The end is nigh…..

Well, here we are, nearly at the end of the year. We have been flat out for the last few weeks doing, well, I’m not quite sure what, but here’s been a lot if it.

Rudolph the raspberry nosed biscuitdeer?

The kids are on school holiday as of today and we are all very happy about that.

Of course, as you can see by this picture, the kids last few days at school haven’t exactly been nose-to-the-grindstone stuff. They have watched movies, decorated biscuits and had parties.

Torturous stuff the poor pets. ;)

I aways look forward to the school holidays, but this time the end of the school year has come with a bit of sadness. Number 1 son is soon off to High School. How dare he grow up!? (For those of you in other countries, here in Australia the school year starts at the end of January and goes until, well, today).

Because of this High School business I have spent the last few weeks trying to be organised; paperwork, uniforms, paperwork, booklists, stationery….. the list goes on….

No matter how organised I think I am though, I know that worrying too much about it all is ridiculous. Having kids means that organisation is really just a thin facade hiding the ongoing chaos beneath.

One thing I have come to realise over the years is that if you don’t have children you can consider yourselves contributing considerably to the saving of the planet. Over time, each child seems to require the felling of entire rainforests in order to satisfy the excessive form-filling-out demanded by whatever schools they attend! The last few weeks have seen Number 1 bring home what I suspect is his own body weight in notices and forms.

The only piece of paperwork I would have actually welcomed would have been a checklist to make sure everything I needed to sign or hand in was accounted for! As it is I am relying on Number 1’s usual tendency to try to control everything to make sure he has handed over all the things I needed to see. I’m sure there are a few mums out there who will be finding some of those “must be returned by the 13th Dec” notices composting in the bottom of discarded school bags the day before school resumes at the end of January…

A highlight of all this rushing about was the yearly school performance. As usual it was a little disorganised and it didn’t go entirely according to plan, but everyone still had a great time.* For me though, one of the best parts of the night was at the very start before a single class had taken the stage.

Before the show begins they always show a montage of pictures taken through the year during school camps and activities. (One of the best ones was of number 1’s group when they did archery a few months ago. A few triumphant bow wielders standing over theatrically dead bodies lying in the grass, arrows clamped under their armpits). During the montage the song playing was Katy Perry’s Roar. Not high on my favourite song list until that moment.

During the performance the back rows of the theatre are occupied by all of the classes who aren’t needed on stage, so that everyone gets to see the show rather than being corralled backstage and getting underfoot. At the time the music started playing the entire school was seated back there, and as the song went on they all joined in. By halfway through all 270+ kids were standing on their chairs and singing their hearts out.

When the song finished, the kids, then every single person in the audience burst out laughing. It was brilliant. I’m never going to be able to hear that song again without hearing the happiness in their voices when they were all singing (well, shouting) together.

For those of you who aren’t Katy Perry fans, and I completely understand, here is a song for you.

The kids who are graduating always get up on stage at the end of the night and get to jump around and sing a song they all chose as their last performance finale. This year they chose On Top of the World by Imagine Dragons. Funnily enough it seems that the same monkey is in both clips!

*The performance is at a High School 30kms away, the nearest place there is a theatre large enough. This means they usually rehearse out in the playground or in their classrooms after clearing their desks out of the way, and the set changes are winged on the night. None of this means the performance on a proper stage will go smoothly but the kids always get a laugh out of the mistakes and so do we!

Summer. Week one. I’m over it already!

Well, here we are, one week into summer in the southern hemisphere and we have already had every type of weather extreme. On Monday it was a boiling 36c and we were all in shorts and eating icypoles. Now it is day six and we are all back to woolly jackets and freezing our butts off. The driving rain didn’t stop all day yesterday and we spent last night shivering in the cold.

No, I didn’t light the fire, it’s December for gods sake! We should have been barbequeing! Maybe I should get some more wood in though, there was even a snow report on the news yesterday morning…

Broccoli flowers and a tiny Hover Fly. On the right there is an even tinier…. hmmm… I don’t know what that other flier is!

That 36 degrees is far too hot for me. I’m not a hot weather lover at all and looking at the insects in the garden I’m probably not the only one.

I want to do a bit of gardening, stripping out a bed and putting in some new stuff, but I am too lazy have been leaving that particular bit of garden to go crazy for the insects.

I love a nice neat garden but at the same time I love it when things start running to seed and are covered in flowers. The bees and other pollinators love it even more and flock in for their share.

On Monday, when clearly the world was about to combust, I dragged myself outside to check if the chooks had enough fresh water.

I stepped off the back verandah into a shady patch of ground (the edges of which I hadn’t been overly attentive to with the mower, frogs live there) to find every weed blade of grass abuzz with Hover flies.

Usually these guys find a place to hover where they can hold position for as long as possible. Clearly the ability to do that is hugely attractive to the females of their species.

It just so happens that on this particular hot day the places they all wanted to hover were all in the shade. Rather than maintaining a polite distance from each other as they normally do, there were so many (hundreds!) they were all pretending that it was ok to be standing around on the same blade of grass waiting for a turn in the limited airspace.

I felt sorry for the poor fried things and, after finding the well-watered chooks happy now their muddy yard had turned back into a dust bath, I hunted down a shallow dish and filled it with water and old fish tank rocks (so they could walk about and drink, but not die a splashy death) so the hover flies could have a drink too.

I placed it near them and wondered if they would all share, or if I had just accidentally given one of the Hover Flies the best slice of hoverable real estate ever, and that the females would be flocking in for this bloke with the nice new swimming pool…..

After a few minutes I noticed that a some of them had managed drift in the right direction and snatch a drink. I guessed that over time any of them who wanted to would find a way to hover in the right spot, so I retired back to the interior and my own cold drink!

