Just popping in to say hi, and share this beautiful photograph of Madeleine with her big sister Emily. Em got home from Italy two days ago and Madeleine was ALL OVER HER when she arrived in Melbourne today, insisting on holding her hand the entire afternoon. It was just the loveliest thing.

Loads of stories and photos to share with you from the past couple of weeks, I’ll get to them eventually! Hope you’re having a beautiful week.

I had planned to bring you a Father’s Day post today. I am truly blessed to have not only an amazing dad who (with my equally-amazing mum) gave me a wonderful childhood, but also a husband who is such an incredible father that he inspired I-don’t-want-kids me to enter parenthood! That post is still to come. But today, I just couldn’t resist bringing you this little barefoot angel.

Sometimes (about two or three times a week), Mr B asks me, “Can you believe this is your life?”

He asks it when my baby throws herself backwards and upside-down into my lap and dissolves into giggles. He asks it when I slump in a chair, exhausted, wearing daggy maternity jeans from Target, stains on my shirt, and with hair looking like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backward. He asks it when my little girl throws a tantrum because I won’t let her put her hand in the orange juice.

Then Mr B says, “When I met you in New York, you conned me!” He says this because when we met in New York I was single and fancy-free and had nice clothes and nice shoes and we had one of those first-date conversations during which you quiz one another about everything. Mr B quizzed me about children and I said “I love children but I don’t want to be a mum.”

I meant it. Really I did.

Last year I wrote about what changed my mind. If you’re curious, you can read about it here. A week after I wrote that post, Madeleine was born.

Oh, Madeleine!

She is light and shadow.

She is willful, affectionate, funny, passionate, clever and loving.

When I carry Madeleine into the bedroom at night, she wraps her arms around my head and kisses me all over my face. When I tell her not to let the dog lick her food, she lets out a screech and tries to bang her head on the floor in fury. When I call “Bath time!” she bursts into giggles and runs away as fast as her chubby little legs will carry her. In the darkest hours of the night she wakes up and nothing – nothing – will calm her but to snuggle down in between us. If she finds one of her dad’s dirty socks, nothing pleases her more than to place the sock on my knee and hear me say “Disgusting! Get it away!”

Today was the first day of spring, and the weather celebrated. There was a wind, but it was soft, balmy and floral. And for the first day in more months than I can remember, Madeleine went barefoot in the park. And for the first time in her life, she ran barefoot in the park.

Joy in my life, these days, is  bare feet. Chubby baby toes in cool green grass. It’s watching Madeleine’s dress billow behind her in the wind as she races, arms akimbo, toward the playground. It’s shadows lengthening and sunlight, golden on my baby’s eyelashes.

It’s funny how life never ceases to tumble you into the unexpected, isn’t it. I never would have expected motherhood to be part of my world. Yet as I type, Madeleine is sleeping beautifully in her cot after her energetic day in the wind and grass. Baby B2 is growing, waiting, dreaming, inside me.

Beside me on the couch, Mr B just pulled out his passport to make a visa application for a trip to China later this year. He is looking over all the old stamps, awash in nostalgia. Santiago. Heathrow. Addis Ababa. Rio. Seoul. Los Angeles. And so it goes. Once upon a time (for 10 years or so), Mr B travelled overseas for more than nine months of each year. Even after we met and he had left that job, he was off somewhere new in the world every few months, and travelling interstate every other week. I’ve talked before about how, when I came home from New York, we moved and moved and moved again, six interstate moves in just 18 months. I don’t think Mr B could ever have imagined being as settled as we are now. Buying a house, renovating it, looking at schools for our children. Watching the Masterchef finale on TV (yay Emma!).

Life, you funny old trickster. I wonder what is in store next.

Consider yourself warned.

OK, these things, in our lives lately (please forgive the dodgy iPhone snaps, I’ve been forgetting my camera around with me lately and I shouldn’t).

1. A butterfly landed on Madeleine’s head yesterday, which kind of freaked her out but I thought it was adorable. That face!

2. Walking the dog is so much more fun than I realised before Madeleine showed me the light.

3. Sometimes, gender-stereotypical behaviour is not learned but simply innate. For example, we did not teach Madeleine to love to wear and carry hats and handbags, to want to brush my hair and steal my headbands, to prefer her pink shoes over her tan ones, to drape my (expensive, Christian Lacroix) scarf around her neck, or to wear her plastic toy rings as bracelets and walk around the house holding her hands high to show them off. She figured these things out all by herself.

