Disorganised Easter

Can you believe Easter will be here in less than a week? It's so early this year! Last year I was all over the Easter craft, and loving it. If you'd like to learn a wonderful, natural (easy!) way of dying eggs and creating beautiful botanical prints on them, like these below, here is a post I wrote about how to do that, last year. I hope we find the time to do this again!

Things are a lot more chaotic in the Easter preparation stakes this year, with Mr B having been overseas since late Feb, plus  photo-shoots to complete for my book, on top of the normal parenting-work-life roles, so I've decided to forego a lot. I've cancelled the roast-lamb-for-friends party that we usually host on Easter Sunday, and I am sorry to say that at the time of writing, there has been no Easter craft whatsoever going on around these here parts.

I did however feed my kids hot cross buns for afternoon-tea the other day. AND we are going full steam ahead for our second annual family-and-friends Easter egg hunt. This is something I host with two other friends, and last year was such a beautiful time. The photos you see in this post are from that day. We show up in the early morning and deposit literally thousands of eggs in the dew-soaked grass. The Easter bunny makes an appearance, a local cafe delivers coffee for the grown-ups, and there are great big mounds of buttered hot cross buns ready for consumption. This is the one Easter activity I've committed to this year, and I'm probably looking forward to it more than the kids are!

Oh my little Ralph, filching Easter eggs from the Easter Bunny's basket. I can't believe he wasn't even walking or talking, only this time last year. Where did my baby go?

Back to food trucks

Today I'm dipping back into an old, semi-regular kind of post I used to do: a celebration of food trucks. If you're interested, here are all the food trucks I visited back then.

For me it all started when we moved here from Interstate four years ago. It was late summer, I was about two-thirds through my first pregnancy, and it was the sixth interstate or international move we'd made in 18 months. When you move to a completely new city that many times, you get pretty good at learning how to turn "a place" into "a home." I'm not just talking about your house or apartment here, I'm talking about your neighbourhood. I have worked from home for the past 15 years, so I don't have the opportunity to make friends and learn about my city through co-workers. I've got to do the legwork myself and, since we only have one car and Mr B needs that for work, it is literally legwork.

A friend told us, "I've heard that if you walk all the way to the end of your street, there's a taco truck that parks up there at night." I became a little obsessed with this promise. I mean I like tacos (who doesn't?), but I fixated on the mysterious taco truck to a probably overly-excessive degree. To me it represented the first entry in my mental collection of "Stuff I Like About My Neighbourhood," which is a very important collection to start when you move somewhere new.

I think my daughter was about six weeks old when I finally caught up with the taco truck, although it wasn't at the end of our street (those darned things have wheels, and it's harder than you think to track them down in the right place at the right time). I had made a new friend and she and I pushed our prams (her son was about two) north along Lygon Street for several kilometres. The traffic was loud and there were all kinds of building works going on so we walked single file and couldn't chat. The truck location was a lot further than I'd anticipated. Scout started crying for a feed, my friend's son was wiggling and fidgeting and decidedly over being strapped into a pram, and still we were walking.

But when finally, finally we made it to the dingy little park outside of which the truck was parked, there were pockets of people milling around. Eating, chatting, lining up for more. Picnic rugs covering dubious patches of grass. Plastic wine glasses and soda bottles with striped straws. People in suits perched on a low wall, bending over their little cardboard plates so that taco juice wouldn't drip onto their nice clothes. Someone somewhere was playing a guitar. Oh and the tacos were really good (especially the fish ones).

It was the sense of "instant community" that got me hooked on food trucks that day, even more than the food itself. The fact that they can roll up there somewhere not particularly pretty, most often a car park or the side of a nondescript street, and can, by way of a colourful awning and a great-smelling kitchen-on-wheels, create community. And so it started for me.

