Kangaroos and deer
“What are you going to dream about tonight Jacinta?” Matt asked. “Kangaroos and deer (pronounced dee-ah) …playing together,” came the response. These animals are slightly similar, in their grazing habits, size, colour, travelling in families, and their unfortunate likelihood of ending up as road kill. I don’t think Jacinta has contemplated all of this, but perhaps just a nice wish to have Australia and America become the same land where we can all live together. Last week she pretended to play with a few of her closest Michigan friends. She took it so far as to disobey me because her friends’ mom had “told” her to continue doing what she was doing. I really am pleased with the development of her imagination, even if it takes her this far.
Lately each night when asked what she wants to dream about or in the morning asked what she dreamt about, she will say Genevieve. Whether a three year old can consciously remember her dreams, I don’t know, but it is sweet to know what she wants in her dreams, in those precious sleepy hours of solitude.
Genevieve, our wakeful sweetheart, I bet she dreams about all the things she is missing. She dreams about being awake, and somehow wills herself awake, no matter how tired she is. Perhaps she dreams of touching the glasses on the kitchen island, of eating the things on her big sister’s plate, of crawling more than two steps at a time. She can cross the room very quickly now, doing the seal scoot. She has taken to chasing balloons. Balloons are rather difficult to hold onto for a baby and make for a good energy-burning toy. Yes, I know babies should not suck on balloons, I watch her well. She watches me well in return. She takes it all in: grabbing apple blossoms as I check on the apple tree, sticking her face in the dough as I knead dough, watching her big sister’s every move, and tasting everything she can get her little mouth on. This week’s foods include some oats, rice, beans, bananas, avocado, and again, orange vegetables. Evie’s meal times always begin with great anticipation, and end with urgent, tired fists rubbing mashed food into her eyes.
Jacinta’s meal times are also greatly anticipated. She is usually ready to move on to the next meal about one hour after she has finished the last. Thus, if I finally agree that it is time to prepare the food, she will not leave my side. She is ready to help. Her motivation is two-fold: chance of a “sneaky” taste and interest in cooking. It is salad season. Keith and Mary gave the “house garden” a make over and turned it into a beautiful, productive, accessible kitchen garden complete with herbs, lettuce, beets, spinach, onions, carrots, and plenty more. Its proximity inspires me to actually go out and pick things a few minutes before a meal. Jacinta and I have been picking small lettuce, spinach and beet leaves before meals, and she eats them without force! She even cried and had a tantrum because a turkey ate her salad the other day. What parents in their right mind would send a three year old to her room for wanting a salad so badly that she had a tantrum? That would be Matt and I, tantrums are tantrums, but it did feel strange.
I do realize that my daughter’s intensity about food is my fault, and I have to live with it as my penance. Poor Matt, so far there are two food psychos in the house. As I do, Jacinta makes hard line food choices and holds strong to them, come hell or high water. Her most recent food boundary was vegetables: she would only eat them raw. One night I decided I had had enough and would no longer make a separate raw plate for Jacinta. We sat it out. Matt helped us through our battle, with the final result being that Jacinta ate four stir fried veggies. I call them “half cooked,” it’s a pretend compromise. She feels like she’s winning because I say they are half raw, and I feel victory because my cooking options are greater.
Since my return, I have been using plain old supermarket grains. Poor me. Normally I order grains from a local biodynamic farm mill. Local…what is local? I suppose a five hour drive is not so local, but it is my best option for good quality flour, rice and oats. Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent book on eating as a “locavore” for a whole year gave me more insight into what is truly local. She also talks about purchasing those items that do not grow locally from fair trade organizations that pay their labourers a real wage and sustain the earth rather than deplete its resources. Anyhow, this week was the first time I hosted a delivery, and I was lucky enough to meet the farmer/driver. After he left I came straight inside and made some bread to celebrate real whole-wheat flour. Normal flour mills here in Australia must not have the capability to make anything but bromide bleached white flour, stripped of most of its nutrients. Typically, in making white flour, they strip the flour of all of the bran to make it easier to use in baking. It sounds insane, but after they bleach and strip the flour of the bran, they throw back a bit of bran into the flour and sell it as “wholemeal style flour.” This is the closest thing our supermarket has to whole-wheat flour. This reminds me of the way brown sugar is processed here and in America. You would think brown sugar would be less refined than white sugar, but it is not. They strip out a lot from the sugar cane to come up with white sugar, including molasses. After it has been stripped out, they pour some of the molasses back in, to make brown sugar. Oh, how I can stray from my point…the bread was lovely. Since I’ve been back I am trying to make all of my own bread. So far, so good.