4. Note to self: if you have hidden your (expensive, Christian Lacroix) scarf from your daughter, don’t let her anywhere near the toilet paper or she will innovate.

5. Lamingtons get the Madeleine seal of approval.

6. Homemade jaffles, lemon cupcakes, a cup of tea and a magazine feature all about our neck of the woods… that was a relaxing afternoon.

7. I am becoming rather bump-obsessed these days. This pregnancy coming so soon after the last one, le bump seemed to pop a lot earlier than I remember happening last year (was it only last year? Eek!). Baby B2 is kicking beautifully (I’m being pummelled at this very moment), and it’s just as lovely to experience the second time around. Oh and another sweet something lately? Ruby has become very attached to my lap all over again. She loves a good bump, that cat.

8. Peppa Pig! Madeleine is soooo into Peppa Pig right now, even while in the pram, in the rain. You have no idea.

9. When my baby eats real food (as opposed to mush) I am ridiculously proud. This is what my life has become. Also, it is super handy to be able to share our meals. And cute.

10. We went to the zoo yesterday with some of Madeleine’s little friends (and my grown-up friends) and she had SO MUCH FUN.

The end.

(11. I have only just noticed: Madeleine sure wears a lot of red!)

Our family has a little secret to share. In December, this little angel will become a big sister! We are thrilled and terrified and exhausted-in-anticipation, in equal measure.

Have you had or do you know anyone who has had two children under the age of two? I’d really love your advice.

I wanted to call it All The Things I Wish People Had Told Me About Parenthood But They Were Too Busy Going On About Sleep Deprivation, but it’s only a little book and there wasn’t enough room on the cover. So I called it Welcome to Parenthood. It’s a little handbook that I made for my brother and sister-in-law, who are expecting their first baby in October.

There’s nothing earth shattering inside, and nothing controversial. I don’t go into breast versus bottle, or immunisation, or co-sleeping or any of the other components of so-called attachment parenting. Whether they ask for it or not, there will be plenty of people dishing out advice on those issues!

Instead, I focus on the things I either had to go hunting to discover, or only found out too late, about welcoming a little bub into your life. Like, what exactly do you need to have ready on the day you bring baby home, and what can wait until later? What criteria should I consider when it comes to choosing a pram or carrier (or to deciding between the two)? Did you know that newborn babies make freakishly loud zoo-noises when they sleep? This scared the bejezus out of me and Mr B on Madeleine’s first night at home.

These are the chapter-ish sections:

↑↑↑ WHAT TO HAVE READY AT HOME
(What you’ll need from Day 1, and what you can get later)
- Getting dressed
- Sleepy time
- Change time
- Bath time
- Feeding

↑↑↑ GETTING OUT AND ABOUT
(Prams, carriers and cars)
- Never leave home without…
- Pram or carrier or both?
- What to look for in a pram
- What to look for in a sling or carrier
- When wearing the baby
- In the car

↑↑↑ GETTING HELP
(What’s available and where to find it)
- At hospital
- Friends
- Community help

↑↑↑ OTHER RANDOM TIPS

The book went at the top of a little care package I put together for my brother. Just little baby things that don’t necessarily occur to new parents (at least, they didn’t occur to me), but that end up coming in really handy. If you’re curious, this is what went into the care package:

I hope they like it!

ps. I used Artifact Uprising to lay out and print the book, and I absolutely love the result. The paper is recycled and just a wonderful texture, it feels like such great quality. I added a lot more text than I think Artifact Uprising is normally designed to take, but it was still pretty easy to use. There are layout templates and then you just drop and drag images in after uploading them to the site. You create a frame if you want to add text anywhere, and adjust the size according to what you want. The little book cost me $12.99 plus postage. So affordable!

Well hello there. How was your weekend? Madeleine has a confession to make: she is going through a hat fixation.

It’s a serious obsession. The second she wakes up, her hand flies to her head to check for a hat. Perhaps it helps her feel secure and warm, since she has made it to the ripe old age of one and still doesn’t have all that much in the way of hair.

If she’s not already wearing a hat, she’ll crawl around until she finds one and then hold it up to the nearest adult for us to put it on her. In moments of particular personal urgency, Madeleine will wear two or even three hats, one on top of the other.

