Well, I’m trying too. First attempt back at the wheel in nearly two years, and it’s amazing how fumbly/stumbly I felt. It took me at least 1/2 an hour to just get it all up and running again after having been *played* with by Stella time and time again!  Anyway, I dusted / polished / oiled and then began … it was soooo fun! While Rhiannon napped and Stella danced to the wiggles I managed a little ball of single strand merino/merino-silk blend yarn with some lovely fluff I got from Ashfords the other day. Tonight I knitted up a hat for Stella…. turned out lovely! The hat looks a bit weird in the photo – trust me, it’s cute

And here’s Rhiannon  modelling a new raglan cardie made by Grandma

And her birthday cake which I was stupidly proud of… until we cut into it at playcentre and found it wasn’t cooked properly   

Well I really don’t know where that year went

Lovely day – complete with picnic and fishing (not that she could join in that part…)

Oh – and I must include Stella in all her glory!

Yes… I have been very neglectful of my blog…. but I will be back with updates…. xxxxx

Well no, not really…. but all of a sudden my blog has become a lot more “active”! I went looking for the source of the sudden HUGE influx of visitors to little old *me* and found that my blog has been picked up by a couple of networking sites – alphainventions.com and condron.us/blogroll.aspx.  The sites are pretty cool – I like that you can sit for a couple of minutes and see a sample of a whole lot of blogs I never, ever would have found otherwise – a couple I’ve bookmarked already!

So all you strangers passing by…. don’t forget to stop and say hello!

I’ve decided (inspired by a bunch of the lovely TNN ladies) that this year is going to be the year of knitting for me! Enough of the longies and soakers and baby hats. It’s all about lovely, pretty (warm!) things for the mama. So I decided I’d start nice and easy. I had a lovely ball of Bendigo Woolen Mills  Rustic 12ply, in Spice Plum and found a lovely little pattern for a caplet that I *had* to try. It has turned out pretty well ….

Except that it’s a tiny bit on the small side…despite all of my complicated mathematical type jiggering of the pattern… and I’m not *in love* with it. So, sleeves still incomplete… tonight it will be frogged.

I’m planning to knit a wicked but need something quick and in 12ply to do first so I can use this lovely BWM first… so I think an easy, quick top down raglan sweater will be first on my to do list. I’m thinking of making some alterations to the pattern, maybe a ribbed neckline and I like the YO sleeve detail of the caplet … I’ll have a play around and see what I can come up with.

In the meantime everything is going well here. Kids are cute and enjoying summer … Rhiannon is crawling, and becoming more scrumptious by the day…

Dad and family have been here *on holiday*… a term they will probably laugh at… more like a week long boot camp hahaha. In the week they were here a lot of progress was made…

Piles of trash were sorted, shipped out to the dump and to the scrap metal dealer leaving the space under the walnut tree virtually bare…(and far more kiddy friendly)

and behind the garage now only holds small piles of junk, instead of the HUGE piles of junk previously residing there….

Hubby has finished splitting the wood from the wattle and gum trees we had felled, just one last pile to stack in the wood shed. This is the spot where the Avery once stood, before it started it’s epic journey to the bottom of the paddock.

And Dad fixed up the raised beds in my vege garden area. The area at the back fence line only gets a little morning sun, so he shortened the beds for me. We’re going to pave the area along the back there and put in a potting table and seedling raising shelves… and maybe a nice bench seat or something so I can sit and watch my veges grow!

My stepmother (a good farm girl!) shoveled what must of been ten years worth of chook poos and old rotted straw out of the grotty old chook house and dug it into the garden beds … and because the new gardens looked very bare we trotted off to the garden centre and bought dozens of plants – beetroot, silverbeet, leeks, lettuces, spinach, zucchini etc to fill them up!

While they were here we had a classic *Canterbury breeze* come through… snapped a huge tree in the front corner of our neighbours section and sent it tumbling onto the phone lines outside our house…

I had to go out in the wind and do a little happy dance… it was a monster of a tree that we had worked out was going to be a real problem in winter – it’s position was going to block a good portion of our afternoon sun! We had been pondering how to approach our *very tree loving* neighbour about giving it a hair cut… and then mother nature came along and gave it a #2!

Kids on the tramp – check out Ethan’s somersaults:

And Rhiannon playing peak-a-boo…

And Stella being a *very delicate* fairy princess ….(excuse the messy house and wrecked mama in the background!)

Our grumpy old bantam managed to hatch her babies… in the washing basket… on Christmas day.

Yes – we did try to move her before they hatched… no it wasn’t successful at all! Anyway – we decided to leave her alone until the babies appeared, thinking if we moved her after they were hatched she wouldn’t leave them. Which turned out to be correct. So after all four of the chicks appeared Jason picked up mummy (while wearing gardening gloves – she has a nasty peck on her!) and I collected up the chicks and off we went to the new house.

The chicks are hilarious looking little things – Aracana / Silkie crossed – some have little rock star hairdo’s.

We’ve also learnt another big lesson – don’t put eggs under broody hens that are sharing a nest. It seems to have resulted in a ZERO hatch rate! When they’re turning their eggs they seem to shift eggs from one hen to another and I don’t think egg sharing works! I noticed that sometimes Henny would have 12 or so eggs and Bossy would have the rest, then the next day Bossy would have 15 and Henny only a few. But a couple of days ago I noticed that there were also some eggs sitting *between* the hens, rather than under them and while they were warmish – they weren’t warm enough. I popped them back under one of the girls at the time, but I think at some stage most of the eggs have probably ended up on the outer and have cooled too much never mind – you learn from these things….

