Kangaroo Island - a knitter's guide, Part 1

Ah - Kangaroo Island.  Place of no rabbits or foxes.  No fast-food outlets.  Life in the slow lane.  Sounding good already?
My wonderful husband, Ben, planned our trip to KI so that we would arrive on a Saturday.  This was so that we could attend the Farmer's Market on Sunday at Penneshaw (find info here on Penneshaw markets ) to support the local economy by purchasing locally grown food, and handmade items.  Because we were visiting off-season, that is, not in the school holidays, the pickings were a little slim, but still very worthwhile.
We went to the Community Market first - handmade crafts and second hand things like old garden tools, and of course lots of toys and books.  It was relaxing wandering around looking at all the creative output of different people.  And THEN - I saw it.  The last stall in the line.  WOOL.  Lots of wool.  All the colours of the rainbow.  Artfully displayed in baskets arranged in a semi-circle on the ground, beckoning me in.  Hanks and hanks of it.  I could tell by the uneven-ness it was hand spun and also hand-dyed by the look of it.  OH YEAH.
I made a quick left turn and zoomed in to the centre point of the semi-circle and feasted my eyes on what was before me.  I vaguely heard a voice behind me that sounded like my wonderful Ben ("Remember, Kate, we DIDN'T bring the trailer, OK........).   Trailer, schmailer.  I need wool, and I need it N.O.W.
I settled on one hand of pinky/red (fuschia, one might say) and one hand of lemon yellow for my good friend Liz, a knitting and sewing powerhouse.  The person who took my money for the wool told me that it was the best wool to be had on the island (in his un-biased opinion, I'm sure), from Leicester sheep.
When we returned to our accommodation, I untied my fuchsia hank with glee, and after seeking a volunteer to hold the hank for me, wound the fuschia into 4 balls.  I suspected it wouldn't be enough to make gloves for both Nicole and I, but would probably be enough to make "armies" which cover the wrist and palm.  Armies will be great for next winter, as wearing gloves is fine when you are not driving, writing, typing, cooking, or reading a book, or doing anything else work-wise about the place.  Unfortunately I had only brought crochet hooks with me, and not knitting needles (what was I thinking!) so had to content myself with crocheting the wool for a bit just for the pleasure of feeling it pass between my fingers and across the palms of my hands.   Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.    Wool.  I admit it.  I'm a yarn snob.  Natural fibres for me.

Armies for Nicole completed

Armies for Kate in progress

 DID YOU KNOW - you may not bring potatoes to KI, or soil that has had potatoes grown in it?  To keep diseases out off the island.  Same applies to bees or 2nd hand honey making equipment, or honey itself.
After visiting the Penneshaw Farmer's market, we had a dinner made from ENTIRELY local produce - Marron, spread with garlic butter and lightly bbqd, lamb chops (grown locally, low stress lamb), mashed potatoes, with broccolli.
MONDAY - we visited Clifford's honey farm and bought the mandatory honey icecream, as well as some other honey-related merchandise.  The Ligurian Bee was sent to KI from Liguria in Italy in the 1800's to establish a honey bee colony.  The colonies on KI remain the only pure Ligurian colony in the world.

Low stress lamb

Marron with garlic butter

We also visited the Island Pure Sheep dairy, and watched the sheep being milked.  Sheep produce about 1 litre of milk, twice a day.  There is no distinct cream in sheep's milk, so the milk is described as being naturally homogenized, so all the products are creamy in texture.  We tasted all the cheeses and yoghurts, and bought some for later eating.

TUESDAY - rest day.  Washing clothes.  Read books, had naps, did some crochet.  Took turns taking the kids to the playground (since kids don't seem to know the meaning of the word "rest").

View north from the Cottage

Keith on the dashers while Ben supervises

Nicole on the go-through tunnels

WEDNESDAY - a big driving day!  We drove from American River to the Raptor Domain on the south coast.  We all voted the Raptor Domain birds of prey show as the best thing we did on our visit to Kangaroo Island.

Ben with Kookaburra

The interactive show was captivating, and you could pre-order lunch before the birds of Prey show, eat it during the lunch break, and then stay for the Reptiles show afterwards.  We didn't, as we were on a schedule and hadn't anticipated 2 separate shows being offered.

Nicole and Kate with Kookaburras

Nicole with Owl

Tilka the wedge-tailed eagle

Kate with Kookaburra

Sophie Rose - One Year On

Sophy's Rose first bloom, October 2012

My blogs this week are likely to be a little disordered, so please bear with me, my friends!

