilda Daisy in bright colours, preferably fluorescent, when taking her to fascinating places with hundreds of other people amongst whom you can easily lose sight of a waist-high person in search of the turtles; thereby saving us ten minutes of rising panic wherein we each shed ten years off our lives. 

: My brother, visiting from the US this week, is superbly talented (no bias here. Absolutely objective.) New demo CD. He rocks. 

: My friend Vanessa, mum of one of Henry's besties at school, is super clever. Check out these cupcakes she made and brought over yesterday!

  

 
Amazing, right?

: Adam can cook. I don't mean to sound surprised, but I don't mean whip-up-scrambled-eggs-and-bacon cook. He's been cooking all week, and we had friends round for dinner last night and he made fabulous gourmet burgers (yep, a bit of meat is back on the menu here - more on that in another post) with haloumi and chutney, served with crispy and fluffy twice-cooked potato chips and a divine, light passionfruit flummery for dessert. Damn I hope this doesn't mess up our I cook/he cleans arrangement. I am seriously crap at cleaning. 

: It's illegal to bury someone without a coffin. My friend Ben (who appears in post comments here as Benoss) and Adam were cheerfully discussing funeral options, as you do, and Adam was saying he wants to be buried in a completely compostable (preferably cardboard) coffin, preferably with worms included. (Could you be any more green, baby?) Anyway, Ben suggested doing away with the coffin and so we sent another friend (the other Vanessa) who loves this stuff, off to call up a few funeral homes and find out the deal. Deal is: gotta use a coffin. No shroud only option. But she's making more calls so will update you as news comes in. 

: The weirder the better. And if you can come up with REALLY weird, send it over to Kate at Picklebums, OK?! (Everyone's going way too easy on her so far.)

xxx

well hello!

 

No, not hello new baby, hello brain! (And hello enormous belly!)

How interesting is acupuncture!? Wow. I had a small moment of panic as she came at me with a needle for my tummy, but gosh, what a cool treatment. And I swear I felt like I was seeing the world more clearly when I was finished. Clear. That's kinda how it felt.

Anyway, while being slightly less knocked about by the blood pressure meds today, I thought I'd drop in and say hello. 

We've been having the most lovely time, Tilly and I. 

Doing a bit of IKEA shopping, the kitchen section. Gah, LOVE it. 

Look at these cupcake (actually 'patty cake', more like it) pans:

(And you KNOW I'm not here to sell you anything, right? But seriously, these are $1.99 for 65 papers. That is SO cheap.) 

And with the Drömmar pan, they make the cutest stand-up shaped cupcakes. 

 

The skill I am most proud of in my three year old? Her ability to smoothly crack eggs, zero shell. Awesome. 

  

Yum!

Good to go. 

Happy as Larry. 

Right as rain. 

OK UNIVERSE?! CAN YOU HEAR ME??!

  xxx
 

zooland(er)

So while we're on the subject of zoo-land (weren't we?) guess where we went this weekend?

Taronga. It has to be the best zoo in the world, surely.  

So much fun. So many amazing things to see and talk about. 

And because I am a Class A Dork (as you know)  I was probably less excited about seeing Pathi Harn, the very little, very cute new baby elephant than the big eco demo house and garden. In fact, no photos of Pathi but about 8 of the vegie and herb gardens. Dork. Told you. 

And this is an un-enhanced picture of the view from right near the pygmy hippo's enclosure:

Those pygmy hippos. View and a pool. Awesome real estate. 

And one more of Tilly sleeping through a walking excursion (only the end bit as we were leaving.) Tuckered out little person. The only time she stopped talking about the giraffes. 

xxx

  

one more: the girl outdoors

 

My contemplative hell-raiser.

 She may look all calm and meditative but you'll also notice she's walking in the other direction to everyone else.

 Independently tying on her mummy-knit scarf.

Yep, you got it, baby girl.

