Sometimes I really worry about my kids.

More than just the average ‘gee I hope she doesn’t fall out of that tree and break her arm’ kind of worry… A deep down worry, about how they might turn out.

I laugh a lot about ‘scarring my kids for life’, but all jokes aside, I am acutely aware of the influence I have on my children.

Everything we parents do, both consciously and unconsciously influences our children.

That is a huge scary thought which I try to squash down most of the time… but sometimes it pops up and blows my ever-loving little mind.

Right now it is my ‘middle child’, my beautiful big boy, that I am worrying about more than usual.

At the moment, he is my favourite (because you are allowed to have favourites you know). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t love him more than any of the others, it’s just that right now he and I get along really, really well.

He smothers me with cuddles. He looks at me with a twinkle in his eye and mischievous grin on his face. He says funny things. He hardly ever pushes my ‘infuriate’ button. Right now, at almost five, he is delicious.

But I worry about him… a lot.

I worry that I am doing wrong by him.

I worry that our anti-football family will put him at a disadvantage at school next year.

I worry that he won’t make friends.

I worry that he has nothing in common with other boys that he knows because he knows nothing of Ben Ten or Spider Man or super heroes in general.

I worry that he keeps his problems squashed down so far that even he doesn’t really know what is bothering him.

I worry that if I try and ‘fix’ any of these things that I am teaching him that we do not value who he is.

I worry that I shouldn’t even be blogging all of this, in case one day someone googles him and reads this and it causes him angst.

Today he has his first school visit and I am sure many of my worries are fueled by the fact that he will soon turn five and soon be off at school and a little further from my arms, but that doesn’t make then any easier to deal with.

But I guess that is my job right now, to worry about him.

I know that many of the things I worry about could actually be the very best things about my boy… so I squash those worries and I pull him closer and enjoy him for who he is.

Do you worry about your kids?
How to do you deal with those worries?

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Do You Worry About Your Kids? is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s cold here right now. Yesterday morning it was -2 degrees C in my kitchen (which is possibly because one wall and the ceiling are still made of blue tarps).

I think I was a hibernating animal in my past life, because when it is dark and dreary outside I just want to shut all the doors, pull down the blinds and keep everyone in. I know that’s not good for us, especially the kids, so I try to get outside every day, even if it is just a five minute walk up the drive to the letter box, or a a quick run around the play group at school pick up, but some days I really REALLY don’t want to!

Despite the freezing bite to the wind and frosty mornings, the sun has been shining here this week which has just been blissful. I can cope with the cold if the sun is shining!

So to encourage everyone outside into the sunshine, and to give the boys something to do while I potter in the garden, this week we resurrected our sand pit and made some plastic bottle sand scoops!

I’d been collecting various plastic bottles for a while now, knowing they’d be good for something (in the past we’ve made these cool fairy houses) and they were perfect for making scoops!

How to Make Plastic Bottle Sand Scoops.

You’ll need:
Plastic bottles in any shape or size, with the lid.
Scissors and/or a craft knife
A permanent marker

Mark a line across the side of the bottle – from the handle down to the side. Make sure you leave enough plastic around the handle to keep it intact and strong, and cut down far enough on the side to make sure there is no lip left from the bottom of the bottle.

Make a starting hole with the craft knife and then cut along your marked line with scissors or continue with the craft knife. I find scissors easier to control, but some thicker bits of plastic may need a craft knife to get through.

You can tidy up your cut after you’ve made it… cutting off any sharp edges and making corrections till you get the perfect looking sand scoop.

You can screw the lids on tight or take the lids off all together and you have a scoopey kind of funnel. You could have lots of fun if you melted holes in the lids and used the scoops with water or fine sand too.

Our sand pit has definitely seen better days. It isn’t used as often these days with the big kids preferring dirt and plants and potion making to the sand pit. So the boys and I had to pull out a good few weeds before we could try out our scoops. I also dug over the sand pit with my big proper garden shovel. Fluffing up the sand makes it a lot easier for the kids to dig and scoop, it’s worth doing every now and then regardless of how neglected your sand pit is.

Now get out there and enjoy the sunshine while you can!!

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How to Make Plastic Bottle Sand Scoops. is a post from: picklebums.com

I’m having trouble finding my ‘zen’ when it comes to house work and the like at the moment.

The thought of actually having to fold the pile of clean laundry sitting on the couch makes me want to curl up into a ball and go to sleep. I know I need to clean the bathroom, and do the shopping, and change the sheets… but ugh.

Just Ugh.

Even cooking dinner or making lunch has become such a heavy weight that I am pretty sure I can’t possibly get up off this chair to go do it.

A while a go I thought I was totally zen when it came to cooking for my family. I had this un-squashable, slightly big-headed, pride that grew every time I made a menu plan or cooked a ‘wholesome meal’ for my family. I felt practically saintly when I managed to cook dinner at lunch time, and akin to Mother Teresa when I baked lunch box treats twice a week.

But these days… even those lofty heights leave me feeling blah.

I am not looking for some deluded, Valium driven, 1950′s housewife kind of bliss. I don’t enjoy housework, I never will, and I don’t particularly want to. But I’d rather not be paralyzed by the loathing of it all.

I chose to stay home while our children are small. I knew this gig wasn’t going to be all play dates and chocolate chip cookies when I started. I knew that part of this job was to deal with the house work stuff. It’s how we worked it out, because I am here, in the house, a lot.

I’m cool with the division of labour at the Pickle Farm. I am not an oppressed, anti-feminist who thinks all women should make their homes nice for their hardworking husbands, and look beautiful at all times while they do it. I just want to find some contentment with the less than fun bit of my current employment situation…

So help me out here…

How do you find your house work zen?
How do you motivate yourself to do the bits of your job that you don’t like so much?
How do you find contentment in ordinary, every day, things?

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Finding your Housework Zen is a post from: picklebums.com

My brain has turned to mush this week.

I know there are things I really need to get on top of, but my head is full of pirate costumes, domain names, cookie recipes, blue tiaras and all manner of insanity.

This week I have struggled to remember my children’s names… let alone remember the moments of wonderful, though I am sure there has been some.

I did however remember that Bigwords’ ‘Me Pledge’ for this week was to draw… and I always find time to draw.

Hopefully my brain will be back to the slowly humming, only back firing now and then, machine it usually is by next week…

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Mush Brain is a post from: picklebums.com

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