I tried to write this blog yesterday, on what would have been Sophie's 1st birthday, but there seemed to be a gremlin in the system and I wasn't able to access my blog.  Perhaps that was meant to be.

Sophie - an early scan

I heard the term "Angel Day" used this week, as opposed to birthday or anniversary, and I think I will adopt it from now on.  30th of October, Sophie's Angel Day.  I've been pondering the custom of celebrating birthdays - another year of our lives lived, and thinking about what a worthy tradition it is, since life is way more precarious than we in the western world appreciate.  Certainly way more precarious than I realized, before 29th October 2011, when an ultrasound confirmed that Sophie's heart was no longer beating.  It's worth celebrating every additional year beyond birth that our children live.  Before the discovery of antibiotics in the early part of last century, infectious diseases were the leading cause of death of children.  These days, if a child dies from a microbial infection, we in the western world tend to be surprised and outraged, and demand to know why.  Due to advances in medical technology, we think we have the "right" to a health baby, and a healthy life.  Medical technology is marvellous, but we do tend to think it can cure all, and things like pregnancy loss and disability only happen to other people, not to us or people we know.

In countries much less affluent than ours, people see death on a weekly or even daily basis, it is not a stranger to them, and I believe they are much better at accepting it, and dealing with grief (I will write a thesis on this later!!)  In our comfortable world, we use family planning to determine the number of children we have, and medical technology such as physiological intensive care keeps people, babies included, alive, and sometimes they do recover and go on to live long lives.

Since I'm indulging myself today in this monologue, I'll go on to tell you that, had Sophie been born alive, she would have most likely only lived for a few minutes / hours, or gone straight to the neonatal intensive care unit and died there.  I've often reflected on how grateful I am that she died in utero, and we didn't have the added trauma of seeing her slowly slip away with many tubes attached to her.  But maybe we would not have minded that, as long as she was still alive.  We will never know.  You see, Sophie died from a viral infection.  When an ultrasound confirmed that her heart was no longer beating, it looked like a simple case of "cord accident", as the ultrasound showed that the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around her neck several times.  A senior Obstetric consultant advised us to consent to an autopsy, since, in his experience, whenever there is a cord problem, there is almost always something else going on, and restriction of blood flow is simply the last straw.  He described to us that you can take an umbilical cord, tie it in a knot, pull it tight, and as soon as you let it go, the knot springs open again, due to the gelatinous Wharton's Jelly present in the cord.  The only case of death due to true cord accident that he had seen in his career (where no other cause could be determined) was a case where, due to a genetic anomaly, there was no Wharton's Jelly present in the cord.  And he was correct in Sophie's case.  Autopsy revealed that a viral infection ravaged her body.  She had severe anaemia, and evidence of inflammation and viral infection in every major organ in her body.  Yet despite this, she grew to a normal size, moved normally in the womb, had a heart rate within the normal range, and to all outside observers, was a normally developing baby.  Isn't the human body amazing that it can do all this despite fighting for its life?!?  Both Sophie and I were tested for all the microbes (viral, bacterial, fungal) that are known to cause sickness and death in babies, but none of the tests were positive.  And do you know what - even if the virus had been identified, and I lobbied the government to introduce viral testing of some sort for all pregnant women, it would not have changed the outcome for Sophie.  There is precious little treatment for viral infections, even in our medically advanced world.  Medicine can provide physiological support, but the fact that viruses hide inside our body's cells makes killing them difficult.

The odds in most Australian baby books tell us that 1/4 pregnancies end in a loss before 20 weeks, and 1/135 end in stillbirth (death in utero between 20 weeks gestation and birth). Pretty scary odds, that you don't want to dwell on too much when you're pregnant or trying to become pregnant.  Due to the nature of genetic recombination and assortment that occurs when sperm and eggs are generated, every individual that is conceived is unique, and contains a genetic code that has never before been tested.  You don't know whether that code is going to "work" or not.  It may, by chance, contain disruptions in genes essential to life.

When I was pregnant with Nicole, I used to be offended if people touched my belly without my permission.  Once Nicole was born, I sometimes took offense if people touched her and cooed at her without my permission.  But now I see things differently.  A baby that makes it from conception to birth, alive, has already run a tremendous race. These people (mostly women, mostly older than me) who desired to celebrate Nicole's alive-ness were much wiser than I.  They knew how precious life is.  They knew that a happy healthy baby cannot be taken for granted.  

Sophie, just born

Now I know too.

