5 Reasons to Love Thy Neighbour

Last weekend, we had a ‘street’ gathering. One kind and very persistent neighbour organised it while another kind and very accommodating one hosted.  Everyone else brought a plate, a bottle and a child or two. 10 households were represented. It was a BIG turnout.  As I hotfooted it home afterwards (a little on the sizzled side) I reflected on how lucky we are to have such a good bunch of people, not only in our street, but also in our extended neighbourhood. Then again, it’s not so much luck as a little cultivation, common decency, politeness and some good old-fashioned friendliness. Here are 5 reasons you should love, or at least get to know, your neighbour…

1.     BORROWED FOOD – It’s not just a sugar that warrants a knock on your neighbour’s door. In addition to emergency call-outs for tomato sauce during badly planned sausage sizzles, our fence has seen the passing of curry powder, bi-carb soda, soy sauce, food colouring, dogs, children and just yesterday, some butterfly band-aids. Neighbours are much closer, more convenient and cheaper than your local grocery store, especially late at night or when your recipe is almost cooked and the obscure final ingredient is not in your pantry.

2.     TEENAGE BABYSITTERS – Finding a teenage babysitter in your street is a ten-point bonus for everyone involved. You trust this whatever-comes- after-Gen Y’er and you know their family. You also know if anything goes awry, mum and dad are a few doors down to help. Speaking of Mum and dad, they’re relieved they don’t need to drive him/her to their babysitting gig, and you’re pleased not to be driving them home when you roll in after midnight. The teenager is pleased to use someone else’s wi-fi for uninterrupted live-chat on Facebook, and the kids don’t know any different because they’re normally in bed while all this takes place. Win-win, win, win, win.

3.     SAFETY HOUSE – Remember the ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ program? People volunteered to put a sign at their letterbox to tell kids it was OK to seek help there if needed. I hope they were police screened or something, but I was a kid back then, and don’t remember that bit… Wouldn’t you rather your kids actually know the people who live around you? That way, if they ever need to seek help on the streets of suburbia, they have a range of places to choose from and people they are comfortable and familiar with too. It’s not just for the sinister stuff either. An elderly neighbour once scraped me off the road and cleaned me up after I stacked my bike spectacularly outside her house. It’s times like these your kids will appreciate a familiar face, a warm hug and a bottle of dettol. Actually probably not the dettol.

4.     GOOD FRIENDS, FUN TIMES – As a kid, some of the best fun you ever have is with your neighbours. It’s like having siblings only without the rivalry. You roam around looking for adventure after school and during school holidays. You band together for trips on the school bus or walk to and from school in a pack each day. You spend weekends in each other’s backyards and swimming pools and eating dinner at one another’s tables. You make secret hideouts and cubby houses and generally have the childhood you’re supposed to have when you can roam and socialise in your surroundings without being scared of the ‘weirdos’ you might find outside your front door. 

5.     NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH – No, not the program I mentioned earlier, just actually

Our furry friend on a not-so-furry day

watching your neighbourhood. People who know one another look out for one another. If one neighbour is away, another might pick up their mail, take out their bins, babysit their fish or feed their guinea pigs. We’ve done all of these in our time. Our lovely neighbour has bravely offered to mind our beloved furry friend for 5 days while we’re away.  It also helps to have the eyes and ears of your neighbours just in case anything suspect really does happen. In a happy neighbourhood, everyone has each other’s back and you just feel...safe.

It sounds like utopia, but like I said at the beginning – I’m lucky. It’s not hard to be a good neighbour. If you’re a nice kinda person, you shouldn’t have to try. You don’t have to live on top of each other, but you do live beside each other, so better to hold hands, eh?