My food truck hunt slowed down somewhat (alright it pretty much stopped) after I had Ralph. It gets a whole lot harder to schlep around town when you have not only a newborn, but also an 18-month-old who only recently started walking. Double prams are not the most mobile of beasts, and timing long outings around competing nap times and feed times and little legs wanting to run just got too hard. This also coincided with Yarra Council (the area where I live) making it increasingly difficult for food trucks to operate in our area, so I tended to have to travel further afield to find them. I visited a few food truck parks, and even the street food festival last year, and it's kind of great having all the trucks gathered together, but that's a) a different kind of community, and b) even I can only sample just so many types of foods in the one meal (especially if I have to individually line up for each one).

But then a few months ago we ducked into a shopping centre to visit the Apple store and, lo and behold, there was a veritable food truck bonanza parked out behind the supermarkets and greengrocers. I left my family waiting inside with the air conditioning (it was 39 degrees that day) and temporarily dipped back into Food Truck Land just for that one afternoon.

What we ate:

* From Wingster's Grilled Chicken: a burger with buttermilk chicken (because the wings weren't ready yet) and a spicy sauce I can't remember (but it was good), and fries * From the Real Burgers: a classic weiner (because I am a rebel and also it looked and tasted so good) and fries * From the Refresher Truck: a (virgin) piña colada, and a "green power"

Ah, I'd missed the smoky deliciousness in the air, and the comforting rumble of those generators.

Strange magic

It was just a simple, one-block walk to get coffee. But today, with the sun searing the back of my neck and the light a strange kind of summer thickness, and me the only person in the whole street, it felt eerie. Hot, still, silent, and eerie. That first summer at the beginning of The Virgin Suicides kind of eerie. I walked on, past the grass and the houses and the oak trees and old wrought-iron fences and one sleeping cat, to buy my coffee.

My footsteps, the only sound on the street.

A dry wind flirted with the oak leaves on the grass median strip, and stung my eyes until I felt the tears pool. Hot and golden and quiet, this day, and it should have been beautiful but it felt like somebody was about to discover Cecelia in the bath.

This is the point where Strange Magic by ELO starts playing in your head.

The royal family

Not so long ago, Scout's career aspiration was to become Father Christmas, and then a doctor... and then a duck. These days she wants to be a queen. Not a princess, my daughter will have none of that: she is going straight to the top.

"I LOVE queens," she tells me. For Christmas, she asked Father Christmas for "a queen dolly." (Father Christmas found it more challenging than you might imagine to convince the elves to make such a thing).

"Why do you love queens so much?" I ask her.

"Because queens are Mummys and I love Mummy." Be still my heart.

"What do queens do?"

"They wear crowns and dresses and high heels." Of course.

"But," I prompt her, "what else do they do, after they get dressed?"

She looks at me with the air of a person patiently explaining something to someone who is a bit slow. "Well, we will just have to wait and see, won't we?"

Ralph, in the meantime, is VERY into castles. Essentially, any building that is more than two stories high is a castle.

"A castle! I see a castle!" he runs on the spot with excitement, every time we pass the construction site of an apartment complex on Sydney Road.

So on the last day of Mr B's holidays we decide to indulge both passions, and take them to Kryal Castle, the only "castle" within driving distance of Melbourne.

Say what you like about this place, my kids absolutely love it. Scout mixes potions and makes her own perfume. ("This is powdered goblin teeth," says the potions lady. "No, that's flour!" corrects Scout, despite being by far the youngest participant in the potion-mixing class. That's my little baker.) They are riveted during the jousting display (refusing to leave until the end, despite a bitter wind blowing); take turns gleefully playing "following the leader" in the maze; and Scout spends the entire drive home speculating how Merlin will rescue Queen Guinevere from Morgana.

Also, she wears her crown all day.

How to stay alive this summer (and all the other summers)

There's no getting away from it that the sun in Australia is mighty powerful, and mighty dangerous. For Australians, the sun is like some kind of god from ancient times: equally worshipped and feared (and equally benevolent and destructive).

