narrating kayoz

Baby monsters to cuddle in bed

The children have just got to bed, a little later than usual (it's 7:25 as I write, Kaely's asleep, Liam's light's just gone out, after he finished reading me a chapter (and a bit more, because I am weak and wanted to know what came next just as much as he did) of his current book), because they were playing so well after dinner. You might think that means we hated to disturb them, but really it means we hated to disturb ourselves when they were playing happily in the other room!

Mikaela took two baby monsters with her to bed tonight. At first she was playing a game of running away from the monster, "It's going to get me. Quick!" But then suddenly it became a baby monster who she had to hold in her arms and rock to sleep. And then the baby monster wanted to sit on her shoulder while she made a bed for it on Liam's bed (where she thought she might sleep too.)

What I found particularly interesting was that she evidently told Liam they could share the baby monster, but then when he wanted it to sit on his shoulder (this is a bit later on, after teeth cleaning when we were all in his room), and she wanted to hold it, it took him quite a while to come up with "Oh, here's my other baby monster under the bed, he wants to sit on my shoulder." For a while it looked like it may all end in tears because both of them wanted to hold their new imaginary friend at the same time.

Then Mikaela was suddenly holding both (they wanted to be together you see, and Liam was busy reading to me), so I told Liam that was another one, and as she took them away to her room he got another one (or two?) out from under his bed to sleep with him.

Also, Mikaela did not want to go into her room, she wanted to stay in Liam's bed, but when I said, "The baby monsters want to go into your room now, they told me," she ran off happily.

My zucchini's are being murdered!

I had a second attempt at planting out a zucchini two days ago.

The first one I planted got completely eaten by pests (slugs? snails? do earwigs cause damage too? cause we've got a lots of them), despite being surrounded by crushed egg shells, which seemed to work last year.

So this time I planted a more mature plant & added four snail traps (bowls of vegemite/sugar-water to attract them) and strewed around some lettuce and silverbeet leaves as slug traps - although that only works if you go out and collect them before they move on, which I failed to do last night.

 

As you can see from the close-up below though, it is *still* getting eaten. And if this is how it looks after two days...

 

You can see in the top right of that pick there's a leaf already completely eaten, and the others are suffering...

I've never had a problem growing zucchs before. Sure, they always end up with some powdery mildew, but it doesn't seem to stop them producing plenty of produce. And I might have lost the odd seedling, but again, not so it's mattered. So this is really rather disconcerting.

Mikaela rides

Yesterday Kaely rode a bicycle for the first time.

We were given a hand-me-down bike for her a while ago, but needed to add training wheels and lower the seat right down. Chris did that yesterday, and Mikaela was very pleased. While Chris and Liam went on a longer bike ride (2 hours, with stops), Kaely learnt to ride on our driveway. Even with the seat all the way down it is a wee bit high for her, but she did really well, even managing to peddle some of the way back up the hill.

Kids' first trick or treat

As Australian readers know, trick or treating is not particularly common in Australia (although it is becoming more so) - nor is celebrating Halloween in general.* I started going trick or treating as a child after (I think) we did some Halloween things in school and I got all into writing spells and drawing ghosts. But not many of my contemporaries did it, and most houses were visited we less than prepared (but perfectly congenial, for all that).

I don't think we've ever even mentioned Halloween to Liam, much less the idea of trick or treating, but it must have come up at school, because on Friday night at dinner he piped up with "Can we go trick or treating tomorrow?"

I don't know what came over me, but I said sure. So at five o'clock on Saturday night we had to come up with costumes and bags. Liam dressed up as a pirate, with a bit of face paint, a bandana, and a stick for a sword. Kaely decided she wanted to be a fairy (I thought she'd be a pirate with Liam), but then changed her mind when I produced wings out of a secret hand-me-down bag. She didn't like them, but she did like the wand. So she went as not-a-fairy with a wand.

We went very, very local, only knocking on doors where we knew the people, up and down the street from us. We ended up finding six people home, out of about nine doors knocked on. The first (one of our immediate next-door-neighbours) said abruptly "Oh, sorry, we don't do that." (See footnote below for probably explanation.) Which led Liam to say "I'm a bit scared," when knocking at the next house. But happily, everyone else was more than friendly. About half were prepared, but everyone came up with something for the kids. 

We don't really see much of our neighbours. We had a street New Year's Eve party two or three years back which was the first time we met most of them. Many of them have been here since the suburb was built thirty odd years ago, and they told us that way back then - when they were mostly young couples with children - they did this every New Year, blocking of part of the street and having a grand old time. Now most of their children have moved away, and so have many of those original owners, and the community has become more disparate.

So it was nice to stop and chat with some of them as we made our rounds. We visited, as I said, six houses, yet it took us about 45 minutes. And as well as the requisite lollies and chocolates we came home with a bag of broad beans and two tomato seedlings ("the best cultivar in the world").

