Goodbye Orange

We've been in our house not quite two years (I reckon it has been about 20 months).  We first laid eyes on the lounge when we attended our very first open home.  This is what the lounge looked like at that open home (photo from the real estate agent's website).  It's pretty orange! And if you look closely (through the archway) you can see through to the purple kitchen. Clearly the colours were not a deterrent to buying the house - pah, just needs a bit of paint.

Well, it's been nearly two years and we have still been living with the orange. To be fair, we'd had plenty to distract us - there was the year of vomiting pregnancy, followed closely by the year of wee Willa. As we drew closer to New Years Eve, I decided that the orange was not going to survive to see in another year.

The first layer of paper came off really easily (good bye orange!) and we thought we were awesome.  The room was looking a much paler shade of white, which I thought I could tolerate until we got around to painting it.  But then we worked out that the layer of white was a red herring, and that it just covered up four more layers that had to come off before we hit plaster board. 

Look at the beautiful white, sitting just under the orange

And then a bunch more layers under that....

After nearly three days of work, we have only done half the room, our shoulders are sore and we're having a break. I suspect its gonna be a number of weeks before we take up the scrapers again.  But look! It's no longer orange (I'm taking that as success).

The final layer (the green stuff) is frackin awful to get off!

Mama Muffins

I always find breakfast difficult. The ordinary breakfast foods have never really appealed to me.  There's something very wrong about a bowl of cereal with milk. Firstly, I'm still dairy free - so that puts the kibosh on the milk; and secondly, milk just makes the cereal go all mushy. I find that whenever I am tempted to have a bowl of cereal that I sink quite a lot of time into trying to save all of my cereal from drowning in the milk. Cereal is generally not really my thing.  So that pretty much leaves toast. And toast is a bit blah.

The Little One seems to also be a bit blah on the breakfast front.  For the last week the toast has been thrown to the floor. Blurgh. So, I thought I'd try making her a batch of some other kind of food for breakfast.  I was gonna make some kind of sweet potato muffins but the veggie market didn't have any sweet potatoes this week, so I decided I'd just make her plain potato muffins.  I took two recipes and smooshed them together and this is what we got.


Potato Muffins
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cardamon
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup melted olivani (so that it is dairy free)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup mashed cooked potato
1 egg
1/2 cup oat milk (or cow milk if you're not dairy free)

• Heat oven to 180°. 
• Combine the dry ingredients and mix
• In a separate bowl, beat together the melted olivani, oil, mashed potato, egg, and oatrmilk.
• Fold the wet mixture into the dry mixture and don't over mix!
• Fill the muffin tray.
• Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown on top.
• Cool and feed to baby!

I reckon this would work with other veggies too - maybe grated carrot, mashed pumkin, kumara, yams.

Not a New Years Resolution

Who is so firm that can't be seduced? William Shakespeare (1564 -1616)

I decided not to make any resolutions for 2012.  Instead, I decided that this year I would just write myself a to-do list - it's much more 'me'. It turns out that there are 12 things on my to do list, so it is my 12 in 2012.

1. Redecorate the lounge (this is going to involve finish stripping the many layers of old wallpaper off the walls, prepping for painting, and then painting the ceiling, walls and window frames - oh, and new cushions too!).
2. Redecorating the halls (urgh, more stripping of wallpaper etc).
3. Painting the toilet (kinda of as for the lounge, but without the need to strip wallpaper and probably without the new cushions).
4. Work out an idea for a redecoration of our bedroom. Consider stripping wallpaper and prepping the walls (if I can bear to think about stripping more wall paper.
5. Have a kitchen design/architect person draw up some plans for a new kitchen and figure out how much money we need to save to turn the plans into a real kitchen.
6. Weed the heck out of our back garden.
7. Rip all kinds of plants out of front garden (those hebes are going!) and weed the heck out of that too.
8. Knit something for the Little One (preferably something that fits her!)
9. Have a decent holiday - I reckon a block of at least three weeks off work, but maybe four!
10. Revamp my wardrobe and get rid of all the baggy pregnancy and breastfeeding clothes that did their job, but that are no longer needed.
11. Take my husbeast on a hot date.
12. Keep breastfeeding the Little One for as long as she wants it.
    

