Poor mummy... no umbrella
Good evening folks. Hope all is well in the hot USA. It seems strange to have given up celebrating my birthday in one of the nicest months in the Midwest to have it here in August, the coldest, windiest month in Australia. Although my family tells me it’s so hot that they don’t get outside much these days. I’m pleased to hear that California Governor Schwarzeneger is going to work with Tony Blair on global warming since President Bush doesn’t think it’s important. Australia is another loser country which refused to sign the Kyoto agreement, stand by your man (USA)! I suppose I can still spend time outside here in the midday so I shan’t complain. Despite the arrival of some cold winds, it has been a lovely week here. Perhaps I owe it to the fact that I don’t ever really have to leave the house, but have options if I’d like to leave such as playgroup, choir, “town,” or visiting friends.
Each day is pretty similar, yet the activities within are quite diverse. We often awake to Jacinta saying, “Mom? Eat down there?” She has gotten in the routine of crawling out of bed and going straight for my drawer to find a piece of fruit, some nuts in a jar or a container of granola. She takes the bribe so we can sleep a little longer, along with a cup of water and sits at her table eating and drawing. As the day rolls on we have breakfast, perhaps do some laundry, play in the cubby house, hammer nails into the floorboards, check for eggs, fetch greens from the garden for lunch, make and eat lunch, feed the chickens, put the goat back in her pen, read stories and nap. Matt often has to work, but joins us for a bit of this routine. Post nap is time to make dinner, play, eat, play, followed by the eternal bedtime routine. Post bed is either time for sleep, music, movies, reading, knitting or letter writing. I really love the consistency of our days lately. There aren’t many surprises, good or bad: just the odd letter from a loved one in America or a friend dropping in.
So today after Matt left for another football trip to Sydney, I sent Jess off to “morning tea” with her grandma and she came back bearing gifts! How does a two year old with no money bring her mom a fancy umbrella home from “morning tea?” It has been pouring down rain for the last 24 hours, buckets of rain. I haven’t gone out and needed an umbrella in the past few days or commented on a plan to purchase one, but 3 weeks ago visited a neighbor and got stuck in the rain. Upon return they offered Jess and I an umbrella to make it home safe, easy. Today as she rode in grandma’s arms under the umbrella, she watched all of the people with umbrellas. “Aunty Moi has umbrella,” she remarked. “Aunty Flo has umbrella.” “Grandma has umbrella.” Mary said she noticed each person with an umbrella, commenting and then said, “Poor mummy…no umbrella.” She went on and on and told Mary’s friends at breakfast about her poor mother. Following morning tea Jess and Grandma went to buy me an umbrella, little did I know there was a lacking in my life. Jess told the ladies in the department store about her poor mummy and picked out a nice big red one to bring home. So how does she get things? Simply by whining for me! Perhaps I should tell her all the things I need like fancy pots, pans and knives, banana trees and nut trees (:
How about walls for our house? Just kidding, we want to build them ourselves and we are actually moving on from the floor to the frame now! Just Friday, before the rains came, we finished the entire floor. The jagged edges have been cut off, each board has been pried in close to the next and hammered down into the joists. There are a few more nails to pound in but I always need an easy job to do while Matt is working elsewhere. The leftover floorboards have been carried down to our shed later to be turned into furniture in the house. Jess can spin in circles on her bedroom floor and draw her bed in chalk where she pictures it. (We will eventually sand the floor down and then halt the chalk drawings, no worries, we’re not that free and easy!)
Matt finished census delivery on Thursday and breathed a sigh of relief. Soon he’ll have to retrieve it from 500 households, this may be a different story. If he sits at the all night gas station and pursues truck drivers passing through, he’ll make extra cash but you know Matt. That just isn’t his style. He said I could do it though (: We might make it a family night out, there is coffee and junk food, tempting. Matt and I actually went out alone last Sunday night. Unfortunately no restaurants in Macksville are open on Sunday nights, other than the smoky pub. We drove 10 minutes to Nambucca and tried out the motel/Thai restaurant. Matt had avoided it like the plague based on its ties to the motel, seems like a bad recipe for Thai food, but it was good. It was the most expensive Thai food I’d had, you have to pay extra for rice, AND for each doggy bag container! I’ll just have to work harder at cooking it myself. It was also so fast that we’d been out for only one hour by the time we finished. It was too cold for the beach, and too dark to gaze at the waves from our car, so we went to the only open shop, Woolworths, a chain superstore. Pretty pathetic, I know. I had avoided it completely in the 10 months we have been here, but took this as a chance to compare prices and see what organics and other treasures they sold. Swiss cheese and Aussie olive oil for me, chocolate for Matt, a baby flashlight and some bath boats for Jess: all things we never knew we needed! It was a fun date, and rest assured, Jess had a great time at home with grandma and pop, and LOVED her new toys.