As a little side note – Does anyone remember the hilarious sit-com ‘Love Thy Neighbour.’  It’s retro gold. They’d never get away with this stuff now – check it out… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_gN7zlpnz8 

5 Awesome Spring cleaning ideas

I don’t know why, but it’s universal – Spring makes you want to clean things out, shed your skin and come out of the darkness and into the light. Or something similarly metaphoric. There’s something primitive about it that I love. I’m about to get serious about my Spring-cleaning and I’m bringing out the big guns. These are my 5 big-ticket Spring cleaning recommendations:   

1.     GET YOUR LOUNGE CLEANED – My lounge is putrid.  It’s almost ten years old too, which doesn’t help, but the constant filth it’s exposed to each day is just unfair.  I thought it couldn’t get worse after the breastfeeding years, when it was covered in spew and rancid breast milk, but it’s only been downhill since then.  Enter peanut butter, vegemite and fingers sticky with jam or honey.  Add snotty noses wiped haphazardly pillows, lolly wrappers hidden by small people who weren’t supposed to eat lollies, filthy feet dancing on cushions and my very favourite, popcorn that hides where even a Dyson can’t reach.  This is my lounge at the moment.  I’m not buying a new one until the kids are 21, so instead, I have it cleaned once a year.  See details of my awesome cleaning dude below…

Watch this space...

2.     GET YOUR CARPET CLEANED – Our carpet is ten years old too.  And almost white.  We were a drunken blur of DINK-dom when we layed it.  (Remember? Dual Income, No Kids...It was a lifetime ago). I must say, it’s held up pretty well, probably because of my incessant vacuuming, but if you take all the crap the lounge gets hammered with and add juice, paint and coffee spills, you start getting a picture of what the carpet is really like. Our recent addition to the family, Ralph, hasn’t helped much.  Tiny poops and yellow puddles are the latest carpet trauma.  Luckily I have William.  He comes once a year to clean my carpet AND lounge with his magic, and is more responsible for the relative good looking-ness of my carpet than any amount of vacuuming could ever be. He has removed some killer stains, and this week I’m giving him a challenge with the one attached.  I’ll post the result after the cleaning takes place. Stay tuned.

3.     GET YOUR WINDOWS CLEANED – I haven’t done this for ages, but am well and truly ready for it.  Last time, my sister-in-law recommended her cleaner, who was not only reasonably priced and did a very fantastic job, he was also young, ripped and took his short off while he worked.  I liked that, so I called him immediately.  His father turned up.  He was little, old and a bit grey all over. I really didn’t want to see him without a shirt and thankfully I was spared. That’ll teach me for being an old cliché pervert.  Still, Pops did a great job on the windows, and although my husband tells me he’ll get the gurney on to it and save us $200, I’m planning another visit from the window-cleaning fairy.  I just hope he’s not wearing a tutu. 

4.     HAVE A BIG THROW-OUT – Choose a day when the kids aren’t home, because if you throw out the Zhu Zhu Pet burger joint and ballroom there’ll be hell to pay.  Ditto their thousand craft creations, ant farm and blow-up guitar. Start with one room and 3 garbage bags. Use one for things you'll pass on to charity, one for things you never want to see again. The last bag is for passing old crap to unsuspecting friends and relatives whose kids are the right age for your kids' battery-chewing pink barbie car, toys that take 20 minutes to set up and 1 minute to play, and annoying magic wands that play repetitive songs in Chinese. Don't stop with the kids stuff, do your husband's crap too!* They don't throw ANYTHING out. My friend's husband has 44 pairs of undies in his drawer (she counted them during an argument) and I'm sure my husband has at least 625 T-Shirts. Be ruthless and throw.

*Disclaimer - The writer will not be held liable for any argument or marriage breakdown following this suggestion. It is a suggestion only and has not yet been trialled in a proper household. 

