An Extreme Colour Weekend.

Why is it that we tend to paint ourselves grey, when we were born with such stunning butterfly wings painted in a kaleidoscope of colours? Indeed, why are we so afraid of colour? Could it kill us? Give us cancer? Mentall illness? Possibly even bring on the plague or ebola? Is too much pink, red, turquoise or even periwinkle, is going to kill us? The way we hide away from it, you’d think so. Why is it so hard for us to live as butterflies? Spread our coloured wings out against the sun and radiate magic sparkles across the sky? Or, even colour ourselves in with a thick brush oozing with luscious paint…

“Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

– Paul Klee

“With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”

– Henri Matisse

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways”.

-Oscar Wilde

“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.”

-Claude Monet

Rather than embracing colour, we’ve been taught to fold up our wings. Blend in. Don’t stand out.

Yet, how would we feel, if we could only view our world in shades of black & white? As bad as that sounds, if that’s all we’ve ever seen, we wouldn’t even know that the world had any colour in it at all. We’d think that’s all there is. We wouldn’t know that the sky is sometimes blue. That the sun is golden yellow and that the grass comes in many varied shades of green and brown. Unfortunately, I suspect this is how way too humans actually perceive our world and themselves. So, they just stick to the tried and tested black & white and shades of grey or beige and wonder why there is no bounce in their step at all.

“Life is like a box of crayons. Most people are the 8 color boxes, but what you’re really looking for are the 64 color boxes with the sharpeners on the back. I fancy myself to be a 64 color box, though I’ve got a few missing. It’s okay though, because I’ve got some more vibrant colors like periwinkle at my disposal. I have a bit of a problem though in that I can only meet the 8 color boxes. Does anyone else have that problem? I mean there are so many different colors of life, of feeling, of articulation. So when I meet someone who’s an 8 color type… I’m like, hey girl, Magenta! and she’s like, oh, you mean purple! and she goes off on her purple thing, and I’m like, no I want Magenta!”

– John Mayer

Perhaps, I should apologize for having this rant about colour. However, this weekend as we celebrated our daughter’s 12th birthday, there was so much shameless colour and it felt so good. Indeed, as I applied a generous layer of mauve lipstick at Sephora and left it on for the rest of the afternoon, I felt quite liberated..like I’d been let out of a vault. Wearing purple lipstick also felt a bit naughty, breaking a tabou and openly flaunting it, but for once it didn’t matter. No one was judging or condemning me or calling me a “weirdo”. I just was. That was a huge step forward for me, although it shouldn’t have been. As an extroverted extrovert, I should be allowed to be me.

Stepping out there in mauve lipstick.

While I’m not into make up and fashion and it’s taken me awhile to feel comfortable at Saphora, I am starting to love it. This is more than picking up on our daughter’s infectious enthusiasm. Rather, I’m finding my own way, which started out with seeing the eye shadows as palettes of colour, paint for your eyes. Yes, that’s what it is…paint and as with any true artist, you can create a masterpiece. When we were in there yesterday, the staff had made up their faces into national flags. For the Greek flag, one consultant had applied cobalt blue eye shadow with some white eyeliner and paired it up with matching lipstick. It looked so amazing and other worldly and definitely belonged in the category of art.

Not unsurprisingly, I’ve never thought about wearing blue lipstick, but my daughter put it on along with some blue mascara and it looked amazing. Then, just for the hell of it, I put on the mauve one and much to my surprise, I didn’t die and no one mocked me either.

However, the wild colours didn’t end there. My daughter had a Rainbow Cake for her birthday cake. This was very easy as we just bought it from our local Coles Market and saved me from tackling something highly creative and risky in the Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book, which is an established Australian birthday tradition, also with all the nail-biting stress.

Then, there were the home made cup cakes with vienna icing. The girls were all too full to serve them up at the party and I was thinking today that they were going to get tossed Out, when Miss and her last surviving friend, were going to decorate the cupcakes. Although she’d initially asked me to leave the icing white, they ended up mixing so many colours together and being so creative that I was really impressed. There was a blue Cookie Monster wearing a red bow tie, another cupcake became some movie star my daughter has a thing for. All of them, were brightly coloured and I confess, loaded to the hilt with artificial colouring.

