naomi loves: nesting

nesting

Things learned and loved on Tuesday

Learned: I couldn’t save the world but I could make someone’s world better Loved: Oona Ristola photography Learned: a recipe for fig, ricotta and honey toast. Yum! Loved: green and growing homes Learned: why our children need to read Loved: knitted comfort food Learned: three surprising decorating tips Loved: this book-themed hotel Learned: how…

Lessons learned lately: The first cup of tea of the morning is the best cup of tea of the year One mango can make a whole house smell like Christmas Sugar is harder to give up than Facebook Clean house makes happy heart Spring starts when the flowers bloom Two children napping at the same…

I have been trying to teach the children about seasons for fruit and vegetables. Late in autumn we had a “goodbye green grapes” party to enjoy the final bunch of the season, which was harder to explain than you might expect due to the plethora of gigantic, California-grown green-grapes that started appearing on grocery-store shelves…

I have been trying to give my body a break from sugar. I like sugar a lot more than is strictly good for me, and also, it’s pretty hard to insist that my children have a healthy diet if I don’t model said diet myself. On Friday I made this sugar-free take on lemon meringue pie…

Pastel-perfect blossoms from the tree behind the wall and across the laneway are floating into our garden and carpeting the grass in pink confetti. The children are shedding layers, leaving trails of socks and stockings and cardigans throughout the house as they cast off the long, long winter and turn their faces to the warm…

A group in Switzerland has come up with a simple and rather lovely way to use your humble letterbox to build community. But it’s not through the writing and sending of letters, it’s about sharing, and involves (gulp!) actual face-to-face contact. You know the old saying about popping into someone’s place to borrow a cup…

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” ~ JD Salinger, “A Girl I Knew” Sometimes do you feel like you are trying – and failing – to hold the universe together? I don’t mean the WHOLE universe, of course (now wouldn’t THAT…

The trees that line our street are bare, their leaves rotting in brown, woodsy, rain-soaked piles in gutters and corners. We are spending more days inside. Baking bread, writing letters, painting, cuddling. Pumpkin, pomegranates, cinnamon, crumpets. Mandarins, red wine, sausages, cloves. Every morning I rise before the sun, readying the house for my still-slumbering family….

Let’s talk about song lyrics, for a minute. Specifically, song lyrics that you get wrong, with somewhat hilarious consequences. I’ll start. 1. In high school, I thought Madonna was singing “Dress you up in Milo” rather than “Dress you up in my love.” (Non-Aussie friends, Milo is a kind of chocolate drink powder that you…

This morning Scout and I whipped up a couple of batches of ANZAC biscuits. We made the monster-sized ones you see here for us to eat on the weekend (and one for me at morning tea), then another batch of slightly more reasonably-sized biscuits to take to her friends at daycare. She was bursting with…

Recently I read one of those “5 surprising habits of happy people” type articles, and one of the five “happy habits” was keeping plants in your home. No real surprises there, of course. Plants are good for your physical and psychological health: they filter and purify the air inside your home, they give you something…

Here’s a lovely, last-minute tutorial for dying Easter eggs a stunning blue, and creating pretty, stencilled patterns out of leaves and flowers. Do you want to give it a go? There’s still time! The idea for this project came from my friend Pascale, who does it every year with her children. When they were little,…