baybeasts

Today, inspired by a combination of this book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the arrival of the blossoms and longer days that indicate the slow turn towards spring, I got my hands truly dirty in the garden for the first time in about a year.

I have been doing the bare minimum in upkeep this year - so far I have pruned the roses, planted out some ranunculus for spring colour, and turned a blind eye to the take-over bid by various enthusiastic plants (scabiosa, I’m looking at you). When I was anticipating maternity leave, I nursed a small hope that it would be an opportunity to spend more time in the garden - I dreamed of growing enough vegetables to make a meaningful difference to our food bill, of weeds conquered and flowers blooming and babies gurgling in their bassinets in the shade while I made all this happen. Clearly, I had absolutely no idea how much these boys would set my agenda for me, and that gardening wouldn’t be on it!

So today was simply wonderful. Huey hung out in the sling with bean, and Arlo hung out with Az who divided his time between helping me rip out weeds and removing small bits of dirt and other crap from Arlo’s mouth. I was gloriously unencumbered, and so was able to rip out an enormous, unprunable lavender bush (like unwanted hair, if it was pruned it grew back thicker and more luxurious within a week); weed gravel paths; and pull out an overgrown fennel plant. Best of all, I discovered an onion patch that I had forgotten about, and that was buried deep in weeds. Behold its current weed-free glory:

And this is what happens to a carrot that is left to its own devices for a couple of years:

I always find it hard to come inside at the end of a gardening session - there is always some small thing that simply must be done. Today, as I pottered about doing all those last little things, my family watched through the living room window, and as much as I love my garden, they were the most beautiful thing I had seen all day:

Gee it’s hard to get back on the horse when you’ve taken a big blog break. There seems to be too much and yet too little to post about. Life goes on - up close, it is vivid and interesting, but from a distance (or a blog break) it takes on a rather bland texture. We get up, we get through the day, we go to bed, we get through the night, and then we get up again.

We haven’t posted much lately because bean being sick made the days harder to get through than usual for a little while there. But from Arlo and Huey’s point of view, life has been very eventful indeed. It is rushing by so fast - sometimes it seems like they hit new exciting milestones every day, and I can’t keep up. We’re long overdue for a list of milestones achieved and cute things done, but today I give you only a few:

• Sometimes they play together in the living room - well, more strictly, they parallel play, but it doesn’t always require our input (though we spy on them anyway!). And now that Huey can crawl, sometimes they set off on expeditions around the house together, accompanied by many delighted squeals and giggles. Arlo is still much faster than Huey (though Huey is catching up fast), and so he travels about twice as far as he goes backwards and forwards between Huey and their destination (usually the kitchen or the bathroom).
• Arlo’s love affair with books continues. Many times a day he will bring a book to one of us, waving it in the air and pushing it into our faces, then climbing into our lap so that it can be read. When we read to him he does his special concentrating heavy breathing, and cries if we stop before he is ready. He doesn’t like to share reading with Huey though, because Huey is still at the eating books stage and that really annoys Arlo. Pointing is Arlo’s second favourite activity after reading (accompanied by an emphatic ‘deh’, and either signifying want of an item, or wanting us to name or talk about the item), and now the two have come together so that he happily points to things he likes in the books (ducks, kittens, babies etc).
• Huey is now pulling up to standing, and cruising rather unsteadily around the furniture. His favourite place to pull up is the toybox, and he stands there for ages holding on precariously with one hand and pulling things out with the other. He’s working on sitting down but he hasn’t quite got it yet, so when he’s had enough he stands there grizzling and occasionally bending his knees until one of us comes to save him. With pulling up has come babbling - ‘hey-dah!’. It’s adorable.

But let me tell you the story of what just happened as I was writing this post. Both boys went down for a sleep around 10am (earlier than usual for Arlo because they have another cold). Bean went out to get a long overdue haircut, and I settled in for a bit of computer time. About 40 minutes later, I heard a sad cry from the bedroom. I rushed in to find Arlo red faced and upset and still mostly asleep, with Huey looking up at me from the far side of Arlo with a bright cheeky grin. Huey had silently crawled across the width of two queen size mattresses and over Arlo to play with his brother (or maybe the curtains), but his brother was not impressed with this feat at all. Somehow I managed to re-settle Arlo while Huey pulled up on me saying ‘hey-DAH!’ at the top of his voice (Arlo really is sick and sad to go back to sleep through that commotion). And now Huey is pottering around at my feet smiling at me and trying to amuse himself in the study (mostly by playing with the heater). Time to split them up for their daytime naps, perhaps?