It’s not that long ago that artificial colourings were banned in our house and were even banned at school and social activities for our kids. They really responded badly. One holiday camp, they fed our daughter orange cordial and fairy bread and she was speaking like a chipmunk afterwards and was almost flying. That was stopped immediately. Mum was bad cop.

As the kids have grown older, they handle the colours better, but that said, they’re not a part of our diet. I make most of our food from scratch and don’t touch the stuff.

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

– Marcus Aurelius

However, like most households, things creep in. Just as she likes bright colours in her make-up, she also adds food colouring, coloured playdoh or paint to the numerous slimes she makes at home. If you don’t know what slime is, consider yourself lucky. Also known as flubber, making this stuff at home’s become a huge crazy and bedrooms around the world are being turned into slime producing labs. The kids add foam balls, glitter and all sorts of stuff to varying the texture and the slime itself is made from a variety of ingredients depending on the desired effect. There’s shaving cream, borax, PVA glue. From where I sit, it’s art meets science which could be considered educational but you also need to be careful in confined spaces or it becomes glue sniffing and bad for the brain.

 

 

 

 

 

However, tomorrow it’s back to the real world and all our colours have been packed up and it’s now raining cats and dogs outside and we’re back to grey skies.

I don’t know how I’m going to maintain a bit of colour from now on. Perhaps, I should get the paints back out and use some of the empty canvases still floating round the house like lost sheep. I also have some beautiful Prismacolour coloured pencils which have really vibrant colour…yum!

Anyway, it’s very late here now. The Internet slowed right down and time ran away.

How do you feel about a little bit of colour? Are you daring or do you prefer to play it safe?

xx Rowena

 

When Your Baby Turns 12…

“There are two great days in a person’s life – the day we are born and the day we discover why.”

William Barclay

So what if it’s my daughter’s birthday? That’s hardly newsworthy. After all, she’s not Princess Charlotte, and the only paparazzi hanging around when she blew out her candles, was her Mum.

Yet, that doesn’t mean that her birthday didn’t mean anything beyond our four walls and her beaming grandparents.

Our daughter turned 12 yesterday. While she’s still not officially a teenager, she’s in her first year of high school. So, this birthday marked a definite transition from childhood into something else. Entré into a zone where it can be difficult for parents to find their way. Are we wanted, or unwanted? In the way, or ignoring them and giving them too much space? Are we expecting them to be kids and adults all in the same breath and setting all sorts of unrealistic expectations? Or, are we feeling like little more than a taxi driver? An ATM only good for more money?  I’ve heard a lot of parents lament that their teens only grunt, and shut them out. Lock themselves away in their rooms. There’s also the great electronics challenge. How do we tear our kids and teens away from Minecraft long enough to even look us in the eye and say “hello”?

These are challenging times. After all, the teenage years come with the same kind of flashing neon signs as the terrible twos. Having been through that, I’m no idiot. I know it’s virtually impossible to come out unscathed, but I also feel empowered. I make things  better or worse.

However, none of that was at the forefront of my mind yesterday. That all came afterwards, as I reflected on how well everything went and how I’ve built connections with my daughter, her friends and their parents. Also, I’m pleased to say we passed muster. So, I’m feeling really stoked…content.

Miss in Saphora Sporting Blue Lipstick.

The big birthday, began with a morning of dance rehearsals and classes for Miss, and I set about trying to find the carpet in her bedroom. Even though the girls would be sleeping in the tent in our backyard under the watchful eye of the dogs, kids always end up in the bedroom and hers needed major reconstruction. I’m still fighting off the sinus infection too so wasn’t 100%. Meanwhile, Geoff was salvaging the backyard from the pups. There isn’t a blade of grass out there, and there was all sorts of chewed up detritus. With only hours to go, we had a lot of work ahead. Fortunately, I did my baking on Friday, making Mars Bar Slice, Pavlova, cup cakes. Dinner would be pizzas.

However, before the party began, Miss wanted to go to makeup Mecca, Saphora, with her friend, so she could go crazy with her birthday money from her Godmother and earn double points and a birthday gift. We also spent awhile in Lush.

An extraordinary moment.

Cartwheels in the sand.

