Weekend links

Do you have plans for the weekend? We are going to a black tie thingy on Saturday night and I need to buy a dress and buying a dress is no fun at ALL when you are a) on a budget and b) under significant time pressure. Am I right?

#firstworldproblems

Right now I'm looking down the barrel of a fairly good weekend-balance between being social and enjoying some family down-time. I hope. We are notorious for over-committing around here, but maybe just maybe this weekend we'll get it right.

What I WANT to do is to spend time doing the everything and nothing that so often make up the best of family time: playing exploring cuddling baking dancing tickling painting eating reading laughing gardening kissing. You know, just... stuff.

What are your plans? I've collected these links for your weekend reading/viewing pleasure:

Before there was Google, this is what people searched for (and how they did it)

These indoor clouds are breathtakingly beautiful

(Dear Santa) I am in love with pretty much everything in this store

How to stop yourself from crying, on any occasion. Have you tried this?

Turn your smartphone into a polariod camera

Can I live in this home please?

This is for all the photographers: magic hour

You've heard of street art. This is forest art

Charts outlining how we live and think, before 30 and after 30. Hilarious!

Molly Yeh is my new blog crush. The photo at the top of this post? Those are her edible gingerbread terrariums

A whole day for free flowers in the city

I love this art on the wall of a building. It's like we all have x-ray vision

19 ways to make snail-mail (even more) fun

A little while ago I mentioned I was making a zine about things you can do with snail mail. Things that help you connect with other people (both strangers and friends), to play games, practice creativity, and show you care. Every page has a call-to-action, like a website you can visit or key words to Google or an address to write to.

I made 11 copies of the zine, and sent them off to some lovely blog readers. I wanted to make more, I truly did, but I don't have a double-sided printer and I just couldn't get the fronts and the backs to line up (do you know what I mean?), so I had to cut and paste all the individual pages and each zine literally took me HOURS to make.

In for a penny in for a pound, so I also hand-made some little envelope homes for the zines, out of last year's old calendar (it was SUCH a beautiful calendar - I wish I had one like it this year!). I finished the whole thing off with a wax seal, as you do.

If you'd like your own copy of this zine and can help me figure out the photocopying conundrum, let me know. Or maybe I should make it available as an e-book? What do you think? Would you like that? In the meantime, I made this little movie so you can see what's inside.

Yours truly, Naomi xo

How to be a good journalist

There is a lot of talk around the Internet (and coffee shops and gyms and office kitchens) at the moment about the failure of the media to query anything, even the most basic of details, about wellness entrepreneur Belle Gibson's claims of surviving countless "terminal" illnesses through diet. As Belle's business and reputation and apparent lies tumble around her, publicly and completely, we are all left wondering, and picking her story apart. WHAT WENT WRONG, everyone wants to know.

And, why didn't anybody ask the right questions?

I'm not going to weigh in on this, other than to say that the whole situation leaves me feeling a bit sick and dirty. Tainted, somehow. And deeply, deeply saddened for everyone involved and everyone whose good nature was callously used. Even for Belle herself, and definitely for her baby boy. I try to put myself in her shoes and I can't but, clearly, something is deeply, deeply wrong.

ANYWAY.

When I started out as a journalist in the 1990s, my first job was in rural commodities. I was a radio reporter, broadcasting daily news stories on scintillating topics like wool futures and cattle markets and whether cotton prices were bullish or bearish (those are real things).

This was a challenge because I felt I could barely count, let alone provide reliable economic analysis and commentary to people who relied upon it for their livings. I think said as much to my Editor, who had taken a massive punt on me in the first place and hired me over more than 100 other applicants.

And that's when he gave me the best advice I have ever received in my entire journalistic career.

Are you ready?

"You don't have to be the expert. You just have to find the expert, and ask the right questions."

It's that simple. To be a good journalist, you only need to do two things.

1) Find an expert. An ACTUAL expert, not a fraud, so do your due diligence. 2) Ask your expert the right questions. Think: what do people need to know? What do people WANT to know? And if you're thinking, "Why does that work," or "How does that work," or simply "I don't get it," then ask those questions, because maybe (probably) your readers will be thinking the same things.

Don't worry about appearing silly, because it's ok. You're not the expert. You're not supposed to be the expert. They are! So just go ahead and ask the right person the good questions and ask them the dumb questions and then put all the answers together into a story that is honest and informative and possibly entertaining and… did I mention honest?

That's it. Now you know how to be a good journalist.

