Food glorious food

Mother's Day dinner at Darshna's place. Darshna looks after Sam 3 days a week at her house. She frequently makes Roti for the kids for breakfast (those lucky kids!). I had her savory breakfast pancakes the other morning, it was so yummy. I took Mother-in-law with me to her Mother's Day dinner. I'm getting recipes from her, I love her curries!


For Sunday morning breakfast we had Pattisons' pastries.


Mum's steamed buns. I bought a big stainless steel steamer last weekend, its purpose is to cook homemade buns like these... when I have time....

Some pictures of Sam

Some photos of Sam, the first few in his family daycare.

Sam reading to little boy Jacob.
Sam loves to read. He frequently brings a book to us so we can read to him. He likes the 'In the night garden' book, 'Spot' books and his Masiy cloth book. Sam's not very careful with his books, h ripped books apart and threw them about.


Sam enjoying a cup of babyccino.
He loves to drink our tea too. Sam loves Indian food! He can eat very spicy curries!





Sam playing with toys.
He loves cars and balls. And trains too. He says 'all on board' (in his own way) every time he sees a train. Did I mention he talks all the time now?



Sam fascinated by Lara's face-parinting in school's 'family fun day'.
We have been to a couple of fairs recently. Both Lara and Sam enjoyed being out in the beautiful winter sun, patting the animals and the play facility. The most recent one we went to was 'Festival on the Green' in St Ives. We paid for Sam to go on a $5 jumping castle and he wanted to get out in 10 seconds....

Nearly harvest again

Our mandarin tree is full of mandarines again. They are green at the moment but hopfully will strat to ripe soon! Simon gave me a new task of doing a mandarin marmalade this winter. Better start researching for a nice recipe!

Eczema and vegetarian cookbook

Sam has eczema since he was a newborn, on and off, sometimes not so good but mostly managable. It got worse when he was around 6-7 months. He had red patches all over his arms and legs but none under his nappy. Doctor suggested we change laundry powder. A acquaintance at daycare told me her specialist recommended pure soap as her son had bad eczema too. I switched to pure soap for Sam's clothes, but we still use normal detergent for ours(omo sensetive). It probably helped Sam's skin somewhat, well enough for us to forget about it for a while until it started again at the end of last year. The eczema was the worst ever, it was not on and off, it was ON all the time! Sam would scratch his skin, it bled and healed and you could see little red blood marks everywhere. The itch would made him awake at night(otherwise he always sleeps through) and made him irritable during the day. Doctor prescribed cortisone cream (elocon) and said eczema is a chronic disease we need to manage. Sam was only 18 months old and my lovely baby boy, for his sake I need to believe I can find a solution for his eczema. Anyway I started doing research on the internet and looking at alternative medicines. We took Sam to see a Chinese doctor for herbal cream and he had acupuncture. I was also looking at naturopaths.

It was during that time that I came across this website : Eczema - One family's solution . As soon as I saw it, I remembered we had changed back to detergent for Sam's clothes at around the time his eczema got worse. I was very moved by this Mum's determination to fix her son's eczema and I realised detergent exposure was probably the main reason Sam's eczema got worse. I can relate to the "water in bucket" analogy of allergy on the website - Sam's bucket was full (he had a lot more exposture to detergent) and that made him susceptible to allergens that he could usually tolerate, like grass. Now we only use pure soap to wash clothes for the whole family, we also switched to a detergent-free dishwashing liquid. I'm watchful for anything that has SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) or similar. Food was another big contributor to Sam's eczema problem.

A book I read recommend eating only veges and brown rice for two weeks then slowly introduce food to determine the 'culprit'. It sounded like a good idea but very hard to implement. Sam is in daycare 4 days a week. It is very hard to control his food intake during those days, it's even harder for me to cook tasty food with only vegetables. I know I need to learn to cook more tasty vegetarian food so I bought a new cookbook "River cottage veg everyday" to help me. Every dish in this book looks so yummy and I want to make every dish in this book! So far, I made beetroot and walnut hummus (page 300), oven-dried tomatoes (page 304), pistachio dukka (page 294), roasted pasnip chips (page 357) and Tahini-dressed courgette and green bean salad (page 74). I will be making more even when Simon and the kids don't share my enthusiasm unfortunately...