The Delica Exhaust Project

In mid 2011, we began looking for a replacement car, one that would accommodate 3 children's car seats across the back. Our beloved Subaru L-series is too narrow, and only has 2 anchor points anyhow.  We settled on a Mitsubishi Delica.   In Australia, Delicas can only be acquired 2nd hand, or as a grey import.  We went through JSPEC, an importer based interstate, and they did a brilliant job for us.  Sadly, Sophie died while the Deli was in transit to Australia from Japan, but we went ahead with it anyway, and we are really glad that we did.
Ben compiled a long wish list of things he'd like to modify to strengthen the car for the purposes we have in mind - i.e. 4wd adventures.  The back lift and bigger wheels/tyres happened pretty soon after we got the car.  The first time I took the newly lifted Deli to school pickup, many jokes were made about needing a step ladder to climb into the car, and the hazards of underground carparks.
Ben's current project is a stainless steel exhaust system.  It has a wider bore than the standard, and some other modifications to increase efficiency of the process.  With his relatively new TIG welder, Ben has bought stainless steel pipes of various shapes, and manufactured the exhaust pipe himself.  I know that Ben is clever, but I still love the fact that I can marvel at what he can do.When he upgraded the exhaust system on his red Ford ute a few years ago, he tried to sell it to me like he was saving the planet.
 

 "Kate, I'd really like to fit extractors to the ute, it'll make the exhaust much more efficient, with less damaging emissions."

 It sounded like a fang exhaust to me, and I teased him about it.  "Ohhh, maybe!" he admitted.  That's OK, boys like their fang cars, it nurtures the adrenaline junkie in them.

    Of course, when he mentioned the upgrade to the Deli's exhaust, "fang" exhaust did cross my mind.

As we relaxed with Ben's parents last night after dinner, Ben was giving them the progress update on the exhaust project.  Ben's dad asked him "So, Ben, what kind of muffler are you using for the new one?"  Ben smiled.  "What muffler?!?" he replied.
I knew it.  A fang exhaust.

Slow Food - Part 4

I'm sad to report that Tilly, the Cauliflower-leaf-eating-chicken, died this week.  Old age I think, possibly compounded by a mite infestation brought in by the visiting chooks.  We buried her in the front garden and put some flowers on the top of the soil.  We are currently looking after our neighbours' 4 chickens, so we are not short of a chicken around here.  The first few nights the visiting chooks spent here, they slept in the diagonally opposite corner to the resident chooks.  Them and Us.  Gradually they became accustomed to each other, and now they are integrated (as in the photo above).  Well almost integrated.  I'm sad to say that "Blackie" is the bottom of the pecking order.  Did you notice the white powder on the perches and the top of the nesting box?  That's to eliminate any residual mites that may choose to hide in the wood.  Since we treated the flock for mites a week ago, egg production has moved from 2 per day to 5 per day.  What a lot of bounty to share with family and friends.  The kids have named the visiting chickens Blackie, Pearl, Flakey, and Angel.  Flakey had scales flaking off her feet - that's what alerted us to the mite infection.  That, and Blackie was pecking Flakey's bottom!  Eating mites, one assumes.  A bit difficult for a chicken to peck it's own bottom I guess.  My Clever Ben made both the perches and the nesting boxes.

The surplus of eggs brings me to the subject of today's blog, which is SLOW FOOD.  A little while ago, I committed to cooking my way through the Green and Gold cookbook, which many Adelaideans have a copy of.  I flipped straight to the puddings section, and chose Bread and Butter pudding, to take advantage of yesterday's stale bread.  It makes perfect sense when you are baking your own bread, sans preservatives, to use it the next day for pudding, that is, if the chickens haven't been given the scraps first.  Yum Yum Yum.  One recipe down, several hundred to go!

The promise of Spring

Soon to be a strawberry

The month of August.  Most people I know have a cold or are just getting over one.  And it's the other kind of cold overnight.  People arrive at school or work wrapped up in beanies, scarves and gloves.  And then, we spy the first blossom of the year, telling us that we won't have that much longer to wait for warmth and longer days....Many other plants other than fruit trees are getting ready for action also.  It's an exciting time of year.  I've just taken delivery of this year's spring/summer vegetable seeds from Diggers, and am planning where everything will go, trying to keep in mind an organic crop rotation plan, such as the one suggested by the legendary Peter Cundall, which goes like this - Bed 1 ONION TRIBE (leek, onion, shallot, spring onion, garlic, chives), Bed 2 LEGUMES (broadbeans, beans, peas, snowpeas), Bed 3 ROOT CROPS (carrot, beetroot, parsnip, turnip, swede), Bed 4 SWEET CORN and CURCUBITS (cucumber, pumpkin, squash, zuccini) Bed 6 SOLANUM TRIBE (tomato, capsicum, eggplant).  At the end of the year, the Bed 6 veggies move to Bed 1, Bed 1 veggies move to Bed 2, etc.  BUT where do I plant the lettuce?!?  Traditionally considered a winter vegetable I guess, but we can get away with growing it up here in summer if we keep it in the shade.  And asparagus?  Well I guess that goes in the perennial bed along with the rhubarb and jerusalem artichokes, which I am looking forward to growing after being inspired by another blog called funky frontyard farmers.  Find their jerusalem artichoke story here
I guess the lettuce will just have to squeeze in somewhere ;)