The new “baby torch” was a great help on our expedition one evening this week. With Matt and Keith both too tired from work, Jess and I went out in the dark and prepared the old chick pen for Iris and all of the eggs underneath her in the shed. We found the nesting box, packed it with straw and hay, filled bowls with food and water and snuck over to the shed. Jess walked proud in the dark with her little torch lighting the way and her basket in hand, knowing the big task ahead. My job was to pick up the sleeping chicken (only 7 months old) and Jess’s was to gently lay the eggs in the basket and carry them all the way to the chick pen. After I picked Iris up we saw NINE EGGS under the tiny hen! Jess was too scared to pick them all up, but she carried the torch and walked all alone while I carried the chicken and the basket of eggs. Once in the chick pen, Jess placed each egg in the nesting box and I laid Iris on top. We locked her in feeling brave and proud and came in to brag about it. The next day Iris hopped off the eggs and left them to go cold. She didn’t like the move, bummer. She was too young anyway, and I really didn’t want to have to kill any more roosters. So it was a good effort, and it ended well. We gave her a chance, but now she’s happy running with the other chooks.
Speaking of the chickens, the teepee garden is well loved by them. They dig and poop and eat all they please as it is not enclosed. It is the only non-fenced garden and will soon be fenced in. The soil is now gorgeous and ready to be planted but almost all the plants have been destroyed. They left a few good leeks which I harvested today and there is a flowering broccoli plant which attracts the bees. The comfrey is hanging on but the ice cream bean looks burnt it’s so brown. It’s a good digging garden for Jess and Rory for the time being. We harvested our last pumpkin, a potkin I’ve been told. All ten of the pumpkins we grew this year were unintentional plants, popped out of the compost and were eventually transplanted to grow good food. Other than that, we’ve been eating lots of spinach, broccoli, peas, lettuce, and Chinese greens. We had a great salad week and I finally found a way to cook the Chinese greens and enjoy them rather than dread their abundance in the garden. I stir fried them in sesame oil, peanut butter, sesame seeds and used the drops of water left from washing them to steam them a little. I just love sesame oil, it’s a true luxury when I actually buy it.
I also found a good way to make pizza dough using 3/5 whole wheat flour, 1/5 cornmeal, and 1/5 unbleached white flour with your usual yeast, oil, salt and water ratio. For sweets, I made some really strong gingerbread, not all that spectacular but full of iron and protein.
Jess enjoys anything sweet we make, just tonight she went to bed after a treat of some gingerbread and a hot carob milk, “hot cayob,” she calls it. This week I tried limiting her tasting while cooking and it really helped her to eat her meal when the time came. She has learned what “no begging” means through this and now uses it on the dogs. After all she has to tell someone what to do! This morning she ate two and a half pancakes, with some yogurt and applesauce for breakfast, I was shocked. She is starting to willingly eat raw spinach but must be forced into eating any other green, raw or cooked. She is a very good helper with the housework, wiping up messes, even vacuuming. She just started helping Keith to do the dishes. I usually say no because I don’t want her wet but Keith’s always game to teach her something new, even if it takes 3 times longer. Just today Keith was painting some animals for me on nice paper, and he is a real painter, concentration required. Jess wanted to help, and as I started to say no he found a way to include her and let her try without making a terrible mess. Even when he looked away for a second and she swiped her red paintbrush across his white bandicoot, he just quietly fixed it and covered up the newly pink bandicoot with brown. Patience is an amazing thing, I learned some in Senegal, but I hope to learn more as time goes by.
I’ll end with a revelation by Jess. Lately Jess recites titles and dialog in her books. She calls out titles which we understand and can then read them with her. This week, as she sat on the potty quite a bit, she rediscovered the book called, “Everyone Poops.” She even requests it at bedtime, while I tend to choose stories that end with the moon and everyone sound asleep. She will now sit alone on the potty while I do other chores reading the book. Her favorite page is the page showing different people pooping, she constantly searches for the page with “daddy pooping.” The daddy is also smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, so it’s pretty funny. Jess then extrapolates on all the people that poop, you’re all on the list. There is one page that she somehow picked up in perfect English and reads to herself while I am not in the room, this is why I am calling it a revelation. Imagine a two year old sitting on potty for 15 minutes at a time, never having done a poo on the potty intentionally, trying to psyche herself up, all alone. She looks at the page for a while and says verbatim, “Some children poop on the potty, while other children poop in their nappies.”
