Oh hai!

I haven't forgotten about you!  (I know, you were panicked, right?)  I have been busy!  I've been building a dot com!

www.cloudlovebaby.com to be precise!

I'm so super excited to share it with you!

Come over and have a look!!

Heart you, you're tops!

www.cloudlovebaby.com

The weekend

Oh look.  Same Mr.  Same cafe.  Two babies, same age, 2.5 years apart.  Love them all.  They make my heart pop.

PS - The Mr said, "Oh!  I'll take a photo of you!", like he was a genius for remembering.  Pity I was half naked trying to feed a hot sweaty mess of a baby who fought like she was an enraged squid that had just been zapped by a taser.  He honestly didn't understand why I declined...

Mums & Photos

Us mums just don't have enough pictures taken of ourselves with our kiddos.  I have this fear that I will be hit by a bus tomorrow and my kids will grow up and create the knowledge that I just never existed.  Because there is such little evidence of it!

So great is my fear, that I have resorted to taking pictures like this

daily just to remind my kids that I was part of those memories.  

And there are eleventy hundred photos of me and Ruby and the ergo.


So I bitched at the Mr to take the camera and snap some snaps, damnit.

We got these gems.

So I went back to taking photos of the things we did and saw and hoped that I'll always be around to tell them where we were, what we did, who we saw, why we were there.

Are you like me?  Have heaps of photos of your lap + kids but not much else?  Or are you really good at documenting life with all of you?  Do you have any tips to share?

Banana Bread!

Within about a 100km radius of where we live is the majority of the banana plantations in Australia.  So, provided there hasn't been a cyclone in the last 6-9 months (Larry, Yasi, I'm looking at you), we have bananas coming out our ears.

Add to that, my BFF gave me this when we moved into the caravan.

It may or may not have been meant in jest.  Regardless, I love it.  If this book doesn't have the recipe I think twice about whether I really want to make/bake/cook it.

It's banana bread recipe is the bomb.  The. B.O.M.B.  I usually bastardise some part of the recipe though, always less sugar, depending on the size of the bananas, less butter, more yoghurt, less milk…  The other day I skipped sugar altogther and used honey instead.  I'm pretty sure it was the best one I've ever made.  I'm thinking I should email David and give him the heads up.

The Original!
Ingredients
1.5c plain flour
1ts baking powder
1ts bicarb
1/4ts salt (have never added this, ever ever ever)
125g butter, softened
1c sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 large very ripe bananas
1/2c buttermilk (or 1/4c milk + 1/4 yoghurt - I only ever do it this way, sometimes all yoghurt, no milk)

Method
Preheat oven to 170 degrees
Grease and line loaf tin
Sift together flour + baking powder + bicarb + salt
In seperate bowl, beat butter and sugar for 3-4 minutes or until pale and fluffy.
Gradually add beaten eggs, mixing well after each addition.
Mash bananas and add to butter mix.  (Have never ever done this, just through those suckers in!)
Stir well to combine
Add combined dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk, beating well after each addition.
Spoon into prepared loaf tin and bake 55-60 minutes.
Allow to cool, turn out onto wire rack.

Yum.Bo.

I replaced the sugar with 1/2 c of honey (or thereabouts!) and reduced the amount of butter to 100g as the moisture in the honey made up for it, win x 2!  Basically your mix will be sloppy but not runny.  It'll slop sluggishly off the spoon or out of the bowl but it won't rush out.  If it rushes out, you got too much goop, add some more flour.

Go crazy!  Best enjoyed with a cup of tea.

Be Less Vanilla!

OH!  On the weekend I was busy squirrelling myself away from the Mr and small peeps and busy working on my website.  I'm building me one!!  I am not so very good at it.  I am also not very good at staying on task for long periods of time so somehow, through my travels, I ended up listening to an interview with Tara Gentile.  I would link it for you but I have no idea where I found it, what site I listened to it on or even what it was about.  It was just humming in the background.

And then I heard her say,

"Be less vanilla."

My heart skipped a beat and I wanted to do a big rock star air punch YES! thing, but I don't know how to do a big rock star air punch YES! thing so I wrote it on a post it and stuck it to the wall.

Everyone will eat vanilla ice cream.  If you go to a friend's place for tea, or around to your folks on the weekend (Oh how I wish!), or have a spur of the moment BBQ, you could serve up a bowl of vanilla ice cream and everyone would (probably) eat it.  It's a safe choice, fairly neutral.  Bland even.  But if you took that bunch of people out to Movenpick, do you think there would be tubs of vanilla ice cream sitting around the table?

NO!  My Mr would choose some sort of berry sorbet waste of a good ice cream flavour.  My dad would get some sort of rich overbearing chocolate flavour.  My brother would go for the most obnoxiously fake strawberry flavour he could find.  Myself, I'd have the maple walnut.  **

Sometimes vanilla is ok.  It's good to appease the masses.  But sometimes you gotta pick a flavour.  It might ruffle some folks' feathers.  It might make some peeps mock you.  It might make others feel uncomfortable.  It might make you feel uncomfortable and vulnerable.

But bugger that.