Before we left home I told the kids that any lollies they collected would be put into a joint family bowl when we got back. This was partly to head off any comparisons on who got what or how much, and partly because the 'fairy bag' I found Mikaela was tiny (though as it turns out, it was big enough).

They got little enough (five houses, after all), that when we did get back I decided to let them eat it all then and there and get the sugar rush over in one go. This worked like a charm. Liam doesn't like chocolate, so although he tried one mini milkyway, he ended up giving it to Chris and was happy for Mikaela, Chris & I to divide the rest. But then, Kaely ate maybe half a dozen lollies, one chocolate, and ended up giving the rest away. She had a butter scotch, which was probably the first really hard lolly she'd ever had, and did not like the effect (I had to dig it out of her teeth for her!), so I think it was partly that put her off.

In any case, they both had a smashing good time, were perfectly happy with their tiny haul, and very keen to do it again next year. And we had a lovely time catching up with some neighbours, so we'll be happy to as well.

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*Which could lead to a whole discussion on how some snotty Aussie's get annoyed by Halloween celebrations, complaining that we are taking on more US culture, when in fact Halloween goes back a lot further than the US does, right back to Pagan culture - but lets not bother going there right now. I'm happy with simply saying that Chris is half American, so trick or treating is letting our kids explore their American heritage.

Writing again

I have half an hour before my pilates session and I forgot to bring a book, so I'd really like to write a blog post, but... I've been staring at this screen almost without a break since 8 o'clock this morning (it's now nearly 5:30) and my eyes are fried. The computer's little workbreak program told me to find something else to do around 3pm, but I don't got nothing else to do. This is my job.

However, I am feeling somewhat revitalised and excited about writing again. I don't mean blog writing (though who knows, that may come too) I mean writing writing. Fiction writing, in fact. I am going to start by working on some things I already wrote but never really finished for whatever reason. Beginning with that novel I wrote a first draft of some years back now (where did that time go?), which I never sat down and edited into something good, for a variety of reasons which now seem somewhat foolish (although being tied up with the Masters was probably a valid one).

I want to talk more about this, but right now I just can't do it. Gotta shut down this contraption before my eyes fall out of my head.

Kaely's blanket

This is Mikaela at about three weeks old, snuggled under the blanket I knitted for her. The one for the next baby will probably be about the same size or a little bigger, similar in colour but with a strand of light blue angora replacing the darker purple mohair in this one (they are both knitted with three colours of wool together. Liam's - which is more than twice is big (lucky first I guess) - was with four.

Liam and Mikaela now both love to snuggle under their blankets when they are building cubbies/watching TV/reading or being read to. Which is rather gratifying. So far Mikaela doesn't mind that hers is so much smaller than Liam's, but I'm preparing for the possibility of having to knit another half to it and sew them together - because as she grows it might not be quite as satisfactory. Which is why I'm thinking of making the current one a little bigger, but we'll see how I go!

A perfect day

I have had such a lovely day today.

After dropping Liam at school, Mikaela and I went to my mum's, where we spent the day hanging with her, along with my cousin & her two little girls (4 months older and 12 months younger than Kaely).

The three girls see each other almost every Monday, but this was a particularly good day. There was some squabbling, of course, but there were also tea parties, taking turns playing drums and piano, racing around squealing like crazy people (okay, that did get old fairly quickly, but my wonderful Mum put a stop to it by reading them a story or two while I got lunch), feeding the fish in Mum's backyard, hiding under bed clothes, building train sets, and so on. Most of which was done in remarkable harmony.

It was 32 degrees today (90F) so after school (and a few errands) Mikaela, Liam & I hung about outside in the shade for nearly an hour, the kids having a cool outdoor bath (in a clam shell), me sitting with my feet dangling in the water. Liam actually spent most of the time out of the water, just popping into it to cool down from time to time, so it wasn't much of a bath for him, but it was a lovely way to spend an hour. And then later the water can be bucketed onto the garden, which it needs.

When we came in I sat knitting* for another half hour or so, while Liam read to me (his idea - we went to the library before we left school), and Kaely pottered around, making beds, reading books to 'Baby Purple Teddy' etc, and Chris cooked dinner.

And after dinner, we spent another half hour outside enjoying the evening cool, playing with Lochie, and watering**/weeding the vegie garden (not as much as it needs though, of either one).

Now the kids are in bed, and I'm off back outside to bucket the water from the clam shell onto the new plants we've put in out the front.

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*I'm knitting a blanket for the baby, to match the ones I made for Liam & Mikaela (a bit like this one, but it I gave to my best friend's baby, who was born first - Kaely's is not even half this size, and neither will this new one be), but while I'm more than half way through the pregnancy I'm only maybe a third of the way through the blanket, so I really need to get on with it!