It will take years before we can endeavour to eat mostly local, and I am at peace with this. I am learning how to garden, how to make the most of each season, and trying to find enough time to feed the plants so they can feed us. Matt is at a stand still in building our root cellar because the tractor he was using is broken. But frankly, I won’t grow enough food to store for a while. I’m still working on feeding us meal by meal, and not much of it is from the garden. Rightly so, we were away for three months. For now, it is an exciting, hopeful planting time, trusting that all of the weeding will have made way for beautiful produce. Keith helped with much of the hard labour, breaking up hard ground, digging out nasty roots and weeds, leaving the planting for Jess and I. We spent about an hour each day in the garden, planting chickpeas, kidney beans, beets, more carrots, arugula, watermelon, and pumpkin. We searched for strawberries, ate borage flowers and watched the fruit trees progress as they bud and burst into spring. The nectarine tree is covered in tiny fruits, but they may never grow to edible form, the tree is too young. We can only hope. Jacinta has learned that word, and she hopes very earnestly to be eating these nectarines soon!
Rather than working on the root cellar, Matt did odd jobs this week. He worked on rain gutters, painted the screen door and a few barge caps (wind breakers that look like rain gutters) for the top of the house. Jacinta, as usual, helped paint for a few minutes. Matt put a little girl handle on the screen door so she can let herself back in from playing outside, built a little stool for the girls and made an extra shelf in the kitchen. He installed the curtain rod and hung the curtains that Mary and I finally made for the bathroom. They curtains cover up our storage area, making the bathroom more like a bathroom and less like a shed. He put in a small concrete slab on the path from the driveway to our front door, complete with little girl handprints and turkey prints. Keith brought home a few truckloads of macadamia tree branches so they fired up the mulcher after a long vacation from loud machinery and dangerous flying sticks. Matt weed whacked the orchard once again, now we can see the poor little blueberry bush. His wrist has been giving him troubles, but he still tries to do some manual labour each day, whether it hurts or not, hoping the pain will just disappear. To give his wrist a rest, he went to court to enter his plea: not guilty for negligent driving (hitting the kangaroo back in February) and was given a court date in November. He finished the first subject in his new counselling course, and was quite proud of his efficiency. He did some writing, some more research on music publishing, and played with the girls.
I came down with pink eye and my cold flared up again, so Matt tried to occupy Jacinta as much as possible. Genevieve is just getting to the “I need momma” phase, so she’s harder to distract. Although Friday, I had a nap! These are hard to come by now, so they are treasured. Matt took Jacinta to Coff’s Harbour to shop and check out the zoo. They had a sneaky treat, this is a sure thing on an all day outing with Daddy. Although it was supposed to be a “secret,” she excitedly described the process of donut making to Mary and Keith. “They take the dough and drop it in the big little donut making thing, it goes up a big ramp and then drops into a big bowl.” For those of you that have heard Jacinta tell a story, you might imagine the energy building in her voice. You’d think she was going to burst by the time the donut made it to her mouth. “It was still warm, so warm we had to blow on it!” After a long day with a grand lead up to the zoo, they found the zoo had closed down over a year ago. Tears, a twenty minute drive and more tears later, Matt took her to the Dolphin Park and all was well. She fell asleep on the long ride home, and slept so hard that Matt successfully transferred her to her bed for a real nap at home! When she awoke, she denied the nap and said she was just pretending. All the while, I was at home with Genevieve, enjoying silence and time with my little baby, but wondering what was taking Matt and Jacinta so long.
Given the pink eye, you’d think I’d have had another socially isolating week, but I didn’t know I had it for a while. I took the girls swimming at the local pool. We went to playgroup, and also had a visit from my friend Trish. Trish is one of my only friends outside of playgroup. Her generosity, quirky sense of humour, and interest in singing, knitting, other cultures, and food just astound me. I am amazed that I could have found someone with whom I have so much in common in such a small town, not to mention she brings divine food gifts every time she visits.
