Sometimes I really worry about my kids.

More than just the average ‘gee I hope she doesn’t fall out of that tree and break her arm’ kind of worry… A deep down worry, about how they might turn out.

I laugh a lot about ‘scarring my kids for life’, but all jokes aside, I am acutely aware of the influence I have on my children.

Everything we parents do, both consciously and unconsciously influences our children.

That is a huge scary thought which I try to squash down most of the time… but sometimes it pops up and blows my ever-loving little mind.

Right now it is my ‘middle child’, my beautiful big boy, that I am worrying about more than usual.

At the moment, he is my favourite (because you are allowed to have favourites you know). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love him more than any of the others, it’s just that right now he and I get along really, really well.

He smothers me with cuddles. He looks at me with a twinkle in his eye and mischievous grin on his face. He says funny things. He hardly ever pushes my ‘infuriate’ button. Right now, at almost five, he is delicious.

But I worry about him… a lot.

I worry that I am doing wrong by him.

I worry that our anti-football family will put him at a disadvantage at school next year.

I worry that he won’t make friends.

I worry that he has nothing in common with other boys that he knows because he knows nothing of Ben Ten or Spider Man or super heroes in general.

I worry that he keeps his problems squashed down so far that even he doesn’t really know what is bothering him.

I worry that if I try and ‘fix’ any of these things that I am teaching him that we do not value who he is.

I worry that I shouldn’t even be blogging all of this, in case one day someone googles him and reads this and it causes him angst.

Today he has his first school visit and I am sure many of my worries are fueled by the fact that he will soon turn five and soon be off at school and a little further from my arms, but that doesn’t make then any easier to deal with.

But I guess that is my job right now, to worry about him.

I know that many of the things I worry about could actually be the very best things about my boy… so I squash those worries and I pull him closer and enjoy him for who he is.

Do you worry about your kids?
How to do you deal with those worries?

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Do You Worry About Your Kids? is a post from: picklebums.com

I’ve had a hankering to try out this Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar recipe from Martha Stewart for a while now. I even linked to it in a quick linky love post on Saturday. I figured I would convert the recipe to metric measurements and more Australian ingredients and share my version of the recipe with you today, complete with some gorgeous photos. As an added bonus I’d also have something for lunch boxes this week.

It all sounded perfectly reasonable, but sometimes this whole cooking caper is not as easy as it seems!

Late yesterday afternoon I googled how much a stick of butter weighed, and decided I could just use self raising flour in place of the flour, baking soda etc, and that is possibly where it all started to go wrong…

Here is my version of the recipe.

Cherry Choc-Chip Failure Cookie Bar Recipe

340 grams of softened butter
4 cups self raising flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 small packet of choclate chips (around 300grams)
1 packet of glace cherries, chopped.

First things first… I fired up the conversion app on my phone and figure out to preheat the oven to 180… this was going to be a cinch.

The butter conversion calculator told me that 3 sticks of butter was 340 grams… that’s a lot of butter and that alone should have been a sign that this was going to make a LOT of cookie bars, but I kind of missed that. By the time I was adding the sugar and whipping it up with my beaters I realised that the bowl I was working in was woefully too small for this large recipe, but I pushed on regardless.

When Morgan asked to crack the eggs into the mix I handed them over. We’d made a LOT of quiches over the summer and his egg cracking skills had greatly improved. The first one went in, no problem. The second one kind of exploded between his fingers with half the egg going in and half all over the floor. Oh well… never mind… I’ll just chuck in an extra egg.

Eggs in and mixed well, add the vanilla and then the flour. By this stage the inadequate bowl was making things rather tricky as we tried to mix in the four cups of flour, the choc chips and the cherries. After working up a huge bicep on mixing arm and losing a large amount of dough to the bench and the flour we were finally ready to put it into a tray.

I got out the builders measure tape with both centimeters and inches and measured up some of our baking trays. I was rocking this conversion thing!

Now I’m not exactly sure what a ’12-by-17-inch rimmed baking sheet’ is… but none of our trays were quite big enough, no problem, near enough is good enough right? The ‘bars’ would just be a little chunkier.

Into the oven… timer on for 20 minutes and off I went.

