Oh wow, I don’t remember feeling this slow at less-than-seven-months when I was pregnant with Amelia. Maybe the fact that I am no longer doing any yoga (or anything at all really) is starting to catch up with me. I am walking with that pregnant woman hobble and sleeping uncomfortably and badly.

There is one big difference this time around, and that’s the size of my belly button. Last time it did the decent thing of not “popping out” until quite late in the game, but this time my belly button starting reaching out to greet the world very early on – weeks ago now. It shows through almost all my clothes and is incredibly embarrassing. I can see people looking at it with raised eyebrows… I guess most must wonder what it is. I feel like telling them something to really thrill them, like “that’s actually the baby’s elbow!” or “nose!”. But of course I just turn away and pretend I don’t notice. I supposed if I was Heidi Klum, I would be taping it down but the idea of removing tape from my incredibly sensitive belly is just straight out awful even for a girl who can handle an eyebrow wax.

Anyway, apart from leaving you with a nice vivid image of my belly button, I thought I might leave you with some cool kid related links:

Firstly is Vegan Lunch Box – winner of the Bloggie for best food blog. I love the daily photos of interesting lunch boxes as I am finding Amelia’s get repetitive (and are mostly store bought things) so some inspiration never goes astray. This site reminds me a little of Mimi Ito’s Bento Box Moblog which she doesn’t seem to be updating any more, but was always very pretty. What amazing mums these two are. Now I have a hankering for these great kids’ bento lunch box systems. We would end up using a lot less cling-wrap.

Another lunch box related thought – a book we love around here is “Yoko” by Rosemary Wells.

In this infinitely readable story, Yoko is lucky enough to take a bamboo cooler full of her favourite sushi for school lunch and a snack of red bean ice-cream; much to her “squeeze cheese on rye” munching class mate’s horror. Her kind teacher decides to hold an “International Food Day” where each student is required to bring along a dish from a different country, and each child must try everything. Unfortunately the sushi goes pretty much untouched, but Yoko finally makes a new friend from a hungry little critter whose hunger overcomes his prejudice. I love the illustrations in this book.

And on a slightly different (but still kid related) note, here’s a brilliant idea – A Baby-sitting co-op (via Kath). If only I wasn’t afraid of mobs of children.

** A quick search through my archives reassures me that I was indeed feeling pretty big and tired at 29 weeks – and I wasn’t even looking after a small energetic child that time around.

Back again. Thank you for all the lovely birthday wishes last week!

Thank you to those concerned folks who emailed regarding our safety in terms of the cyclone Larry. We are far, far south of Innisfail so we are completely ok. We will be affected by the ensuing banana crisis though. Some members of this household could live on bananas if given a chance – but as the federal minister for agriculture put it “People will have to understand that their unsatisfied yearnings for bananas are infinitesimal compared to the suffering and hardship of the banana growers of north Queensland.” Fair enough. So, while it wasn’t the cyclone that prevented me from blogging as some have feared, school holidays combined with not sleeping and feeling glum has meant no room for blogging this last little while. This week is looking up.

So what’s been happening? Not a whole lot. I have had almost no motivation so everything is suffering.

The baby’s room is slowly moving forward. Having decided on a light, peaceful blue for the walls (and leave the orange for accents – all for the sake of encouraging sleep), it is also important to us to find a paint that isn’t too toxic – both when applying and in terms of the amount of nasties that keep on being produced months after application. We took a trip into the Northern suburbs (“Look Amelia, Mummy and Daddy used to live in that house! And that house! And that one too! And that’s where daddy shared a house with 8 other people!” etc) to Porter’s Paints which Linda was kind enough to inform me from her research sold paints with a 0 level of VOCs. I have been a great admirer of Porter’s Paints for the longest time, always noting the beautiful colours they produce in interior magazines so I was quite excited in a design-nerd kind of way to finally be going in to check out their products.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the paints with a zero level are the limewash paints, which are not particularly child-friendly in that they don’t stand up to a lot of toddler love and are hard to patch when marked. Also, from an aesthetic point of view the splotchiness of the finish wasn’t quite what I imagined in the small baby’s room, but it was (I promise) the toddler-proof issue that sealed the no-deal. Fortunately even their acrylic paints rate far lower that the Australian Standard so what ever we choose, it will be better than what we have used in the other rooms so far. We came away with a handful of little sample pots and a couple of sample cards ready for testing on the walls.

(** ooh look – over at a new favourite of mine, The Worsted Witch, there are two entries (1 and 2) about toxins in paints, and better alternatives with many links and products to check out **)

While we were over in the North, which still brings back bitter-sweet nostalgic memories, we had lunch at our favourite hang-out from the olden-days, the Tin Pot (where we seriously bored Amelia with painful reminiscing) and we also stopped at Douglas & Hope on Brunswick Street which is my ever-favourite shop. Heavenly cushions, bags, clothes and accessories. I can’t find a single useful link for D & H apart from this incredibly dated article.