Recently I took some photographs to record this strange obsession, so that I can show her when she’s older. This is just a selection of Madeleine’s hat collection. There are more, left behind at friends’ places, in shopping centres, on footpaths…

Earlier this week I had a bit of a minor meltdown. I dropped a glass of orange juice and it shattered all over the kitchen floor. The next minute I was in tears, Madeleine watching on in wide-eyed concern that only poured guilt on my inability to cope.

I’m just. So. Tired.

Our family has been sick for months and months. Lately, Mr B has had a bad stomach bug and I have the ‘flu, while Madeleine has a viral chest infection following closely on the back of septicaemia (admitted to hospital and on IV drugs for 10 days) on the back of a horrible gastro virus (rushed to hospital in an ambulance at the doctor’s behest) on the back of another virus (taken to Emergency by us because we couldn’t get her fever down), all mixed in with her heart condition which makes her at once more prone to picking up these illnesses, and in more danger when they occur. When Madeleine is sick she doesn’t sleep which means we don’t sleep, which makes it a lot harder to get healthy, let alone… cope.

Even the dog is sick, with a torn tendon, a heart murmur and bad teeth (with accompanying Biblical bad-breath); and each separate condition will cost us literally thousands of dollars to treat – thousands that we don’t have – so we’re working on pain management and comfort instead. The healthiest member of our family is Ruby the cat, who has been referred to a weight clinic for her obesity problem (I’m not even kidding and yes, we think that’s as funny as you do).

I don’t talk about this kind of family stuff all that often on here, because this blog is supposed to be my happy place. It is where I like to document and uncover beautiful things: things that make me smile and inspire me to create, and hopefully do the same for you. But, honestly, there’s a reason why there have been long sessions of silence on here periodically since… March? Have we really been sick for that long? Yes, we have!

Anyhoo, on Meltdown Morning, I had only managed to get about two or three hours of sleep. My little baby had been so sick and congested that she could barely breathe, and was panting and sweating (one of the key warning signs we’d been told to watch out for with her heart). Eventually in the early hours of the morning when I’d had precisely NO sleep so far, Mr B took her out onto the couch so she could sleep in a more upright position. So he didn’t get much sleep either. We were both subdued, tetchy, worried and generally unpleasant by morning.

[Warning: the next paragraph is a bit gross. Skip it if you have a weak stomach.]

Madeleine agreed to take some milk and a tiny bit of toast for breakfast, which felt like progress until an hour later when she projectile vomited it up all over the carpet in the direction of Playschool. (A critique on the fruit-salad dinosaurs they were making? Only Madeleine can answer that, and she doesn’t say much other than “Gak” which means “Cat.”) I cleaned up my poor baby while she sobbed. She’s like her mother, she cries when she vomits. Then I tried to clean up the main event. Problem was there was so much phlegm in the mess that nothing would soak it up – it just moved around under the damp sponges I was using like ball-bearings. Particularly slimy, smelly, offensive ball-bearings, speckled with chunks of Vegemite toast.

I made the decision that the rug had to go: it was getting old and hard to clean anyway. But it was trapped under heavy furniture, so I would have to wait for Mr B to get home before I could remove it. So I covered the disgusting mess with a couple of cloths and a big towel to stop Madeleine from digging into it (which she was already trying to do), then dragged an armchair over on top of the towel and that’s where the phlegmy vomit stayed, all day, until Mr B and I were able to remove the carpet that night.*

There wasn’t much room for Madeleine to play in our tiny living room once a vomit-towel and armchair were dragged smack into the middle of it, so I opened things up for her to crawl around in the kitchen while I packed up for our day. Until I smashed the orange juice all over the kitchen floor, mercifully managing NOT to cut my baby with flying shards of glass.

I was already running late to get Madeleine to the hospital for a check-up following the septicaemia, and what with the broken glass and vomit debacle there was no floorspace left to put her down while I cleaned it up, so I cried instead. Then I gathered up my bags and my baby and walked out the door, leaving the glass where it was and the juice to grow sticky and the vomit still on the carpet and TOO BAD, I was over it.

