‘What’s that window doing there?’ I asked. ‘It’s not really a window,’ the brickie told me. ‘It’s more of a vent.’ I said nothing. ‘So they can get some fresh air in this bathroom,’ he clarified. ‘It’ll be frosted.’ ‘A frosted glass vent that opens and shuts is commonly called a window,’ I said in a pleasant enough voice that nonetheless contained the suggestion that he might like to go get the foreman, Paul. ‘I’ll go get Paul,’ he said. Paul the foreman, to whom I am a frequ

i carry your snot with me (i carry it in my bag) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my snotfaced dear; and whatever is blown into a tissue goes only in my bag, my darling) i fear there are no bins (for I am your bin, my sweet) I want to not litter (for beautiful this is our world, my true) and it’s i am where you have always put your snot and wherever your snot will always go is me here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is a scrunched up dirty tissue and so

I, sadly not a celestial being, had to remain here on the earth that quaked every day for eight or nine hours as the diggers ripped through the sandstone layers a metre or so from our house. I did go mad and on several occasions came close to becoming a supernova. Not in a good way. I yelled back at the small people who yelled at me and the large people who didn’t. And we all did have to yell a lot to make ourselves heard. There was a lot of bursting into tears, wailing, putt

That, of course, is when then the gods strike you down. That is when you all come down with a virus and the teacher sends home a bunch of exercise books and tells you to cover them with contact. Contact. I don’t know if it’s called that the world over. I expect the Germans have a word for it that literally translates as ‘roll of judgement by which we can tell how much you care about your children’. Contact is transparent adhesive plastic. It’s five metres of clear flattened m

In the past I have been very bad at giving Valentine’s Day gifts to H, which is a great shame because he is far more romantic than I am and deserves better. Once a couple of years ago, he was cranky because he found an old globe in the recycling. He had given me the globe some years earlier, as a Valentine’s Day present. The arm that makes the globe stand up was broken, and no, I’m not a totally heartless wench, I didn’t just chuck it straight in the bin. I let the kids kick

Proper homemade gingerbread house that I had absolutely nothing to do with. Grandmothers are where it’s at. Good New Year to you, dear people of the internet. It seems to be week three of January. I haven’t written since well before that dark and dreadful time back in December when everyone was mainlining candy canes and behaving like juvenile Hunters S. Thompson, coming up with insane demands and changing their minds about what was on their Christmas list every eighteen seco

I’m doing that thing I always do when I come back from new and wonderful, and I try to transport the lifestyle. When H and I went to Borneo by steamer sometime back in the 1800s, we came home and bought an entire pantry’s worth of ingredients to make complicated sambals and rending pastes, not to mention buying five limes for what would have bought us 100 kilograms of them in Kota Kinabalu. I’m doing the Scandinavian equivalent. I’m eating rye bread and smoked fish, putting d

Festival of Dangerous Ideas kicks off. My parents are going to heaps of things at this festival, including Alexei Sayle’s talk ‘Thatcher Made me Laugh” and ‘The Government We Deserve’ presented by Annabel Crabb and David Marr. I will be staying at home with my children, while H heads off to Perth for a few days. But that’s no reason not be challenged and wrestle with ideas. I’ve decided to run our own Festival of Dangerous Ideas, as programmed by my almost four and almost six

We are disgraceful: this was one of only two photos we have of anyone in this family doing anything even vaguely athletic, while also not being naked. The other choice was H carrying 9 pizzas, which I agree is pushing it as an illustration of a post about the Olympics. We’re all sick this week. I’m pretty sure it’s Olympic Fever. Being sick and living with your parents is basically exactly the same as being world-class athletes in the Olympic Village: we’re living away from h

Garnet searching for his socks. We’ve been on a holiday. A driving holiday, and while I’ll try to write about that soon, and tell you all about the long car trip to Melbourne and the long car trip back and all the in-between parts that involved snow, alpacas, honey prawns and a new tyre, today I can only write about socks. Because I have realised that it’s not the pram in the hall that is the enemy of creativity. It’s the fact that as designated Chief of Socks in this family,

