We’ve gone a little autumn leaf mad this week, so please excuse us if you are on the other side of the world, or live somewhere where there aren’t many leaves changing!

After threading with leaves earlier in the week, the kids reminded me of a favourite song they have all learned at kinder (preschool). I didn’t know this song before my girls attended the local kinder but they loved it so much that they sang it over and over and I soon learned it. My big boy was excited to come home and tell us that they sang the very same song at ‘His Kinder’ (which happens to be the same kinder with the same teacher!).

It’s now a family favourite… so I thought we had better make some printable leaves to go with it!

We also made a quick little video to help you learn the song (the words and on the printable). Excuse my terrible singing, but as I’ve said over and over, your kids don’t care how bad your singing is, as long as you sing… so I am hoping the internets won’t care too much either!

To make the leaves, simply download the pdf document, print it, and cut out the leaves and the little tabs of paper to make the ‘finger straps’. Loop the finger straps and secure onto the back of the leaves with tape and you are good to go.

Do you know any more autumn songs?
What is your favourite song to sing with your kids?
Can you suggest any more sing puppets we could create and share?

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Printable Autumn Leaf Puppets and a Song is a post from: picklebums.com

You’re sure you’ve just snapped a fabulous photo of your kids. You download the camera and get it up on the big screen, and… someone always has their finger up their nose!

Why??

I play Wordless Wednesday with My Little Drummer Boys

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Why?? is a post from: picklebums.com

Sometimes I just need to find a good excuse to brave the freezing weather and get everyone outside. On the weekend that reason was autumn leaves… we needed to collect autumn leaves.

I wasn’t exactly sure why we needed autumn leaves, it just seemed like an important thing to do before they all fell from the trees and turned into a slippery mushy brown mess on the ground.

After putting fifty-gazillion layers of clothes on all the kids, and only ten-gazillion on myself (which really was an over-site) and attempting to bribe Noey with chocolate chips to keep his hat on (which didn’t work once the chocolate was gone… duh!) we headed into town to the park.

The kids raced around collecting leaves, watched the cockies tear up the pine cones and drop bits on our heads, and had a quick play on the equipment. Once my fingers were blue and the toddlers snot had frozen to his face (it was cold ok) we piled back into the Big White Bus and came home… with a HUGE bag of autumn leaves.

“So what are we going to do with all the leaves Mum?”

Um…. er…. um…. then inspiration struck and I went to find the hole punch.

Two days, lots of searching, and finally a trip to the shops later, with a brand new hole punch in hand Morgan set about punching holes in some of the Autumn leaves. We were going to thread them!

As Morgan worked on his fine motor and problem solving skills with the leaves and hole punch, I dug around in the cupboard for some beads, buttons and other thread-able items in ‘autumn colours’. We also discovered we could punch holes in the bits the cockies had stripped off the pine cones too, bonus!

Armed with some plastic threading ‘strings’ (The plastic ‘strings’ are stiffer and make it easier for little fingers to thread. You can buy packets of plastic string at craft shops or you can buy a roll of cheap whipper-snipper cord at the two dollar shop which is just as good) Morgan, and Noah (with a lot of help from me) had a lovely time making autumn leaf threadings.

We were going to use them as necklaces but when the sun shone through the window we decided they would look lovely hung up in the sunshine…

Now what to do with the rest of the autumn leaves?
Here are some autumn activities we’ve done in the past. (How cute was my big boy when he was little!)

Autumn crowns and autumn leaf collage.

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Autumn Leaf Threading is a post from: picklebums.com

I’ve had a hankering to try out this Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar recipe from Martha Stewart for a while now. I even linked to it in a quick linky love post on Saturday. I figured I would convert the recipe to metric measurements and more Australian ingredients and share my version of the recipe with you today, complete with some gorgeous photos. As an added bonus I’d also have something for lunch boxes this week.

It all sounded perfectly reasonable, but sometimes this whole cooking caper is not as easy as it seems!

Late yesterday afternoon I googled how much a stick of butter weighed, and decided I could just use self raising flour in place of the flour, baking soda etc, and that is possibly where it all started to go wrong…

Here is my version of the recipe.

