Going Bush

"Look at all the school kids" came the cry from the back seat as we pulled into the Information Centre carpark. Our kids - a dozen of them - gathered picnic basket and jackets, big kids escorting little ones across to the picnic table, past The Other Group.

We eyed them up.
They eyed us up.

We decided they weren't school kids at all, but a Homeschool Group.
They probably decided the same about us.

There are some things that give it away.

Firstly, there's usually a Mama with a baby in a sling.
There will be toddlers as well as teens.
Lunches are carried in icecream containers and baskets instead of little individual lunchboxes.
There's often a mother off to one side "having a word" with one of the youngsters.
There's always someone called Zechariah or Ezekiel, and he's usually called a few times.
The baby in the sling will be lucky to have socks on - definitely won't be wearing shoes.

We exchanged friendly smiles.

They were there to be Bush Detectives.
We were there because we two families had got together for lunch and some board games, and decided at the last minute to pack sandwiches and make the most of the break in the weather with a walk through the bush.
We didn't have any worksheets, but L6 darted about reading the plant identification signs. M4 and T3 noticed lots and lots and lots of "fellen down trees". We all stopped to *listen*. Conversation raced from Maori myths to pirates to church growth to blogs.

The rain started to fall as we got back to the car!

Kitchen Makeover

We fell off the healthy eating wagon. It's not like we jumped....it wasn't intentional....as the truck slowed down we didn't notice the tailgate had dropped and we slowly slipped over the edge. We bounced along on the ground for a while, occasionally noticing the view was not quite the same, but I don't think we were really aware.

This morning I woke up to the fact that lots of little things have slipped, and lots of little things multiplied together become A Big Thing.

So I'm about to drag together all the little things from the dusty corners of the kitchen and the even dustier nooks and crannies in my head, and Make An Action Plan.

It all started over a year ago when the oat groats we got from our organic farm were full of husks. For a few weeks we tried all sorts of things - cooking with husks and trying to ignore them (impossible), cooking with husks and picking them out, picking out husks after flaking but before cooking, soaking and seeing if the husks would rise to the top of the water (they didn't), grinding the oats into flour (the grain mill got plugged....every time), dehusking the oats before flaking (now there's a job for monkeys).....and before we knew it, we started buying "shop oats"....just once or twice, to mix in with the husky oats.....then three or four times......then to eat just on their own...meaning we still have an almost-25-kg bag of oat groats sitting in its bin in the garage.
When you get out of the habit of flaking your oats, soaking them and cooking them up in the morning to make a nutritious porridge, you start thinking about other cereals (especially when you are actually stopping in the cereal aisle at the supermarket to buy oats!)...and so now we have a big batch of muesli sitting in the pantry. To be fair to ourselves, we did make it....but it doesn't change the fact that porridge is Better For You (and much easier on the wallet).
So I think if I sorted the Husky Oat problem, we would be well on the road to recovery.
That is, after we get rid of the white flour that somehow found its way into the cupboard. That came on the heels of wholemeal flour.....you see it's a slippery slope; you stop grinding your own flour (for a not entirely ignoble reason - the farm ran out of wheat) and resort to buying shop flour....when you pick up a bag of wholemeal, it doesn't seem quite so bad to then grab just one bag of white and before you know it the kids are saying "oh I like white bread"
So the shop flour needs to go - I've emailed the farm to see if they've got any more wheat in stock yet. And if not, I'll bite the bullet and buy it from our local organic shop who charges an arm and a leg (pity he won't take tummy rolls or fat from the hips instead!)
And with no white flour, the kids may lose their interest in making chocolate chip cookies and so the big bag of white sugar may last a bit longer...then it can be replaced by organic dehydrated cane juice instead and if said kids want to do any more baking they can choose something from Nourishing Traditions.
Perhaps I should remove the recipe books from the kitchen - except for my well-worn copy of NT, of course.

Now why is it that making lacto-fermented cabbage does not hold the same appeal as making chocolate brownie? If I could just work that one out, then I could convince the kids to take over making the pickles each week and we would be bouncing around with a renewed zing! In the meantime we can pile up our sourdough bread with the pickles in the fridge. In the recipe book it says they improve with age - I wonder if the author had twelve months in mind?