Apple picking at Bilpin

This trip was supposed to be steam train rides, apple picking was a do-if-we-have-time event. Apple-picking became the main event when we arrived at the zig-zag railway and found it closed due to unexpected maintenance. What a disappointment! Thank goodness for apples to cheer us up. The day was beautifully sunny. Driving up the Bell Line of road was lovely. We heard the distinctive high-pitch ringing sound the Bell birds made when we wound our windows down. Being Easter Saturday, there was a small traffic jam at Richmond. We managed to stop at Fruti Tutti for lunch and ice-cream but due to time constrain, drove right past Mt Tomah national park. The Fuji and Pink lady apples we picked were nice, Sam had 3 and didnt have much for dinner afterwards. There are also plums/apricots to pick if we go at the right time.

First term of school

I can't believe how fast the first term of school went. This blog entry was changed from first week of school to first month then the fist term of school!



The few weeks leading to Lara's start at 'big' school were busy days. Not only was I trying to get everything ready (uniforms, shoes, socks, school bags, swimming gear, lunch boxes to name a few - there were a lot of things to buy!), I also planned special activities for Lara, we went swimming and skating, went to the beach, had playdates and watched 'The Muppets'. Lara was very excited with the prospect of going to school 'every day'.

Lara's first day at school was smooth and uneventful. We had our cameras and took a couple of quick pics but as advised we didn't make a big deal of it. We left Lara as soon as she settled in the classroom. It was good as there was no time for Lara or us to get too sentimental. Getting upset or emotional would not help Lara or us in this situation.

Lara made some new friends and seemed to take this new school thing matter-of-factly. She loved school and complained about school being too short. The first couple of weeks of school was perfect. Then she got sick, vomiting, temperature and had to stay home for 3 days. After that it was complaint of tummy aches. To cut a long story short, the recurren tummy aches, we found later, was due to not drinking enough water (apparently very common in school kids) not bullying as I suspected.

Swimming classes started at week 2 and homework at week 5. There were readers to read every night and sight words to revise (when I remember). My life was extremely busy with class funcitons, playdates and plays-in-the-park, pencil-shapening and literacy volunteering. There are special days to remember (Harmony days all kids wore orange, healthy-lunch-day $5 but no lunch etc), lost properties to find (Lara seemed to lose at least one item of clothing every week), and so many notes going back and forth. I felt like I have two part-time jobs!

Even though I am busy with work at the moment, I'm very happy about this short break called school holiday! Somehow I managed to volunteer to do more reading and pencil-sharpening next term!! Hopefully things run smoothly next term.

Violin lesson 25-Feb and beyond

Lara is learning "Song of the wind" at the moment, the second song after the Twinkle variations. The challenge of "Song of the wind" is the jumping Mr three, which Lara seemed to get quickly. Maybe being left-handed helped in that regard. The twinkles, though simple, were the toughest part of the violin journey. We experienced a lot of crying, and resistance during that time. I did not complain about it much, but it was hard work without a doubt. I did a lot of reflections (was I too strict, too relax, did I ask too much or not enough) and researches on internet, read books and wrote emails to teacher during that time in order to calm myself down. The Suzuki Institute holds 'twinkle graduation concert' in Opera House every year, because being able to play the twinkles is a great achievement. I see other parents going through the twinkles stage now and listening to their stories, I am very glad that Lara's home practice sessions are getting easier.

Music is a long road and we are only at the beginning. With violins, there is also that initial period of learning to hold a foreign object, tilt your head in an almost unnatural way, press down hard on your fingers(they do hurt) at the right place or you don't make a pleasant sound. We have our good and bad days. Lara's young teacher Elle said it took her a long time to complete the twinkles, but 18 years later, she's still playing. I think about this every time we encountered difficulties.

