Shake it up

I’ve been getting super jealous of Pip and her photo shoot. It sounds like a dream come true. This afternoon I finally finished my small group of five rabbit/mice things and thought I might do a little photo shoot trial run ready for the next sunny day. I asked Lily if she’d hold on to one of the girls hoping that it would give potential buyers some kind of idea of how big the toys are - but despite being hugely enthusiastic she really didn’t quite understand what we were trying to achieve. We had lots of intense movement; head shaking, rabbit shaking, dancing around… A zakka photo shoot this was not.

This one is called “Mummy, rabbit attack camera”:

Less blury photos to come in the next few days.

Father’s Day in suburbia

On the way out to the Glen this morning Amelia asked us from the back seat “what can I get for 1 dollar, 20 cents and a googley eye?”. Well, she got a packet of honey coated popcorn and loads of yuks with her olds. Happy Father’s Day phil. You’re the best. We love you and your weird eye.

Punkdorf doll

Look! I’m twittering (as of 22 minutes ago)! I seem to think in tweets these days so it suits my style.

Look! I’m making another Waldorf doll (I have been calling them punkdorf dolls due to my very un-Waldorf kind of approach. Lots of swearing and seam ripping).

Look! I found a very nice blog - beautiful dolls - and I wish I looked so incredibly gorgeous (and French) as I sew up my little creations.

New doodle pen

The kids are beginning to wake up earlier again - that’s the draw back to lighter, brighter, fresher mornings full of bird song, it’s the grating cry of “DAD! DAD! DAD! HOP ME UP!”. We have to remember to go to bed earlier and not spend stupid amounts of time looking at celebrity blogs. It’s a little like watching bad television - you get too tired to actually get up and turn it off and go to bed, so you just sit there in a sleepy stupor. Oh! Frances Bean Cobain is turning 16!! How did that happen? click. Oh wow, Suri’s blanky is so much nicer than Lily’s - every time I see it I think “why did Lily have to fall in love with the hot pink polyester sleeping bag?” etc. I need more sleep.

Woodland Park Folk at Hudson

Phil and I dropped in to Hudson today to check out Jhoanna’s solo show! Beautiful softies. I was so keen to snap up little Gurion (on the left) but of course he was well and truly gone. Instead the cute little guy on the right is coming home with us in October. He is made from Lara’s beautiful fabric so it’s a double whammy!

Hudson Clothes
229 Carlisle St Balaclava
Vic 3183
Australia
(03) 9525 8066

Spring enthusiasm

There is dappled sunshine in the garden and on my keyboard this morning. The first day of Spring feels very nice indeed. I will continue to ignore the weeds for the time being.

We had a busy weekend full of friends and relations, croissants, swimming lessons, fish n chips, movies (date night = Tropic Thunder - brilliant!) birthday parties and even some of my parents’ friends giving us a spontaneous singing rendition over lunch on Saturday. When I looked at my calendar on Friday I wasn’t sure how we were going to manage it, but it was actually an incredibly refreshing weekend.

You will notice (if you visit this site, and not just read the feed) that I have updated my right hand side bar links today for September. There are plenty of lovely blogs this month. I got a bit carried away.

So, here are some more Spring thoughts;

1. Angus Stone has a very nice voice. I have Paper Aeroplane on repeat.

2. I have almost finished my enormous pile of rabbits and they will be on sale early next week. Stay tuned for details.

3. Rachel Power’s book combined with my teenage journals have been an incredibly potent combination of “get your ass in to gear” type of inspiration for me lately. Reading back over those years of 15-17 where everything was exciting because everything was a possibility made me feel a bit sad that I have seemed to have lost that sense of wonder. Every play I saw had a little tingle of excitement because somewhere in the back of my mind there was a “I am going to do something like that one day”. Every good book I read continued to convince me that one day I would have a bash at something like that. I have found that as I have got a bit (lot) older a good play or a fabulous book can leave me with a little tinge of sadness, a little sense of regret.

And then suddenly I realised (thanks Rachel, thanks teenage self) that there is absolutely no reason at all, just because I’m a “grown up” and primarily a mother that I can’t start dreaming like that again. And the exciting bit is that as a “grown up” I actually have the capacity to let some of those dreams become more of a reality. All that’s required is a little hard work (and a little less worry about how clean the house is).

So there you have it… I am doing some writing. Lots of crazed, first draft writing. It’s fun.

The Divided Heart - Rachel Power

Firstly, a big thank you to those who recommended I track down The Divided Heart by Rachel Power when I wrote about life/work/art balance a while ago. I did indeed track it down and then devoured almost the entire thing in a weekend - a pretty mean feat, you would have to agree, when there are small children to be entertained but I am pretty adept at reading while I cook, collect laundry off the floor and make creatures out of playdough. Despite life buzzing around me, I couldn’t help. I just had to keep reading.

As you know, I am no book critic, but someone who will rave endlessly and evangelically about a book I enjoyed - and The Divided Heart falls into that category. Reading it, especially so intensely, had such a profound affect on me. I took a little mini roller-coaster ride of emotions that weekend. To show you how extreme, my thoughts went from finding more childcare for Lily, to giving up my work entirely and then to, for the first time, contemplating a third child. THAT is how much of a roller-coaster ride and that is no exaggeration.

