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  • Night sky

    There is a Tawny Frogmouth that is often perched on one of the fence posts near our front gate when I arrive home in the evening. It freezes in my headlights, and then when I get a little closer or open the car door, it opens its wings and flies off silently into the dark. They are such well camouflaged birds, particularly when perched still on a branches or in this case, a natural wood fence post. My eye often glides past it, only noticing it when it takes off and swoops over my head.

    My brother had an evening bonfire for his birthday recently, and Edward and I sat outside and looked at the stars. He is fond of pointing out the moon to me, and I like telling him about the few constellations I can recognise. It reminds me of my own childhood, lying on a blanket down in our orchard with my father, binoculars pressed to my eyes and listening to him talking about the planets and stars. The night skies of my childhood were brilliantly clear, rural properties in Daintree not being particularly subject to light pollution, and my father made us go through a ritual of turning off all the lights before leaving the house so that no trace would disturb our star gazing.

    The night sky at our house is not quite so spectacular, as we are surrounded by many more suburban and distant city lights, but on clear nights it is still brilliant. Standing at the foot of our stairs and looking upwards, there is a rough circle of clear sky, surrounded by the tops of eucalypts, and the Milky Way arches over our house. Before Edward gets too much older, I need to learn some new constellations so I can dazzle him with my ineffable depths of parental knowledge – at the moment I’m limited to Orion, the Southern Cross and advising him that that particularly bright star is probably Venus.

  • The last fire

    We used to have a possum living in the chimney of our wood heater. We coexisted happily for a few years, the possum scraping and banging each evening as it levered its fat bottom out of the narrow confines of the chimney to explore the night, and grumpily vacating the chimney for the month or so during winter when we actually lit fires.

    My mother flew down right before my due date, almost two years ago now, so that she could spend some time with us when Edward was born. The afternoon was chilly and we decided to light a fire. “The possum will head out when I light it,” I said breezily, although I felt a bit guilty booting the nocturnal possum out of its comfortable hidey hole into the daylight. When I set the fire and lit it, smoke billowed back into the room. It tends to do that when the chimney is blocked with possum. I coughed, banged on the side of the chimney to alert the possum, and blew on the fire. The flames caught and started licking at the kindling. The room became smokier. The possum started coughing.

    Mum and I dithered. “It’ll move upwards in a minute,” I said, and we stood there waiting. The possum started coughing more loudly, and started scrabbling against the metal of the chimney. I couldn’t tell what direction it was heading in. As the smoke billowing into the house was showing no signs of abating, I decided to cancel the idea of a cosey afternoon fire. This is a bit easier said than done, particularly because I was worried about the possum and didn’t want to create even more smoke by pouring water on the fire. We were now dashing about in a flustered manner, and Mum shovelled the fire into the little bucket I used to transfer the cold ashes out of the heater. We were standing there listening to the possum’s coughs, trying to figure out if it was moving out of the chimney, when I glanced down and realised that the bucket was on fire. “Mum! Mum! The bucket is melting!” Mum grabbed the flaming melting bucket and galloped out of the house with it. I waddled out after her. We were both in fits of slightly hysterical laughter.

    When we came back into the house, the possum had stopped coughing. “I hope it’s alright,” we said guiltily to each other. “Yes, I’m sure it’s alright.” My labour began later that evening, apparently induced by fits of laughter. The possum wasn’t alright, as we later discovered, and the husband spent a while during one of our very sleep-deprived early days with Edward removing its dead body from the chimney while Mum and I solemnly contemplated our new status as possum murderers. We had to break rather a lot of the insulating tiles in the heater to remove the possum’s body and with our usual speedy attention to matters of house maintenance we haven’t yet replaced them. The recent cooler weather brought the heater to mind, and I remembered the poor dead possum and shrieking with laughter with Mum in the garden as we smothered the flaming bucket. We should really get around to replacing those tiles. It would be nice to have a fire again.

  • Foxes

    I find my eight-string ukulele really difficult to tune. The first two pairs of strings are one octave apart, the last two pairs the same notes, and once I’ve gone through the strings the first ones seem to have gone out of tune again. The husband kindly tunes it for me occasionally, as for some reason it behaves for him (or he’s just better at tuning things than me).