A friend was talking to me about starting her 2-year-old on violin lessons at 3. I don't think I will do that with Sam personally. At the Suzuki summer camp, I met a piano teacher whose 4-year-old girl started violin at 2 (& sat in at lessons at 18 months (Sam's age!) I didn't get a chance to hear her play but I watched her on stage at the final concert. She might play well but she didn't have the mental maturity to follow instructions. During the time she was on stage, she kept stopping in the middle of the song to do other things (look at other kids, scratch her arm etc). I can only imagine what daily practice would be like. Do I want to go through this with Sam every day? The answer is no.

*********************************************************************

I was looking for photos to go with this post, and another 3 weeks passed. Lara is now up to 'oh come little children', the forth song after the twinkles. This song had some difficult parts (esp the two up bows). Just when I thought practices were better, we had an awful week. Luckily during this time, I chanced upon an article in "teaching suzuki" about learning 'oh come little children'. Then I realised my mistake - I couldn't expect Lara to remember the bow movements before she can play the song. I needed to just let her play the melody, once she knew the song well, the bow movements would follow. And she played so much better after that! I have a lot to learn too....

Eating out alone

We had a few chances this past month to go out for lunch by ourselves (without the kids). Simon was off work and looking for job (he just found one so will start work soon), and I work 3 days a week. Sam is in daycare four days a week this year so I can have a day 'off'. On my first 'day off', both Lara and Sam were sick, so we had to cancel our plan to watch a movie. We also realised it was too ambitious to watch a movie and go out to eat on the same day, because Lara needs to be picked up from school at 2:30pm. Yes 2:30. The off day is extremetly short anyway.

We managed to eat out a couple of times after that and it was great. We had a nice relaxing lunch at the local Thai place last week. This week we went to the Cooks Garden and had steak'n' chips (simon) and zucchini flower stuffed with prawns (me). You don't need to keep 'stop eating' to feed someone small or not keep to the conversations because the kids keep interrupting.

It is very nice to eat out in peace and quiet sometimes.

The picture shown above was taken at a vietnamese place in late Jan. I think Lara was with us at that meal (but no Sam). We love Sam to bits but a 18-month-old is a lot of work at meal times!

Visit the zoo

We finally managed to visit the zoo at the beginning of Feb thanks to free zoo passes from work. We hadn't been to the zoo for over 10 years. The cloest we got to the zoo was when I pre-bought tickets last year, but Lara and I had food-poisoning the day before we planned to go. The tickets expired before we had time to use them!



The day started out raining but it turned sunny and quite warm by mid-morning. The giraffs were much taller than we thought. The chimps and gorillas didn't seem too happy to see us, but put on a bit of a show for us. The tiger/lion roared near the window, you could feel the thick glass trembled. One of the elephants did a huge wee right in front of us, Lara and I were glad we were not near his feet. The seals were cute as usual, but Sam couldn't sit still for the seal show. Lara enjoyed feeding goats, chickens and pigs at the kindy farm too. I was not too impressed with the lunch set-up, maybe we should pack our lunch next time.



Sam didn't have his midday sleep therefore was a little cranky at times. Walking up and down pushing a pram and running after a 18-month-old was tiring too. I can't say that it was a nice and relaxing trip but we all enjoyed it very much thanks to the good companions we had. We did a lot of walking around that we wer all exhausted at the end of the day. This trip inspired us to go and vist the Dubbo Western Plains zoo in the near future. Maybe when Sam is a little older?

Suzuki summer school and first violin lesson in 2012

We neglected our violins somewhat and didn't practice every day in January. The teacher was away so there were no lessons. Furthermore, I bought our violins after the rental period was up so for a couple of weeks there were no tapes to guide the left fingers. The frustration of not getting the note right also cast a shadow over practice and made it less frequent. Fortunately Lara and I slowly learned to listen to the tunes and adjusted our fingers accordingly.



During the holiday, we manged to get to the Suzuki summer school for a couple of days. We attended 2 parent talks, a play-in session and the closing concert. It was nice to walk around in the beautiful Abbotsleigh ground, seeing kids with violins on their shoulders and immersing ourselves in music coming from many of the classrooms while lessons took place.