And I never made that cake. We ended up having an electrician in the kitchen making huge amounts of mess and noise so the cake will have to wait.

Tomorrow is my birthday! So today I am going to bake myself a birthday cake. Of course, it would be nice if someone else did it for me, but I know my Mum is baking (or buying one, I honestly don’t mind which Mum!) one for the big family lunch on Sunday, and Big-P has one day off a week at the moment and I personally think it’s much more important that he spends that day (today) shopping for my present. And you know I like baking. So now, which one to choose? Any suggestions? I will probably try something out from Nigella’s How to be Domestic Goddess, because I have become a little stuck in the bread chapter in that one and it would be nice to move on. I am tempted to try a multi-layered sponge because I bought the tins and they are sitting there looking intimidating and collecting dust. Maybe I will construct some kind of birthday thing made out of marshmallows from The River Cottage Family Cookbook because Jane’s always make me think I should. Mmmm.

Reading to and with Amelia has always been a top priority around here. Big-P used to think I was a bit mad to bother reading to her when she was barely big enough to even smile, but of course at that age it’s all about love and sounds and connection as well as language and story telling. He soon got it. He gets it even more now when we see her (as most kids do) fall over herself to choose bedtime stories and then snuggle in to our bed ready to be read to. We have recently moved her book case to the family room, and in tidying it all up she has rediscovered many old favourites and spends quite a lot of time quietly going through the books on her own (on her own is something she doesn’t do a lot of at the moment: preschool = seperation anxiety, but that’s a tale for another day).

It has got me thinking about us and kids and books. I know Mem Fox (author of the quintessential aussie kid’s book, Possum Magic) has been heavily involved in a campaign for literacy and advocates the idea that we should be reading to our children every day for at least ten minutes. I found her web site and it has lots of interesting stuff about reading aloud – including a guide on how to read aloud effectively (Mem style) and her 10 Commandments for reading aloud. She also has a list of Must Have Classics for kids aged 0 to 4 which is a great collection of books to choose the daily three from.

Speaking of lists of books for kids, I was pleased to find this blog just now; Read Alert, a blog about youth literature – from our own State Library. It includes an interesting collection of lists of 10 books children should read before they leave school. I like Ben Okri’s version.

Other links that I have been enjoying on Read Alert are:
Shirley Hughes on the aging of literary characters

Visions of a Little Girl’s Utopia (which has helped me see why Amelia is really fond of the Milly-Molly-Mandy books at the moment)

The Famous Five in their own words.

And OMG — “Beginning in September, Drawn & Quarterly will publish the initial book of a five-volume series of Moomin: the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, the first North American English translation of the late Finnish cartoonist’s internationally acclaimed comics strip” I didn’t know this but D&Q do Moomins? I am so thrilled!….

… actually, there is so much good stuff on Read Alert, there’s no point listing them all. I have just spent the evening reading all the archives and feel like it was an evening well spent (and how often do you actually feel that after browsing the web for hours on end?).

Last week I mentioned that I made bread which failed to rise. This problem has not repeated itself since even in similar environmental conditions so now I am convinced that I didn’t include the yeast.

Two nights ago I was making steamed rice, and seconds after I removed the lid from the rice container, it went missing. Completely, utterly, disappeared off the face of the earth — it still hasn’t reappeared. Shortly afterwards I put the brown rice in at the exactly the same time as the jasmine rice (we usually have a mix for taste and texture) forgetting for the second time this week something that has never before elluded me in all my 10 years of rice cooking that jasmine rice cooks in twice the time brown does. Mushy rice again.

Last Tuesday night I went out to join some friends for desert and gossip only to completely forget that I had arranged to meet one friend here and take her with us. She arrived a little while later and was quite gracious about being stood up.

On Wednesday I invited one friend along to another’s friend’s place as a kind of grand play-date get together, and then couldn’t for the life of me remember if I had actually cleared this with the host before hand. After a last minute phone call, where I was awkward and the host was gracious, I was assured that yes, we had already had the discussion and it was all ok. I have no recollection of this discussion at all.

Yesterday I turned up to another friend’s place for a prearranged morning cup of tea and a bit of play get-to-gether for our girls only to have the door answered by her husband in his pajamas. He too was most gracious but agreed with me that, indeed, they were not expecting us. Being flexible people they welcomed us any way and I downed my tea as quick as possible and whisked a much complaining Amelia back out the door. When I got home and checked the calendar, which stares at me from the kitchen wall every day, I found that I was out by a week.

As I sit here and write this entry I know that there are other things I have done in a similar vein this last week, and I have been mentally jotting them down, but now I can’t for the bloody (I can use that word, it’s “cheeky, friendly and very Australian”) life of me remember anything more.

I am completely reassured that yes, I do in fact have BLOODY PREGGO BRAIN.