Rachel is such a sensitive and hugely intelligent author. Her introduction and her own reflections on being a writer and a mother are some of the most interesting parts of the book. She looks at the sad truth that, on the whole, historically women were not given any chance to attempt to be both a mother and an artist and so many women artists turned away from motherhood as a result. She looks at the mythology that surrounds art and (usually male) artists, and she talks about motherhood and domestic life still being feminism’s final frontier; the fact that our generation has grown up believing that it is possible to do everything (and let me tell you - reading my 80s journal is a blinding testament to that! I was going to be a film making / writer / mother of FIVE according to my 17 year old self) only to discover somewhere along the track - around the time of breastfeeding is the general impression - that despite the best of intentions of all parties, this is not always so easy. Each of the women she talks to have pretty similar struggles - and her point is made so very clearly that it’s a hard thing to be both a passionate mother and a passionate artist.

All the women she spoke to and interviewed for the book (including such gorgeous women as Claire Bowditch, Rachel Griffiths, Joanna Murray-Smith and Davida Allen) are refreshingly candid and touchingly open in their desire to share their experience. You get a real sense of sharing a heart to heart over a cup of tea with each of the women, a sense of their life and also a clear sense of the transience of all these feelings - which, we all know, change from day to day, stage to stage, child’s age to child’s age, yet a sense of the universal truths they live by.

I loved this book but at times I found it a little bleak as unsurprisingly there is no easy path to follow and the resounding message is “yes it’s bloody hard but you do the best you can do.”

But in the end I did come out feeling a little better about all in the world. There are so many pearls of wisdom to be found within the interviews, unsurprisingly the most inspiring come from the older women Rachel chose to interview, the ones whose children have grown up a little and who can look back on the early years with a sense of perspective. One of the interviews is with printmaker, Franki Sparke. It was a paragraph from this which resonated with me last week:

“There is always a gap between what we imagine ourselves to have the potential to become and what we really are,” Franki warned. “Motherhood is just one of the things that can be used as an excuse for not realising our dreams. You can always find a way to adapt your practice and work around your children. Perhaps it’s your career that’s compromised, as opposed to your art, or yourself as an artist.”

I realised that this for me is SO true! I have been banging on about not having enough time to do my “Work” for so long that I haven’t even any idea what my “Work” really is. I should just bloody well do something!

I highly recommend The Divided Heart, especially if you, like me, are feeling that inevitable pull between your work and your children… but I suggest reading it slowly (though the temptation is to keep reading it in a kind of frenzied desire to find answers to all the big questions) because it can be overwhelming and then let it sit before you rush off to have extra babies, book nannies, chuck in your art or your family.

A Divided Heart can be found in bookshops here in Australia, and can be bought from the publisher’s web site for those who are interested from Overseas.

Sucka

There was a little Mr Mom moment in the kitchen this morning. I came out in the kitchen to find Phil cleaning Lily up after her breakfast with the vacuum cleaner! He looked at me and said “What?? This is highly effective!”.

The funniest bit was Lily telling my Mum later in the day all about it, and Mum turned to me and said “Did she just say daddy cleaned her breakfast out of her sleeve with the vacuum cleaner?”, Umm, yes she did.

** Portrait of Phil by me and Lily.

Cold Grey

This has been one of those long winter weeks.

Phil is away working in California and both girls (and now me too) have been sick with temperatures and ear aches, and there have been sleepless nights and lots of hiding inside away from the chill and the rain. I am still not complaining about the rain (oh why didn’t we get a rainwater tank installed before the winter?)- but I took a fully recovered Amelia to a (disco) birthday party this afternoon and the car almost got bogged on the way home! Yes, it was Greensborough but honestly - that’s not exactly rural.

But at twilight tonight I realised I could hear blackbirds in the garden and I wandered outside and while the sky was still a cold-grey, I could smell blossom, so the end of our winter hibernation is nigh.

And look at the garden! Some serious work is needed in the vegie patch.

And I need to get to some marmalade making - the only cheerful thing in the garden are the kumquats.

Bring on Spring!

I am a shy person, really!

I have been completely lost in my aforementioned 80s journals these last few days and looky! I found Johnny Depp’s autograph glued in one, I thought it was gone forever! I have, over the years, occasionally wondered if I had perhaps made the whole thing up and just come to believe it. Thank goodness for the evidence. Having been thinking about all that stuff again, I was momentarily amused to hear the Eurythmics playing over the shopping centre loud speakers this morning as I stacked boxes of crackers into my shopping trolley. A song from the very same tour I mentioned on Sunday.

As we continued to scoot around the mall, Lily said hello to approximately 25 people. She says, very loudly, “HELLO MAN!” (or GIRL) and then if they say hello back, she says “WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” and if they don’t respond to her, she shouts at me “WHAT’S THAT MAN DOING?”. It gets kind of tiresome, as I politely smile and hurry away. The worst bit is when she can’t work out whether it’s a MAN or a GIRL so she’ll say - “HELLO MAN GIRL!”. As you can imagine, I pretend I didn’t hear what was undeniably clear, even in 2 year old dialect and I hurry away too fast (and with a very red face) to smile politely at those people.

But apart from Lily saying hello to strangers, I did it myself today. I have been enjoying Victoria’s blog lately since she left a kindly comment on my blog last week. She’s a local girl - from my very suburb. She makes dolls, has two little girls, grows vegetable… so I emailed her lately to say a hello and to warn her that I may spring out and say a hello in person if I ever see her at the local shops. The idea that it might actually happen seemed remote enough to entertain, even for a shy person like me. But today - there she was! I did that momentary thing of thinking “am I really going to say hello??” and then finding that before I made an actual, rational decision I had already turned back and stopped her and asked her if she was indeed Victoria — And it was! It was a very nice coincidence. Lily is fortunately too young to be embarrassed by such things - but give her 10 years or so and she’ll be groaning (that ubiquitous teenage chant) “Muuuuum! You are soooo embarrassing!”

and I will promptly remind her of her “HELLO MAN GIRL!” days.