Thankfully, dinner hasn't been such a problem. We're very much in the habit of roasting a chook or a leg of lamb and then making soup from the bones the next night and stretching it with lots of garlic and chilli to do a third night...and it's been very soupy kind of weather recently. I'll go easy on myself and just continue the same ol same ol. One day I'll become an Interesting Chef (or not).

Taking the time to Stop and Think was all I needed to get back on track. No need for an action plan. I'll just go and tell the kids we're back to porridge with yoghurt or cream or butter-n-salt for breakfast, eggs and sourdough bread for lunch with as many lacto-fermented veges as they can eat, and if they want to bake, I choose the cookbook! I might even insist on the drop of cod-liver-oil and a half-cup of beet kvass before breakfast each morning. You're sure to hear their groans when I mention that one.

give us this day our daily bread

We have been through a many-week-stint of purchasing French sticks after church on Sundays.....so much so that it has reached Habit Status.
Why have we ended up doing this?
We started the year buying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with hydrogenated oil (and if I wasn't sure, I just didn't buy it - I still don't know about French sticks, but my suspicions are......well, obviously they are merely suspicions, and certainly of less consequence than my principles!)
We make perfectly good bread ourselves. Much better even than store-bought-fluff-that-leaves-you-hungry-in-spite-of-eating-twice-as-much-as-usual.
And to top it all off, we end up coming home with a plastic bag which is really not good for anything other carrying French sticks in - and we all know what I think of that!
What is a girl to do about it?
a) stop buying French bread until all ingredients are identified
b) take plastic bag to church in anticipation of the spontaneous bakery-drive-by on the way home
c) buy two linen tea towels at an op shop while you're waiting for KnitWorld to open (I wouldn't have been early if the clock in the car hadn't been running six minutes fast, so you could say that it was the car's fault that I ended up in a situation that lent itself to making an unnecessary purchase - oh, where HAVE my principles gone?)....then you come home and turn them into French Stick Carrying Bags.

By the way, that's not French bread in the bag. That's perfectly good homemade sourdough bread. Do you want to know how to make it? It's easy-peasy. You just need flour, water, salt and a big dollop of patience. Good things take time.

Mix together two cups each of warm water and flour. Cover with a cloth and set aside somewhere warm until it's frothy (could take a few days or as little as a few hours, depending what organisms you've got floating round in the atmosphere....stirring it every day is a good idea if you can remember to)

Take out two cups of this gloop (which is also known as a starter by Expert Bread Makers...you'll see I call it gloop). Feed the rest of the gloop with a bit more water and flour and put it in the fridge if you're not going to want it for a few days (which you won't, because you've already taken some out to use now). When you're ready to make more bread you can omit this first step and just take your gloop container out of the fridge and join the recipe at this point. (But before I go on, let me tell you that from here on in it's really hard to go wrong. Your gloop will appreciate being fed a bit of flour and water every few days if you're not baking, but it's not absolutely essential. You might think it's getting temperamental if it develops a black layer on top - this is called hooch - really, truly, it is. But don't worry - there's nothing wrong with hooch - just stir it in to your gloop and away you go. In fact, you can stir your gloop whenever you think of it if you like.)

So you've got your two cups of gloop in a big bowl. Add two and a half cups of warm water and four cups of flour (I use organic ground-at-home whole wheat, but you can use what you've got) Leave it to go frothy (this is where the patience bit comes in). You can leave it anywhere from 8-24 hours without causing any damage; and you can stir it if you want to. When it's nice-n-bubbly, add a teaspoon of salt and another four cups (more or less, depending on the humidity and temperature and type of flour and which apron you're wearing) until the dough is not sticky. Knead for about ten minutes (or longer if you get distracted and realise you're pampering the dough rather than kneading it).
Put the dough in a greased bowl, cover with a damp cloth and let it rise in a warm place for a few hours - you'll have to be patient to wait for it to get at least fifty percent bigger than it was. Trust me, it will happen and it's nothing short of a miracle.
Split the dough into two loaves and pop them into greased bread tins (or I guess you could just plop them on an oven tray if you don't have tins).

