simple

A couple of years ago we were sitting drinking coffee at a cafe in town next to another couple and their real estate agent. As we sat and drank our coffee it was impossible to ignore the conversation to our side as it was both loud and near. The couple had a plan. A huge project. And they were excitedly filling the agent in on the details while asking for his help. He was nodding, asking the occasional question and scribbling notes in a book.

And as they filled him in on the where's and how's and whats, we kept looking at each other over the tops of our coffee cups. It was impossible not to be swept up in the excitement, to get carried away with their dreams, to feel certain that big things were on their way, that the sky was the limit, that anything was possible, or indeed probable.

Later as we walked off down the street I told my farmer boy that I was a bit jealous of their grand plan. Not of the actual plan itself, but of that feeling of having a big idea that changes everything: it takes up time in your thoughts, in your actions, in your feelings and changes the way you see your future. The potential is exciting, the risks are worth considering, your dream is a trickle that becomes a stream and then a gushing, overflowing river and you are swept along for the ride.

Yeah I don't think so he replied.

I guess we already have our very own grand plan story.

We moved to the country all those years ago for the lifestyle. We wanted a simple life of growing and eating our own food, making things with our hands and having time for our family and for things that made us feel happy.

But then our little plan grew greater and bigger and took on a life of its own and became Daylesford Organics.

At its height we kept 2,500 chooks, we grew hundreds of varieties of vegetables and fruit, we had full time staff and wages and insurance, we had trucks carting our produce to fancy restaurants in Melbourne, we had cool-rooms and trailers and a logo made, we were in all the magazines, we sold at farmer's markets most weekends, we won awards, we wrote invoices and BAS statements and we kept records and made so many phone calls. We worked crazy long hours in the heat and in the icy cold. We put our girls in child care or left them in the house with a walkie talkie. We sent all the best produce out for other people to enjoy and then too exhausted for anything else, we fed our kids fish fingers for dinner. We planted, we collected, we irrigated, we weeded, we harvested, we hired, we worried, we felt like inadequate business people, we became managers with clean hands, we stressed, we realised that this life wasn't making us happy, and eventually we closed it all down. It was a grand plan but all we ever wanted was a simple life.

A simple life where we can prioritise growing healthy girls and each other above all else.

In the last few days since we've been home from holidays that conversation has been running through my mind. At first I thought that maybe it was because I wasn't satisfied and wanted something bigger in my life. But as the days have gone on I've realised that it's exactly the opposite. I am right where I want to be, but for some reason I'm questioning that. Is it okay to be content living in the moment without plans to move forward? Is it okay to spend my days looking after my family, doing house hold chores, working in the garden, working on the farm, making things and reading and writing? Is it okay to plod along or do we have to be going somewhere?

Farmer Bren likes to tell the story of a woman he heard interviewed on the radio a while back. She was a migrant who worked at a chocolate factory watching the Freddo Frogs come down a conveyor belt on the look-out for the imperfect ones. She spoke about how content she was. She had a job that earned her money that she could leave at the end of the day without any stress, and go home to spend the rest of her time with her family who she adored. It was a simple story and it moved him.

At times I do have thoughts about adding to the mix. About maybe studying or volunteering or working off the farm, but any shift will unbalance and complicate what is working so well here at the moment, so I have to make sure that it's something important to me. Having said that I know that if I do have a burning desire I will follow it and we will make it work. That's what we do.

After all where and how we live isn't a lucky coincidence, we've made choices all along the way.

So after much thought and wonder I'm choosing to appreciate and enjoy what I've got and where I am. It's the best place for me.

In my simple life this week we've been picking and eating carrots, beetroot, lettuce, spinach, rocket, leeks and brussel sprouts from the garden. Most of these we planted late last summer and they grew while there was still warmth in the soil and now they sit waiting to be picked.

We've been admiring a patch of fully grown cabbages that grew from the plants we harvested in autumn but never pulled out. I actually had no idea you could grow a second cabbage off the same plant. Hopefully these will become a batch of sauerkraut before too long.

