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  • Up north

    Some scattered memories from our recent holiday:

    Green Ants

    Edward and I left a chilly winter morning in Brisbane, and arrived to warm sunny weather in Cairns. Mum picked us up from Cairns airport in a borrowed car. “The air conditioning doesn’t work,” she said. “I mean, you can test it, but I turned it on and it just made the car hotter.” The sun burned my legs through the windscreen on the drive to Daintree as Edward obliging fell asleep in his car seat.

    Mossman smelled of the distinctive heavy molasses of cane harvesting, and a thick column of smoke was rising from the working mill. Closer to Daintree, a couple of kids perched on the back of a truck on the side of the road next to a hand-painted sign advertising “$10 ugg boots”, which presumably fell off the back of a truck themselves.

    Sacred Kingfisher

    We spent a lot of time at a local beach, tropical winter being the perfect time for a toddler to waddle around in the sand digging holes and joyously crushing the sandcastles painstakingly made and decorated for him by his grandmother. I spent a lot of time wandering around with my camera, taking photos of hermit crabs and snails squiggling around in the shallow water of low tide, and a hopeful kingfisher perched on a log, waiting for something to catch.

    Crocodile

    Edward wasn’t as captivated as I thought he would be by floating past basking crocodiles and he lost interest in our surroundings about halfway through the morning cruise. I suppose it isn’t entirely clear to a three year old that crocodiles are really real, particularly as the most attention they tend to pay to the boats is to follow us with their eyes.

    Bamboo

    The bamboo garden now looms metres high above our heads, and the wind blowing through the trunks made a complex background creaking soundscape as we walked down to one of the wetland ponds. After Mum paddled Edward around for a while in a little canoe I took a turn and promptly got tangled up in weeds, causing Edward to shriek with gales of laughter as I pulled wet bladderwort into the canoe. “What?! Are you doing?!” he gasped in between giggles when I got us lodged on some fallen bamboo. Mum laughed along unhelpfully from the bank and took a number of unflattering photos of my concentrating expression, as a mother should.

  • Spikes

    I’m not sure what these weeds are that are filling our garden, but those little v-shaped spikes lodge themselves in firmly at the slightest brush of fabric, pulling their tiny spine free of the seed. I then crossly pull them out of my pants or shirt and scatter them wherever I happen to be, helpfully assisting them in fulfilling their biological imperative and contributing to their spread through the garden. They’re quite beautiful up close though, with the miniature intricacy of the spikes. I admire their tenacity.

  • Pink berries

    I was watching Edward busily gathering up pink berries scattered over our friend’s garden, as he muttered about them being “tiny ‘matoes”, and asked our host if they were safe to eat. “Oh yeah, the lilly pilly berries. I think they’re actually deadly poisonous,” he told me laconically, watching his own children play with them. “Johnno told me that his dog ate some of them and got real sick.”

    I told Edward firmly that the berries were not tomatoes, tiny or otherwise, and that he mustn’t eat them, before sidling off to google “lilly pilly berries” on my phone. I was relieved to discover that they’re edible and can in fact be made into jam. Presumably Johnno’s dog became sick from other sources. They certainly look edible, crisply pink with touches of white, like tiny little apples.

    Edward loves the easy access to the outdoors at our friend’s off-the-grid property, and spent much of the Easter weekend running around covered in dirt; his idea of paradise. The final mud stains on his feet have only come off after a few consecutive days of long baths. We camped in the garden, watching the full moon each night from our beds (apart from the evening of the lunar eclipse, when the clouds disappointingly wouldn’t shift). Despite the presence of three young children, I was able to spend a reasonable amount of time each day sitting in the late afternoon sun drinking wine and reading; a very satisfying way to spend a long weekend.

