Sweet dreams

Sweet dreams are what I'm longing for. Honestly, I'd even settle for bland dreams, perhaps even bad dreams, if they meant I'd get some sleep. I love my precious cherub. I love her even when she wakes me up only an hour after I get to bed, because she is hungry. And again at 1am because she wants a cuddle, an hour and a half later because she's hungry again, and at 4am because she wants to play. And I love her even through all the tears and screams and back-arching-thrashing that follow "No darling, it's sleepy-time not play-time," which last for TWO HOURS, causing Mr B and me to spend the rest of the morning feeling nauseous from exhaustion and trying not to be unreasonably snippy with each other.

By day, Madeleine will only sleep in her pram. Not the cot, not the car, not anywhere but the pram. And she won't be fooled by a gentle rocking back and forth, it has to be full-on forward motion for Her Majesty. So I pound the pavement, for at least four hours a day, every single day. I have blisters on my blisters, on my heels and on the balls of my feet and even on the top of my toes, and I barely even feel them any more. The heels of my ankle boots have worn thin. You'd think I'd be super-svelte by now, wouldn't you, with all that exercise? Unfortunately my long walks all-too-often take me past a really great cupcake place, so I suspect we are calorie-neutral.

In between walking and being awake in the middle of the night, I am working a lot. I'm up to my bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyeballs in unmet deadlines.

The point of this rather self-indulgent rant is to say "Hello! I miss you guys!" I miss blogging. I miss reading your blogs. I miss my creative projects and taking photographs and drawing pictures and thinking up stories and writing them down. When you are time-poor and sleep-deprived, creativity is so often the first thing to go. Who has the energy to create when you are putting everything you have into just surviving? And as a writer, my job is to create, so any residual creative energy has to go there (my clients are paying me, my blog isn't).

But I'm really going to try. I'm well aware that my complaint could come from the mouths of thousands of mothers the world over. So I just have to suck it up and BUILD the energy to do a little bit for me. Because giving myself time out is the best thing I can do for me AND my family. Which is why I am here, telling you all about this. And why I will try, TRY to take more photos and tell more stories and read more blogs be present in this little space again. How are you guys going?

Photo by Jochen Spalding from here.

What would Anna Karenina wear?

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina This photo shoot makes me feel like Anna Karenina has just stepped into our time. I am picturing snow, and Grand Tours, and lonely wealth, and art and love and lust and disgrace, and each unhappy family unique from all the others.

It's been many years since I read Anna Karenina. It's one of those sweeping books, I think. It swept me along, miserable in the inevitability of Anna's decline, and yet compelled to keep on reading. It was also grand and vast and old and beautiful.

It might almost be time for me to read it again. Almost. I think I need a few good nights' sleep before I tackle that particular emotional journey.

Meanwhile these dresses, aren't they glorious in all their old-world rewritten charm? They are from here and I don't even know what I'm looking at or what I'm (not) reading, but I couldn't resist sharing because they are so beautiful. Bring back bustles!

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Meals on wheels - Dos Diablos

When a food truck rolls into your 'hood on the weekend, the best thing you can do is tuck a blanket (ideally made of excessively vibrant granny-squares) under your arm, call your friends, and make a picnic of it. The Dos Diablos food truck is both cheap and cheerful. Tacos and fries, that's it. Or at least, that was it the afternoon we visited the little food devils, along with our good friend Tonia. It was the perfect combo.

There were three choices of taco fillings, including a vegetarian option, and it's good to note that the whole menu is gluten-free, if that is important to you.

Miss Madeleine had been perfectly happy with her little lunch of steamed carrots and beans until she saw the fries. All of a sudden, half-chewed pieces of carrot were tossed unceremoniously onto the blanket and she positively lunged for the fries. Geez they start young these days, don't they.

ps. More of Melbourne's food trucks

Into the 'burbs

Sometimes it is fun to act like a tourist in your own home, wouldn't you agree? I have done this many times. Eaten crocodile pizza at The Australian Hotel in The Rocks, Sydney. Caught the ferry to Manly to visit the aquarium and eat overpriced ice-cream. Walked the High Line in New York the weekend after it opened. Last week, I did it again. Mr B, Madeleine and I followed a foot-and-bike path from the end of our street in Carlton North through Fitzroy and into Clifton Hill. "I KNOW WHERE WE ARE," Mr B yelled in surprise as we emerged onto a main road. So we turned left, and kept on walking. We walked to Westgarth, then through it to Northcote. We continued on to Thornbury, and then Preston. Finally, when we reached the beginnings of Reservoir, we turned back.

