Junior Masterchef

Our kids don't watch a lot of television, and neither do we, really. But I've been wanting to check out Masterchef for a while, not having ever watched it before.

Several weeks ago I saw that a new series of Junior Masterchef was about to start, and I thought this might be a great way to get the kids watching something new and interesting, and I'd watch with them.

We recorded the first two episodes which screened on a Sunday night and the following Monday night, and then one day on the school holidays we sat down to watch them.

After ten minutes, Mars asked me when he could start to learn to cook. I told him he could start straight away.

That night he made his favourite food, tuna noodle casserole from his Nana's recipe, with small amounts of help from me where boiling water and the hot oven were involved.

He was completely inspired by the show, which is fantastic. Now he wants to help in the kitchen all the time, which I love. He's been pouring over the Junior Masterchef website for recipes. He wants to make the most difficult hazelnut meringue cake I've ever seen, and I've never even made meringues!

I, on the other hand, have been completely awed by what children only a little older than Mars can produce. The most amazing desserts, unbelievable pasta dishes. These kids are making food that I've never even attempted, with little or no help.

I feel like a complete dolt in the kitchen now.

I can only hope that one day soon, when Mars surpasses my level of cooking talent, that he will let me help him in the kitchen, and I might pick up a few skills from him.

Zucchini meanie

A little while ago I was putting Venus to bed when she started telling me about the zucchini meanie.

Apparently her Pooh Bear wears a bodysuit to bed, just like Bumblebee, and this bodysuit is covered in pictures of animals.

She pointed to a random spot on this invisible bodysuit and told me "this is a zucchini meanie."

"Oh," I said. "What's a zucchini meanie?"

"Well, it's a lot like a giraffe, but its neck is this long (she indicated about 20cm with her hands) and its legs are this long (about the same length), and its nose is this long, as big as my hand, and its eyes are this big (about the size of a tennis ball)."

"What colour is a zucchini meanie?"

"Red. Well, the spots are red. The rest is brown because it's very dangerous so it hides in caves and gets dirty. It used to be a normal giraffe but some people treated it special, so now it's a super giraffe."

"What do you mean when you say people treated it special?"

"They gave it special food."

"Oh. What does a zucchini meanie eat?"

"Frogs... but not all frogs. Kileanie frogs."

"Kileanie frogs?"

"Yes. They're called kileanie frogs because they always lean on things."

Looks like she's been reading Dr Seuss behind my back.

Stars and chickens

I have long been remiss in not mentioning the Star family. We have known them for many years and they are very dear to us.

Mrs Star is actually Dr Star, and Mr Star is from Brazil. In addition to being Venus' Godparents, they have three gorgeous girls of their own. Jellybean will be eight soon and is at school with Mars. She is lithe, loves gymnastics and excells at it.  Miss Mouse is five, two months older than Venus, and is by far the biggest rascal of the three. Then there's little Pumpkin. She is two years old, beautiful of face and beautiful by nature.

A few months ago the Star family got some chickens. Three were hens, but one, Pecky, turned out to be slightly more of a rooster than they would have liked, so he went back. He was replaced by a lovely hen, who also turned out to be a rooster, who also went back. So currently the numbers stand at three hens.

Their names are Brownie, Dirty and Skinny.

Last week they started to lay eggs, and Jellybean took one to school on Monday for Show and Tell. Venus and I dropped Mars off at school, and on the way back to the car this happened.

"Mummy, why did Jellybean bring an egg to school for Show and Tell?"

"Because their chickens have just started laying eggs and it's very exciting."

"But what happens if the egg gets broken while it's at school?"

"It probably won't get broken. I'm sure Jellybean will be very careful with it. And besides, I'm pretty sure Papai* was going to eat the eggs anyway."

Venus was horrified.

"But Mummy, you can't eat those. They're chicken eggs!"

"But you saw me eat two eggs for breakfast yesterday."

"But they're meant to grow into chickens!"

"Oh, no. These are just eggs for eating, it's okay. If you want to grow baby chickens you need a rooster."

"Oh. Why do you need a rooster?"

"The rooster does something special to make the egg grow into a baby chicken."

"What does the rooster do?"

Now this is the point in my conversations with my children where I usually say too much. So I tried to be sensible in my response, without wanting to crush Venus' thirst for knowledge by flatly refusing to answer the question.

"Honey, that's a bit of a grown up story. Can I tell you that story when you're a bit bigger?"

"Okay Mummy."

I don't think her brother would have let me get away with that.

*Papai is Portugese for Daddy, and it's how the girls refer to their father. Venus worked this out when she was very small, and she also started to call him Papai, and still does. He just loves it. 

Heather's hat

Heather simply despises her haircut.

At least, that's what her facebook status said many months ago. A hairdresser inflicted an unflattering bob on my friend, and she was not happy. So I did what any knitter would do. I offered to make her a hat.

That was before winter. It is now spring, but the hat is finished. Well... almost finished.

We agreed on a felted grey cloche. The first wool I bought had been treated to survive the washing machine, so it was resistant to felting. I thought if I was really harsh with it I could probably still get it to felt, but I tested a small piece and it failed. So I had to go back for more wool. It's a darker shade of grey than I would have liked, but I didn't have much choice.

The wool joined the queue of projects I had lined up at the time. Several bee hats jumped ahead of Heather's hat in the queue, so that delayed things by about a month. 

When I finally got the wool, the correct needles and the pattern all assembled in my knitting bag the actual knitting, after some initial hiccups because of mistakes in the pattern, went smoothly and was very enjoyable.