Image credit: Sergey Zolkin, licensed under Creative Commons

Incoming mail - Dear Friend

“My heart was trembling as I walked into the post office, and there you were in Box 237. I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right there. Oh, my dear friend…”

Klara Novak (to Alfred Kralik), via post "The Shop Around the Corner"

Does it ever get old, that thrill of anticipation you feel when you spot something in the mailbox that looks handwritten and personal?

I received these two lovely letters and gifts in the mail last week and they made my day!

They made Scout's day, too. She loves to post my letters when I send them, and can't wait to see what people write when they reply. On this day, we picked up both letters from the Post Office on our way home and I had to promise not to open them until she woke from her nap.

Scout also likes to "read" my letters to me before I can get to them. Generally, they go something like this: "Dear Naomi, one-upon-a-time, it is a scary dinosaur to EAT YOU UP. ROAR. Now you are a cat. The end."

These real letters (from Anke in Germany and Sara just up the road) were even better. Warm, funny, friendly, offering me snippets and glimpses into their lives. As so many letters do.

This blog and my little snail-mail project have brought me so many friends, met and unmet. Thank you!

At table

Let's pretend we are all sitting around the table together, talking about our lives. Can you please pass the salt?

How was your weekend? Ours was absolutely lovely, filled with little moments that in the grand and global scheme of things probably hold no great significance but, in the tiny universe of our family, may become milestones to how we live and love.

I taught Ralph the word "grapes" and he pronounced it "gapeths" with gusto. So cute!

Scout helped me cook dinner last night, perched on a stool beside me with her apron on. Everything was a sensory learning experience. "Mummy can I touch this garlic?" she would ask, softly stroking the peeled clove. And, as I opened a jar of capers, "Can I just try one little one?" followed by frantic evacuation of said caper from her mouth, and the endearingly optimistic pronouncement, "I think it probably will be better when it's cooked."

Ralph, who still doesn't walk or even stand on his own, taught himself how to climb onto the bouncing zebra toy, ride it, then get off again. All by himself. He was immeasurably proud.

Scout spent a good hour yesterday being my mummy. As her baby I am required to spend a lot of time asleep, so it's actually quite a restful game. She tucks me in, and kisses me, finds me a toy to cuddle, then says "I love you a moolion boolion troolion my dahlink. To the moon!"

Another new word for Ralph this weekend was dance ("danth"). Ralph LOVES to dance, and once he learned how to say the word, he would yell it at the end of every song, before the next one came on. I also found it very sweet and telling that when I offered to play some music for him, he crawled as fast as he could not towards the Sonos speaker, but to the record player.

After Scout and I had cooked, we ate dinner together as a family last night. This is SO rare in our house, because the kids tend to eat and go to bed quite early, and Mr B doesn't get home from work until quite late. It was such a treat to sit down at the big table and share a meal, all of us, that we had cooked together.

Of these small things are memories woven and held.

Thank you to everyone who wished me well with our "VIP lunch" on Friday. It went really well and everyone had a great time, complete with an impromptu octogenarian and nonagenarian dance party to The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. I've already posted all my thank-you notes to our guests. I'm trying to get better at sending thank-you notes.

I'm a celebrity! OK not quite, but the mail I sent to Pip Lincolne for her 52 Hellos project made it onto her blog yesterday. I was proud and a little bit embarrassed to be there. I think I knew but it didn't really sink IN that the letter I wrote her might be publicly displayed for people to read. Maybe that's how people on reality TV shows end up doing silly things on camera. They KNOW the cameras are there, but there's too much going on in their immediate world that they forget about the potential others who are witnesses to what they do and say. I don't mind, but maybe I would have tried to be a bit more clever or witty or write about something more momentous than being rejected in an umbrella incident if I'd thought of that. So maybe it's good that I didn't, because nobody enjoys reading self-conscious writing.

How about you? What will you share at the table today?

Outgoing mail art

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Hello! I'm just popping in quickly this morning because we have 10 people coming to our place for lunch today. I'm not cooking (I wish I was, because I love cooking for friends), but the house is a MESS and there is play dough in my hair and I just discovered my black pants have a hole in one knee.

Before I bundle the kids off to daycare and change my clothes and start the mammoth clean, I thought I'd share some of the mail art I've been sending all over the world. Mostly to blog readers who subscribe, but also a little sneaky letter for Pip Lincolne's "52 Hellos" project. Have you written to Pip yet? Would you like to join in?

Have a lovely weekend, dear friends!

ps. Did I tell you I'd made a gallery of all my past mail art? At least, the ones I remembered to photograph? I did, and it's here if you'd like to have a gander 

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The Most Beautiful Letter You Have Ever Written

Come join me and a host of gentle, creative, like-minded people in my five-week letter-writing and mail-art course, delivered entirely online. This course is all about creativity, personal connections, and spreading joy to others through the old-fashioned postal service. Learn more or join in here.

