Keeping the beat

The Beatles have played the soundtrack to my life, as they have to most of the modern world.

My first memory of the Beatles was staring at the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for ages. Looking at every tiny detail in the rich artwork. My dad had bought it back in the '60s which is strange because he's a jazz man and so not into pop or rock.

As I got older I remember my brother playing the album and buying other albums. My cousin, who lived for us for a while, was a big Beatle fan and played Rubber Soul all the time.

When I was about 12 or 13, I fell hard for the Beatles. The first ever CD I bought was a Beatles disk (a step up from my first cassette of 1985 Comes Alive). I was obsessed. My good friend and I would read Beatle books, buy CDs, memorabilia, go to Beatle festivals and watch Beatle coverbands and scream. The obsession lasted quite a while. When we were about 20 the pair of us made it to Liverpool and went to the Cavern, Strawberry Field, Penny Lane and all the other Beatle sites.

The moment I thought Skip might be a keeper was when he told me one of my favourite Beatle songs reminded him of me (without any prompting). I even walked down the aisle to a Beatle song (In My Life).

Since the girls were wee babes I would sing them a Beatle song before they went to sleep. Now most nights they request Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds before they drift off.

The past couple of months, I've been putting on a lot of Beatles while they draw or quietly play and I do stuff around the house. I thought they'd love all the early stuff like Love Me Do and Hard Day's Night, but it seems they prefer Sgt Pepper. I guess there's a lot of child-like rhymes plus some orchestral strings for them to do 'ballet' and twirl to.

I wonder if they will have fond memories or if it will just be the old fuddy-duddy music Mum listened to.

A piece of cake

I've talked about cake making before. I'm fairly bad at it, but I love doing it for my kids. A cake baked with love, that hopefully they'll remember for the rest of their lives. I love an old-school birthday party, with just a handful of people, fairy bread and chocolate crackles. There are no jumping castles, magicians or caterers, just a trampoline, some music and kids running around like lunatics.

My last attempt at a cake was for Lil-lil's party last year. A princess fairy cake:

As Goosey's birthday approaches I'm trying to decide what to make this year. She's tossing up between a fairy garden and a fairy cloud. We shall see... I promise to share the finished product with you.

We recently went to our friend's birthday who had this awesome cake:

This afternoon, Goose and I will take a trip to Go-Lo to stock up on party favours and streamers, while I ponder party food, which will probably be Skip's famous homemade snag rolls and bowls of chips. 

Help me out, share with me some of your never-fail party tips, party food recipes, etc.

Routine, misssing husbands and puffy paint

School holidays are over, back to the routine. Lil-lil is bursting at the seams to get back. Goosey is cranky and saying she's not allowed to go, the bottom lip has been out all morning. Goose is really going to miss her as they've had a great time the past two weeks – they've invented more games than I can remember. They even created a little boy called Lowen, he was from Russia and his parents were killed by witch. He could fix anything except cars. He stayed with us for most of Saturday. Strangely enough, even though he was from Russia, he couldn't speak Russian.

We waved Skip off early this morning as he headed to the airport, to go to Melbourne until Friday evening. It will be a girly week of easy dinners and taking control of the remote. Though we do have a lot to take our mind off Skip's absence, such as a certain 3rd birthday to prepare for. I can't believe my little one will be 3 ! There is a cake to plan, presents to buy and sausage rolls to make.

I wanted to share something my girls LOVED doing over the holidays. I completely stole this idea from i-mumma. I'm so not a craft mum. My idea of doing craft is throwing some paper and crayons at them and hoping they don't draw on the walls. But this is super easy and super fun.

Puffy paint

• 1 tablespoon self-raising flour
• a few drops of food colouring
• 1 tablespoon of salt

Combine the above together with a little water to make a smooth paste and paint away on pieces of cardboard. When the artworks are finished pop them in the microwave for 30 seconds until they magically 'puff' up and dry.

The girls had a ball doing this and created some birthday cards for their little mate's 4th birthday.

Have a good Monday!

Some daze are diamonds... others are vomit.

I'd been looking forward to this morning for a while. The kids and I had been invited to a preview of The Lion King and I thought it was going to be a great holiday treat. The movie itself was fab, I'll write a review at a later date, the events around it were not so fab.

It's just one of those days that are annoyingly bumpy. Nothing runs smooth. The day wasn't helped by another night of hideous snoring that kept the house awake, me waking every half hour well aware that I sound like a steam train. Goosey decided that she was just going to awake for two hours in the night, nothing wrong, just awake and wanting to chat.

I hurriedly got the girls ready for the flicks and we headed up the street to catch a bus. I noticed as I walked out my front gate, I'd put out the wrong recycling bin. Another fortnight before it can be emptied. Yippee. I kept walking.

You have to pre-buy your ticket to catch our local bus, which would be fine if there was actually somewhere to buy a ticket. Every shop we went into had run out or only sold travel passes (with 10 trips). We ended up having to walk about a kilometre with Goosey crying that she couldn't walk anymore.

We finally got on the bus and I fumbled with the ticket. The bus driver yelled at the girls to sit down as I fumbled. I then sat down and burst into tears. For no apparent reason, other than Sydney buses suck quite a lot.

We got into the movie theatre and settled in, then I was reminded that I had promised popcorn. Big sigh from me, I left my coat and various 3D glasses on the seats to mind them and then headed off to buy overpriced movie popcorn. We got back in the theatre and someone had moved my coat and taken our seats. After a few terse words and a woman telling me "But my daughter really wanted this seat" they finally moved. We settled in again.

About 20 minutes into the movie Goosey insisted on sitting on my rapidly disappearing lap. She proceeded to kick and elbow my belly for the rest of the time. I started to get a headache from the 3D. Seriously, why do they persist with 3D? It's crap.