I'm glad Lara's teacher is back now. Lara just had her first violin lesson after 6 weeks of break. There were a lot of communications, changing of schedules before we finally arrived at the 8.30am Saturday lesson time. In the lesson, Lara learned to play 'small bow', a couple of bow work-outs (moving bow up & down and side to side in rapid consessions to build strength in arm and wrist) and the Allegro body movement song. This week, the main practice will be to get 'Mr 3' down as soon as possible after the open E in twinkles. I learned something new too - always start playing with a 'down bow'.

Looking forward to learning new songs this year!

Two dinners

Two of the dinners we shared with family and friends this month at our house...



Earlier in the month, ex-work-colleagues-turned-friends G and N came over for a simple lunch. This year was very difficult for N being a empty-nester (youngest leaving home for uni) and going through a separation/divorce. We hoped a small lunch would get N out of the house and made her feel a little better.

Menu: Shallow fried mixed seafood (fish, prawns and calamari- N is a vegetarian but eats seafood), mango salad, cabbage salad, homemade Hungarian salami (made by G, yummy!),home-grown tomatoes (hand-picked by G that moring), curry puffs (curtesy of N), olives, bread and crackers.

We all had too much to eat. The stroll to the nearby park after lunch(it was around 5pm by then)was a nice and relaxing way to end the day.



Chinese New Year's Eve dinner with in-laws.
Menu: Fried rice with carrots and eggs, veges (brocolli and cauliflower), pork spare ribs (american ribs marinated in bbq sauce), beans with bacons, coconut prawns.

I didn't cook a whole fish as is the tradition (whole 'fish' symbolise having more than enough for the new year) because I didn't have fish in the fridge. The inclusion of spare ribs wasn't very chinese either, but the ribs were very popular with in-laws, husband and kids, so who cares!

Holiday swimming lessons

Lara did school holiday swimming lessons for the last two weeks. The lessons took place in the big school Lara will go to this year, so she got used to going to school (to swim) every day!



Lara can't swim yet but she has improved a lot and is very close to be able to swim by herself. Her water confidence increased dramatically in a very short space of time, most importantly, she enjoyed the lessons very much. I'm going back to work so she won't be able to continue the lessons for long. I try not to set up too many after-school activities for Lara but I have to keep swimming lessons now that she's so close to be able to swim! One of the resolutions that is on my list (for 2 years?) is to swim reguarly myself. Hopefully, I'll be able to find a pool to do that this year.

Too old to skate

I took Lara and her friend Annie ice-skating on Monday. I have skated regularly for a couple of years when I was younger and thought skating was like riding a bike - you never forget how to do it. Lara had done a couple of skating lessons so I thought it would be fun to go around with her as a holiday treat. It was harder than I thoguht looking after two kids who can't skate when I'm quite rusty myself. On top of that, I forgot that I'm a lot older now.

Lara was crying (her friend was faster than her so I tried to stay between them but I was too far for comfort for Lara) and in a haste to get to her, I fell down bottom first. Luckily, I didn't break anything and I was still able to walk, I got up with a sore bottom and continued skating. But by the time we finished and walked to the car park (I also managed to get a pair of school shoes with Lara afterwards so I guess the pain was not too bad), it hurt a lot more. That night I couldn't get up from a sitting-down position without some efforts and had to take pain-killers. I really worried I would wake up unable to walk, who will look after Sam then? Fortunately, the pain subsided the next day.

I forget that I am on longer the young 18 year old who could just get up from a fall, my older bones don't handle it too well. Maybe skating is not a great idea after all?

Baked & stuffed pumpkin

Every Christmas, I like to try to make something new, something a little special and different. Simon find this strange and couldn't believe I do this at stressful times like x'mas. I don't know why but doing a new dish makes the dinner more intresting for me and I often try new things on people. Not all things I did came out great of course. This year my experiment was the stuffed pumpkin (Jamie Olive's Hamilton pumpkin in one of his earlier cookbooks).



