Brazil

A random collection of photos from our Brazil trip

Mum's birthday, or, mission impossible

Today was Mum's birthday.

So we started out by cooking a cake. This may not sound a big deal, but mum is allergic to gluten, wheat, sugar, dairy, eggs, iodine, yeast... suffice to say, that building a cake which looks like a cake, and tastes not like a metal sponge is verging on mission impossible stuff. difficult.

But we have found a solution: There are a couple of new brands available at the local supermarket

• Easy Bakers yeast, dairy & wheat free flour. From Lauke Flour. Which is actually flour that looks and feels like real wheat flour, and not (to randomly choose something) re-fried dirt.
• Orgran, gluten free, No Egg - which is an egg replacement.

We sort of followed the "basic cake" recipe on the flour box. Flavia inevitably asks me why we can't at least follow the actual recipe once before deciding that it won't work without substantial creative input. I don't know why recipes are written that way, but the answer is we just can't.

So. Into 250g of the nifty flour (correct to recipe) sieved, we added 5 heaped teaspoons of No-Egg should have been 4 whole eggs. We also added 150mL fresh-squeezed orange juice that should have been 100mL water and some water because it wasn't looking wet enough and about 20 drops of Sugarine should have been 75g of sugar. I also accidentally added 1/2 a teaspoon of the vanilla essence we have in the cupboard in a moment of non-concentration. We then cut a super-ripe banana and dropped the slices into an concentric-round cooking dish (it was supposed to be a flat square tray) covered the banana in nutmeg and cinnamon the recipe is just looking at me shaking it's head with a why-oh-why do I even bother type look and poured in the (rather small looking) batter. It was starting to rise and bubble in the mixing bowl.

Oven at 150C correct to recipe and the whole thing cooked in about 10 minutes which I take to be reasonable when the recipe said 30 minutes or when golden. The batter was golden when I put it in, so no help there, and after all, they hadn't accounted for half the stuff I did o their recipe..... We just did the classic toothpick test a few times.

Mum loved the cake, it actually tasted like banana bread, and we started the day with a completely out of time and tune happy birthday song in English and Portuguese. Lilly helped blow the candles out, delivered the present, opened the present, stuck her head in the bag and shouted There's chocolate! and after handing Mum the chocolate, shouted And a scarf! So the surprise element of the present may have been lost.

Astute readers may wonder, with all those allergies, what we're thinking giving Mum chocolate for her birthday, but it's (again a recent find) Sweet William chocolate which I have to say is one of the best foods we've found for Mum ever. It is milk, sugar free, but still tastes close to real chocolate.

We've previously bought mum membership to the National Gallery of Australia, and so we took Mum for the first time to the "members lounge". She was impressed with the view and the service. Lilly loved looking at the forest from above, and watching the people walking around the trees. I carried Gabriel in the Baby Bjourn, facing outwards this time, and he had a great time. Never complained once.

In the lounge Flavia noticed some lilies in water - and pointed them out to Lilly. Lilly was fascinated that flowers have names. So after returning home, she noticed that we had some flowers in vases on the table. These are Lillies! No, they are camellias. Oh. All flowers have different names. We looked around the house and pointed to some pansies Lilly had planted a while ago. Pantsees? Pansies. Ah. And did Lilly remember the little tiny blue flowers that grew in the grass outside? Mum asked her What do you think they are called? Harry.

So we now have some tiny blue grass flowers which are named Harry.

We've ended the day with watching the first Mission Impossible movie, it seems appropriate.

Painting by footprints

So last weekend, instead of cleaning the house, gardening or doing anything that we ought to have done, we painted.

I begin by noting that the amazingly large paper is courtesy of work, and a never-ending-demand for posters. I also note that Mum is still staying with us, and as an ex-pre-school teacher of many years "doing something interesting with a three year old" takes on a whole new world of meaning.

Enough context. We got up, we wandered around the house finding the paints -- we used squeezie-marker pen type ones, that were supposed to be not too hard for small people to use. I believe Flavia has photographic recall of every object we've ever bought, and where it currently resides. She managed to find and unearth the paints based on no more than my statement "We got some squeezie paints for Lilly a year or so ago, you know, the ones you can hold. Do you know where they went?" With my GPS-like description of the materials in question, and less than one minute, we had the paints. And so with two A0 posters stuck together, we filled the lounge room.

