An insight into ME!

I hesitate to do this, there are some things better kept a secret.

Like who your parents are...

um, no...

that's not how I meant it to sound...

Ahh...

What I meant was...

My mum has decided to divulge all our family secrets and skeletons...

no, perhaps...

Mothers know too much to be let loose in blogland...

Note to self *once in hole, stop digging*

So I guess what I am trying to say is...

My Mum is blogging now. She is officially "Grannysaurus" and you can find her here @ Dragonlady Grotto.

It's her deep profound thoughts, some family history and probably stuff about her completely adorable grandchildren.

So if you want an insight into how I turned out the way I did... probably best not to go there, anything she writes about me is all lies ;)

Wednesday is Playday

Since there is no point in trying to get anything done with these three in the house on wednesday afternoons we thought we would take them out somewhere so at least they weren't making anyones house messier. We thought we would go to the marina and take some photos of the boats but it's not the place you really want to be with these three. I got two shots of the boats neither of which is worth showing. So here's some shots that I do like...

Don't these two look like they are up to something.

I got a few good shots of them sharing this rocker. I wish they shared more things, I was expecting an outburst from dragon as little bear climbed on board but he actually stopped rocking to let her on.

My Lion.

Isn't he just the cutest little thing. I am having trouble with him turning 4 this month. I just want him to stay my little boy forever.

We were playing in ANZAC park. Lion has been asking a lot of questions lately about the army. we have an army couple living next door to us and we often hear the practice in the hills near us and the planes flying overhead. We explain that they are practicing so that if we need to be protected from naughty people they will know what to do. Also that sometimes they need to go and fight in countries where kids arent safe playing outside and families are taken away from each other and our army people go to their countries and help them to be safe from bad people. He was asking about the memorials at the park and I was explaining that some of our soldiers die while they are trying to protect other people and we put their names on plaques so we can remember who they are. He was particularly intreagued by being able to walk underneath the eternal flame and look on the map everywhere our army people have faught.

I love the weathered stone

Lion loved having his rocket with him. He wanted to have his photo taken with it, he picked where he wanted to stand and where the rocket should go. Then he wanted to swap places. He had such a great time posing for pictures. I just wish he would pose when I wanted him to.

My boys kept wanting to drink the fountain water. They also liked to play with the spouts of water shooting out.

My baby splashing around

And of course little bear was as photogenic as ever...

She really didnt want to hold anyones hand.

Isn't she a cutie?

And I thought it couldn't get any worse

Okay, so after the bare backside in the middle of the video shop episode (I think I'm still living in the 90's, they havent stocked videos for years!) I thought we had dealt with our embarassment for the weekend. Oh how wrong I was.

We decided to go to Bellarmies (Sizzler) for dinner tonight and invite Grandma and Grandad to come. Everything was going nicely, Lion was eating everyone else' prawns...

Dragon was eating everything in sight...and we were generally having a lovely time. Until Lion noticed a man walking past our table, he was not a small man but he had a bit of middle age spread happening, nothing more. Just as he got level with Lion... "That man is FAT!" and not in that nice quiet voice he is know for (oh, who am I kidding, he never uses a nice quiet voice) it was his larger-than-life-everyone-in-a-3Km-radius-can-hear voice. The man ignored him if he did hear (and lets face it, no one missed it) but we got some looks later on from his wife. As I tried diplomatically to explain to Lion that what he said was not appropriate he decided to counter me with (again in his LTLEIA3KRCH voice) "But he is FAT". Mummy was trying not to die of embarassment so she kept a smile plastered on her face and continued on... in the end I decided the longer I kept trying to explain the inappropriateness of his statement the more he was going to keep loudly saying the (other) F word so we resorted to "we'll talk about it later". How do we explain to kids where truth ends and "better to keep your mouth shut" starts????

Verbatim?