I cut the pumpkin in half, scooped out the flesh(this took me about an hour of hard work!!), fried the onions and mushrooms, roasted the pine nuts, ground spices, mixed the rice in and put everything together the day before x'mas. Luckily I did it the day before because it was quite a lot of work. It smelt beautiful after baking for 1and a quarter hours on x'mas day. I left it out to rest for some time. Initally I thought the hard bits were the spices then I realised it was uncooked rice! Most of the rice was well cooked. I don't believe cooking longer would make any difference. In fact, I think the pumpkin was overcooked as the colour was very dull and texture very soft (I didn't weight the pumpkin, my pumpkin possibly was smaller than the recipe's). I think the uncooked rice was due to uneven moisture even though the book says not to worry about rice not being cooked as the mostiure in the pumpkin will keep the rice moist. It was editable and most of the rice was alright. But any amount of hard rice every so often still ruined the dish. It was not a great sucess like I hoped it would be.



I would not try this dish again in a hurry. It was too much work for someone with two little kids like me. But will I try something else new next x'mas? The bet is I probably will!

Ballet concert

Lara had her ballet concert on the first Wednesday of December. 'Sleeping beauty' was this year's production and Lara was one of the little red riding hood. This being her second concert, Lara seemed less overwhelmed and quite excited about being on stage. She 'directed' a younger girl to the right place on stage and didn't forget any of her dance. The 2 Saturday rehearsals plus a dress rehearsal on top of the normal lessons made us all very busy (& tired!). Prior to the concert, Lara said she wanted to do gymnastics with Matilda next year but she has since 'changed her mind' and told me she really wanted to do ballet next year. She was very inspired seeing the other big girls dance. All my hard-work (yes it was hard work taking Lara to all the rehearsals) was worth it when I saw how much she enjoyed the concert.

The little red ridding hoods get ready to get on stage!


Unfortunately, I'm not sure doing ballet would be possible next year. I found out Lara didn't get a single day of after-school-care next year despite me making every effort to hand in the application form early. I found out by accident, no one in the school bothered to inform me! (this is another story, don't get me started) I can't even work out Sam's daycare for next yer let alone trying to fit ballet class in there as well. Hopefully when things settle down, we'll be able to continue ballet.

The Christmas bug

This Christmas happened in a big rush. We had two lots of family guests over, there always seemed to be people leaving and people coming. There was an extra guest, many shopping trips, and the cooking took some time. I was either in the kitchen or attendint to one of the kids and didn't even take any pictures. oh did I mention both kids were sick at x'mas?

Lara had diarrhea on Friday, vomited in the middle of the night and spent most of Christmas and Boxing day lying on the couch feeling miserable. Simon must have caught Lara's bug and also had diarrhea early x'mas morning. Sam had eczema on and off for two weeks before x'mas. A friend of a friend (a dermatologist) saw Sam on Friday and thought the eczema was severe and it needed medical attention. It prompted me to get to the doctor's at 5pm on Friday. I knew the itch bothered Sam but I dind't realise it was that bad and thought it would get better by itself. After taking antihistamine (kids Zyrtec), Sam did seem better. It didn't last long as he also caught Lara's gastro bug. He vomited over my new x'mas dress and three days later still vomiting. We had to change his bedding 3 times last night. I didn't think there was anything else left to be puked up!

At one stage (on x'mas morning) we thought we had to put off x'mas lunch! Luckily, besides the kids, nobody else got sick and Simon felt better. The good thing is we have enough food to last us for a long time so it's one less thing I have to think about.

Violin practice and concert

Lara had her violin concert last Saturday. She was included in the group twinkles at the last minute because she has not done all the twinkle variations yet(note 1). It was good training and great to see Lara trying to play the twinkle she has not yet learned by ear. There was a small group practice just before the concert. This was the first time Lara played with other kids (she played with me at home). Even though the other kids are more advanced than her, she did her best. The home practice sessions after the concert were very good and less tears. It's like a driving force, a goal (she already picked out a song she likes in Book 2) to work towards. I like the concept of group lessons in the Suzuki method, and look forward to more of these in the new year.

