Our favourite homemade bread

We made the switch to homemade bread about a year ago. That decision was based partly on not wanting to buy store bread because of all the preservatives and other additives in them (we thought Jacob might have been reacting badly to something in store bought bread) and partly because homemade bread is so yummy! We are very lucky that Chris really enjoys making and cooking bread. He's experimented with lots of different breads so far so thought I'd share some pics of some of our favourites:

Sourdough loaf (this is our standard old favourite!)


Rye bread


Marbled rye bread


Tiger loaf


Foccacia with herb oil


Raspberry and cream cheese braid (a sweet bread!)


65% hydration sourdough pizza (Chris' own recipe)


I'm so lucky to have a husband who is such a wonderful cook (among other things!) I will be posting Chris' instructions for making a sourdough starter to make your own bread in a few days too if anyone is interested.

Fun with shaving cream!

It’s amazing how such simple things can amuse kids for hours! I often find that the toys we have in this house get played with for all of about 5 minutes before being put aside in preference for some other activity like unloading the dishwasher or hanging out the washing or something else that ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ are doing. This is why we don’t like to have many toys (that and the fact that we just don’t have room in this house for lots of toys!) Luckily, the kids love being outside and can spend ages out there playing.

The other day I decided to pull out the shaving cream and some muffin trays, spoons and utensils for the kids to play with. Shaving cream is a great tactile activity for kids and something we used to use for the kids with special needs I taught. I didn’t do it this time but you can even add some food colouring into the shaving cream so kids can experiment with making different colours. The kids had a ball and spent ages playing happily together (something that rarely happens with these two kids!) Esme’s reaction was a bit funny when she touched the shaving cream, I don’t think she really liked the feel so I ended up getting a bucket of water out for her to play in.

We love our puddlewear too! It’s great for this kind of messy stuff and for getting outside in the wet weather.

Esme ‘feels’ the shaving cream:

Jacob making muffins:

Playing happily together:

Water play is so much fun:

We made it into the papers!

Well, the local papers that is ;) Our meeting with our local MP, Jason Wood and attendance at the homebirth rally made it into our local news.

Here we are in the Ferntree Gully, Belgrave Mail and Ranges Trader Mail (minus photo that is actually in the paper!) I'm not quite sure where the journalist got the bit about having a 'midwife birth in hospital with a raft of guidelines' but she got the general gist of what I was saying!

And again in the Berwick and District Journal (with photo ;) )

It was lovely to see so many articles about the homebirth rally in local papers around the country too, we're really getting the message out there!!

My first attempt at cloth pads

There's so many reasons to convert to cloth pads...It's cheaper, it's better for the environment, they're more comfy...the list goes on!

I have been meaning to get around to making some cloth pads for myself for quite awhile. I actually bought all the material at least a month ago and it has sat around since then! I finally took the plunge on the weekend and got around to making some. I was quite impressed with how easy and quick they are to make!

I used the patterns and vaguely followed the instructions on this site for the panty liner and 11inch pad. Both of them turned out really well. The panty liner is made from two layers of flannelette and two layers of hemp. I changed the instructions a bit and inside of making the two parts separate I made them all together and top stitched around the outside. The pad is made with two layers of flannelette, two layers of bamboo and a layer of PUL.

Panty liner on left and 11 pad on right:

Folded up and ready to use:

I still have to make a few more but I’m looking forward to going cloth instead of using more plastic and putting it in landfill!

