Some days you just have to dance it out

Some days after school are easy. 

Everyone piles in the front door, bags are unpacked, food is devoured & homework is finished. Then more food is devoured before they all scatter off to fill the time void between snack two & dinner time. Minimal bickering & maximum amusement. Will & Blake scamper off outside to ride their bikes or jump around like lunatics all over the back yard. Ben, Rianan & Jack pull out the UNO cards & see how many rounds they can each win before it's discovered that Rianan has been cheating by sliding a few extra cards under the couch so she can declare "uno!" first.

Other days are not so easy. 

When everyone pushes their way through the front door like a herd of stampeding elephants, bags are dumped in bedroom doorways or along the hallway. The kitchen is filled with too many kids all vying to find the best after school snack, then stomping away when there is only the usual's on offer still. When getting their homework started, let alone finished is harder than trying to devour a bar of chocolate undetected in this house filled with minions. What would normally take ten minutes to complete, will instead span over an hour painfully filled with moans, complaints, messy & spaced out writing or staring at the same pages in the same chapter of their book. And that is just the older three.

Then there's Blake, Will & Clay, who will spend their time either a) running, screaming, jumping their way through the house until someone gets knocked over & trampled on the unforgiving floor tiles. Proceeding to burst my ear drums with their screams, before turning to retaliate against whoever they think is guilty of sending them sprawling to the floor.

Or b) Blake & Will spend the next hour or so annoying each other until I can't stand it any longer. While Blake & Will have me distracted with their arguing, Clay will quietly walk through each bedroom, opening drawers & pulling out every shred of nicely folded clothes he can reach. 

Before I know it, 5pm has ticked over, dinner isn't even thought of yet let alone cooking away. The house looks like an abandoned clothes warehouse after a cyclone has torn through & we've all given up on any legitimate attempt on the homework front. Forget about baths, at this stage the kids will be lucky to get anything more than spaghetti on toast before being shipped off to bed at my soonest possible convenience...after tidying from the storm that wiped me out flat.

Half an hour into yesterday's after school gauntlet & I could see the sides beginning to crumble. While the bags were put away, empty stomachs were filled & homework was done (because there was hardly any required) the disagreements & arguments were starting to come thick & fast. Add in several emails & phone calls that demanded my attention & could not wait, meant that everything going on out of my little bubble had to wait. By the time I put the phone down & decided the rest could be done after the crazy had passed, there were shoes everywhere, clean & dirty clothes littered the house mimicking behind the scenes of a fashion runway show, Clay was cranky, Ben, Jack & Blake were filthy from the waist down after playing soccer together & a lone empty fry pan was still waiting on the cold stove top.

I issued orders like a drill sergeant - "pick up those shoes"

"dirty clothes in the laundry now"

"put the clean clothes on the couch with the rest of the washing"

"bags in rooms"
"balls outside!"
The minions responded like a class of hyped four year old's coming down from an intense sugar rush.   

There was only one way to rescue what was shaping up to be an evening from hell & the breaker to demolish the last whispers of sanity that were stopping me from going all exorcist mummy.

Ignore the time & turn the music up.

You can't hear the petty little arguments, whinging & dobbing if they are drowned out with only the best playlist selections from the iPod on a volume level just bordering too loud.

It was the best decision made all day. It didn't take long before the boys turned the Xbox off, Rianan came out of her room (after escaping in there for some peace & quiet) & the younger three channeled their destructive energy into dancing like maniacs. While I was chopping up chicken, dancing & singing my heart out to Clay who had joined me in the kitchen, the other five had set up the coloring in gear on the table & were all happily getting along, talking, encouraging & laughing together, with the occasion dance off thrown in for good laughs.

Before we were even a quarter of the way through the playlist, dinner was cooked & the table was swiftly cleared & then set, on my first request, ready for the plates & bowls to be distributed. Knock knock jokes were told & the best things about our days were shared as we slowly finished eating. The tension & frustration that was flooding us all not forty minutes earlier had completely evaporated. Baths & showers were done, with the older minions doing a quick but thorough {enough} tidy around the house while the younger three were bathed & prepared for bed, not that much later than their usual bedtime either.