Mummy McT- "Lion hide these Timtams and take them inside then give them to grandma and say "surprise grandma, I love you, these are all for you"

Lion- Runs inside with timtams clutched tightly to him but still in plain sight, holds on to them for a while until mummy gives him a prod in the right direction... "Surprise Grandma, I love you, These are all for you to share with us"

I've noticed your blog hasn't been updated for a few days...

My reply to this comment from my mother was something along the lines of "oh, sorry, I have been busy chucking my guts up" (I am so polite aren't I??) so to appease the masses (let me kid myself that there are enough people that care that I can call them masses) Here is a quicky.

I felt like a new pair of earrings this morning so I whipped some up...

Whaddayathink????

The bottom bit is actually purple, yeah, doesn't look it to me either in this photo. And the diamondy one at the top is a different earring.

Now, my mother did know exactly how I have been feeling lately becuase she came over to help while I was in recovery mode yesterday and I also sent her this text today... (edited because there are some things that only your mother needs to hear)

"I have an aching face from sinus junk like I have only felt on a landing plane, and I have to do groceries this avo or we will starve, I dont think I can handle that combo with kids thrown in, can I deliver you my un-fed kids when they wake up so I can do my groceries without inserting a small chid down the throat of and un-smiling pimple faced checkout kid who feels they have to comment on how tired I look and proceed to tell me how hard year 10 is."

Thus the need for some pick me up earrings this morning!!!

I promise I will post a post i have been working on (in bits and pieces as i can handle it) soon.

Time for some honesty...

After this post about our frog-eating-friend now dubbed "Cranky" Wolf was told pretty much that he was a big chicken for not rescuing the frog with this comment from his little sister...

I mean, what harm could a 60cm non poisonous snake do to a big man? Especially when it has a huge frog 1/4 way down it's throat?

So in reply wolf posted this. Which recieved these comments...

Wow, that is so coooool !!! So how big was 'big brother'? Does this make them 'cranky' & 'crankier'? What a great BBQ story you've got now (though would have been cooler with the fang marks to show for it !!)

and

You could have lied and said the scratch was from the fangs of the snake. But you didn't, so you are not just a big, strong man - you're a big, strong, honest man. But you'll always be my little big brother. That snake is lucky I wasn't there coz NO ONE attacks my brother!!!!! By the way, are you going to send that into funny home videos?

and within minutes of posting it he recieved a very concerned phone call from his MIL checking that he really was okay.

I had been suggesting we add an ammendment after only 1 person thought it was real, (which was when I first saw it) Wolf needed 3 people to believe him before he decided that he should submit a retraction. Actually people believing him was fine, it was his sister calling him honest that really made him think perhaps he should let people know it's not real. And if we are being really honest, we have no idea how to get our own videos on here anyway so it certainly cant be in our drain. I did inform my mum that she should have realised it wasnt real because if Wolf had discovered that snake in the drain beside our house I would have called her saying "get some beds ready, I'll be there in 10 minutes with the boys and all we need to survive until someone catches that thing".

So appologies from Wolf to those who believed him and consider this a warning from me... Dont believe everything you read on the net. Especially not if it involves Wolf McTavish!!!!!

-Mummy McT (and the first snake really was real and really was in our back yard, HONESTLY!!!)

Machiavellian Prince

[this photo taken end January 2007]

Our sons love reading books, even though they can't read yet. Maybe I should say they love books; they love to dance on them, they love to stand on them, they love to fold them the wrong way, they love the sound of the pages tearing, they love their parents reading the stories to them, but most of all they seem to love sitting down and looking at the words. Strange as it is to me that seems to keep them occupied for a long period.

I previously posted a photo of Dragon the Warrior Poet, he still loves that copy of Hamlet with it's Klingon translation, he even took it in the car the other day to read while we traveled and into the coffee shop with Grandma. You can imagine the looks Mummy McT and Grandma got when their nearly two year old companion sat there at the coffee shop reading Shakespeare.

So while Dragon has the heart of a Warrior Poet, I believe that Lion may become a psychiatrist, politician, CEO or someone who loves Machiavellian scheming. (Take a close look at the title in the picture above.)