But you're not ready to bake yet! I told you, you'd have to be patient! You need to wait for them to rise for another few hours (one would be a bare minimum......five would not be too long....I'm not sure about longer as I haven't waited any longer than that).

Preheat the oven to 200*C and bake for about 40 minutes (or a bit longer if it doesn't sound hollow when you tap the bottom of the loaf).

Once it's cooked, you still can't eat it though. You won't be able to cut it tidily for another hour.
But once you cut it and smother it with butter you'd better get that gloop container out of the fridge and start again, because these loaves are not going to last long!!!

I realise it sounds like a massive long drawn-out process, but really it's not. Yes, it takes a lot of time...but most of that time you can be weeding the garden, making preserves, darning your socks, cleaning the toilet, sleeping, reading War and Peace, visiting your friends, feeding the poor...oh yes, feeding....the bread.....it only takes about 15 minutes hands-on time, and that includes grinding the flour. Give it a go!

PS this is the point in my blog-life that I realise I am actually writing TO you...it has turned FROM me putting my ideas into a plastic box TO a conversation with you (well, with those of you who comment and talk to me in real life and email me). I guess you're the ones I feel I'm writing to - there are plenty of lurkers according to my Stat Counter, and I suppose I'm writing to you too, just I don't know who you are!

every time a coconut!

Over the past few years we ahve become ardent believers in the healing powers of coconut oil! Every time someone has had the vaguest suggestion of a cold Father Bear has dosed them up with extra organic coconut oil - and apart from our sickly M4, it has worked every time!
We use it liberally in cooking as well as coconut cream and dessicated coconut too.
Two weeks ago our 10l box ran out.
This week we are all - without exception - suffering from heavy heavy colds, runny noses, coughs and some lost voices!
We raced to the organic shop and bought a small jar of the liquid gold ($90 for 10l - but $8 for not even 200g) to tide us over to when the Big Box comes in. We are slowly coming right, but it's definitely worth nipping this type of thing in the bud early on.


Are we scared of dying of heart failure due to consuming this saturated fat?
No, and while we're not ordinarily conspiracy theorists, this is one topic that does have a scientifically dodgey past.
Can I encourage you to get hold of Mary Enig's book "Eat Fat, Lose Fat" for the inside scoop!
And if you can't get hold of that, you could always google Weston A Price Foundation and read some of the cholestrol and fat articles. You just might be surprised.

it's quiet round here

I've got no energy to climb up on any soapboxes today!
And even if I were able to do so, I've got no voice!

I've noticed all the children are talking quieter! I didn't think I was that loud!!!

Racing round my head are ideas for our travelling website......thoughts about a house auction Father Bear is threatening to bid at on Saturday.......musings about another house we were shown but was withdrawn from the market and seemed pretty ideal.....travel plans.....a couple of conversations I'm taking part in on a discussion board......what's for dinner....wild dreams of moving to Simpler Times Village and doing something like this (and we're not even farmers....at all....not even a little bit)......wondering why J11 has taken himself off to bed three afternoons out of the last four......more travel ideas....all topped off with an itching to scrapbook and crochet and knit and sew all at once!!!!

Blogging from the hospital bed

Well, it turns out that paranoid mother was quite right to be concerned about that nasty wasp sting. L6 and I have just had three nights free accomodation at Starship Children's Hospital. It seemed silly to be admitted for a wee sting, but on the other hand, his arm was red and swollen right up to the armpit! So he did need a good dose of ABs.