    I had this picture book when I was little – an illustrated version of “The Fox Went Out On a Chilly Night” – and it now sits in Edward’s bookcase, rather battered. I have always been fond of it, and I really like Nickel Creek’s speedy bluegrass version of the song. When I was first playing ukulele, I put together the chords for it as it’s a nice easy song – only three chords – but good practice for a beginner with the fast changes during the bit before the “town-o, town-o” section in each verse.

    Now that Edward is older I can get more chores done with him actually being a small help, rather than a determined little hindrance, and as a result I’ve been trying to do things like play music during his naptimes rather than catching up on housework. Last weekend I propped up my phone on a pile of recipe books on the verandah, and recorded myself playing a few songs. It’s interesting watching myself play and seeing things I don’t notice in the moment – the sudden hunch over the ukulele when I have to stretch my fingers into a bar chord, or the odd way I lean back in the above video because I’m running out of breath and need to finish the line. I am working on my strumming at the moment, trying to be less repetitive and “thunka-thunka-thunka” and have more variation and tone in my playing. I’m never going to be an excellent instrumentalist, because most of my enjoyment comes from accompanying myself singing – I really like being able to sit down and bash out a few songs.

  • Grand plans

    As my vague intentions of learning to use the Elna sewing machine I inherited from my grandmother never came to any sort of reality (as with most vague intentions, I suppose, but especially mine) I have been going to sewing lessons once a week. I have now got to the stage where I can (mostly) thread a machine, know how to use an overlocker – overlockers! what marvellous machines! – and I’ve sewn two completed things, a pair of pyjamas and a pair of pants with an elasticated waist, both for Edward.

    The pyjamas were from a McCalls pattern for – I think it was actually for a baseball uniform, pants and a baseball shirt. It looks very sweet in a purple flannelette as pyjamas, with blue buttons on the top. “Blue buttons!” Edward declares when he wears them. He is currently in a “gleefully identifying things” stage. He read a book to me this morning, the story consisting of “cat! tail! ear! leaf!” as he jabbed his finger at those parts of the picture on the page he had chosen.

    I chose a rather lurid purple floral fabric for the pants, a heavy and slightly corded material for winter. They look rather groovy now that they’re completed, and I really like the fit – a nice narrow leg but with enough room to wear comfortably with a nappy. (They’re from the Clean Slate Pants from Blank Slate Patterns – I skipped adding pockets, as Edward doesn’t use them yet. It was my first PDF pattern, and very easy and convenient to print out and put together. I think I’m a fan of PDF patterns).

    My inherited sewing machine has a broken gear and I’m waiting for it to be repaired. In between lessons I cut out patterns and fabric, something I am incredibly slow at. My next project is something for me, a Tiramisu dress in a dark purple ponte knit. I have high hopes for it as dress I can wear to work this autumn and winter, but it does involve only my second attempt at sleeves and my first attempt at pockets, so I might reduce them to moderate hopes.

    After the Tiramisu, I intend to sew the following, possibly not in this order:
    1. A Beachy Boatneck for Edward in a cheery red spotted knit
    2. Two Renfrew tops for me – a rusty red knit with short sleeves, and a dark grey knit with long sleeves
    3. An Alma blouse for me in a floral print, although I think I may be being a bit ambitious leaping into that pattern.
    4. The Little Bow Pleat Dress for my niece because it’s so gloriously cute, and I want to make something with an extravagantly huge bow on it just because.

    And then endless possibilities and an increasing collection of bookmarked patterns stretch out temptingly before me – exercise pants! Cardigans! It would probably be sensible to wait until my machine is in working order and I have made a little sewing area at home before I go too crazy with future plans, but not-being-sensible is just too much fun.

  • Movement

    My ankle twinged doing one-legged squats in a kettlebell class yesterday, and today during a fake yoga class (aka Body Balance) it expressed its unhappiness at me standing on one leg. Now it’s frustratingly achey, and I am dolefully contemplating my plans to go for several runs over the long weekend. They were rather optimistic plans, admittedly – my past history of following through with plans to go running hasn’t been great.

    I have been making yet another one of my very slow attempts at being able to run 5ks, by sporadically following the Couch to 5k program (a mixture of walking and jogging that incrementally increases the amount of jogging each week until magically you are running for 5ks, filled with joy, moving gazelle-like along the road. Well. Running for 5ks, at any rate. You may also be gritting your teeth with the tedium of it all and wondering when it becomes fun.) Running has been my weekend activity, and I’ve been going to various gym classes during the week of different levels of ludicrousness. “Abs, Butt & Thighs”, for instance. (Which is less interesting than it sounds and is basically half an hour of squats and lunges until you want to fall over).