Slow Food - Part 3

I used to be a purist - we will NEVER eat in front of the TV.  Oh no.  We will sit at the table and have intelligent conversation with our children.  
Well tonight we had a TV dinner with a difference.  We made homemade fish fingers from relatively economical frozen fish fillets purchased at the local supermarket.  I removed the skin, chopped them up (luckily bones were already removed), cooked them for a few minutes in the microwave until the flesh had turned from opaque to white, and then mashed them with the juice of one lemon.  We added enough breadcrumbs to absorb the excess lemon juice, then shaped them into vaguely fish-finger-like shapes, coated them in more breadcrumbs, and then shallow-fried them in the wok.  No compulsory vegetables tonight, just the fish fingers.
We ate them in front of Gardening Australia (isn't that beard and hair AMAZING!) occasionally dipping them in tomato sauce, and the smaller members of the household declared them to be "even better than the ones from the shop!" which is the highest praise possible from a child.  TICK - one to Mum.
It's nice to be able to let go of being a perfectionist and embrace practicality.
Remember that famous line from the iconic Australian movie "The House"?

"During dinner, the TV definitely gets turned DOWN."
Yeah.

Slow Food - Part 2

We harvested our first cauliflower today.  It was well worth the effort to get the seedlings in the ground by the end of March to be eating them today.  For lunch today, I chopped 4 florets off and steamed them, then chopped them up, mixed with a little dijonnaise, added a grated 1/2 a carrot, then put the whole lot into a sandwich that got toasted.

Keith and the first Cauliflower of 2012

Very nice.

I have now consumed 2 out of my goal of 5 vegetable serves for the day.  A serve, according to the experts, is approximately the amount of veggies you can fit in a 1/2 metric cup.  I don't know about you, but I struggle to consume 5 different vegetables in one day.  Steak and 5 veggies certainly is a challenge to my tired brain at dinnertime.  Knocking over 2 veggies at lunchtime sure is a good start.  We are going to have the rest of the cauli with dinner, covered in a cheese sauce to appease the junior food critics.

The junior food critics didn't have the same level of enthusiasm as I did about a toasted sandwich containing vegetables, but oh well.  Maybe if I offer it to them another 14 times, they'll eat it eventually.

Tilly the chicken munching a leaf

And guess what else - the chickens LOVE eating the outer leaves of the cauliflower.  (Did anyone spot the red chicken comb sneaking up on Keith and the cauli in the above photo?!?)

Speaking of chickens, ours have developed a frustrating habit in the last few weeks since the cold weather started to bite - they are laying their eggs while on their sleeping perch, instead of going into the nesting box.  Splatttttt.  Broken egg on the ground in a pile of chicken poo.  Maybe they are too cold to leave their snuggling perch-buddies to go to the box?  So I've put a box underneath their perch, with some straw in it to try to reduce the egg-loss.  I'll report on the success or otherwise a bit later.
 

Slow Food - Part 1

We are enjoying slow food.  A couple of weeks ago we bought some peas in a pod, just for the joy of extracting the peas from the pod before cooking them, having to work for our food, so to speak.  I love that the peas are not all the same size, and that they have the stalk part where they attached to the pod.  There was something very satisfying about working for this bowl of vegetables.  It will be even more satisfying next summer when we grow our own.  We cooked them for a couple of minutes in the microwave and then added a dob of butter.  Delicious.