Cherry Choc-Chip Failure Cookie Bar Recipe

340 grams of softened butter
4 cups self raising flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 small packet of choclate chips (around 300grams)
1 packet of glace cherries, chopped.

First things first… I fired up the conversion app on my phone and figure out to preheat the oven to 180… this was going to be a cinch.

The butter conversion calculator told me that 3 sticks of butter was 340 grams… that’s a lot of butter and that alone should have been a sign that this was going to make a LOT of cookie bars, but I kind of missed that. By the time I was adding the sugar and whipping it up with my beaters I realised that the bowl I was working in was woefully too small for this large recipe, but I pushed on regardless.

When Morgan asked to crack the eggs into the mix I handed them over. We’d made a LOT of quiches over the summer and his egg cracking skills had greatly improved. The first one went in, no problem. The second one kind of exploded between his fingers with half the egg going in and half all over the floor. Oh well… never mind… I’ll just chuck in an extra egg.

Eggs in and mixed well, add the vanilla and then the flour. By this stage the inadequate bowl was making things rather tricky as we tried to mix in the four cups of flour, the choc chips and the cherries. After working up a huge bicep on mixing arm and losing a large amount of dough to the bench and the flour we were finally ready to put it into a tray.

I got out the builders measure tape with both centimeters and inches and measured up some of our baking trays. I was rocking this conversion thing!

Now I’m not exactly sure what a ’12-by-17-inch rimmed baking sheet’ is… but none of our trays were quite big enough, no problem, near enough is good enough right? The ‘bars’ would just be a little chunkier.

Into the oven… timer on for 20 minutes and off I went.

When I came back and cracked open the oven I realised things were not quite going to plan… The mix had risen, A LOT! It was all but spilling out over the edge of my tray. Damn.

Still I turned it round and left it to cook for the last 20 minutes… it’d be ok. But as the oven timer beeped and I lifted the tray out of the oven and left it to cool, I realised things were probably not ok.

The edge of the cake/slice/giant cookie had risen and browned way too much, yet the middle sunk as soon as I took it out of the oven.

As I tried to lift it gently from the tray onto the board to cut it, the damn thing split down the middle and I could see that while the edges were dry and over cooked, the middle looked decidedly like raw cookie dough. Crap.

So what went wrong?

For starters this makes a LOT of mixture, I should have used a bigger bowl, or better yet, made half the quantity, that would have solved my not big enough tray problem too. The extra egg was probably not the best idea, neither was using all self raising flour… possibly changing on of the cups to plain flour might have helped?

Perhaps a lower oven temp (as well as the right sized tray or less mixture) would have helped the crispy outer, uncooked, sunken inner problem…. maybe?

And I really shouldn’t have attempted to cook anything while also making dinner and dealing with a sick and miserable toddler.

But all’s well that ends well. I managed to salvage a little of the slice to go in lunch boxes, the kids ate the gooey broken bits with a spoon for dessert and I still had something to blog about!

Want to make me feel better about my cooking failure and share one of yours?

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Cherry Choc-Chip Cookie Bar Failure! is a post from: picklebums.com

The big kids are outside chasing the chickens (what’s left of them after the fox attacked this week in broad day light!) and the small child is playing with the trains and I am putting off doing other things… so thought I’d share some of the things I’ve enjoyed online this week.

Where’s My Glow – Weekend Whine
Noey LOVED Glow’s vlog, kept saying “oooh preeettty”.

Edenland – Being a Mother is not the Most Difficult Job on the Planet.
Just when you think she can’t amaze you any more, she does it all over again.

Pigtail Pals: Redefine Girly!
This blog is an interesting read for anyone who has girls in their life.

I think I might cook these Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars… and maybe this Cinnamon Sugar Bread. (In reality I am cooking these Pizza Pockets instead)

What things have you been enjoying online?
Share a link or two…

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Online Things is a post from: picklebums.com

One day they will cringe at the cute and funny things they said when they were little.

And for that very reason I will tuck these little gems away in the back of my mind, so I can remember.