In the end, it was much more fun to finger paint than it was to use the paints as markers. Yes, that's me in the trackies and ugg boots. Lilly is performing her first ice-skating based masterpiece. At this point in time we have (I think) finished breakfast. Flavia has very generously not shown any identifying features of anyone except the artist in the photo.

This weekend we might add some more paint, and put the work-in-progress up on one of our walls.

And the flame grows...
Today Mum started blogging. This takes us from Flavia, Its just a way to put pictures up to me, and now Mum, who is very excited. I am looking forward to the news, and hoping that once we all separate back to normal households in a month or so, we will keep the blogging active.

Ballet

Flavia's sister (Renata) has just sent over this link. My niece (Manuela) is taking ballet classes. She is the last to enter from the left. The view is from Manuela's first ballet presentation.

I don't care what anyone says, I think it's brilliant.

A moment of pause

Yesterday, the 28th, would have been Dad's 59'th birthday.

Several things happened yesterday, most of them trivial and none of lasting consequence, but like most days I am kept busy with the small. There were few moments of pause. In the one in which I now sit, at 2am on the following day, I am thinking of the void left with Dad's passing many years ago.

Mum is visiting, and she is the only other person in this house who knew him. He had passed a few years before I met my wife, and long before children stopped seeming (to me) like something that happened to other (much older) people. We have some photographs. No recorded films, no recorded sound. The works he did, in building the farms we lived on, the houses we lived in, have been sold whole or subdivided. The physicality of the time we knew him has largely been absorbed.

What remains? There are some small pieces - a clock that I helped build from an old red-cedar stump we dug out, tools, some clothes. But in a sort of parody of memory, they don't do anything. My memory of Dad is one of constant, nay, frenetic activity. He moves through the still-life, slow-motion memories I have as a child with speed. Almost all my memories seem to be about getting out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning, with Dad fully awake, radio on, rushing breakfast and zapping off to fix fences, chase cattle, spread fertilizer, do something.

It can't really have been that early, I mean the sun is usually already up in those memories, so it must have been more my perception than reality. And to have Fate tweak my nose, nowadays I seem to be dragging Lilly from bed, forcing toast into her and zapping her off to pre-school whilst she is still closer to sleep than wake. I guess she will grow up thinking that I must have been awake forever each morning since I now wake her up and already have the radio on....

As I write this, I am having many happy memories, but it is not my intent to recount them here. My thinking is more toward a simple question: How will I introduce my own children to their Grandfather?

For them, he would seem to be not much more than four celluloid pictures living on the breakfast bar, in a world which doesn't really value a few still images. Gabriel's second name is Warwick in memory of him, and I tell Lilly stories about things he and I used to do when I was her age. But I remember that Dad also used to tell me stories of the things he and his father did -- and to that small me, listening at that time, the only real character of those stories was Dad. Some not-quite-law-abiding child-version of himself, for whom the father and brothers were more props in the stories than actual characters. I don't know, if I had never met them all many times in real life, if I had not spent Christmasses with all the characters in those stories many years later, I don't know that they would have been very memorable to me.

And perhaps, perhaps, if we'd had tape-cassette recordings or if we'd video-taped a conversation, then perhaps we'd have something more real. But I don't think so. Nowadays, with movies by the thousands, and all the vision and sound and documentaries we have to distract us, I think a few moving- or audio- snap-shots would not be so much more than the few still-frames we've got.

If, as the cliche says, a picture is worth a thousand words, what price are memories? For I think that is my ultimate desire - to allow Lilly and Gabriel to see what I have seen, and hear what I have heard. Not on some crackling, fading, stretched 180minute VHS or audio-cassette, not sitting in an armchair in the lounge room, but being there, actually there, then.

To know Dad as I did, which surely would be nearly as good as meeting him for themselves.

Steam train

We've been waiting for this for weeks. Today, we caught a steam train from Canberra railway station to Bungendore.

The train is maintained and run by the Australian Railway Historical Society (ACT), who are entirely volunteers. Flavia (the organised) booked tickets for us all some time ago, so Lilly, my Mum, Flavia Gabriel and I would have a train trip. It's Lilly's first train ride. (and its also Gabriel's - but at 10 weeks everything is his first, and so it gets a bit monotonous observing firsts)

I make the observation that I'm just (yesterday) back from San Francisco, and so slightly faded after several hours of United Airlines.