Thirsty hoverflies.

A very big birthday party.

This weekend is a very important birthday. Is it mine? No. That was a few weeks ago and was nowhere near as exciting as the one I’m talking about.

This weekend is the 50th birthday of Doctor Who, a milestone which will be celebrated around the world. Our family will be doing our part by getting up at a ridiculously early hour to watch the Day of the Doctor anniversary special which will be broadcast around the world on Sunday. Thanks to some pre-existing wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, other parts of the world will be celebrating in the very same way at the very same time, but it will be our yesterday.

Thanks to a conversation with Frivolous Monsters recently I decided that I would try to make the event a bit more memorable than just the four of us sitting blearily on the couch with our morning cuppas.

To that end I spent Friday in a creative frenzy, making a huge mess in the kitchen trying to come up with a series of unhealthy and breakfast-inappropriate Doctor Who inspired treats. A quick trawl of the interwebs showed that I am not alone in my intentions so I had a lot of  pictures to inspire me.

What would the Doctor eat if he was coming for breakfast? Well, Jammie Dodgers of course. We don’t have that exact biscuit here but we have a very similar looking one so into the shopping basket they went.

I also found some a packet of small caramelly slices that seemed a much better option than the actual fish fingers they resembled for the fish finger and custard part of the menu. There was no way I was serving actual fish fingers for breakfast. I have to draw the line somewhere… ;)

Of course we had to have Daleks to nibble on, but they aren’t something that come in a packet, so I had to imagine my own. Hmmmm…. A packet of Chocolate Royals for heads and Oreos for bodies seemed perfect so they were added along with some silver sugar balls (edible ball bearings, of course) for decoration. The Chocolate Royals would also be pressed into service for Ood faces and I found some sour strawberry strips to be cut into Ood tentacles. Perfect.

Glueing short stacks of silver ball-studded Oreos together with icing and topping them with appropriately decorated Choccy Royals meant the Daleks turned out quite well. As they had no wheels they became the kind of Dalek I’m sure the Doctor would prefer to face, mostly made of chocolate and unable to escape. Perfect.

When I was rummaging through the cupboards I discovered some forgotten chocolate moulds in the shape of robots. ROBOTS! Some of them could pass for Cybermen so chocolate drops were quickly melted and the moulds filled.

By now I was running out of time to finish, clean up, and hide the evidence before I had to pick the kids up from school… Eeek! I threw the chocolate Cybermen into the freezer to harden and hid the container of finished Daleks and Ood in the fridge under the cauliflower. Totally safe from discovery there of course!

Now I just have to get up before the kids on the day and arrange it all for maximum effect. It shouldn’t be too hard to thrill them, I already told them watching the show involves a compulsory breakfast of real fish fingers and custard…. ;)

A chocolate breakfast.

The perfect place to take this picture was on my kitchen bench, right beside the perfect prop, my very own TARDIS. No, it isn’t full of excitement and adventure, it is just full of tea bags. Still, it puts a smile on my face every time I use it and the grindy wooo wooo noise comes out from the lid. :D

Good weather for ducks.

We have been having all kinds of weather lately cold, wet, warm, dry…. it’s been all over the place. It hasn’t been too good for drying my washing but it has been good for my plants, and, judging by the activity in the garden and the amount of spiderweb I have walked through in the last few weeks, it has clearly been good weather for those who live outdoors.

Well, nearly everyone who lives outside. We had a few days when the heavy rain never let up, only the strength varied, keeping away the birds who usually arrive for their daily feed. We figured they had found somewhere comfortable and dry to wait it out. Our assumptions were proven wrong when a small group turned up, soaked and hungry…

One look at their bedraggled feathers and it became clear that they had just been hiding in a tree waiting for it to stop, and that no food deliveries were being made to them!

I made the mistake of going out in the rain to put sunflower seeds out on the back verandah for them and this guy didn’t even let me put it down. As I stretched my arm out he jumped onto my wrist and scoffed the handful before any of the others got a chance! I felt so sorry for the poor soggy thing I stayed out in the rain until he was finished. :D

Wet and hungry…

Maybe plants can read too!

When I started buying seeds and seedlings for the veg garden earlier in the year I decided that I wanted different varieties than the normal things you usually get at the shop. To that end I have collected things like both red and purple carrots, green grape tomatoes, red spring onion and golden beetroot among others.

Ages ago I also planted some purple sprouting broccoli. It has done one thing really well, sprouted.

The plants are thigh-high with beautiful big green leaves. Unfortunately, their sprouty green-ness had gone on for so long I wondered if anyone had told them that they were supposed to do anything else!

The other day I rearranged the tag on their row and they must have finally read it. I was very excited to see that over the next few days they all managed to summon up some of the ‘purple’ and ‘broccoli’ part of their name. Yippee!

If only some of the other colourful things were ready for picking, now that would be an interesting looking dinner plate. :D

More interesting than the green variety!

Happy Halloween.

As a rule we don’t really celebrate halloween seriously here in Australia, although in recent years the supermarkets have been doing their best to wring a few bucks out of us, tempting the kids with shelves stocked with halloween-y things

Nevertheless, All Hallows Eve is the ideal time for me to share this clip, a short film called Vincent about a tormented young boy, Vincent Malloy, who wants nothing more than to be like Vincent Price.

Of course this film had to be narrated by Vincent Price, the owner of the best evil laugh ever, and animated by the suitably dark Tim Burton* who was probably just recreating the story of his own childhood. What more could I possibly ask for?

Happy halloween and a Mwah ha ha to you. :)

*You just knew animated movies are my favourite didn’t you? Nightmare Before Christmas, the best xmas movie ever, or maybe that’s just me ;)