When I came back and cracked open the oven I realised things were not quite going to plan… The mix had risen, A LOT! It was all but spilling out over the edge of my tray. Damn.

Still I turned it round and left it to cook for the last 20 minutes… it’d be ok. But as the oven timer beeped and I lifted the tray out of the oven and left it to cool, I realised things were probably not ok.

The edge of the cake/slice/giant cookie had risen and browned way too much, yet the middle sunk as soon as I took it out of the oven.

As I tried to lift it gently from the tray onto the board to cut it, the damn thing split down the middle and I could see that while the edges were dry and over cooked, the middle looked decidedly like raw cookie dough. Crap.

So what went wrong?

For starters this makes a LOT of mixture, I should have used a bigger bowl, or better yet, made half the quantity, that would have solved my not big enough tray problem too. The extra egg was probably not the best idea, neither was using all self raising flour… possibly changing on of the cups to plain flour might have helped?

Perhaps a lower oven temp (as well as the right sized tray or less mixture) would have helped the crispy outer, uncooked, sunken inner problem…. maybe?

And I really shouldn’t have attempted to cook anything while also making dinner and dealing with a sick and miserable toddler.

But all’s well that ends well. I managed to salvage a little of the slice to go in lunch boxes, the kids ate the gooey broken bits with a spoon for dessert and I still had something to blog about!

Want to make me feel better about my cooking failure and share one of yours?

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Cherry Choc-Chip Cookie Bar Failure! is a post from: picklebums.com

He throws himself on the floor and cries.

Perhaps his arm is broken, or I’ve just shoved bamboo wedges under his finger nails… or perhaps he is just being a pain in the bum, pushing my buttons, being a ‘terrible two year old’.

His arm is definitely not broken, I don’t have any bamboo wedges handy and as for those last few ideas? I wonder if those are just created by a society that often sees parenting as an ‘us against them’ game of control.

I fall into that trap myself every now and then.

When he is throwing a whopper tanty or yelling “no!” in my face, I often jump to the conclusion that he is doing that just to annoy me, to be contrary. It’s easy to feel that way with a toddler, but in reality, he is a small person who is most probably confused, frustrated and just plain sad.

According to Child Development theorists, at 23 months old Noah hasn’t long figured out that he is actually a separate person to me or others, and he is still very ego-centric. That means that he can’t possibly fathom that I don’t feel the exact same way that he does. He really can not see things from my point of view.

When you know this little tid bit of child development theory, the idea that a toddler is even capable of doing something just to annoy an adult seems a bit silly. But when you are there, in the moment, that little bit of knowledge doesn’t always pop into your head, and it doesn’t always make it any easier to deal with the situation.

What I’ve been trying to remember, right then, in that kicking screaming moment, is to find compassion for my child.

If I can find compassion for him, then I can remember that the tears are probably because he is frustrated.

He is only just figuring out that if he wants a drink, he needs to ask for it, that I won’t simply know that. And he is only just learning the words and non-verbal ques to use to ask for that drink. That stuff is hard when you are almost two. And when it doesn’t all work out the way it is supposed to, then all these crazy feelings come bubbling up until all he knows how to do is throw himself on the floor and howl.

If I can find compassion for him, then maybe my response will come from love and understanding, instead of anger. Or maybe all I can do is keep my mouth closed, not yell, and be present while he wails, because I am not a perfect parent… but even that is better than nothing.

Finding compassion for my child doesn’t mean that he gets everything he wants. Sometimes I will still say no, sometimes I can not change the laws of physics and sometimes we will still have to go… but I will tuck him, kicking and screaming, under my arm and go with compassion, instead of anger…. or at least that is my goal.

Do you have any tips for dealing with tantrums?
Any great ways to remember to have compassion for your kids?

(And yes, Noey is sporting a pretty spectacular ‘black eye’ at the moment after launching himself off the couch into the side of the coffee table. It’s actually all colours of the rainbow… the photo doesn’t do it justice.)

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Find Compassion for your Child. is a post from: picklebums.com

Last night I crawled up into the roof storage in our shed, looking for crafty stuff my girls could take to school and use to make me a mothers present.