Have you seen the new TV ad by the Cancer Council of Victoria? The whole message is that it's not just those marathon sun-baking sessions or the unexpected "first of the season" sunburn that can cause skin-cancer; even little moments in the sun - walking the dog, rushing out to buy milk, cooking the BBQ - can add up. And your skin, the ad tells us, forgets nothing.

This is no toothless scare campaign. Australia has the highest incidence of melanoma in the world, and two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the age of 70. It's frightening!

My father-in-law died from melanoma. I didn't know him then, but I'm told it wasn't pretty, and the suffering was immense. Mr B and his mother and siblings lost their husband and father much too soon. Both of my parents regularly have skin-checks, and small cancers (thankfully benign) removed, and I know my own skin-future is probably not great. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I would spend all day every day outside without any kind of sun protection. "I don't burn, I tan," I'd tell people. Oh boy.

So anyway enough of the miserable stuff. The whole point of this blog post was to introduce you to a fantastic, FREE app I recently discovered: the Cancer Council of Victoria's SunSmart app. I use it every single day!

You tell the app where you are (in Australia) and it gives you advice on UV levels, in real time. The idea is that you know when to wear sunscreen, protective clothing and a hat, and to stay in the shade; and when you can be free to play in the sun and soak up some of that vital Vitamin D.

You can also create a "skin profile" (I created one for my children) by answering a couple of questions, that will tell you how much and how often to apply sunscreen. If you think you'll be out of doors quite a bit, you can turn on regular reminders to reapply sunscreen.

I use this app every day to watch the UV index rates, sending my children outside in the morning and late afternoon to get some healthy rays when I know it's safe, but bringing them in or covering them up when the UV index climbs. One thing that has been interesting for me to learn is that UV doesn't seem to necessarily correlate with clear skies, OR heat. There have been times during drizzling rain when the UV index was "extreme," and the other day it was 39 degrees but the UV was only "moderate," compared with an "extreme" rating earlier in the day when it wasn't quite so hot.

That's been an education for me and now I rely on my little app all the time. If you're concerned about sun safety this summer, I highly recommend it. For me, I feel a whole lot of peace of mind that my family can now enjoy the sun in a safety that is educated, rather than based on guesswork and estimations.

Photo credit: Cole Patrick, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons 

Home delivery coffee

Dear entrepreneurs and cafe-owners of Melbourne, here is a business idea. Consider it a gift from me to you.

Home delivery coffee.

Allow me to put my case.

Imagine, if you will, the thousands upon thousands of parents, grandparents, friends and nannies in Melbourne right now who have spent all day chasing after babies and toddlers. Anyone who has done this knows how BEHOND EXHAUSTING it is to do. And now imagine this occurring on the back of a night of little or at best broken sleep. Make that THREE AND A HALF YEARS of little or at best broken sleep, night after night.

And now imagine that at around two o’clock in the afternoon, by some happy confluence of hard work, planning, and sheer dumb luck, those babies and toddlers actually fall asleep for a nap. In their own beds. At the same time.

And so all those thousands upon thousands of parents, grandparents, friends and nannies who have spent all day chasing after all those babies and toddlers FINALLY get a chance to sit down. They know they should be cleaning, or working, or folding washing, or calling their mothers. But they are just so mind-numbingly exhausted that all they can do is sit and stare at that stain on the lounge-room rug left over from the Great Banana Mush Incident of ’13.

Do you know what they would love right now? Coffee. They would really, really love a nap-time coffee. Some might even kill for it, and most would probably pay through the nose for it.

But - and here’s the kicker - even if they had the energy to walk, they couldn't leave the house to buy it. The babies and toddlers are asleep, remember?

Now if someone was to develop an app via which all those people could ORDER a coffee, and have a barista with a coffee cart rock up at their home a few minutes later... Well, that person may well be in line to make their first million.

Just a suggestion.

