So it turns out that...

...if you're making a banana smoothie and drizzle the honey over the vanilla ice cream the honey turns rock hard and it sounds like you've got a blender full of bullets for, like, ages.

Toddler Twister

Today 2yo composed a song. There was one verse, "Daddy's not afraid of Mummy any moooore!!" She accompanied herself on the ukulele and had the rest of us in fits of laughter. We have NO idea where the words came from. Daddy is not owning up to anything anyway.

Later on we had an activity conundrum.

2yo: "I want to do painting?"

Bad Mummy: "No, it's too late for painting, you can do drawing or play dough."

2yo: Thinks. "Pasting!"

Bad Mummy: "No, you can do drawing or play dough."

2yo: "Pasting!"

Bad Mummy: "Drawing or play dough."

2yo: Thinks. "Drawing WITH play dough!"

So that's what we're doing. She's going to show me how.

Mummy Wordle Made from Tweets. Tres Cute.

I wish I could say the same for the html they give you to paste :-\

href="http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/799254/Mummy_Wordle"
title="Wordle: Mummy Wordle">

Money shmoney and kiddy shmiddies.

Trivial response to an Age blah. I mean blog!

You will never regret teaching your kids how to save, pay bills and have money left over for nice things. Why? Ask any parent of a teenager who doesn't have those skills....

I negotiate pocket money with my 11yo. A portion goes straight to his personal account and he gets the rest as cash. 10% of any other money he gets also goes into his bank account. The only real rule is that I won't buy him junk food, toy weapons or video games, he uses his own money for that (right now he is hoarding cash to save for an X-Box 360). Meanwhile he gets to see his bank savings grow via the "Pay Yourself First" method of saving. You should have seen his face the first time he was paid interest - "The bank GAVE me money, just for keeping my money with them? WOW." I tell him this money is for later, for a gap year, or a car or whatever.

My parents told me nothing about money when I was growing up, so I make up for it now with spreadsheets, 13 bank accounts (each with a different purpose) and a system of automatic debits so complex that if I die without writing an instruction book it will take years to figure out what I was doing... Perhaps I over reacted...

You won't regret teaching your kids to save. Teaching them while they're in nappies is probably a bit early to my mind. Though when they were in nappies, and I was a broke single mum, I saved for them anyway using a rather quaint rule:

Every payday put away the same amount of cents as they are days old.

This was a TINY amount but I stuck it in a reward saver and didn't touch it. I used internet banking for the transaction so I didn't have to embarrass myself at the teller with the trivial amounts I was transferring... and of course, because the amounts were trivial, they were easy to let go of each week. My son is now eleven, the weekly payments are no longer as trivial (but thankfully I'm no longer as broke), and what started as a rather embarrassing award saver with less than one hundred dollars in it has grown to a cool seven grand in a high interest term deposit - all by putting away a few dollars a week and letting compound interest work its magic. That money is dipped into occasionally to get him special stuff, like the musical instrument of his choice and school camps. Now it's being used as part of a house deposit so I guess I'll have to give him part ownership of the house? Hmmm. Might be going a bit too far...

Saving is ace, the rewards are numerous and you don't need a massive paycheck to get started. The key is to put it away and don't touch it, even if it's as little as $2 on a regular basis. Teach your kids how, they will thank you later when they buy their x-box, or designer shoes, get a better car, go overseas.... I wish someone had taught me.

Mummy is writing letters to MPs again. Bad Mummy.

Bad Mummy because I should be reading up on dopamine and brains. Oh well.

http://emervents.blogspot.com/2009/04/letter-to-ministers-re-maternity.html


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Sarcastic Mummy

Sometimes I'm such a Bad Mummy I give ranting sarcastic responses to my kids' requests. In my defense, they tend to be requests born of sheer laziness so I don't feel too bad. Here is a lovely example from ten minutes ago:

11yo: Mu-u-um! 2yo is turning the heater on!

Bad Mummy: So turn it off at the power point.

11yo: Where's that?

Bad Mummy: Well, if it were me, I'd follow the cord from the heater and see where it leads. There are other methods I suppose, like radar, detecting it's magnetic field with a compass and iron filings, or ancient household cartography, but I think mine's the quickest.

Taking Buffy obsession to new and exciting heights.

Bad Mummies are all Buffy fans. Most of us don't suffer under the illusion that Joss Whedon is a feminist icon, but we do like to see blonde chicks kick demon butt. We also like irony done proper, a private lingo, word play, and humour that doesn't always have to be at someone's expense.

Today while sorting through my books, passing them through the keep/value/chuck filter, I came across Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. I decided to keep it if and only if it is the book referred to in the first episode of Buffy Season 4.

Which it is.

So there.