This Week.....

.... we have enjoyed an early family Christmas celebration...

All very busy opening presents.

.... we have celebrated Eden's fifth birthday...

Please forgive me for the paper plates and cups - at least we could compost them afterwards!

Birthday Girl.

Enjoying the very talented face painting by a clever kindy mum.

Eden's tiara birthday cake.

.... we have done some Christmas crafting, by ourselves and with some local friends...

The spice angels we made with our friends.

Christmas cards the kids made with their Grandma.

.... we have coped with the current heatwave by going swimming and relaxing...

.... we have had Grandma over for a stay...

.... we have enjoyed cricket and homemade beer...

Even Brannen has taken his place on the couch to watch the 'kiyet' (cricket)

.... we have done some Christmas cooking...

Gingerbread Christmas tree decorations.

.... we have made some Christmas gifts...

Lined tote bags for the girls to carry their swimming gear to swimming lessons.

My first attempt at a reversible tote with box corners - happy!

 ....receiving my university results. One distinction, and two high distinctions. I am very happy with that. I am changing my course slightly for 2014 onwards, to a double major in Sustainable Development and Community Development. I am slowly hatching ideas and plans for my future 'career' (or not) direction and am very excited about what the next few years may bring.

.... the lead up to Christmas is so exciting! What have you and yours been up to?

Advent

A few years ago, when I first started sewing, I made a string of Christmassy bunting with pockets on the front to use as an advent calendar. The problem with early sewing projects, however, is that over the years you become increasingly aware of the not-so-little flaws in your rudimentary sewing, in a way that is only glaringly obvious to you, the sewer, but nonetheless has the power to drive you crazy whenever you look at it.

I decided this year, as we pulled the very rustic Christmas bunting out of the suitcase, that I would make a new advent calendar for our family. I've been struggling a little with insomnia recently, and therefore found myself at four in the morning looking through Pinterest at different advent calendar designs, and settling upon one that was actually far more work than my sleep deprived brain realised. In the couple of days since, I have cut and sewn 25 little drawstring bags, 25 little fabric circles and hand sewn the numbers 1 to 25 onto 25 little felt circles.

And I am very glad I did, because this little advent calendar is gorgeous, and looks lovely sitting in a cane basket on our rocking chair.

Nath and I wrote out 25 little messages with 25 different Christmas-related tasks for the kids to do and reflect on, and every day they open a bag to find out what their Christmas activity for the day is. Every three or four days, they even find a chocolate each!

The advent countdown is on!

Right Now

Last exam tomorrow. I feel as if life is about to un-pause. It's marvellous. Sadly, my commitment to study has diminished slightly with every exam that passes, I am limping to the finish line whilst dreaming of the unimaginable freedom I will feel when uni is finished for the year! Not that I haven't enjoyed it, on the contrary, I have loved the content and the learning. But..... summer holidays!

Meanwhile, please allow me to indulge some of my holiday dreaming...

Wishing: ...we could have been with family in the UK for the dedication of a delicious newborn nephew.

Reading: ... An Anthology of Modern Verse, found in an opshop for $8, complete with old clippings and an inscription from 1925. Lovely.

Looking Forward To: ...Christmas! I love this time of the year, and I have so many gift and craft ideas to get onto after exams!

Creating: ...a memory wall in my bedroom. A place for artwork, photos, quotes, letters and inspiration.

Planning: ...handmade Christmas gifts, including some beautiful wall name plaques for the girls.

Cooking: ...Christmas pudding. All the fruits are soaking in a generous amount of sherry and brandy, ready for baking into pudding for Christmas Day.

Arranging: ...Christmas meat. We sent a pig, purchased from a friend, to slaughter last weekend, and are picking it up butchered and dressed next weekend. A full freezer, including a lovely rolled pork roast just in time for Christmas!

Enjoying: ...the longer days. Evening swims, walks and bike rides, drinks on the deck, no wonder it has been hard to concentrate on studying!

Hoping: ...my baby boy (who really isn't a baby anymore) enjoys his second birthday this Saturday!

See you on the other side of my last exam!

On Contentment.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
- Lao Tzu

Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

- Socrates

Our day old fresh batch of chicks.