I'm knitting up the ankles of my socks. It's interesting to note that I knitted six of those shapes in the five days we were away and only one in the six days we've been home. I'd love to have them cast off and being worn by this time next week. We'll see.

I'm reading this book and loving every page. It is surprising and interesting and quirky and clever and witty and dark and lovely. There's a quote on the back of the book that says A story about the very worst and very best that humans are capable of...Funny, brave and utterly devastating. I agree completely. This is a story that has the potential to be as depressing as a book can be, but is instead something quite wonderful.

I am grateful to the kind people at Harper Collins Australia for sending me a copy.

I am spending lots of time in the green house watering, watching and planting. To be honest it's still so cold here that planting seeds out now isn't really going to give me any sort of head start over those I plant in a month or so, but I can't help it, I love it in there and simply cannot wait.

I'm feeling very lucky to have received this beautiful parcel in the mail from my instagram friend Ainslee. It's such a wonderful thing to chat with someone online for months and months and then to hold a little piece of them in your real life. Thank you Ainslee, I love every little bit.

Check out Ainslee's store here and her gorgeous instagram here.

I'm also listening fascinated to Richard Fidler's interview with David Gillespie on How to spot a psychopath. Trying to drink more water. Aching from last night's Body Combat class. Wondering how we can be in so many places at once this Sunday. Splitting wood for the Esse. Watching nothing much really which is a bit of a relief after last week's indulgence. Deciding if I can get away without doing a load of washing today. Hoping that we can keep getting up a bit early and running on the treadmill and doing exercises next week like we did this week.

I'm reading through the Words In Winter website (try saying that six times quickly), book marking bits that sound interesting.

And I'm realising that Bren was absolutely right back then, I don't want to be anyone else with a grand plan, I want to be us. I want to work really hard in season and to take it a bit easy in winter. I want the freedom to be spontaneous with the jobs we take on each day. And above all else I want to be available for the girls. I want them to feel heard and appreciated and pushed and helped.
It's the simple life for me.

For now anyway.

How about you?
Do you have big plans for change or are you content to let things be?
Are you a cafe eavesdropper?
An everyday launderer?
Do you have time to sit and read a book under a tree?

I hope your weekend is both fun and restful.

See you next Friday.

Love Kate

xx

a postcard from the beach

Dear (insert your name here),

How are you?

We've been having a lovely time at the beach. Even though we're only here for five full days, the break from the cold and from our everyday routine has been worth every travel mile.

Every other year we've come here we've spent big chunks of time away from the house; exploring, shopping and wandering, but this year we've hardly left. The girls have spent hours sitting up at the kitchen table doing homework and painting in their journals, farmer Bren has been playing guitar and I've just turned the heel of a pair of socks I cast on four days ago, I'm sure that's a personal record.

Before we came here I thought I might be done with knitting socks. The last few pairs I knitted didn't fit their intended recipient properly and I lost confidence. There's nothing worse than a few weeks' worth of 4ply knitting on 2mm needles sagging at the ankles.

But the night before we left home I packed three skeins of sock yarn and didn't look back. Socks are the best traveling project and I just had to give them another go. Initially I thought I'd knit grey and blue stripes, but once I'd wound the yarn into balls I changed my mind. I'm always looking for plain grey socks to wear with clogs and these purled cabled ones will be perfect.

And knitting those toes felt just like coming home. I am still well and truly a sock knitter. 

I've also fallen in love with watching tv in bed. I know!!!! Lying back against a mountain of pillows, flicking through the stations and getting sucked into the lives of tattoo artists, brides, airline stewardesses and cooks feels so indulgent and like nothing I'd ever do in my real life. It's probably lucky that we don't have a tv at home so I won't be tempted.

We've walked all the way to the end of the beach and back a few times. We've swum and enjoyed the sunshine on our skin. We've read books and listened to music. We've tried to convince the girls to stay another week and miss some school. But they won't. Bum!

And I've thought a lot about what it was like when we were here at the same time last year and how far we've come since then. 