The girls and I had a lovely day out at Nickolas and Sara’s house. Whenever we drive out to Taylor’s Arm, we stay all day. There is nothing in this town but a pub (albeit the most famous pub in Australia), a general store, a school, and no gas station (I found this out last time when Sara’s partner had to siphon gas out of his water pump to get me home). It’s always a lazy day, lounging around in Sara’s peaceful little home and backyard. Jacinta and Nickolas entertain themselves quite well. They are both stubborn, loud, focused little food lovers. It’s hilarious to watch them play. At one point Nickolas really wanted to play a game, inside, and was determined to convince Jess to join him. She was baking in the sand box. After his first attempt, he just joined her. Later on, he came back inside pleading with Sara to play a game with him. “Go and ask Jacinta to come inside, maybe she’ll be ready now.” Sara and I were inside watching Evie roll around, and after a few minutes heard a very loud ferocious “NOOOO!” We couldn’t determine which obnoxious child had done it, but when Nickolas came in, defeated, we knew. Jacinta was spoken to later about this tone, and eventually came in for a game. Their favourite game seems to be playing in blankets. It’s nice for Jacinta to have someone her own age to play with once in a while. Most often, she enjoys playing with her Pop who is home all week, her little sister, her daddy and I.
This weekend we did a few new things. We took a night hike down towards the wetlands. Jacinta loved playing with her flashlight. It was a new moon and the stars were bright. It was a special family outing, mostly because Jacinta is usually in bed by that time. On Saturday, we took the girls to the closest beach for a walk on the boardwalk. Jacinta brought her tricycle and rode further than she ever has. She’d park her little bike every twenty feet or so, and we’d climb on the painted rocks lining the boardwalk out into the ocean. We watched fishermen and women, and searched for fish in the deep sea below. Matt eventually coaxed Evie to sleep and earned a good nap against a rock once we finally made it to the swimming beach. Jacinta ran up and down the beach, in and out of the shallow waves, skipping happily, more carefree than I have seen her in a while. Eventually Genevieve woke up to join in the fun and crawl around in the sand. She didn’t want to miss out on a meal of sand! It was a beautiful spring day, not warm enough for Matt and I to swim, but just fine for our little girl.
My pink eye is easing off thanks to a combination of some salt water, vitamin C, Echinacea, Olive Leaf Extract, eyebright tea, rest, time and a lot of hand washing. You never know why or how your sicknesses are healed, which herb or drug did it or if it was just time, or maybe intention. But I suppose you just give thanks for wellness and hope that some of your efforts made a difference. Compared to the nasty pink eye I had six years ago, this was a dream. So I’ll give thanks. Another thing worthy of note is that today, Genevieve’s first little tooth broke through her gums, and she truly began crawling. Big day for a little baby!
Have a great week y’all. Hope you don’t catch pink eye through my email!
Peace,
Shana
Lately each night when asked what she wants to dream about or in the morning asked what she dreamt about, she will say Genevieve. Whether a three year old can consciously remember her dreams, I don’t know, but it is sweet to know what she wants in her dreams, in those precious sleepy hours of solitude.
Genevieve, our wakeful sweetheart, I bet she dreams about all the things she is missing. She dreams about being awake, and somehow wills herself awake, no matter how tired she is. Perhaps she dreams of touching the glasses on the kitchen island, of eating the things on her big sister’s plate, of crawling more than two steps at a time. She can cross the room very quickly now, doing the seal scoot. She has taken to chasing balloons. Balloons are rather difficult to hold onto for a baby and make for a good energy-burning toy. Yes, I know babies should not suck on balloons, I watch her well. She watches me well in return. She takes it all in: grabbing apple blossoms as I check on the apple tree, sticking her face in the dough as I knead dough, watching her big sister’s every move, and tasting everything she can get her little mouth on. This week’s foods include some oats, rice, beans, bananas, avocado, and again, orange vegetables. Evie’s meal times always begin with great anticipation, and end with urgent, tired fists rubbing mashed food into her eyes.
Jacinta’s meal times are also greatly anticipated. She is usually ready to move on to the next meal about one hour after she has finished the last. Thus, if I finally agree that it is time to prepare the food, she will not leave my side. She is ready to help. Her motivation is two-fold: chance of a “sneaky” taste and interest in cooking. It is salad season. Keith and Mary gave the “house garden” a make over and turned it into a beautiful, productive, accessible kitchen garden complete with herbs, lettuce, beets, spinach, onions, carrots, and plenty more. Its proximity inspires me to actually go out and pick things a few minutes before a meal. Jacinta and I have been picking small lettuce, spinach and beet leaves before meals, and she eats them without force! She even cried and had a tantrum because a turkey ate her salad the other day. What parents in their right mind would send a three year old to her room for wanting a salad so badly that she had a tantrum? That would be Matt and I, tantrums are tantrums, but it did feel strange.
