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Off to Market (Piccadilly Market)

Things are a bit quiet in here of late (and will continue to be) since I am having a market stall at the Piccadilly market in Geelong on the 29th of this month:


I am concentrating all of my efforts on my market stall presentation this time around as I feel it is lacking a little. Since I need to display as much product as I can on a table 1.8 metres long, I want to make sure that I am utilising the space as best I can.

Today we screen printed the letters for a bunting which will hang across the front of the table and I am hoping that we will be able to sew it together tomorrow:


I am fortunate enough to be able to do these kind of business activities around the kids. I simply set Corben up at the table with me (since he is the one most interested in what I am doing) and give him an activity to do. At the moment, he is totally into making pictures with the pieces from the board game Blokus:


Since sequencing is such an important thing to teach your kids, I spend a bit of time talking about what I am doing and why I am doing it. Once he can tell me the order things happen in I let him help with some of the steps, like taping off the screen:


Sometimes I try and trick him by doing things out of order but he ALWAYS picks me up on it!

Illustration - What I would wear if I were an Ewok

Today (as part of my goal to enhance my illustration ability) I thought I would share with you a drawing of what I would wear if I was an Ewok.


Since I find the standard Ewok attire a little drab (and perhaps a little too revealing for my prudish nature), I am instead opting to wear the following:

• A decorated head scarf I picked up on some recent travels;
• The Christmas sweater my American grandmother knitted me;
• A pair of stripey mittens I bartered for some nuts and berries;
• Some patterned pants I picked up on eBay; and
• My sturdy hiking boots
  

And since I don't really plan on doing much hunting for the clan, I figured I would carry a crochet hook instead of a spear... because you never know when you might have to bust out a crocheted dish cloth.


Please excuse the colour of my face. I had it waxed last week and well, the skin underneath was a little paler than I had anticipated. Nothing a bit of fake tan won't fix though, I guess...*awkward*

Anyway, while I was drawing this picture I got to thinking about the Ewoks and I came to the conclusion that they can't have been the most clever of beings. I mean, they apparently had a Caravan of Courage yet they opted to live in tree houses? What is with that?

The Ewok me would definitely have lived in the caravan. I get pretty cold, especially at night, so I wouldn't have wanted to be living in some drafty tree dwelling! Anyway, my caravan would have looked something like this:


and (of course) it would have been decked out with all of my favourite items, like a mega huge canister of coffee, my juicer and a whole heap of organic vegetables.


I have to say.. I think the life of an Ewok would be pretty damn sweet!

By now you may be thinking I am a little crazy (and you'd be right), but I think the above illustrates perfectly what I really wanted this post to be about...Imagination.

Imagination is such a big part of our family life and I believe it is one of the most important things you can encourage in your children. Without imaginative play, children do not develop the thought processes they need to be able to solve problems creatively. Essentially, they fail to be able to "think outside the box".

How do you encourage imagination in your children?

For us, a lot of our imaginative play is in the form of role playing. On any given day we may be a dinosaurs, the pilot of a rocket ship bound for outer space or prospectors looking for gold nuggets. So if you happen to visit us while we're searching for the bog of eternal stench... well you better be ready to join us... or you may not be allowed in!

Creamy Pumpkin "Pasta" - A work in progress

It turns out that I have quite a flair for combining ingredients together in such a way that they taste pretty damn good.

I am currently working on a recipe for Creamy Pumpkin "Pasta".


I almost have it right, but not quite....

Growing an Organic Vegetable Garden (Part 4 - Planting the Seeds)

Late last week we had a couple of days of sunshine, so we took the opportunity to finish off the vegetable garden.

Luckily we had some "helpers". One in human form:


The other in our resident chicken, who we've named "Shaz-Licken":


We have no idea where he came from, but he's been hanging around our front door at random intervals over the last week and a bit.

Once we had topped up our garden beds with compost mix, we planted our seedlings, using the *not so secret* formula below:


1. Make a hole and drop in some clean egg shells
2. Add a couple of spoon fulls of fertiliser
3. Pop in your seedling pot, including the newspaper and the twine
4. Cover the pot with dirt and give a good water.

Unfortunately not all of our seedlings survived, but instead of raising more I just threw a couple of handfuls of various seeds into the two remaining garden beds.

Guess we'll see what happens.

Illustration - What I Wore Today

According to Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote the book The Outliers), it takes a person approximately 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at that task.

By that standard I am probably an expert eater, sleeper and TV watcher. What I'd really like to be, though, is an expert drawer. Sure I can draw good enough, but the illustrations I draw in my head look ten times more amazing than when I put them on paper. So I thought I might incorporate some illustrations into my blog posts.

Since I have been wanting to do a "What I Wore Today" post for a while, I thought it might be fun to illustrate that for you instead of taking a photo. So, here's what I wore today:


Black turtle neck sweater from Portmans
Grey slouchy woolen jumper by Jump
Khaki linen skirt by Emerson
Purple tights found on eBay
Black Mary Jane's by Sketchers

I hope the start to your week has been great!

Reaching my Fitness Goal

Four years ago I set a fitness goal to run the 6kms around our local lake. A couple of things got in the way of this goal (a tumour and two babies to be exact), but since I am now fit and healthy I decided it was time to do it:


I made it around the lake without stopping in 37 minutes 40 seconds, which wasn't too shabby since I had a horrific head wind and I haven't been running much for the last couple of weeks.


The run was pretty uneventful, except for one thing...I had the most ridiculously freezing cold left armpit. I'm not sure what the deal with it was, but at one stage I actually remember thinking that if I had have gotten my groceries before my run, I could have just tucked a chicken breast under my armpit and it would have been frozen by the time I got home.

It feels good to have reached this goal especially since it is winter, which is when I usually stop exercising all together and chunk up a bit. Now I know I can do it, I guess my new goal will be to shave a bit off my time.

What are your winter fitness goals?