Lost trades, diets, & coming up for air

Life has swept us up lately. Nothing momentous, but one thing is bleeding into the next and leaving little room to come up for air.

I have been making zines and snail-mail packages and painting and posting mail-art. I have also been working on the picture-book I told you about. I sketched up the pictures for the story-boards and then didn’t like them at all, and had to throw them away because even looking at them blocked my ideas for what I WANTED them to do. I think I feel the pressure because I’m not a professional illustrator, and I really want to do my friend’s story justice. I need to find a way to let go of the creative burden and just enjoy the creative process. Do you know this feeling? Does it happen to you? How do you overcome the fear of letting somebody down, when you’re doing something creative?

My little boy has been keeping us up of a night, and not just with nightmares. We don’t really know why. It is probably a combination of teething, and too many grapes during the day (that was definitely the reason on one particular nappy-dominated night), and wanting to crawl around while watching CSI with us at 11pm. Anyway CSI is not THAT great and I’d rather be sleeping and secretly, I think Ralph would rather be sleeping too. He just takes a bit of convincing. Lucky he’s cute.

Mr B and I have been ordering Lite ’n Easy for our lunches and dinners for the past four weeks. We are trying to lose some of our combined “baby weight,” and enjoy the convenience of having the food ready to go. That would be great if you could call Lite ’n Easy food. Which you can’t. At least, the lunches are mostly lovely and fresh, but those frozen dinners! Our theory is that people lose weight because they simply lose the will to eat. Seriously, I can’t spend one more night smelling that food permeating from the microwave, so I’m going to give up. I’ll take away the lessons I’ve learned in portion control and the fact that I no longer seem to desire sweet things after a meal, and make the effort to cook even when I’m exhausted rather than order take-out, and hope for the best. I should probably cut back on the wine at night, too, but nobody’s perfect.

On the other hand, I think anyone in customer service should study the way they do it at Lite ’n Easy. I might not enjoy the meals, but the people on the other end of the phone are wonderful to deal with. Consistently, no matter who I speak to, they are polite and knowledgeable and supportive and friendly and flexible and personable. That’s pretty good, don’t you think? It’s not their fault that frozen microwave food tastes like, well, frozen microwave food.

The cat has a weird allergy that is causing her to scratch her nose all the time. The dog has gone blind. I'm sure you needed to know that.

In other news, we visited the Lost Trades Fair at Kyneton on the weekend and I've never seen so many pre-hipster beards in the one place in all my life. It was a perfect day for a jaunt to the country and the fair would have been lovely, if it were not for the uninvited swarms of European wasps.

We didn’t stay long, but it was enough time for Mr B to discover the joys of letter-pressing and decide that I really needed a letterpress machine to enhance my snail-mail endeavours. So, who am I to argue? I would LOVE to get into letterpress! Would you like your next mail from me to include something lovely and tactile with that classic letterpress debossing? And maybe some kind of illustration I've created on metal plates? I found a nifty little starter number on the internet for $100, to which Mr B responded “Pshaw, you need an original!” He promptly pointed me to an antique (and very expensive) printing press, not letterpress. Now that would be seriously fun, except that we’d have to move to the suburbs to afford a home big enough to house my new hobby. Which might be worth considering. I think the world is almost ready for the Naomi Loves Times.

What’s been going on at your place?

On being needed

Ralph has nightmares. He has since he was quite little. We often wondered what it was in his little life that could feed his nightmares. Not receiving milk in a timely fashion?

During the day, Ralph is the happiest baby you could ever meet. And that's not just his parents talking: friends, doctors, daycare teachers, everyone comments on how cheerful and loving and easygoing he is. Ralph's real name starts with H, and from Week 1 of his little life, his big sister was calling him Happy H. She still does.

But at night - not every night but most nights - Ralph cries out. It is a sudden, piercing wail that has me leaping from the dinner table or couch or bed at double-time, and racing up the stairs to his cot. More often than not, though, the crying stops before I make it to his door. I tip-toe into the unmatched peacefulness of a bedroom with a ticking clock and a sleeping baby, softly sucking his thumb. On the other side of the room, Scout sighs in dreams of her own.

Last night Ralph's nightmare must have caught me in the middle of a REM cycle. I was out of bed and into his room and reaching into his cot before my brain had even registered that the crying had stopped and he was peaceful once again. It was too late. I picked him up, and snuggled him to me, feeling tiny shudders as his sobs subsided. Ralph rested his head on my shoulder, snuggling just under my chin. One arm reached around mine and tiny, chubby fists opened and closed, opened and closed, on my arm, just the way he used to do when he was still nursing.