If you live in Melbourne you will appreciate just how far this is. And if you spend time with babies, you will understand just how well behaved my little girl was, to put up with being strapped into her pram that entire time. Granted, we did stop for a while to let her stretch her chubby little legs. And while Mr B and I wouldn't have minded trying one of the several rather lovely cafes we crossed along our path, Madeleine came first. So we ate our lunch in a nondescript, one-in-every-suburb pub bistro, because it was big and empty and had a (clean!) carpeted lounge area so she could get on her hands and knees and crawl at great speed through 'tunnels' under the coffee tables before the ubiquitous chicken parma lunches arrived.

We paid attention to crumbling architecture. To old and new and evidence of urban sprawl throughout the past century. To street art and community art and just plain ole' graffiti.

Trams rattled by, wind whipped around our faces, and the sun played peek-a-boo behind fast-moving clouds. We took little detours down side streets; one minute tightly-packed with weatherboard cottages and miniature cottage gardens in the front; the next spaced out with wide, red-brick homes and statues and fruit trees in the front yards, and spotless cement footpaths leading from the front doors to the garages.

As the kilometres unfolded under our feet, we left the working week behind. Our conversation, that started with Mr B's work challenges and Madeleine's feeding and sleeping challenges, moved, slowly, into hopes and dreams. In our imaginations we renovated the house we didn't even live in yet. We planned holidays we couldn't afford. We grew Madeleine up and watched her walk and talk and go to school and then, all in a rush, I hurried her back into baby-state and wanted to hold her close and never let go.

Do you ever take walks like these?

First Easter

Madeleine's first Easter is waking up to a house that smells like cinnamon and hot cross buns. It is long, exploratory walks into the northern suburbs in slanting sunshine. It's wind that, at long last, admits autumn has arrived and freshens the stale old air. Madeleine's first Easter is crawling like a speed-demon through improvised tunnels on the floor of a public lounge; it's discovering the delights of pumpkin and green beans and carrots; it's a first little tooth shyly peeping up beneath drool-damp gums.

Chasing chickens and rabbits and lambs in a petting zoo. Me catching Madeleine's hand and cautioning "Gentle," as she tries to pull the horns off a very patient little black goat. Belly-laughs; pointy-toe bouncing in Dad's arms; a new sound (or is she calling someone we know?): "NAnnnnnaaaaa."

Madeleine's first Easter is picnics on her great-grandmother's crocheted rug, and oft-thwarted attempts to crawl off the rug and eat the grass. It is a golden chocolate egg (forbidden!) and soft, brown bunny-ears (adorable!) from Aunty Tonia. It is infectious joy, and overwhelming love.

And it is only half done.

Easter! Eggs, buns and feet

Oh you guys, my feet are killing me! Back when I lived in New York, my friend Mish and I would walk every weekend along the Hudson, from Canal Street to up into the 100s, often to the top of Central Park, and back. The first time we did this we were both wearing flip flops and by the end of the walk, we were hobbling like old ladies. We re-christened ourselves with old lady names: Mish became Esme, and I was Mavis. To this day, those are the names we call each other. I lost count of the times Mish would unintentionally introduce me to new friends as Mavis. Call me Mavis today, friends. I'll answer to it. We are back from a day-long exploration deep into the 'burbs of Melbourne (more of this in another post). I wore my pretty little suede ankle-boots, which looked rather nice with my skirt but were NOT intended to be used to pound a pavement for six hours or so.

But that's not actually what I wanted to talk about today. It's Good Friday, so I thought I'd share with you a couple more eggy Eastery projects I've been doing of late. Both involve carefully removing the yolks out of a dozen eggs, just as I did for this hidden message project. Now I have two dozen eggs sitting in pairs in zip-lock bags in my freezer, so you know who to call if you fancy making a quiche.

A smashing egg-hunt

For the first dozen, I made an Easter game for Emily Rose. I painted the hollowed-out eggs with water-colours, having previously stuck a letter on each egg so that it would work as a stencil that, in the end, spelled out HAPPY EASTER.

Then I filled 11 out of the 12 eggs with confetti, and the 12th egg with gold glitter. I sealed each of the eggs and nestled them back into the carton, so you couldn't tell the glitter egg from any of the confetti eggs. I wrapped them up and posted them to Emily with some simple instructions for a twist on a classic egg hunt:

* Hide the eggs and invite your friends to find them * When all the confetti eggs have been found, smash them over each others' heads * Whoever ends up with a head full of glitter wins the prize

I got the idea here. Pretty cool huh?

