Fruit bats and boot bats
Good evening loved ones A while ago Jacinta asked me “what season is it?” She was talking about fruit, which fruits were in season. This was in the slightly barren stretch between winter citrus and spring fruits. Yesterday on the way to the market out of nowhere she joyously called out from the backseat that, “It’s blueberry season!” It is springtime, the days are hot and the nights cool. Our two blueberry bushes together will probably produce about 20 blueberries. Yes, just 20. Nonetheless, when Jacinta may get to eat one or two every few days as they ripen, this makes them very exciting. It is also mulberry and strawberry season here at our place. Nearby there are peaches in season, so we are eating them every morning for breakfast. We have been waiting for stone fruits to arrive in the fruit shops: peaches, plums and nectarines. These are actually only available when in season. Their scarcity makes them taste even exotic when they finally arrive. Our most hopeful fruit tree, the nectarine has already lost most of its fruit to fruit bats. There are about sixteen remaining nectarines on the branches, counted by Jacinta, and they could be ready in about a month.
Although they will someday be the reason that all of our beautiful trees will wear ugly nets for protection, fruit bats are magnificent creatures. Coming from the US, my idea of a bat is a strange looking little creature that sleeps upside down, eats mosquitoes, and might one day get stuck in your attic. Here they are dinner entertainment for our family as we look out the kitchen window. Matt is always the first to spot a bat each evening. You’ll hear a funny screech, and shortly after see two feet of wingspan flap by. Once one flies by, the race is on for the figs. Then it’s easy to catch a glimpse even as the sunlight fades away into blackness. One night I sat out on a bench looking up at the moon watching them flap overhead. I wonder if in five years when my fruit trees mature and these bats are the bane of my existence, if then, I’ll still admire them so.
We have been calling Jacinta a fruit bat for a while now, given her love of all fruits (except papaya). Genevieve has tried a few fruits now: apples, pears, bananas, melons, strawberries, mulberries, pineapple, oranges, and peaches. How could you dislike any of those, really? The littlest Henry is fond of her fruits, but what she loves are shoes. Boots, sandals, slippers: anything you can wear on your feet, she wants them in her mouth. I’ve mentioned before that she pants like a little puppy dog when crawling in pursuit of desired objects or people, shoes are definitely the most coveted item. In our small little house, she has no trouble spotting the lonely shoes that one of us has forgotten to put on the rack. Within seconds she has the dirty shoes in her mouth, again, like a puppy as we lunge to take them away. It must be the rubber, I don’t know. We have taken to calling Evie the “boot bat” and Jacinta the “fruit bat.”
Joking the other day about what kind of bats we all were, I think I was a nut bat. That could have been an insult, maybe? Matt became the chocolate bat. In Matt’s great efforts to eat a little closer to home, he has been pre-making himself burgers to fry up for lunch, rather than running out to buy a sausage roll or a meat pie. He doesn’t buy much junk, he just munches on his mum’s stock of chips and chocolate cookies. Such is life living really close to your mum. Occasionally he must go out for a chocolate fix. In the past few weeks, the thought has crossed my mind that sugar is not the devil. I grew up with sugar, but started slowly weaning myself from overloads by the age of 20. Between 20 and 30, influenced by some big sugar demonizers, I progressively knocked refined sugar out of my diet, leaving fruit sugars, vegetable sugars, and honey. So it is possible to do it and still be very happy and healthy. Now I know. But getting along with the other humans and allowing your children the freedom to do as other children do is also nice.
I have made a serious conscious effort to chill out about food in the past six months. As a part of my “healing” I decided to make real American brownies, following the Betty Crocker recipe to the letter (this was Matt’s urging). Other than using whole wheat flour, I kept my word. They were rich and good, of course. Brownies have more sugar than flour in them, sugar shock could be the only potential problem. Jacinta rose to the occasion, crushing the chocolate, even standing at the stove carefully stirring the butter and chocolate as it melted. This was the first time I allowed her to hold the handle of a pot and stir, “like a momma.” She did the job much better than I could have, given her capacity to stick to one task and my tendency to flutter away and forget. No doubt she enjoyed licking the bowl. The best part was eating the finished product with a glass of milk: connecting with her American self.
