Lunchboxes for Two

Rachel officially began kindy this year, so even though I've been making her lunches in lunchboxes last year, here are are lunchboxes that go elsewhere and are eaten without me around at all.

Kindy day one: sushi. It was the request of both girls that they have sushi for the first day. These are egg and avocado, in the lunchbox with some grape tomatoes, carrot, capsicum and cumber sticks, grapes and soy chips. 

Day two: so vibrant and healthy still! Wraps with cream cheese and ham, grapes, cucumber, carrot and capsicum sticks, grape tomatoes and watermelon. Already I can see the familiar go-to items of the lunchboxes making their appearances.

Hooray! A change of pace today. Pasta with cherry tomatoes, ham and parmesan. Apple pieces and corn puffs. I made this lunch the night before and it was waiting in the fridge in the morning.

Side by side lunches, because I have two kindy girls. It's a whirl wind of children growing up, that suddenly they are at kindy, and before you know it, the year is gone and then they are at school. And then they are gone. Soon to happen to me I suppose. The days are long, but the years are so so short.

Anyway, back to the lunches. Cream cheese and ham sandwiches, boiled egg, pepitas, grape tomatoes and cucumber sticks and corn puffs. Rachel has grapes in the orange-print reusable lunch pouch and Sophie has a pear.

What madness is this? A different lunch box!? You saw it first people, sometimes I use different lunch boxes. This was for a playgroup day actually, so I did see them eat it. Carrots (cooked), ham, grape tomatoes, ramen noodles. Cornpuffs, crasins and apricots. 

Planning ahead, I made some mini quiches and put them in the freezer. Although it takes up a lot of space in my tiny freezer, it does make lunches easy to throw together. Same old same old for everything else. I remember last year lamenting about what I would do when grapes and grape tomatoes are out of season. I find I am again wondering the same thing.

Wraps again, cornpuffs, blueberry yoghurt, olive, grape tomoatoes, hiding under the cucumber flowers. See I'm changing up the cucumber sticks with cucumber flowers!

Are these lunchboxes self expliantory? I don't feel I need to talk about the next one at all.

These next two lunches are an example of what happens when Brisbane has a heat wave and it's too hot to organise any kind of nutrition in lunches in the morning. You put leftover dinner in one lunchbox: pizza that Rachel didn't eat the night before, along with anything else you can find that doesn't require any effort. Grape tomatoes (lunchbox lifesaver!), popcorn, marshmallow, choc chip biscuits.

Sophie ate her pizza for dinner, so she got some store bought Vegemite and cheese scrolls. Since she doesn't like the choc chip biscuits, I gave her marshmallows. And olives. Most terrible lunch ever. I would not recommend this as a regular lunchbox option, but for a once off, it was really hot and I couldn't be bothered but at least the kids are fed, it's pretty well perfect.

We had burgers for dinner one night, so again, I used some leftovers. The breadroll has avocado and cheese on it. Then some tomato and the meat patty, because I know they will just be taken off and eaten separately anyway. Olives, carrot and capsicum sticks. Popcorn.

Another leftovers for lunch kind of bento here. We had spaghetti and meatballs, so I saved some of the pasta and meatballs for the girls lunches. Didn't bother with the actual pasta sauce but just used tomato sauce for them to dip into. Added grape tomatoes, pear, cucumber and capsicum.

The frozen quiches make another appearance here, along with ham and salami, grape tomatoes, cucumber flowers, corn puffs, passion fruit (from my parents vine) and some apple. Rachel is smashing the passion fruit, and Sophie wanted to try it, but didn't end up eating it.

Salami and cream cheese sandwiches, cucumber flowers and grape tomatoes, peach, apple and passion fruit. This is Rachel's lunchbox. Sophie had olives where the passion fruit is in hers. They also had a pack of corn puffs because they were going on a kindy excursion to the park and I knew they'd be extra hungry.

And that's half a term done. Sophie has been asking for Totoro shaped onigiri (like the one in this post) for the last week, so maybe that will be tomorrow's lunch. We will see.

The Faraway Tree

A friend of mine who works in a bookshop gave the girls an audio book copy of Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree, read by Kate Winslet. It took a little while for them to get into it, but they love to listen to it now, and it's been a pretty handy thing to have on the long car rides to Bundaberg. There are three books in the trilogy, and when you've spent 16 hours listening to the lot of them, you find you really want to do something more, or maybe that's just me? 

Anyway, I've made a Faraway Tree. From cardboard. Glorious cardboard. We had a real growing collection under the house, and I knew it was time to use some after the last tidy up down there. Steve was pretty happy to see it getting used. 

I feel I must look like a stalker when I say that I got the inspiration for this particular incarnation of the Faraway Tree from Ikatbag, who made one for her own girls here. But it really is a coincidence. And there was no point reinventing the tree, so to speak, given that there were already good basic guidelines to follow right? 

Here it is, in it's tall cardboard glory. My cardboard supplies came from my parents, (thanks for getting those new outdoor chairs and the bunk bed for the kids!) and also a random box that I picked up somewhere. I was using it to segregate the children in the car when they start to get annoying. Let's hope I don't need it for that anymore...

This Faraway Tree has a working wash basket lift, that you move up and down by turning the dowel at the top. The children love this particular feature, especially Hugo. He was the first to really investigate it. I hid the turning mechanism by cutting a channel in the top of the tree for the dowel to lie in.