Image credit: Lesly Juarez, licensed for unlimited use under Creative Commons

Public transport scenes

Yesterday while walking to the tram stop during peak hour I saw traffic banked up four or five cars deep around a roundabout, at every entry point. Nobody was going anywhere, but nobody was honking their horns, either. When I came closer, I could see that a mother duck and her nine ducklings were waddling across the road, and all the cars were cheerfully, patiently, waiting for them to safely pass.

You know when you are talking really loudly over music and then suddenly the music stops and everyone hears you say something and it's really embarrassing? That happened to a lady at a tram stop in the city today. One minute she was having a perfectly private conversation with the young man next to her, and the next minute two trams rolled away at the same time and all the traffic stopped at the lights and she yelled to just about all of us, "LET'S GO TO A SEX SHOP ON THE WAY HOME."

On Bourke Street, a busker was playing the didgeridoo to a hip hop backing track. I don't know if that was culturally appropriate. Is it culturally appropriate? Anyway he was pretty good and the music was pretty catchy, and I think the old woman in front of me thought so too, because she started singing "bap-bap-bap, bap-bap-bap" along with the beat. The old man next to her disagreed. "I'd pay him $50 to shut up!" he said, and the old woman stopped singing. "Yuhumph," she responded, and I'm guessing that answer was deliberately obtuse. Then, subtly at first but with increasing gusto, she began to nod her head to the music again. "Do you think that music this loud is even legal?" grumbled the old man, and the nodding stopped. "Hmm, it's loud," she gave him. The old man huffed and puffed and turned his back on the busker. And then I saw the old woman's foot begin to tap...

Middle aged?

Please add two more items to my list of Things My Parents Did That I Thought Were Really Boring But Now I Like Doing Too: 1. Looking at other people's houses, and 2. Going to garage sales.

I remember traipsing around Berowra Heights with my mother while she delivered pamphlets for a part-time job in the 80s, and she would get SUCH a kick out of looking at the way people designed their front gardens, the facades of their houses, even their letter boxes. It was kind of interesting but kind of boring and I never could quite understand why she found it so compelling… until I owned my own house.

On Saturday, as we strolled through the perfect spring sunshine and in and out of unexpectedly cool spring breezes, hand in hand with two pretty adorable children, through Carlton North and into the back streets of Brunswick, I could hear my mother's 1980s words coming out of my 2015 mouth.

"Look at what they've done there - I like the gloss on the paintwork on their fence," I said, without a hint of irony or sarcasm. And, "Hanging plants like that would look good on our balcony, too," and, "I don't like this street as much as ours but imagine how amazing it would be to have a big front yard like that."

Maybe home ownership makes us all middle-aged, whether we are six or sixty.

And also, garage sales. Oh my gosh. Garage sales were so bo-o-o-o-oring when I was a teenager. By this stage we were living in the bush without electricity and Dad was building our house, so my parents would scour the newspaper every weekend and circle garage sales, then off we'd go, looking for second-hand floor-boards and fence-posts and old generators. It became a truly monotonous way to spend the day, weekend after weekend.

But now! Apparently Mr B and I are little old ladies because there is nothing we love better than a garage sale, full of miss-matched teacups, old books, kooky clothes, 70s glassware and ceramics, and enamel just about anything. One of our favourite things is when the warmer weather comes about and all the students in our street host impromptu garage sales on the grass strip that divides our street.

Our walk on Saturday, through the sunshine and the breeze and past all the houses we admired, had a purpose. Our goal was to visit one or 10 of the several thousand garage sales being held in Melbourne that day, as part of the Australia-wide Frankie and Friends Garage Sale.

What we bought:

1 x quirky painted enamel cat-brooch 1 x succulent plant and pink-painted concrete pot from Pop Plant 2 x sweet, vintage little fruit-embellished glass bowls from Pip Lincolne 2 x chocolate and hundreds & thousands doughnuts from All Day Donuts 1 x jingly jangly (but a bit smelly) gold necklace for Scout 1 x truly hideous gold-glitter purse, also for Scout 2 x lucky-dip parcels (resulting in glitter transfer-tattoos and stickers, plastic dinosaur, rocket-ship pencil) 2 x adorable edible teacups made out of biscuits and lollies

What we resisted:

Seriously, you will never know what it cost me (other than money I didn't have) NOT to buy some of the amazing handmade stoneware, super-fine gold rings, limited-run letterpress prints, vintage Little Golden Books and beautiful vintage clothes also on sale that day. Budgets. Le sigh.