Although I may be relaxing about sugar intake, I am still pretty energized to grow a lot of lovely healthy food here at home. We’ll see how many years it takes me to lose this energy. Right now in the garden we are harvesting lettuce, celery, strawberries, carrots, arugula (if I ever get the nerve to eat it), spinach and broad beans (I must figure out what to do with them). We had our first ripe cherry tomato, just one. It is still early. We are anxiously awaiting corn, potatoes, beans, beets, cucumbers, melons, basil, peppers and tomatoes. With our daily morning garden visits, we have been feeding the plants, watering, tying up tomatoes, cutting back overgrowth, hilling potatoes, weeding, and planting little bits here and there. Using the clay from our dam, we have started building a mudbrick fort with Keith. It will serve as a playpen for Evie and a hideout fort for Jacinta. It’s messy work, great fun though. Keith does most of the hard labour. Keeping Evie somewhat safe is rough next to a wet, mucky clay wall, thus we have gone back to simple gardening for a few days now. The gardens actually look well tended during a point in the season when things usually get out of control. Matt helps out with watering, weed whacking both gardens for us and staying with Evie if she ever falls asleep while gardening.
Genevieve works hard, I have to give her that. Her will to be involved in every part of the day keeps her awake even when her body says, “LET ME REST!” She has just figured out how to push a stool along the wood floor, walking with it as it slides. She’ll use any old thing to pull up on now, no matter how precarious. If it’s a sturdy item, she may hold on with one hand and lean down to pick up a toy. On her way back up, she will sometimes forget how hard the balance is to hold and just let go, wavering in the air with no hands for a few seconds and tumble to the ground. Oops! She concentrates quite intensely at times and at others, just forgets completely. If concentration would help her teeth come out any quicker, she would surely have them all out in a few weeks. For now she has two lovely little crooked bottom teeth, and is mining in her mouth for more. Whining and dining, chewing on different foods as teething toys. She is not so interested in the rubber teething toys. I suppose I wouldn’t go for them either if I could have a cob of corn instead. She’s not whining that much, mostly on the move, looking for a good toy, and ready for a laugh with her sister.
Jacinta likes to play “baby games” with Evie now, slapping their hands together, sometimes getting too rough but often she gets it right. Genevieve loves the attention, and Jacinta enjoys the reward of Evie’s smile and her infectious giggles. “Dancing time” is a new request we hear from Jacinta once in a while. She needs music, mom, and some things to twirl around. Genevieve sits on the floor and watches in awe while we dance. Typically I put on fast Irish or bluegrass music, but this week I put on an amazing classical guitar song and she enjoyed it just as much. We went up on our toes when the music went up high, and danced slowly with the tempo. Although Jacinta will not dance unless I join in, she will not dance “with” me. She moves to her own beat, but needs me there moving to my own beat as well.
Have you ever scoffed at a musical in its silly efforts to put a melody to the most mundane aspects of life? Well, at this point Jacinta’s life seems to be a musical. She sings little sentences she is thinking quietly, gradually getting louder as she realizes she may want to voice the thought. She sings about fruit, toys, dolls, anything. Most often she hums to herself though. This morning I had to stop and just listen to the beautiful buzz of our children in their first few minutes of the new day. It’s as if their voices, having been trapped in sleep for the last twelve hours were finally released, allowed to fly free. The girls were out in the lounge room while Matt and I were groggily, quietly submitting to the day doing little morning tasks. Genevieve was saluting her toys making quiet happy baby sounds while Jacinta sat humming and setting out blocks. This is good music.
Of course our girls hear a lot of music, but watching them process it is just amazing. A few times a week Matt will sit in Jacinta’s room for a half an hour with his guitar or mandolin and play as many songs as it takes to put her to sleep. I laughed the other night from a room away as she excitedly commented after each song, “I like that one daddy!” She must have had a nap that day, it took a few extra songs to do the trick.
In addition to singing the girls to sleep, Matt’s been busy studying and building the new veranda. He now has all of the cement footings in and a the beginning of the frame. Last Sunday he smashed his finger pretty badly between “a rock and a hard place,” but he’s back on track now.
Mostly Matt’s time has been spent on this computer, getting his website ready to launch. He finished yesterday, so my voice has been liberated and I can now open my big mouth. It is www.toomanyphotos.com and it is a service for people who have “too many photos” and no energy to deal with them. He makes short movies put to music, acting as a modern photo album. They are a quick easy way to share your photos with loved ones, or just to keep for your own enjoyment. He is also providing a service to groups of people who want to compile all of their pictures to share with each other. We have a movie for every month of life since Jacinta was born. Rather than a long video of her looking at giraffes in the zoo, it’s a whole bunch photos of everything we did that month put to a song that we liked at that time. It’s really neat to look back at what Jacinta was doing at eight months, and see how similar or different she and Evie look and act at each stage. I’m not meaning to advertise, but I suppose I should. We would like some business, but actually input from friends is what Matt is after right now. If you don’t mind having a look at the website, he had a hard time deciding on prices that would fit in with the current market for this service and wouldn’t mind comments.
