Soviet-era polka dots

I have been seriously crushing over these Soviet-era polka-dot kitchenware designs of late. The red I understand. But can anyone tell me what was behind the polka dots?

{Image links - all on Etsy: 1. milk can 2. tin canisters 3. enamel pot 4. tea cup 5. vintage clock 6. ceramic pitcher 7. sugar bowl & creamer 8. coffee cups 9. tea pot 10. square canisters 11. porcelain bowls 12. enamel cups}

10 things probably only of interest to my mum

Consider yourself warned. OK, these things, in our lives lately (please forgive the dodgy iPhone snaps, I've been forgetting my camera around with me lately and I shouldn't).

1. A butterfly landed on Madeleine's head yesterday, which kind of freaked her out but I thought it was adorable. That face!

2. Walking the dog is so much more fun than I realised before Madeleine showed me the light.

3. Sometimes, gender-stereotypical behaviour is not learned but simply innate. For example, we did not teach Madeleine to love to wear and carry hats and handbags, to want to brush my hair and steal my headbands, to prefer her pink shoes over her tan ones, to drape my (expensive, Christian Lacroix) scarf around her neck, or to wear her plastic toy rings as bracelets and walk around the house holding her hands high to show them off. She figured these things out all by herself.

4. Note to self: if you have hidden your (expensive, Christian Lacroix) scarf from your daughter, don't let her anywhere near the toilet paper or she will innovate.

5. Lamingtons get the Madeleine seal of approval.

6. Homemade jaffles, lemon cupcakes, a cup of tea and a magazine feature all about our neck of the woods... that was a relaxing afternoon.

7. I am becoming rather bump-obsessed these days. This pregnancy coming so soon after the last one, le bump seemed to pop a lot earlier than I remember happening last year (was it only last year? Eek!). Baby B2 is kicking beautifully (I'm being pummelled at this very moment), and it's just as lovely to experience the second time around. Oh and another sweet something lately? Ruby has become very attached to my lap all over again. She loves a good bump, that cat.

8. Peppa Pig! Madeleine is soooo into Peppa Pig right now, even while in the pram, in the rain. You have no idea.

9. When my baby eats real food (as opposed to mush) I am ridiculously proud. This is what my life has become. Also, it is super handy to be able to share our meals. And cute.

10. We went to the zoo yesterday with some of Madeleine's little friends (and my grown-up friends) and she had SO MUCH FUN.

The end.

(11. I have only just noticed: Madeleine sure wears a lot of red!)

Renovation inspiration

"Renovation inspiration" is going to be a new occasional feature on this blog. It will be a place where we can all dream about creating ideal spaces in our homes. I need this feature to help keep me positive about the renovation that is underway on our new (old) house. This is what it looks like inside today.

We are two weeks in and already countless skips of rubbish and rubble have been removed from the street out the front. At first that was incredibly positive. It felt like progress and I could imagine my family living happily ever after in our little cottage.

Then the inevitable happened. Scope-creep.

Like, the floor boards and the joists supporting them turned out to be in such bad condition they had to be pulled up and replaced. Shazam! A hefty five-figure increase to the already-stretched budget, and another several weeks added to the whole process.

Then the little things started coming up in conversation. Little things like this.

Building manager: A lot of the old locks need to be replaced.

Us: OK, let's get a locksmith in to replace all the locks so the house is secure.

Building manager: No problem. That will be another several thousand dollars.

Ditto the conversation we had about modernising all the electrical outlets and light switches. Oh and the "we hadn't expected that" unusual plumbing in the upstairs loo ("unusual" is a euphemism for "expensive" in renovations, I'm learning). And a whole bunch of other 'little' jobs that are sending this project through the financial and time-line roof.

I know these are important to the finished product and, while we were thinking big (kitchens, bathrooms, floorboards), we should also have been considering light switches and locks. Being newbies to renovating, we didn't get our heads into the nitty gritty until the process was underway. But I can't help thinking that our building company on the other hand is not new to the process and possibly would have anticipated that these sorts of issues generally come up. Yet they said nothing. And so I can't help feeling a little bit... managed.

Be that as it may. Part of me knew that scope-creep would happen, in one form or another. It happens in every renovation story I have ever heard. It happened to my parents when our family owner-built our home while I was a teenager. That doesn't stop it being stressful right now, but it does help me hold onto perspective.

And the good part is still dreaming about the home we are going to create, albeit at a greater financial, emotional and time cost than originally budgeted. So I'm going to start this feature called "renovation inspiration" and we can all dream together.

Very few of us have the cash or time or opportunities to make everything just the way we want it. But let's think together about the little things we can do to our homes to help us feel that little bit happier to be in them. It could be something as simple as cleaning up, or bringing in a fresh vase of flowers. Or hanging a new picture on the wall.

I'll start next week, and I'll start with kitchens. What is in your dream kitchen? Let's get thinking and inspire one another.

ps. Take a look at this amazing gold-and-green Victorian velvet wallpaper uncovered in our front room. I think it is all kinds of spectacularly, hideously wonderful.