Maybe I’ll just leave it. Last year the suggested gifts were iron and sugar, and H is still a bit grumpy about the bits of toffee that remain stuck to our ironing board. Today being our anniversary means that two days ago was my birthday. H pulled out all the stops to make it a truly wonderful day. Unfortunately, he was working against the combined forces of birthday ruination, our children, so all his good intentions were for naught. Garnet kicked the day off by getting up a

This time the kids were home so we thought we’d mix things up a bit. We assessed each item with a cool and unforgiving eye, and applied some of the rules of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This is a book that has been at the top of the NYT bestseller list for months and months. The gist of it is that you should only keep items that spark joy in you. Everything else should be jettisoned. So we looked at the things we had pulled out and stacked on the ironi

Last week Garnet turned three. He’s not a hundred per cent ok with that. The boy has a complicated relationship with the ageing process. He likes being three, but he wants to be a three-year-old baby. In all the games he and his friends play, he must play the baby. The baby pirate. The baby brother in Peter Pan. Baby Cottontail in Peter Rabbit. He’s dipping his toe into the world of superheroes with a character he has invented called – you guessed it – Superbaby. He gets stra

Tomorrow is the first of December, which means today is the perfect day for good parents to fire up Pinterest and check out some of the inspiring things other good parents are doing with advent calendars. Because you’ll realise, your children only just having come down from the sugar high of Halloween, that those Cadbury ones from the supermarket are not really good enough anymore. All over Pinterest, parents are tucking little messages of hope and goodwill into tiny handmade

Obviously this is not the beach we went to in this story. This is Waikiki beach, where I have also been grumpy in the recent past. I’m very grumpy these days. My wonderful mother suggested she could babysit while H and I went out last week, so we took her up on it, because I have this idea that maybe if I leave the house more I won’t be so crabby. The first thing I do after leaving the house for the evening is tell H I’m in a grumpy mood. Because what if he can’t tell? What’s

One morning – bloody early one morning – he asked me the following questions in the space of half an hour, which is how long it takes to boil a kettle and make coffee in our prehistoric kitchen. “Why does the goanna in Blinky Bill have stripes?” (Does he? I hadn’t noticed. I’m still trying to get my legs to work for the day.) “Do soldiers have boots?” (Yes? I think? Yes. Definitely they do. ) “Why is sugar sticky?” (So I have more reasons to try to prohibit it. Also so you ca

Garnet, who has a lot of dandelion picking to do to get back in my good books. There is a new rule in the House of Gusto: no one is allowed to eat or drink within 10 metres of our car. There is a very good, very expensive and extremely revolting reason for this. Two weeks ago we bought Garnet a new sippy cup. One week ago we went away for the long weekend and when it was time to come home, we thought we would outwit our children and wait until bedtime before leaving the farm

This morning, as I prepared the third course of May Blossom and Garnet’s breakfast, I began to think they were a bit spoiled. After they had eaten cereal, followed by fried eggs and Vegemite on toast, May Blossom asked for some leek and potato soup. My desire to be finished with the short order cooking was quashed by my rule that if a kid ever asks for vegetables you give them vegetables very quickly before they have chance to change their mind, so I warmed up the soup. The

I made the cookies using an amalgamation of recipes on the internet, which I found by googling ‘cacao almond cookies’. They all contained the following ingredients, in seemingly arbitrary quantities: Ground almonds Quinoa flour (I used flakes) Chia seeds Coconut oil Baking powder Cacao (unprocessed cocoa: I believe it is the heat-treatment that causes the a and the o to swap places) Shredded coconut Rice malt syrup Coconut sugar (can you tell who has been following a bunch of

Benny Hill is a cultural reference that is on its last legs, I’d say. I only recall it vaguely from my childhood, mostly because it featured the only bare breasts I can remember seeing on TV. And I may even have misremembered the part about Hill often having his pants down while chasing scantily clad women to the bouncy saxophone soundtrack, because I’ve just done some very scientific YouTube research, and it seems that Hill mostly stayed dressed and the girls got their kits