Within half an hour of arriving, we had filled out forms, had initial observations done and been whisked away to the weelchair storage room to isolate us from everyone else who had not been in contact with measles last week. This room was to be home until 10pm! For five hours we read poorly-written stories, devised games with the ubiquitous-cut-in-half-out-of-date-calendars (two months kept us going for two hours!), we counted ceiling tiles, hopped across the room, played "I Spy" and even fell asleep (only to be woken for x-rays)
Let me tell you about that "I Spy" game. It was "something beginning with F". After exhausting all the obvious possiblities (and there aren't too many in a windowless carpetted room full of wheelchairs and one curtain) and ascertaining there were no hidden fish or foxes in the room, L6 furnished me with a clue. "It's in your mouth". Well I don't have freckles on my tongue and I wasn't gnawing on my fingers, so I had to give in. "FROAT!" How could I have missed it?
We went back to drawing circles around the odd numbers on the calendar and squares around the evens.
An hour after being seen by a pedeatrician, L6 wanted to know why the doctor was going to "whack" his infection and would it hurt? He also needed assuring about the other doc who had promised to "knock it on the head"!! Poor boy! As if they were not concerns enough, the nurse who handed him 5ml of Pamol and an iceblock at "bedtime" (7pm)told him that was dinner. To a grumbly tummy, it was a good start, but it did not count as dinner, especially being seven hours since lunch! As it turned out, she was right! By the time we got up to his room, bed was beckoning stronger than his stomach. And he smiled as he told me I could do the 40 Hour Famine if they didn't bring me breakfast!

In the morning we were given a couple of hours to wander down to the domain with a bag of crusts. Did you know sparrows can fly through the air to catch crumbs in mid-flight? Did you know pigeons are really slow at getting anything? But they hum. Not like the seagulls - they squawk at whatever gets near the bread! And the ducks we were trying to feed? Well, they weren't much quicker than the pigeons. Watching these birds reminded L6 of the pukekos we watched one day - they take a piece of bread and then pass it on to another bird in the group after they've had a mouthful. We call them sharing birds.
When the bread ran out we walked up to the museum and walked through the revolving doors just for the fun of it. We wandered back to the Wintergarden and perched on the edge of the ponds watching the fish for ages. Mrs E broke the spell with news that she was bringing her four cherubs in to visit so we raced back to our isolation room. (Thanks for the puzzle - L6 ended up doing it more times than I could count! And thanks for the food too - I'll do the 40 Hour Famine some other time!)

That afternoon we were moved to another ward. And somwhere in the middle of the move, unbeknown to me until we were discharged and I read the discharge papers, our "contact with measles" turned into "contact with chicken pox" and we were no longer in isolation. We got to share a room with a boy who had a lovely large family who stayed until 10:30 at night! With that many people in the room, you'd have thought they wouldn't have needed extra media, but we were treated to both Samoan radio and TVNZ simultaneously. I had my first exposure to Australian soaps, The Simpsons and...yes....even Gray's Anatomy (sorry, all my dear friends who love it - what's the deal? what's so good about it? Maybe you need to watch it more than once!) Anyway, once the whanau disappeared, we tried to grab some shut-eye. Difficult between the two-hourly wakings for goodness-only-knows-what-needs-to-be-done-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-hospital, emergency helicopter landings right outside and the snortings of the poor lad who couldn't breathe - as we tried to go to sleep, I kept holding my breath, waiting for him to take one of his own!

In the morning L6 discovered there is such a thing as "morning television".
Morning tv is much worse than after hours tv! Believe me!
We learnt that ricies are good for you and will keep you full of energy all day long.
We learnt that if you help someone you will get a McDonalds Happy Meal.
We learnt that if you're a girl you can have your own electronic diary that your little sister can't get into. Lovely eh!
To top it all off, I actually tuned into the lyrics on one of the kids' shows....it was all over before I could grab a pencil to record faithfully....but it went something like this:
decide what's right for you
you do what you want to - it's so much fun
march to the beat of your own drum

I was glad we were to be going home later that day!

We were literally walking off the ward having been discharged, with Dadda waiting downstairs for us, when L6 said "It's getting itchy again" Sure enough, the hand was reddening and swelling again. We were not allowed to leave. Another lure and more antibiotics were on the cards....and another blood test too.....I had read the discharge papers and pointed out the little problems with it seeing as we were being readmitted - L6 was a boy and not a girl, and he had been exposed to measles, not chicken pox. The staff went into overdrive with the Measles Information and we were back in isolation again, they were busy ringing infectious diseases personnel, taking blood and calling the lab for results. They were happy for us to go out for a walk while they tried to get to the bottom of the mis-communication. We wandered down to Queen Street and caught a bus just because we could!
By the time we got back we had a new room mate who had a sausage stuck in his man-made oesphagus, which relies on gravity to get his food down! The things you learn! Someone asked me if we were schooling while we were there......I asked he how we could possibly not learn. She still wanted to know if we were "really schooling" and I realised again how much learning is just part of life for us now.

what was it again? something beginning with f!!!!!!


postscript: discharged this morning......five more days of oral antibiotics to go......when they've finished the sling can come off......as for me, I've never done so much knitting in three days in my whole life!!!!!

doctor! doctor!