5.     GET YOUR INSIDES CLEANED – If you don’t like gross stuff, don’t read this, it’s gross. Just as junk collects and sticks in your home, it collects and sticks in your gut too. Especially in winter. A good cleanse helps get rid of that winter sluggishness and gives you the little kick up the butt you need to spring into summer.  You may have guessed that butts are where I’m heading with this. The gross bit. But I’ll do the nice bit first. Try a green smoothie cleanse. You can do a quick little three day cleanse, or something more radical.  Check out the green smoothie website.  After that, if you dare, try a colonic.  I won’t go into it, it really is gross, but you’ll feel amazing afterwards. Fresh, clean, energetic and clear-headed. It’s the physical and mental equivalent of cleaning your rooms, your lounge, your carpets, your windows and even your garage.  If you’re in Sydney, go to Boda. They’re awesome.  

5 things I wish I could ...

I don’t like the C word.  I try not to use it and I strongly discourage my kids from using it. I’m a yes-person, a can-doer.  The C word, ‘Can’t’ just doesn’t cut it - there simply must, must be a way!  Lately though, I’m starting to choke on my C’s. I may soon have to admit there are some things that no matter how I try, I just…well, you know. Not the way I want to anyway.  Everyone has their thing. These definitely aren’t mine. 

I really, really wish I could…   

1.     COOK LIKE MY MOTHER – We recently had international guests, and in the space of a week, my mother and I each hosted them for dinner.  I did my best trying-to-entertain-mass-numbers spread; three varieties of entree, a roast beef main, green salad and baked potatoes that once again failed to cook through. The dessert from the patissiere was the dish of the night. 3 days later at mum’s, we were treated to prawn linguine, eggplant parmegiana, rolled and stuffed pork belly, 2 varieties of salad and a plate of perfectly steamed greens. We ate in silence except for snorting sounds from people whose mouths were too full to breathe, and intermittent requests for seconds. Then the homemade tiramisu came out.  Mum blows me out of the water.  She’s amazing! Cooking is totally her thing. Mum CAN.  I c…ook.  Just not like her.

2.     MEDITATE – After 40 Days of Personal Revolution (hence my hiatus from this blog) I still couldn’t manage to be still without thinking, fidgeting, wondering what to cook for dinner, listing my chores for the next two hours, scheduling the kids activities for the next two days and wondering why my boobs hang out of sports bras more than the other ladies’ at yoga. Why?  Why can’t I shut up, even when I put aside time to do so? Is it because I’m fascinating with extremely important stuff to say about all the big issues? I don’t think so.  For meditation, I c… am continuing to try.  You may hear more about it some day, unless I actually master it, because then I’ll be too zen to write a narcissistic blog like this. 

3.     HAVE SOME QUIRKY, ECLECTIC COOL – Do you sometimes go to people’s homes and think wow – awesome chair.  Cool rug.  Great picture.  Each ‘piece’ has been carefully selected, has a meaning or experience attached to it and tells a little story about its owner. There’s nothing from Freedom, Target, and definitely not K-Mart, and nothing bought as a set. They are the pieces of the quirky and eclectic owners life and have just been thrown together for a fabulous look of fabulousness. And uniqueness.  And individuality.  Some people do it with clothes too.  They just know what goes, and more specifically what says ‘this is who I am.’ I love those people. Sadly, I’m not one of them.  

4.     SAY NO – I’m getting better at this but it’s still an almost daily dilemma.  People invite me to things - a quick cuppa, a long dinner, a play at the park, a tupperware party, baby shower, bridal shower, personal shower, whatever, I’m invited, and I always feel compelled to go. Yes, yes, yes!  Yes I’ll come, even if it means leaving one place early, eating lunch in the car, making 3 phone calls at the wheel, dropping the dog off in between and turning up in my sweaty gym gear because I had no time to change. Sure, I’ll be there. The problem is I often end up double, sometimes triple booked, can’t relax at any one thing, feel overwhelmed, forget stuff and wind up buggered at the end of the day. It' a double-dilemma because not only do I have to master saying ‘no’ I also have to say the C word.  “Thank you, but no.  I can’t make it to your party.”  Copy/Paste, send.