**With rain water, of course, though that is fast running out.

A kicking baby! (or Seventeen weeks pregnant)

Seventeen weeks pregnant today. And I just felt a really big kick.

I didn't feel anything like it this early in the other two pregnancies, so it felt different to anything I did feel - lower, I guess, than it would have been the other times. But also really strong. I was just starting to bend to get up off the couch, and maybe the baby was surprised or something. It almost felt like someone jabbed me from the outside - didn't hurt, but gave me quite a shock. But a good one. :)

I've been feeling subtle movements for a week now. At first I wasn't totally sure if that's really what it was, but over the past few days I'd become more certain, and today I've been feeling heaps of movement. People talk about bubbles, or fluttery movements, but for me it's more like the baby turning, or slowly moving across my belly, which is how I remember the early movements with the other two as well.

I don't remember if I blogged this already, but when I saw the midwife at 15 weeks she couldn't find a heartbeat. If my GP hadn't found one the week earlier (though it took him forever, and she didn't try for as long, knowing that I had heard it the week before), I would have been seriously paranoid.

As it was, I was a little paranoid. I had a dream a few nights ago that I saw my GP and then a nurse when I was exactly 17 weeks, and the nurse *still* couldn't find a heartbeat, except that she barely tried at all, and kept moving the doppler around too quickly to catch anything anyway. I remember being more annoyed with her than worried, but still a bit worried!

Anyway, now I can really rest easy, which is very, very nice. The midwife did say I could drop in sometime in the next couple of weeks to give it another try, but I don't feel like I need to now. I have the 19/20 week ultrasound three weeks from today, which I am really looking forward to - hard to believe now that I didn't even have that when I was pregnant with Liam, and wasn't worried the whole time. 

In other pregnancy news the 'morning' sickness is almost completely gone now (which is much earlier than it did with Kaely, about the same as with Liam, maybe slightly later), as long as I don't get too hungry. I felt sick moreorless all day Sunday, but barely at all Friday or Saturday or today (which is Wednesday, BTW). When I do it's usually only in the evening. The reflux is also better, oddly, though I remember that with Mikaela too - it was their more 1st trimester than 2nd, then back in 3rd. It's not gone, but it's better.

Aside from that I am feeling really pregnant now. And looking it too. Can no longer possibly be mistaken for merely putting on weight. Plus my skin is stretching (meaning, I can feel it feeling stretched), my belly is getting in the way, and I can feel the slight discomfort of the baby on the cervix from time to time (nothing like it feels in the third trimester though!).

I also have more energy, but I must say I am still easily worn out - more so than I remember in the second trimester last time. Then again, I've always joked that the second trimester doesn't start for me until about 20 weeks, when the nausea is truly gone, so maybe more energy is on it's way. Hopefully. Also I've had a mild bug on and off (maybe two different ones?) for the past couple of weeks - passed on from the kids - so of course that reduces energy.

But I guess the best thing of all is that the first trimester depression is completely gone and I'm feeling rather happy indeed about being pregnant, even though I know how much work children are! And that feels very good.

The Spring garden

I found some self-seeded oregano this morning, while out of the front planting out a few clumps of violets pulled out of my cousin's garden, and a purple daisy cutting from my own. Also a self-seeded grape hyacinth and a tiny violet plant - all on the edge of our so-called 'lawn'. I think I'm going to cultivate the un-lawn look just there and see if some more will come up next year.

I love when things come up by themselves. It's good when things we plant deliberately flourish, of course. But when things come up by themselves - and in a good spot - it seems as though we must be doing something right. It feels like that's how a healthy, productive garden should work. Permaculture, really.

On a separate topic - I can't wait to be eating fresh tomatoes out of my garden, instead of the tasteless shop-bought ones. If that's all we grew every year, it would still be so worth it.

Kids, garden, worms and more!

A post in dot points.

What? It's Spring, and I'm pregnant. I don't have time to do better than this! But lots of things are happening.

• Mikaela, for instance, has been out of nappies (except at night) since last weekend. We picked an awful time to do it, given she was sick - quite sick by Monday - but oh well. It's going reasonably well so far. A few more accidents than we had with Liam, but she is six months younger than he was. I know some people do it about a year or more earlier than this, and put up with accidents for longer, but I just don't have it in me for that. I'd much rather deal with nappies than accidents! But she was more than ready, and the weather is warming, so we've taken the plunge.


• Liam started Hapkido last week. He was over the moon with excitement about it afterwards. He's gone along to his second class today. Chris has been doing Hapkido on and off for a few years (though his real background is in Taekwondo), but mostly off for the past couple due to various injuries (not to mention ankle surgery). However, he is back for his first class in a year today and very happy about it. They have a 'parents & kids' session - two classes side by side - so we're hoping that will work out for the two of them for a while. I am more than happy to have it not be an after school activity that I will have to drag Mikaela and the baby to next year.
  