A certain member of our house turned 40 this week (hint - it wasn't me).  Since he doesn't like cake, he requested a vanilla slice for his birthday cake.  The kids and I made it together this afternoon.  We used up almost all our remaining custard powder, so I almost put custard powder on the shopping list but then thought - no - why not make it from scratch next time?  So I consulted the trusty Green and Gold Cookery Book, first compiled in 1923 as a fundraiser for King's College, now Pembroke School.  Sure enough, one can make custard from eggs (which we have in abundance), sugar, milk and cornflour or ground up rice.  Why have I not done this before?  It's no more time consuming than using custard powder with milk, surely?  Convenience is thrust upon us in supermarkets.  Packaged this, packaged that - no wonder our recycling bins are full every fortnight.
Even the packet custard took a full half an hour to thicken up on the stove, as I made 2Litres of it to ensure that the vanilla slice was a thick slice.  It was strangely therapeutic and peaceful, stirring the custard constantly (as instructed on the packet).  I had time to process the events of the day, do some pelvic floor exercises, observe how much grime and dust seems to be stuck to the wall above the stove, wonder how many hours of my Grandparents' days were spent cooking.  A lot of it I suspect.  Along with cleaning and washing clothes, that would have consumed their day easily I think.  Is this why our parents' generation grabbed the convenience food with glee, determined not to be chained to the house as their mothers were?
The Green and Gold was a purchase I made in the year 2000, at BigW for $7.48, according to the sticker on the back of the book.   Flicking through it, I thought how resourceful these women were.  Bread and cakes had no preservatives, so once they were stale, there were plenty of ways to use them up, so they need not go to waste.  Most families had backyard chooks for eggs, and roast chicken once the eggs were no longer forthcoming.  A lot of recipes specify "the weight of 2 eggs in flour, sugar and butter".  I was surprised to find that 2 of our eggs weighed 150g.  No wonder they don't fit in the egg cartons that come from the supermarket.  I perused the recipes, noticing that as long as you had eggs, milk (and therefore cream and butter), flour, and sugar, you could make almost anything sweet by adding seasonal fruit or stewed fruit.  I then set out to look for slices (for my friends The Slice Girls) - but SHOCK HORROR - no heading for slices.  Clearly a deficiency in our Grandparents' cooking repertoire.  Oh wait, there it is, right at the end, under "Confectionery" - toffees, caramels, fudges, even homemade turkish delight and homemade marshmallows.  I propose to work my way through the Green and Gold for the rest of this year, partly as a way to keep in touch with my grandparents generation.

Bee-ing with your family

A bee sampling a flower from the Pin-cushion Hakea in our front yard

The catch-cry of the The Early Years Learning Framework is the 3 B's, which stand for Belonging, Being and Becoming.  
click here to find out what this is 
Quite soon after adopting the EYLF at my current workplace, we starting using cute pictures of Bees when producing documents for families regarding the 3 B's, mostly because cartoon pictures of Bees look oh-so-cute :)

One of the things that has become crystal clear to me since Sophie's death is how much emotional energy I wasted everyday.  For example, getting irritated when someone pinched a parking place I'd been waiting for, or criticizing another person's driving if they forgot to indicate or made some other small error.  All that sort of stuff really-does-not-matter.  I have resolved to spend more time being in the moment and being with my family, my children in particular.  I have been being in the moment with them in things that they are interested in.  Like building a cubby house with Nicole from pruned branches today.  Or doing excavation work in the sandpit with Keith and his Tonka trucks.


I am really enjoying how I spend my time these days, and I'm confident that what I'm spending my time on are the things that really matter in life.

Crochet Hats

I started to knit with enthusiasm when I was pregnant with Nicole, thanks to encouragement from my good friend, Liz.  I've since admired crochet, and wished to try it, but always chickened out, until I borrowed a fabulous book from the local library called "Essential Crochet" by Erika Knight.  It showed step by step how to make the stitches, and had photos to boot.  It got me started.  I soon discovered how much quicker crochet seems to be than knitting.  I like small achievable projects, so I've settled on hats to try out my newly learned skill.  One puzzle that fellow crocheters will be familiar with is the fact that the English conventional names for crochet stitches are different from the American conventional names.  Thus, you'd better know in which country the pattern you are reading was published before you start, otherwise you won't know whether you're doing a double or a treble or a half treble, or a double treble....aaaarrrrggghhhh!   The English names seem more logical to me, sorry about that to anyone who likes the American names.

Bonjour!

 This is the first one I made.  It was intended for me, but young Keith commandeered it for himself.  It looks rather like a beret on him, we thought.  So he got to keep it.  Nicole immediately demanded that one be made for her.  In pink and purple please Mum.

The princess in pink hat

 Nicole's looks less like a beret because I added a flare at the base to make it more feminine, and just to try it to see how it would look.  I like it.  (Not that blokes cannot have flares on their hats).   I like them both.  I am currently working on 2 more hats for 2 friends, in a different colour to these.  I am using variegated sock wool for all of these because they make such a beautiful colour.

The flare