An award!

I was really flattered to receive the following award from Susana at Our Homeschool Fun last week. Susana writes a fantastic blog full of interesting tips and ideas and all the things she's done with her three children - soon to be four! and I am amazed she finds time to do it all, on top of homeschooling and housekeeping. If you don't know her already, and you have a minute, stop by there.



To accept the award, I have to pass it on to 15 blogs that I have newly discovered and enjoy reading. I've put something about each one so you can see if any spark your interest.

Godspace - my favourite - currently running a series called "what is a spiritual practice?" and accepting submissions for it. Check her out!
Yummy Mammy - life as a single mum in another country, trying to move home.
Future Mama is learning about babies, pregnancy and the like, writing funny stuff and hosting cool giveaways.
Blue Cotton Memory has five boys, some grown up already, and a lot of wisdom to share.
Down to earth is all about gardening and making things at home, simply. Great recipes and ideas.
Filth Wizardry - Full of fun, messy ideas for kids!
Hans and Shinta live in the Faroe Islands. Never heard of it? It's between Denmark and Iceland. Go have a look, she's organising a round-the-world trip for a toy bear for a sick child - perhaps you'd like to host him?
The Artful Parent - the title is self-explanatory, I think.
Traveling the Blogosphere - featuring lots of different blogs from around the world. Lovely.
Wise Craft - has a lovely fabric flower tutorial which is on my to-do list! and lots of other things.
Unplug Your Kids - currently on holiday but usually full of ideas.
Your Cool Friend Cheryl - cool and funny. Kids and crafts.
Five Orange Potatoes - this site has everything, but I love it because of the garden and flower related stuff. Oh, and the activities. And...
4 Crazy Kings - Where I get lots of craft ideas!
Steadfast At Home - I love her thoughts about being feminine (which I'm not!) And about her garden.

Open Ended Art - yellow collage

Click here to see what everyone else did for OEA!

Not only did we start on this late, but it was not a very auspicious beginning:

After your milkshake, would you like to do a collage?
What's a collage?
It's when I give you glue and paper and you do some sticking.
No. I want to drink my milkshake.
Of course, but when you've finished your milkshake?
No. I want to play in my house.
How about if I give you the paper and you can stick it to your house?
Hmm. No.

Ah. So I tried again after the milkshake:

Would you like to do some sticking now?
No.
Not even if Mummy comes and watches you?
Yeah! Sure! Sure!

Bingo. Must remember to specify that first, next time!

Here's what he did before getting bored:

Click on the photo to get a closer look

An advert for the local bus service, fireworks, Swiss flag with yellow cheese cross (from a magazine). It's Swiss national day soon, can you tell? Also an old handprint and a bunch of the sticky-backed plastic that we used in our OEA with paint last time! Which is why those bits are yellow... and in fact he had already added them to the house, when it was still just an Ikea cardboard box.

To use up the leftover glue, I made serendipity squares - first time I've made them. They're not quite finished yet so no photos. But here's my lovely boy in his newly decorated house instead!

The handprint is one we made for party invitations back when he was turning one!

MTM - weather!

We've had a lot of hot weather and thunderstorms recently, including the largest hailstones we have ever had, I think. (nothing like what you get in America of course, but still the size of large marbles).

So here is our tin - I think these ideas were my own but I've seen so many other tins that maybe I have been inspired elsewhere and forgotten it. If you've done a weather tin let me know and I'll link to you! and don't forget to click here to see what everyone else did this week.

Pickled onion hailstones, yellow nasturtium-sun in blue banana-yoghurt sky, bread and marmite thunderclouds and yellow pepper lightning, white bread/cheese/marmite cumulus cloud. Served on upside down lasagna tray for thunder noise!

Froglet absolutely loved playing with this meal.

Look Mummy, the thunderclouds have arrived...
*bangs them together while making thundery growling noises*
I'm going to dip it in here to make blue thunderclouds. Why are you writing down what I said? ... what's a blog?

The great thing about pickled onion hailstones is they accurately portray what a hailstone looks like inside as well as outside! Marmite is British yeast extract (Aussies and Kiwis also have it but theirs is slightly different).

We can take the flag out later and stick it in the muddy ground where the plants are growing.
*When asked what for:* For fun! And to show that it's windy.
The hailstones are dropping out of the thunderclouds...
bang! It went in the sun!... bang! It went in the blue sky!

We were meant to have snow too, but I hadn't had chance to make it so we had it as a snack later instead:

Chocolate and coconut snowman, strawberries hidden under cream snowclouds.

Look Mummy, I made an eye and a nose for the snowman.

Open Ended Art: Yellow Paint

This time I got to choose what materials Froglet needed for his craft. Yellow paint was a given. We also had white sticky-backed plastic, a paint roller, scissors, a pen, imitation canvas (the sort of textured paper you get for oil or acrylic painting) and red and blue tempera. Because we only have red, yellow and blue tempera. We should really invest in another colour, like white.

