Eggs Excess

Bright early morning sunshine blinds the egg-hunters, as they line up on the stoep, armed with empty baskets to collect the Easter bunny's bounty. We managed to hold them off till 8 o'clock by letting them watch The Knight's Tale, which was enthralling enough to allow the Easter Bunny to hop around outside undetected.

We egg-celled ourselves this year with an over abundance of eggs. The Easter Bunny must have been staggering under the load of chocolate he brought to our farm. I don’t know how he made it up our drive, I really don’t.

We had friends staying so for the first time it wasn’t just our three kids hunting for eggs early on Easter morning, but a posse of five children armed with baskets. Living on a farm with two doting aunts, the kids know that after they’ve checked round our house for eggs they need to pay a visit , more like a mine-sweeping mission, to the other three houses, where the Easter Bunny will have hopped with a lavish generosity of egg distribution.


The addition of two more children proved too much for the bunny deputies who, fearful of a shortage, had more than doubled the egg provisions. So baskets had to be supplemented by plastic bags, as they were full to overflowing. The hunt lasted a full hour, by which time the adult camp followers were gasping for a cup of tea and some breakfast and the sun was getting warm! We now have enough chocolate to last till Christmas!

Back at the house our son initiated an egg audit, to make sure that everyone had fair shares. His remarkable grip of numbers had lasted until halfway through the hunt but then he lost count of who had what, so a check ensued, with everyone declaring their goods and divvying up any extras.

Beware - this is what happens if you have four Easter Bunnies providing the chocolate ... one child's haul!

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Ten

It’s the end of term today! Hurray! It has drawn out long because of Easter being late and had started to feel like it would never end. In celebration summer has decided to make yet another come back and we have a suffocating day of 38C, all the more fierce for the cool weather we've enjoyed lately.

Back from school with two of the girls’ friends in tow, we went straight down to the pool in an attempt to let off the end of term steam in cooler surroundings. Four girls and one boy clashed against each other repeatedly, girls’ games thwarted by boyish attempts at improving them by running a bit of interference.

The girls got out protesting, leaving him alone in the pool and started another game by the side of the pool. His fun curtailed he also got out and came over to me, where I was reading in the shade and trying to be deaf to all the shrieks.

“I don’t think they’ll ever get husbands” he announced in a matter of fact tone, sounding rather like a dowager duchess despairing of the younger generation.

“Why’s that?” I enquired trying to disguise my laughter.

“They don’t seem to like boys very much.”

It’s tough being the only boy, but I’m sure it will improve when they’re all teenagers!

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Candles for Earth Hour

Candles, lots of them... for Earth Hour we got out all our most colourful candles and candle holders and lit them all along our big table, before going round the house, switching off all the lights, the TV, the computers. Our eyes adjusted to the low light, the gentle glow of yellow candle flame reflecting off our red clay walls, and then we each took a candle and went out to our circle. As we walked along the path the lights went out in the other houses on our property until they were just dark silhouettes outlined against the starry sky.


The children were in pyjamas and winter jackets and the cool breeze kept blowing out the candles, until only Youngest's was still alight. Amazingly there was enough glow from the stars to see quite well, even though there was no moon. The sand was cold under our feet after the first autumn rains the night before, so we didn't stay out long. Just enough time for each of us to say some positive intentions for saving energy in the future and put out some hope and love for the future of the planet.


Then we headed in to make hot chocolate (with the electric kettle) and sit around our candlelit table enjoying the reflection of all the different colours.

Soon the children were yawning and we carried candles through to the bathroom for brushing teeth.

We've had plenty of practice at going to bed by candlelight, with the power cuts we've had now and then over the last couple of years, but this time it had more of a magic through being intentional. We weren't fretting for the power to come back on, just sitting back and enjoying the calm. And experimenting with candles as camera flash!


After the children were in bed three of us sat on the sofa chatting. In the pauses in conversation the silence seemed absolute. No background hum of music or television, no computer whirr or dishwasher swoosh. We ended up going to bed early once our hour without lights was up, there was something soothing about the quiet of dim candlelight that didn't want bright lights and loud noise to chase it away. We'll definitely take part in Earth Hour again next year, if we even wait that long.