Izzy : We’re almost 9!
Zoe : Which means we are practically ten… and then we’ll be 15!
Izzy: Yeah! And then I can get a snake!

Morgan: What’s for dinner?
Me: Shepherds Pie for us and Eggy Pie for Marco (a friend who is helping build our house)
Morgan: Oh yeah… cause Marco is a vegematarian, he doesn’t eat shepherds.

Noey: Cake???
Me: No cake.
Noey: oh bugger

What are you remembering?

This is my little mission to remember all the little things, all the moments that make life wonderful, that I would otherwise miss in the haze of craziness that is my life. This is my reminder to stop for a second, and remember… because these days will soon be long gone.

Feel free to write your own remembering post, or leave a comment telling me your rememberings. There is no rules, no time frames, no official linky… but if you’d like to join in, please do! If you blog a remembering please leave me a comment with the link so I can come read it and I’ll share it.

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Remembering the Things They Say is a post from: picklebums.com

He throws himself on the floor and cries.

Perhaps his arm is broken, or I’ve just shoved bamboo wedges under his finger nails… or perhaps he is just being a pain in the bum, pushing my buttons, being a ‘terrible two year old’.

His arm is definitely not broken, I don’t have any bamboo wedges handy and as for those last few ideas? I wonder if those are just created by a society that often sees parenting as an ‘us against them’ game of control.

I fall into that trap myself every now and then.

When he is throwing a whopper tanty or yelling “no!” in my face, I often jump to the conclusion that he is doing that just to annoy me, to be contrary. It’s easy to feel that way with a toddler, but in reality, he is a small person who is most probably confused, frustrated and just plain sad.

According to Child Development theorists, at 23 months old Noah hasn’t long figured out that he is actually a separate person to me or others, and he is still very ego-centric. That means that he can’t possibly fathom that I don’t feel the exact same way that he does. He really can not see things from my point of view.

When you know this little tid bit of child development theory, the idea that a toddler is even capable of doing something just to annoy an adult seems a bit silly. But when you are there, in the moment, that little bit of knowledge doesn’t always pop into your head, and it doesn’t always make it any easier to deal with the situation.

What I’ve been trying to remember, right then, in that kicking screaming moment, is to find compassion for my child.

If I can find compassion for him, then I can remember that the tears are probably because he is frustrated.

He is only just figuring out that if he wants a drink, he needs to ask for it, that I won’t simply know that. And he is only just learning the words and non-verbal ques to use to ask for that drink. That stuff is hard when you are almost two. And when it doesn’t all work out the way it is supposed to, then all these crazy feelings come bubbling up until all he knows how to do is throw himself on the floor and howl.

If I can find compassion for him, then maybe my response will come from love and understanding, instead of anger. Or maybe all I can do is keep my mouth closed, not yell, and be present while he wails, because I am not a perfect parent… but even that is better than nothing.

Finding compassion for my child doesn’t mean that he gets everything he wants. Sometimes I will still say no, sometimes I can not change the laws of physics and sometimes we will still have to go… but I will tuck him, kicking and screaming, under my arm and go with compassion, instead of anger…. or at least that is my goal.

Do you have any tips for dealing with tantrums?
Any great ways to remember to have compassion for your kids?

(And yes, Noey is sporting a pretty spectacular ‘black eye’ at the moment after launching himself off the couch into the side of the coffee table. It’s actually all colours of the rainbow… the photo doesn’t do it justice.)

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Find Compassion for your Child. is a post from: picklebums.com

Last night I crawled up into the roof storage in our shed, looking for crafty stuff my girls could take to school and use to make me a mothers present.

It was freezing up there, and as I shuffled through rat poop and spider webs to find ribbons and buttons I wondered, why on earth I was doing this? I don’t even celebrate Mother’s Day!

But I did it anyway.

And I will hand over my hard earned cash tomorrow so my girls can buy some bit of junk that I don’t want or need from the school mother’s day stall.

And I will smile and hug my boy and try not to cringe as I read what he has dictated to his kinder teachers about what my favourite things are.

And I’ll do all of this, not because Mother’s Day is important to me, but because we chose to part of the school and kinder community, and because doing these things is important to my children.