Nothing like a deep thought to close (: Wishing you all cooler weather and a happy August.
Each day is pretty similar, yet the activities within are quite diverse. We often awake to Jacinta saying, “Mom? Eat down there?” She has gotten in the routine of crawling out of bed and going straight for my drawer to find a piece of fruit, some nuts in a jar or a container of granola. She takes the bribe so we can sleep a little longer, along with a cup of water and sits at her table eating and drawing. As the day rolls on we have breakfast, perhaps do some laundry, play in the cubby house, hammer nails into the floorboards, check for eggs, fetch greens from the garden for lunch, make and eat lunch, feed the chickens, put the goat back in her pen, read stories and nap. Matt often has to work, but joins us for a bit of this routine. Post nap is time to make dinner, play, eat, play, followed by the eternal bedtime routine. Post bed is either time for sleep, music, movies, reading, knitting or letter writing. I really love the consistency of our days lately. There aren’t many surprises, good or bad: just the odd letter from a loved one in America or a friend dropping in.
So today after Matt left for another football trip to Sydney, I sent Jess off to “morning tea” with her grandma and she came back bearing gifts! How does a two year old with no money bring her mom a fancy umbrella home from “morning tea?” It has been pouring down rain for the last 24 hours, buckets of rain. I haven’t gone out and needed an umbrella in the past few days or commented on a plan to purchase one, but 3 weeks ago visited a neighbor and got stuck in the rain. Upon return they offered Jess and I an umbrella to make it home safe, easy. Today as she rode in grandma’s arms under the umbrella, she watched all of the people with umbrellas. “Aunty Moi has umbrella,” she remarked. “Aunty Flo has umbrella.” “Grandma has umbrella.” Mary said she noticed each person with an umbrella, commenting and then said, “Poor mummy…no umbrella.” She went on and on and told Mary’s friends at breakfast about her poor mother. Following morning tea Jess and Grandma went to buy me an umbrella, little did I know there was a lacking in my life. Jess told the ladies in the department store about her poor mummy and picked out a nice big red one to bring home. So how does she get things? Simply by whining for me! Perhaps I should tell her all the things I need like fancy pots, pans and knives, banana trees and nut trees (:
How about walls for our house? Just kidding, we want to build them ourselves and we are actually moving on from the floor to the frame now! Just Friday, before the rains came, we finished the entire floor. The jagged edges have been cut off, each board has been pried in close to the next and hammered down into the joists. There are a few more nails to pound in but I always need an easy job to do while Matt is working elsewhere. The leftover floorboards have been carried down to our shed later to be turned into furniture in the house. Jess can spin in circles on her bedroom floor and draw her bed in chalk where she pictures it. (We will eventually sand the floor down and then halt the chalk drawings, no worries, we’re not that free and easy!)
Matt finished census delivery on Thursday and breathed a sigh of relief. Soon he’ll have to retrieve it from 500 households, this may be a different story. If he sits at the all night gas station and pursues truck drivers passing through, he’ll make extra cash but you know Matt. That just isn’t his style. He said I could do it though (: We might make it a family night out, there is coffee and junk food, tempting. Matt and I actually went out alone last Sunday night. Unfortunately no restaurants in Macksville are open on Sunday nights, other than the smoky pub. We drove 10 minutes to Nambucca and tried out the motel/Thai restaurant. Matt had avoided it like the plague based on its ties to the motel, seems like a bad recipe for Thai food, but it was good. It was the most expensive Thai food I’d had, you have to pay extra for rice, AND for each doggy bag container! I’ll just have to work harder at cooking it myself. It was also so fast that we’d been out for only one hour by the time we finished. It was too cold for the beach, and too dark to gaze at the waves from our car, so we went to the only open shop, Woolworths, a chain superstore. Pretty pathetic, I know. I had avoided it completely in the 10 months we have been here, but took this as a chance to compare prices and see what organics and other treasures they sold. Swiss cheese and Aussie olive oil for me, chocolate for Matt, a baby flashlight and some bath boats for Jess: all things we never knew we needed! It was a fun date, and rest assured, Jess had a great time at home with grandma and pop, and LOVED her new toys.
