This is the first time we’ve been living in a house we actually owned while having a Pending Baby, so I was very much looking forward to having a chance to decorate a nursery.   As it turned out, our other renovations in the house (creating a space for Billie to move into) meant that Bear (and Grandad) squeaked in with a quick paint-job of the walls a meagre three weeks before my due date.  But that was enough to get some assorted wall decals from Trademe and the $2 Shop up, along with the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star curtains that had recently come down from Beetle’s room.  (Normally those wall stickers shouldn’t actually go up on the walls on so fresh a paint-job, but the nursery is earmarked for Renovations Part Two: The Rest of the House in the not-nearly-distant-enough future)

I searched online for space-themed mobiles with little joy, so Beetle and I set to making some planets out of some $2-shop paper lanterns we’d bought earlier for Billie’s room, but only got so far as stringing them up in the kitchen for a birthday party.

Here are our three planets:

This was a really easy project – all we needed was the lanterns, tissue paper in assorted colours, and some glue.  We used slightly diluted PVA but anything that dries transparent would do.

We ripped up some coloured tissue paper into strips and continent-ish blobs.

For our Earthish planet, we used a blue lantern, with tissue paper in white, blue, and two shades of green.

I sat the lantern in a noodle bowl to stop it rolling around, then Beetle brushed on some glue and started sticking the tissue paper on. I think it looks best if the strips have all rough edges and none of their original corners or edges left, but I wasn’t about to be so fussy while Beetle was working on them.  I’m just mentioning it in case you are making a planet by yourself as a grownup

Keep sticking on bits of tissue paper, overlapping as you go, but leaving some of the original colour of the lantern to show through (if it suits your planet). You will need to rotate the lantern as you go, and may need to turn it upside down partway through the process to ensure both hemispheres get decorated.

This picture shows our Earthish planet when Beetle had finished with it.  I did a quick brush over the top with the diluted glue to smooth down the particularly woolly parts.

Since the first one was a success, I sat down and made a Saturn-ish planet while Beetle decorated one that is kind of like Venus.  I like the stripy planets the best.  Then we hung them up to dry.

Later on, I added a comically small ring to the Saturn lantern for added flair.  After considering various complicated ways to attach a ring, I settled on making one that was too small to go around the equator, so it wouldn’t fall off.  I just traced around a flattened lantern on the biggest bit of scrap cardboard I had (which wasn’t quite big enough!), cut out a circle somewhat bigger than that tracing, then cut out the hole in the middle to be smaller than the tracing of the lantern.  Anyway, it works.

They are jaunty wee planets, and they make me happy to see them hanging above the Pending Boychild’s changing table.

We were aiming this project at school holiday fun and decorations in the nursery, but I’m certain a more educational tack could be taken by those with a good reference on planets and a source of different-sized paper lanterns!

I love it when Beetle goes all experimental, as she did in this painting session.

It’s Beetle’s third week of school now. At first she settled in wonderfully, but then we had some upsets late last week when she realised that we meant it; that she was a School Girl and these long school days were going to keep on happening, even if she missed me during the day and that doing fitness made her so tired she had to come home and have a nap. (Note: this has never happened)

“Mum?”

“Yes Beetle?”

“I hate school”

*sympathetic look*

“Mum?” *eyebrows and sad voice* “I love you Mum.”

…

Yesterday she mentioned over a (thankfully early) breakfast that if she made a teddy bear and took it for news, she would get a sticker (“nearly like being Star Of The Day”), so with a quick reference back to the latest Kids Craft Weekly (conveniently themed Bears) we managed to throw together a cardboard bear face from some packaging cardboard lying around the place.

Beetle took her Bear and proudly wore her sticker until she got too hot and had to take off her sweatshirt. That perked up her yesterday.  She likes school much better on her walk home than at breakfast time… or bed time.

"Dot-to dot window"

All in all, I think she is settling in okay. She’s willingly using the toilet at school (a big thing because using the loo is Too Boring and therefore to be avoided as much as possible), eating lunch, rocking her uniform, and very very excited about the junior school production which is on next week. Two evenings!  And of course, starting school means starting to count down to the school holidays: 3 weeks to go

Today is Beetle’s 5th birthday. We had a very successful school visit, and she will be starting school for real on Monday. But I’m changing the subject for now… everything is going so nicely I don’t want to talk about it yet.

I woke up early enough to take a quiet moment before the big birthday morning, and join SteadyMom’s afternoon tea and chat (which was at 6am NZ time)  I was telling her about the volcano cake Beetle and I made, just for fun, when the kindy kids were learning all about volcanoes and crystals last term, and I realised I hadn’t posted it here.

We started with a chocolate-and-banana cake baked in a bundt tin…

covered it in thin chocolate icing….

…just enough to stick on some coconut-and-green-food-colouring “grass.”

