baybeasts

Thank you for your kind and supportive words. We are trying to be mature about this grandparental neglect, but not succeeding terribly well…

Anyway to show my thanks, I’ll give you an…

Easy lump-free white sauce recipe

35 grams butter (1.2 oz or 2.5 Tbl)
35 grams flour (1.2 oz or 1/3 cup)
500 ml milk
1/2 tsp nutmeg, salt, pepper

Heat milk in a saucepan. Melt butter in a fry pan and add the flour when it crackles. Whisk for a few minutes on low heat but don’t brown. Add the hot milk all at once and continue whisking while it thickens. Add nutmeg and seasonings as you will.

S made the knits below…

My mum moved overseas when I turned eighteen. She usually visits Australia once a year. Next month she is coming to Australia for a six month contract in Sydney (we’re in Melbourne). She finally emailed me her flight details today. She is coming to Australia three days after Arlo’s first birthday, and she’s going to visit other family in Brisbane before she heads to Sydney to start work, but not come to us. She has not even met Huey yet. Even though she lets me down every time I see her, I still feel so disappointed that I can hardly breathe.

Hooray for the safe arrival of wee Judith. Her mums sure did get a cute one!

We love our evening routine. Dinner is some time between 5pm and 6pm (chaos!), followed by playtime, then bath at 6.30pm and bed at 7pm. But they are just delightful after dinner and we love hanging out with them so much that playtime often stretches a leetle longer than it should…

It seems we have a climber on our hands. Heaven help us all.

Gee it’s hard to get back on the horse when you’ve taken a big blog break. There seems to be too much and yet too little to post about. Life goes on - up close, it is vivid and interesting, but from a distance (or a blog break) it takes on a rather bland texture. We get up, we get through the day, we go to bed, we get through the night, and then we get up again.

We haven’t posted much lately because bean being sick made the days harder to get through than usual for a little while there. But from Arlo and Huey’s point of view, life has been very eventful indeed. It is rushing by so fast - sometimes it seems like they hit new exciting milestones every day, and I can’t keep up. We’re long overdue for a list of milestones achieved and cute things done, but today I give you only a few:

• Sometimes they play together in the living room - well, more strictly, they parallel play, but it doesn’t always require our input (though we spy on them anyway!). And now that Huey can crawl, sometimes they set off on expeditions around the house together, accompanied by many delighted squeals and giggles. Arlo is still much faster than Huey (though Huey is catching up fast), and so he travels about twice as far as he goes backwards and forwards between Huey and their destination (usually the kitchen or the bathroom).
• Arlo’s love affair with books continues. Many times a day he will bring a book to one of us, waving it in the air and pushing it into our faces, then climbing into our lap so that it can be read. When we read to him he does his special concentrating heavy breathing, and cries if we stop before he is ready. He doesn’t like to share reading with Huey though, because Huey is still at the eating books stage and that really annoys Arlo. Pointing is Arlo’s second favourite activity after reading (accompanied by an emphatic ‘deh’, and either signifying want of an item, or wanting us to name or talk about the item), and now the two have come together so that he happily points to things he likes in the books (ducks, kittens, babies etc).
• Huey is now pulling up to standing, and cruising rather unsteadily around the furniture. His favourite place to pull up is the toybox, and he stands there for ages holding on precariously with one hand and pulling things out with the other. He’s working on sitting down but he hasn’t quite got it yet, so when he’s had enough he stands there grizzling and occasionally bending his knees until one of us comes to save him. With pulling up has come babbling - ‘hey-dah!’. It’s adorable.

But let me tell you the story of what just happened as I was writing this post. Both boys went down for a sleep around 10am (earlier than usual for Arlo because they have another cold). Bean went out to get a long overdue haircut, and I settled in for a bit of computer time. About 40 minutes later, I heard a sad cry from the bedroom. I rushed in to find Arlo red faced and upset and still mostly asleep, with Huey looking up at me from the far side of Arlo with a bright cheeky grin. Huey had silently crawled across the width of two queen size mattresses and over Arlo to play with his brother (or maybe the curtains), but his brother was not impressed with this feat at all. Somehow I managed to re-settle Arlo while Huey pulled up on me saying ‘hey-DAH!’ at the top of his voice (Arlo really is sick and sad to go back to sleep through that commotion). And now Huey is pottering around at my feet smiling at me and trying to amuse himself in the study (mostly by playing with the heater). Time to split them up for their daytime naps, perhaps?

And because we haven’t posted a photo of Arlo for a little while, here he is pushing around the pumpkins that he helped me pick from the garden. Cute, hey.

Eek! We’ve been tagged by Erin and Maria to do a meme.
We have been dreadful at doing memes when tagged (sorry and sorry! and any others we have missed) so we will try to do this one right away rather than wait for something interesting to say…

1) What were you doing 10 years ago:
bean
I was 24 and it was a big year. I moved from Brisbane to Sydney (I never bonded with Sydney), started my first hospital job as a registered midwife, became uncomfortably familiar with the low after the high of party drugs, and started my first long-term relationship with a woman.
sorenson
Oh, 1998, how I loved you - you were indeed a Very Big Year. I spent 1998 in Japan, ostensibly on exchange at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, but actually spending most of my time hanging out and partying with a wildly fascinating group of queer artist types (and I learnt a lot more Japanese from them than I did from my classes!). It was one of the best years ever.

2)What are the five things at the top of your “to do” list:
bean
a) decide if I am going back to my old job or if I am going to do something completely different
b) weed the garden
c) work on ‘regaining my figure’ (as my grandmother’s bridge friends would say)
d) decide if we are ever going to (try to) have more kids
e) learn to cut hair to save money
sorenson
a) finish at least some of my endless unfinished craft projects
b) empty the worm farm
c) clean out the chook coop
d) prune the climbing roses
e) write more blog posts

3) What are five snacks you enjoy:
bean
a) a banana with a cup of tea
b) fruitcake with a cup of tea
c) an apple (Fuji) with a cup of tea
d) a bikkie and a cup of tea
e) baked-at-home wheat based treats with a cup of tea
sorenson
a) home baked goodies
b) any piece of fruit that I have grown myself (except the tamarillos)
c) toast with butter and honey
d) cracker with peanut butter and honey
e) cheese

4) Name some things you would do if you were a millionaire:
bean
Buy a home in the country and one by the sea and one in the heart of the city with housekeepers and groundskeepers and maybe a chauffer while I’m at it. Hmmm… maybe a million doesn’t go that far any more.
sorenson
Oh, exactly the same as bean!

5) Name some places you have lived:
bean
Germany, Chile, Japan, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne.
sorenson
Apart from a slow migration south from Queensland to Melbourne (Coolangatta, Sydney, Albury, Melbourne), only Japan.

6) Name some bad habits you have:
bean
Not putting the top back on the toothpaste properly, not separating colours, eating when I’m not hungry and being easily defeated (especially by craft projects).
sorenson
Not putting the lids back on jars properly, making a huge mess in the kitchen when I cook, picking at the food as I cook, not finishing craft projects.

7) Name some jobs you’ve had:
bean
audio-visual assistant at the state library, fast food job in high school, nursing home assistant, registered nurse, registered midwife and lactation consultant.
sorenson
mucking out horse stables, corner store assistant, selling books, teaching English in Japan, waitress, cultural studies tutor, public servant.