It was freezing up there, and as I shuffled through rat poop and spider webs to find ribbons and buttons I wondered, why on earth I was doing this? I don’t even celebrate Mother’s Day!

But I did it anyway.

And I will hand over my hard earned cash tomorrow so my girls can buy some bit of junk that I don’t want or need from the school mother’s day stall.

And I will smile and hug my boy and try not to cringe as I read what he has dictated to his kinder teachers about what my favourite things are.

And I’ll do all of this, not because Mother’s Day is important to me, but because we chose to part of the school and kinder community, and because doing these things is important to my children.

But I won’t buy into the commercialisation of Mother’s Day.

I don’t need a pink dressing gown, or pink fluffy slippers, or a pink blender or a pink coffee mug, or any of the other ‘pink for mother’s day’ items that filled the junk mail catalogs this week.

I don’t need my family to spend money on me to show me that they love me and appreciate what I do. I know they love me, and appreciate me, because they tell me, all the time.

I am lucky like that.

I am lucky in other ways too.

I am lucky that have all that I need. Of course there are lots of things I ‘want’ but there really is nothing I ‘need’… nothing at all.

I am lucky that I live in Australia. I can not shake the notion that I had been born in some other country, a country that is less affluent, a country without decent health care, a country without enough food… how different my life would be, how different my children’s lives would be. What if I was a mother in Niger? Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers Report has just name Niger as the worst place to be a mother…

So while it’s no secret that I don’t ‘believe’ in Mother’s Day, and I won’t be getting any presents on Sunday, that doesn’t mean I can’t give one… or two… to another mother, who isn’t quite as lucky as I am.

Today I’ve given some water purification tablets, a bag of seed and two chickens (my kids helped me choose) to families in need via World Vision Gifts. Such an easy way to give and meaningful for my kids as they can choose an item that means something to them.

I’ve also contributed to another loan via Good Return to help a mother in Nepal start a pig farm to help make ends meet. You can contribute directly or but your Mum a gift certificate so that she can choose who to support (and she gets the money when the loan is re-payed, or she can choose to reinvest!).

It’s not much, and while Mother’s day is not important to me, I choose to be part of the world community, and these little things, these small gifts, are important to someone.

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No Mother’s Day Gifts For Me! is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s cold and wet outside, a perfect environment for our Rhubarb to grow like crazy, and a perfect excuse to eat cake!

This cake is best eaten warm, straight out of the oven, while curled up under a blanket on the couch, watching a DVD…. or at least that’s what we think!

Rhubarb Tea Cake Recipe

A couple of sticks of rhubarb (some water and a sprinkle of sugar)
60 grams butter
1/2 cup of brown sugar (or any other sweetener you like)
1 egg
1 1/2 cup of self raising flour
1/2 cup of milk
Cinnamon sugar mix

Wash and cut up your rhubarb into smallish pieces. Pop them into a microwave safe bowl with a little water and a sprinkle of sugar and cook them in the microwave till they are just starting to soften but still retain their shape (or you can cook it on the stove too).

Cream butter and sugar, add the egg and beat well. Stir in the flour and milk alternatively. Set aside some of the pieces of rhubarb to decorate the top of the cake, add the rest of the rhubarb and a little of the pretty pink water and stir it through the batter.

Pour the mix into a well greased cake tin, and arrange the left over rhubarb on the top. Push the rhubarb down into the cake, but don’t let the batter cover it. Sprinkle the top of the cake with lots of cinnamon sugar… or a little bit if you don’t love it as much as we do!

Bake the cake in the moderate oven for 45 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Eat it while it’s warm!

You can also make this cake with apple if you don’t have any rhubarb, or a combination of both!

I love to cook with rhubarb, mostly because we always have some in the garden! Some of our favourite rhubarb recipes are Fruit Sponge Desert, Rhubarb Fizz Drink, and Rhubarb and Apple Scrolls.

Are you a rhubarb fan?
Got any great recipes to share?

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Rhubarb Tea Cake Recipe. is a post from: picklebums.com

Every now and then time seems to slow.

It’s almost as if the flow of time is hampered by the scattering of cars across my floor, the laundry baskets piled one on top of another, and the miscellaneous shoes in odd places.