Last year on one of the first days of our holiday I closed myself in my bedroom and wrote down the story of my daughter's bullying from my perspective. After months of watching the story unfold, of witnessing my daughter crumple, of finally taking matters into our own hands and exposing it to everyone who was involved and everyone who would listen, and completely losing myself in distress, I wrote down my feelings and reactions and fears. And then I posted them to my blog. It was a terrible time.

A year on and things couldn't be much more different. Our girl is blossoming. She's strong and independent, she has a bunch of great friends and she can make me laugh like no one else can.

I think we all see the world a bit differently in the after, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think we're all more aware and careful, I think we're more compassionate and I think that after hearing so many other people's stories, we're always ready to listen and support and defend.

I'm astounded by how widespread bullying is and has been for a very long time. It kills me. I can only hope that all the cliches about time passing and difficult situations making better and stronger people are true. 

I'm so terribly sad and sorry for those of us who have been treated badly and especially for those of us who have had to watch it happen to someone we adore. It's the worst. I'm sending love and strength and courage out to all.

And sunshine.

We're heading home tomorrow to the depths of the dark Daylesford winter and I'll be holding onto the memory of this bright, sunshiney week for as long as I can.

I hope you've had a wonderful week wherever you are.

Are you reading a good book? Traveling somewhere interesting? Planning something exciting?

I'd love to know all about it.

See you in a week.

Love Kate

xx

from yesterday with love x

So here's something a bit weird. I'm actually writing this on Thursday and not Friday, even though I'm posting it on Friday and not Thursday, and you're probably reading it on Friday and definitely not on Thursday. But if I didn't tell you that you wouldn't know any different. The internet is funny like that isn't it? All this information and all these assumptions and in the end we just have to sort through it all and decide for ourselves what we believe in.

But you can trust me I promise. The reason I'm writing it a day early is because we're going to The Australian Sheep and Wool Show tomorrow (Friday) and on the way home we're going to pop in on our old friends in their new house, and I don't want to feel all rushed or like I've got something at the back of my mind that I feel like I should be doing instead.

So here I am. It's Thursday evening and it's dark and rainy and cold outside. I'm sitting about as close to the heater as I can get, Bren's in the other room practising guitar, the smalls are next to me programming a robot that Pepper and Bren just finished building, and Indi is on a bus home from Woodend. When she gets home we'll have spaghetti with lentils for dinner.

The top photo is of the kitty cat hot water bottle cover I knitted for Miss Pepper for her birthday last year. I was just looking through my Ravelry page before and noticed that I had never taken a photo of it, so now I have. The details are here.

This is the tractor hot water bottle cover that I'm just finishing off now. Did I mention it's cold? 

I feel like overalls are the only clothing option that makes any sense these wintry days. I pretend that I wear them for work, but really it's the handy hot water bottle sized pouch up front. So cozy.

Speaking of sheep and wool and knitting and stuff, here's a little shearing shed drawing my farmer boy found in a box of his primary school exercise books. This one's from grade three. There are more pages of sheep drawings but I forgot to photograph them and now it's dark. Oops, hopefully I'll remember and add them in tomorrow. So cute!!

I'm reading my daughter's copy of Once & Then by Morris Gleitzman, trying to stay ahead of her so we can discuss it as she goes. Once & Then are fictional books that follow the life of a 10 year old Jewish boy called Felix living in 1945 Nazi Poland. I've only read 50 pages so far but I'm already completely engaged in the story. I'm so interested to see how the book progresses and how Morris deals with the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child and for an audience of children.

I'm also interested to see how the conversation with my daughter evolves. She says that most of the kids in her class have already read the books and she's grown up in a house where many discussions about the Holocaust have taken place in front of her over the years. But still it's pretty tricky subject matter for a kid. I'm hoping that I can trust Morris Gleizman to be sensitive to his young audience and their naivety, but like I said, I'm reading ahead just to be sure.

I'm thrilled to report that my onion seedlings have finally decided to show their sweet green faces a month after I planted them. These were the first seeds that I planted in our new green house so it means so much to me that they have. We also eat a lot of onions so it'll be great to have a big stash.

