Chickens!

After more than two years of being chickenless, we now have 4 new young birds!

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There are three white ones and one brown one.

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Georgia calls hers Chelsea, whilst Matt calls his Alex. The children are understandably very excited to have chickens again!

Over the past few weekends, a sturdy and safe chook house has been built. It is fully enclosed. We have had too many dramas with quolls to risk anything less secure.

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The hen house is built from a kit shed that measures about 2x2m. We have laid saw dust on the floor. Roosting perches and laying boxes will line the walls. A small opening will lead into the enclosed outdoor run, which we can access through a door at the back. the outside bit isn’t quite ready, so for now they are cosy in the shed, whilst they settle into their new home.

Hopefully the quolls won’t be a problem now. We are looking forward to collecting eggs one day, when these (supposedly female) chickens are older.

For now, the children have some more interesting animals to watch, care for and learn about!

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Treechange Tuesday: toilets

Yes, well, probably not a title you thought you would see on my blog.

We have two of these toilets. In hindsight, we only need one. It’s a really good choice for our main toilet because we did not need to worry about plumbing in another basin in ‘the powder room,’ and of course the water saving concept is excellent. However, in an ensuite, it might not be the best choice. It’s hardly necessary. You’re close enough to the sink to wash your hands so you don’t really need the fancy loo. Again, however, the water saving option is a good one.

With these toilets, I wonder about the long term result of using soap over the cistern. Surely the soap will eventually leave scum inside the cistern. As yet there have not been any dramas with the toilets, although guests always ask, without fail, if the tap will turn itself off.

Yes. It will.

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30/1/12 – 5/2/12

30/1/12: rain! After such a dry few weeks, it was delightful to have such a huge amount of rain. The pond that had dried up has been filled to overflowing! Our garden is rejoicing with its beautiful, long drink, but the weather is not very conducive to drying the washing or enabling little children to run amok outdoors!
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31/1/12: op shopping. I got this cute plate and this gorgeous, lovely coat. Just to splash a bit of lovely bright vintage in my home.

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1/2/12: it’s February, and what a cool date we have today. One of my highlights was having a cup of tea with a friend. As our sons played happily, and Georgia and her friend (who had slept over) played happily, and with Elora at Childcare, we were able to have uninterrupted conversations (mostly). I felt so normal after that, being able to sit and chat, without running around so much, and enjoying the company of a truly awesome girl.

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2/2/12: I had the opportunity to have a day to myself today, because Elora was at Childcare and the other two children went to play at their friends’ house. It was weird. In fact, as I drove away after saying goodbye to my children, I felt a bit ill. I just wanted to cry. My tummy was in knots and I had that horrible feeling that I had left something behind (because, of course, I had)! So after lunch with my lovely husband, and a few errands (which included picking up cupboard doors for my new cupboards and some op shopping), I had actually started to relax, and I spent some time outside on the deck, in the sunshine, drinking a hot cup of tea and wondering what that noise was (it’s called silence. Have you heard it?). Of course, Elora, as she ran up to me, squealing with delight on seeing me when i picked her up from childcare, really made my day.

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3/2/12: with Elora in Childcare for the day, I had time with just Georgia and Matthew. We went into Hobart for the day, after picking up school books and school uniforms. School uniforms! Matthew’s school uniform! For a while, Matthew has been asking about going to the museum. It was wonderful to have a leisurely, relaxed explore through the museum, even if it is undergoing a lot of renovation and is partly closed. The Antarctica exhibition is brilliant: very tactile and great for young hands and minds. I loved having a picnic in the park with my two oldest children, and I loved watching them have so much fun. It was a wonderful day. A great way to spend one of the last days of their summer holiday!

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4/2/12: what a great day. Saturday. Sunshine. Summer. The type of day that your children love to run around in. Washing dries quickly and smells fresh. Cupboards and chicken pen are built. Eagles soar above our heads gracefully and magnificently. I will miss them when they travel north when the weather gets warmer. Another 6m of shelving is put into the pantry, making it a spacious storage place indeed. Saturday: BBQ dinner with wonderful friends and wonderful wine; children run about happily. Fresh blueberries are squished on the boards of our new deck. Dogs happily eat leftovers. We talk and laugh, late into the night and wake the next day with a headache.

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5/2/12: such a quiet day, with my firstborn spending the weekend with a friend. I spent the afternoon outside with Matt and Ella, just pottering around, picking flowers, exploring the vege garden, watching clouds, playing in the cubby house and watching the chook pen get built. It has been such a marvelous summer; I don’t want it to end.

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Fabric Friday

I confess that I once thought that I could never be very interested in boys’ fashion. I thought that boys’ clothes were very boring, compared to the dresses and things that girls wear.

How wrong I was, back then in my 20s. On the contrary, boys’ clothes are just as, if not more interesting than girls’ clothing. Just look through any sewing book and you will see that clothes for boys are often highly detailed and elaborate pieces of work. They involve more work than a simple skirt or dress because they usually have contrasting pieces of fabric detailing all over the place.

I also never thought I could like skulls and pirates or shooting machines. Or swords. Or boy shows like Ben10. I was obviously living in some kind of weird, sheltered bubble, to be so blind. I like all that stuff (not so much the guns, but neither does Matthew for that matter).

Anyway, my fabric choice today is this piece of pirate cotton that I bought at Spotlight. I made Matthew a pair of pants, using my favourite pattern from my favourite kids’ clothing pattern book.

I have 30cm leftover to make other things with. I only needed 70cm for the shorts. I tend to overbuy!