Then Beetle mixed up some lurid red icing for “lava” (I think there was cocoa in there as well)

I jammed a plastic cup down the “crater” of the cake to stop things falling down in there and getting lost, and drizzled over the red icing, which looks alarmingly like we’ve been decorating with the tomato sauce bottle…

Beetle stuck on some lovely, colourful dried fruit for lava. Hooray for the bulk bins! We had dried mango strips, papaya, dried strawberries,  dried cranberries, and some kind of dried apple chunks.  Plus some chocolate coated raisins for “scoria”. Yum!

More applications of the red icing were required. Beetle kept sticking and drizzling icing until she used up all of the dried fruit I’d bought.

It was quite a violent explosion, this little volcano.  Such a lot of molten lava!

When it was finished, we took it around to  Nanny’s place. Beetle was a little concerned that her aunties and uncles might think it was a real volcano, and be somewhat alarmed by that prospect. She carefully reassured them all that it was just a cake, and we all enjoyed having a slice of not-real volcano for afternoon tea.

The next week, Beetle took photos and her story about making a volcano cake to kindy and shared them at news time. Everybody was most impressed

PS: So many of you are enjoying the beach, recently, following the last of summer, or the very first signs of spring in our neck of the woods. I am so jealous…. the sun is shining here, the beach is so, so close, but we have some Dregs Of Poison Pufferfish or something washing up on the shore. Whatever it is, it is killing dogs and prompting stern warnings to keep children off the beach. Poo.

Something that I have learnt in the past year or so is that a slow morning can be a glorious thing.  At Beetle’s kindy drop-off time, Billie immediately gravitated towards the painting easel, rolling up her sleeves and taking tiny baby steps while peeking back over her shoulder to see if the kindy teachers or I were watching.  “It’s okay, Billie” and she was off to work.

Beetle joined her at the easels and they painted together in relative tranquility for a good 20 minutes. Billie did three paintings, and Beetle worked so hard on her one that mat-time came along, so she had to finish it afterwards.

Billie and I rolled up to the shops, where I was planning on doing my yucky glucose screening test but instead took a phonecall from Mum and had an almond croissant with her instead (a much better deal!).  Caught up with Billie’s much-needed haircut, picked up our prescriptions, bought a ten-cent post-haircut lollipop, had a go on the strange little car ride outside the Four Square, and then wandered back to kindy.

It’s nice to not be in a hurry.  That season is coming soon, but for now we’re taking it slow when we can.

Today, my Mum and Dad are moving into a new, smaller home, some 15 minutes up the track.  They’ve moved out of the family home that they have been in for 25 years; where they lived when my sister was born, and where us kids all grew up and left home from.  Since they were left with an empty nest, a large and hilly section, and a house that was “designed by somebody who hates the sun” (according to Bear) it was time for Mum and Dad to move on.

The process happened very fast.  In the last days of May, they fell in love with a little place which was for sale by tender.  They missed out on that one, but pushed through to put their house on the market anyway.  After a decade of worrying about how long the place would take to sell, and having to sell it in the middle of winter, they had a cash buyer the first day after it came on the market, and they have turned around and bought their new place to move into today.

On the day they moved out, I took the girls, a rug, a stack of paper napkins and a batch of cinnamon-swirly scones around, and we all sat on the rug with Mum and Dad and my sister in the empty lounge, for one last time.

It is a big change.  The old house is a 10 minute walk from our house, and a 3 minute detour from our walk to Beetle’s school, and was a very convenient place to pop in between morning-goings-out and end-of-kindy-pickup.  And besides, we have a lot of memories there.

But (once I have driven that motorway-run “up the track” a couple of times) we will soon be settled in to the new place.  Bear’s parents have lived in 4 different places since we got married, and once you go to the new place a couple of times you don’t really think about the old one any more.

Today, Billie and I drove past the old house.  I thought Billie might not understand, but she just said “Nanny’s old house. Nempty now.”

She gets it.  In the next few months, I’m going to miss having Mum so close by.  But I’ve lived 10 and 20 minutes away from her with a baby before; I can do it again.

Beetle is so generous with her artwork.

This afternoon she worked and worked on a crayon heart, which I thought was beautiful and wanted a frame. She then wanted to make a frame out of coloured paper, which we didn’t have (and also, I was trying to make dinner), and then wanted to fold up some white paper.  But she was satisfied when I used a ruler to trace a simple frame around the outside and got out some tempera paints. She decorated the frame and then inside the frame as well, and it was beautiful.

Just then my brother phoned; he and his wife moved house today, and they were inviting us around for coffee-and-dessert after dinner. Immediately Beetle said that she made the heart for them.  It dried in time and I de-framed a previous artwork so I could put it in a wooden frame for them. We lost a bit in the cropping, but we were very happy with it.

She will gladly give away a project she has spent an hour on, to the first visitor who walks in. It is lovely.

One picture that hasn’t yet been given away is hanging on the fridge. She was gazing at it while eating her Weetbix the other morning.  “I’m such an artist!” she said “I’m so glad I don’t scribble.”

—

Today was bright and sunny, so we went for a test-walk up to Beetle’s new school (she starts in just over a month) to see how long it took.  Pretty much 15 minutes front-door to classroom-door. In anticipation, she got dressed in her uniform, and very proudly walked up the road. We had a good play on the playground equipment and walked back again.