By the end of the night everyone went to bed in a good mood & I didn't feel like crap for spending the last three hours nagging & yelling while serving up a less than substantial dinner. I'm fairly certain that I'm not alone when I say I would much rather listen to the likes of Paramore, The Smiths, Ed Sheeran & Pink {to name a few}, than give myself a headache & everyone else immunity towards the nagging tones in my voice, topping off with foul moods all round.  

Next time our evening - or morning, is beginning to morph into a train wreck I'm going straight to that magic button, play.

The best chocolate chip cookies EVAH!

We all know I love me some chocolate chip cookies. Over the years I have tried & tested all the cookie recipes - brown sugar or white sugar, eggs or no eggs, condensed milk or no condensed milk. 

Countless hours in the kitchen & I have the recipe down to perfection.

Out of the oven they are super fudgey. I recommend taste tasting the cookie dough prior to cooking - roughly every seven balls rolled & placed on the tray for optimal quality control.

The Best Evah Chocolate Chip Cookies

175 grams Unsalted butter, softened

3/4 tin Condensed milk

1 teaspoon Baking powder

1/4 cup Caster sugar

2 cups Plain flour

250 grams (or so...) Chocolate chips (white, milk chocolate or dark - or all three)

Preheat oven at 170 celcius & line two baking trays with baking paper.

Cream the butter & sugar together in a large mixing bowl. With an electric mixer, beat in the condensed milk (feel free to be quite liberal here, often I put in nearly all of the condensed milk. The more the merrier) Beat for two minutes.

Sift in the plain flour & baking powder together, gently stir with a spoon until just combined. Add the chocolate chips & combine.

Place teaspoonful balls on the baking trays 2cm apart. Once all the cookie balls are on the trays gently roll each one between your palms, then flatten slightly.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until lightly golden.

Remove from oven, cool for two minutes.

Eat.

Makes approximately 44 cookies {depending on how much of the dough you ingest for quality control & the size of your cookies}

Days Three, Four & Five

Monday

 The older three minions spent most of the day out playing with other 

kids on our street - soccer balls, footballs, bikes 

& roller blades littered many front yards.

Waiting patiently for everyone...anyone to come back & play. 

Fishy got a new home, a big improvement from the over sized vase he was calling home. 

New playlists were created for the kids (With no references to bakery foods or snakes).

This has pretty much gone out the window.

Tuesday

Ben & Rianan spent Tuesday at their friend's houses.

 With only four minions to fill the car, despite the wind & threatening gray skies, 

playgrounds were in & lunch was take-out.

 Home just in time.

                                     

So we spent the afternoon playing with these...

 & on these.

Wednesday

These handsome little men kept me company while the older three played.

Do you know how many out takes of this photo were taken? 

...& this was the best one. 

No wonder we have so very few photos of all six minions that make the cut. 

It's hard enough getting it right with just three.

Ben & Z are the brains behind this entertainment.

Fuel.

In preparation for their upcoming 'show' all neighbourhood bikes were washed.

& cars, for cash of course.

Not to be left out, little bikes were washed...

While the littlest of them all watched.

Not a lot of sleeping was happening today for this little guy. 

I don't know whether it's teeth (we have new chompers emerging up the top.) 

Or the constant activity with kids coming in & out the front door,

yelling down the hall way or kicking soccer balls 

& riding bikes out the front. 

They topped the day off with drawing & coloring in while talking about what makes them angry (Top of the list, unanimously, one yelling at another).

In no particular order...

Even though it's not yet 'officially' the school holidays, I felt my next post still needed to be a photo-mentary - especially following on from the last post warning you all of the visual overload that was imminent. 

I wasn't quite prepared with having the camera handy all the time, especially for some of the 'busier' moments, so a few parts of our weekend are left out. I'm considering this weekend that leads into the school holidays a trial run. 

I present to you our last 48 hours... 

Sneaky banana thief forgot to remove the evidence.

Big brothers = 24/7 entertainment.

Love.