Pick a flavour.  Rock that flavour.  Own that flavour and let everyone know.  It's what makes you great.  Maybe you are like me and have a teeny tiny business that you want to grow into a big fat business.  Maybe you are super proud of your gay sister-in-laws for being super brave and getting married when there are peeps around them who didn't want it to happen.  Maybe you want everyone to know that you think we can do better with Indigenous issues and telling them to get over it isn't the answer.  Maybe you just want it to be known that you don't like tuna sandwiches.

Pick a flavour!  Chances are your flavour won't be everyone's cup of tea.  But that's what makes it good.  That's what makes you different!  There is a whole crew of Maple Syrup lovers out there!  They are my cup of tea!  I like collecting those ones!  But you gotta tell me you are a Maple Syrup lover first!!  I bet if you try it, you could even find your own little posse of Cognac VSOP lovers.  You know, if that's your flavour.

The best bit is, even if you don't like someone else's flavour, you can still like them!  You can still treat them with respect and kindness.  And if you can't, you should practice that.

So, what's your flavour?

**I'd tell you my mum's flavour but she doesn't eat ice cream.  I know, right?  How has she not been voted off the island yet!  (Jokes, mum, it's a joke.)

Silence and Noise

Parenting is noisy work.  Small peeps make lots of noise.  Even when they're sleeping.  

The noise really does my head in.

A few weeks back I heard myself say, "Careful, Ruby!"

She was hanging out on the top of the step - there's 2, I believe sunken lounges were all the rage in the early nineties - and it's like her favourite spot in the whole wide world to test out new skills, live life on the edge, literally and figuratively.

I said, "Careful, Ruby!", to a nine month old, like I expected her to act on that.  

I take the kids grocery shopping and I say, "Don't go too far, Flynn!"  I don't actually mean it, he won't go far, the worst he is going to do is steal a grape or put a packet of Maggi Beef 2 minute noodles in the trolley.  

We went to the Museum last week and he nearly turned himself inside out with determination to climb that barrier and get in with the dinosaur.  I said, "Stop, come back, don't", but I didn't mean it.  I knew he was too teeny to get up and over and all he was really doing was putting sticky little hand marks on the brilliant shiny glass, which lets face it, would be covered in sticky hand marks by the end of the day anyway.

We make just as much noise as the small people sometimes.  I find I do it most when there is a crowd, an audience, other people witnessing our parenting.  I guiltily apologise for his 'bad' behaviour, when really I'm feeling as guilty as sin that I am totally selling him out to make myself feel better.  It makes me feel like I'm doing something constructive as I comment on his 'bad' behaviour.  Really, I don't care about the thing he is doing, it's just that those around me seem to so I make the accompanying noise to show my agreement. 

He found a piano at the wedding.  Once upon a time I would have yanked him off it and dragged him away.  This time I figured if they didn't want people to touch it then they wouldn't leave it out...

Little secret, I don't care if he runs up and down the aisles at the supermarket, I don't care that he steals a grape or two, I don't care that he likes to put his face up against glass windows and watch them frost up when he breathes on them, I don't care that he likes to hear how his voice echos in some spaces, I don't care that he likes to pick stuff up and see what it feels like or what it sounds like.  So I'm choosing to stop the noise that goes with it.  Imagine how good and nice and happy our day would be with me only saying what I really wanted to say and not what I think everyone around us wants me to say.  And Ruby?  Well I think I just stick to telling her she's a super star and wonderful and gorgeous because she's so sweet and happy and that I love her so much I want to squish her.  I'm not sure that telling her to get away from the step is productive for anyone…

So yeah, I am losing the noise and choosing silence.  Do you have noise?  Do you make noise?  Do you feel more comfortable when others make noise?

Pop your bubble!

We took the small peeps to Melbourne Museum!  It was fun!  

Except this bit was kind of stressful.  It was peak hour traffic and my iPhone didn't tell me we needed to turn and then we found Pip!  And then we turned 2 corners and then we found the museum.  Hoorah!

I loved the newness and the oldness of the museum and the Royal Exhibition building.  

Girlfriend was really wanting to get down and crawl around and I was really really wanting her not to.

Everyone should know how many wombats tall they are.

"And then she made me ride a wombat."

And then she was pooped.

We were hungry.  We went hunting for food.  Hungry tummies, tired little people and a need for pram space meant we sat down at the first suitable spot we could find.  I was a bit sad to go to Lygon Street and go to the only restaurant I could have gone to here in Cairns, Villa Romana!  I'll let you in on a little secret.  I do not like Villa Romana here and I do not like it there.

Cairns is so very small in comparision to Melbourne, to any major city or capital, and it is also so very remote when you think about it.  Before us is Townsville and really, the next stop after us is Darwin.  I have this fear that my kids will grow up and move away.  But then I have an even bigger fear that they will grow up and won't move away.  This trip reminded me that it's good to be a small fish in a big pond, it's good to be a bit uncomfortable, it's great to see new things and it's vital to never ever forget that your little piece of the world is just that -  your little piece.  I think that close-mindedness starts when you forget that, when you think everything in your bubble is how it is for everyone else.

Challenge yourself every now and then.  Step out of what is comfortable and pop your bubble!