5.     KEEP MY COOL WITH THE KIDS – Staying calm in the face of stupidity, defiance, frustration, revolt, manipulation, complete ignorance and frequent bouts of hysteria is a real challenge.  Weeks go by, and I’m patient, capable and reasonable, but sometimes I go from semi-comatose to breathing fire within a half hour of waking because sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I just CAN’T keep my cool with the kids!

Insightful endnotes…

I love saying I can. Doing and achieving is empowering. Trying and failing is enlightening. Can’t sucks. Of course you can. But it might not be perect. Or pretty.

And FYI, when I make calls at the wheel, I have a hands-free car kit.

Just so you know.

5 (quick and healthy) things your kids will love for dinner

Last week, my very funny and very lovely galpal, Bec from saynothingactcasual blogged about the tribulations of making a healthy, preservative-free dinner that everyone at the table will actually eat, night after night after night.  While reading her post I was nodding my head in agreement hell, because as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm a vegetable scoffing, wheat-free, yeast-free, sugar-free, preservative-free try-hard, whose children came out of my you know where with two food likes on their palates; refined sugar and complex carbohydrates. My arch nemeses. (Is that even a word?)  Needless to say, coming up with popular dinners in our household is an issue, but I have a few winners up my sleeve, and here they are for you.

1.     COTOLETTA – This is a fancy word that we Southern Italians use to describe crumbed veal or chicken. I don’t even know if it’s real Italian or dialect, but I don’t care, because my kids would eat it every day if I gave it to them. Basically, you lightly salt thin slices of whichever meat, dip it into a beaten egg, press it into a mixture of bread crumbs, parsley and parmesan. Shallow fry in a decent oil, drain on a paper towel and serve with cherry tomatoes that only one kid will eat, carrot pieces that the other one will, and cucumbers dowsed in tomato sauce that they’ll both suck up.

2.     ZUCCHINI OMLETTE – By far the easiest.  I think.  Three eggs, whisk, whisk, whisk.  Add milk (I use rice milk, cos we’re half dairy-free).  Grate some zucchini and add it to the mix.  Slice some tasty cheese.  Melt a little oil (coconut oil) in the pan, then pour in the mixture.  Lay the cheese on one half of the circle and turn the heat down by half.  When it looks like it’s holding together, flip the cheeseless side to make a semi-circle, and cut in half.  Voila!  Healthy dinner for two fussy punks.

3.     TACOS/BURRITOS – My kids won’t have the tomatoes, avos or lettuce on the taco or wrap, but I sneak red kidney beans, capsicum, celery and tomato into the beef mixture so I don’t care!  I absolutely won’t touch the preservative-laden store-bought taco mix, but I add spices like cumin and tumeric for the Mexicano flavour.  Beware; I once turned my neighbour’s kid into Angelina Jolie for two days after eating this, and although his mum didn’t think it was the herbs, I’ve never seen a lip swell so quickly in my life, so do test first!  Other than that, my kids – who are tiny – will eat two tacos and a burrito each, including the beans, so knock yourself out!

Crap photo of awesome blender.

4.     PUMPKIN SOUP – Some time ago, my blender broke, and I convinced myself that instead of buying an $80 replacement, I needed a $320 version that also heats things.  The upside is that all I need to do is heat some chopped onion.  In the blender.  I know.  It’s amazing.  I add the stock and the pumpkin, hit boil, and when it’s nice and soft, I hit blend.  Add a little cream, there’s dinner.  Making the toast is the hardest part! My kids like to chop their toast and mix it into the soup, then, simply by eating the massive chunks of soggy toast, the soup disappears as well.  It is, seriously, magic!