    I don’t think I will ever be one of those people who get a big buzz from running. But that moment when everything falls into a rhythm, my breath steady, when I can stop thinking about what I’m doing and just watch the road ahead of me – I want to keep being able to do that. Hear that, foot? Pull yourself together.

  • Night rituals

    Once a night, I am often awake giving Edward a bottle of milk and then lying next to him on a swag on the floor of his bedroom waiting for him to go back to sleep. Once he seems to be satisfactorily unconscious, I push myself up in order to sneak out of the room, at which point my shoulder invariably cracks loudly, and I wince, anticipating toddler stirrings. I expect it does this quite often, an inconsequential sound that escapes my notice, but it seems very noisy in the early hours of the morning.

    If I happen to mention broken sleep, people occasionally enquire with varying degrees of solicitude why my child still wakes up at night when he is a great hulking 21-month-old. I suppose the reason I haven’t yet resorted to sleep training is that part of me quite likes cuddling with him until he goes back to sleep, when he presses his face against mine so I can breathe against his warm baby skin and enjoy his nice Edward smell. I lie there in the dark and think (when I am awake enough to think rather than my brain producing a “hrrrrrrr” sort of noise, which is my general mental state upon waking) how fleeting this time will be, how long it seems since the other stages of babyhood. Particularly that delightful period when I spent much of the night sleeping in Edward’s bedroom. At the time, I found that very wearying – now, I find it hard to remember exactly when that was, or how long it lasted. Waking briefly once a night is such a vast improvement from the various varieties of sleep disruption that he has exhibited throughout his life that I find it hard to consider it a particular hardship. Although having said that, unless he figures out how to sleep through in the next few months, I think I may resort to some sort of sleep training (a term I rather dislike, it makes me think of training sheep dogs, for some reason. Sleep -> sheep -> sheep dog training, I guess. I am not responsible for the random connections of my brain). It would be nice to be finished with regular night waking after two years.

  • Recent baking

    I was moved to another area at work occupied by rather more people than the previous area I was in (I do refer to it as Cubicle Death Farm, but only in my head and mostly in an affectionate tone), which has given me a chance to try some new cake recipes and leave cakes in the kitchen for general consumption. Occasionally with apologetic post-it notes about burned bits, raw bits, and lumps. Sifting is so dull.

    1. Gingerbread snacking cake from Smitten Kitchen (pictured above) is delightful – a really easy recipe that you can put together in one saucepan and bakes in half an hour. Lovely combination of spices, and you can easily halve the sugar. I used treacle instead of molasses, and it still has a nice depth.

    2. Chocolate banana bread from Smitten Kitchen – this isn’t overly sweet, just nice and darkly chocolatey. I like banana bread, but I think it is only improved with the addition of chocolate. As are so many things!

    3. Ginger & parsnip cake from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet – rather like a carrot cake, in that it uses grated raw parsnip, and a wonderfully spicy gingeriness. I’d like to try the alternate versions with turnips and swedes.

  • Sunshine

    Edward’s current favourite book is one of my childhood picture books, and after spending many years in humid conditions in Daintree the slightly musty smell of the pages make me sneeze. “Sunshine” by Jan Ormerod is a wordless book, a series of pictures of a little girl getting up for the day, and then waking up her parents (at 7.20! on a work day! I have long since driven off at such an hour), and so on through their morning routine. I describe what the little girl is doing and Edward focuses intently, fascinated by the little details of their morning.

    “And then she has a wee on the toilet…”
    “Wee!”
    “And washes her hands…”
    “Wee!”
    “And then she brushes her teeth.”
    “Wee!”
    “She doesn’t brush her teeth with wee, that would be unhygienic.”
    He looks at me scornfully, and indicates that I should turn the page. He has no time for my off-topic ramblings. I clearly do not understand the simple joy of chanting “wee!”. Adults, man. What can you do.

    “Book! More!”. We read it again. The illustrations are lovely, and I can vaguely remember – although it is probably an invented memory – being very fond of the book myself. There is a companion book called “Moonshine” which is more suitable for a bedtime story, being about the end of the day. I have ordered a copy. Edward will no doubt continue to prefer “Sunshine”. 20 months is a contrarian age – at least, that is my impression of it. This is exacerbated by the fact that Edward hasn’t yet grasped the meaning of “yes”, and answers all enquiries and suggestions with a firm “no!”, regardless of his intentions. His other all-purpose response is an interested sort of rising “mmm”, which I enjoy immensely and start elaborate conversations with him in order to hear him “mmm” along in obliging tones. Perhaps it’s not such a contrarian age after all. “Oh, mother… that is yet to come,” Edward thinks merrily, “mmm”-ing along to keep me happy in the meantime.

