Jikana Damaru: 03/31/11

How would you label me?

We all have our ways of avoiding housework, right?

This afternoon, after I popped the kids into bed for a catnap I begrudgingly surveyed the state of the house. It wasn't pretty. Put it this way; I think they were wrong when the said the earthquake didn't hit Australian shores... I'm sure there is a faultline right underneath my home....

I should have cleaned up. Done some washing. Hung clothes out on the line. Vacuumed. Washed the food off the floor. Tidied up my sewing debris.

Instead?

I did this:

When the going gets tough........ the tough make labels!

And even though the kids are now awake and screaming and my house is no closer to being clean and tidy than it was 2 hours ago, I am standing in front of my larder (it's no longer classified as a pantry, it is waaaay too romantic now for that!) and sighing with pleasure. My matching round containers lined up all symmetrically along their white shelf, their contents beaming behind their opening credits.

What a wonderful day.

And now? I might as well tuck into a few of these dipped in a mug of hot chocolate. Why not? I've earned it.

If this post has you sighing in envy (go on, admit I am not the only complete dag in blogworld), sigh not! These labels can be betrothing YOUR containers this very day. Download your FREE template here and print n stick away to your hearts content! Oh, and those containers are on sale in Coles for $2 a pop this week. You can thank me later ;)

Have a lovely lovely weekend. x

Ella's Kitchen Company

Kids Cabinet

I was delighted to meet Katerina Saunders of Ella's Kitchen Company at the Country Living Spring Show, having coveted her beautiful kitchen storage for years. I envision owning the pale blue 12 scoop and spice Norwegian Cabinet like the one featured in Living Etc one day when I have a large kitchen with a dedicated baking area! I would fill the scoops with my flours and sugars and fill the little pots with my baking sundries. I love the colours they come in and the vintage charm to them.

Katherina started the company in 2004, drawing on her Norwegian heritage. The original Kitchen cabinet was left to her by her Norwegian grandmother, Ella, and she has fond memories of seeing and using it since her childhood in her home in Oslo. When Katerina started children's baking courses in 2003 she loved how the kids got excited queuing up for their baking ingredients from the Norwegian Cabinet. This sparked her idea to make them and Ella's Kitchen Company was born.

Have a sweet day!

yum with a capital B

for Brownie

if you would like to bake some of these amazingly easy

& oh so delicious brownies

just follow the recipe below

this recipe was given to me by a mum I met through 'Mother's group' in my early days of motherhood & I am ever so grateful to all the mums I met, for the journey we started as friends & for the cups of tea & brownies we shared together.

You've come a long way, Bunsen

Today is Robert Bunsen's 200th Birthday.

He is the chemist who invented the bunsen burner which lead to the invention of the Bialetti stove-top coffee maker, so as far as LOML’s concerned he is the best inventor ever.

But that’s not why I noticed his birthday.

We all have a Mean Girls story from our school days. Mine happens to be a Mean Boys story, but we all know how these things play out. Group of kids makes life a misery for single kid for reasons known and unknown to themselves only.

I guess being nicknamed Bunsen and having a large group of boys call out ‘heeeeey BUUUNNNSEEEN’ every single time you walked past them isn’t the end of the world. I’ll take that any day of the week over so much of the teenage warfare a lot of kids endure.

But still.

Ground-opening humiliation for a teenager desperately wanting to fit in, even if the boys only came up to my armpit and, like all teenage boys, had absolutely nothing to offer. On and on and on it went. I went from laughing it off with a sweep of my offensive tresses, to attempting to ignore it, to only ever walking in the centre of a gang of girls, to going miles out of my way to avoid them altogether.

The burden of the peer group.

You know, once those boys stopped being a peer group, many turned out to be very nice indeed. I was oddly the only girl invited to every single one of those boys’ 21st birthday parties. I went along to a couple. To them it was ‘hey old mate!’ and I realised that as BUUUUNNNSSEEEEEN I was always a part of their gang; their quirky little mate who took teasing on the chin. They were boys and that’s just what boys do. Shudder.

The mystery of the peer group.

That’s what Robert Bunsen means to me. Happy birthday, clever man.

Were you picked on as a child? Do you think that Bunsen was bullied? What's the line between teasing and bullying? Is there one?

[Image by giac1061]