I do realize that my daughter’s intensity about food is my fault, and I have to live with it as my penance. Poor Matt, so far there are two food psychos in the house. As I do, Jacinta makes hard line food choices and holds strong to them, come hell or high water. Her most recent food boundary was vegetables: she would only eat them raw. One night I decided I had had enough and would no longer make a separate raw plate for Jacinta. We sat it out. Matt helped us through our battle, with the final result being that Jacinta ate four stir fried veggies. I call them “half cooked,” it’s a pretend compromise. She feels like she’s winning because I say they are half raw, and I feel victory because my cooking options are greater.
Since my return, I have been using plain old supermarket grains. Poor me. Normally I order grains from a local biodynamic farm mill. Local…what is local? I suppose a five hour drive is not so local, but it is my best option for good quality flour, rice and oats. Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent book on eating as a “locavore” for a whole year gave me more insight into what is truly local. She also talks about purchasing those items that do not grow locally from fair trade organizations that pay their labourers a real wage and sustain the earth rather than deplete its resources. Anyhow, this week was the first time I hosted a delivery, and I was lucky enough to meet the farmer/driver. After he left I came straight inside and made some bread to celebrate real whole-wheat flour. Normal flour mills here in Australia must not have the capability to make anything but bromide bleached white flour, stripped of most of its nutrients. Typically, in making white flour, they strip the flour of all of the bran to make it easier to use in baking. It sounds insane, but after they bleach and strip the flour of the bran, they throw back a bit of bran into the flour and sell it as “wholemeal style flour.” This is the closest thing our supermarket has to whole-wheat flour. This reminds me of the way brown sugar is processed here and in America. You would think brown sugar would be less refined than white sugar, but it is not. They strip out a lot from the sugar cane to come up with white sugar, including molasses. After it has been stripped out, they pour some of the molasses back in, to make brown sugar. Oh, how I can stray from my point…the bread was lovely. Since I’ve been back I am trying to make all of my own bread. So far, so good.
It will take years before we can endeavour to eat mostly local, and I am at peace with this. I am learning how to garden, how to make the most of each season, and trying to find enough time to feed the plants so they can feed us. Matt is at a stand still in building our root cellar because the tractor he was using is broken. But frankly, I won’t grow enough food to store for a while. I’m still working on feeding us meal by meal, and not much of it is from the garden. Rightly so, we were away for three months. For now, it is an exciting, hopeful planting time, trusting that all of the weeding will have made way for beautiful produce. Keith helped with much of the hard labour, breaking up hard ground, digging out nasty roots and weeds, leaving the planting for Jess and I. We spent about an hour each day in the garden, planting chickpeas, kidney beans, beets, more carrots, arugula, watermelon, and pumpkin. We searched for strawberries, ate borage flowers and watched the fruit trees progress as they bud and burst into spring. The nectarine tree is covered in tiny fruits, but they may never grow to edible form, the tree is too young. We can only hope. Jacinta has learned that word, and she hopes very earnestly to be eating these nectarines soon!
Rather than working on the root cellar, Matt did odd jobs this week. He worked on rain gutters, painted the screen door and a few barge caps (wind breakers that look like rain gutters) for the top of the house. Jacinta, as usual, helped paint for a few minutes. Matt put a little girl handle on the screen door so she can let herself back in from playing outside, built a little stool for the girls and made an extra shelf in the kitchen. He installed the curtain rod and hung the curtains that Mary and I finally made for the bathroom. They curtains cover up our storage area, making the bathroom more like a bathroom and less like a shed. He put in a small concrete slab on the path from the driveway to our front door, complete with little girl handprints and turkey prints. Keith brought home a few truckloads of macadamia tree branches so they fired up the mulcher after a long vacation from loud machinery and dangerous flying sticks. Matt weed whacked the orchard once again, now we can see the poor little blueberry bush. His wrist has been giving him troubles, but he still tries to do some manual labour each day, whether it hurts or not, hoping the pain will just disappear. To give his wrist a rest, he went to court to enter his plea: not guilty for negligent driving (hitting the kangaroo back in February) and was given a court date in November. He finished the first subject in his new counselling course, and was quite proud of his efficiency. He did some writing, some more research on music publishing, and played with the girls.