There is a hole at the top of the tree, with the ladder leading up to the land above the cloud. The girls love to pretend there are all sorts of lands there, just like in the book.

Here is Moonface's round tree room with the ladder just outside. The most exciting feature of Moonface's room is that in the middle it has the start of the Slipery Slip, which goes all the way down the tree to the bottom and is by far the fastest way of getting down again after you have climbed up.

You can see the slippery slip going down the middle of the tree in the photo below. It does go all the way down to the bottom. Hugo initially tried to put cars down it, but they didn't fit. Thankfully. 

The tree also has little windows and doors that open and close for the people who live there, and also for visitors.

The little people who live in the tree at the moment are actually just peg dolls that I painted ages ago, (and the girls painted one each actually), that loosely look like Disney Princesses, but the girls have renamed to be tree characters without much fuss. That said, they have put a lot of other things in the tree, including the wooden Koalas (who blend in and are hiding in some of these photos), and all of their soft toys. Hugo has also housed some cars at various points.

One thing I do regret about this tree, is that I got so excited about making it as big as I could with the cardboard that I had, that I kind of made it too tall. Rachel (pictured with the tree below), can not see the land at the top of the tree unless she stands on tip toe, which makes it very hard for her to play there. Not that there will ever be a next time for this tree (I don't think), but if there was one, I'd make it shorter.

Since these photos, I've let the kids glue green "leaves" on (scrap paper, ripped up), to give it a bit more colour.

Job's Done

Remember last June, when I suddenly took it into my head to repaint the downstairs toilet to increase it's general aesthetic appeal? You can read about it here. Well, we had a free weekend, and suddenly were hit by a wave of energy to get some things done. 

Behold! One downstairs toilet with painted walls, floor and a new toilet seat.  

Such shinyness.

Completely different to the old floor. And now, when we look at the floor in the general laundry area, just outside the downstairs toilet, it seems that we have some more painting to do.

We also put up some hooks to hang extension cords, re-fly screened the front door, and I made these:

All in all, a good weekend.

Tea Travel Case

Steve and I have officially become tea snobs. We use loose leaf and have more than one type of tea in the house. In fact, we have at least seven regulars on the go.... It could be getting out of hand.

Anyway, what it means is that when we go away, we languish slightly, because we can't possibly take all of the tea with us. When we try to take tea with us, it's always a bit of an ordeal; have we got the infusers, the tea measuring scoop, the right mix of teas? Then, there is the practical question of how do we carry it all?

After taking several trips last year where the tea stuff was unceremoniously thrown into the top of a green bag of random food stuffs, I knew it was time to work on something else. Thankfully, my favourite blogger of all time has a pattern just for something like this! Ikat Bag had done a lunch bag tutorial in her Zip A Bag series that was pretty perfect.

I was just going to try to follow the tutorial and mess around with sizes until I got it right, but there was tricky curved seams, separating zips and loads of fabric layers that put me off. Luckily, right after the Zip a Bag series, or maybe during it, she also put out a full tutorial for the exact bag! You can see it here.

Originally I was inspired by the fabric I had used for the Document Case for Travel, and was hoping to use that for the Tea Travel Case too, but I figured I'd better do a prototype first to check that all the essential tea things would fit for travel. I'm glad I did, because while it does fit the infusers, scoop and two tins with a little room for an extra bit of tea, we would ideally like it to fit a third tin of tea, just in case.

Anyway, the prototype, which I made out of the spotty blue material (previously used in Sophie's shorts here), and scrap stuff I've had lying around for ages. Yellow stuff left from the Table Tent, some blue from who knows where (Rachel's Easter Dress maybe?) and some frog material that I think was a hand me down from 2013 somewhere. I've never used that before because there wasn't enough of it, but it was perfect for this.

I had to get a quality separating zip from Spotlight, but that was all I bought for it, so $6 on a bag is pretty good I think! I know I deviated from the recommended materials a fair bit, but I was using up stuff and it was a prototype, so I think it's ok. It turned out pretty fabulous anyway.

It's good for right now, and when I upgrade with a slightly longer zip and the final materials, we will be travelling in style with copious amounts of tea along for the ride.

Sophie's Birthday 2018

Being true to my word, I am here to document Sophie's 5th Birthday happenings. This year, because we had only just got home from the Big Travels, Sophie did not get a full blown birthday party. She did of course get cakes though!

I made some little pokémon cupcakes for the day of her actual birthday, where we spent time with friends. I took this photo very quickly before the kids reached in to grab their cupcakes.  

Then, on the weekend, we just had family over for afternoon tea, which consisted of a fruit platter, a bowl of popcorn and cake. I figured that was enough and also that way, people would eat the rather enormous cake and we wouldn't have copious amounts of leftovers.

Again, this is a rather terrible photo, but it's the only one I have. I saw how to make this unicorn cake on the internet somewhere. It's simply a rectangle cake that you cut and rearrange. Unfortunately I managed to snap mine in half when I was transferring it to the cutting board, so it's a little out of proportion, but it worked none the less. It took a while to ice, because of the fondant, but I wasn't going to risk butter icing that would melt in the Australian summer heat. I think the feathers as the mane and tail were pretty fabulous.

Sophie was only a little disappointed that she didn't get to help with the icing, because we ran out of time during the day and I had to do it while she was asleep at night. Oh well.

Now she's five. Next year she'll need two hands to show how old she is.