Wordless Wednesday - Cake

Weekend grateful - snuffle

This week I am grateful for
tissues,
antibiotics,
more tissues,
our wonderful family doctor and
the Captain cooking dinner for us tonight so I can have a little time to myself.

Yep, you guessed it, the dreaded lurgy is in the house. The Bowler has a cold that has developed into a chest infection and I have a cold that I am desperately hoping does not go down the same path. I have spent the best part of the last 4 days with a 17 month old who has not let me sight and had to be glued to my hip at all times. While the extra cuddles have been lovely, I am ever so grateful that he is fast asleep now and I can get some sleep too.

I love joining in on Maxabella's weekend gratitude. It's good for the heart and soul.

Lovely is simple, simple is lovely

The Batsman will turn 4 next Tuesday. My baby boy, my first born, will be 4 years old. When he turned one we had 100 people at his birthday party - he howled all the way through happy birthday singing - but nevertheless it was a joyous celebration.

Since the Batsman was diagnosed with autism, it has given us lots of insights about how to do things (and not do them) in ways that will support him to participate with the minimum of anxiety and the maximum of fun. He really struggles with big crowds of people and us having a house full of friends and outlaws relatives isn't really conducive to him (or us) having a good time. So this year for his birthday we did small and simple. Six children and seven adults. Small, manageable and intimate.

There was fairy bread

And fruit

There was a little party table with lollies and rice chips

And animal plates

There was a lion cake that I made

Lollies to take home

And he loved it, all of it.

Lovely is simple, simple is lovely.
I think all our birthday parties are going to be like this.
Love you buddy, Happy Birthday

PS: I also blog about our autism journey over here at the I Love You Song. I would love you to come along for the ride with me

Plastic un-fantastic

It happened on the Batsman’s 1st birthday. It was the day when I first saw the craziness of this. As a deluge of birthday gifts arrived at the party for our precious first boy it became apparent. Do tell, what is the deal with the extraordinary level of plastic packaging around children’s toys?

I remember coming home from his party with the swag of presents he had received. We began to unwrap them, to enjoy them with our little guy. The pile of wrapping paper as well as plastic packaging, plastic ties, tags and other assorted bits of crap plastic quickly became much larger than the pile of toys themselves. It bothered me. IT IS RIDICULOUS.

I have tried very hard ever since to buy gifts that are not over packaged in this superfluous, environmentally unfriendly way. There are so many beautiful “eco” toys and gifts on the out there, one only has to do a quick “Goggle” to find them.

The Batsman and the Bowler often receive lovely gifts when the special days roll around and yesterday I had the occasion to attempt to “de-package” one of them for today’s play. It’s an ark fishing boat complete with Noah a fisherman and an assortment of lovely animals. Here it is:

And here is the amount of packaging we had to unfurl to get to it:

There is a box, an inner box, some other bits of cardboard, 23 (yes 23!) cable ties holding pieces in place and a few other bits of “not plastic fantastic”. It took almost 20 minutes in my carefully planned chaotic day to undo it all. Like I said, ridiculous. Now I am not so naive that I don’t understand the role packaging plays in marketing, presentation and perhaps even (as the Captain pointed out to me) prevention of shoplifting. But for the love of loopy mums and dads everywhere, you can’t possibly convince me that this amount of packaging is even necessary, never mind the planet health implications.

So I know this is not one of the biggest issues going down right now. But it bugged me. It bugged me enough to sit here and write a post about it. It left me shaking my head at our human “wisdom”, that we think we need to use precious resources this way, boiling up a whole lot of poisonous chemicals to do it.

What do you think about the “not plastic fantastic” issue? Have you had any recent moments where you’ve been left shaking your head at the crazy stuff we humans do? What efforts (no matter how small) do you make to counter our overuse of plastic?

Wordless Wednesday - for Queensland