In the future I would also like to try the menstrual cup but I'm still working my way through the huge stash of tampons I purchased before I got pregnant :(

Homebirth rally in Canberra

It seems I've become quite the activist lately! For someone who's not very politically minded this is a break through!! It's all to do with the government's plan to make sure that registered midwives have public indemnity insurance. All good in theory but midwives who attend homebirths can not get public indemnity insurance which effectively means that once the new legislation is passed they will be practising illegally and will face a $30,000 fine or a jail term. Ridiculous, isn't it? It's not only taking away the rights of woman who homebirth and those that support them but it's taking away the rights of all women - we're going back to the dark ages when women had no rights! Because the homebirth community is a minority (approx 700 people a year in Australia homebirth) apparently we don't matter. The thing that really irks me is that a woman can still choose to have a c-section and have a highly interventionist birth that cost the tax-payer thousands of dollars, uses up resources in hospitals and no one even blinks an eye at that. In comparision, a homebirth costs relatively little and has been shown to have the best outcomes for mother and baby (when attended by a registered health professional) It was quite ironic that 3 days before this rally, Nicola Roxon decided to make an announcement that there would be a 'reprieve' on this legislation and it wouldn't come into effect until 2012 now. That decision doesn't really mean a lot and seems like a rather cowardly response. It just means our fight will be much more prolonged!!

Anyway, a huge rally was organised in front of Parliament house in Canberra on the 7th of September which I attended. It was an absolutely awesome day and it was such an inspiration to be surrounded by such strong women. I think there ended up being about 3000 people who attended and we came from all over the country. Izzy and I (and Esme ;) ) flew up to Canberra on Sunday night and stayed with Melanie and her daughter Rebecca at the hotel. We headed off to the rally in the morning to meet with our local MP, Jason Wood (member for Latrobe). It was great to chat to Jason about our concerns and so wonderful to find him supportive of our cause. I felt like he genuinely cared about our cause, he was interested in what we had to say and asked lots of questions. Turns out we were even the focus of his speech in parliament the next day! We're hoping to make it into the local newspapers too as Jason's office was going to do a press release.

The actual rally was awesome. We started off the rally at the Aboriginal tent embassy to receive an official welcome from the original land owners and then walked as a group up to the lawns in front of parliament house where the formal part of the rally began. So many people and so lovely to see so many pregnant bellies (you included, Izzy ;) ) and kids and babies. We had Tracy Bartram as MC who was great, she has also homebirthed and breastfed her son until he was 3.5 years old. We heard from various politicians (some good and some not so good ;) ) and Sarah Buckley. The official part was finished off by some songs about homebirth that people had written. 'Song to Nicola Roxon' was a huge hit lol. If I find a link to the 'official proceedings' I will add that in later. There were media there during the rally but disappointing to see that we didn't get much of a mention on the news. We watched channel 10 at the airport and there was absolutely nothing on there about the rally!!

The rally went for a couple of hours all up. Once it was over we headed off to find some lunch and thaw out in Melanie's car. I can't say the weather was ideal for this sort of thing (it poured with rain on and off throughout the rally) but it didn't put a dampener on the spirit of anyone attending the rally!

We will continue to fight for homebirth on our terms!!!

Photos to come...

Father's Day

We had a pretty uneventful Father’s Day this year. Chris wanted to stay at home (we’ve been so busy lately!), so stay at home we did! I thought I’d try something different this year for Chris’ present. I’ve been experimenting with applique lately so thought I’d get the kids to do some footprints and handprints and applique them onto a t-shirt. I was a bit worried about how it would all turn out, especially as I was doing it at the last minute (Chris was banished to the room upstairs while I worked on it last night ;) ) but I think it turned out well in the end!

Here’s some pics of the t-shirt (including close ups!)

And some of Daddy with his little boy ;)

ABA calendar

I've just found out that our tandem feeding photo, taken by our photographer Vicky Leon, has made it into the 2010 ABA calendar. It came as a bit of a surprise! Vicky had emailed a while ago to say our photo was being considered for the calendar but I hadn't heard anything more. I looked at the calendar the other day and was excited to see that the photo was in there! We're the month of February ;) The only thing I don't like about the photo is that you can't see my face but I think I had my head down to concentrate on keeping them both attached. It's tricky stuff this tandem feeding business ;)

Here's a link to the ABA calendar with the photo in it

And here's the actual photo:


And another tandem feeding photo (just 'cause I like it!):