Surprise egg-cakes

For the second dozen I baked baby cupcakes, inside the egg shells. First I submerged the eggs in food colouring (with hot water and vinegar): red, orange, blue, purple, yellow and green. Then I mixed up my favourite chocolate cake. I would have preferred to make vanilla, but I was worried the food colouring would come off on the cake batter and look a bit gross. I piped the cake batter through a little hole in the top of each egg.

It was tricky figuring out how much cake batter to add to the eggs. There are loads of instructions on the Internet for doing this, and most people said they overfilled their eggs. I did, too. It was hard to decide when to stop piping the batter because you couldn't actually see (the hole in the top of the egg was not much bigger than the pipe nozzle). When I pulled the eggs out of the oven, rather than breaking off the overflow, I decided I rather liked the look of it. Instead, I iced it with a kind of snowy lava-looking blob, and topped it with a little candy flower.

I put a dozen of the eggs back into an egg carton and sent Mr B to work with them yesterday. I told everyone to crack the eggs and peel the shell just like they would a hard-boiled egg. Inside, they discovered chocolate cake!

But eggs and chocolate are for Sunday (so you still have time if you want to do something like either of these projects for yourself.) Today was Good Friday and, after my inappropriate footwear-clad 'marathon', I was all "craft-shmaft" and "cooking-schmooking." So we had takeaway fish 'n chips for dinner. And Madeleine approved, after some initial trepidation, of her first ever hot cross bun.

Happy Easter my dears! I hope you have a wonderful time however you spend it.

The Easter craft challenge #3 - wildflower eggs

This is a super-cute and incredibly easy Easter craft activity. These little papier mâché eggs are laced with wildflower seeds. Tie them up with a pretty ribbon or a piece of washi tape, nestle them into a decorative nest, and you have a sweet little springtime Easter gift for a friend (even if Easter is an autumnal festival, as it is in Australia). 1. Tear up little pieces of paper and put them in a blender. Pour in enough warm water to cover them, then blend them into mush.

2. If you are only using one type of seed, mix the seeds into the watery mush (don't blend it any more!), then strain it well. However, I was using three different types of seeds, so I strained my mix first and then separated it into three separate bowls, before adding the seeds. 3. Roll your seeded mixture into little egg-shaped balls. I made mine about the size of those mini chocolate eggs you can buy in bags. Then rest them on absorbent paper or a tea towel and leave them to dry. That's it! I used some lovely, patterned tape to decorate the eggs. It will come off easily when my friends are ready to plant the eggs to grow wildflowers from the seeds. I also typed up growing instructions and rolled them into a little scroll to go with the eggs.

This post is the third and final one in a series of Easter craft challenges, sponsored by the good folk at Uni Hill Factory Outlets. They sent me a gift voucher to spend at the Kaisercraft Uni Hill store, and I didn't waste a minute.

* I used some of their fabulous scrap-booking supplies to make pretty mail * I used their rub-on stencils to decorate Easter eggs with hidden messages * Then I used their decorative embellishments (like birds' nests, doilies and pretty paper) to pull the various elements together into lovely boxed gifts for my friends, complete with handmade cards (see below)

I hope my friends like their presents. Happy Easter!

My mum and the 1957 Blue Mountains bushfire

This is my mother as a child, in a snowball fight with her best friend Lorna (they are still friends). Aren't they delightful? (And can you possibly imagine how cold Mum's bare legs must have been?) She grew up in a tiny mountains town north-west of Sydney, Australia, called Leura. When my mother was 10, her school burned down. You'd think that having your school burn down would be every 10-year-old's dream come true, wouldn't you. But the day my mum's school burned down, it very nearly took the children with it.

The school fell prey to a devastating bushfire that destroyed more than 158 homes (130 of them in Leura), shops, churches and a hospital. Four bushwalkers died while trying to outrun the bushfire up a steep slope at Blackheath.

It is terrifying to think how close those little students came to disaster, back in the days before fire drills and 'orderly exits'. Can you imagine, today, a school principal racing through the halls yelling "Everybody run!" and watching the children scatter?

Recently that same school asked Mum to write down her memories of the fire, to share with the Years 3 and 4 children who attend the school today. This is Mum's story.

A fierce mountains day*

When I was a little girl I lived in Lett Street, Katoomba, with my mother and father. My dad was an electrician. His job was to put electrical wires in houses and buildings, so that the lights and ovens and other electrical things worked. He would have to get up very early to do his job, and I used to eat breakfast with him at five o’clock in the morning. Even though that was many years ago, I still like to get up early.

Every year in December the owner of Everglades Gardens, Mr Sorenson, held a Christmas party for the children. I think I remember going to that party the weekend before the fire. When I woke up on the morning of the big bushfire in December 1957, I was thinking about how much I had enjoyed that party. I remember that it was a very hot day, even at five o’clock in the morning!