 I've been thinking a lot about life purpose lately. I think it's probably because of one of my units at uni - getting the mind ticking about all kinds of deep things! In one of my lectures it was said that in modern, secular life, people tend to engage in the pursuit of happiness as their ultimate life purpose. I wasn't sure if that resonated with me. Happiness seems so fickle, you think you have it and it slips through your fingers. The pursuit of happiness seems to me to be akin to chasing echoes. You know they are there, but you just can't seem to grasp them. Happiness is fleeting, and dependent on influences outside of ourselves. Things make us happy. Things make us happy.

Lazy summery days in the hammock.

What I seek is contentment. Contentment begins inside of me, it's not a fast, rolling boil of emotions, it is rather like a simmering pot, always warm and ready for a pot of tea. Contentment isn't about what we have, or haven't, it's about enjoying what's there, without feeling we need more. Contentment is about being in tune with our values and beliefs and living accordingly. Contentment is not restless, or dissatisfied, it's calm and strong enough to ride out the harder days secure in the belief that our lives are just as they should be.

Labneh in chilli and herb olive oil.

Lately, I have been feeling so thankful for the life we lead. We don't have much money. We make sacrifices accordingly. But we live well, so well. We love our home, our little family, our community. We love the land that surrounds us, the Earth that sustains us. We love the animals and the gardens that feed us. We love making do, repurposing, breathing new life into old things. We eat like kings and queens, and appreciate the skills we are learning to help support ourselves in the life choices we have made. We live simply, we don't need much, we run out of money nearly every fortnight. But it's fine. We go without. We thrive without.

When Nath finished work, the money question was the one we were asked most often - how will you survive? I will admit, it was the thing we were most nervous about, too. Four months in, though, and I can honestly say that not only are we surviving, we are thriving. We want for nothing. Sure, our holidays are shorter and more local than they have been in the past. Dinners out are fewer, and we tend not to pay for convenience anymore (Can I make it myself?). Do I miss these things? Not really. This life we lead, is the right life for us.

Probably for the first time in my life, I am truly content. It's wonderful, and even bad days are made better with the knowledge that life is just as it is meant to be.  

From Our Kitchen.

A basket of backyard goodness.

I am in the midst of exam preparation, my first exam is on Monday. I have three all up, and will be so relieved to have earned my holidays when they are over. Uni has gone well, I am sitting on a distinction or high distinction in all of my units, but exams may change that! Nath is on uni holidays now (no exams for his course) and he has maintained a high distinction average for his Masters degree, which has him on track to complete it by doing his thesis.

Amid all this study, though, life has a habit of continuing to tick along, regardless of how much we feel we have in the day to get things done. I have been feeling quite overwhelmed with the need to remain 'on top' of everything, and my days have felt not as slow as I would like them to be. My goal for next academic year is to achieve a bit more balance, and this will quite possibly involve actually saying 'no' to a few more things! I've missed having the time to do some of the things I love to do, like cooking and sewing. To be honest, it's probably not so much a lack of time as a lack of prioritising these things which nourish me (Mezz over at Mezz Makes Stuff wrote a post recently on the difference between indulging and nourishing ourselves - worth a read).

Anyway, the past couple of days, despite the mountains of washing, despite the uni notes to be made and the cleaning to be done, I have snuck in a few moments of kitchen time, and thought I'd share some pics with you.

Salad with greens from our backyard, eggs from our chooks and dressing made from homemade yoghurt and homemade chilli sauce.

Potatoes which, having been blanched in vinegar and sprinkled with salt, are ready for dehydrating to make salt and vinegar crisps.

Finished potato chips. Very tasty!

Homemade yoghurt being strained to make labneh which will be marinated in olive oil with a blend of spices.

Two jars of loquat and lemon jam. I was so excited to find loquats at the markets!

Preserved lemons, which will be ready for winter cooking.

For me, it is the times when we are eating and drinking largely from our own produce, spending evenings preserving, fermenting, making, that I feel most connected to the Earth, each other and our family values.

Oh, The Weather!

Here in our town, for most of the year, we complain about the weather. It's a local pastime. A not entirely unwarranted one, however, if this year's transition to Spring is anything to go by. Until two weeks ago, we were pretty consistently still getting very cold nights, and rainy, grey days. We got back from sunny Queensland in the school holidays and were disappointed to be considering the need to light the fire! Two weeks on, however, and yesterday we reached 40 degrees celsius, with hot days forecast for the next week, at least. The air has changed, the cicadas are out (as are the blowflies and mozzies, with a vengeance!) and Summer is definitely here. We really only have two seasons here - bloody cold and bloody hot.

