Week Five - February 5th

A few 'upsets' this week. Trev welded a bike seat and handlebars and footpegs onto the back of my $2, bought from the dump, bike. (It's a lovely shade of yellow - I'm a complete trendsetter) I was concerned about putting Caleb, who weighs somewhere around 25kg, on the back of it because I wasn't sure it would be safe. But a quick tour of the cul-de-sac, with me throwing a wobbly about Caleb wobbling, and we got the hang of it. Caleb whooped away on the back while I sweated profusely.

The first ride to school took only 10 minutes instead of the usual 30. In the past Caleb has biked but, what with the 80km an hour traffic (lots of big trucks) coming head on at us, and only a small space at the side of the road to ride on, my nerves were shot. Caleb kindly suggested I should have a button installed, one that I only needed to hit once to have it repeat a constant litany of, "Keep to the side of the road - brake slowly - don't ride on the crumbly edge!"

The second day we managed only a metre of travel before I asked him,
"Got your feet on the pegs?"
He tucked in his heels, one of which was caught by the spokes and drawn in. I heard three strange clicks, immediately stopped and turned to find a wide eyed Caleb, his foot drawn into the bike spokes at a funny angle, his shoe half twisted off. He screamed for five minutes. Burst capillaries, pinched white flesh, and the beginning of a whopper of a bruise. We didn't go to school. We made a pact not to ride again. Trev came home and pop riveted some guards on so Caleb can't get his feet in the spokes, (unless he really tries) - and so we are back on the bike again. Behind me I can hear him grinning as he exhorts,
"Keep to the side of the road, watch out for those crumbly edges!"

The second upset was more worrisome. I gave Caleb one of the three hundred cuddles he gets a day, rested my head on his chest and heard the unmistakable sound of an erratic heartbeat. Frequently missing the beat altogether. As medical expenses are excusable, and because you couldn't have stopped me, we pulled the cover off the car and drove to the doctor. The outcome is we will also soon be driving 200km and back to go to a pediatric cardiologist. We're worried. Caleb is more interested in his first wobbly tooth.

For anyone wondering if Caleb's heart rate is to do with our experiment - this is the third time in the last year we have taken him to the doctor suspecting something is wrong with his heart, this is the first time doctors have agreed with us.

Upset Three - I finally identified what was happening to the beans. I've never had a problem growing them. Now they grow great guns (maybe they could shoot the birds for us) then suddenly collapse overnight, to lie dejected and dying with gnarled and twisted stems. It's taken me a while to give the problem a name - bean fly - or more specifically the maggots of, which burrow into the stem, chew it out, and eventually the poor plants succumb. We've never had Bean Fly before. The only cures I can track down are horrendously poisonous, or impractical. I have snake beans growing, which are naturally resistant - I'll stick with those - however that will limit us until the weather cools down, and the fly is less of an issue. We will have 'bean gaps'. Thankfully we have 6 kilos of soy beans already dried and in jars, plus smaller amounts of dried pinto, red kidney and Madagascar. But it is another food disappointment.

Fun things this week - making 'ink' for my fountain pen from plants and berries, making elderberry cordial (I'm the only one who thinks it's yum) and harvesting peanuts - satay sauces here we come!

Caleb also received a 'food parcel' from his grandmother which included a small lego set, three lollipops (2 of which he immediately shared with his friends) and some chewing gum, three packets of which Trevor immediately shared with Caleb. Caleb, who is into reading Roald Dahl books at the moment, now aspires to breaking the world record for the length of time one can chew the same piece (as did Violet Beauregard) and keeps it stored (as she did), tucked behind his right ear. I can see an emergency haircut coming on.

Week Six

¼ of the way there!

Trevor had a lapse. He stayed away overnight with work commitments and bought his dinner, breakfast and lunch. While he had agonized about spending the money, when it came to the crunch, there was lots of it (crunching) happening; reef and beef -crunch crunch- sausages and eggs, sausage roll and veggie pastie, and chicken wrap for lunch. Crunch.

As there wasn't really any option apart from a long fast, whilst working physically hard (he planted 689 trees), we decided he would have to eat bought food. I don't think we expected him to blow out quite so seriously although, as he said, as long as he was going to have a lapse, he might as well ditch the guilt and enjoy it. He's back on the tracks now.

The great peanut harvest has begun in earnest. The 'flailer' that Trev made from an old laundry drum and works well for grains and dried beans breaks the nuts into tiny pieces, so it's back to shelling them by hand. My thumbs are wearing out.

Last night we had pumpkin soup with a lightly spiced peanut sauce stirred through, sprinkled with fried cubed potato and topped with chopped nuts, served with bread 'pasties' filled with fetta cheese. I called it satay soup. Caleb ate the lot. As I put him to bed, I leant over gave him a kiss and whispered, "It was very good of you to eat pumpkin soup tonight".
"Pumpkin Soup! Pumpkin Soup! I ate pumpkin soup?! I hate pumpkin soup!"

I let out a wicked giggle from the doorway. Our latest feedback we are giving Caleb is that his tastebuds must be getting mature as his baby teeth start to loosen, though not quite fall, because he's trying new foods, even that horrid goats cheese.

For Show and Tell this week, Caleb did a talk on how to cook snails. Apparently there was much ewwwwing and yucking going on in that class. They ended up making a pictorial display for the class window, based on the instructions Trev had written out for him, which included such comments as, 'They taste like gumboots'. While Trev is worried that the population of large snails in the garden is reducing, and his next feed is looking slim, Caleb and I are no closer to eating them.

On the subject of eating garden pests there are lots of large grasshoppers pervading the garden, as they do every year. Trev and I spend time each day grabbing them and throwing them into various chook pens, where chooks rugby tackle each other to get at the jumping parcels of protein. While it might look like blood sport, the food value is excellent.