I was 10 years old. After I had breakfast and got dressed for school, I met my friends from next door, Lorna and Allen, and we walked to Leura School together, carrying our school cases. Our school cases were called Globite cases, and you carried them in your hands. They were very heavy. You could buy little leather satchels like the backpacks you have today, but they didn’t hold very much so most of us didn’t use them.

To get to school, Lorna and Allen and I walked up the steep hill to the Mall, then crossed the road and walked past the church. (In autumn, we liked to collect the leaves from the Liquidamber trees outside the church as they changed colour, and use them for art projects.) Next we walked over a wooden bridge to get across the railway lines, and finally crossed the highway, which was not very busy or dangerous back then, to arrive at school. Leura School had been converted from a little house, and each class was in a different room of the house. The stairs to that old house are still in the front garden of the school today.

When the bell rang, we sat down to our lessons with no idea that this was to become one of the most frightening days of our whole lives! We worked until the bell rang for Recess (which we called Play Lunch). No-one had much energy to play because it was so hot, but we still enjoyed the short break from lessons.

Not long after we went back to class, we heard the voice of the Principal (then called the Headmaster), Mr Hartcher, sounding different and a bit panicky. He hurried into our room, saying “Run! There is a fire coming very close to the school!” We could hear him running through the hallway with the same message in all the other rooms. When we ran into the hallway at the entrance of our school, we could smell smoke and the sky looked red and angry.

Some of the parents had realised the fire was heading for the school, and they arrived to pick their children up, but they blocked the doorway of the school so we couldn’t get out! They hadn’t realised that we all had to run away quickly, and they were blocking the only door that faced away from the fire. Mr Hartcher ordered them to move, but many of us children were too shy to push past them. I think I was one of the last to leave, because I did not want to squeeze past a mother who had started to panic.

At last I ran out the door and across the highway without even taking my school case, trying to get home as fast as I could. I ran across the railway bridge and the fire was so close that I could see flames in the grass next to the railway tracks. When I ran down the stairs of the bridge and onto the street, I caught up with a little boy who was only in Kindergarten. I ran with him for a little while, and the flames came closer and closer in the bushes and gardens behind us. Suddenly, the little boy cried out and I turned around to see he had dropped his school case, which he had been clutching tightly all this while. He tried to pick it up, but the fire was almost on top of us by now so I grabbed his hand and told him we needed to get away, and that he could always get a new school case.

By this time, some of the parents had gone to the school to pick up their children, only to discover that we had all left. So they were driving around the streets of Leura and Katoomba, looking for the children. The little boy’s parents arrived in their car, and took him away with them, leaving me alone. I kept running, and was very relieved not long afterwards to see my Dad’s car! Dad and I drove back home without really knowing what was the best plan for escape, as the fire seemed to be moving behind, in front and all around us.

It was a very scary time at our house. My parents packed our car with things like clothing and family photographs and insurance documents, thinking that these were the most important things to keep if our house burned down. We had to evacuate to the theatre in Katoomba Street. A truck stopped by our house and the driver offered to pick up anything large that we wanted to save, but Dad said “No thanks,” the important things like people were his only priority. Then the Principal Mr Hartcher and his wife arrived looking hot, with burns from the fire, to check that all the children had made it to their homes safely. Finally Dad drove us to the theatre. Mum and I waited there with all the others, while Dad went back to help fight the oncoming fire.

It is interesting how different people react to dangerous times. There were a few people in the theatre who tried hard to take our minds off worrying, by telling jokes and stories. Other people were quiet, some were agitated, and one or two were crying. Mostly, we were worried about our family members – usually men – who were fighting the fire to save their own and other people’s homes.

Later we heard that one of the teachers, Miss Nelson, had stayed at the school to make sure the children all made it out. That meant she was one of the last to leave and as she crossed the railway bridge, flames licked around the supports. I don’t really remember, but I assume those supports were made of wood.

The school burnt down completely on that day, but my Dad managed to save our house and some others in Lett Street. The fire came so close to our house that our garage wall was black and charcoaled. Mum said that the truck carrying everyone’s belongings was piled high, and there were things like fur coats (which were very expensive) with a goat sitting on top!

I seem to remember we had a very long holiday after Christmas that year, as we had no school to go to when the New Year began. Christmas was always exciting, and I usually thought it was the best thing about the summer holidays. But this year, it was hard to be really excited about Christmas. Some of my friends had lost their houses as well as all their Christmas presents, and it just didn’t feel right to be celebrating. Normally we went to visit my Nanna in Sydney every Christmas, but we didn’t go this year. Everybody was a bit unsure what to do next, and how to reorganise our lives after such a big change to our normally peaceful Mountains lives.