Who knows he maybe even become Prime Minister of Australia once day.


-Wolf McT

BREAKING NEWS!!!!!!

As I post this there is a frog being eaten by a SNAKE in my backyard!!!!!! right next to the boys sandpit!!!! Am I slightly freaked out????? YES!!!!!! Does Wolf care???? NO!!!!!!! he's asking me to hold it so he can get a better photo! Does my mum care????? NO!!!!!!! she's telling me to get out there and rescue the frog (and I told her if she really cared about the frog she'd come over and rescue it herself!)

Oh, the noises the frog is making... it's been going on for about an hour (which apparently is sort of a good thing since it means the snake isnt poisonous or the frog would have been dead an hour ago)... it's a heartbreaking wail... sort of like the sound they make when they get mutilated by the airconditioner and refuse to die quietly!!!!!

I called the Wildlife carer people because they put you on to whoever is the on-call snake man (or woman here) but she said if it's out at night in the cold and the rain it's probably going to be a tree snake not an eastern brown (they are bad ones, really, really bad ones), and it's not doing itself any favours by eating when it's this cold.

First I called mum to see if I should call the wildlife carers. She was asking me all sorts of questions about the shape of it's head and the type of neck it has. How was I supposed to tell. IT HAS A FROG HALF WAY DOWN IT'S NECK!!!!

so here it is... and also a shot of how close it is to the sandpit which is why I was freaking out.

Can you see it??? it's there just behind the strappy leaves.

It's about 60cm long.

AND HAS A FROG IN IT'S MOUTH!!!!!

Okay grandma get out that Tropical Wildlife book and identify it! And I only want to know if it's a "good" one.

The Chairs.

Great-Aunty S gave us some new to us chairs for our cubby house and the boys decided that they wanted to sit outside like grandma and grandad. Mummy McT qualifies this... G'ma and G'dad dont sit down at the letterbox, they sit on their patio, it's all the same to a 3 and 1 year old.

Rosella Jam... FINALLY!!!

For those sick of hearing about our Rosella monster bush we have finally harvested and made the jam!!!

Picking the Fruit...

Everyone got involved, Dragon was quite helpful, Lion felt his skills would be better put to use running around the yard pretending to be an echidna sucking up ants.

Making the Jam...

First you make a batch of peanut butter cookies to keep you going because there is a lot of work to do...

Mummy McTavish Peanut butter cookies

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar (best with half brown and half white or raw for that gooey inside and crunchy outside)

1 egg

mix it all together, add bit and pieces if you want (chocolate, chopped dried fruit...) bake in a moderate oven for 10 minutes. let them cool on the tray.

then you've got to get all those seeds out, so get some helpers... I roped in Grandma and GREAT-grandma. Also, great-grandma knows how to make it so we really needed her.

then there is a lot of chopping (we got through it super fast thanks to our two Tupperware Quickchef's:) ), cooking, waiting, stirring, messing, bottling and a few other steps and you get some REALLY YUMMY JAM! we got 11 bottles of various sizes. some quite small some were REALLY large. It took all day, because we had nearly 6kg of rosellas to get through, but we learnt how to make rosella jam and we have a cupboard full of jam to have on scones and pikelets!

Little Bear comes to play

Aunty K has had to go back to work but Little Bear doesnt have a full time place at day care so we are sharing her with grandma on wednesdays! She had so much fun! They trashed the lounge room and play room and all Dragon wanted to do was be with her but she got a bit tired of that after a few minutes. I think he was playing "wombats" or something with her, he would crawl up to her and put his head down and ram her. or if she was sitting down he would lie down in her lap and look up at her until she hit him hard enough to make him think that it was a bad idea. They did have a great time!
Later in the afternoon we went to the aquarium with JMac. They had a ball. there were baby turtles and big fish and little fish and in between size fish and more fish and sharks and big turtles and lots and lots of exciting things!!!

just a couple of photos, it was hard to keep track of all the kids!!!