I asked Froglet whether he wanted to cut up the SBP himself, or wanted me to cut it, or wanted me to draw shapes for him to cut. He chose the latter, and announced that he would like birds. We ended up with two birds, an egg, two cars and some squares. After a bit of a meltdown when the first car lost its wheels in the cutting process, peace was restored and everything else cut out rather well. I cut some thin strips from the scraps, which Froglet thought might be trees. One of the scraps looked a bit like a whale, so we used that too. Then I helped him peel the back off the SBP - he couldn't manage it himself - and he stuck all the bits onto the paper.

It's a forest, with cars and birds and a dolphin.

Some rearranging was necessary before the final result was deemed acceptable. Fortunately this stuff peels off nicely.

Next we made three pots of yellow paint and talked about what colours might result if we mixed in a drop of red to one and a drop of blue to the other. Froglet thought red and yellow might produce green, then after stirring a bit he suggested pink, and finally orange. He got blue and yellow right first time. Then we discussed whether the orange paint was really orange or whether it was still more yellow, and the same for the green. After that I let him loose with the paint roller.

After waiting for it to dry and peeling off the SBP, here is the end result.

The daddy duck is in this car and the other one is the visitors car.

I love how the greeny-yellow has dried almost fluorescent. Froglet was still in painting mode when he had finished the first masterpiece, so he did this on a sheet of Ikea packing paper (note to self: this stuff is way too thin for paint!)

He had more fun than last time and we stretched the project over a couple of days too! Check out what the other crafty mums and kids did for the blog carnival here:

Organising meals

This post is part of the ABCand123 picnic. Sort of. Click here to see how everyone else organises their space.

My mother, parent of four children all neatly spaced three years apart, was extremely organised. She had a huge diary in a drawer of its own, and any time we wanted to do or plan anything, or had school trips or whatever, we would be instructed to go and put it in her diary. Menus were prepared in advance, shopping was never done without a list, meals were served reliably on time, the house was neat, with a place for everything, and so on. (Did I mention my mum later became a teacher? Unsurprisingly, she's very good at it.)

Sadly, not much of this has rubbed off on me, although I am told that at 2 years old I was very tidy and had a home for everything. The two things I have retained are the diary, and the menu planning. It saves so much money and stress when you go to the shops armed with a list. It saves time too - leaving more time to teach and/or play with your kids! And it means you're sure they're getting a balanced diet. Of course I don't always stick exactly to the list - if things are on special offer we will buy those too and throw them in the freezer for when they do come up on the menu.

I have two sets of menus, which live in a folder on top of my freezer: 4 weeks of cold-weather menus including items such as cottage pie, lasagna and hot pasta dishes, and 4 weeks (newly drawn-up) of summer menus listing salads, bread-based meals and other things that require minimal cooking. Who wants to slave over a stove in summer?

Each of the folder menus comes with two shopping lists at the bottom of the page - one for Monday and one for Friday. These lists only include things that I don't always have in, or run out of quickly, like tomatoes. Then we have a "staples" list full of all the stuff that I always have in and replace as soon as I run out even if we have no plan to use it immediately.

The lists work in conjunction with my boards. Here they are:

Hopefully you can see that the left board is mostly like a diary with the week laid out and upcoming dates written at the bottom. The right hand board has a set of my cold-weather menus (minus lists) pinned up behind it - I still have to change those - and a space to write up our to-do lists, one for each of us, and another for items we have just run out of and items we wish to acquire on our next trip to the UK. When I make my Monday shopping list, I use the menu, the staples list, the freezer list - of which more in a minute - and the board, and write it all down in the order that I will find it in the supermarket. (I hate it when they move the shelves around! Fortunately that rarely happens here.)

I do have a real diary for writing in long-term dates too, but the board is so easy to use because it's just there. It's just a piece of plastic from a very large picture frame, cut in half (it broke when it fell off the wall, that's what gave me the idea of doing this), and with the edges covered in black electrical tape so they aren't sharp. The two pieces are on adjoining cupboard doors above the kitchen counter. They're only attached at the top so I can get under them, albeit with some difficulty, to change the menus when needed. The whiteboard pen doesn't wipe off very well , even with cleaning alcohol, because the plastic isn't really intended for use as a white board, but it wipes off well enough to see what is current and what isn't. I love having the two layers so I can move things around temporarily with arrows and so on.

The freezer is also very organised:


The numbers at the top refer to which drawer an item is in. Numbers following items refer to either how many bags of something there are (e.g. two packets of mince), or how many portions in the one bag (e.g. lemon chicken to serve three people). Only I know which ones are which! Things get crossed off as they are used, and written up on the board if they need renewing.

My fridge does not benefit from this system, because it is a filing place for all sorts of pictures and coupons and informative papers. My mother, of course, would keep these neatly in her diary, in its special drawer.

Blue impossible pie

Today Froglet and I decided to use up some leftover coconut by making impossible pie. And since ABC&123 are looking for blue or brown activities, we decided to make it blue. Hopefully they've not beaten me to posting this time! *laughs*

When I say we decided, I mean I decided. Because I, and not my son, am the boss, despite his apparent disagreement. Just because you are steadfast in your belief does not mean that you are right, Froglet.

