Bananas are no, paint is go

Back again. Thank you for all the lovely birthday wishes last week!
Thank you to those concerned folks who emailed regarding our safety in terms of the cyclone Larry. We are far, far south of Innisfail so we are completely ok. We will be affected by the ensuing banana crisis though. Some members of this household could live on bananas if given a chance – but as the federal minister for agriculture put it “People will have to understand that their unsatisfied yearnings for bananas are infinitesimal compared to the suffering and hardship of the banana growers of north Queensland.” Fair enough. So, while it wasn’t the cyclone that prevented me from blogging as some have feared, school holidays combined with not sleeping and feeling glum has meant no room for blogging this last little while. This week is looking up.

So what’s been happening? Not a whole lot. I have had almost no motivation so everything is suffering.

The baby’s room is slowly moving forward. Having decided on a light, peaceful blue for the walls (and leave the orange for accents – all for the sake of encouraging sleep), it is also important to us to find a paint that isn’t too toxic – both when applying and in terms of the amount of nasties that keep on being produced months after application. We took a trip into the Northern suburbs (“Look Amelia, Mummy and Daddy used to live in that house! And that house! And that one too! And that’s where daddy shared a house with 8 other people!” etc) to Porter’s Paints which Linda was kind enough to inform me from her research sold paints with a 0 level of VOCs. I have been a great admirer of Porter’s Paints for the longest time, always noting the beautiful colours they produce in interior magazines so I was quite excited in a design-nerd kind of way to finally be going in to check out their products.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the paints with a zero level are the limewash paints, which are not particularly child-friendly in that they don’t stand up to a lot of toddler love and are hard to patch when marked. Also, from an aesthetic point of view the splotchiness of the finish wasn’t quite what I imagined in the small baby’s room, but it was (I promise) the toddler-proof issue that sealed the no-deal. Fortunately even their acrylic paints rate far lower that the Australian Standard so what ever we choose, it will be better than what we have used in the other rooms so far. We came away with a handful of little sample pots and a couple of sample cards ready for testing on the walls.

(** ooh look – over at a new favourite of mine, The Worsted Witch, there are two entries (1 and 2) about toxins in paints, and better alternatives with many links and products to check out **)

While we were over in the North, which still brings back bitter-sweet nostalgic memories, we had lunch at our favourite hang-out from the olden-days, the Tin Pot (where we seriously bored Amelia with painful reminiscing) and we also stopped at Douglas & Hope on Brunswick Street which is my ever-favourite shop. Heavenly cushions, bags, clothes and accessories. I can’t find a single useful link for D & H apart from this incredibly dated article.

And I never made that cake. We ended up having an electrician in the kitchen making huge amounts of mess and noise so the cake will have to wait.