Lionism

Been meaning to blog this one for a while, grandies had a trip to Tasmania at christmas and since then we have had a bit of a fascination with Tas. Lion was doing his usual pretend to be something else this day and decided he was "the biggest Stegosaurus you've never seen in Tasmania".

He also informed Grandad and Wolf something along the lines of "you cant fly a plane to tasmania because there's too many devils down there". Well Grandma and Grandad did go on a boat.

Breakfast Time

Lion was sitting talking to himself at breakfast this morning "it's a SOULment mixer, You gotta, gotta, gotta have soul" I could make out that Lion is super spiritual and draw some deep conclusions from this but I think the truth would be more like this... Lion watches too much TV and has a well developed sense of humor for his age.

Dragon, well, draw what conclusions you want from this... We dropped wolf of at work and I turned around to find that Dragon had opened up Lions kindy lunch bag and was trying to open his lunch box to get the sangas out. I got them off him and put everything back in the bag but couldn't find the yoghurt. Wolf search all over the place, so did I. we came to the conclusion that i must have forgotten to put it in the bag. I could remember breaking one off the pack but couldnt actually remember putting it in. Since Lion was a little light on the lunch without it I remembered Grandma went soft the other day when we did some shopping and agreed to buy some Bob the Builder yoghurt for him to have at her house (mummy is mean and only buys the ones with the mark down sticker on). Off we trundle to Grandmas to snaffle one of her yoghurts, Mummy runs inside, explains to grandma the situation, grabs a yoghurt and goes back out to the car. "Dragon found the o-gut Mummy" and so he had. He must have felt "his" yoghurt was safe now mummy had another one for Lion and pulled it out of wherever it was hiding. we tried to give one back to grandma but as we were pulling out Dragon looked so sad and wouldnt wave, "yow, yow, yow" so we stopped and got his "yow" back from grandma and took off for kindy. we were late, not surprisingly. As we were leaving kindy I put Dragon in his seat and started to drive off and I hear a delighted little voice in the back "Yow, Yow, Yow" I think he had spotted it in the front and was already anticipating his yummy morning tea that he had single handedly saved from the clutches of Kindy and of grandma.

Creative Flair

Dragon surprised me today. Lion has never had the "be bothered" to sit still and do any sort of art or craft. So my attempts to get him to creat masterpiece birthday cards for people have failed misserably. Today I was determined they were going to sit down and make some cards. With mothers day next week and grandma's birthday dinner tonight we needed some cards. Lion fiddle-faddled and drew a little bit and decided that blue paper wasnt for him and could he have some white paper and which side should he use and then he stuck a few bits on his paper and it was painful and drawn out and why we dont do craft very often. Dragon on the other hand drew beautiful pictures all over both sides of his red paper (that there was no way I was getting off him even after he sneezed on it and I wanted to swap it for another piece) then I put some glue on the paper and gave him the collage box. He went to town! Sticking here, sticking there, asking for more glue (silly mummy assumed we would have some of the drawings underneath showing through), trying to get the glue for himself (that just ended up with heaps of collage bits stuck to the glue stick and not the paper). So this is the result.

Both sides were used but I only took a photo of this side. It was going to be folded in half and turned into a card but I left it unfolded and just wrote our message on the back. Dragon was beaming when he gave it to Grandma.

Often as I sit cutting up left over bits of scrapbook page or pictures off wrapping paper I wonder why I am wasting my time, Lion wouldnt notice if we never did a collage again. Now I will think of how much fun Dragon had creating this as I spend ages painstakingly sorting through the wrapping paper after a birthday to find the pictures that are still usable.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRANDMA!