Impossible pie, in case you've not come across it before, is named thus because it's a self-cruster. My recipe asked for a 10 inch pie dish (25 cm), but mine was 11 inch (28 cm). How is that possible? Or should I have measured the base rather than the rim? Anyway, we also have tiny pie dishes so I halved the recipe and used five of those, although I think six would have been better.

The halved recipe runs as follows:

2 eggs
25 g (1 oz) margarine
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup coconut
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt (1/8 tsp!)

and blue food colouring, of course. We added the blue colouring to the milk, and then added some more when it was all blended because it looked more green than blue.

My cup measure is 250 ml, in case you're using different cups.

Blend all together, pour into greased pie dishes (4 inches/10 cm), bake at 160 C for about 40 minutes (fan assisted oven). The original recipe said 175 C for 1 hour, but that was for the full recipe in a large pie dish so I adjusted. You may need to fiddle with this a bit for your oven.

When it was all cooked, the coconut was supposed to end up on top, the eggy bit in the middle and the crust on the bottom... and it did! Very thin crust, but I think it was always thin.

I will have these pieces, and two of that one, Mummy.

I'm happy to say it met with approval!

On being a permanent expatriate

I've been an expat for almost as long as I can remember. There was a brief lull after my sister was born when we moved back to the UK for about 3 years, but then we were off again. Oh, and I returned to the UK to study, meet and marry my husband. No I didn't study my husband. I studied languages. Perhaps not surprising, when you've grown up in several of them.

Less than two years after our wedding, we were leaving the UK for good (well, probably). That was 6 years ago. So for 22 years of my life I have lived in places that were not only abroad, but were not even English-speaking.

There's something incredibly odd about not being at home in your own country. To many people there's something pretty odd about not feeling patriotic towards your own country - although as I've said before, Brits aren't as patriotic as other nationalities. And there's something quite strange about turning up at university to find that although you speak English perfectly, with a perfect RP accent, and understand the correct use of shall/will, everyone else appears to have learnt something rather different. My husband once told me that I sound like a character out of an Enid Blyton book. Well yes. I've never read any of the books he grew up with - if I hadn't returned to the UK when I did, I might have missed out on Harry Potter - but Enid Blyton was readily available on my librarian-mothers shelves.

As a child I rather liked being an expat. I liked attending the local school, learning to speak fluent French but being able to switch back into English for any secrets I wanted to share with my sister. I'm sorry to say I rather looked down on people who "couldn't be bothered" to learn the local language and try to fit in, who spoke of "going home" for Christmas, as if they were not living long-term in this country. As I and my 3 siblings were quick learners, we were always perfectly contented and at home where we were.

But now, as an adult, in a country where the local tongue is more dialect than language, spoken rather than written, and as such very nearly unlearnable without tremendous effort, I find a whole new aspect of being a permanent expat. Loneliness. I realise why it mattered so much to my mother when her friends moved back "home", as they invariably did. There is something special about being with another native speaker of your own tongue, that almost no non-native speaker, however good, can quite attain. (I wonder if my friends felt this when I was a teenager - or perhaps it doesn't apply if you grew up somewhere and are effectively a native). That certainty of understanding as much as anyone can understand, of being understood in the same way. No need to watch the face of your interlocutor carefully to detect the slightest hint of "you just lost me". Out here, such moments are rare. Or if not rare, then at least infrequent enough that you appreciate them when they come.

Not that we have no friends. We have lovely, wonderful friends. Many, if not most, are expats themselves. (Some are even reading this!) But here's where the second special aspect of expatriate-dom comes in. Distance. Live in a country that speaks your language, or where you speak its, and friends can be just round the corner, in the house across the road, at church which is only a ten minute walk away. Some will be acquaintances and others will be kindred spirits. But live abroad and suddenly your options are limited. It's hard to be a kindred spirit when you're not sure you understand each other all the time. Perhaps no one speaks your language in your neighbourhood. The kindred spirits you stumble across might live nearly two hours drive away. Or they might rely on public transport, making a ten-minute car drive an hour-long trek. Your church might meet in the next city, because it's hard to worship in a language you command imperfectly even on your best day. (Church becomes study!) And that wouldn't matter elsewhere, because you wouldn't rely on those people, the ones so far away. You would have your network close by, as well. Here, distance becomes important.

And then of course, just living becomes hard work. If you want to go out, you need a babysitter - your friends network is too spread out to help much, and of course, the grandparents are elsewhere. Nearly all your sons little friends at playgroup speak dialect. (Your son comes home and speaks dialect to you, and gets frustrated when you don't understand!) Shopping becomes tricky. The Engineer bewilders people when, on business trips to the US or the UK, he starts excitedly chattering away to a shop assistant. It doesn't happen here - it would if we spoke fluently, no doubt. The toilets desperately need the attention of a plumber but just the thought of having to try to explain over the phone is daunting.

It's amazing what we take for granted as children. The ability to easily understand and be understood, to learn quickly and fit in, to call the place you live home and be fully settled and content there. I'm grateful for those things, grateful that my parents settled when I was still young enough to cope, that I was exposed to enough languages as a child to cope now, even when it is hard work.

Who knows, in 25 years time Froglet may be writing something like the above. Perhaps to him, born and bred in Switzerland, living in England would be expatriation.