In the car on the way to the hospital (which honestly feels like a second home because we have been there so often, I mean, the guys in the cafe know my coffee order and greet Madeleine by name!), I kept thinking, we can’t catch a break. It’s one thing after the next, after the next. Mr B wanted me to ask the specialist if there was anything wrong with her immune system, that she just couldn’t seem to get healthy.

But somewhere around my second coffee (“The usual love? How’s Maddy?”), and around-abouts the reassurances that Madeleine’s heart was yet-again unaffected by this latest infection, and that her immune system was fine, reality began to seep in.

I have a beautiful, happy, affectionate and intelligent little girl. Yes, she has been plagued by illnesses lately, but we are so lucky that they are mostly minor illnesses, and even the serious ones have been quickly and effectively treated. Here I was feeling sorry for myself because my child had a virus and I broke a glass, when there were families next to me in the cafe who were genuinely suffering. Brave little children facing trials that no child – or parent – should ever have to face. Some of them, with very little hope.

That afternoon I went from victim to victor, in my head. I am so thankful for all I have, particularly for my loving, healthy family. So if things continue to go quiet on this blog from time to time, well, it just means I’m prioritising my little family to give us the best chance of staying victorious.

Right now, Madeleine’s breath is rattling around like old bones in her young chest while she plays. But that’s the point, isn’t it? While she plays. Even during our recent stay in hospital, Madeleine took every opportunity when they allowed her off the drip to crawl around the ward and play chasings with the nurses, squealing with laughter.

I am truly lucky. And I am truly thankful.

*I will call Council Pick-up and put the rug out the front of our place as rubbish. However, I am hoping that the scabby neighbours who have stolen Mr B’s Lite & Easy food delivery TWICE from our front porch will help themselves to the Vomit Rug. That’s karma, friends.

In a quest to eat my way through the menus of all the food trucks in Melbourne, I’ve brought you Po’ boys, organic frozen yoghurt, pulled pork, classic burgers, chipotle chicken and loads more, with even more to come.

But I’ve been neglecting a decent-sized portion of our food-truck-eating population: the kids! Enter the Famous OTO. It is a little further afield than most of the food trucks I’ve been visiting (it’s in New York, to be exact), but OH MAN wouldn’t you buy ice cream from one of these cute little food vendors pictured above?

Illustrator and animator Måns Swanberg (look for his other work under the name Pistachios) has designed a sturdy playtime food truck for kids, made out of biodegradable, recyclable cardboard. The vintage-style ice cream truck pictured here is his prototype, but Swanberg has plans to develop any number of other food trucks (including tacos, noodles, BBQ, churros, hot dogs, hot rods and lemonade).

This will completely revolutionise the lemonade stall, you mark my words.

After a successful Indiegogo campaign, Swanberg now has the funds to get into production, so look out for these little beauties soon.

Can you imagine if there were a few different kid-run food trucks in play at a kindergarten fete, serving up cupcakes and lemonade and fairy bread? The school would make a KILLING (even if the rest of us had to crouch down on hands and knees to make a purchase).

All photographs here used with Swanberg’s kind permission, from the Famous OTO Facebook page

ps. You can personalise the number plates, too

When in the back yard, here is what you must do:

Roll down hills of newly-mown lawn, gathering green and fragrant debris on your clothes and face along the way. Adjust your pink hat. Cuddle a cousin. Cuddle another cousin. Feed the goats. Relish in the glories of the swing-set, again and again and again.

We love living in the city, but sometimes it does our souls good to drive out to the country and spend time in the winter sunshine of Nanna’s back yard.

How about you? What did you do on the weekend?

ps. Do me a favour and LOOK AT THAT FACE. Have you ever seen anything like it?

First birthdays are for waking up to a room full of balloons. They are for giggles, smiles, and squeals of glee. They are for daffodils, and boxes covered in homemade, polka-dot wrapping paper, made by Mama late last night using potatoes and paint.

First birthdays are stay-in-your-PJs-until-lunch, they are wear-a-silly-hat-if-you-want-to, they are tear-the-paper-off-your-presents as if there were no greater joy in the world.

Madeleine spent the morning of her first birthday with her parents and grandparents, playing, kissing, laughing, opening presents, playing with her new toys.

In the afternoon some friends came over and there was more laughter, more exciting new presents, a song, a loving kiss for a new doll, a first taste of chocolate cake, a chance to stay up late.

Her joy was so infectious, she made her first birthday the most special day possible, for all of us.