Things are getting dry. During the last week we had 9mm of rain. Pathetic compared to other totals in the area. Still, we have lots of water in the tanks; it just means an extra hour a day doing hose meditation while eating fresh figs and playing spot the bearded dragon.


Week Seven

Fifty days, one hundred and thirty one to go.

Had a tumultuous week. Confession to follow.

We ran out of flour and oil and spent the week devising food without the two, resorting on occasion to grinding wheat from the goat's bin to make batter for vegetable fritters, and straining the oil in the semi-dried tomato jar to fry them in. Remarkable how many foods required one or the other, if only to fry off onion and garlic.

Friday arrived along with 2 litres of sunflower oil and 5 kilos of assorted flours. Trev and I speculated on what food we could cook that utilized the two at the same time for maximum impact … and simultaneously yelled, 'Donuts!' - jinksies, says Caleb. I cooked up donuts for dessert, rolled them in raw sugar and Trev and I galloped through them amid Homer like drooling sighs. Caleb remained impervious to their allure, having just eaten a whole bowl full of ratatouille that has been especially blended for him so he can't see the eggplant, and smothered in homemade Parmesan.

One morning the microwave made a large bang and has ceased to toss high-frequency radio waves around at it's usual 2 billion cycles per second. This makes lots of things harder to do and more power intensive. No more will I be able to slaughter a few hundred fruit fly in thirty seconds. On the plus side - there is now more bench room.

Part of the tumult has been a visit to Brisbane to visit the paediatric cardiologist - the diagnosis is bicuspid aortic valve, which also causes some mild aortic regurgitation, which is doctor talk for it leaks a bit. So he has a heart defect, one that we will have to take some precautions with and take him for a yearly check up in order to see if it deteriorates. He may also need his valve replaced when he's older.

We were at the hospital for far longer than we had hoped, when we left for home we were hungry, a little despondent, and very, very hungry. We made it out of Brisbane, our intentions good, but the car turned off the highway and into a food hall twenty minutes later, and there we splurged. Did I say we were hungry? "Caleb, what would you like, you can have anything, today is a free day, like free dress at school. Don't feel bad, what would you like?"
He chose a fresh fruit salad.
I chose an egg sandwich on WHITE bread. It was truly awful. It was relegated to chook food, while Trevor decided his nachos were much the same. So we, having been quite restrained, unhitched ourselves from the wagon and dug in. I won't mention any brand names, but there was chicken, sandwiched between two rounds of white bread, chips, brown drinks, steak burgers, rainbow coloured icecream, cheesecake, pastries of various kinds. There were rest intervals between packing in just that little bit more , for when we left, we knew it would be over.

Caleb disappeared into the children's playground where we could see him lifting his shirt to show everyone his electrodes which led to the bum bag where a 24 hour ECG was being recorded.

So Wednesday was a write off. We've put it down to 'medical expenditure'. But the wagon is hitched again. Our stomach capacity having been much extended, Thursday was full of complaints about 'congested fart failure' or 'leaky valve'.

On the home front - we've had 25mm of rain so far this month - unusually low. I spend a couple of hours a day watering. We've had a good harvest of sunflowers and sorghum. The sorghum has then been passed through the chaff cutter and spread back out over the area from which it came as mulch. A great cardiovascular work out.

The crosses on the calendar are marching along and we are looking forward to the end of the month when we can say … "A third of the way there".


Week Eight - February 26

This month is one of the ten driest Februarys since 1887. 28mm and not going anywhere. While we have plenty of tank water for veggies and seedlings, we can't water the whole block. Possum's fodder trees and plants are suffering, and as a result are not recovering fast enough to keep up with her requirements. I've supplemented her food with peanut plants after harvest and plenty of scrounging. The long and short of it is we need more rain and soon. However there is nothing in the long range forecast to alleviate our fears.

Trev has had a hard, hot week and makes dramatic protestations of privation and hardship, yet manages to look younger and fitter than he has since I first met him. It's a battle not to let him put on some of his antique clothes from the back of the cupboard and wear them in public. On the subject of wearing clothes I took to streaking in the streets during the week when my skirt, which, like all my skirts, no longer fits, made a sudden and unexpected lunge for the ground on the busiest stretch of road on the way to school. Caleb shrieked, "Mum, your bum is showing!" How embarrassment.

We've got cracking on the whole barter thing. Trev and I feel embarrassed to approach people, and have avoided it to a large extent. The whole selling thing is squirmable. We undervalue our product and wait too long before we make our approach leaving us short on staples like flour, oil and sugar. When one of our regular barters couldn't make it this week we had to get ourselves into gear and organise more. It proved a worthwhile experience. We're resolved to get over the squirm and work harder on keeping ahead of our usage.

Trev has been enjoying his elderflower champagne and ginger beer made with our own ginger. Small pieces of it float at the top of each glass and are a nice extra taste sensation. However we probably won't be able to keep up with the amount of ginger we are using and will experiment with galangal and lemongrass alternative.

People often comment that we must get sick of our own food, but we do make great efforts to introduce new foods and tastes to our diet, and even Caleb is getting adventurous. This week he asked, "Mum, seeing as I have adult taste buds now, is it OK if we have some onion tonight?" Backwards I fall. He's conquered goats cheese, pumpkin and has made and eaten his own peanut butter, a substance he has always scorned. This week he made headway into the issue of new toys and made his own bow and arrow. With a handsewn quiver slung over his shoulder and pink straws for arrows, he manages to look more like Cupid than Legolas.

Two more days and the second month is over. March is looming large but only for the sake of suspense as we wonder- 'Will it ever rain? And if so, will it be in time?'

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