Da Vinci & The Dawn Treader

Recently I had a day in Brisbane with my oldest, the Cyber Kid. He's 9 and pretty scientifically minded, so I thought he'd like the Da Vinci exhibition that was on at Southbank. It was a collection of models that had been built from Leonardo Da Vinci's designs. There were heaps of pulleys and gears and levers that actually worked and you could try some of them out.

We were amazed to discover just how many inventions Da Vinci was responsible for, including the submarine, the parachute, the bicycle, and the floodlight...

We could only wonder what Da Vinci would have been capable of if he were alive in our time. Although it was slightly disturbing to see how many deadly war machines he designed (he invented the armoured tank too).

We particularly had fun in the "mirror room" an eight-sided room with all sides made up of full-length mirrors. You could see yourself at any angle, in infinite repetition. As with many of his designs, this was never built when Da Vinci was alive - because such large mirrors could not be produced at that time.

After the exhibition, we decided to try out the big wheel at Southbank - it is 60m high and gave us good views of the river and west to the mountains. Not high enough to see over the tallest city buildings, but high enough for me!

After that, we headed down to Cleveland Point, where the latest Narnia film, the Dawn Treader, is being filmed. We love the Narnia stories, so this was an exciting preview for us. The Dawn Treader is a great sailing ship and the filmmakers have made the life size version and parked it on the edge of Cleveland Point.

The ship's not actually sea-worthy though - it's mounted on hydraulics to give it rocking motion! It was also interesting to see the blue screen suspended in the air beside the ship. It was hard to get close, with the set being fenced off and there were loads of caravans between us and the action, but we couldn't miss the impressive sight of the Dragon's head at the front of the ship towering above it all...

Rallying for Homebirth

I recently joined a couple of thousand women, men and children who gathered outside Parliament House to protest proposed new laws which will make it virtually illegal for women to access homebirth in Australia. We travelled from all states to be there and braved the wet and cold. I've got to say it was the nicest protest rally I've ever been to! What a beautiful gathering of people who are passionate about the way they choose to bring their babies into the world.

This issue is close to my heart because my three babies were all born in the warmth and love and peaceful comfort of our own home and I wouldn't have had it any other way. No bright lights for them, no loud noises or cold hands of strangers, no separation from their mother, no needles or scales or baths and no travelling home strapped into a car seat. They had instant skin-to-skin contact, bonding with their mother, the gentle familiarity of voices they knew, the quiet stillness of home, and the joy of being instantly enveloped in the love of their parents and siblings, with no other distraction.

When is the world going to realise that these things MATTER? Birth is an amazing momentous event in our lives, why shouldn't we take the time to approach it with awe and reverence and respect? People who work with birth need to honour every mother and baby as divine beings, not as just more names on a chart during the shift.

The moment babies' take their very first breath on this earth is sacred. If we cannot welcome new life into the world without gentleness and respect then we do our civilisation a great injustice. When our society begins to treat birth with the reverence it deserves then we will really begin to move forward.

Those of us that believe that this is how birth should be choose homebirth because that is how we can best achieve this peaceful entry into the world. Of course there are lots of other great reasons as well!

There has been a lot discussed in the media about the safety of homebirth, and a lot of untrue statements have been thrown around. These comments come from a position of ignorance and fear. People make up these ridiculous claims to support their beliefs because they need to validate the way they feel about something they really don't understand. But truly if one actually took the time to sort through the literature on homebirth, they would find that there is very strong evidence to show homebirth is a safe practice. For goodness sake, we have been doing it for thousands of years - hospital births have really only been popular for the last 2 or 3 generations!

Oh, I hear you say, but some would argue that women and children used to die in childbirth. Yes they did, and sadly, they sometimes still do, but that is why we have professionals (independent midwives in the case of homebirths) to monitor mothers and babies and to provide expertise and to recommend hospitalisation or other courses of action as are necessary. I also must make the point that a lot of problems that do arise for mothers and babies in hospital occur as a result of inverventions/policies of the hospital - this is a fact many people do not realise.

I don't mean to demonise hospitals here. Obviously I don't choose to birth in hospital but I would not hesitate to use them if necessary, so yes, I am grateful for their existence and I respect other women's right to give birth in the place of their choosing. And the real issue at the heart of homebirth in Australia at the moment is exactly that - the right to choose! We need to have all options available to us in birth, and homebirth is one of many models of care. It has proven to be successful in other countries and we are fighting for it to remain a choice for women in Australia. It should be up to a woman to decide where she is most comfortable giving birth.

Anyway, I'm probably just blogging on to the already converted, so I'll stop raving now and post my photos from the rally! Unfortunately I didn't get as many great shots as I should have, but I didn't like taking my camera out in the rain!

The lovely Majikfaerie in the thick of the action. My gorgeous homebirthing, homeschooling travelling companion and her youngest, Z. We were so lucky to have a mutual friend in Canberra who also homebirths, and she lives very close to Parliament House, so we had the most wonderful accommodation! Me and Superboy. He had cold wet feet and needed to leave by this stage...

Winter Recap

Winter is officially over, spring has sprung, and I'm about to head off to Canberra to save Homebirth. I'm sure I'll come back with lots of great pics, so I better do a catch-up first as it's been a while since I posted. Well it's been so busy around here...here's just a few of the things we've been doing over the winter.

We got some baby ducks (who are now grown already), and it's been lovely watching them waddle about the place. They are so nice to cuddle and quite smart. It's cute to see how they hang out together too. And we love to see their antics in water!

As it turns out, they're all boys, so alas, no duck eggs for us, but lovely pets, all the same.

The kids wove cubbies in the she-oak grove - they all had their own "bedroom", with a shared central "living room". Might sound cliche, but it really was "hours of fun"... We had a fantastic time at the Dreaming Festival again - highly recommend it, it's on in June every year at the Woodford Folk Festival site. Here's our camp at the festival. Amazing to think these were bare paddocks about 15 years ago. I helped plant some of these trees in the 90s and it's so lovely to now be camping in their shade. I might have to blog about the Dreaming again later, because I have loads of great photos..... We also went to World Environment Day at the Sunshine Coast University - had a great day, met some interesting animals and ate some yummy food....(those organic sourdough donuts were DIVINE) We had a homeschool first aid day, where all the kids got to practice bandaging each other, and resuscitate dummies and squirt fake blood etc. They had a ball. Although there was a lot of giggling about the mouth-to-mouth! (Not sure if any of them actually did it!) We had a visit from a Majikfaerie who brandished her machete to help CK make a twirling staff from bamboo.... We went to the "Right to Homebirth" Circus - a show touring to Canberra to raise awareness about the threat to legal Homebirth in Australia. More about this issue later... We went to Australia Zoo and got to meet a Rhino called DJ. We've been playing with some new facepaints... And here's our egg-heads - with sprouted wheat grass.... See you soon!

Spontaneous Days

One of the things I love about homeschooling is the flexibility. Not being tied to anyone else's schedule gives us so much freedom to do whatever we want, whenever it suits us. Some days, we just get a really great idea and run with it. And I've always been one who loves a bit of a spontaneous adventure, so I try to create this for the kids every now and then.

I thought I'd share some pics of one such day we had recently, when we thought we'd take a trip into a mountain forest for a picnic. We took along a bag of dress-ups and when we got into the forest we were suddenly in fantasy land. Being a Monday, there were very few other people around and the ones that we did meet very good-naturedly played along with our game. There were a few costume changes along the way, and all characters contributed to the exciting adventure....