Amelia with Nikon camera aged 2.5

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Saphora really is a kind of fantasyland and they let you play around with a kaleidoscope of eye shadows, lipsticks and highlighers so you can even glitter and sparkle in the dark. It was so much fun. After all, how often do we have the opportunity to colour ourselves in using the brightest of brights without any limitations and get away with it? At Saphora, our face is a blank canvas only limited by our imaginations and our arms are our palettes. Indeed, there’s even a word to describe trying out this multitude of product…”swatching”.“

Not unsurprisingly,  I don’t keep up with make up or fashion trends. I was chaperone. My daughter’s friend’s Mum likes the girls to be accompanied, and that makes the decision easy for me. I’m a slow walker. So, they’re always a metre or two in front and I probably look more like a stalker. However, this means they have their own space, can do their own thing and have an old head with them if required. You just don’t know what those unpredictables can be, and they’re not quite at the stage where they have the life experience to deal with all of that on their own. Also, my daughter is tiny and younger than many of her friends and I’m quite conscious that a stranger could pick her up and cart her off without any effort at all, aside from her resistance. In Australia, we had a young man called Daniel Morcombe who was abducted from a bus stop, violated and murdered. He was 12 years old. That puts things into perspective for me. While a 12 year old might be sensible, trustworthy and intelligent, they are still a child and need a backstop.

I don’t know how parenting a teen will look down the track. Her big brother turns 14 in a few weeks and hasn’t brought us the usual problems of teenagers yet. We tend to be late bloomers in the puberty stakes, so perhaps all of that is just around the corner. You sort of hope it is as a parent, as much as you want to keep pushing it off into the future. After all, they really can’t have a relationship with their electronics. Or, at least not one that’s going to produce any grandchildren (not that I’m wanting them any time soon).

Anyway, my modus operandi for parenting teens at the moment, is to get to know my kids’ friends and their parents. Keep those lines of communication going. After all, what I’m finding so far, is that they’re all quite chatty and we’re all getting on really well and they trust me. This might not matter much at the moment, but it might down the track.

So, I’m now positioning myself as my kids’ parent and their friend. Trying to make the hard decisions and enforce boundaries and deadlines, while also being involved enough that they feel I know them,that they know I have their back and can see their point of view, even if I don’t agree with it. It can be very tempting to think that now our kids are growing older, that we can get more “me time”. Work more. Pull back. I’m not too sure.When they were younger, they could go to daycare or before & after school care but once at high school, they’re home alone…or not. Unfortunately, that doesn’t address the family finances or the need for both parents to work, sole parent families and the complexities of life. My complication is my disability and chronic health, which has ruled out paid work for the last 5 years, although I am now starting to set the wheels in motion. I’m currently looking into freelance writing opportunities.

I’ll write more about how the birthday went in my next post. In the meantime, I was wondering what your view are about parenting teens. What are your hot tips for parenting teens? What helped you? I have definitely found that we often have our best chats in the car or around the family dinner table. I’ve also been playing quite a lot of board and card games with our son lately at his request. That’s usually when the wifi gets turned off, but it’s him seeking me out, not vice versa. These games might be old-fashioned, but we’ve had a lot of laughs, the competition is fairly intense, and I can feel the bonds knitting together on the spot.

On that note, I’m off for slice of pavlova. Birthday party leftovers are the best.

xx Rowena

 

Mummy’s Littler Miss.

This is the inimitable Miss, Age 3…a long 8 years ago!

I’m currently riffling through photos on my hard drive, searching for a photo of my daughter with her ballet teacher, which was taken about 5 years ago. That’s how I chanced upon this stunner,  which grabbed my heart with both hands.

The things is, eight years down the track, I’m struggling to remember why she’s covering her eyes. Is she playing hide-and-seek? More than likely, she’s hiding from my flash.

So, I return to the scene of the crime.

After all, I never take just one photo. There’s always a series!

 

Someone loves Mummy’s lipstick a tad too much!

 

Look at me!

I’m not going to show the next image of her contorting herself to escape from the flash. However, there’s no doubt she’d had enough of the paparazzi!

Fast-forwarding to 2017, her make-up is impeccable and the lipstick well and truly stays within the lines and yet it’s so lovely to hop into my time machine and celebrate this exuberant moment… three year old’s passionate journey into Mummy’s world.

She has plenty of time to grow up!

xx Rowena