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Wine Cubes in a Steamy Kitchen

A frantically domestic kitchen mood overtook me this afternoon and I found myself baking rusks for the first time in ages. I used to keep a tin on the go at all times in those days when I was ‘only’ a full time mother and didn’t have the distraction of work and computers. It used to be one of those things that would keep me and two toddlers busy and flour-dusted for half the afternoon, a huge juggle to get them in the oven before the baby woke up and needed feeding.

Today, after I’d thrown together a batch of ginger oat biscuits too (domestic halo gleaming!) with visions of full tins of home-made rusks and biscuits on the counter ensuring domestic goddess status for at least a week, I progressed onto something I’ve been meaning to do for about ten years and never have…

We are beset by half bottles of leftover wine. I like wine but don’t drink more than a glass at a time and my husband hardly ever drinks it any more, so any occasion like our festivals will leave a line of unfinished bottles on our kitchen counter until they are too vinegary to drink, and the depressing waste of once-good wine going down the drain always annoys me.

In one of those annoyingly efficient household tips books, I once came across the idea of boiling up leftover wine, reducing it by half and freezing it in ice-cube trays, so that whenever you need a dash of wine for cooking you can just add one, without needing to open a bottle of wine especially. Brilliant idea, I thought, and promptly ignored it for the next decade. Until the line of bottles left from this last festival looked back reproachfully at me today and I finally took action.

I nearly overdid the reduction, returning to the pan just before it caramelized the wine completely by boiling it dry, and from just under a half bottle I'm now left with four big ice cubes of deep red wine flavour to freeze. Perfect for adding to gravy or the mince for shepherd’s pie or something.

So now I resolve never to waste good wine by pouring it away again. It’s all going to be stashed away in the freezer and my halo will gleam and smell gloriously bacchanalian in the steamed up kitchen. What are your best domestic goddess tips? Just in case this mood lasts and I need more inspiration!

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Earth Hour

Tomorrow is Earth Day. In an event called Earth Hour, millions of people and organizations are going to be turning off their lights at 8.30pm local time for an hour, to make a gesture towards awareness of energy use, global warming and saving the planet. Major monuments like Table Moutain and the Pyramids are going to be turning off their spotlights for an hour and thousands of communities and organizations are joining in.

We only heard about it this week but are all going to join in, have a candlelit evening and sit outside looking at the stars shining even more brightly with less light pollution out there. Yes, we do get light pollution, even here 50 km from Cape Town there is a dirty orange glow on the horizon.

Middle Daughter was really excited about the idea, even though we get plenty of candlelit evenings courtesy of Eskom, who are doing their bit towards saving the planet by inadvertantly giving us compulsory energy saving hours on a regular basis. When she heard it would be after her bed-time she was disappointed, so maybe we'll have to start earlier and read a story by candlelight tomorrow evening.

I'm excited about the amazing energy (sustainable of course!) this will put out into the universe, if everyone is part of it.

Are you going to join in too? Sign up if you haven't already.

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Two Trips to Town

It was an average Thursday that kicked off with car no.2 refusing to start for the school run. I’d breathed a sigh of relief having successfully dispatched all three kids out to the car, fully equipped for school, hair brushed and plaited (except for our son!), and was just about to take my first sip of tea, when the door blew open again and they all trooped through on the way to borrow my sister-in-law’s car to take them to school (Car no.1 is still, after more than three weeks, at the garage in Cape Town). Once the children were duly dropped off, my husband returned to resuscitate the Toyota with a bit of borrowed energy from SILs car battery….

But this wasn’t supposed to be another car post. Suffice it to say that both of our cars are now out of action in vehicular intensive care, with no prospect of a cure until some time next week, and no fuming or fretting or storming or ranting is going to help. Luckily we share our property with my two SILs and with some juggling of their cars we can function, almost…we hope.

So with one sister in law working from home today I could use her car and thought I’d better do the weekly shop while I could. The children had been fractious and squabblesome on the way back from school, so not feeling patient enough to drag their unpredictable mass energy around the supermarket, I set off after lunch with just Middle Daughter in tow, as she urgently needed new shoes having grown out of them all overnight.