I think that stripes are fabulous for boys – and girls (though I lean more towards florals for my girls) – and I like the colours used: blue, white, red and black match nicely.

For Matt’s shorts, I used a red fabric to complement the pirate fabric for the cuffs and pockets. Whilst the colour was a great choice, the material was not: it is polyester. It slipped about in my machine and it was difficult to sew straight. It has rubbed up during machine washing. I could unpick and replace the red panels, but I won’t. Matt loves these shorts and wears them a lot, usually with his pirate or robot t-shirt (which I think are very cool indeed!).

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Treechange Tuesday: sheds

Writing about this topic has got Monte and I talking about how we would do things differently. Some days we don’t think that we would change very much; other days we talk of changing many things! Thank you, Andrew, for inspiring me to discuss this topic!

Most recently, MG and I talked about how we would build sheds first, if we were ever again to embark on such an adventure. We have recently built two sheds and a chook house on the west side of our house. It would not have been difficult to build them earlier on. We should have had the slab made for the sheds at the same time as the house slab. We should also possibly have made our land cut a bit bigger, in order to accommodate bigger sheds.

Not having sheds made our building process a bit more awkward. Storing the straw bales, for example, was done in friends’ sheds (thank you, Ady, for your help, and Wally and Simon, for your sheds!). Monte’s tools and so forth were stored all over the place. We had a bus once, down by the cabin, which served as a shed, but having a shed at the house site is something that we really should have done much earlier. And we feel silly for not doing it earlier.

In a related topic, our property came with an unassembled American barn, plans and a council permit. We still haven’t built that, although we plan to, one day. We will put it down the hill, by the cabin. In hindsight, we should have built that in the first year, when our plans were being drawn up and we were getting building permits and so forth.

So many of our decisions have been based on finances. When we moved here, our original goal was to build our home without aquiring a loan. Part of our goal has been to be mortgage free. Therefore, we made a few sacrifices early on. Now we are kicking ourselves gently, as we realize some of the things we could have achieved.

The worst advice we were ever given was: “never go without something just because of money.” Sure enough, we ignored this snippet of craziness. However, sheds like ours are not overly expensive, and we should have built them earlier.

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Matthew was so little when we moved here, and he was such a great helper during the build. You can imagine that the process was a little boy’s dream! Here he is, helping us mark our our house site. That was such an exciting time for us! Sometimes I look at part of the house and reminisce about an aspect of the build. I like the feeling that so much of our hands and heads went into our home.

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29/1/12

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One enormous zucchini was put to good use in some relish. It was such an easy thing to cook in the slowcooker.

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28/1/12

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Several awesome things happened today, but my highlight was spending a few hours with Georgia in her room whilst Elora slept. We chatted. She sewed. I read craft books. She brought me afternoon tea. I could not get over how grown up she was being. I had flash backs to when she was born. Has time really gone so quickly? She is awesome.

Another highlight was watching wedge-tailed eagles soaring in the massive expanse of sky in the valley. They are majestic and graceful and when I see them my heart fills with joy.

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27/1/12

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Nobody likes a show off. But we read blogs anyway. I bought this dress – it’s a size XS. That’s a big deal for me. Last Christmas I bought an XL dress (I took it in so I can still wear it).

I love it. I’d wear it with leggings or tights and boots. I have my eye on a swing cost which would go perfectly with it, with a bright scarf…

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26/1/12

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Our Australia day BBQ dinner was awesome! Bbqd abalone with carrot and beetroot salad – and chips.

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Australia Day 2012

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Because it’s not Australia day without rubber thongs (even if they are your husband’s)

Matthew asked me what Australia day means. We had just sung the national anthem at the kitchen bench, having just sliced some cheese to snack on (we don’t like Vegemite, sadly). I said it’s a day we feel proud to be Australian, and that we are lucky to live in this country.

However, these emotion-driven responses didn’t satisfy my curious son, and he asked, ‘but why do we have Australia day?’ I explained that a man called Captain Cook landed in Australia and met the Aboriginal people who were already here because they were here first. Georgia told us some things that she had learnt at school and then I went and got the cricket set from the laundry.

What ensued was a family game of cricket. Being a big portion of my childhood memories, I’d like my babies to remember summer games of cricket too.

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I tell you what: we’re grateful for the fielding efforts of our old kelpie, d’Artagnan. She’s awesome, even if she does sneak in a few extra chews on the ball sometimes. Ella and Jac tottered off together, rolling in the sandpit and the grass (those two are awesome together).

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I think, for Australia day, you need to wear your rubber thongs for cricket.

Giving the children an Australia flag to flap about was more or less a good decision – nobody was poked in the eye at least, and they seemed to enjoy it!

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For our feast, we cooked a BBQ, of course, with good old’ snags, bread and sauce, as well as abalone! We ate chips and salad (beetroot, carrot, onion, baby spinach, avocado) and sipped some brut cuvĂ©e and/or lemonade made in the soda stream.

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Dinner! Delicious: abalone sliced and fried with butter, garlic and mushroom in some oil on the side burner of the BBQ. I grated up the goodies for the salad (refrained from using zucchini, sadly).

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A little bit of cheese (pickled onion vintage cheddar) and sparkly.

I spoke a bit with the children about what makes us proud to be in Australia. We didn’t go into too much depth. At their age their world is the one existing in our home, where they are safe and happy, and I am more than happy to keep it that way for them for as long as I can.

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Hills hoist. I am grateful for this Aussie icon. I think it’s re-erection in our backyard has made our yard complete. And my laundry jobs even more enjoyable (I love doing the laundry!).

Happy Australia day. What makes you feel proud (or grateful) to be an Aussie?

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