And because we haven’t posted a photo of Arlo for a little while, here he is pushing around the pumpkins that he helped me pick from the garden. Cute, hey.

the bay tree

Before we were even pregnant, we decided that we would honour our baybeasts by planting their placentas in a big pot along with a bay tree. This week we finally took the placentas out of the deep freeze where they have been languishing since the births. We inspected them closely before burying them in a big terracotta pot that my friend A gave to me many years ago, and planted a bay tree bought from Ceres on top.

Loey’s placenta was dark and twisty. The cord was full of strange twists and lumps, and its insertion was velamentous, which means that the blood vessels were all caught up in the membranes rather than coming directly out of the placenta. This is a very rare thing and a bit scary, because when the waters break a vessel can rupture which would be likely fatal for the baby.

Huey’s placenta was small and neat. So much for the whopping great placenta that supposedly blocked him from getting into a good position in utero! There wasn’t much cord, but we don’t know if that was because it was actually very short or if it’s because it was chopped in the caesar and they didn’t give us the whole thing. I like to think that his cord was a bit short, plus round his neck (maybe even twice, I think I heard the doctor say), because then I can understand why he wouldn’t put his head down and the hideous labour and emergency caesar make sense.

It felt good to finally do something meaningful with the placentas - they were so precious, keeping our babies alive and well inside us all those months. And I think the bay tree, which was looking a bit wan and cramped in its nursery black plastic pot, is already looking greener and happier.

the christmas tree

This is our fifth christmas together. Of the four christmases so far, we’ve had one very sad one when we lived in Footscray where we didn’t do anything and felt rather miserable, one on the south coast of New South Wales with my family, another fairly sad one here in Preston, and one in Brisbane with bean’s family. We’ve never had a proper christmas tree, and rarely bought each other secret presents - we’ve always just bought something big we both wanted (like a camera) and called it our present.

This year, with two small babies, we couldn’t spend christmas with either of our extended families, so we decided to really do it properly at home, in celebration of our own little family. The two things that make christmas for me are having a real live christmas tree, and a big pile of exciting presents underneath it. So we allocated a budget for christmas shopping (that we both broke!) and made time to go out alone and buy presents for each other and for the boys (because they are too small to appreciate the surprise, we have made surprises for ourselves by each individually buying presents for each of them). And last week, I ventured out in the car to find a christmas tree. I had just been to three separate christmas tree vendors, and decided on a beautiful little spruce in a pot, when an idiot in a shiny Honda ran into the rear of our car. It was very scary - I was turning right, and waiting for a bus to go past when it happened. I am so lucky that the bus didn’t hit me, and so glad that I was alone in the car. I wasn’t hurt at all, but the car, sadly, was so badly damaged that the insurance company has written it off. This means that we have to somehow find a new one. We loved our car, but they are not terribly common because they don’t make them anymore and they are in demand, so we are feeling a bit miserable about our chances. We also feel miserable about the loss of the car itself - the car we bought so that our little family would be safe on the road; the car that carried our brand new babies home from the hospital.

Luckily, our brilliant friends S and K lent us their second car. The very next day I went out and bought that little spruce in a pot, and it has made everything seem better somehow to have it glowing with fairylights in the corner of our loungeroom, with a big pile of presents underneath.

blame the drought, not our chronic lack of gardening time…

(mind you, we did grow the apricots too, and they were pretty ace, even if there were only 4 of them)

It’s been a funny old year. It’s the year in which we got our dream - our family, our two boys. And we couldn’t love them more. But it has been such a humbling year too. We didn’t have the births we hoped for, and we are not the parents we thought we would be. We were never going to wrap (we did), give a dummy (we’ve tried but Loey refuses it), use disposables (Huey needs them for his nappy rash), give drugs (we’re giving panadol to Loey to get a few precious hours sleep, and oral antibiotics to poor three week old Huey for the hideous nappy rash). We knew this year would be hard, but failed to realise just how hard that would feel.

