Play Time! Rice

 

Playing rice is on high rotation around these parts. It's easy, fun, and the imaginative and learning possibilities are endless.

It's basically the same idea as water play, only this gives a different sensory experience, is good in colder weather and makes great sounds when poured into or over different surfaces.

You need:


plain, uncooked rice (a cheapie bag of No Frills white rice is great to have on standby in your craft cupboard/useful box)
various cooking instruments/noisemakers - whatever you have on hand really:

mixing bowls and measuring cups
wooden spoons
funnel
containers
aluminum foil
baking paper

Let the kids explore and find their own fun with it.

Just a tip: I set this up on a picnic blanket, which makes clean-up really easy. Just fold the rice up into the blanket and tip it in the bin!

5 Spring-time Gardening Jobs

I truly find my inner peace outside in the garden, and this time of year has no shortage of jobs for me to tackle. These jobs are quite general and apply to pretty much any type of garden:

- Weeding!! 
We're having a bumper year for weeds and I've already filled our garbage bin twice over with weeds from the garden and lawn. And I've still got the front yard to go.

- Pruning.
Most of our winter flowering natives are spent now, so I've given them a really good prune, which should encourage stronger, bushier growth in spring/summer. Otherwise they can end up looking weedy and stringy and all-round ugly.

- Fertilising.
The gardens and potted plants need a good fertilise in early-mid spring (low or no phosphorous for your native gardens), water, plus a seaweed treatment to encourage good, healthy growth.

- Mulching. 
Once the gardens are fed and watered, give them a nice layer of mulch. This will help suppress the weeds, maintain water levels once the weather warms up, enrich the soil and protect against big temperature fluctuations, which can happen all through spring.

- Transplanting/Editing. 
Any plant that's underperforming in its current position could be transplanted to a more suitable spot in the garden, to see if it will rally. While any plant that looks too far gone should be taken out. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind!

In other gardening news, we've decided to put the vege garden on hold until autumn or maybe winter next year, as we've just got too many other projects to work on over spring and summer. As excited as I am about growing some of our own food, it's another nod to living a simpler life by focusing on one job at a time, rather than spreading ourselves, our time, our energy and our money too thinly.

Bonus: getting the backyard tidied up means we can put the new-to-us chook shed in place and get us some chickens soon! 

K.I.S.S: Decluttering the Computer Desktop

 

Well, this is embarrassing...

Here I lay bare my ridiculously jumbled, unorganised desktop with you, in the hopes that the shame of it will drive me to pick up my game. Simplifying life for us is an all-encompassing pursuit, and that means the hub of our digital life too - the computer.

Confession Time:


I edit photos and "save" them straight to the desktop. I have files and folders still there from my business (which has been closed for over a year now). Not to mention scores of hours of video and thousands of photos that haven't been catalogued or sorted. Ever.

And please, please, please don't mention the b-word. (Back-up). I did have it setup before the renovation, but amongst moving and having Toby and moving back in and life, I lost one of the cables and haven't ever bothered to find it again and set up the external hard drive.

This isn't going to be a quick project, but I'm putting it out there now, that by the end of the month I will have organised my desktop and put in place a system for blog images, family photos and videos, personal files and home files. Plus set-up my backup again.

Hold me to it. Please!

Happy-Making: Fathers

Sunday is Fathers Day and this week, Sparky-the-Wonder-Dad is my happy-maker. He's an amazing Dad, wonderful hubs and brilliant friend. He works so hard for us only to come home and give more of himself to make us feel special and loved. And we do.

Isla says it best: "I love you. I love you so much. I love you Daddy. We're family."

Happiness and inspiration:

- Continuing the declutter and photographing a heap of things to sell on eBay.

- Hearing Isy tell Toby that she loved him - heartswell!

- "Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is the beauty if things unconventional." via Re-Nest

Have a beautiful weekend and remember to tell any fathers/grandfathers in your life just how much you love and appreciate them. xx

Bringing the Outside In

Spring has sprung and I'm over-the-moon, crazy excited! I'm a huge fan of the warmer weather, the longer days and the lively garden this time of year brings.

I've been spending a lot of time outside, starting on the spring-time garden jobs (list coming soon) and have been snipping some of the beautiful blooms to bring inside. Such a little thing can make the biggest difference to a space and the way you feel in it.

I've got some teeny tiny white paper daisies in the front hallway, some kangaroo paws on the dining table and azaleas next to my side of the bed, and I can't tell you how happy it makes me to wake up (multiple times a night at the moment, thanks to Tobes) and see something so simple and beautiful. It's my little piece of zen amongst the chaos.