This is by far my favourite little toy at the moment. I call him Space Monkey, but really cannot think why. I made him out of upholstery fabric samples that I salvaged from a certain ill fate at the local dump.

The phrase, I Made This, was of course part of pop culture about a decade or more ago. At the end of The X Files, after all the credits, the production company sound bite was a little girl exclaiming excitedly to the world I MADE THIS!  When I started my own graphics company in late 99, I adopted a company signature line that read “Kash Made Me” (Kash being both my name at the time and a pun on cash, and the need for cash having made me do commercial graphics work). The phrase Kash Made Me would always be hidden somewhere on the graphic, often where only I knew it to be.  But the Kash Made Me idea did not come from The X Files, but rather from centuries ago, from my all time favourite English king, King Alfred, who once had a bunch of special “pens” hand made and sent out to all his Lords. The pens were to be used for the Lords of England to sign a document to pledge their allegiance to him. On each pen was etched the words “Alfred Made Me”. It referred both the actual pen and to the fact that Alfred was making the Lords sign or else. I love all that stuff…..

Anyway, the I Made This post is part of a Meet Me At Mike’s round up of  hand made things. Go see the fun, check out the comments list for all the other I Made It posts.

2.8 metre tall chicken made from recycled materials. Materials include wood, yellow pages directory, gloves, fabric, plastic bags, coffee tins, juice cartons, coffee cup lids and cardboard packaging.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michelle3duk/

recycled yellow pages. I like it. (as I quietly eye off the use by date of our own yellow page phone book) Papier mache stuff is so much fun.

How unexpectedly compelling it is to place a portrait of The Wolf next to The Girl. It’s like a snapshot just before the climax of the story. We all know what the tension is!

I was almost going to call this post ‘Good versus Evil’ but it is no such thing. Both parties are innocent in their own world, it is just that their worlds have different rules.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fairycatcher/

I may be the last person on planet Earth who is not yet switched on to muffins.  Although I’ve been known to quaff the odd Double Choc Mocha chip or Banana Maple Pecan number, I’ve never thought ‘oh yeah…muffins’ in the same way I might think ‘oh yeah…cheesecake’ or indeed ‘oh yeah…fudge’.  I’ve always been slightly of the opinion that one should hold off on the muffins entirely until a really good cupcake comes along. There seemed to me to be no sense in settling. I feel the same way about bagels when perfectly soft and flavorsome rye rolls exist. 

But I have changed. A bit.

I’ve come across Gloria Ambrosia’s The Complete Book of Muffins; a terrific little book that modestly sets out recipe after recipe of the most extravagant and superior muffin recipes I’ve ever read. There is not a single photograph in sight, and yet this book completely grabbed my sensory imagination. I suppose that is a mark of how good the flavour choices are. I note that Gloria Ambrosia (what a great name, incidentally) is among other things a practising Buddhist, and her bent is partly focusing on the nutritional value of her recipes. Muffins and nutrition; now there’s a thought combination not often spoken of.  Even in Australia muffins are more often associated with coffee, being decadent lumps of  mostly sugar-plumped treats.

The book has soooooo many good recipes. The flours chosen are often wholegrain or non-gluten, the sugar content is mostly delivered in fruit puree or concentrate (more fibre, vitamin and lower GI than plain sugar), and the emphasis is on the wholesomely adventurous, exploring all these very lovely new super-foods commonly available here. So far I’ve tried the “Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream-cheese Muffins”, the “Easy Living Southern Pecan Muffins”, the “Double Choc Chip Muffins”, which is made with whole wheat flours Jack never suspected were there and the “Thanks to the Tropical Sun Muffins”, which features fresh mango puree and chopped papaya. Lordie! I am stunned. And I’m dying to make the Chai Tea Spice Muffins and the Carribean Sweet Potato Gingerbread Muffins and the Spanakopita Muffins and the Almond Cardamom and Fig Muffins and the….sigh.

My Roasted Red Pepper, Rosemary and Herbed Cream Cheese Muffins

Jack’s made heaps of new school buds, won an award for “being a good friend”, and he seems okay with the whole school gig. I, however, have learnt that a good teacher is a rare find, how hard it can be to keep the attention of a group of five year olds let alone teach them. 
Jack’s teacher is a wonderful woman; plain spoken, calm, decisive, warm but not effusive.  She is every bit the type of bookish and wise owl type one always hopes will teach your children. On occasion I have helped out in the class. They encourage parents to do this, perhaps to instill in us the true and correct understanding that teaching five year olds is a real art. My stints as volunteer teacher’s aide have been fraught events. Kids are great but on masse they form mini tsunamis.