However, the mornings are beautiful. Nath and I have been getting up at six most mornings, and it's such a lovely way to start the day - before the kids get up, soaking up some early morning sun on the front deck with the birds singing in the garden (and Bella bellowing at us for her morning milk!).

The arrival of what is promising to be a long, hot summer means we have to get a few things in order. We have been working on getting the retic set up in the backyard for all the vegie beds to minimise need for hand watering. We received a decent amount of dripline retic from someone on Freecycle a while ago so Nath has been engineering that into a workable system. The front yard is on an automated retic system but as it is sprinkler based we would like to get someone out to talk us through converting it into something a little more waterwise.

We are also buying a self filling cement water trough for the goat pen. At the moment they just have buckets of water but two rambunctious kids means lots of tipped buckets and on these hotter days their water requirements are quite substantial. It means buying 'new', and I feel like we've done a bit of that lately, with fencing equipment and feed tubs and beekeeping equipment and so forth, but I think it is the best decision for the health of the goats.

Also, in not very eco-friendly news, we have decided to get our backyard pool up and running. As we don't use air conditioners, the pool would be a lovely way to spend the hottest days, and a local pool pass for the family costs $250. We can get our pool functional for far less than that. We have recently learned from a friend that we can run the pool for far fewer hours than we thought so we will trial it for the Summer and see what difference it makes to our energy usage.

I really do love Summer. I love the lead up to Christmas, and all the plans for crafting and gifting, and driving around looking for Christmas lights, and taking the kids into the city to see the Christmas displays, and soaking up their wide-eyed wonderment at being allowed up so late and being in the city and going on a train! I love Christmas carols and getting geared up for Christmas camping, and choosing the Christmas menu, and cooking a roast in the Weber in forty degree heat, then not feeling like eating it because it's too hot and eating prawns instead. I love Pimms, and trips to the wineries and breweries and cideries and distilleries. I love TV cricket and backyard cricket and BBQs at the beach and lazy days swimming at the local lake with friends. I love seafood, and mangoes and berries, and salads. So many salads. And shorts and singlets and summer dresses, and bare feet, and beer at the pub on sunny Sundays. I love thinking that I love fishing, and then complaining when Nath wants to take his fishing gear everywhere we go, then, once all the hard work of setting rods up and those first few awkward casts into the water (and around jetty legs and into each others' lines) are over and done with, realising that I actually do love fishing after all. Until I get bored. I love the noise of the cicadas and frogs, the cry of young magpies, and running away from swooping, cranky, mama magpies while waving my arms around my head like a lunatic. I love longer days, with the house all opened up overnight to try and cool it down before another hot day, and evening drinks on the deck, while a bare-chested pack of kids runs hollering around the garden but doesn't come too close to the house in case they get sent to bed. I love Vacswim, and spending days sitting by the pool, or floating in the pool, counting kids' heads and meeting half the town around the splash pool. I love hanging the 'swimming bag' near the back door, where it is needed on a daily basis, and wriggling into wet bathers that we forgot to hang to dry the day before, and frantically searching for thongs, kickboards and towels when a spontaneous swim is announced. I love the constant slightly panicked neighbourhood talk of snakes, of learning again to walk with our eyes to the ground, and keeping a tally of all the snakes that have been sighted so far, and how far they are from our house, and what kind, as if to determine how close we were to actual danger. I love Christmas beetles, and Christmas spiders. I love watching my skin turn from milky white, to cream, to the colour of sand, and finally, to the golden bronze it settles on after a couple of weeks in the sun. I love the smell of suncream and salt and chlorine. I love that my hair colour wavers between the whitest sunbleached white to slightly green, pool tinged blonde, and that the kids all end up looking like little surfie dudes, all long legs and bleached, windswept hair and brown skin.

How are your plans for the festive season shaping up? Do you love Summer, too, or does it make you want to hibernate with iceblocks on your belly and an airconditioner pointed straight at you?

Untechnologising

I feel the temptation to apologise for my absence here on my little blog. I won't, though, as this blog was always intended to be merely a creative outlet for me, regardless of who may be reading along (although I love that you do, dear reader!), and lately my creativity has been on the wane. Not for any reason in particular, although spending portions of my days in front of the computer for uni diminishes any desire to spend my downtime in this way! Two holidays in the space of a month (Bali and Stradbroke Island) has kept me busy as well, and of course there is just the normal hum of busy days at home.

However, general busyness is not the only factor that has kept me away from this space. Increasingly, I have been feeling uncomfortable with my engagement with technology (particularly technology with screens) and have been examining the reasons for this.

