Dayboro Day and Antique Market

On Sunday, the girls (including my mum and sister) headed out to Dayboro for the Dayboro Day festival and Antique Market.  It was absolutely packed.  But still, we waited very patiently in line for little miss to get her face painted, a must-do activity whenever it's available.

It was such a beautiful day, this is the best time of the year in Brisbane (although as I write this, it's grey and miserable here).

We waited in line at the Antique fair too because Mum wanted to get a valuation on some of my Grandpa's china, very Antiques Roadshow of us. Best of all, I scored Polly a beautiful vintage cast iron bed for $75. It even has a 'P' on it!  Now I just need to clean up her room so I can set it up.

rhubarb + polenta cake

We had a playdate on Friday and I wanted to make something I hadn't tried before (I get bored very easily!).  So after a quick flick through a couple of recipe books I decided on this rhubarb and polenta (cornmeal) cake from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess.

This cake is yum!  It's pretty quick to make and would work for a morning tea or a desert.  I served it with a little bit of cream but the book includes a recipe for a muscat-marscapone cream that sounds like it would be really good.  Will have to try that next time.  The cake is nice and moist and the polenta makes it a little bit crumbly.  If you're on a gluten-free diet I think this is a recipe that would work really well if you substituted the plain flour for a gluten-free flour.

Rhubarb + Polenta cake

500g rhubarb

300g caster sugar

150g plain flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

155g fine polenta (cornmeal) 

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

125g butter, softened 

250g thick natural yoghurt

Butter and line a 23cm springform tin.  Preheat oven to 180 degrees. 

Wash and trim the rhubarb and cut into 1/2 cm slices. Put into a bowl and add 100g of the sugar. Don’t let the rhubarb stand for more than 30 minutes or there will be too much liquid.

Mix together the flour, bicarb, salt, cinnamon and polenta. With a fork, beat the eggs with the vanilla in a measuring jug or small bowl. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and the remaining sugar and gradually add the egg and vanilla mixture, beating while you do so. Then add the flour/polenta mixture alternately with the yoghurt., don’t over mix.

Finally, add the rhubarb together with its sugary juices, folding in to mix, and then spoon the batter into the prepared cake tin. Bake in the preheated oven for about 1 hour until the cake surface springs back when pressed gently.  You might need to cover the cake with a bit of foil after about 40 minutes to prevent the top from going too brown. 

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for at least 30 minutes before attempting to turn out.

Gratuitous baby photos

Just because.

Milestones

I saw these Baby Milestone Cards on Pinterest a couple of weeks ago and knew I 'had' to have them.   Although I'd missed a few of the milestones included in the set (weeks 1-6), Emilia is the last chance I'll have to use these cards so I had to do it, they are too cute.

I cheated a little with the smiling one, she's really been smiling for a couple of weeks but only in the last week has it become a reliable thing... the big grin when you go to pick her up from a nap or when she's been with someone else and is passed back to her mama.  Love these grins.

Looking forward to taking more photos with these.

Weekending

It's Wednesday and I'm posting about what we did on the weekend, that's not too late right?

We didn't really do much of anything last weekend either, but one of the amazing things about kids is that simple things are so exciting for them.

After failing my first attempt we successfully babysat the day care mice from Thursday night to Monday morning (I forgot to pick the mice up the first time we were on the roster!).  The girls loved looking after them, getting their food and water ready and covering them up with a blanket at night.

They weren't terribly impressed with me not letting them get the mice out of their cage though.. the closest we got to that was letting one of them run around in their plastic ball for awhile.  I was too scared they'd run away and we wouldn't be able to catch them and I'd have to show up at day care with an empty cage on Monday.

And on Sunday some family friends delivered a load of hay to mum + dad's house (for their garden) so we left a few bales on the trailer and the kids got a hay ride around the backyard.

Admittedly, the ride only lasted about a minute but they thought it was a great adventure.  I remember driving around with my Grandpa on a tractor when I was a kid and thinking it was the best thing ever... that probably only lasted about a minute too but the memory still sticks with me.  

The Playroom

We have a lot of toys in this household.  And I mean a whole lot.  Too many really, but my girls are very lucky and very spoiled by their extended family and friends (and probably by us too).

I'm also not very good at throwing things out so we keep everything - a trait I fear I've passed on to Matilda.  She won't let me sweep the floor without checking to make sure I'm not about to throw out anything precious such as a tiny plastic googly eye that fell out of her craft supplies, or a pipe-cleaner/chenille stick that has been made into a bracelet and then a bunny and then a fish.  So anyway, we have a lot of stuff.

The living room in our house isn't huge, it's fine for our couches, tv etc but there's no way all those toys were going to fit in there - we tried it, it failed.  Same deal with the girls bedrooms.  So we needed a playroom.

The front door of our house opens up to what is meant to be a formal lounge room.  I really prefer houses that have a proper entrance and don't just open up into a room but that was the only thing 'wrong' with this house and it ticked all our other boxes so that's why it's our house :)  But we were never going to have a formal lounge room, it would never get used and we'd have to buy another lounge suite.  So for most of the 3.5 years we've lived here there has been next to nothing in the room.

We couldn't decide what to do with it, we were thinking about turning it into a library/reading room kinda thing but when faced with all these toys the most practical use of the space was to turn it into a playroom. I guess it's a bit weird opening a front door into a playroom, but you've got to make use of what we got and there's no hiding the fact that we have kids.