  • Pumpkin Pancakes

    I found this recipe somewhere in the depths of the internet, and now can’t remember where. Google is no help because there are billions of almost identical pumpkin pancake recipes floating around out there. Anyway, these are lovely, and as you dig into them for breakfast you can think virtuously, “I’m eating vegetables!” and it will be somewhat true.

    ingredients:
    2 cups plain flour – I expect you could probably use spelt, but the pancakes might be a bit more solid
    1 tsp bicarb soda
    2 tsps baking powder
    3 tblsps brown sugar – or whatever marvellous alternative sugar you’re into
    1 tsp cinnamon
    1 tsp ginger
    1 tsp nutmeg
    1 1/2 cups of milk
    1 egg
    2 tblsps rice bran oil
    1 tsp vanilla extract
    1 cup pureed pumpkin

    The night before you decide you want pancakes – if you’re that organised, which honestly I rarely am – chop up about a quarter of a smallish pumpkin (I know that’s unhelpful, but I just eyeball what amount of pumpkin will roughly make a cup, and incorporate leftovers into dinner) and steam or boil it until it’s nicely mushy. Chuck it in the fridge, and go to bed dreaming of pancakes.

    In the morning, sift the flour, bicarb and baking powder (or don’t, I think it’s fine not to sift) into a large bowl, add the sugar and spices and stir. Whisk the milk, egg, oil and vanilla extract in a different bowl, and then stir in the pureed pumpkin.

    Pour the pumpkin mixture into the flour mixture, and fold in until well combined.

    Heat up your frying pan, add some butter, then scoop in 1/4 cups of the batter, cooking pancakes for a few minutes on each side. Stack up and serve to your delighted family, or just to yourself. They’re a pretty pumpkin colour, and the spices go beautifully with syrup or honey as a topping.

  • 2 and a half years

    Things I’m enjoying at 2 and a half years:

    1. MY CHILD SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT.

    2. This honestly feels so momentous that it should take up two points. It was probably around two years and three months when he started sleeping through the night more often than not, and suddenly he was only waking up very occasionally, once a fortnight or something like that. It is a rather glorious state of affairs, all this unbroken sleep.

    3. The conversations we have with Edward are so immensely enjoyable. He is intensely inquisitive about everything, soaks in information, eavesdrops on our conversations (well, it probably doesn’t count as eavesdropping if we’re talking openly in front of him, but he often seems absorbed in what he’s doing and will then surprise us by chirpily repeating something that we’ve said).

    4. Edward’s imaginative play is so very amusing to watch. At the moment, much of it revolves around cars – driving cars, getting in and out of cars, and discussing car aerials which are a particular intense interest of his for some mysterious reason. He narrates what he’s doing at a rapid speed, only about half of it clearly intelligible. Multiple times a day, he will dash up to us, shout something like, “I’m going shopping! Will buy milk and meat! And the aerial will go UP UP UP ALL THE WAY UP, bye-bye!”, and then open an imaginary door and brrrrm off loudly.

    5. He has started a lot of dancing and singing recently, by which I mean he gallops around in tight circles, trying to cajole myself or the cats into dancing with him (he doesn’t have much success with the cats), and chanting in a monotone. I naturally think this is the most adorable thing I have ever seen.

    Things I’m not enjoying at 2 and a half years:

    1. Getting Edward to sit down and eat can be a bit challenging; eating is a very dull activity and there are many more interesting things for a toddler to be doing. Despite telling myself for the past year that I really would put my foot down about proper mealtimes, I still feed him some meals by following him around and shoving food at his mouth as he plays. I feel keenly the weight of my inadequacies as a parent while I’m trotting around after him though, so it all evens out.

    2. My hair being his favourite soothing aid when he’s tired. This is a much, much more annoying habit now that he’s older and stronger, and I frequently fantasise about shaving my head. It’s probably the thing I snap at him about most, frequently hissing “will you let go of my hair for god’s sake” with much intensity in the supermarket.

    3. The reason that happens is that I generally take him grocery shopping when he’s tired and ready for a nap, so he refuses to ride in the trolley, instead clinging to me and pulling on my hair. And the reason I do this is that I can usually only get him to have a nap if he falls asleep in the car, and I then shift him into his bed. Yes, this does strike me as a ridiculous thing to be doing with a two and a half year old. However, let us recall that he sleeps through the night now! This makes me feel so successful that I am willing to continue to do ridiculous things in order to get him to have a nap. (I also still lie down with him until he goes to sleep at night which can be quite a long drawn-out affair at times, but – HE SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT. On reflection perhaps sleeping through the night was a cunning stratagem on Edward’s part to get away with all sorts of other nonsense.)