It’s been awhile, but Deb left me an encouraging comment so I thought I’d come back.  This year has been tremendously…. interesting…. and between all the family ups and downs I have mostly been doing my best to just.hold.it.together while simultaneously being sleepily, 27 weeks, pregnant (with a boychild this time! we will have the full set!) and having comprehensively destructive renovations happening in the house since February.

For example, this morning we only had the three identically bewhiskered gib-stoppers in the house and it was like, woo, a holiday, how’s the serenity?  And the dining room and kitchen is coated entirely in some kind of powdery plaster dust, which I suppose I ought to tackle somewhat soon, unless it’s going to be Roast Shop for dinner again.

We’ve been coping with the chaos of the invasion by shutting ourselves in the lounge (one of the two unaffected rooms in the house), and during Billie’s naptime I’ve been switching on the Kidzone for Beetle while I curl up on the sofa and have a Pregnant Lady Nap.  It’s amazing how well I can nap to a soundtrack of drop-saws,  Radio Hauraki, and Hooray For Huckle. A lot of the time it feels a lot like I haven’t done anything else, all year.

Still, in the meanwhile Billie can nearly sing her whole ABCs – apart from when I try and video her, when she switches on the “SEE IT! SEE IT!” she learnt from her big sister. And she’ll sit entranced and perfectly still through a stack of stories, demanding “LAST ONE!” when we think we’ve finished. And Beetle is still entranced by “vo’canoes,” wants to call the boychild either Bonny, Steve Irwin or Ash Dolomite Scoria Lava [Lastname], and is starting school next month, which we are still trying to get our heads (and our routines) around.  These girls (and these parents) are not morning people.

But, although we’re trending more towards “Keep Calm and Carry On” than “Get Excited and Make Things” in our current season, we have still been doing something in my brief, cranky, wakeful periods.  I think I will look through my photos and see if I can post a few.

This activity happened by accident. I was inspired by Tiny Happy’s single-colour painted t-shirts, but when it came to the crunch I thought that Beetle could do the drawing first with a fabric marker, and then we could paint in a few bits and pieces.

I slid the shirt over a bit of cardboard and used a few bits of sticky tape to hold the fabric taut, then handed it over to Beetle with a fat black fabric marker.

Beetle has been doing very detailed pictures recently, with lots of funny little features in them, and she got right into decorating the shirt.

So when she had finally finished the art work (complete with signature in the corner) I decided it didn’t need painting in at all, and was rather striking in just the black ink.  It set in 24 hours too, so we were ready to roll without even ironing it. Sweet as.

This is a good activity for doing towards the end of summer (or winter) when your kids’ plain tshirts start to get a few stains and be a bit worse for wear!  I even had Beetle decorate one for Billie as well.

We went out this afternoon for an iceblock, a play and an explore at the Stredwick Reserve in Torbay, up behind the Titoki Montessori Preschool at 70 Stredwick Drive

The girls played on the reserve playground, which was a bit challenging for Billie (especially since the swings had all been removed when we visited) but Beetle had a great time climbing on the chain climbing-net thing and trying out the flying fox.  She has really blossomed in her physical courage and ability recently.

We followed the concrete path beside the preschool’s (fenced off) playground and switched to a gravel path a bit further along, to stroll through some reasonable bush and beside the stormwater collection pond, where we were mobbed greeted by some very enthusiastic ducks.  Note: bring food for ducks next time.  The pond is stocked with grass carp, not that we saw them.

With a few trit-trot-trit-trot bridges to cross, and toddler-accessible terrain, this is a not-terribly-exciting walk through not-that-fabulous bush, but a quick one, good enough for small ones who want a new place to explore, particularly one with a playground attached and just down the road from the Stredwick Dairy. There are no steps, so a stroller would be fine.

My heart has longed for a play kitchen like Soulemama’s for a long time, so I was very enthusiastic when I spotted this little wee hutch dresser on Trademe.  Even better, it came with all the carefully collected vintage cookware from its previous life – lovely little saucepans, tiny enameled baking dishes, wooden spoons and a wee teapot.  I was very happy to bring it home.

Beetle has been busy cooking from a colourful recipe book Mum found for me at the opshop:

Amazing Magical Jello Brand Desserts from 1977 – promising “72 GELATIN AND PUDDING RECIPES YOUR KIDS WILL ENJOY, plus MagicTricks by Marvello the Great”

The graphic design is magnificent, but Beetle is a literal sort of a girl and struggles with “cooking” recipes that she doesn’t have the “ingredients” for.  She was probably happier when she was mixing the dry ingredients (dolly was mixing the wet) for her carrot pixie buns, without the book.

(in one of those synchronicity-of-the-universe moments, we discovered pixie buns when we saw the trays for sale at a kitchenware shop at Thames on holiday last week, then found a tray amongst the lovely bits and pieces with the shelf)

Here she is studying the recipes for Ambrosia Pudding and Sunny Whip.