Before bed, I'd washed Ralph's hair. Scout had helped me. He smelled divine. So I just stood there in my babies' room, feeling Ralph squeeze and release, squeeze and release, on my arm, listening to Scout's regular and heavy breathing, and inhaling this tiny, close, intense world of early-motherhood that I'm in.

Sometimes, being the mother of tiny humans can feel claustrophobic. I'd read about this before but didn't really experience it the first time around with Scout. Partly, I think, because she would only sleep during the day if it was in the pram or the Ergo, so at least twice a day for several hours at a time, I could walk and walk and walk, with only my own thoughts for company, and that gave me the precious alone-time to think and imagine and process and renew.

But by the time Ralph was born Scout was walking, and soon after that talking, and there has been no rest since then. Not one day. Probably not an hour, or even a minute. They talk and cry and play and laugh and gurgle and eat and wail and crawl and grab and smear and break and yell and squeal and kiss and tumble through life from sunrise to sunset, and a good few hours either side of that. I'm not alone, I'm not exercising, I'm not renewing.

Even of an evening when they are in bed asleep and I pull out my computer to write this blog or pull out some pencils and paints to send some snail mail, half of me is still on mama-alert. I'm listening for the sounds of someone being sick, I'm checking the temperature in their room, I'm packing bags and preparing menus for the next day, I'm racing upstairs at the nightmare-call.

All of that can wear you down after a while, and leave you feeling closed in. Where am I, in all this?

And then I stand in the stillness of their bedroom with Scout shifting and now snoring softly, and Ralph's hand relaxed at last, limp over my arm. His jaw drops softly open and he is fully asleep. Gently, I place him back into his cot, tucking him in tightly the way he likes it. I listen to my own breathing, deep and slow now. I think about these exhausting and all-encompassing days and nights with my babies and I remind myself, "This too shall pass." But I don't want it to. Not yet.

Being needed can sometimes feel like a burden. But not being needed is heavier to bear.

Love

love has no gender

love has no race

love has no disability

love has no age

love has no religion

love has no labels

This video from Love Has No Labels has been doing the rounds of social media lately. Have you seen it? Just from watching, I feel so GOOD about the world. Like there is hope for us. Have a great weekend! Try to hug somebody.

(ps. If you can't see the video embedded below, watch it here)

Mean it

I want to share with you one of the best and most important lessons I've ever learned.

In my early 20s I used to babysit for a family who had four children under six. [Insert multiple exclamation points and utter parental exhaustion here. How did they survive!?!?]

The parents were (and are) dear friends of mine, and mentors. I’d known them since I was a rather lost and confused teenager, and our age-gap fell perfectly into that in-between state: they were not old enough to be my parents, but old enough to seem all-knowing while still fun and relevant.

As a teenager I looked up to them in every way and, in many respects, I still do.

One night, as they were preparing to go out and I was helping to tuck all the kids in and brush all the teeth and read all the bedtime stories, I witnessed their father breaking up some sort of disagreement between the children.

“I didn’t mean to do it!” cried one child, over some small crime I can’t remember.

“That's good,” their father said, “but you should mean not to do it.”

I don’t know about those children, but that was a lesson in intent that I have never forgotten.

It is one thing to be blameless on intention. To be going about your own life, and not deliberately causing harm. But to swap those two words around is a whole other level: to deliberately not cause harm is a conscious act in intentional kindness that is so much more powerful.

Last week, not far from my house, a young man was killed while cycling to work. And the person who caused his death did nothing more dastardly than open their parked-car door without looking. The cyclist was thrown into the path of an oncoming truck. Death was instant.

In my compassion for the family of that cyclist, I also feel devastated for the person in the parked car. That person is probably a good person. A kind person. Someone who loves their family, and hugs their Nanna, and sometimes buys lattes for their friends at work. All they wanted that morning was to get out of their car.

But they will carry the burden and consequences of the cyclist's death forever.

People all over the news this week are talking about penalties for opening car doors in cycling lanes. They want stronger legal consequences because otherwise how will the rest of us learn, and remember? I'm going to stop here because this is getting too heavy and too sad but the whole horrible incident reminded me of my friend's advice to his small children, all those years ago.

Dear friends, let's consciously do good. Every time.

Too often, we stop at intent. We like to say it's the thought that counts, but we let the lack of thought go without remark.

Mean to do it. Mean not to do it. But don't ignore it.

Folks, let's mean it!

Image credit: Joshua Earle Photography, licensed under Creative Commons