 3:45pm Friday afternoon - The first coffee of the (unofficial) school holidays.

The aftermath of Rianan's indoor hopscotch.

Torture objects. 

Lunch

 minus two who had already abandoned the table. 

(& unfolded washing)

Sunday morning.

Saturday night.

Will aka Mr Threenager

It doesn't fly, but that's probably a good thing.

fourteen day do over

Our last school holidays kinda sucked. Back then, when we were all stuck inside the house with no fresh air or fresh company, I blogged that the next school holidays would be here soon enough, when the sun would be shining, no one will be sick & we could make the most of getting our feet in the grass & the sun on our faces.

It has been ten weeks since that statement, & you know what that means - the next round of school holidays are upon us. Yay. No, seriously, that is a very enthusiastic "Yay" - complete with happy smiles & invisible pom poms.

I've written lists of everything I want to squeeze in during the next fourteen days. Friends to catch up with (visits that are long overdue), beaches to visit, forests to explore, bike rides to go on, trips to our local oval to kick around the soccer ball - because five onto one is completely fair & ridiculously fun. We have recipes to follow, board games to play, movie days (or afternoons) where we get to stuff our faces with popcorn. Museums to revisit, city gardens to explore, playgrounds to climb, picnics to eat, friends to sleep over & water balloon fights to have.

And you're coming along with us.

Well not really, I don't have enough room in my car to take you all. But you can come along through my camera.  I have my photographer hat at the ready, my bucket is filled with motivation & inspiration, my shutter button happy fingers ready for capturing snapshots & memories. I'll be sharing them here, a visual narration of our ventures. 

Hold onto your hats, we're going to be busy.  

Cookbook junkie I may be, Foodie I am not.

I have a confession.

I am enamored with cookbooks & the anticipation of cooking. I would love to say I am a Foodie, passionate about passion fruit, organic quinoa, farmer fresh vegetables, grass fed beef & free range chickens. Loading photo after photo on social media sites of home cooked meals made from scratch (not a jar or sachet in sight. Boasting hand made passatta & home ground almond meal) that would leave Maggie Beer in awe. But that would not be true or accurate. I love the thought of lavishly presenting our family with a feast of dishes every evening, reminiscent of any rustic Jamie Oliver three course spread. I even have three Jamie Oliver cookbooks in my collection of paperback heaven to help me fulfill this dream. But my lofty ideals fall short more often that not. I can cook, I can cook well. I just can't reach the state of perfection & full-bellied nirvana I fantasise of. While Foodie I am not, family chef I am.

The only prerequisite any cookbook that fills my shelves must meet is the recipes cannot exceed more than half a dozen steps & all ingredients can be sourced at any major grocery store. I don't have time to spend mincing prawns, combining with spices (that can only be found in a small specialized delicatessen that does not bode well for a time restrained mum with at least three little minions in tow who would love nothing more than to touch everything in the lovingly presented displays & shelves filled with exotic food stuffs.) Then spooning the delectable but fiddly prawn mix onto wanton wrappers, before they dry out & stick to my fingers making wrapping them up a task in advanced origami. Then to steam, no more than two at a time, in a bamboo steamer. Not to forget there is still two side dishes to slave through yet. At this stage in our lives we need not so much five star gourmet, but five step gourmet. 'Good food fast', 'Midweek Mains', 'Fast, fresh, simple', '30 minute meals' are just some of the tittles that match our current culinary conditions.

Cookbooks are the only books I still buy in non-digital form. It's well known that I am an avid reader, staying up until the late hours reading e-book after fictional e-book. But when it comes to recipes & food inspiration it must be on a glossy page, not a touch screen. Plus, trying to wake up the tablet touch screen with food covered hands is always an inconvenience. It's so much easier to glance at an oil splattered, flour doused, well loved cookbook. 

Every week on a Monday night I sit down with a small hoard of cookbooks & magazines to plan our dinners for the week. Don't get too carried away, I only pick two or three meals from the taste bud taunting pages, the remaining four dinners are assigned from frequent rotation meals I can cook with my eyes closed (or on the minions) & my arms occupied with a six month old baby. Lasagne's, Stir-fry's, Roasts, Pasta dishes, Meat & Veg.

