Author: Isolde

We bought the girls bikes for Christmas. I looked on Gumtree for weeks, but the kids’ bikes that were advertised were always in poor condition or not quite the right size. The only alternatives were expensive bikes from a bike shop or cheap ones from Toys R Us or Kmart, branded with the latest movie merchandise. I was attracted to the price of the cheap ones and Rhea and Lara were attracted to their merchandising, so we bought a blue and purple Frozen bike with blue and purple ribbons from its handlebars for Lara and a pink and black one…

The girls are starting school tomorrow. After another long, relaxed beach holiday with Steve’s family, learning new expressions from their older cousins like ‘oh crap!’ and ‘oh fudge!’, they had a couple of days at their new school’s holiday program last week to help them with the transition, and befriended a little girl going into Grade 2 called Alexis. The kindergarten playground is separate from the primary school one, so they might not see very much of Alexis this year. Many of their friends from preschool are continuing too though, so there will be some familiarity there. And of course,…

Another year of little bodies lengthening and getting skinnier, of new experiences, of challenges for the girls and us and another year of language development. Here are some of the most memorable of the girls’ utterances: Lara: ‘Are you hot hot hottity hot?’ Rhea: ‘Are you strong by name and strong by nature daddy?’ Lara: ‘Yuck yuck yuckity yuck.’ Rhea: ‘Can you keep an eye on my baby? She’s only little.’ Lara: ‘Yum scrum!’ Rhea: (passing a farm in the car) ‘A farm needs a farmer but there are never any farmers on the farms. Maybe they only come…

The night that we were going out to dinner after Steve’s dad’s memorial service I missed a call from Maggie. I remember her message caused me some worry: it was something about my aunt Kay being unwell, but she was OK. I decided to put off calling Maggie back until the following day as I wasn’t feeling up to any more bad news, and when I rang back, Maggie said that Kay had been diagnosed with leukaemia. We have almost always lived in different cities, but blue-eyed, fine-featured Kay has been a constant presence in my life. Apparently after Marcus was…

Rhea and Lara quite like the book by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas called ‘Possum Magic.’ It’s a story about how Grandma Poss hunts all over Australia to find the food that will make her grand-daughter Hush visible again after she had made her invisible. The characters and the story are beautifully drawn. Now that we have had the good news that our roof doesn’t contain loose asbestos, we’ve made some decisions about our living arrangements. They are not going to include possums in the immediate future. Poo pellets all over the back garden that stink out the shed, back…

They say one tip for a happier life is to clear out the clutter. We have been working hard at that recently. Looking at our small house, bursting with toys, clothes, children’s artwork, craft materials, plastic bicycles, bound and loose recipes, vases, legos, clothes racks, birthday cards, books, food scraps and odds and ends of all descriptions, I wrote a list earlier this year. It was entitled ‘what really annoys me in this house.’ I listed all the things that I found irritating, from the fact that the girls’ play table was always piled high with craft/textas/papers, meaning that the…

We had a weekend at the snow last weekend. It was a real mixed bag. Such a lot of organising and packing, and a fair drive to get there too, so we left work at lunchtime and picked the girls up early on Friday. They were excited. They were kept occupied by lollies in the car and colouring in books on the way down. We stopped to hire ski gear for the girls and I, and car chains due to the weather forecast which wasn’t great – rain and very windy. The last time we stayed at the ski lodge…

This week, after four months of Rhea having hearing loss due to fluid in her middle ear that the nurse audiologist concurred has made her ‘as deaf as a post’ (‘watch her near cars especially, she can’t hear them’), Rhea had day surgery to implant grommets into her ears. I had the same procedure done when I was seven. I remember enjoying the novelty of being in a hospital and people being extra nice to me; the event also marked the beginning of my lifelong love affair with apricot and coconut bars, which mum had bought me as a special…

– ‘Welcome everybody! Why are you here?’ – ‘To do some cooking!’ – ‘To eat some cakes!’ – ‘Anything else? Is it Christmas?’ – ‘It’s Lara and Rhea’s birthday!’ This year we had the girls’ birthday party at a cooking school where they made muffins. First they drew on their chef’s paper hats with pencil, were aproned up, washed their hands then got straight in to the mixing in their individual bowls. Steve and I stayed outside and chatted with the parents, sipping tea. The party marked the end of a full week of birthday festivities – we enjoyed it…

I’m pretty pleased with myself this week. On my three allocated days for making dinner for the family, I made three very tasty meals; but more than that, I used up some rather old food items which would otherwise have had to be thrown out. On Sunday night it was the four skinny cutlets left over from a few days before for the girls’ dinner; they definitely wouldn’t have lasted another day. I served that with a delicious Jamie Oliver salad of baked carrot, avocado (again, using up what I could salvage from some avocados that wouldn’t have had another…