The new “baby torch” was a great help on our expedition one evening this week. With Matt and Keith both too tired from work, Jess and I went out in the dark and prepared the old chick pen for Iris and all of the eggs underneath her in the shed. We found the nesting box, packed it with straw and hay, filled bowls with food and water and snuck over to the shed. Jess walked proud in the dark with her little torch lighting the way and her basket in hand, knowing the big task ahead. My job was to pick up the sleeping chicken (only 7 months old) and Jess’s was to gently lay the eggs in the basket and carry them all the way to the chick pen. After I picked Iris up we saw NINE EGGS under the tiny hen! Jess was too scared to pick them all up, but she carried the torch and walked all alone while I carried the chicken and the basket of eggs. Once in the chick pen, Jess placed each egg in the nesting box and I laid Iris on top. We locked her in feeling brave and proud and came in to brag about it. The next day Iris hopped off the eggs and left them to go cold. She didn’t like the move, bummer. She was too young anyway, and I really didn’t want to have to kill any more roosters. So it was a good effort, and it ended well. We gave her a chance, but now she’s happy running with the other chooks.
Speaking of the chickens, the teepee garden is well loved by them. They dig and poop and eat all they please as it is not enclosed. It is the only non-fenced garden and will soon be fenced in. The soil is now gorgeous and ready to be planted but almost all the plants have been destroyed. They left a few good leeks which I harvested today and there is a flowering broccoli plant which attracts the bees. The comfrey is hanging on but the ice cream bean looks burnt it’s so brown. It’s a good digging garden for Jess and Rory for the time being. We harvested our last pumpkin, a potkin I’ve been told. All ten of the pumpkins we grew this year were unintentional plants, popped out of the compost and were eventually transplanted to grow good food. Other than that, we’ve been eating lots of spinach, broccoli, peas, lettuce, and Chinese greens. We had a great salad week and I finally found a way to cook the Chinese greens and enjoy them rather than dread their abundance in the garden. I stir fried them in sesame oil, peanut butter, sesame seeds and used the drops of water left from washing them to steam them a little. I just love sesame oil, it’s a true luxury when I actually buy it.
I also found a good way to make pizza dough using 3/5 whole wheat flour, 1/5 cornmeal, and 1/5 unbleached white flour with your usual yeast, oil, salt and water ratio. For sweets, I made some really strong gingerbread, not all that spectacular but full of iron and protein.
Jess enjoys anything sweet we make, just tonight she went to bed after a treat of some gingerbread and a hot carob milk, “hot cayob,” she calls it. This week I tried limiting her tasting while cooking and it really helped her to eat her meal when the time came. She has learned what “no begging” means through this and now uses it on the dogs. After all she has to tell someone what to do! This morning she ate two and a half pancakes, with some yogurt and applesauce for breakfast, I was shocked. She is starting to willingly eat raw spinach but must be forced into eating any other green, raw or cooked. She is a very good helper with the housework, wiping up messes, even vacuuming. She just started helping Keith to do the dishes. I usually say no because I don’t want her wet but Keith’s always game to teach her something new, even if it takes 3 times longer. Just today Keith was painting some animals for me on nice paper, and he is a real painter, concentration required. Jess wanted to help, and as I started to say no he found a way to include her and let her try without making a terrible mess. Even when he looked away for a second and she swiped her red paintbrush across his white bandicoot, he just quietly fixed it and covered up the newly pink bandicoot with brown. Patience is an amazing thing, I learned some in Senegal, but I hope to learn more as time goes by.
I’ll end with a revelation by Jess. Lately Jess recites titles and dialog in her books. She calls out titles which we understand and can then read them with her. This week, as she sat on the potty quite a bit, she rediscovered the book called, “Everyone Poops.” She even requests it at bedtime, while I tend to choose stories that end with the moon and everyone sound asleep. She will now sit alone on the potty while I do other chores reading the book. Her favorite page is the page showing different people pooping, she constantly searches for the page with “daddy pooping.” The daddy is also smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, so it’s pretty funny. Jess then extrapolates on all the people that poop, you’re all on the list. There is one page that she somehow picked up in perfect English and reads to herself while I am not in the room, this is why I am calling it a revelation. Imagine a two year old sitting on potty for 15 minutes at a time, never having done a poo on the potty intentionally, trying to psyche herself up, all alone. She looks at the page for a while and says verbatim, “Some children poop on the potty, while other children poop in their nappies.”
Nothing like a deep thought to close (: Wishing you all cooler weather and a happy August.
posted by Matt & Shana & Jacinta & Genevieve Henry at
1:02 PM
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