I have a screen addiction. If I'm not sitting with my laptop on my knee, mindlessly surfing the internet, I am playing with my smartphone. If it's not email, it's Instagram, or reading blogs, or 'researching' god knows what. Sometimes, you'll find me attached to both the laptop AND my smartphone at the same time. Over time I have disentangled myself from a mind numbing attachment to Facebook (I no longer have an account as that is the only way I can control my use - Nath won't even tell me his password anymore as I kept hijacking his account!) and we no longer watch TV (footy finals aside). I can't get rid of my computer as I need it for uni but something had to change. My creative energy was hidden somewhere under the numbness of disengaging with screens. I checked my phone compulsively, from first thing in the morning until last thing at night. I used to love photography, but that passion had been reduced to snapping photos to upload immediately to Instagram, so that I could then obsessively and repeatedly check to see if anyone had 'lied' or commented. I've heard people refer to this as FOMO - the fear of missing out - but I believe that, for me at least, it's more than that. I think that it all comes from my need to be validated and approved of.

Our trip to Stradbroke Island was a wonderful, cathartic time of reflection. We left the kids with some very generous friends for the week which gave us plenty of time for thinking, talking and doing nothing. I realised I had been craving more slowness in my life, not numbness. Always flicking from one screen to another was not giving me this. I decided to 'downsize' from a smartphone, to a basic, talk and text only phone. No more Instagram, no more social media, no more distracted parenting. My laptop stays switched off and put away until I have a purpose for using it.

It has been only four days so far, but already I feel freer. I have purchased a secondhand digital SLR camera and have really enjoyed taking creative time out to take mindful pictures. It helps me slow down and appreciate the beauty around me. I am loving rekindling this old hobby of mine.

I feel more present with the children, less rushed, less distracted, less frustrated at their intrusion into my busyness. I feel like I have more time in the day, but really I am just using it more intentionally.

I'm not writing this to pass judgement on anybody else' use of screens - I'm actually jealous of people who have more restraint than I! But although I am not apologising for my absence, I thought a little explanation wouldn't go astray!

Meet Elsie; Chicken Babies; and Getting Ready for Spring!

I've been flat out lately, with uni work and our family making the adjustment to having Nath home full time! It's a great adjustment to have to make, but an adjustment nonetheless.We have a new family rhythm now that we are all getting used to. We are loving having Nath at home, though! The kids have taken it in their stride, as if it has been this way all along, and Brannen particularly is loving 'helping' Dad do everything from cutting wood to weeding gardens. He loves putting his boots on just like Dad and puffs his little chest out as if to say, "Right, lets get on with it then!"

Elsie is the little one in the front.

One of the biggest things to report is, we now have our goat! She is being agisted at a friend's property until we get back from Bali, mainly because our goat run isn't built yet, but she has company there so she is happy. She is pregnant, hopefully with twins. This is her first pregnancy - she is only eleven months old. We named her Elsie and she is a Saanen x Boer. Saanen goats are good milkers, and Boers are good eaters, so we are hoping for the best of both worlds! She isn't the goat we were planning on getting, for a number of reasons, but she is a sweet little thing and we are very happy. I have been holding off writing this, as the lovely Jessie from Rabid Little Hippy and her family have just gone through the grief of their goat Anna kidding two stillborn kids. Such a sad story and even though there was nothing they could do I will be watching anxiously for the safe arrival of our babies.

Our silky hen became clucky a number of weeks ago, and now that we have a rooster, I thought I would leave a clutch of eggs under her and see what happened. None of the eggs she set were hers, she stole them all from the other chooks, and ended up with nine under her. A few weeks down the track we were very excited to welcome six new chicks into our lives. They look largely like crosses between Plymouth Rocks and Australorps, so I am very happy.

Silky and her brood.

Spring is just around the corner, I can see blossom buds beginning on some of our fruit trees and our blueberry bush is flowering. So many bees are visiting our garden and the birdsong is lovely. It's time to get organised for spring planting so tomorrow I am propagating seedlings from seed into toilet rolls and putting them into our greenhouse, to give them a head start over the end of winter, so they will be ready to plant when the warmer weather decides to stay. Tomatoes, chilli, salad greens, sunflowers... I am excited! This is a great time of the year in the garden, when we can really get into maximising garden bed space and eating from what we grow as much as possible.

Hope everyone is enjoying the first flushes of spring (or autumn, or fall, depending on where you live!)