Jack’s first day of big school. Which is not really big, you understand. It’s relative to the concept of Kindy/Day Care/Preschool.  John took the morning off work and came with us out to the school (a fair hike I need to remark). We were in plenty of time, there was no panic or stress.  Jack was fine. He was actually excited to go there. And I was surprised he announced it to be “awesome” in his summary comments at the end of the day. He looked very fine. Very grown up. The whole gush of emotion I had thought might come from me never came. The whole day was so relaxed and even keel one would hardly even guess that something so momentous had taken place in our family life. 

I picked him up at lunch time (a short day today, by way of introduction to the teachers and the general swing of things)

Not many people know this but “Prep” is a non-compulsory year of education. The way the government introduced it —just two years ago now— set it in the minds of most parents as a pre-requisite year. Nope. You could actually give the whole shamooz a miss if you were up for that extra year of heavy duty stay-at-home mum-drum or the alternative, heavy duty Day Care fees. Having said that not sending your child to Prep may put them at a disadvantage in year 1. And Prep is miles cheaper than Day Care fees, even at one of the city’s most expensive non-state schools.

I admit to it; the last week I have been dreading the end to Jack’s Day Care days and the beginning of his Primary School days. They call it Prep. I’ve never heard anyone call Prep anything else but ‘prep’, but it appears to be short for ‘prepartory’. The concept, hatched by our formidable education leaders, is that this is a year devoted to preparing young fertile minds for school life. It gets children out of the kindergarten phase and into a education mode…that’s the theory. So far, all I understand of prep is that Jack will be doing much the same sort of thing but in a school uniform.

So why am I dreading? Good question.

I’m so not ready.

I think it’s the uniform. I think it’s the psychological impact of driving him to school, no small jaunt, twice a day….for the rest of his school life. I think it’s me leaving one idea (Mum of boy) and moving to the next (Mum of school boy). I’m finding it hard to be brave. I want my darling baby boy to be with me. Jack, meanwhile, is crazy ready to cut a swathe through the education system.

Today was his last day of Day Care. I cooked forty cupcakes for all his mates. Oh, for the mates that are left of course. Most of his former play mates there have already moved on to prep at one the various primary schools about town today, but Jack’s school has staggered start days and Jack will be attending prep from tomorrow. And that’s another thing, all the friends he has known all these three years have all gone their separate ways now. Even though this is a small town, we are just as likely not to run into any of them ever again. Weird. All those lovely children I will no longer see.

He will thrive at school. I’m pretty confident about that. But it will change him. That’s what I dread. But that’s what he needs. Change. Growth. 

Meanwhile I make cupcakes and quietly wish I could relive the last five years with him. It’s been very real.

I suppose that things are not what they were is a sign that our culture is alive and moving. I cannot count the number of times I was spontaneously greeted with the dubious salutation of ‘happy Australia Day’. Not only were Australian flags quite commonly hoisted from makeshift flagpoles everywhere (including one neighbourhood wit who pegged his flag to his Hills Hoist clothes line, a potent Aussie icon), every third car was bedecked with fluttering flags of the blue, white and red. As it happens our car was one such car, sporting three flags. We found one of them on the roadside (having broken off a car apparently) and were given two others by a generous and patriotic  mate. He revealed that the local bottle shop was the main culprit in starting the flag to car trend; “buy a carton get a free flag for every kid in the family” and I cannot express how deeply Australian that advertising sentiment is. Riding about town with three flags fluttering was John’s idea of sensational, and my idea of a bit gauche. But there we have it. The flag car tradition starts about here.

Yesterday in church once of the hymns chosen was Advance Australia Fair, and yet another was “We Are Australian”. Hmmm.

Today we took up an invitation from the parents of one of Jack’s long-time day care friends to go for an outdoor barb-b-que brunch at a swimming hole in the bush. What we have done in years recent is to drive up to Palm Cove, a posh Northern beach mainly for tourists, were the council throws a free sausage sizzle and puts on irritatingly loud bush bands singing scratchy versions of ‘ Ryebuck Shearer’ at eight in the morning in the blazing beach heat. A chance to do something different and perhaps much quieter and shadier sounded good to me. We went down in a convoy with others (all cars fluttering with flags, of course!) to an incredibly beautiful bush area with a quiet crystal creek, a large sandy bank area overhung with lush leafed trees…..in short, absolutely Australian. No-one there. Just us. In the utter Australian-ness of it all. We had a snag barbie, boiled a billy, and I even brought freshly made damper with golden syrup. The kids yahooed through the water for hours, we sat about having tea and occasionally got into the water to wallow about. It was about the pinnacle of Australian-ness, in truth.

And to make it just that tinsy bit more Australian, one of the friends in attendance was indigenous. His wife wished us a “Happy….Uhm…Australia Day” as she applied an Aussie flag temporary tattoo to my arm. She added that it’s also Invasion Day, which is not something to be happy about. It’s a complex nation. While her Aboriginal husband was handing out the Aussie flags he’d procured at the bottle shop, she was tattooing me and reminding me that it was not a day to celebrate if you’re black. Uhm…

This is our culture in motion.