I came down with pink eye and my cold flared up again, so Matt tried to occupy Jacinta as much as possible. Genevieve is just getting to the “I need momma” phase, so she’s harder to distract. Although Friday, I had a nap! These are hard to come by now, so they are treasured. Matt took Jacinta to Coff’s Harbour to shop and check out the zoo. They had a sneaky treat, this is a sure thing on an all day outing with Daddy. Although it was supposed to be a “secret,” she excitedly described the process of donut making to Mary and Keith. “They take the dough and drop it in the big little donut making thing, it goes up a big ramp and then drops into a big bowl.” For those of you that have heard Jacinta tell a story, you might imagine the energy building in her voice. You’d think she was going to burst by the time the donut made it to her mouth. “It was still warm, so warm we had to blow on it!” After a long day with a grand lead up to the zoo, they found the zoo had closed down over a year ago. Tears, a twenty minute drive and more tears later, Matt took her to the Dolphin Park and all was well. She fell asleep on the long ride home, and slept so hard that Matt successfully transferred her to her bed for a real nap at home! When she awoke, she denied the nap and said she was just pretending. All the while, I was at home with Genevieve, enjoying silence and time with my little baby, but wondering what was taking Matt and Jacinta so long.
Given the pink eye, you’d think I’d have had another socially isolating week, but I didn’t know I had it for a while. I took the girls swimming at the local pool. We went to playgroup, and also had a visit from my friend Trish. Trish is one of my only friends outside of playgroup. Her generosity, quirky sense of humour, and interest in singing, knitting, other cultures, and food just astound me. I am amazed that I could have found someone with whom I have so much in common in such a small town, not to mention she brings divine food gifts every time she visits.
The girls and I had a lovely day out at Nickolas and Sara’s house. Whenever we drive out to Taylor’s Arm, we stay all day. There is nothing in this town but a pub (albeit the most famous pub in Australia), a general store, a school, and no gas station (I found this out last time when Sara’s partner had to siphon gas out of his water pump to get me home). It’s always a lazy day, lounging around in Sara’s peaceful little home and backyard. Jacinta and Nickolas entertain themselves quite well. They are both stubborn, loud, focused little food lovers. It’s hilarious to watch them play. At one point Nickolas really wanted to play a game, inside, and was determined to convince Jess to join him. She was baking in the sand box. After his first attempt, he just joined her. Later on, he came back inside pleading with Sara to play a game with him. “Go and ask Jacinta to come inside, maybe she’ll be ready now.” Sara and I were inside watching Evie roll around, and after a few minutes heard a very loud ferocious “NOOOO!” We couldn’t determine which obnoxious child had done it, but when Nickolas came in, defeated, we knew. Jacinta was spoken to later about this tone, and eventually came in for a game. Their favourite game seems to be playing in blankets. It’s nice for Jacinta to have someone her own age to play with once in a while. Most often, she enjoys playing with her Pop who is home all week, her little sister, her daddy and I.
This weekend we did a few new things. We took a night hike down towards the wetlands. Jacinta loved playing with her flashlight. It was a new moon and the stars were bright. It was a special family outing, mostly because Jacinta is usually in bed by that time. On Saturday, we took the girls to the closest beach for a walk on the boardwalk. Jacinta brought her tricycle and rode further than she ever has. She’d park her little bike every twenty feet or so, and we’d climb on the painted rocks lining the boardwalk out into the ocean. We watched fishermen and women, and searched for fish in the deep sea below. Matt eventually coaxed Evie to sleep and earned a good nap against a rock once we finally made it to the swimming beach. Jacinta ran up and down the beach, in and out of the shallow waves, skipping happily, more carefree than I have seen her in a while. Eventually Genevieve woke up to join in the fun and crawl around in the sand. She didn’t want to miss out on a meal of sand! It was a beautiful spring day, not warm enough for Matt and I to swim, but just fine for our little girl.
My pink eye is easing off thanks to a combination of some salt water, vitamin C, Echinacea, Olive Leaf Extract, eyebright tea, rest, time and a lot of hand washing. You never know why or how your sicknesses are healed, which herb or drug did it or if it was just time, or maybe intention. But I suppose you just give thanks for wellness and hope that some of your efforts made a difference. Compared to the nasty pink eye I had six years ago, this was a dream. So I’ll give thanks. Another thing worthy of note is that today, Genevieve’s first little tooth broke through her gums, and she truly began crawling. Big day for a little baby!
Have a great week y’all. Hope you don’t catch pink eye through my email!
Peace,
Shana
posted by Matt & Shana & Jacinta & Genevieve Henry at
9:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home