The latest disappointment is the loss of the chickens. It was such a great idea - we were going to pre-load the cost of eggs by buying the coop and the chooks, and save ourselves heaps of money. What we didn’t expect was to fall in love with them so deeply - fussing around in their glossy black dresses, they bring our backyard to life. And Loey loves them - he will sit quietly for ten to fifteen minutes just watching them.

But a friendly neighbour yesterday told us that some not-so friendly neighbours are planning on complaining to the council about our chickens. It is true, they do greet the dawn in a very enthusiastic manner. And they do attract rats (though we were going to deal with that). And we aren’t strictly following the by-laws - they are a bit close to other people’s houses. So we think that the only thing to do is to wave goodbye - we do not have the energy to have a showdown with the neighbours. Luckily, very good friends of ours who live nearby have chickens already and can also accommodate ours - we will have visiting rights and the occasional batch of eggs. But we are devastated nonetheless.

We just have to hang onto the knowledge that we won’t be here forever - there will be other chickens, in other houses. And in the meantime I think I want to get a couple of rabbits or guineapigs for Loey to watch…

(Huey post in draft, coming soon)

Loey examining the stethoscope in order to help me figure out how to make one for Dr Fantastico to eat (we’re thinking licorice and marshmallows - I’ll post a photo when it’s done):

Also. I want to give a big shout out to the lovely Nix and his partner, not only for the tea and real life scrabble, but most especially for showing us that our camera actually can take decent close-ups. For over a year now we’ve been disappointed with our medium-priced digital purchase because it just couldn’t take a decent close-up - we never bothered to read the manual of course. We are absolutely spewing about the missed opportunities for close-ups of Arlo when he was very small, and are making up for it now:

And bean had fun in the garden the other day:

Tootle will be well close-upped, you can be sure!

We have 4 chickens. Because we chose a heritage backyard variety (Australorps) rather than a commercial laying variety, they lay 4-5 eggs a week when they are in peak condition. Ours are just warming up, because they are new layers, and also because it has been winter. So for us, a 4 egg day (when all of them have laid) is cause for excitement.

Yesterday was a 5 egg day. But it was no ordinary 5 eggs that we found:

Yes, Chook Pink has finally passed not one, but two eggs in one day. They are strange eggs though - it’s hard to tell from the photo, but the first egg (discovered first thing in the morning) has a porous, not-quite-right shell, and the last egg (discovered last thing at night) is almost perfectly spherical!

Hopefully she will lay an ordinary egg today, and we can officially say that she is fixed. Yay!

What with worrying about Loey’s neck, and him deciding that he’d like to feed every one and a half hours overnight, it’s been a pretty stressful couple of days. As if worrying about small son through extreme tiredness wasn’t hard enough, the other morning one of our girls got sick. I let them out as usual - I thought it was a bit strange that only three came out, but just assumed that the fourth must have been laying. About an hour later I happened to look out the laundry window, to see an alarming bundle of black feathers plonked in the middle of their run. I raced out, thinking we had a dead chook for sure, but as I approached she lurched to her feet, staggered a few steps, and then collapsed again.

Great. Sick chook.

I put her in a box and called the fellow that we bought them from. After laughing at me a bit because he was sure that we’d been giving them names and overfeeding them, he said he thought it was probably a stuck egg (because of the overfeeding), but if it wasn’t it was something horrible and deadly. I stuck my well gloved finger up her bum but couldn’t feel anything egg-like.

Great. Really sick chook.

So I rang the animal hospital, who luckily had an appointment with their bird vet available that very morning. They would only make an appointment if I provided a name for the chicken, which made me laugh after being teased only a few minutes earlier for naming them. They don’t have names, because I can’t tell them apart, so we said just call her Chook. We then pissed ourselves when at the hospital they called out ‘Chook Pink to room 6, Chook Pink to room 6.’