The home practices had been up and down. Practice was easy at the start, because it involved singing songs and playing games. I remembered the fist time Lara practiced the left hand at home. She thought she could not do it therefore refused even to try for 3 days. I'm glad we got over that hurdle! We usually spent about 1/2 an hour a night practicing violin. Most of the time, I got Lara to play the twinkle variations she alreay learned 4 or 5 times (each twinkle was about 1 minute long so that's 5 minutes). I don't know where rest of the time went. My next thing to try is perhaps to make practice a little more productive but keep in mind that music is just games and play for kids at this stage. Rather than a block of 30 minutes, I want to try 15 minutes of practice twice a day. Still trying to figure out where the second practice could fit in.

I went to check out some violins last week. I had to decide whether to rent the violins for another 3 months or buy a new/second-hand one. I don't know a lot about violins so the risk of getting a second hand one might be the set up fees on top of the violin. Lara is on a 1/8 violin at the moment and as she grows, we'll have to change violin sizes. Anyway I was talking to the violin dealer and I told him how Lara cried at home practices a lot, not because she didn't want to practice (she was usually the one who reminded me to practice) but she was frustrated she couldn't get the sound right. The violing dealer told me he got a lot of school violins for repairs. "One of the hardest thing I had to do is to clean the tear marks off" he said and showing me where the tears fell on the violin. So Lara is not the only kid who does this.... I have great admiration for any kids who play the simplest tunes because I know how much work is needed behind the scene...Here's a snippet of Lara's violin concert.



note:
Twinkle variations:
A - Busy Busy Stop Stop
B - ? (not learned yet)
C - Long little Long little(or Run Mummy Run Daddy)
D - Pineapple Pineapple
E - Running little catepillar

Paint bedroom

Lara helped me paint her bedroom today. I have wanted to make the kids' bedrooms more 'kid-like' for some time, but procrastenated until now. To minimise work, I've only done one feature wall. It is blue, Lara's favorite colour with free-hand clouds on other walls. Sam's bedroom will have a similar theme, maybe I'll do that next week. Lara helped me with the first coat, but was 'too tired' so she watched Harry Potter while I painted the second coat. Where was Sam? He was in family daycare. One of these rare days where I can spend some quality time with just Lara.

ps colour: dulux - sky babe

Perfect ears

Sam had his ear check-up again this afternoon. We were only in the specialist's office for about 5 minutes. After Dr looked into both ears, he confirmed they are now perfectly normal and healthy. It was worth the one hundred dollar fee just to hear these words. The troubles we took to both work part time so Sam could stay out of daycare was the right thing to do. Now the test will be to see if his ears can self-drain next winter (the cold season).

After we left the doctor's office, we bumped into a ukelele group playing outside. Lara insisted we stay and watch. With good news in mind, the afternoon breeze, and some live festive music, it was a good Friday afternoon to end the week.

Now Sam does not have any execuse to not listen to me!

Remote controlled cars

We stopped at a garage sale on the way home from violin lesson this morning. I bought 2 remote controlled cars for a grand total of $4. Simon never had remote-controlled cars as a kid and was thinking of buying one for Sam for Christmas because he was sure Sam will love it! Simon was very excited when he saw the cars. He recharged the batteries, put new AA batteries in and fixed the wheels. All these were done very quickly, much more efficient than, for example, when I asked him to change light bulbs in the house. He was nearly late for his massage because he couldn't wait to try them.

Simon and Lara spent some time outside trying the bigger car in the afternoon (they also played with the smaller car inside). I heard lots of laughter and screaming, they must be having fun. I had to do preparations for some work I had to do at night so I couldn't join in.

Zeb busy chasing the car...


Oh how do we get the car out?


As for Sam, he went outside to watch the remote controlled car after his nap. Was he interested? No, not a bit. I guess he's not getting remote control car for Christmas this year then!