The room was painted a horrible green colour and I have been desperate to change it so with the decision to turn it into a playroom we finally got our butts into gear and painted the walls.

This is what it used to look like...

And this is what it looks like now (I still have to change the blinds, but I haven't decided what I want yet).

And I still needed the room to be a little bit practical as an entry way so these shelves serve as "lockers" for all the family's school bags, handbags etc.  The wooden box on top has all our car keys and other bits of randomness.  The shelf has some of the kids art framed to keep with the playroom thing and I've told them we can change it every couple of weeks or whenever.  I love the littlest picture.. it's a birthday cake Matilda drew for Polly :) And the beautiful (?!) pink frame is my mothers day present from Matilda.

And just for all the mum's out there... the playroom looked this tidy for about 5 seconds and probably never will again!

Yo! Polly is 2!

My middle girl turned 2 last Thursday, we had a little birthday party just with her cousins to celebrate.  But around here no party is too little to have some decorations and this little munchkin is obsessed with Yo Gabba Gabba, so she got a little Gabba party.

I'm not sure she really has the concept down though because I'm pretty sure she thought it was Yo Gabba's (as she calls it) party and not hers.

She does however, have the concept of opening presents fully under control.

Earlier that morning, she had woken up to presents in her very own teepee.  Unfortunately her other special present didn't arrive in time, but that's ok... she'll get them tomorrow.

This little girl loves to sit down with a pile of books and flick through them all - so now she has a special little place to do that with the added bonus of hiding from her bossy big sister for a little while too.

Her big sister who wasted no time in showing Polly how to play with her presents about 5 seconds after she'd opened them.

At least the little one still can't get involved.  Poor Polly, middle child!

If you want to make a teepee like Polly's, I used this excellent tutorial from My Poppet.  I thought it would be complicated, but it's actually quite straightforward.  The only thing I need to do is trim down my dowels a little (one day!).

Both the big girls love it.

Sunday night supper club: chicken + chickpea pilaf

So I had this idea awhile ago to post a recipe on Sunday's because I was totally lacking in dinner inspiration.  I haven't done it in awhile but I thought it might be time to bring it back.

This recipe, from Nigella Lawson (it was in a Delicious Magazine from last year) is a total winner.  Really quick, super tasty and it passes the kid test (well it gets 75% from my kids - Polly loved it, Matilda loved it until she was half way through her dinner until she decided she didn't like it any more but I think that's a different story). It has the added bonus of being made from stuff I normally have on hand.

Chicken and Chickpea Pilaf
Serves 6-8

4 teasp garlic oil4 spring onions, finely sliced1kg chicken thigh fillets, the recipe says to cut it into 4, but I make it smaller.. normally about 6 strips1 teasp ground turmeric1teasp dried dill2.5 cups basmati rice2 x 400g cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed3 cups hot chicken stockChopped parsley, chives, dill and coriander (or the recipe says whatever you have on hand really)
Squeeze of lemon juice  

Pour the garlic oil into a wide, heavy-bottomed pan that comes with a lid and put on the heat.
Add the spring onions and stir for a couple of minutes before adding the chicken.
Turn the chicken, then add the turmeric and dried dill and cook for another couple of minutes.
Add the rice and stir well, so that the chicken and rice are combined, before adding the chickpeas and stock.  Give another good stir before bringing to a simmer.
Clamp on the lid, then turn down the heat and leave for 20 minutes, by which time the chicken will be cooked through and the rice will have absorbed all the liquid.
Season to taste and fluff up with a fork before serving.
Squeeze some fresh lemon juice over before serving (this is a must if you ask me). 



And if you have any good ideas for dinners, let me know.  

Rough start

Our little Emilia is already seven weeks old, it's gone so quickly and yet I feel like it's been months.  We haven't had the easiest of rides for the last few weeks.  Our littlest family member seems to like us best when we're feeding her or standing up bouncing and giving her cuddles and with two other little girls to entertain at the same time that can be a little difficult.

(see - she's a cranky pants!)

Plus she's not that into sleep... well that's not strictly true, she'll sleep in the day time if you're cuddling her or if she's in the baby bjorn.  At night she doesn't want to go to sleep until around 11pm/midnight and she's fairly unsettled from about 6pm so that makes for some long nights.  That has been a bit frustrating because those are the hours in which stuff got done around this place - when the 2 big girls are asleep.  But she does sleep from about midnight through til 4 or 5am so can't complain about that!

One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn since having kids is to limit the list of things I think I can get done in a day but I've always been the kind of person who has a to-do list that's about 3 pages long so this is a tough thing for me. With each baby I've had to learn to re-adjust to the new amount of time I have in a day and I don't find it that easy (it's taken me about 10 days to write this blog post for example... a few words at time before being interrupted by someone crying, fighting, hungry or just needing a cuddle).  Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't change it for the world, I just find it tough.

On top of that we had a bout of gastro (Norovirus) hit the family (all of us plus Granny, Pa, Auntie C and Uncle T) that landed Emilia in hospital for 2 nights (with me) because of dehydration.  Luckily she was fine, but it was a pretty yuck few days for everyone involved and everyone was a bit out of sorts as a result.

Despite our rough start however, I think we're slowly getting into a new routine and things are becoming a bit more calm around here.  Emilia is starting to get her own little pattern happening (I think) which makes things a lot easier to manage and a little more predictable.  Plus we celebrated Polly's 2nd birthday on Thursday and had great fun, I managed to make banana bread last weekend, tomorrow is Mother's Day and I even finished a blog post, so things must be looking up!