There’s the news for this week. Would love to hear the newness in your life or perhaps about how lovely the same old routine feels in your life. I’m starting to enjoy routine these days. Love you all.
Peace,
Shana
Although they will someday be the reason that all of our beautiful trees will wear ugly nets for protection, fruit bats are magnificent creatures. Coming from the US, my idea of a bat is a strange looking little creature that sleeps upside down, eats mosquitoes, and might one day get stuck in your attic. Here they are dinner entertainment for our family as we look out the kitchen window. Matt is always the first to spot a bat each evening. You’ll hear a funny screech, and shortly after see two feet of wingspan flap by. Once one flies by, the race is on for the figs. Then it’s easy to catch a glimpse even as the sunlight fades away into blackness. One night I sat out on a bench looking up at the moon watching them flap overhead. I wonder if in five years when my fruit trees mature and these bats are the bane of my existence, if then, I’ll still admire them so.
We have been calling Jacinta a fruit bat for a while now, given her love of all fruits (except papaya). Genevieve has tried a few fruits now: apples, pears, bananas, melons, strawberries, mulberries, pineapple, oranges, and peaches. How could you dislike any of those, really? The littlest Henry is fond of her fruits, but what she loves are shoes. Boots, sandals, slippers: anything you can wear on your feet, she wants them in her mouth. I’ve mentioned before that she pants like a little puppy dog when crawling in pursuit of desired objects or people, shoes are definitely the most coveted item. In our small little house, she has no trouble spotting the lonely shoes that one of us has forgotten to put on the rack. Within seconds she has the dirty shoes in her mouth, again, like a puppy as we lunge to take them away. It must be the rubber, I don’t know. We have taken to calling Evie the “boot bat” and Jacinta the “fruit bat.”
Joking the other day about what kind of bats we all were, I think I was a nut bat. That could have been an insult, maybe? Matt became the chocolate bat. In Matt’s great efforts to eat a little closer to home, he has been pre-making himself burgers to fry up for lunch, rather than running out to buy a sausage roll or a meat pie. He doesn’t buy much junk, he just munches on his mum’s stock of chips and chocolate cookies. Such is life living really close to your mum. Occasionally he must go out for a chocolate fix. In the past few weeks, the thought has crossed my mind that sugar is not the devil. I grew up with sugar, but started slowly weaning myself from overloads by the age of 20. Between 20 and 30, influenced by some big sugar demonizers, I progressively knocked refined sugar out of my diet, leaving fruit sugars, vegetable sugars, and honey. So it is possible to do it and still be very happy and healthy. Now I know. But getting along with the other humans and allowing your children the freedom to do as other children do is also nice.
I have made a serious conscious effort to chill out about food in the past six months. As a part of my “healing” I decided to make real American brownies, following the Betty Crocker recipe to the letter (this was Matt’s urging). Other than using whole wheat flour, I kept my word. They were rich and good, of course. Brownies have more sugar than flour in them, sugar shock could be the only potential problem. Jacinta rose to the occasion, crushing the chocolate, even standing at the stove carefully stirring the butter and chocolate as it melted. This was the first time I allowed her to hold the handle of a pot and stir, “like a momma.” She did the job much better than I could have, given her capacity to stick to one task and my tendency to flutter away and forget. No doubt she enjoyed licking the bowl. The best part was eating the finished product with a glass of milk: connecting with her American self.
Although I may be relaxing about sugar intake, I am still pretty energized to grow a lot of lovely healthy food here at home. We’ll see how many years it takes me to lose this energy. Right now in the garden we are harvesting lettuce, celery, strawberries, carrots, arugula (if I ever get the nerve to eat it), spinach and broad beans (I must figure out what to do with them). We had our first ripe cherry tomato, just one. It is still early. We are anxiously awaiting corn, potatoes, beans, beets, cucumbers, melons, basil, peppers and tomatoes. With our daily morning garden visits, we have been feeding the plants, watering, tying up tomatoes, cutting back overgrowth, hilling potatoes, weeding, and planting little bits here and there. Using the clay from our dam, we have started building a mudbrick fort with Keith. It will serve as a playpen for Evie and a hideout fort for Jacinta. It’s messy work, great fun though. Keith does most of the hard labour. Keeping Evie somewhat safe is rough next to a wet, mucky clay wall, thus we have gone back to simple gardening for a few days now. The gardens actually look well tended during a point in the season when things usually get out of control. Matt helps out with watering, weed whacking both gardens for us and staying with Evie if she ever falls asleep while gardening.