    4. Edward gets into these strange contradictory ruts when tired or just feeling particularly two-ish. He will whine that he wants to do something – close the door, for example – and then when I say yes, please go ahead and close the door, he will cry with chagrin that he does not want to close the door, why on earth would he want to close the door, am I quite mad? Alright, I will say peaceably, don’t close the door then. “WANT TO CLOSE THE DOOR”, he will howl, before selecting another topic. We will then enact this thrilling little play over and over again until one of us collapses screaming with frustration.

  • Reading Round-Up For 2014

    I finally reversed my downhill reading trend! I read 85 books in 2011, 61 books in 2012 and a mere 24 books in 2013. What the hell happened in 2013 – I think I watched a lot of TV.

    Anyway, these numbers are finally on the rise again as I read 66 books this year. A lot of them were really great books as well – according to my handy statistics provided by Goodreads, I rated 5 books with 5 stars, and 30 books with 4 stars. That’s around 53% of the year’s reading that I would rate as pretty fantastic. Another 36% were 3 stars, which are pretty decent reads, which leaves a very small 11% of books that were a bit ordinary or awful.

    My goal was to read less YA and trashy urban fantasy this year, and pleasingly this seems to have resulted in reading a greater proportion of excellent books.

    I had a few great new author discoveries this year. Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt mystery novels were some of my favourite books of the year – brilliantly surreal novels. Ariana Franklin wrote a series of historical mysteries set in 10th century England, and I loved all three that I read – starting with Mistress of the Art of Death. Max Gladstone writes really fantastic noir-ish fantasy novels about dead gods and necromancers, like Three Parts Dead.

    Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is probably my favourite book of the year, if I had to pick one. It’s a very difficult to summarise novel, but is excellent and deservedly much-awarded.

    Lexicon by Max Barry was a really thrillingly exciting neurological-sci-fi-thriller (that’s a category, right?), won an Aurealis award, and is a great read.

    My favourite rollicking feminist romance of the year was Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War. I may have only read about three, but that one really is a great book.

    Best self-published sci-fi thriller I read was SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game, which was a really well-crafted and fast paced novel. Probably the best self-published book I’ve ever read, actually.

    Nicola Griffith’s Hild is an incredibly dense, detailed novel set in 7th century Britain about a girl called Hild, who would become St Hilda of Whitby. It’s wonderful, with beautiful use of language, and Griffith’s imagined Hild is an amazing character. It’s a very self contained book, but only takes you to Hild’s… late teenage years, I think? There will be at least one sequel.

    If you want to read some spectacularly original epic fantasy, Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs is fantastic. And on the other side of the SFF spectrum, Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, about life 15 years after a devastating epidemic, was bleak and beautifully written.

    It was actually quite difficult to choose stand-out books; I imagine this was due to the statistics above (53% awesome books and all). I received a couple of lovely books for Christmas, so I’m starting off my 2015 in fine style (and with actual physical books, which is an enjoyable change – the vast majority of my reading these days is e-books).

  • 24 December – Star of Wonder

    Some say a star will rise again
    In the hearts of humankind
    Some say we have been in exile
    What we need is solar fire

    Tori Amos sung this version of We Three Kings on her Christmas album, Midwinter Graces. It’s a little Tori-ish, and heavy handed with the production, and I like it.

  • 23 December – Christmas Kiss

    Snowflakes fall, cold winds blow
    Outside it’s winter white
    And there’s nowhere else I’d rather be tonight

    Diana Panton has a stunningly beautiful voice, and this is an original song of hers from her Christmas Kiss album.

  • 22 December – Summertime in Australia

    Winter’s fine, a little bit of cold and ice
    And we’re stuck inside, with the drapes shut tight

    Said The Whale are an indie rock band from Vancouver, and Summertime in Australia is a short little track from their West Coast Christmas EP collection. It’s upbeat and sweet, and sometimes I like having songs on the Christmas mix that acknowledge that Australian Christmases are summery affairs.

  • 21 December – Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)

    The church bells in town, all ringing in song
    Full of happy sounds, baby, please come home

    Melissa Etheridge’s version of Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) is a great rocking number, complete with guitar solo. (And a very clunky title, why not just call it “Baby, Please Come Home”?) It’s a 1963 pop song originally performed by Darlene Love.