  Getting Liam into a martial art has been something Chris has always been in favour of, though he agreed with me that he shouldn't start too young, so he's happy too. And I've ruled that it's going to count as his summer activity (instead of cricket, tin pin bowls or basket ball, which were Liam's other plans), so I'm happy. I'm a bit strict about limiting out of school activities - he's always had swimming on Sundays, but aside from that, the AFL this winter was his first regular extra-curricular commitment.
  
  I'm mean about it partly out of a philosophy that really wants to limit those sorts of structured activities, and partly out of an awareness that eventually there will be three of them to ferry around.


• Liam also started knitting at home this week. He's been knitting at school since the start of second term (ie about April), but on Friday he convinced me to buy him some needles (5.5mm) and wool from the Orana shop, and he's been working on a 'stick holder' (don't ask) enthusiastically since. One row at a time (or less), but almost all his own work. I was a bit worried that he would end up asking me to do most of it, but so far so good.


• It is Spring and the gardening fever has hit. Well, in theory anyway. In practice I'm trying not to ask too much of myself, given I'm only just getting over the morning sickness part of pregnancy (despite being 16 weeks now, and a few days).
  
  I was looking at my vegie garden the other day, and realised that if I did nothing but maintain it (weed, water and harvest) we'd most certainly have silverbeet, parsley (both of which are still there from last year), and volunteer tomatoes - at least tom thumbs - peas, maybe snap beans, and probably potatoes. Which wouldn't be so bad. Oh, and cos lettuce, some of which have already come up, self seeded.
  
  However, I don't plan to leave it at that. So yesterday Kaely and I got out and planted some sugar snap peas (seeds) and some rocket (seedlings). Next month we'll get in some zuchinnis and tomatoes, and hopefully between now and then I'll sow some carrot and spring onion seeds. Oh, and I really want to get some basil in this year. And Liam wants corn.
  
  Pretty basic. I'm not going to bother with beans this year - unless maybe one or two plants - because we just couldn't keep up with them last year. We're not really bean eaters, except raw in salads or straight off the bush. And having realised that if I do nothing, we'll still have some harvest, I now feel that anything is a bonus. But I have set myself up for better success this year by not planning too much.
  
  Same with the rest of the garden. We've got weeds galore coming up out the front, so I must get out and pull them up after the next rain, but aside from that if I get nothing but maintenance done I'll be happy. We put in a second apple tree and a medlar at the very last gasp of the bare root tree planting season (or slightly beyond, if the truth be known), and next year we'll try for some more fruit trees. But I remind myself that we will shortly have three young children, and that neither one of us has (or even really wants) a good protestant work ethic. We like to read, rest, sit around and chat, that sort of thing. So if we don't get the garden to look as good as my parents' garden does, well, it's nice to remember that theirs wasn't anything close to what it is now until I was in high-school. So as long as we get some more fruit trees in over the next couple of years, we'll be right.


• Also on the gardening front, I got a garden bed worm farm last weekend, which we are planning to use to process all the poo Lochie produces. Seriously, that dog is just a pooing machine! Obviously we won't haven't put it near any food plants, but I am hoping that we can move it around the garden to a different spot every six-twelve months and really build up the worm population in our soil, as well as deal with the poo problem. The worms supplied with it are a mix which includes both composting worms, and a kind of earth worm which will work more to take the goodness of the worm castings down into the soil. It sits directly in the garden bed, so there's no need for us to remove the castings ourselves. Lovely system. Hope it works!
  
  Unfortunately Chris wormed Lochie right before we got the farm, so we've had to wait a week to begin feeding them the poo. And that's going to be an issue for one week of every month. But processing the poo to be useful (instead of polluting) three weeks out of four is still a huge improvement over what we've been doing.


• I'm 16.5 weeks pregnant. I *think* I've started feeling the odd movement - as of Wednesday morning - but I'm not completely convinced yet. I know that with both the other kids I had a similar experience, and then later when I was sure I decided that's what I'd been feeling all along. But I also know that there've been times between pregnancies when I've felt some gas moving around in my gut and thought it felt exactly like the baby moving around in later pregnancy. This early it's a different feeling, but still, I'm withholding judgement. It's still exciting though.


• Edited to add: And Liam's reading is coming along in leaps and bounds. I got him some new Zac Power books from the library, not realising these were longer with smaller text. At first he struggled a little (though not as much as with Harry Potter, of which we are still reading a couple of pages at a time in between Zac Power books), but a few days later and he's doing really well with them.

Okay, I'd better start getting dinner organised now. I promised Kaely we would make pancakes for dinner, so she's been agitating to get started for half an hour already.