So we arrived 45minutes before the train was due to depart - giving Lilly a chance to wander around the station platform and the train. The staff were extremely friendly, and let the kids go up on the locomotive. Lilly was keen, right up to the point of being there, and then I think the fire and the surrounds were a bit much. We got on the train (having had our tickets checked on the platform) walked to our seat and ta-da! double booked. Some grandparents and their little one sitting in the seat. After much too-ing and fro-ing ("that carriage" "no seats here" "that one..." ) we walked the length of the train. Were placed on some temporary chairs near a window.

Lilly thought it was amazing. Gabriel slept.

As I write this it is 12 hours after the train ride, and Lilly (who has only just gone to bed) has been shouting "Toot-toot, all aboard" for about 6 of those hours. Interestingly, no-one actually shouted all aboard, except for Lilly.... The ride was brilliant - staff were helpful and friendly and although it was teeth-shatteringly freezing walking between carriages, we did so to find snacks and coffee.

Three tunnels, much smoke, half a pack of tiny-teddies, and an hour later, we arrived in Bungendore. Which is damn cold at the best of times. We walked from the station to the Cafe Woodworkers, had a decent lunch. They burned the pancakes. I mean, how hard is it to cook a pancake?!? I think the staff got overwhelmed by a marauding group of steam-trained up pensioners.... We finished our lunch, and walked back to the station and little Miss 3 fell asleep in Nanna's arms.

Gabriel is at the stage of saying "wooooh" and so (since he was awake all the way home) he responded to the train's whistle every time. Train-whistle, Gabriel "wooh-woooh" and so on. I'm not sure if he ever got the answer he was looking for.

So now we are home, and Miss 3 and Small dude are fully flaked - a good day had by all.

Birthdays & busy-ness

This Sunday (5th July) is Lilly's 3rd birthday.

We've gone for the do-it-by-someone-else option this year. Mostly because with a ten-week old in residence; setting up the house for guests and then de-setting up the house for us living in it again is just too much like hard work. They say money can't buy happiness, but I say it sure does buy plenty of laziness, and that's almost as good.

Lilly's first party was under-the-sea: Flavia and Mum mostly set everything up while I was at work, and then the night before we decorated the entire lounge-room with fishing nets over the ceiling and jangly fishes everywhere. Second party was in Brazil with the other half of the family, and that was mostly done by others. A bunch of people showed up with crepe streamers, boxes of stuff and turned the ground-floor of Vovo's (grandma's) house into a jungle. I am advised it was a garden actually. Big garden, trees and vines....

This year, it's fairies and pirates. We are quietly eating all those pre-parenting slogans such as "We're not going to do all that pink and Barbie stuff, she's unique" Well, she's unique, but she likes pink, princesses, Barbie, fairies and frilly dresses. She likes boots, mud, painting, and running around the house semi-clothed shouting "I'm not naked", jumping (on the wooden floor) whilst holding a finger to her lips to indicate that she's well aware that the small-dude is asleep and is only jumping, rather than jumping-and-shouting and therefore, doing everyone an immense favour at great cost to herself.

Makes me realise how completely naive I was when I thought some sort of coloured clothing might limit her.

We're looking forward to seeing the results of sugar, cordial, an adult fairy and a dozen other 2-4 year olds placed in a room. And then, at the allotted time, we're also looking forward to coming back home with Nanna, Mum, Mr Small & Little Miss 3.

Rotarix

Two days ago, Gabriel - our youngest 8 weeks - had his vaccination for Rotarvirus. The vaccine was Rotarix which is an oral form. The nurse said that he was the first to actually enjoy the taste of the vaccine.

For those who've not experienced the wonders of Rota, it provides a form of gastro-enteritis with extreme diarrhea and vomiting. Lovely. I put it only a single step below food-poisoning on the list of things never to have, and only because with food-poisoning I thought I might die, whereas with Rota I thought I'd like to. Remarkably, the symptoms (when Flavia and I both got it) lasted only a day or two, but since we didn't know when it would end, it felt like it would last forever.

I am a strong believer in vaccination, and have difficulty seeing the alternate viewpoint. More than 500,000 children under five years of age die from rotavirus infection each year.

Gabriel, despite his vaccine, is doing brilliantly. He has started goo-ing and generally trying to make his wishes known. Previous experience (older sister Lilly, 3 yrs in two weeks) suggests that this process is only going to get more forceful....