Tale of Three is back!

Thought I'd quickly mention that my other blog has relaunched after a long hiatus. The Tale of Three girls are back together...with a couple of newcomers. So it's Tale of Three...or so (Tale of Five just didn't have the same ring). We hatched the plan back on this weekend, and now it's finally come to fruition. The idea's the same - weekly tasks that we each complete and blog about. The London girl is back in Australia now, so we can no longer claim to be covering three different countries. But we're in two countries and three Australian cities (hopefully soon to be three Australian cities and one lovely country town). Head over and check it out - we're a funny bunch!

Livestock

A cow goes moo, a dog goes woof and a sheep goes, "Raaaahhhhh." According to Stella, that is. Which is why we need to get out of the city.

OK, it's not really, but I've got a couple of dozen real reasons, if you've got the time. How about just five?

1) A house on my street is for sale and the sign out the front says "Massive 384 square metre block." Leaving aside the fact it is a tiny two-bedroom house with a price tag of $850,000, in this neighbourhood, 384sqm is 'massive'.

2) City kids think milk comes in plastic bottles. That was what my mum used to tell us. It might have been a slight generalisation on her part, but we country kids knew where our food came from. We could see it out in the paddocks on the bus ride to school. I want my kids to live it, not just hear about it.

3) Today, my four-year-old described the single tree in our backyard as 'lonely'.

4) Almost everyone I know works far too much and far too hard. And the women I know who don't have to work never see their partners who do. Nor do their kids. All to sustain the city existence. 

5) Because I want chickens. Chickens, goddammit. Isn't that reason enough?

It's been a joint goal for the GM and I since before we had our babies. We always knew it would be possible to do our work (staring at words on computer screens) remotely, and the having-two-babies-at-once thing was enough for our employers to finally succumb and set the home-based office wheels in motion. So now that it's not just a hypothetical, it's time to launch in. We're not going too far - just an hour or so south where the grass is green and the hills roll. Far enough away to feel like country folk, close enough to get our city fix regularly and easily, if we have to. Close enough to doting aunties and grandparents. Close enough for the girls' night out Japanese on King Street.


And far enough away to feel like we can slow things down, let things go, try things out, free things up. 

Want more reasons?


This kid likes running in the grass:

This one wants two dogs, a big one and a small one:

And this one thinks sheep roar:

Watch this space - Typically Red goes Rural, perhaps?

this moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. 

Via Soulemama

The Dealer

I had a coffee with my dealer today. My button dealer. She's an old school friend and she runs this amazing online business. These days, whenever we catch up, she passes a little ziplock baggie across the table filled with some sort of sample for me. My button and ribbon jars are getting very full as a result.

A parcel arrived in the mail recently from another old school friend. This one's a very talented photographer based in Brisbane. She has patiently watched me wrangle my lovely DSLR and offered advice and tips along the way. Now, thanks to this lovely gift, I'm a hundred miles away from where I was a few days ago, if not in results, at least in comprehension. And I've been using the manual exposure switch! And now I know why that little line jumps left and right! And where it should be! It's exciting stuff.

Thanks, lovely pair of old school friends.

Green

Here is my Pearl, modeling her green kimono top. It appears it might be a touch too small for her. Perhaps it would have fitted better back when I made it (then put it aside for weeks to await buttonholes), back when the weather was cooler and she had need for a long-sleeve top. But she is chubbing up fast, that Pearl, little sausage fingers and roly-poly legs. To think what a skinny little baby she once was!

See how she blends in with the grass?

And another green thing I came across this week. I've always fancied the idea of a red door, but I could be swayed in this direction.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

Many days - most days, in truth - it feels like a battle of wills. She who is four versus she who is 30...something, clashing all the day long. Please eat your breakfast. Please use your spoon. Please come and get dressed. Please help pack away your pencils. It occurred to me, sometime around two (years old) that one of the things I struggle with most is hearing 'no' all the time. Having endless requests turned down politely, refused defiantly, ignored totally. No, no, no, no, no. And though we have happy days where it feels like our goals align, there are so many stretches of day after day where her ears seem to stop working and I'm on the hamster wheel of shouting, then feeling bad for shouting, then shouting again, then feeling bad again...

She is so spirited, a little fire burning in her. And on the days when she behaves beautifully, trying so eagerly to please me, that spark is somehow diminished. Because her natural inclination is to do as she wants, follow her imagination, meander about in conversation and in thought. And that means, when you're four, that boring requests like "pick up your fork and eat your dinner" or "say goodbye to the little dog and come home now" have to be ignored. And a mummy who has asked for the same thing a dozen times and been ignored or refused several dozen more can sometimes lose her cool.