Perhaps time knows that every now and then it needs to wait a little, while I catch up.

But it doesn’t slow in the crazy moments when you wish it would…

Last night’s bedtime routine was crazy. There was bruised heads, and books to be read, and pajamas without buttons, and a late realization that I didn’t have anything for school lunches.

I’d promised to have an early night, but when I crawled into bed it was 11:50.

Last night was one of those nights when everyone woke and needed me, one after the other. Coughs and cries and bad dreams and when I finally put my big boy back in his bed at 4am… when the house was finally peaceful, time slowed.

I lay there feeling the warm hollow my big boy had left in the bed beside me and time went all wonky.

I remembered the time when my small boy cried and cried and cried the first night we were home from hospital. I remember how worried I was when he slept 8 hours straight as a four week old, and how fleetingly that lasted.

I remembered a time when my big boy used to rub my arms when he fell asleep. I remembered the way he grunted in his sleep to let me know he needed more milk.

I remembered a time when my newborn girls, so tired from simply breathing, rarely opened their eyes. I remembered finally bringing them home and tucking them in, side by side, in the one cot.

I remembered a time, before I was a parent, when cold weather on the weekend meant only getting out of bed to get more food.

I remembered a time, as a child, needing to have talk back radio playing all night, because if the robbers came they would hear people talking and go away.

And I thought how strange life is. How much life changes, and how much it stays the same.

And them time moved on again… but at least for a moment it let me stop and remember.

What are you remembering?

Feel free to write your own remembering post, or leave a comment telling me your rememberings. There is no rules, no time frames, no official linky… but if you’d like to join in, please do! If you blog a remembering please leave me a comment with the link so I can come read it and I’ll share it.

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Remembering a time… is a post from: picklebums.com

What’s worse than living in a half renovated house?

What’s worse than living in a half renovated house with all kinds of small gaps and openings?

What’s worse than living in a half renovated house with all kinds of gaps and openings, and children who leave food crumbs everywhere?

What’s worse, is living in a half renovated house, with all kinds of small gaps and openings, with children who leave foo crumbs everywhere…. in the middle of a mouse plague!

Yes, we have a mouse problem.

When the kids all finally go to bed and the house is quiet, I hear little scurrying feet and chewing teeth everywhere. Behind the TV, under the bed, in the laundry basket. And if the noise isn’t enough one night a mouse popped his little furry head up from behind the couch and started watching TV between my husband and I.

I am not scared of mice, they can even be kinda cute, but I have a problem with bold mice… the kind that attack you when you least suspect it, and I have vowed to eradicate them.

A long time ago, in those carefree childless days I encountered my firs bold mouse.

We lived in the city back then, and when this tiny little mouse scurried across our lounge room floor my first thought was “awww it’s so cute…. don’t kill it!”

As we chased it down the hallway I eagerly suggested “let’s catch it… and let it go in the park.”

We cornered it behind some phone books and I was instructed to move the phone books aside so he could catch it in an ice cream container. I got in close, and carefully, carefully moved the books… “come on little mousey… we won’t hurt you” I coaxed.

Suddenly that tiny, ‘so cute we should save it’, little mouse, shot out from it’s hiding place and ran right up my leg.

Yes… it ran up my leg.

UP. MY. LEG.

And into my pants!

I was wearing shorts.

SHORTS!

That bloody, stinky, feral beast, of a bold mouse, literally clawed his way up my bare leg and attempted to hide in my shorts.

I screamed, and leaped around, and screamed some more.

Before I could manage to get my pants off, the mouse dropped out of the leg of my shorts and ran under the front door and away.

I was left, shaking, standing with my pants around my ankles, damning that bold mouse to hell and vowing to kill every mouse that ever entered my house for the rest of eternity.

Fast forward to last year when I attempted to put on a shoe which contained a dead mouse.

And then, just the other day, when I went to put on my jacket and found a relative of that very first bold mouse living in the sleeve!

That was it, the mouse that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. I am now on a personal mission to kill as many feral mice as I possible can.

Each night we set an elaborate series of traps and baits that makes the Mouse Trap game seem lame in comparison. During the day I dream up more and more places I can hide traps and even crazier food I can lure those bold mice with.