Feeding the Little One

The Little One is growing and growing and growing. She is such a little person now, and clearly no longer a baby. I think the growing is due, at least in part, to our ongoing habit of feeding her. The Little One is pretty good at clearly communicating when she needs feeding - usually by waving her arms around and whinging, and a lot of pointing at anything she recognises as food and that is visible to her (today there was a whole lot of pointing at the bananas sitting on our kitchen bench).

We've kind of done the Baby Led Weaning thing, but our own mix of it - and kinda just doing what works for us and what feels right.  I've been working on making batches of food for her that we can easily freeze, particularly lunchy type things that the husbeast can easily pull out and feed her during the day.  My most recent success has been pea fritters (they were going to be sweetcorn fritters, but we didn't have any sweetcorn so I used peas).

 Recipe for pea fritters

1 cup of flour
1 tsp of baking power
1 egg
1 cup of frozen peas

• Take the cup of frozen peas and sit them in a bowl of boiling water for about 5 mins.  Rinse under cold water to cool them off and drain them.
• Mix the flour and baking powder.  Break the egg into the flour mixture and mix it in.
• Add the cup of peas and mix. Add a couple of teaspoons of water if needed to get batter to the right consistency.
• Heat a tablespoon of oil in frypan.  Drop tablespoons of batter in to frypan. Flip when browned.
• Yumm (for those who like peas).

Nom nom nom

Oh look, biscuits for dinner....again.

We've made a few changes to meal times at our house.

The first big change is that I now leave work earlier so that I'm home in time to eat dinner with Willa. I'd like to say this was because of some kind of warm fuzzy 'let's all eat together' thing, but while that may be how I feel about it now, it actually came about for a different reason.  Willa was getting increasingly frustrated at us eating dinner in front of her (with her having been fed the previous hour). She was getting upset at being fended off while I try to scoff dinner before her little possum claws get to it -  and so it became the easier thing to make sure we eat at the same time.

A pet puppy would help me out with this...

The second change is that eating together has meant pretty much ditching the high chair.  Instead we have dinner picnics. This consists of spreading a big rug/blanket on the floor of the lounge and sitting down on the floor together to eat. Yep, it's messy. But oh my, it is fun. (And she can't play that game where she drops food over the side of the highchair on to the floor, one piece at a time.)

Sometimes I have to help my mouth hold it all in

The third is that I have given up ownership of my plate. Oh sure, Willa still gets her own little bowl, but the food on my plate is always going to be more interesting (even when it is identical to what is in her bowl). So we share. Turns out that she really likes olives.

I can't have eaten it all.....

A snappier life

 We finally got around to buying ourselves a new camera yesterday, and it is fantastic. And so, because it is faster and less taxing to upload photos than it is to write stuff, I will now resort to just adding photos. They'll mainly be of the most delicius baby in the whole world (and you know, she has pretty much been the sole subject of my photo-taking in the last 24 hours).

It was really hot on Saturday and Willa *needed* water!

And it was still hot in the evening, so Willa got togs on and played with a water trough thingee

Very serious business, this water stuff.

Months of Willabeastie

My little Willabeast is 9 and a bit months old - she has now been on the outside for the same amount that she was on the inside.  My 7-toothed, long-legged, fair-headed, food-munching, solo-standing child is just the most delightful creature that I have ever had the good fortune to nibble.  She does so much that amuses me - I'm even amused when she's having a total strop (she seriously does this already - often due to not letting her fiddle with the keyboard on my laptop).  I often watch her as she puts blocks in and out and in and out and in and out of containers, and think 'who will you turn out to be?'  I really cannot wait to see how my little beastie turns out.

One of my favs places: the last feed before bed. Bliss.

I have a pot of chicken stock/broth brewing in the crockpot. It is going to slowly brew all night, and all tomorrow and maybe all of tomorrow night as well. I anticipate waking up tomorrow to the gentle waft of chicken yum.

I have made a batch of baby food, bathed the baby, and ironed my clothes for the week.  I declare this weekend to be a success. The only thing left to do is to take to my bed with the newspaper, so that I have some vague chance of reading it before the 'news' is too old to be considered 'news'.