We had an unhurried shopping session and really enjoyed the rare one-on-one time, choosing her shoes quite quickly and getting two pairs, as they were in the sale and very cheap and cheerful. I suppressed any twinges of parental guilt left over from having grown up myself in good quality leather Clarks sandals that are fitted for width and good for growing feet. They don’t do Clarks or any sort of width-fitted shoes over here and they would be way too expensive if they did, especially at the rate the kids are growing at the moment.

We did the grocery shopping amicably, with her pushing the trolley and practising her reading on the labels of the cheese biscuits, working out which brands were cheaper and trying to decide whether to buy the better brand for slightly more or the cheaper one that wasn’t quite so nice. All in all we enjoyed ourselves doing the routine shop without the usual crowd control measures and drove back home happily.

At home the new shoes were duly admired by all, and we in our turn admired the frog that had been caught and the elaborate house constructed for it by Youngest and Ryan in our absence. Fifteen minutes later, while I was still unpacking shopping, before even getting a cup of tea, a howl erupted from outside.

My husband returned from investigating, hand clamped round Middle Daughter’s left arm, where a deep cut was oozing all over the floor. She’d been climbing over the remains of the rusty metal jungle gym that we’d taken down because it was getting dangerous, but not yet carted away.

One makeshift bandage later and she and I were retracing our path in a reversal of the afternoon’s shopping trip. Twenty-five minutes back down the same long road into town, that we’d driven only half an hour earlier, and into the doctor’s surgery, where he’d very kindly waited for us after surgery hours had finished.

It was a deep cut, right close to the elbow and she was frightened by the idea of needles sewing her up, confiding to me that she felt like screaming. I told her to go ahead and scream but she didn’t and was very brave, managing to keep still enough while he put in local anaesthetic and then eight stitches to close it up. And then after all that she still had to have a tetanus injection.

So the day closed its second shadow cycle, as we drove back down the main road once more, watching the sun slide down behind the horizon, turning all the clouds pink and orange. Table Mountain in the distance had a delicate shawl of lilac draped around its shoulders, and my daughter and I had had even more one-on-one bonding time than we’d expected, sharing both the joys of successful shopping and the growing-up experience of bearing pain and discomfort without kicking up a fuss or refusing to co-operate.

So after a day like today, with Mary Alice's Thankful Thursday in mind, I’m thankful for several things:

• living on a shared property where there is always someone happy to help out in an emergency
• having sisters-in-law who are more than happy to share their cars
• having a kind family doctor who stays behind after hours to stitch up an arm, so that we don’t have to run the gauntlet of the hospital emergency room
• and even the one on one time spent with my daughter however it came about, which doesn’t happen often enough in a family of three children
• last of all for the colours of sunset holding out beauty and hope.

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Pumpkins and Angels in Autumn

Another equinox has been and gone, signalling shorter days and colder nights for us, and the spring surge of energy and lengthening days for all you Northern hemispherites.

We celebrated our autumn festival yesterday. It’s our harvest festival, with the theme of Earth, where we give thanks for all the fruits of the earth and the children build and decorate sandcastles in our big sandpit.


After a really cool week, where it felt more like winter than the end of summer, it warmed up to a perfect early autumn day, with blue skies and warm sunshine.

We make straw angels too.


The first time they were made of lengths of straw from wheat that had seeded itself from the straw bales used to build our houses and we wove it into angel shapes to hang around our circle. Subsequent years have lacked the long straw and pressed us into more creative ways of making angels, with materials like the restios that grow wild here, lavender, flowers and raffia.

This year the angels were more creative than ever!


This is also my chance to carve pumpkins, which for some reason I really enjoy, and make pumpkin soup with the contents.

One of our friends made a fantastic mandala in the sand around the circle, radiating out in glorious sun rays the whole way round.


The kids lose no opportunity of combining sand and water and had a full on sand castle water feature.


We carried all our creations and harvest offerings of almonds from our trees into our circle at sunset, lit pumpkins glowing, and said some blessings and gave thanks for all the fruits of the earth and the harvests of the year.

And then we feasted on the pumpkin soup, bean stew, salad and homemade bread followed by plum quiche, apple pie and chocolate pudding and all the children ran around outside in the dark, playing hide and seek and jumping on the trampoline way past their bedtimes, with only two doses of Arnica required!

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