For banding together and buying the kids the MOST FABULOUS present ever! A 14 foot trampoline…. complete with safety net (which was an absolute necessity…. otherwise I couldn’t cope with the danger factor!) The net is really strong – so far I’ve counted at least 2 *saves* for Ethan and numerous more for Stella so I’m pretty happy. And being made in Germany the whole thing is built like a tank so I’m sure it’s going to last them for years! I had no idea it would be so MAMMOTH until the frame was partially erected - lucky we’ve got a fair bit of space aye

Here was stage one… unfortunately the wind was blowing a bit ferociously last night, so it wasn’t *ready* to be discovered on Christmas morning… but that’s ok – because we woke up to rain anyway so no one went outside until late morning!

The kids waited (not patiently at all!) for the rain to clear so Dad could finished putting it together and they’ve been fighting over it ever since… both Ethan and Stella have decided it’s *MINE*. Jason has had to resort to using a stop watch to time out 10 minute turns for them both… while one gleefully bounces the other lurks sulking by the ladder. Ethan has even tried to resort to bribery in an effort to get Stella to shorten her turns – running to his room to get usually sought after and prized toys for her, but she’s not falling for his trickery this time! Hahaha.

Of course Stella has decided everything else that was wrapped under the tree is hers as well, including Rhiannon’s new bike!

Fighting aside, it’s been a wonderful day Merry Xmas everyone.

We have a little bantam. She’s really REALLY grumpy. Apparently she is nine years old (I never knew chickens could live that long!) and she was left here (along with the junk….) by the previous owners. She’s very very unfriendly…. very very loud…. and very very silly. Not long after we moved in Grumpy Hen decided she was going to go broody. She found herself a nice little position safe and secluded…. in the top of an old washing basket filled with dried leaves….

See the white washing basket under the big sheet of steel? Right here… 

Yes… that is where she decided to nest. 

We didn’t even realise she was there for a couple of weeks – we thought she’d moved out in disgust after being chased by the kids one too many times (she’s always the one they chase because she’s the only one who runs!).

So once we discovered she was there we put a makeshift cover over her to keep the rain off and left her there. She seemed happy enough. When my stepfather arrived for a visit back in early December we decided to candle her eggs and see what was happening in there. Unfortunately none seems to show any sign of life which wasn’t surprising…. she’s probably a bit old for making babies. But she was so dedicated to her cause we felt a bit sad for her and decided to do an egg swap. So we took away her old eggs and gave her some fertile Araucana/Silkie cross ones we picked up from a B&B in Tai Tapu when we popped in to buy some fertile Barred Rock eggs. The babies are due any day now. Obviously she can’t raise babies in the washing basket… so Hubby has made her a lovely new house especially for hatching and raising her brood.

Now we just have to work out how to move her into it without causing a massive coronary event …. she gets really stressed when you go anywhere near her … and she is VICIOUS! We’ll give it a go tonight, when it’s nice and dark… wish us luck!

Now Hubby just needs to *whip up* two more houses for these girls….

These are two of our original chickens … Henny (the Langshan) and Bossy (the New Hampshire Red). Between them they’re sitting on 14 eggs – A mixture of Barred Rocks and Blue, Black and White Orpingtons. There was 15 eggs… see the tiny little brown thing outside of the nest – that’s a dead chick. One of the girls accidentally crushed the egg at some stage – by the looks of it at least a few days ago. I had seen the broken egg earlier in the day when they got off to eat, but I didn’t have a chance to get it out before they came back to the nest. At first I got a heck of a fright – I thought it was a hatch-ling that had fallen out and died. But when I picked it up I realised that it was too young (and from the smell had been gone a while!) I figured that while turning the eggs one of them has tossed it out of the nest.  The other chickens must have pecked the shell off.

Been thinking about these a bit this week (as you do at this time of the year!) – I thought I would make a start on my list. Given we have bought a house which lines up nicely with our dream of becoming more self sufficient and living more frugally I think some appropriate resolutions are in order. So where do I start? I’ll start with the most important thing…. FOOD!

Resolutions for 2009

#1. This year I’ve resolving to only eat *home made* or free-range chicken. Well, there is no way we can afford to buy free-range chooks… so I guess that means we *have* to do the deed ourselves. Hubby is preparing for this resolution already by drinking beer with neighbours. I know that sounds a strange form of preparation. But it’s in fact been invaluable so far. We have had all of the *how to kill a chicken* advice one could ever wish for. Complete with gesturing, pantomimes and sound effects!

#2 To only eat New Zealand grown seasonal produce (I know – locally grown would be so much better but I don’t think I could give up the avocados and kiwifruit!). This means no more American apples. This is actually a tough one for us. Ethan will *only* eat apples – been that way for months now. No other fruit – only apples. This means that (much to my own disgust) … fearing scurvy or something equally awful…. I’ve been buying imported apples.

#3 To be prepared for spring next year! This year we’d just moved and were so overwhelmed with packing/shifting/unpacking etc we missed out on a lot of spring planting / seedling raising / ground preparation time. This year we’re going to be on to it!

On, and one last one for now…. (this will have to be a joint family resolution)…..

 #4 NO MORE BUYING OF CRAP. Of any kind. Final. That’s it.

….Want the Chinese factory worker’s perspective on our crap? LOL  http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31049

That’s not a bad start to resolution making I think!