Happy Birthday Grandma,
Love Lion and Dragon
XOXOXO

Frilled-Neck Lizard

Lion has a new passion… being a frilled-neck lizard. I am guessing it’s a use you had never thought of for a coccyx cushion. He is quite an impressive lizard, he would scare me if I was a predator looking for a nice meal of desert lizard. Grandma helped him look up some video on the web of frilled lizards running, after we very unsuccessfully tried to demonstrate it for him (and aren’t I glad there’s no video of that!!!) and now he can run just like a frilled lizard with it’s back legs flicking out sideways and with front legs dangling. He makes a great frilled lizard noise too, it’s a brilliant hiss with his mouth wide open, the only thing that gives it away that he isn’t a real frilled-neck lizard is that the inside of his mouth isn’t yellow.

Frilled-Neck Lizard Running to scare off a predator.

Displaying his frill to threaten the predator

Displaying his frill and hissing to let us know he means business!

Dragon is wearing no shirt because he is doing a bit of growth spurt eating but then throws up on himself because he doesn’t slow down even with a VERY full tummy. And we have used all the spare shirts at grandma’s house. But he looks so cute standing there with his shoulders back, so I had to take a photo. Grandad decided to make sure all his food was well and truely digested, we hadn't told grandad why Dragon wasnt wearing a shirt...

And while the lizard frill was having a rest they boys tried to break into Aunty J’s car. They didn’t get very far.

Did you know???

That smoke, dust or steam in the air makes the moon change colour? okay, you most likely did but if you are old enough to read this without help then you dont count. I just wanted to brag that Lion now knows about why the moon changes colour. And if you ask him he says it so matter-of-fact that you would never doubt it even though it is coming from the mouth of a three year old. We'll just add that to his adorable little explaination of how a car engine works. Oh he's so intelligent... and i'm not at all biased.

Grandma and Grandad took Lion and his big cousin M up to the beach hut today to see Great grandma. it's an easter tradition, Great grandma goes up there and we all make the pilgrimage to visit for at least a few hours. This year we had mountains of cleaning planned so it was great that the grandies could take lion and we got cracking. Aunty J even took Dragon for a couple of hours so Wolf and Mummy McT could go and have lunch together. YAY! anyway the moon colour conversation came up in the car on the trip back and Lion Proudly informed us on his arrival home how the moon changes colour.

Then we had to decide where to put out the easter baskets... Mummy sort of might have influenced his decision a little. I am guessing that had i not intervened they would have been put in his room or the lounge room so that he can get them first thing in the morning and eat all the eggs before the rest of us even woke up. probably not much chance they would have been put on top of the tall-boy in mummy and daddy's bedroom well out of reach of Lion paws but there they are and he thinks that it was all his decision. As I am a mummy for longer and longer i start to wonder how many of the things i thought were my decision growing up really were my decision...

the bunny is a bit tight this year. thankfully they arent up to comparing their bunny's leavings with other kids bunny's. I dread the thought of all that chocolate in the fridge until i get sick of it and let them eat it all in one go and just put up with them on a sugar high for 24 hours (or more). The bunny decided not to do it this year, they are only getting a couple of pieces each and I have, I hope, given enough hints out that I really hope others do the same. They are getting a box of duplo to share with the money great grandma gave them for easter instead of buying them more chocolate! I was very happy with great grandma!

well, off to bed now. Dont forget in all that chocolate that JESUS IS ALIVE!!!!!

Huddy

Lion has a pet bird. Not a real pet bird, a pretend one. Grandma looked after a bird named Huddy over the Easter holidays and Lion decided that he would have a bird named Huddy too. Huddy just happens to be Lions hand. We have tried to get a photo of Huddy but he keeps flying away just as we take the photo. Huddy also has a friend named "J"Huddy. "J" being Lion's friends name. "J"Huddy is Lions other hand. That is all cute and we have been meaning to post about Huddy for ages but were hoping for a photo to go with it but todays incident required a post even without a photo. We were driving in the car after dropping Wolf at work and I hear "AAaachooo" I look in the rearview mirror to see a look of horror on Lions face, twice more "Aaachoo, aaachoo" two more horrified looks. Then a little lion voice says "oh, sorry Huddy".

It's a good thing imaginary birds are forgiving. I just hope this doesn't stop Lion covering his mouth when he sneezes!!!!
- mummy McT