Some Daily Outfits give me more challenges than most – especially when children and roller skating are involved! I was invited to take Miss Five on her first skating expedition this week along with a group of mothers and children from her school.  She was SUPER excited about going, wondering if she was supposed to win a gold medal and jump off big stuff! Me, well I used to be a big skater, going a few times a week and carving up the floor…. but that was a very long time ago.  I still had the old skates out away in the cupboard, but the have only been out on the rink about once or twice in the last eleven years.  This presented a whole new wardrobe challenge – just what does one wear when rollerskating with a bunch of five year old children??

I had to think long and hard on this one as my first instincts were to go with some of the outfits I last wore and break out the whole Olivia Newton John in Xanadu tpe of look.  But just in case that may cause the other mothers to shield their children from this crazy woman I decided to go with something a little less theatrical.  There was no way I was going to wear my workout gear for this ,as for me, workout gear belongs only in the gym so I had to think of the next best thing.

After a bit of a rummage around in the depths of the wardrobe I came up with an outfit that I haven’t worn in a while – it was one of my last pregnancy staples!  I have this great skull print jersey dress that has an open, cross over back that I used to wear backwards while I was pregnant with Miss 2. I’d throw this over yoga pants for casual days and it did the trick.  So it was the perfect thing to be both cute and comfortable whilst skating too.

Outfit Details:

Skull Print Dress – Episode    Tank Top – Portmans

Cropped Yogo Pants – Puma   Pewter Ballet Flats – U.B.H

Hair Bow -Bought so long ago I can’t remember!

Skates – Check your local skate store!

Of course it turned out that none of the other parents intended to skate and I ended up the only one over 3 foot tall on the rink!

Today’s Daily Outfit is a special guest appearance by Miss Five.

Styled and directed by Miss Five….

Outfit Details:

Dress & Cardigan – Target

Shoes – Grosby

Mask – Costume shop

Necklace – Candy

Working from home is fraught with danger. Overeating, daytime T.V, believing that Snuggies are fashion…  How do I deal with this workplace minefield?  By watching children’s television in the daytime.  Given, it isn’t that often, but when it gets too quiet here and I need a little something in the background, I tune into Sesame Street and this is why.

Sesame Street does Mad Men!

That poor old horse is being flogged to death again.  Thanks to an article in this weekends news, a “light hearted” piece looking at competition at the school gate of ” Slummy Mummies vs. Yummy Mummies”; we are back to the same old argument being sparked in the comments.  The so often spouted clap trap that if you give a damn what you look like then clearly you have nothing better to worry about in your life.  I’m sorely tempted to just say, “grow a brain people!” and leave it at that,  but clearly the topic deserves more attention or it wouldn’t keep cropping up.

So before you get all indignant and start writing me nasty comments (I say this not to my regular readers who already know what this is all about), let me give you a quick snap shot of my life.

Firstly, I work. I work both in the home and outside the home. I work more than fourty hours a week.  I have two children (2 & 6), whom I dote on, play with, sing with, get dirty with. This blog focuses pretty much solely on fashion related issues as it is my interest; just as gardening, scrap booking or collecting toy trains might be yours. My family didn’t sign up for this blog and so I don’t expose them or other non fashion related things here. And most importantly, I’m not interested in competing with you.  Which brings me back to the heart of the issue…

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because someone is “dressed up” that they do it to make you feel worse about yourself.  Yes, there are always those groups who are motivated by being the top of the pile in their social group and use fashion as a means of belittling others.  (Which I believe was the ‘light hearted’ topic the article wished to cover) But it would be unwise to tar everyone you come across with the same brush, no matter how conditioned you may be.  In the simplest sense this can be boiled down to one key problem – ascribing moral values to people based on what they look like. Just as certain ethnic minorities in your city are often targeted as being sinister based on their skin colour or choice of religious dress, the same principle of discrimination is at work here. For myself and many others, we dress up because it is fun and it makes us feel good. It doesn’t come at the expense of  “a life” or a happy family.  Dressing well and having happy kids /rescuing puppies/ or whatever other “better things to worry about”, are not mutually exclusive.