  • Compound eyes

    1. I have actually taken some shots with my macro lens recently that I’m quite happy with. Like the photo of the fly above – I like its crazy compound eyes and its little yellow fuzzy chest. I still find working with the limited depth of field pretty challenging, but I’m getting more shots that seem decent. Breaking news: taking photos regularly seems to improve your ability to take photos. Amazing. I’m as stunned as you are.

    2. I recently sped my way through Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, and Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, a pair of wonderfully surreal mystery novels by Sara Gran. I want more Claire DeWitt, and am settling for reading one of Sara Gran’s earlier books instead.

    3. I am baking things out of a new cookbook at the moment, Short & Sweet – so far I’ve made a basic white bread, sesame & date biscuits, and some way too sweet chocolate biscuits. (If I think that something is far too sweet, trust me, it is far too sweet.) Next up is a parsnip & ginger cake, because parsnips were ridiculously cheap at the fruit and veggie store, and I bought a large bag of them while vaguely thinking of that recipe. I discovered when I got home that it only calls for about 150 grams of parsnips so I will be browsing around for something else to do with the rest of them. A stew or something, I expect.

    4. In between making new recipes from Short & Sweet, I want to try these Prune and Caraway Scones over at The Wednesday Chef. In that post, she writes a little about explaining to people why you like to cook, and I related to the description: “Whenever people ask me why I like to cook, when so many people find it stressful and complicated, I wonder how to put into words that feeling. You know what I mean, right? The sense of providing your loved ones with edible comfort and happiness?…” Prunes. Scones. Edible comfort and happiness. They sound lovely. I’m not sure they would appeal to either Edward or the husband though, which is a slight drawback. I need more people to ply with baked goods.

  • Mornings

    I slept in this morning, having scheduled my alarm for 5.40pm rather than am. Edward cried out and woke me up just after 6, and I walked down to his room, telling him to lie down and I would make him a bottle of milk. He understands this concept now and plugs his thumb into his mouth, waiting fairly patiently for me to return (as long as I don’t dawdle over the task too long for his liking). I gave him his milk and left him lying in his room while I hurriedly got dressed. He made whinging sounds of protest. I normally lie next to him while he has his morning milk, chatting to him about who he’s going to spend the day with and what we can see out the window. He in turn informs me of such things as the fan being on, and the fact that he can hear a cat outside. “Omn! Aaaa!”, being on and cat, respectively, those single sounds becoming more complex communication when accompanied by an energetically pointing or waving hand.

    Edward trotted closely behind me on my way out to the kitchen, and then said “Mup! Mup!” in urgent tones, clinging to my pants. He wants to perch on my hip, watching me cut his sandwich and spoon some yoghurt into a container. Parenthood has made me very adept at preparing food with one hand. He likes to suck his thumb and grip painfully onto the back of my hair with his other hand. “Don’t pull my hair,” I say many times a day, and tap his hand. He lets go, but will absentmindedly grab onto it minutes later, particularly when he is still sleepy in the mornings and I’m rushing to get us out of the house. Sometimes I think his ideal comforting toy would be a revolting stuffed animal covered with hanks of my hair.

    We drove to my brother’s house, listening to The Good Lovelies sing Backyard. Edward enjoys most of the music I play in the car, applauding with a grinning smile at the end of each track and saying “More? More?” until the next one starts. I drop him off, switch the music to a podcast, and start my trip into work. People, mostly those whom I don’t known well, often respond to my description of my four day working week with a frown. “Oooh, four days, that’s a lot,” they say. I enjoy the time away from parental responsibilities. It’s lovely being able to sink into my thoughts, and read books on the bus, without having to go and investigate suspiciously silent moments or deal with toddler meltdowns. But coming home at the end of the day never fails to be wonderful, even if I’m greeted with tears or ignored in favour of a particularly absorbing activity. At some point Edward’s voice squeaks “Mup! Mup!” at me and when I pick him up he leans his head against me, and twines his fingers securely through my hair. This habit is somehow less annoying at the end of the day; a sweet trait of babyhood rather than an irritation, something that I will probably miss in years to come.