When we were first talking about and designing the green house I just assumed we'd use old windows for the roof as well as the walls. But then I was quickly talked out of that because their weight and fragility would make the structure unsafe. If we wanted to use old glass, we'd have to build a proper roof structure to support them. 

So after much research and discussion we ordered some poly tunnel plastic and popped it on up. We thought it would be reasonably priced, easy to fit and that it would be UV sensitive come summer.

What ended up happening is that it looked flat and ugly, and when it rained huge pools of water collected in the low points. We tried shoving bits of wood and tubes of cardboard up to stop it, but nothing stopped the pools and we were worried that one day the weight of the water would burst through the plastic and flood the space. 

So this week the plastic came down and some good old, practical Laserlite went up in its place. It's strong and sturdy and safe and now that it's up there I don't mind that corrugated look as much as I thought I might. It does the trick in the rain anyway.

And look at that. Remember in my last post when I told you that we'd been having issues with our Esse stove since it was installed in 2012? Well, on Monday Bren's Dad's plumber came back and after another big day they lit it and ever since then it's been running like a dream. Our house is warm, tonight's dinner was cooked on the hot plate, and if you sit with your back to that radiator in the photo above to write your blog you'll feel as toasty as a marshmallow. So my farmer boy is happy and so say all of warm us!

And that's me all blogged up and no place to go. That is until the sheep and wool show tomorrow. Can't wait!

And just for fun, if you could have anything at all knitted into a hot water bottle cover what would it be? I think I'd like three little girls on mine, or maybe a sheep.

I hope you have a great Friday, honey bunches. I have no idea how to schedule a blog post so I think I'll just publish this early before we leave. And I haven't decided if I'll take my big camera along, but I'm certain I'll be posting to my instagram stories if you want to follow along over there.

Big love!

Kate
xx

the afternoon after

Last night when we were in Melbourne picking up Pepper I bumped into an old friend. He asked how I was and then I asked him. We both answered really good without even really thinking. But then I took a breath all the way in and noticed all the parts of my body that had been stuck sitting inside the car for the past two hours. I'm on a bit of a mission to get out of my head and into my body more often these days. And I noticed my aching shoulder and I added that I am actually feeling great because just this past week I smashed a goal that I'd set myself close to a year ago.

Working with our trainer at gym twice a week, she'd often talk about a particular fitness class she runs. The group who turn up a few times a week to take this class are at peak fitness. They pick up the choreography quickly, they move to the beat, they are strong and they work together to achieve this amazing feeling of strength and joy that has them sweaty and cheering by the end of the class. 

For months every time I bumped into a friend of mine who goes she'd encourage me to come and list all the benefits, and I'd tell her that one day I would. One day.

Then on Tuesday our trainer told me I was ready and she thought I should come to that night's class. As she ran through some of the trickier moves with me we discussed the importance of learning new things as an adult, about the fact that being bad at something is not a waste of time, about the importance of goals and challenges and about doing something for myself.

That night I left my warm house and went out into the cold and the dark. After working with our trainer for a year and a half I trust that she knows me well enough to know what I'm capable of so I wasn't nervous, I didn't expect much of myself though.

And like she'd said, the people were lovely and very serious about it. I stood at the back and watched in awe as they punched and jumped and kicked and lunged, in time, and again and again and again.

And you know what? I did too! Of course I found it tricky and stumbled and tripped often, I sweated my head off and there were many times when I wondered if the end of the song would ever come. But I kept up. And apart from the knee push ups that killed my knees, I managed every single exercise. They might have even clapped me at the end.

The few days since have been an anatomy lesson in muscle groups of pain, but gosh I feel great. And proud. And strong.

The friend I told this to last night made all the right noises and told me about his own goal that he'd smashed recently. I don't want to betray his confidence so I'm not going to write about his part of the conversation, but just know that I asked and listened as well as spoke.

He then asked me about the girls, how are they are and what they're up to? It's funny, I told him. So often there's something going on with one of them being extra needy or demanding. But right now they all three seem to be doing things they love and they're happy. School holidays are tricky with the big two now that their friends live an hour away, but we're managing.