With the meals decided, the shopping list written out, & the shopping ordered, my motivation & inspiration levels are high, amped up from perusing pages of delicious, mouth watering dishes. Then the lead up to dinner time arrives, coinciding with the disappearance of my motivation & time. Instead of the dukkah crusted chicken breast served on a bed of wilted greens & char-grilled vegetables I was dreaming of the earlier, plates are served up with grilled chicken breast sans dukkah. The vegetables are not so much char grilled, but steamed. & the wilted greens, they are wilted...by the end of the week at the back of the fridge, unless I remember they are there & throw them in a stir fry.

Serving up our meals on rustic wooden chopping boards or large funky hand painted platters goes out the window (the idea, not the food). Serving up from gorgeous fancy tableware only results in mine & Doug's food going cold as we spend ten minutes dishing up for the minions. Requests for more of this, less of that & none of those coming from every chair. Or if we let them serve their own dinner they are more successful in turning the table into a scene not unlike a Pro Heart inspired commercial, with less food on their plates & more food on the table. If I needed any more reasons that center piece dishes served up in the middle of our table is just not a good idea right now, the fact that every meal see's our dishwasher loaded to capacity is just another strike against banquet style platters. The less I have to wash by hand the better. So for now, while the kids are young, the serving platters remain in the cupboards & dinner is dished straight from stove top to plate to table. Fast. Simple. 

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking, I enjoy baking. There is a huge sense of satisfaction obtained from the kids claiming "These are the best cookies ever Mum!" or the feeling of fulfillment when every morsel is devoured. But at the moment, often it feels like more of a chore, lacking the sense of comfort & joy I used to get. At the end of the day with the clock ticking down, I just want to get in the kitchen, get dinner cooked & serve a meal that is nutritious, tasty & pleasant to seven individual taste buds. This goes for snacks too. Every week I plan to bake cookies & muffins, but every morning sees that planned baking time eaten up with something else that is not baking, & often not important. I've been waiting for the motivation to come back, but it needs a little nudge along.

In the event of procrastination, take action. Tomorrow, I bake! 

Everything, nothing & a birthday

I've been struggling to write this week. Two posts were started, kinda got halfway, then shoved back to the drafts folder. Just not flowin'.

I was rambling on about food, I'm not going to go into details because it may re-appear one day. So it remains relegated to the background, it seems I'm always waffling (ha, see what I did there? Boom tish.) on about food here. I figure you're all probably thinking "Yeah, we get it already." 

Then there was some thoughts about body image, largely because there is so much of it on the net at the moment, particularly around the comments from one stupid arsed male. Doubt his personal training business is going to take off any time soon. Everyone else already has it covered, so much better than I ever could articulate via keyboard. Plus I'm not a mainstream popular blogger, so it felt as if I was just echoing their sentiments. We'll just leave it as he is a douche & all mother's are beautiful exactly as they are, five minutes after giving birth or five years. Rounding up on a quote from Milena Katz "It would be better to concentrate on self worth. What you are like as a mother is more important than how you look in a size 10 top." 

Inspiration crept up when I was thinking back & comparing how I felt being a first time mum (like a fish out of water) to this time round being a sixth time mum. How I took on the words & advice of 'experts' from parenting magazines (& supermarket aisles, baby books & child & youth health nurses at the local community center) as Gospel & near drove myself cuckoo. But I wasn't entirely sure what point I was trying to make, or if I was just letting my own past insecurities out of the closet. For now that closet door can stay shut on that post.

So that was my week of introspection that ran around in what head space was available & not absorbed with other generic minion raising thoughts. Beyond that our life has been normal - full of food, noise, social lives & washing.

In exciting news, Will turned three. 

This happy, vivacious, adorable, cheeky, milo-moustached minion has graduated from the terrible two's & is now stretching his wings in the terrifying three's. Or terrific three's, depending on his erratic three year old moods & whether he's allowed another bowl of yogurt or not.