And so it came to pass that spending the day with the people I loved, doing things that my parents used to do that I once thought were quite boring, turned out to be one of the best kinds of days a weekend can throw out there. I guess I'm middle aged.

Or old.

Tactile

Is there anyone who doesn't like playing with clay? I mean, you may or may not fantasise about THAT scene in Ghost, and anyway that's none of my business, but I bet if I handed you a lump of clay right now, you'd start manipulating it. Rolling, flattening, squeezing, shaping, smoothing…

There is something so wonderfully tactile about clay that makes it almost impossible to resist. Even more-so if you harbour dreams of creating beautiful things, and even more than that if you happen to be a three-year-old well-practiced in the art of play-dough, who ALSO harbours dreams of creating beautiful things.

We were at the Northcote Pottery Supplies open day a couple of weeks ago, and Scout was in her element. She made a plate: she shaped it, smoothed it, trimmed it and painted it and was incredibly proud. And then she held my hand and insisted on taking a tour of the entire studio, upstairs and down, watching demonstrations and visiting every individual artist in turn.

Now, Scout wants to make something more. I want to make something too! How about you? Do you want to make something with me?

Homecoming?

When we turned the corner on the freeway on the way into Sydney and I caught a glimpse of that oh-so-familiar skyline, I waited for the feeling to settle.

That feeling of homecoming. Of nostalgia, of "this was always my place, and it knows me, and I have come home."

But the feeling never came. I thought, "There it is, I know that place," and that was that.

The next day we took a walk into Surry Hills, where I had lived and was happy for many years. At every corner I said to Mr B and the children, "We used to go for work drinks in that pub," and "I used to walk my dog in that park and there was always a man walking a white rabbit," and "Let's go in here, they make the best fresh juices in the city."

But this was no homecoming. It was as though I was narrating somebody else's life, a television show that I had watched over and over until I knew it by heart, and maybe I had even imagined myself into the show sometimes, but it wasn't REALLY me.

Later, we drove into the Blue Mountains to help celebrate my father's 70th birthday. On the way up, past the local movie theatre, past my high school, past the paddocks and trails where I used to ride my horse, I tried it again. But there was nothing.

Not even when I watched my children play with their cousin and their grandparents, which was pure joy.

I don't know why I wanted to feel like Sydney was a homecoming. Why did I need it? I LOVE living in Melbourne. Living here is the best life I've had since I left New York. I don't want to move back to Sydney. In fact, I feel a mild flutter of panic every time I think of it (which is weird, because my life in Sydney was actually pretty good).

So, why did I go searching for ghosts? Maybe I felt like I just ought to. I mean, how can you live for such a long time in one place, and not feel SOMETHING when you return? I don't have the answer.

And then twice, I felt it.

The first time, it was during a sunny morning spent at the beach with one of my dearest friends, Sarah, and her beautiful baby girl. I was never a beach-dwelling Sydney-sider but that morning, watching my children build sand castles and make friends with waves, sitting beside the friend I hadn't seen in three years although it felt like only yesterday, was like coming home.

The second time was when we arrived back at our house in Melbourne a day early, and an hour past the children's bedtime. They were hungry and exhausted, but they greeted this house like a long-lost parent.

"Look at these new chairs! They are LOVELY!" gasped Scout, about the same chairs we had had since before she was born. And then my darlings made their way into the playroom and reacquainted themselves with all of their toys, one toy at a time. Each toy was held and celebrated and cuddled. Cherished. Everything was as though it was precious and their best. The absence of 10 days had made their hearts grow fonder.

And seeing their happiness, I knew I had come home.