We’re keeping a running tally, on who’s caught the most mouse and with what. I text my husband while he is at work to share my mouse killing prowess and he leaves me little notes in the morning before he goes to work to update our tally. Last week we caught seven in one day and I am almost ready to declare Natural Confectionery Company jelly snakes as the ultimate mouse trap bait. (And before you suggest we try peanut butter, remember the deathly peanut allergic kids we have. Same goes for suggesting we get a cat.)

Ok… I know that this might seem a little gruesome, declaring war on small seemingly innocent rodents, but they started it. If those darn bold mice would just stay outside then I’d be all ‘live and let live’ about it. But when they decide to come into my house and have the audacity complain about what we watch on TV and take up residence in my clothes…. then there is nothing left to do but declare Mouse War!

{image: by paulmoriss via flickr}

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The Mouse Wars is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s the way he rolled over at 6:30 this morning, and before his eyes were even fully open, said “Muuum…. Cake?”

It’s the way he giggled like crazy when I chased him with my fish kissing face.

It’s the way she talked non-stop the whole way home after school camp.

It’s the way she effortlessly goes from ‘almost grown up’ busy drawing fashion designs, to ‘still a little kid’ busy making ‘disgusting pizzas’ from mud and flowers.

It’s the way he makes me laugh as he stalks mice in his socks and undies.

It’s all these things I want to remember.

What are you remembering?

Feel free to write your own remembering post, or leave a comment telling me your rememberings. There is no rules, no time frames, no official linky… but if you’d like to join in, please do! If you blog a remembering please leave me a comment with the link so I can come read it and I’ll share it.

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Remembering is a post from: picklebums.com

‘How to Find Balance in your Life’

‘You CAN Have it All’

The headlines flash up on my screen as I read article after article and am left feeling like a failure.

Finding ‘balance’ seems to be like finding Nirvana for Mums these days, or so it seems.

But my life? My life is totally unbalanced.

Every now and then I wish to ‘have it all’, and have it served up in neat little portions, with everything nicely organised and perfectly ‘balanced’. But instead I live in constant chaos.

But perhaps the articles are wrong. Perhaps unbalanced chaos is not so bad after all? Perhaps balance is the last thing I need right now?

When I stop to think about it, I realise what I need right now is to live in the moment… This crazy moment, surrounded by piles of unfolded laundry, a house that is feral five seconds after I clean it and four kids who need me to be totally, utterly and chaotically, unbalanced.

Right now I choose to be unbalanced.

I choose to load the scales in favour of my children.

There are other things I juggle around the edges. Things like time to do stuff I enjoy, fleeting thoughts of a career, my marriage, my friends… But right now, when my kids are small that is where I choose to spend my time.

I am not always happy about it, in fact sometimes it frustrates me that I can’t just leave the kids and do things and go places whenever I want to. But I know it is not forever, one day the kids will be grown and I will have more time than I know what to do with… but not right now.

Right now I know I can’t ‘have it all’ and be sane and happy.

Right now I need to look at ‘balance’ in a new way. It is not about having equal portions neatly arranged, it’s about priorities, working out what is important for me (not anyone else) right now and figuring out how to make it work.

I choose not to buy into the hype. My marriage won’t end if I don’t have regular ‘date nights’. I will not shrivel up and die if I don’t carve out some ‘me time’. It’s ok to spend 90% of my time with my children, because that is where my life is at right now, that is my priority, and shock of shocks…. that is what makes me happy.

So I say “poo” to balance.
Balance is baloney… and I try not to feed my family too much of that processed crap!

What do you think about the idea that mothers should aspire to ‘balance’?
Can we really have it all? Should we want it all?

{image – that’s me, juggling broccoli provided by Ella’s Garden, at the Kid’s Business Bloggers BBQ recently. Photo via Kid’s Business on flickr.}

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Balance is Baloney! is a post from: picklebums.com

The zucchinis are done, and the cucumbers long gone. We picked the last of the pumpkins on the weekend, and collected the beans that we left to dry out on the vines. We still have tomatoes hanging on, trying their hardest to ripen in the lovely Autumn sunshine we’ve had lately, but this week’s forecast for cold nights will pretty much do them in if I don’t pick them now.