But I won’t buy into the commercialisation of Mother’s Day.

I don’t need a pink dressing gown, or pink fluffy slippers, or a pink blender or a pink coffee mug, or any of the other ‘pink for mother’s day’ items that filled the junk mail catalogs this week.

I don’t need my family to spend money on me to show me that they love me and appreciate what I do. I know they love me, and appreciate me, because they tell me, all the time.

I am lucky like that.

I am lucky in other ways too.

I am lucky that have all that I need. Of course there are lots of things I ‘want’ but there really is nothing I ‘need’… nothing at all.

I am lucky that I live in Australia. I can not shake the notion that I had been born in some other country, a country that is less affluent, a country without decent health care, a country without enough food… how different my life would be, how different my children’s lives would be. What if I was a mother in Niger? Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers Report has just name Niger as the worst place to be a mother…

So while it’s no secret that I don’t ‘believe’ in Mother’s Day, and I won’t be getting any presents on Sunday, that doesn’t mean I can’t give one… or two… to another mother, who isn’t quite as lucky as I am.

Today I’ve given some water purification tablets, a bag of seed and two chickens (my kids helped me choose) to families in need via World Vision Gifts. Such an easy way to give and meaningful for my kids as they can choose an item that means something to them.

I’ve also contributed to another loan via Good Return to help a mother in Nepal start a pig farm to help make ends meet. You can contribute directly or but your Mum a gift certificate so that she can choose who to support (and she gets the money when the loan is re-payed, or she can choose to reinvest!).

It’s not much, and while Mother’s day is not important to me, I choose to be part of the world community, and these little things, these small gifts, are important to someone.

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No Mother’s Day Gifts For Me! is a post from: picklebums.com

Some days it is all about quick and easy. It’s all about using things I have on hand, not needing to buy or collect or wait for anything.

Today it was an old idea from the my early days of teaching, and I can’t believe I’ve never done this my own kids

It’s easy, a few wooden blocks (or in our case off cuts from the renovations) with some string or wool wound around them. Some paint (with a squirt of dish washing liquid for easy clean-up) and some paper.

I think we’ll use our painting for wrapping paper!

For some more easy printing ideas how about some circle printing, printing with duplo or some sponge printing?

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Easy Art For Kids – String and Block Printing. is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s cold and wet outside, a perfect environment for our Rhubarb to grow like crazy, and a perfect excuse to eat cake!

This cake is best eaten warm, straight out of the oven, while curled up under a blanket on the couch, watching a DVD…. or at least that’s what we think!

Rhubarb Tea Cake Recipe

A couple of sticks of rhubarb (some water and a sprinkle of sugar)
60 grams butter
1/2 cup of brown sugar (or any other sweetener you like)
1 egg
1 1/2 cup of self raising flour
1/2 cup of milk
Cinnamon sugar mix

Wash and cut up your rhubarb into smallish pieces. Pop them into a microwave safe bowl with a little water and a sprinkle of sugar and cook them in the microwave till they are just starting to soften but still retain their shape (or you can cook it on the stove too).

Cream butter and sugar, add the egg and beat well. Stir in the flour and milk alternatively. Set aside some of the pieces of rhubarb to decorate the top of the cake, add the rest of the rhubarb and a little of the pretty pink water and stir it through the batter.

Pour the mix into a well greased cake tin, and arrange the left over rhubarb on the top. Push the rhubarb down into the cake, but don’t let the batter cover it. Sprinkle the top of the cake with lots of cinnamon sugar… or a little bit if you don’t love it as much as we do!

Bake the cake in the moderate oven for 45 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Eat it while it’s warm!

You can also make this cake with apple if you don’t have any rhubarb, or a combination of both!

I love to cook with rhubarb, mostly because we always have some in the garden! Some of our favourite rhubarb recipes are Fruit Sponge Desert, Rhubarb Fizz Drink, and Rhubarb and Apple Scrolls.

Are you a rhubarb fan?
Got any great recipes to share?

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Rhubarb Tea Cake Recipe. is a post from: picklebums.com