This little guy is so happy he walks around with a grin on his face 98% of the time. He makes my teeth hurt with his sweetness & my heart burst with love, wonder & pride. We created this awesome little guy, helped him grow from a squishy faced little newborn to a trike riding, slippery dipping, running, jumping, climbing, car br'mming little boy. No longer a baby, now a fully fledged little boy.

Where did the time go. 

Sob.






** Yes, there is only two candles on Will's third birthday cake. No excuse other than not only do we get confused with their names, but also the candles required on their cakes. Another perk of being in a large family - the parents don't even know how to count candles let alone kids.

Life with six

For a while I've been playing around with a post detailing what it's like having a large family, beyond having at least double the little bodies to tuck into bed at night. Really, whether you have two children or six children we all have the same daily tortures - tantrums & food battles. Mother guilt & toilet training. Identity crisis & nap time warfare. Rescuing octonaut figurines from the toilet & saving books from turning into shreds. Maintaining a facade of alertness & lucidity in the face of three hours broken sleep. Juggling one on one time between each child, date nights with our other halves & finding conversation that doesn't solely revolve around the little people.

So what is different now compared to when we just had Ben & Rianan? What does (our) life entail with six children?

The obvious one is our food budget. Over the years as we've doubled the size of our family so has our grocery bill. The only thing that's remained constant is the packets of nappies in every over full & precariously stacked trolley I take through the check out. If I knew then what I know now I would have bought shares in Huggies back in 2004. Or used MCN's - aka cloth nappies. I have a dozen excuses why we have used a disposable nappy for every three hourly nappy change over the last 85,440 hours...or nine & a half years. MCN's really only became more user friendly around the time Jack was born, & back then we had figured he would be our last baby (because 'everyone' stops at two or three children we thought there must be a universal reason why & that it would also apply to us. Approaching Jack's first birthday we knew that we definitely wanted another child & realised there was no reason not to add to our minion count.) Back to the topic at hand though. Figuring Jack would be our last there wasn't much point in selling my left kidney to fund an MCN stash for just one child. Then Blake came along. At this point I seriously considered abandoning the nappy aisle at Coles & going the environmentally friendly way. But with four children aged four years & under time was a little scant & our little washing machine was already spinning at a 1000rpm 16 hours a day. So for my sanity & our poor washing machines last legs (that managed to hold on for a further 18 months. We've never had a more faithful washer, 8 years & 5 children later she finally gave up. Bless her 5kg white cotton socks) So lack of time & a surplus of washing dictated we continue our regular walks down aisle eleven. 

Clearly my attempts at appearing alert & lucid are falling a little short today, I've gone from talking about food budgets to justifying (to myself more than anyone, even after all these years) why we have used a hoard of disposable nappies instead of doing our bit to neutralize our carbon footprint & go the alternative way. 

Back to food. Our quota of bread & milk has reached ten loaves of bread & often eighteen litres of milk a week. Forget the 275gm boxes of cereal, which barely stretches between five bowls on a good morning. I reach for the 800gm suckers - half a dozen of them at a minimum. We've dedicated an entire pantry shelf just to house our weekly breakfast cereal requirements & even then I have to employ my tetris skills to get them all on the same shelf. You will never find a single box of cracker & cheddar dip LeSnacks in our house - you'll find several. Even then they rarely see the school week out. Our weekly fruit quota is equal to the combined weight of our six minions. By now you've probably gathered that we buy double or triple of everything. Extend that line of thinking a little further & we come to cooking. Dinnertime is not unlike a catering event. A 30cm fry pan & two 4lt saucepans are barely adequate when cooking a basic meal in our house. At this stage we can manage, but give it a few more years & I will be sourcing catering sized cooking equipment to try & keep up with the nutritional needs of several growing pre-teen bodies. I don't know what we're going to do yet when they are teenagers, devouring & digesting more food than a herd of elephants.