Snail mail: love letters to strangers

"You may struggle at times, but here you are, having picked yourself up again and pressing on. Never lose that. You are so much stronger than you think." "Love can't enter through a wall. It comes in when doors are open."

"Well, friend. I guess - I guess we're not so fleeting after all. I'd say we're pretty damn infinite."

These are all excerpts from love letters written to and from total strangers. They are part of a project called The World Needs More Love Letters, a community of more than 20,000 letter-writers from across 49 different countries.

They mail love letters to strangers in need (you can request a love letter of your own here), and they leave love letters in public places like cafes, libraries, holiday destinations and college campuses for strangers to find.

The whole project started with one young woman, Hannah Brencher, who left love letters for strangers all over New York City to help lessen the loneliness and depression that followed her graduation from university.

How about you. Would you write a love letter to a stranger? If you'd like to, you can get involved here.

{Image credits, all licensed under Creative Commons: 1. BiblioArchives 2. Trondheim Byarkiv 3. petertandlund 4. State Library of Victoria Collections}

Meals on Wheels - the Brulee Cart

It's a food truck. That sells crème brûlée. Honestly I could stop right there. But I won't.

Only a couple of weeks old, the Brûlée Cart debuted amid the patio lights, floating flamingos and historic buildings of Trailer Park, a weekend gathering of food trucks in the Village Melbourne precinct.

Village Melbourne is the relatively-new kid on the old Belgian Beer Cafe block, on St Kilda Road. There's food and wine, music, theatre, comedy and special events a-plenty. And on weekends throughout August and September, there's a curated gathering of food trucks! I took myself and my taste buds down to Trailer Park on the weekend and joined the line for a takeout tub of burnt cream of my very own. The flavour choices were classic French vanilla, nutella and strawberry, and salted caramel. Apparently they change regularly. After not a little internal debate, I chose the salted caramel.

They pulled out a blowtorch and set the toffee then and there while I watched, and followed it up with a generous grind of black rock-salt to finish things off. That added nice little bit of theatre to the usual food truck experience, I thought.

Oh and the dessert itself was sublime. The custard was sweet and sloppy (just the way I like it) and full of flavour.

And the best part? The toffee crust was thin, beautifully set, and cracked exactly the way it was supposed to. See for yourself.

ps. The Brûlée Cart was put on the road through crowdfunding. It's such a clever world we live in these days, don't you think?

ps2. More food trucks!

Long distance love

This little "Roshambo" mini-series from Free People reminds me of Mr B and me when we first met, and it has me feeling all nostalgic. Of course we were neither so good-looking nor glamorous nor well dressed as these two, but I know what it feels like to be living a Grand Adventure while your heart is elsewhere. Mr B and I met in New York. I had just moved there, he was visiting on a conference. It was a beautiful, brief romance, and that scene at the end of the first Roshambo video where the guy hops into a taxi... oh so heartbreaking and familiar!

Two days after our own 'taxi scene', I had an email from Mr B saying he wasn't going to let a little thing like thousands of kilometres get in the way of what could be something good. And so started a year-and-a-half of long-distance love.

I went to Peru, but I thought about him. He went to Dubai, but he thought about me. We met up for holidays together in Fiji, in London, in Australia, in New York.

And in between the travel and the longing we just had to get on with our own lives, his in Queensland and mine in New York. There comes a point, when you're in a long distance relationship, when you just have to let go and let yourself be in the moment wherever you are. If you constantly pine for the other person, you never open your eyes to the world in front of you. That's something in the second video that I really related to.

Anyway, this is a fun, romantic little mini-series if you're in the mood for some light entertainment. Plus, I have to give props to Free People for such a creative way to showcase their latest collection. And it's working, too. I want to wear ALL THE CLOTHES.

Going home

Guess what? We are going home! We are moving into our own home, I mean, not a rental. I am incredibly excited. I can't even begin to tell you how insane the nesting hormones are going inside me right now. Squirrels on caffeine, just picture that. Then triple the energy output.

This is our home (top pic is of the front, bottom pic is of the back). It is a little cottage, one street away from where we are living now. It has to be renovated before we can move in, so Madeleine and I snuck in earlier this week to take some 'before' photos ahead of the demolition process. (That was on Tuesday. On Thursday I walked past and there was a great big skip out the front already half full. It made my heart sing).

The budget doesn't stretch to extensions or any big structural changes, but we will have new bathrooms and a new kitchen (oh boy!); fresh paint and floorboards (right now, there is a downstairs colour scheme of dirty green carpet with dirty green walls, upstairs is a psychotic sensory assault of pink carpet with pink walls and pink CEILING, and everywhere you don't see green or pink you see yellow-ish 70s wood paneling, on both walls and ceilings); plus some extra bits and pieces and cabinetry like a conversion of a wine cellar into a teeny-tiny office for me. Later, we will pull up some of those tiles outside and plant a garden. And build a pergola to cover with vines for outdoor dining.

There are also some beautiful features to the house that we plan to keep. Like lovely Victorian details and fireplaces. Pressed metal patterns on the ceilings in the living room, dining room and kitchen. A light-well that we will paint up and fill with vertical gardens and decking as an extension of the rest of the room. And views from the master bedroom across all the old rooftops in our area, probably much the same as anyone who wanted to look would have seen 100 years ago.