 "I KNOW, I KNOW!" she says, "LET'S GO STOMP IN PUDDLES!!"

 "PERFECT!" she declares, sounding just like me.

Sometimes there's nothing funnier than a three year old, right? Particularly your own. 

xxx

Easter camping part 2

Easter egg hunt! 

Confession: we actually did this a day early - on Saturday. 

We were in the middle of nowhere, how were the kids to know?! 

And it was pretty much selfishly driven: the sooner we organised an egg hunt, the sooner there would be chocolate eggs in the esky for us all to nibble on!

There's been a lot of discussion over the last few days on Facebook about how many chocolate eggs are OK to give kids. We ran a hunt with LOTS of eggs then collected them all back up and gave them one each. Pretty tough love. The eggs were then doled out very occasionally over the next few days and at the rate we're going my kids will still be getting one egg a day until Christmas. 

There's one school of thought that says give the kids all the eggs (i.e. a reasonable number), let them eat them all then run around and burn it off. 

If I gave my kids a whole bunch of chocolate all at once they'd go crazy. They're quite happy with this arrangement. It's like birthday party lolly bags. The kids have a couple of sweets then the bags go away up in the cupboard (on a designated shelf) and they can have a couple of sweets a day until they're gone. 

People might roll their eyes at this tactic but it works for us!

Besides, it also meant a fairer distribution between the kids - mine were a tad more focussed on the egg retrieval than our friends!

 

 Not the Easter bunny...
  
 But this is the Australian bush!

P.S. Dear Alex: no photos of me I'm afraid - not deliberate, I'm just always holding the camera! Will attempt to take self portrait this week so you can appreciate 28-week-pregnant tum! (Besides, my lovely friend Coralie in the pics above is so much more photogenic!!)

xxx

the artist as a young girl

I can't paint for peanuts.  

My drawings are pretty laughable (the kids do frequently) and even my sketches of maps (i.e. straight lines) are pretty dreadful. 

Art is not my thing. 

But I'm very encouraging of it in others.

I admire the impressionists.

I think hands-on art is awesome. 

We're very serious about it here.

As you can see.

    Very serious. 

And clean. We are always so clean here.

Hope you had a lovely messy day too.

xxx 

wabbits

How much do kids love love love rabbits?

 Our friends James and Kristy have two: Pocket and Rocket. One calm. One not so. (Rabbits, I'm talking about.) Both gorgeous. (All gorgeous.)

Henry warmed up with a remote pat.

Hi Kristy.   

This is Pocket.

And Tilly, in love.

Sorry Tilds, you can't take her home. Not while there's no actual grass in our backyard.

 Who left Tilly supervising potential escapee? (yep, that's Rocket about to bound out of her playpen.) 

Henry supervising James being a rabbit. (We have very sensible friends.) 

  Speaking of sensible, put the fast one on a lead! And give it to Henry to mind!

Am getting an anxiety headache.

Colour coordinated girl and bunny. (Still can't take her home Tilds, sorry.)

Awesome.

Even more awesome? 

James and Kristy just rang: they just got a puppy.

xxx

Paint job

Henry hates painting. It's messy and it takes up time he could be (a) surfing the Disney Pixar website, (b) talking about his allocated computer time or (c) arguing, pleading, whining for more computer time.

Tilly LOVES painting. She's paint all day if left alone. Which is a mistake. Refer exhibit A below:

You may notice the flannel PJs: it was a before-breakfast painting bonanza today.

Everyone's getting Christmas presents wrapped in Tilly-designed paper this year. Even Elliot, the poor painted doll. (No, I didn't name him. Rachel's partner Craig named him. A year later they named their beautiful daughter Stella, so pretty. Meanwhile poor old Elliot chafes away at amusing dolly moniker. Craig is a fabulous uncle, the best kind, but perhaps don't let him name our future pets?)

Here's one she was quite sure she needed to make some artistic improvements to:

I love painting.

xxx