Scones, Bees and Blackberry Jam

Two days before Christmas the girls has the chance to pick blackberries on a friend of a friend of a friend's blackberry farm.  I'm not sure what usually happens to these blackberries - it isn't a 'pick your own' farm, but this year they were going begging.  The kids came home with 15 kilos of them.  Kim took half, but even so that was more than 7 kgs of berries to do something with.  We made a heap of jam  - I gave all my family jam for Christmas (and rocky road and shortbread and gingerbread) and froze a number of bags full. 

On New Years Day we visited Kim in Warbuton for scones with (surprise surprise) blackberry jam.  She had also been dealing with 7 kilos of blackberries. 

Our flowering gum sounds like a bee hive. Every bud has a bee or three. The vine over our deck is also flowering, dropping pollen onto the deck,  attracting bees who wander around the deck collecting it and sometimes getting stood on by a small child. Poor Lil copped two bee stings within a week (worse for the bees though).  I figure it's a rite of passage  - the annual summer bee sting. 

My brother's family came to visit and as usual his boys and my girls shot hoops for hours on end.  We tested out our new dining room table and it seated twelve comfortably, and when my sister's two kids came for dinner as well, it accommodated fourteen without too much trouble.  Having that lovely long expanse of table and a new sideboard for storage of sewing stuff has, so far at least, meant that I do actually keep the room pretty functional as a dining room.  I've been sewing a lot this past week and the set up is working.

Tomorrow we leave for two weeks in Japan.  I am excited, after a very long and stressful few weeks.  My sister is in hospital but she is doing as well as we can possibly hope, so I feel that I can finally exhale and enjoy the break.

The Bungle Bungles and other Drawings

It's only now, in the relatively quiet days post Christmas and visiting cousins that I have really had a chance to look at some of Lily's drawings and paintings from the year.  Once I regularly snapped the things my kids were making, whether I recorded them here or not. I seem to have lost the habit and rarely do so now.  I love this selection - the colours and the subject matter - Swiss chard, mushrooms and an unidentified leaf, as well as the Bungle Bungles. The only time I've ever been in a helicopter was in a 'scenic flight' over the Bungle Bungles. I wouldn't do it again. I constantly felt an almost overwhelming desire to be down and in amongst that rocky splendour rather than close but so far in this noisy apparatus. 

Christmas 2014

My photo record of Christmas this year starts and ends with Winnie, our ancient and increasingly decrepit pug.  She is a constant in our days, following me around the house on her arthritic legs, weeing on the carpets, whining for food and providing the soundtrack to our days with her chronic snoring. Poor old thing, we'll miss her when she's gone. 

Apart from a few photos of the present opening most of the photos are of the food - a very non-traditional selection of gnocchi, paella and salads as well as turkey and ham. I toasted nuts in my new frypan ( a gift to myself) and made gravy in my new saucepan ( a gift from

Craig). We had 24 for lunch and were grateful that the weather was perfect for eating outdoors as we wouldn't have fit in the dining room.  My lovely mother did nearly all the washing up, the kids had water fights and played badminton, my eldest sister and I sang carols - she's a wonderful musician. The kids joined in sporadically but weren't much interested which was fine. I always felt awkward when the adults sang carols when I was a kid too, 

At the end of the day we spontaneously decided to go over to my eldest sister's house for a swim and a bite to eat. I think we all wanted to prolong the day a bit. Tomorrow the Perth cousins arrive and my girls are so excited. It is so lovely seeing the cousins together, forming their own connections and bonds. 

I had an interesting chat with my brother in law about his own family history and his sole surviving relative on his father's side. That story, that history will one day be lost.  Our family changes too. What seemed so important fades away. We've made our new traditions and our children will make theirs - keeping what they like, discarding the rest. Really we have only now. 