Back to the school gate competition issue.  Yes it does exist, but you have to choose to buy into it or NOT.  It is just another adult version of teen peer pressure and generally those that give in to it were the ones that behaved in the same manner in high school. You’d hope that we would have matured beyond that. When it comes to the big “What to Wear at the School Gate”, it is entirely up to you. Dress up, dress down – but figure out what makes you happier and WHY you are doing it. If it is to make other mothers feel inadequate – just don’t, and by the same token if you deliberately break out the old trackies  as a non verbal form of  “well f#$k you!”; then it is time to take a step back and consider the impact of that attitude on both yourself and others.

It’s only a war if you choose to be in it.

That’s enough pot stirring for a Sunday afternoon.

This weekend was the big day – Miss 5’s birthday party! My own first memories of birthdays past began at my fifth birthday.  I remember mum making a “Dolly Varden” cake from the Women’s Weekly cookbook, complete with faux Barbie inside the cake.  I remember receiving the coolest gifts from my friends and family; my first “lipstick”, a set of fashion plates (which I have since recovered via the magic of eBay) and a special dress with matching hair ribbons.  As I thought about my own fifth birthday, it occurred to me that so much of what happened on that day and the type of gifts I received, have gone a long way to shaping who I am today.  And so it was that I decided that this birthday had to be a cracker for my own daughter,  something that she would remember for the rest of her life as a fabulous pink dream.

All these intentions are well and good, but just how the heck do you pull something like this off without a team of event organisers and caterers at your finger tips? Here are my tips for making your own Unicorn Pony Party.

Pick Your Colour

When you’re a five year old girl, you just can’t go past pink. Sugary sweet it can do your head in, so pick your shade wisely. We decided that “Musk Stick Pink” would be our shade of choice, and then applied that to everything we possibly could.  It helps if you already have a bit of a colour theme to your home decorating and can scam pieces from your own collection to help pump up the ambiance. I brought out every pink table cloth, bowl, picture frame, flower and outfit I possibly could.  Even Mr SKM got in on the act wearing a pink and red shirt!

Carry Your Colour Theme Through to the Food

The easiest way to make your party table look fancy is to carry you colour theme over to the food.  When your catering for kids, this is 100 times easier than trying to come up with adult versions of coloured food! So we had every pink and white lolly we could think of, musk sticks, marshmallows, jelly snakes, white chocolate cover red licorice… enough to make your teeth fall out just looking at it. Savoury food was covered by those ever popular “little boys” also, reddish in colour, and the usual mini quiches, pies etc.. and for desert (as if all those lollies weren’t enough) mini pavlovas with pink whipped cream and raspberries.

Pink Cake Too!

Rather than staying up till midnight the night before, creating some elaborate confection that was way above my culinary skills, I decided to stick to cupcakes again this year.  I still haven’t gotten the hang of that perfect icing yet, and spent much of the previous evening licking strawberry frosting off my elbows as the piping bags continued to burst mid swirl.  They passed the taste test with flying colours though.

Goodie Bags!

Every good party comes with goodie bags, but after such a sugar laden day, I didn’t think that sending people’s children home with yet more sweets would be the best idea. As some of you know first hand, mixing both sugar and red food colouring is akin to baby crack, so sending them home with yet another stash would have probably seen me relegated to parental purgatory.  The goodie bags are a fun, cheap and easy way to win good party points with all your guests. Once again, make sure to stick to your colour theme, but think of things that can be used over again and aren’t simply going to break or end up in land fill.  They needn’t be expensive, but just make them look pretty!

For our stash we put together little pink organza bags containing My Little Pony makeup sized bags, super cute doggie sticky note pads, scented erasers shaped like cookies, and a little Cuppa Chup lolly pop.

The Piece de Resistance

All the best parties have one event that makes them the stuff of legends.  The stuff that shapes memories and imagination.  When I was asked for a Unicorn Pony for her birthday I knew I had a challenge on my hands. But with the magic of the internet, a little saving up, some glue and glitter; I managed to work a miracle.

Behold – The Unicorn Pony!

And now after all that, I plan to retire from partying for at least another month… until Miss One turns Two!