I spent all day yesterday looking at tiles and taps and shower-heads, and I enjoyed it. Today I have to see a woman about a doorknob. I can't wait to share our new home with you as it starts to take shape!

Friendships and solitude

You know those weekends that happen sometimes that are full to the brim of lunches and dinners and walks and house-guests and catch-ups with old friends, and you never stop talking or laughing or hugging or lining up for the shower or saying "I have really missed you!"... ? I had one of those last weekend. We had a big charity ball on, organised by Mr B and his team at work (I'm talking 1300+ people), and a whole lot of our dear friends travelled down to Melbourne to dress up and party with us on Saturday night. Most of them stayed for the weekend and some extended their stays from Friday to Monday. It was wonderful and chaotic and all too short.

On the night of the ball, our family booked a room in the same hotel as the function, because we knew it would be such a late night. Neither of us got to sleep until after two-thirty in the morning, which would have been fine if Madeleine hadn't been such an angelic sleeper, slumbering away in her little travel cot next to our bed (cuddled up with pink bunny and pink bunny blanket and looking like something you want to kiss forever and maybe eat), which meant she happily woke up ready to play at six. Welcome to parenthood, Naomi.

So there was nothing for it but to get up and play with her, then take it in turns having showers that never ran out of hot water (bliss!) and head downstairs to introduce Madeleine to the joys of the breakfast bar (she had scrambled eggs and honey on toast and water melon and banana and yoghurt and a sip of my tea).

By nine o'clock Madeleine was rubbing her eyes and ready for another nap. Oh, sweetheart. By that time Mr B and I could have told her a thing or two about being really tired. Mr B stayed behind at the hotel to meet up with some friends who were coming around a bit later, while I tucked little M into her pram under her polka-dot sleeping bag, and walked her home through Melbourne's Sunday-morning streets.

All of a sudden, after the cacophony of crowds and friends and disco music (yes! and an ABBA tribute band!) and giggling babies and goodness knows what else, the solitude was tangible.

Madeleine was snoring before I made it across the road. The pavements were shiny from last night's rain, and mist residue clung to the tops of the skyscrapers. The river was still as stone. And other than me, not a creature was stirring. Not even the proverbial mouse.

Other folks who spend their days and nights with little ones will know what I'm talking about when I say that I no longer experience solitude, not even for a moment (no, not even on the loo). Even when I walk Madeleine normally, it's in busy areas or my own town where every second person knows my name. And I do love my community, but...

But to suddenly be alone in the big city with frost in the wind and my footsteps echoing on the pavement and everything washed clean and new... it was a precious gift. I walked slowly, ever so slowly. And I smiled.

Then the spell broke and we got home and Madeleine woke up and we raced to catch our friends to meet them for lunch and it was all chaos and laughter and joy all over again, and I just felt so lucky for my friendships and my solitude, and especially my family. After lunch they all packed off to the AFL but we headed across to the playground at the museum and something rather wonderful happened.

Madeleine walked! For the first time! And we just so happened to both be there to witness it, and I just so happened to have the phone out and so captured the exact moment on trusty Instagram. Insanely proud Mama moment.

The found notebook

It is mid-morning. You are walking through the city, minding your own business, when you spot something colourful on a stone fence up ahead. You pick it up. It is a journal, lovingly hand-made, and beautiful. You think, "The owner of this will be devastated when they realise they've left it behind." You start flipping through the pages backward. Not to read, not properly (you wouldn't want to intrude on their privacy), but just to see if you can find a clue as to the owner.

That's when you realise the journal is empty: open to possibilities, for stories, dreams, ideas, feelings as-yet untold. "Gosh," you think, "I wish this was mine."

But it is not quite empty, after all.

On the first page, you see writing. There is a message inside, inscribed by a local artist or writer. And the message is for you.

The journal is for you.

You have found one of 30 handmade journals that will surreptitiously be left in various places around Melbourne from 1 to 10 August this year, as gifts of "guerilla kindness" to whoever finds them. (You!)

It is a participatory project called "Sharing Ink" by public artist Sayraphim Lothian.

"I create these works as tiny moments of loveliness for the finder – that instant when the finder spots the work out of the corner of their eye, that moment when they realise that someone has made something and left it somewhere for them to find. That moment is the whole point of the work," she says.

"As the artist, there is also a thrill to the unknowing... I’ll never know what happens to most of them, but there’s mystery and awesomeness in the unknown. While a thing is unknown, it could be anything. It’s only when you know that you narrow down the possibilities."

Shall we take some slow walks through Melbourne together this week?

Photos of the journals (and the inscribers hiding behind them) all from the Sharing Ink blog). Last photo is of the journal materials ready for Sayraphim to make them.

We have news

Our family has a little secret to share. In December, this little angel will become a big sister! We are thrilled and terrified and exhausted-in-anticipation, in equal measure. Have you had or do you know anyone who has had two children under the age of two? I'd really love your advice.