Genevieve works hard, I have to give her that. Her will to be involved in every part of the day keeps her awake even when her body says, “LET ME REST!” She has just figured out how to push a stool along the wood floor, walking with it as it slides. She’ll use any old thing to pull up on now, no matter how precarious. If it’s a sturdy item, she may hold on with one hand and lean down to pick up a toy. On her way back up, she will sometimes forget how hard the balance is to hold and just let go, wavering in the air with no hands for a few seconds and tumble to the ground. Oops! She concentrates quite intensely at times and at others, just forgets completely. If concentration would help her teeth come out any quicker, she would surely have them all out in a few weeks. For now she has two lovely little crooked bottom teeth, and is mining in her mouth for more. Whining and dining, chewing on different foods as teething toys. She is not so interested in the rubber teething toys. I suppose I wouldn’t go for them either if I could have a cob of corn instead. She’s not whining that much, mostly on the move, looking for a good toy, and ready for a laugh with her sister.
Jacinta likes to play “baby games” with Evie now, slapping their hands together, sometimes getting too rough but often she gets it right. Genevieve loves the attention, and Jacinta enjoys the reward of Evie’s smile and her infectious giggles. “Dancing time” is a new request we hear from Jacinta once in a while. She needs music, mom, and some things to twirl around. Genevieve sits on the floor and watches in awe while we dance. Typically I put on fast Irish or bluegrass music, but this week I put on an amazing classical guitar song and she enjoyed it just as much. We went up on our toes when the music went up high, and danced slowly with the tempo. Although Jacinta will not dance unless I join in, she will not dance “with” me. She moves to her own beat, but needs me there moving to my own beat as well.
Have you ever scoffed at a musical in its silly efforts to put a melody to the most mundane aspects of life? Well, at this point Jacinta’s life seems to be a musical. She sings little sentences she is thinking quietly, gradually getting louder as she realizes she may want to voice the thought. She sings about fruit, toys, dolls, anything. Most often she hums to herself though. This morning I had to stop and just listen to the beautiful buzz of our children in their first few minutes of the new day. It’s as if their voices, having been trapped in sleep for the last twelve hours were finally released, allowed to fly free. The girls were out in the lounge room while Matt and I were groggily, quietly submitting to the day doing little morning tasks. Genevieve was saluting her toys making quiet happy baby sounds while Jacinta sat humming and setting out blocks. This is good music.
Of course our girls hear a lot of music, but watching them process it is just amazing. A few times a week Matt will sit in Jacinta’s room for a half an hour with his guitar or mandolin and play as many songs as it takes to put her to sleep. I laughed the other night from a room away as she excitedly commented after each song, “I like that one daddy!” She must have had a nap that day, it took a few extra songs to do the trick.
In addition to singing the girls to sleep, Matt’s been busy studying and building the new veranda. He now has all of the cement footings in and a the beginning of the frame. Last Sunday he smashed his finger pretty badly between “a rock and a hard place,” but he’s back on track now.
Mostly Matt’s time has been spent on this computer, getting his website ready to launch. He finished yesterday, so my voice has been liberated and I can now open my big mouth. It is www.toomanyphotos.com and it is a service for people who have “too many photos” and no energy to deal with them. He makes short movies put to music, acting as a modern photo album. They are a quick easy way to share your photos with loved ones, or just to keep for your own enjoyment. He is also providing a service to groups of people who want to compile all of their pictures to share with each other. We have a movie for every month of life since Jacinta was born. Rather than a long video of her looking at giraffes in the zoo, it’s a whole bunch photos of everything we did that month put to a song that we liked at that time. It’s really neat to look back at what Jacinta was doing at eight months, and see how similar or different she and Evie look and act at each stage. I’m not meaning to advertise, but I suppose I should. We would like some business, but actually input from friends is what Matt is after right now. If you don’t mind having a look at the website, he had a hard time deciding on prices that would fit in with the current market for this service and wouldn’t mind comments.
There’s the news for this week. Would love to hear the newness in your life or perhaps about how lovely the same old routine feels in your life. I’m starting to enjoy routine these days. Love you all.
Peace,
Shana
posted by Matt & Shana & Jacinta & Genevieve Henry at
11:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home