This is the end of the summer crop. It’s a bittersweet time in the garden.

It’s lovely to be harvesting the last of the summers bounty. Pottering around picking beans in the afternoon sunshine, while the bees buzz in the borage. There is still enough herbs, lettuce, and spring onions to make a salad for dinner and still flowers in bloom. Just enough growing to let you imagine the warm days aren’t quite over yet.

But they are.

There dews are heavy and there has already been one light frost. The coming heavy frosts will kill off even the hardy nasturtiums and soon there won’t be much left in the garden to add to our dinner. It’s time to pull out the last of the summer crop and start thinking about what we might plant for winter.

We don’t plant a lot over winter. I am a fair weather gardener. I don’t like the cold, so I don’t intend to spend hours working in the garden when it is cold, wet and miserable over winter. But there is something about growing things that gets under your skin… I can’t rip out the zucchinis without thinking about what I could plant in their place. The seed catalogue lures me in and makes me think that perhaps the winter isn’t entirely too cold to garden…. I mean it’s not like it snows here or anything (well not often!)

So I will plant a winter garden, just a small one, but I’ll keep to my usual gardening ideals…

A Busy Mum’s Guide to Growing Veggies – in Winter!

Grow what you eat.
This the most important thing…. plant the stuff that you and your family like eating!
There is no point having a garden full of exotic Russian Kale if no one in your family will eat the stuff. We will grow bucket loads of broccoli and cauliflower because we like broccoli and cauliflower, and I can put it in lots of different meals, as well as freeze it if we have too much.

Plant what grows well in your garden.
There are some things I just can’t grow. Even though those things are supposed to be ‘easy’ to grow, in our garden, they just won’t. For a while I tried and tried and tried, then I got wise and gave up. I put my efforts into growing things that do well in our garden. We grow enough rhubarb to supply an army because for some reason, rhubarb grows in our garden even with severe neglect, and those are the best kind of plants, especially in winter! Another good winter plant for us is silver beet, it requires very little input from me to thrive.

Plant lots and put them close together.
Jackie French taught me this trick – ignore the planting distance written on the seed packets and punnets, put your plants close together. Some of them may not grow as well because they are crowded, but odds on they’ll still do ok and you can often pick those ones first and enjoy them as ‘baby broccoli’ or ‘pea sprouts’ etc. Planting close together and planting lots will mean less space for weeds, and more chance of success, especially if you are planting from seed.

Think ahead but don’t get too hung up on technicalities.
When growing veggies you do have to think ahead, at least a little. I need to plant garlic and potatoes in winter to have them in the summer. I need to think about how big plants will grow and where to put them so they don’t shade or crowd out other plants. But I try not to get too hung up on technicalities.

There is lots of great advice about companion planting, crop rotation, permaculture and all kinds of other fabulous gardening information, but I just I can’t seem to keep any of that information in my head. I’ve let got of having ‘the perfect garden’ and just settled for ‘a garden’ and so far, despite some failures, it’s been ok. I am sure when I have more time and my brain is not filled with sleep deprived mush and concerns of what on earth to put in school lunches, I’ll master crop rotation, but till then I’ll let it go.

Plant something for the kids.
If your life is full of small children, like mine is, it is unlikely you’ll ever get time to potter around the garden alone. I’ve found that planting something that kids can pick and pick and pick and never kill is important. We have lots of mint in our garden, which some people may think of as an invasive weed, but I think of as a play thing. My kids can pick the mint bare without any damage to the plant. They make potions out of it, or just collect it in a bucket, keeping them entertained for hours.

Also planting something the kids can eat straight from the plant is also a good idea. Peas are good in the cooler months

So there you have it… my probably almost fail safe, might work for you, if you want to give it a try, I’m not making any promises, guide to growing veggies. Of course these tips work equally as well if you are lucky enough to be on the other side of the world and enjoying spring instead of autumn!

Do you have some gardening tips for busy mums (or dads, or whoever) to share?
Do grow a winter veggie garden? What are your favourite winter veggies to plant?

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A Busy Mum’s Guide to Growing Veggies – In Winter. is a post from: picklebums.com