The bird vet turned out to be a total spunk, and lovely to boot. We had assumed that either she’d be able to get the stuck egg out, or Chook would get the chop (’be euthanased’ in the delicate phrase of the vet). But it turns out that it’s very difficult to diagnose a chicken without cutting it open, and it wasn’t clear what was wrong - it could still have been a stuck egg, only stuck pretty early in the process which is why I couldn’t feel it; or it could have been something deadly. (And she was pretty overweight, so all our girls are now on a strict diet.) So, for the cost of two replacement chickens, Chook got to spend the night in the hospital being tube fed fluids and generally cared for much more carefully than we ever do. The next day spunky chicken vet called and said that Chook was walking again and feeling much better, so it probably was a stuck egg after all, and we could come and pick her up that day.

So Chook is now segregated from the others so that we can monitor her output - she is basically in solitary until she proves that she is working again by pooing regularly and laying an egg. She’s definitely brighter than she was, making loads of noise and poo and generally trying to tell us something, though whether it’s that she’s happy to be home or pissed off about being in solitary I can’t tell.

Loey update for those who made it this far: we took him to the osteopath on Monday night. It was a bit anti-climactic - we’d been expecting to be given a series of exercises or something, stuff that we can DO about it, but she just said we’re actually doing the right things already (lots of tummy and back time, encouraging him to look in different directions), and that she wanted about 3-4 weeks to work on releasing the nerve that controls the muscle that is shortened, before we attempted manually stretching the muscle itself. So we’ve given her 4 weeks to prove that her way will make a difference, and then we’re going for the more conventional care of a physiotherapist, who will treat with physical therapy and stretching. We felt hopeful that after Monday he did seem a bit less tense in the neck, maybe a smidgen straighter, but it’s so hard to tell - we’ll take a photo a week to monitor any changes. It’s frustrating to realise that this is going to be a really slow process…

When bean and I talked about when I should finish up work, I said - I don’t mind if you go early, but it would be nice to have a week together before the baby comes.

And so we have. It’s been a strange week - a bit like being on holidays, except instead of impending return to desk job and working for other people, I am instead waiting for the biggest job of my life to start, working for my own family. It has been a lovely week too. We have kept busy with shopping and crafting and walking and gardening and admiring the chickens and cooking and seeing people. We’re in limbo - all plans are provisional, every twinge is something to talk about (we even had a false alarm when we went to see the new Harry Potter movie), but nothing much is changing. The days are blurring into each other and time is in slow motion, and it’s hard to believe that some day soon there will actually be a baby, our baby that will be with us all the time.

It’s even harder to believe that in spring there will be two - and as my 24 week picture shows, it is still well hidden!

There is no way a casual acquaintance or stranger would risk asking if I am pregnant. B2 is very much present though - bean has been getting regular kicks against her bottom as we spoon at night, and if I sit or lie in a position that cramps B2’s style I soon find out about it.

It’s actually a nice day outside today for the first time in weeks, so I’m off now to plant broccoli and onion seedlings, and broad beans and sweet peas. The garden has been so sadly neglected - it feels great to give it some love again.

Last weekend, we made a chicken run, with the help of our friends S and K and Az. We fox-proofed the coop (bought off ebay), made a path, and put up a fence around their territory. It looks like this:

(The green bits are frames for covering up seedlings when we let the chickens out into the wider yard.)

Last night, we drove down the highway out of the city, to one of those housing developments with big houses and tiny yards. We drove around roundabouts and through gates that said something like ‘Fairlea Village’, and eventually found the house of the daughter of the farmer whose wife had brought four Australorp pullets all the way down from their farm (2hrs away). The cardboard boxes they were in were too dark to see inside, but they were warm, and on the way home they emitted a series of gentle boks and a rather sad keening sound. We put them in their coop, lifting their soft, heavy bodies out of the boxes, and went inside. Later we went out with a torch but they were wild-eyed and huddled in the corner, and it didn’t feel right to have a good look at them.

The next morning we took them warm bran mash and silverbeet and other treats, and they seemed much happier:

In the daylight they are stunning - huge and black with the faintest sheen of green, with bright red engorged combs and shiny eyes. They have the funniest fringing of black fluff on their bottoms, like layers of tulle underskirts, and the most incongruous, dinosaur-like feet. We’ve decided to call them ‘the girls’.

To our surprise, two of them lay eggs today.

We ate them soft-boiled for lunch with salt and slices of toasted Norwegian Mountain Bread (the next bread in bean’s Nigella journey).

Home grown eggs and home-made bread - it was a glorious day indeed.