And Bren? He's really great too. The farm is slowly going to sleep for the winter which gives him the time to express himself creatively. He's got a few projects going on and he's learning and loving working on them.

He had a difficult time during the week when we had yet another plumber out to try and fix the hydronics on the wood stove that have never worked properly in the five years we've had it. He questioned himself and his decisions and whether it was worth persevering at all. But after a good night's sleep and a discussion with the plumber who is confident that he can come back and fix it and get it running properly, he's feeling cautiously optimistic again.

It's horrible watching the person you love really struggling. My first impulse is always to try and fix it and take the hurt away. But over the years I've learnt that it's more important to support them. To listen carefully, to offer my thoughts if needed and to sit with them through the process without getting impatient or suggesting certain solutions.

Fingers crossed this week will see the cooker fixed and the end to a very long five years of problems.

Then he asked about the apples. It's funny that no matter the time or season, people always do. And the chooks and the dogs? All good.

We then spoke of country living versus city living and how I could never go back. We spoke of all the changes we've made to our house since they last visited and when they can come back.

He didn't ask me about my crochet or knitting, surprise-surprise. But incase you were wondering I'm darning in the ends of my crochet blanket and knitting squares onto my scrappy sock blanket. My farmer boy needs a new beanie next.

And I'm reading Abby's advance copy of The Lucky Ones. I started reading it a couple of weeks ago when I was feeling crappy but put it down after I realised it was pretty heavy in places. Now that I'm reading it in a better frame of mind I'm loving it.

Set during the peak of Columbia's drug fuelled conflict, The Lucky Ones is one of those books where each chapter stands alone as a short story and also fits in as a part of the intertwining bigger picture. Set over a 20 year period, the interconnecting bits between the stories are sometimes so surprising that they feel like bits of a jigsaw puzzle clicking in together. Told from the perspective of high school students, teachers, guerrilla fighters, parents and prisoners, The Lucky Ones capture a period of time so vividly but so far seem anything but what the name of the book suggests.

I thought you'd like to see this picture of our Pepper and her friend Drew taken by local photographer Juanita Broderick for the Tripwire Theatre production of Hollow recently. Pepper played Thomas Graham, one of three young boys who left their Daylesford homes 150 years ago to play in the forest and never returned home. The play told the story of the events that surrounded their disappearance.  


And that's me in my point in time. It's funny but when I sat down to write my blog this afternoon my brain didn't want to. It was like because I'd kind of done it yesterday, it didn't want to do it again today. So I got distracted and found a heap of other things to do instead. In the end, looking for a way to trick myself into it I remembered how often you guys leave comments telling me that my blog is just like catching up with a good friend. So I started there. And my brain cooperated. Thank goodness.

Which makes me wonder about your side of the story.
How are you going?
How's your family?
Your animals?
Have you made or smashed any goals lately?
Are you making anything cool?
I'd love to know.

I hope you have a great weekend.

Love Kate

xx

see you tomorrow

Hello sweet friends, I can't believe how fast this week's flown by and that here I am on Friday again sitting here tapping out yet another blog post. I probably say that every Friday but it always feels true.

Usually Friday is the one day of the school week that we don't have to spend hours in the car driving the big girls over the hills and back, to and from their school. I love Fridays, apart from our one hour at gym, the rest of the day is for blog writing and bowl turning and other creative adventures. But today being the first Friday of the first week of the school holidays means that all routine is out the window and rather than a slow and easy day, today I am being pulled in all sorts of other directions.

So instead of giving myself a hard time and trying to rush this and fit it into all the small gaps, I'm going to have a quick shower, put on my Melbourne clothes, and drive into town to pick up Miss Pepper and bring her home. I'll post a proper blog tomorrow when I can give it a decent chunk of time.

In the meantime why don't you pour yourself a cup of tea from the kettle farmer Bren has boiling on the stove in his workshop and make yourself a toastie on the fire. I'll be back here before you know it.

See you tomorrow!

Love Kate x

PS What're your favourite toastie fillings?
I'm pretty boring with my cheese, olives and semi dried tomatoes.

PPS I like the old peppermint tea the best too.