Generally items destined for felting are knit loosely on bigger needles that you would normally use, so that when the fabric shrinks in the felting process you end up with an item that is roughly the right size. You can't tell from this picture, but this sucker looked massive, on and off the needles.

The felting process involves taking your knitting and torturing it. You get a bucket of cold water and a bucket of hot soapy water and you repeatedly plunge and scrub the knitting in the hot water, and then every so often dunk it in the cold bucket. The heat, soap and friction make the wool fibres relax and then bond together, which is what turns something from knitting into felt. The cold water shocks the fibres and their bonds become stronger.

After about thirty five minutes of scrubbing it was clear that the felting was going well but it didn't seem like the hat had shrunk much. I squeezed out a lot of the water and tried the hat on and it was still miles too big. So I gave it another fifteen minutes and it was just right. You can see it standing up all by itself because the felt is nice and thick. 

All that remained was to fit the hat to my sophisticated drying apparatus, painstakingly crafted from a vase and a balloon blown up to head size, and wait a day or two for the hat to competely dry out. 

So that's what I did yesterday. I'm really pleased with the end result. Let us hope that Heather likes it too, and that she never looks at it and sees what I can see: a vague resemblance to Darth Vader's helmet.

Oh, and if you're wondering what happened to the first lot of gray wool that I bought, I made Heather some wristwarmers.

If Darth Vader had been given handknitted wristwarmers he might not have turned out so evil.

Wrong number

Supernerd and I have lived in five houses together. One house we lived in had the old phone number of a dojo somewhere, so we used to get the occasional confused person trying to book in for a class or find out our opening hours. That was entertaining.

Another place we lived had a number very similar to a nearby restaurant. At odd hours of the day and night we'd get phone calls for them too.

A few weeks ago I got a call from a woman who clearly thought she'd rung someone else. When I picked up the phone and said "Hello, Alison speaking" she wasn't listening.

There was a lot of background noise on her end, it sounded like a few kids yelling at each other, so I waited. Then she put the phone to her ear.

She said "Hi, I want to order some pizzas for delivery" with the rising tone at the end that suggested she was asking a question, even though it wasn't a question.

Now sometimes, in the moments between seconds, wicked little thoughts flash through my brain. I had one of those moments.

A tiny little voice in my brain said "Oh go on, take her order."

My rational voice said "No, no! Wrong number. Tell her she's called the wrong number."

"Take her order. She'll never know."

"But it's a wrong number!"

"But don't you want to know what she wants? How many pizzas? I bet it's a lot. Sounds like she's got a few kids there."

"But I'm not the pizza shop!"

"Go on! She'll never know it was you!"

I opened my mouth as she started to give me her order and said "Hold on, I'm going to stop you there. I'm really sorry but I'm not the pizza shop. You've called the wrong number."

She said "Oh, thanks." 

I laughed and said "I mean, I can take your order if you like, but you'll probably never get your dinner."

She laughed, said thanks again and hung up.

All this left me wondering what on earth is wrong with my brain? For a fraction of a second I was seriously tempted to take this poor woman's pizza order and just leave her hanging. But if I had I just don't think I could live with the guilt of having done it. I'm not good with guilt.

Mind you, if she ever calls back when I've had a few drinks... she'll never see that pizza.

Mixed up words

I love the wonderful ways in which little kids can get their words mixed up.

For a long time Venus would say wetting instead of wedding. The words "Mummy, how many days until Libby and George's wetting?" uttered many many times leading up to the actual event, turned out to be somewhat prophetic as it poured rain for most of that day and the ceremony had to be held indoors rather than out in the garden as originally planned.

At the moment she keeps calling her dressing gown her dressing down. It makes me giggle every time.

Once we were in the fruit and vegetable section in the supermarket and she asked me whether we needed to buy georginas. It turned out she meant aubergines. We didn't.

We were on the bus tour at a wildlife safari park earlier in the year. We stopped in the enclosure where the bison live. Venus stood up in her chair, pointed at the bison and yelled "Look Mummy, hacks! Hacks Mummy, hacks!" It sounded like she was being awfully insulting, but she thought they were yaks.

Recently Ms Awesome jokingly threatened to feed my children ox tongue when they were misbehaving at her house. Venus told me later that Ms Awesome wanted to make them eat fox tongue.

But my all time favourite so far is this:

"Mummy, when are you going to do your ogres again?"

"Ogres?"

"Yes, your ogres. You haven't done your ogres for a long time."

"I don't know what you're talking about. What are my ogres?"

"Your ogres are your exercises Mummy, on the Wii."

"Do you mean yoga?"

"Oh, yes. Yoga."

Family tree

Sometimes Mars amazes me with his complete lack of consideration for others, but at other times he really impresses me with his thoughtfulness and kindness.

He brought home from school a drawing of a family tree which featured ovals labelled "Me", "Mum", "Dad", "Mum's Mum" and so on. We had a week to print some pictures of the family, glue them on and send it back to school.

But there was a problem.

As soon as Mars looked at this family tree, he noticed something. Something very important. Something was missing.

There was no space on the tree for Venus, and it really bothered him.

It bothered him so much that he insisted that we add her. So while Supernerd was downstairs painstakingly printing portraits at just the right size, I took out my black pens and went to work. 

It's a fairly dodgy effort, but I was pretty pleased with the result. I showed it to Mars, and I think he was almost as impressed with me as I was with him for insisting that his sister be added to his family tree.

I don't think every brother would do that for his little sister, but I sure am glad that Mars did.