Yet, here's the clincher - everything's easier when I bend and flow with her rhythm rather than trying to force her to fall into step with mine. She is so alive, so sociable, so curious, I fear that 'fixing' the part of her that is defiant, disobedient, sometimes downright naughty, will damage those other qualities. Do I want the perfectly well-behaved, compliant child who's too afraid to speak lest she say the wrong thing, or do I want my kid, she who is four, who'll stop and chat to anyone, and whose enthusiasm for life can't help but bubble over, even when the more socially correct thing to do is to sit quietly? Obviously that question's a rhetorical one.

Today I listened to this podcast that has been waiting on my iPhone for months, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. Psychologist Hara Estroff Marano talks about the over-supervision of children and how little time and space we give them to play, make their own mistakes and solve their own problems. And she hit a chord with me when she talked about wanting her children to have a backbone - as in, she didn't mind if they answered back, if they were outspoken, if they expressed strong opinions. She said compliance wasn't high up on her list of values.

And I think, until listening to this, compliance has been up there for me. Who is this four-year-old who lives under my roof and still thinks she can defy me? Fall into line, kid! Perhaps it's because I always fell into line. I was so polite. I didn't want to do the wrong thing. I didn't want to step on any toes.

Well, I'm removing 'compliance' from my list. At least, I'm going to start trying. I still want her to understand respect and good manners and courtesy. I want her to be kind and compassionate and to have empathy. But I'm going to stop demanding obedience all the time.

 I want her to be strong and gutsy and funny and vulnerable, and to learn and appreciate my and her dad's values. I want her life to be a series of great bursts of happy, and for her to have resilience against any sad, angry, hurt, disappointed or scared that falls in between. But ultimately, I want to give her the resources to make her own decisions, recover from setbacks and follow her own path.

So when she tells me, as she did recently, that she wants to be three things when she grows up - a princess, a "doctor-nurse who drives an ambulance" and a farmer's wife - I'll say, "Go get 'em, sunshine."

:: I'm hoping lots of people listen to the podcast and take on the ideas, because if I ever work up the courage to open the door and send my girls out into the street for a morning of unsupervised play (like in the good old days when we were young), it'd be nice to think there'll be some other kids out there to play with...

this moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. 

Via Soulemama

Happy Haul

A quick dash into my favourite oppy this morning resulted in this happy little haul of vintage patterns - all in size 1 or 2, and only one with missing pieces, which are conveniently for the boy's pyjamas, so that's not going to be a problem in this girl-heavy house.

I'm always amused by how much I think I might achieve when I get an hour or two with  my sewing machine. Thursday afternoons are often a good bet - Lola is at preschool, the little pair are asleep. Today I was envisioning two new pairs of pants for overdue presents, and a much-anticipated nightie in (bloody) Disney princess fabric for the young miss - a firm lesson in not taking said young miss to Spotlight.

Anyway, with two precious hours on my hands, a stack of new-old patterns for inspiration, some lovely new fabrics that arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and a pile of planned projects to choose from, I was obviously going to be very productive...

Yes, three buttonholes and three buttons. Sum total. Two hours. (All that lovely tidy yellow binding was completed weeks ago so I can't count that...)

At least this little top has been taken off the "almost finished but not quite" pile now.

Joining in with Our Creative Spaces again this week.

Yarn Along and a Finished Project!

Yarning Along again, and would you look at me and my swatching! Ysolda would be impressed. I received a little parcel of Bendigo Woollen Mills yarn last week - four big fat 200g balls - and I'm so impressed with the colours and the prices, and most especially that it is Australian-made,  I'm hoping I'll love it enough to use it a lot. So I'm swatching away (halo a-shinin') to see how it feels to work with. 

And I've been permitted to begin working with this new wool because I finally finished something, albeit something tiny. It's a little Eden's Adam for my cousin's brand-new baby boy, and I used some lovely green Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece.

The reading situation is a bit dire at the moment. I'm just not getting into my current book, 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog' by Muriel Barbery, so I keep looking around for other stuff to grab my attention. Thus, I passed a quiet half hour this afternoon with the latest Delicious magazine and my Bendigo swatch and a nice cup of black coffee. Bliss.

Back on the topic of Australian yarn, while I'm not shy about buying European or American yarns, and have spent many lovely minutes oohing and ahhing over Madelinetosh and Quince colour palettes, I'm aware of how small the local wool industry has become. Even my favourite Aussie yarn, Jo Sharp, is made in Italy. I received an email from a pal today with a link to this project, which I think is great. I'm off there now to make my pledge.

Cluck Cluck Cluck

Still with the eggs?! The leftover whites were today turned into a lovely, slightly ugly roulade. The recipe wanted me to use passionfruit, but I felt I needed to complement the chocolate ice-cream, so I came over all inventy and made an (outrageously pink) raspberry yoghurt cream for the filling then drizzled the whole thing with melted dark chocolate. The meringue was suitably chewy, the raspberry cream was ridiculously sweet, the chocolate was...chocolatey.

I might have a future as an abstract painter if the below pic is anything to go by.