Finally in February 1958, a few days after everyone else, we started school again. But we still had no building to go to, so we had school in the Church of England hall in Leura. We were given pencil cases to carry to school every day, and exercise books and other supplies, but we didn’t have any library books. Since there were no computers in schools in 1958, library books were the only way we could research our projects. Encyclopaedias were very important but they were expensive, and most of us didn’t have them in our homes, so we just had to muddle through until our school library was replaced.

Eventually our new school was built. It was just one building (the one your office is in now), and it seemed very spacious and clean to us. It was wonderful to have desks to store our books in again, and stationery, and a library with exciting new books to read. We missed our little ‘house school’ but soon became used to the new one, and settled in nicely.

As long as I live, I will never forget the day of the 1957 bushfires. That day, the fire burned all the way from Katoomba Hospital right down as far as Springwood. It burned down many houses and buildings and trees.

* When Mum wrote this story for the children at her old school, she called it "A fierce mountains day" because when she recently went back to visit the school, the children sang a song by a local composer called "A mountains kind of day." Mum said, "The song was very evocative and talked about mists and trees. I loved it."

(All photos of the 1957 Blue Mountains Bushfires used here are from the Blue Mountains Library's Flickr stream. The 'before and after' of the school are from an invitation to the official opening of the new school in 1958, that Mum kept.)

ps. This last photo is of a family in front of what used to be their house. The little girl's name is Marion Weiss, and she went to the same school as my mother. In the comments under the photo another of my mother's fellow students, Jean Collins, wrote this:

"I used to play with Marion Weiss when we were pupils at Leura Primary School - also burnt out in the 1957 fire. I remember running from the school that day, up the highway, with fireballs flying through the air and houses exploding. We took shelter in corner store, down past the Baptist Church. The church burned down, so did the corner store. Our house caught fire, but my brother Barrie put it out, and also saved the house next door to ours, in East View Avenue. The owners gave him five pounds reward. I have lots of memories of that dreadful day."

Madeleine's year book

Help! I need your advice! I am creating a book to celebrate Madeleine's first year, something to keep for ourselves as a precious memory, to give to the grandparents, and most of all for Madeleine to look through when she is a little bit older. And I'm finding it more challenging than I thought.

There's certainly no shortage of photographs of my beautiful girl (although photos of the first three months of her life seem to consist almost exclusively of selfie iPhone shots of her sleeping on my chest). But I'm struggling to decide exactly what to include and exactly how to go about it. For example:

Photographs

Do I choose photographs at each age, watching her grow? Do I include all the key events - Christmas; her 'coming home from hospital' outfit; her first meal of solids; her first trip to the zoo - or just pick and choose? Should I include photos of all the relatives? And what if the event or person is significant but the shot is lacklustre?

Text

How much text should I include? None at all? Just captions? Or should I pepper the book with little stories and anecdotes from Madeleine's first year?

Layout

I have InDesign but I don't know how to use it, other than line editing and copyfitting something that's already been laid out. Do I try to get creative, with collages and illustrations and handwritten notes and deep etched 'items of significance' etc, alongside the more traditional 'bleed to edge' photos of my beautiful girl? And if so, do you know of a publishing software or website that will help me do that, without any design experience? Which leads me to...

Publishing

I've yet to choose a print-on-demand publisher. I'm rather drawn to Artifact Uprising, because the cloth covers and binding and paper quality look rather beautiful, much nicer than anything else I've seen. But I'm not sure how flexible the layout could be.

Have you done this with your child(ren)? I'd love to know how you approached it.

Old friends, new links

Last week I met a group of women in a cafe who had been regularly getting together for more than 40 years. They were all in their 70s, enjoying coffee and cake and gossip with each other and a handful of grandchildren. As I apologetically manoeuvred Madeleine's pram past their table, they told me "We understand, that's how we met." Turns out they were all from the same mothers' group and had been friends ever since. Isn't that incredible? It's been a long time since I've shared any links to my writing elsewhere, and I feel like I'm neglecting my old friends, the wonderful websites and publications who support me. Here are some bits and pieces you might enjoy.

Unexpected snail-mail connections

Have you heard of 'slow blogging'?

Amazing (colour!) photographs of Paris a hundred years ago

How to score a business loan (pdf)

What's inside Frida Kahlo's closet?

The nights are long but the years are short

The food of love

Can your business outlive your career?

Dear celebrity, I thought we were friends

(Photo by aftab)