The Nativity - A Miniature Christmas Scene

I had such fun making this tiny nativity scene.  I painted all the little wooden people and then made clothing for them, the animals are all miniaturised versions of the animals in Karin Neuschutz's 'Sew Soft Toys'.  I can't find an internet link but I know that l'uccello stock this book.  I just photocopied the patterns at 25% and cut them without a seam allowance as I stitched by hand in blanket stitch rather than sewing right sides together and bagging out.  They were too tiny for that.  The only things I didn't make were the gifts from the wise men, though the gold is not right and I'll have to see if I can find something better next year.  I put these in our nativity calendar and the girls took it in turns opening a drawer each day.  Luckily four goes evenly into 24 or there would be fights.  I snuck a mouse in - not traditional I know, but Nina adores mice and I reckon there would be one near a stable.  I was so pleased with how it turned out  - exactly as I had hoped, which is a very rare thing. 

I always do lots of things at Christmas, or at least in the month leading up to Christmas. We always have a gingerbread party and I usually make lots of shortbread and often we make some decorations (this year painted gumnuts). We always make Christmas crackers, with fortune cookies and one dollar scratchies.  The kids still make all their presents for each other and their friends, which is pretty time consuming, and I usually make the kids something each, most often a dress. Cherries are always the sign that Christmas is near and this year I splurged on a whole box, which I've never done before. It was so luxurious for everyone to have as many cherries as they felt like and still have some the next day.

So even though Christmas is always busy and I always do lots of things, there has been a different edge this year. One of my sisters is very unwell and so all the activity has an air of keeping oneself busy and distracted, as well as a particular poignance to it. She came to our gingerbread party and we talked whilst keeping up brave faces for the kids - hers and mine - and I expect this is the reason that the door of the gingerbread house is wonky and the whole thing has a rather rushed look to it. We won't find out for a few more weeks exactly how bad things are, and of course we are hoping that the news is better than we fear. It seems a bit farcical to write about the little things I've been doing and making, whilst in the background this massive, life changing event is unfolding, and yet it also seems wrong not to record our Christmas season. And however powerfully something like this puts all our other petty concerns into perspective, still those petty concerns remain and have to be dealt with. This blog is, after all, about small matters, not large matters!

I appear to have misplaced the letters to Santa Claus which were rather delightful. Ruby began hers by hoping that Santa had been a good boss, as the elves need someone responsible - so proud that she's already identified the potential for exploitation in the relationship between capital and labour. Grace is hoping for a parasol and a beret (she really was born in the wrong era), and Nina asked for a briefcase (!). Lily is beguiled by almost anything she sees in a toy shop - a Jemima doll, a Strawberry Shortcake, a real live Minion please! And Ruby just desperately wants an ipod and swears she is about the only (nearly) 12 year old in the whole world not to have one.  I struggle with the whole technology thing. It does seem that most kids her age have something - a pod or pad or phone - that enables them to link in to social media and communicate with each other and by comparison we seem the most ludditish parents on the face of the earth. Lots of schools require an ipad but ours doesn't and so far she has only been able to really engage by using my phone, which obviously I control. I've held the line because I fear that once she has a device of whatever kind, she will disappear into a world of constant texting and surfing.  I don't think she's particularly interested in games, it's Instagram and social connections that fascinate her.  I know that rules around usage can be established, but I suspect that those rules rapidly become a battleground where parents are thrust unwillingly into the role of enforcer. And I'm not even sure what rules are appropriate - how much time is too much? how much privacy is reasonable? where can she take or use the device?

Once she has a device, and I know that it is inevitable eventually, I fear that she will never  again scoot round and round on the deck for hours, making up plays and stories. I worry that she won't write or draw as much - or at all.  I wonder if she'll still play with her sisters (admittedly this only tends to happen now when she is bored, but with a device, perhaps she'll never be bored?). And I am not sure that she will continue to read as much - or at all.  I also wonder whether I am totally overreacting and whether I'll look back on this dilemma in the same way that I look back on worrying about kindergarten and think how ridiculous I was.

The year, to all intents and purposes, is over. Craig and I have finished work, the kids have finished school, the concerts have been performed, the presents bought and wrapped and tomorrow the business of preparing the house and food for Christmas begins. I'm half thinking that if I am super efficient with all of that, I might just have time to quickly rustle up a couple of Christmas dresses afterall.....