Yesterday L6 was racing a car around the dining room table when he put his hand down on a wasp. Said wasp expressed its disapproval by stinging that left hand of our left-handed boy!
Medical assisstance was rendered and L6 returned happily to play.
A new day dawned this morning and with it came a red and swollen hand. Attached to the end of the hand was a sad boy with puffy eyes swelling out of a pale face. Breakfast was served with a good dose of antihistamine. But a couple of hours later the redness was spreading, the fingers had swollen so much he could hardly bend them, he was sporting a fever and was now even sadder, not to mention paler. So we toddled off to the doctor.
Add to the antihistamine some antibiotics and pamol. And sleeping beauty took himself off to bed before noon!

That, however, is not the full story.
While waiting at the doctors, K9 looked miserable. It turned out he had tripped over my shoes last night on his way to bed and hit his head on the corner of the wall. He went to sleep with a mild headache and woke with a really good one this morning. By the time we left the doctor's surgery, he was apparently feeling pretty grotty, but didn't say alot about it until he howled half a minute up the road. I really could not decipher what it was all about and he went silent, so I figured it couldn't have been too important. Only a matter of seconds later, he howled again and over the din came the other yells "He's throwing up everywhere" And. He. Was.

sigh

we now have one very clean car sitting on the driveway with all doors open to air it out!
we have over half the family in bed and it's not even half past twelve!
i'm being an out-of-character-slightly-paranoid-mother looking for symptoms of memory-loss from one of the boys and wheeziness from the other!


Postscript......there were at least three other Trippings Over Mother's Shoes in the night and NO-ONE thought to move them!!!!!

Friday Favourites #4

My favourite four-year-old ;-)

It's coming up two years since you got sick. You were down for months, with fevers and headaches lack of appetite and taking yourself to bed for hours every day. Eventually it turned out you had had glandular fever (even though the first doctor we had seen had said that was not possible). But even when you were supposedly over that you still kept getting those fevers up to 41 degrees and dreadful lethargy for two or three days every two or three weeks. You contracted every little bug that was going round - when the other kids vomitted for 24 hours, you went on for five days. You got all mannner of rashes and spots and lumps and stomach hardness and enlarged lymph nodes and various swellings. You had blood tests and scans and more blood tests and more scans. We discovered you've got one oversized kidney - bonus! A stange growth appeared on your cheek and grew and grew - because of everything else going on, the doc wanted it removed. It turned out to be fine.

Then this summer you went for longer and longer stretches without any fevers or sickness at all.

A month or so ago you changed overnight.

You woke up *silly* one morning.

There was a new crazy boy running round the house. You were full of fun and laughter. It was so dramatic a change that people commented on it! I thought perhaps you were now just *well*, driving on all six cylinders. Then you got sick again this week. But it hasn't knocked you like in the past. And apart from a runny nose, you're fine already. This is more like a *normal* childhood ailment.

We thank God for your good health and your crazy nature. We love you.

Total Intestinal Aganglionosis What?

Have you noticed the cute little picture of Aria in my sidebar?

Aria was born with a very rare condition of the bowel known as total intestinal aganglionosis or total Hirschsprung’s disease. There is no cure and it means she will never be able to digest food.....unless she has a bowel trasplant, which can only be performed in the US at a cost of $1-2 million dollars. Aria's family is part of The Nappy Network and as a community we are all pulling together to try to give her a bit of a break.....


Pippa from Snazzipants is running an auction at her shop opening on Friday the 20th of April.


You can purchase this cute little newborn soaker and hat set knit by yours truly if you turn up at 145 Kitchener Road, Milford at 4pm. All proceeds go to Aria's family. There will be lots of other things for sale too;-)