Bath & shower time is reminiscent to running a gauntlet on a Japanese game show. Dodge the sweaty, putrid socks discarded haphazardly around the bathroom, narrowly avoiding the dirty & stinky undies as they are thrown in the air with gleeful abandon, while launching forward to catch the two year old as they attempt to bomb dive into the bathtub. Only to be foiled by the tube of toothpaste on the floor & end arse up in soggy towels. This is only round one, there's still more bodies to reach a state of cleanliness yet. Then the real fun begins, cleaning up the bathroom & revealing the floor tiles once again beneath all the water logged clothes, soaked towels & soap bubbles.

The amount of washing our crazy tribe creates these days is more than enough to keep me struggling to maintain a hold on the cotton-poly blends that procreate by the hour. Not unlike us - so we've been told. Our washing machine works harder than I do, often churning through four loads on a good day, or ten loads on a bad day. The amount of dishes we go through isn't much better either. I thank my lucky stars for our dishwasher everyday - because it wasn't all that long ago I was still doing them all by hand. The dishwasher job I had in my early teenage years at our local popular restaurant gave me a valuable skill set that I never dreamed I would be needing again once my dish-lackey days were over. Back then I also never imagined I would be a Mother to six.

Between our minions they have enough shoes to rival a Betts & Betts shoe store. A couple of those shoes may be a little lonesome, with their other half swallowed up somewhere. Probably where all our socks & teaspoons have ventured off to. There's often little point of packing away clothes that have been outgrown, instead they simply get shipped from one wardrobe to the next. If I can't find a specific shirt of Blake's in his drawers inevitably it will be found in Will's - sometimes even I can't keep up with what item belongs to who. I think it's only a matter of time before we're entertaining thoughts of a communal wardrobe for the boys. Maybe not, that's a little to extreme larger family style for my liking.

Always a hot topic when it comes to families greater than five, cars. Clearly the average family sedan is too small. Heck, even the people mover we drive at the moment is still too small. My automobile dreams are not filled with Dodge's & Jeep's, but mini buses that don't look like a childcare or community bus. Given that's the next step up for us after the people mover category to have any spare seats available.

Twelve seats, ten child restraint anchor points, tri zone air conditioning & enough boot space to rival any wagon, plus all the bells & whistles included in any luxury vehicle, on top of tinted windows & any paint job that isn't white. Oh, & doesn't come with a Mercedes Benz price tag. Surely I'm not asking for much.

Family movie nights with bodies strewn haphazardly around the lounge room, with piles of pillows, blankets, teddies & little people taking every available space. Weekend family soccer or cricket games with enough people to make teams bigger than two on two. Knock knock jokes at tea time coming from all sides of the dinner table - some making sense & others just adorable as they make no sense at all, but have us all giggling regardless. Every Mothers Day & Fathers Day see's our bedside tables covered in drawings of round bodied, stick legged families, love hearts & smiley faces & homemade card upon homemade card filled with misspelt words, back to front letters & being their favorite Mummy & Daddy in the whole entire universe.

My heart feels like it has grown bigger than a full term pregnant uterus. Each time both my heart & my belly expanded beyond belief with every tiny body we have bought into this world & each time I never imagined I could love any more than I already did, or fall deeper in love with Doug as I watched him hold his new son or daughter. I figured after three children it would all feel the same, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

We may be busy, whether we're busier than others I honestly couldn't say. Regardless, in no way does it compare to the happiness, pride, love & memories our family is filled with. Every now & again Doug & I will say to each other "Can you imagine if we stopped after Ben & Rianan, or after Jack. Not having Blake, Will & Clay in our family." 

I can't imagine it, I honestly just can't. Impossible. Unfathomable. Unthinkable. Inconceivable to think they may not have been conceived. Life truly would be so different if they weren't here. Which has me thinking, who else are we missing in our family? What will the future look like if we call our family complete now, or what would it look like with another not yet conceived little soul. Can we imagine our lives without them, even though we don't know 'who' they could be? 

Seeing five toothbrushes lined up on the kids bathroom sink this morning made me a little mushy & indescribably grateful for each & every one of our little minions. Imagining seven toothbrushes all lined up made me a little clucky & has Doug genuinely questioning my sanity. 

Not that this would surprise anyone. The cluckiness that is, not the sanity.