By the time we got out, the rain was coming down and we shuffled off to the bus stop. As we stood in the rain, I decided "this really isn't the fun experience I was hoping for". Some days just don't go to plan.

To round off the last day of the holiday, we stopped in at our local Japanese restaurant for lunch. It was delicious, the girls behaved. At last, we were having fun! We'd finished up and were getting ready to leave when Goosey decided to eat a piece of garnish. She took one taste, gagged and her whole lunch ended up on me. Nice.

So I officially give up on this day. There will be no more fun. It's just not working for me.

Edited to add: While I am feeling a little over it all today. I have a whole positive post coming up very soon. x

A little night music

I came in here today to write about all the people who are currently pissing me off. There are quite a few of them, they really do make up quite the list – Tiger Airways, real estate agents, Energy Australia, the car wax salesmen in the shopping centre car park. Then I decided to write about something else. Something that is annoying to me, yet so much more annoying to the people in my house.

My snoring.

Yep, I admit it, I'm snoring terribly. I know I'm snoring, not just because Skip has bags under his eyes that would fit a semi-trailer, but because I can hear myself. That's right, I'm sleeping so lightly and snoring so loudly that I actually hear myself. Terrible. I like to think that it's just a bad dream, but no, it's not. It's very, very real.

I  have something worse to admit than just snoring at night – I think I'm actually snoring during the day too, while I'm awake. I know. I'm catching a glimpse of what life will be like when I'm 90.

I'm also suffering from terrible heartburn/reflux/indigestion. It's been bad, but the past few days it's been worse as I've had to eat a high carb diet for a glucose tolerance test. Admittedly, I didn't have to eat the pie at the top of the page, I just did cause I could. Man, it was not worth the pain I felt for the rest of the day though. Here's a tip – shares in the manufacturer of Mylanta and Gaviscon are going to skyrocket over the next three months.

Pregnancy in all its glamour. Poor Skip though, I think he's ready to put a pillow over my head to stop the night noise. As I lie there snoring and listening to myself and feeling the pain of regurgitated food in my oesophagus, I'm ready to put myself in the old folk home.

Are you a snorer? Have you ever woken yourself up snoring? Come on, help me out here...

Bestest sisters

These school holidays we've spent a lot of time just hanging at home. It's been great though as it's given the girls a chance to just be together. They've created imaginary worlds, jumped for hours on the trampoline, created Lego cities and most of all just had fun being together.

Sure they've had their fights and Lil-lil has declared on more than one occasion: "It's really hard having a little sister!" But the majority of the time they've been, in their words, "bestest sisters". Playing nicely, hugging on the couch, looking after each other and lots of giggling.

I hope they remain the best of friends in the coming years, though I'm sure there will be lots of ups and downs. It's nice to know they'll always have each other. That they'll have a sister on their side.

Yesterday, we were heading to pick up some dry cleaning when Goosey cried out to Lil-lil as she ran away towards the car: "But I love you!" And Lil-lil stopped and took her hand and said: "Don't you want me to go back to preschool?" Goosey shook her head. "But I have to go to preschool so I can learn what to do at big school, but don't worry I'll be back in the afternoons." And then they gave each other the biggest hug. I couldn't make this stuff up.

As we drove off, I snuck a peek in the rearview mirror and caught them holding hands and snapped the picture above.

Don't worry, they're not always this sickly sweet. There's a lot of fist-to-fist combat, hair pulling, scratching and general whacking. That's why I have to record these moments, when the fighting gets out of control and they're plotting to destroy the other, I can remind myself that they do actually love each other.

Hairy times

I've been a bit neglectful of my hair recently. There's always, well, something else that needs attending to first. You know that things are getting out of control though when other people start telling you it's time to tame the mane.

The universe (disguised as PR people) obviously thought I was looking a little unruly as one morning I opened my door and found the whole range of the new Pantene line, Nature Fusion, on my doorstep. Now I'd heard the whole 'Pantene is bad for your hair' thing before, but apparently that's crap and I must say my hair (and the girls) have been pretty good. Even Skip commented that it 'smelt nice' the other morning.

Soon after, I received an email from another lovely PR person asking if I'd be interested in a cut and blowdry for myself and the girls. Well, sure!

I decided that I'd book in before my fancy birthday dinner so that the blow dry wasn't wasted on the other mums at the park, my usual haunt on a weekday arvo.

The girls and I turned up at Christiane's hair design, Gladesville very excited (There are a heap of other Christiane's around NSW too). It was the first time we'd done something girly like this. The girls sat up next to me as I got washed, intrigued as to what was going on. I then moved over to the mirrors to get cut, they put boosters up for the girls to get their hair washed together. Goosey jumped up eagerly, Lil-lil burst into tears and froze. As Goose happily got shampooed, loving every moment of the attention, no amount of coercion could get Lil-lil up in the chair and her hair under the hose.

Lil-lil unsure about the whole thing.

Goosey loving the salon.

Glued to my side as I got my hair cut, we eventually bribed Lil-lil with a lollypop to get her hair trimmed. The staff were lovely and kind and so good with the kids, I don't think Lil-lil would have relented if they weren't so sweet. Both girls sat up and got snipped and both of them were fussed over.

Goosey.

A lollypop is being tightly grasped under the cape....

I've never considered getting my hair done with the girls, the hairdresser is usually my escape, but it really worked quite well (despite Lil-lil's fear and uncertainty about the whole thing). I'd do it again, I'd just make I'd pick a salon that was kid-friendly and pick a time when they're not too busy so the staff and the kids don't get freaked out.

The three of us walked out looking quite glam, the blowdry even survived the icy, gusty winds as I walked through town to dinner. Skip even noticed that I had my hair done, so that's always a positive!