5.     VEGETABLE FRITTERS – Again, these hail from my mother’s Italian kitchen where I can’t pretend to belong, but the fritter-making skill is one I’ve picked up and has seen me through many agonising weeknight dinners. I tend to use zucchini and sweet potatoes, or corn or any veges I have in the fridge.  Mix with eggs, salt, pepper and parsley. Finely chopped shallots also go well with the corn ones.  Add flour to make a batter-ish mix. I use rice flour, because of the wheat-freeness of my home. Again, pull out a good quality cooking oil, heat it, and shallow fry these babies. Dollop big spoonfuls of the mix into the oil, and really let them cook for a while before attempting to flip them, otherwise they’ll be a great big mess.  When cooked properly they’ll be lovely light brown on both sides.  The kids will still drown them in tomato sauce, but like I always say to my husband, it’s better than a burger!

I’d love to put a picture of some of these delectable delights up, but it’s almost 10pm and I’m not hitting the kitchen at this hour.   Will post a pic next time I make one…probably tomorrow night!

5 Things You can do to Get Organised

Sometimes you need to clear the decks to clear your head. That's what I did this week. I semi-wagged work (told my boss I needed some me time...I'm a lucky chick), then spent my day getting rid of crap I haven’t worn in years, cleaning out cupboards, and mass culling the kids wardrobes. The result?  The kids no longer fight over the last pair of black leggings, I can find my scissors, egg cups and glue sticks, I’ve cut my dressing time to about 10 mins, and weirdly, I feel about 5 kilos lighter.  Here’s a few ways you can drop 5 kilos without dieting!

1.     BUY BOXES – It’s the $2 shop again. A world of boxes in all shapes, colours and sizes.  Plastic or paper, choose at will and use them to store your kids’ mementos.  The stuff you can’t bear to throw away, and think they may want to look at when they’re 21. The bookmark they made you for mother’s day, the story they wrote in barely legible first-words writing, the teeth the fairy took to build her castle and the patient name-tags from when they had their tonsils out. Box it, label it store it. See ya later crapola, you’re gone from my sight and from my coffee table!

2.     CLEAR OUR YOUR WARDROBE – I did this.  It’s fabulous.  You can see what you have and what you need. For example, I need two new pairs of boots and a pair of flatties pronto!  It’s great for clearing the headspace and saving you time.  Look at what you’ve got, and if you like it, keep it.  If you can’t see yourself wearing it again, chuck it.  If you can’t see yourself wearing it again but you really, really like it, box it!  (see above).  Or bag it, in one of those vacuum seal bags that I can’t seem to use.  

3.     CLEAR OUT YOUR KITCHEN CUPBOARDS – Oh the relief this brings!  No more bread crumbs in the cupboard where the toaster sits.  No greasy ring marks from five varieties of oil.  No drink bottles without lids, cups without saucers, or muffin tins that will never release their contents.  Candles, lighters, toothpicks, bubble mixture, straws, label writing machines, the labels that go with them, thumb tacks, blue tack and the fuzzy little stickers that go on the bottom of your bar stools – you finally know where they are! YAY!

4.     PAY BILLS & MAKE CALLS – Sooooo tedious. Soooo time consuming.  But it has to be done.  Set aside 2-3 hours.  Get your pile of paperwork, your computer and your phone.  Pay what you can online, call whoever you have to, sit on hold and deal with it.  Activate your bloody new FlyBuys card, change your healthcare provider, send the enrolment forms to 5 high schools your kids won't go to, and get the childcare rebate you didn't know you could claim. Stamp them all at once and file them, finished, done, finito!

5.     GET A NOTICE BOARD – I forgot something this week. Two things actually.  Really, monumental, embarrassing things I should never have forgotten.  I have a smartphone calendar with little alarms to remind me about stuff, and yet I still forget because I have SO MUCH stuff to remember.  And because I never know the date, just the day. The easiest way for me to remember stuff is for it to be smack-bang in front of my face.  I use a whiteboard marker on my kitchen splashback to make notes to self, and as I spend so much time in the kitchen, whatever is on that wall is in my head.  Obviously making food for the lady with newborn twins didn’t make it on to the wall. Neither did the two catch up swimming lessons.  They were on the high tech email/phone which system I ignored because I didn’t know what date it was!