:: 120 Days of Making a Drawing Day 4 ::

Here she is...day four...not much to say really, other than - I fitted it into a busy day and pleased I did - maybe suffice to say I was well-supported by husband to make the effort and get it done!  Looking forward to the weekend and days with a little more breathing space in them.

:: the 120 Day Do What You Love Challenge ::

ok, so I was feeling like I needed a little something extra to motivate my own artistic practise generally, of a day, type of thing...  Sure - I attend the visual arts course and attend to the homework, etc and I also want to be able to just draw everyday as an independent thing I love doing...
...and then I heard about the "120-day do what you love" challenge on the lighthouse lounge on Bay-FM yesterday morning and I thought: "that's it! Make a drawing everyday."  And, so I have begun...
...and it is brave to make the posting here, showing you what I'm doing...and I think it's important for me, too, as it will be another little check-point along my path to motivation.

Here she is, number 1.  Guess who, at nearly one?  Now, there is PLENTY I can see that needs improvement just from the distance of a day, etc - it's a start, though! YES!!!
And, number two will be something from tonight's attendance at Dr Sketchy in Byron...nervous... wish me luck!!

:: my favourite flower ::

one of the many reasons living in this part of the world is so pleasant...and especially at this time of year...warm and not too hot, not too wet...YET...and the fragrant blooms of frangipani bursting open - joy on a tree!  I love that Phoebe found the monstera leaf and laid it into the bowl - I was simply going for floating some flowers...together it is so much more...

Phoebe's kite flies HIGH!

the beach at Brunswick Heads...

one of those absolute thrill moments... and, of course, 'touch and go' just before the successful lift-off!  While Phoebe had been given her kite at Christmas time last year, we'd not managed to have a really good, proper go with it until now.  So, on a very dull, wet and windy [Father's!] day recently and we could be contained no more - out we tripped to a local beach for some fresh air and a gasp at nature.  So good for our souls, thoroughly feeling the elements, paddling in the surf and all taking turns, finally - after we claimed it from the Father (aka biggest kid!). And here is Phoebe's own-all-by-herself-inaugural kite-flying moment - such a 'swell' moment for a parent.  Oh - and what was with all the rainbow colours?  Well, a dull day does call for colour!!!

The faithful subject...

Phoebe's latest strong interest is in taking photos....and Luke is one of her favourite subjects...

Puppy Love

I'm not sure what you'd judge to be the 'cutest' about this pic...the cuddles, those big puppy eyes on the girl, the snuggling of the puppy's coat by Phoebe's friend, Kade, or the apparent implicit trust deep within those big doggy puppy eyes...aw!
SO - here we introduce...WINSTON, a lovely little 8 week old Pomeranian puppy...+ our neighbour, Peter's, latest addition and new companion for his other dog, Ivan.

pure appley fun!

one day last week, I was a little pre-occupied, working away steadily with my seedlings or seed sowing or something...and a little voice asked "Mum, what can I do apple-bobbing in?" Quite a surprise and yet, not. We have apples dropping in luscious red and green striped blobs all over the ground under our old Cox's Orange Pippin at the moment...and I now remember we'd thought about this game for playing at Phoebe's party...and not followed through...
So, as resourceful as Phoebe is, it wasn't long before she'd filled this large container with water, watering can by watering can-full, found said apples and begun anticipating and dipping and dripping and giggling and wiping and beginning all over again...for a very long time, it seemed...delicious, pure appley fun. Of course, the apples in a game of apple bobbing never get cornered with a nice, wide, round barrel for playing with...
All the same, it was her fun, generated by her and she thoroughly enjoyed herself and even built a little more confidence with getting her face wet...+ some progress in that department is wonderful!

the kitchen table

...where we find ourselves writing, reading, creating, (homeschooling), eating, communing and generally living the most...the kitchen table... built lovingly by Aaron from reclaimed timbers, bolted solidly together - he would call it "rough as guts" - I call it a little bit of "French Country Chic". Anyway you look at it, it sits very happily amid the cosiness of our tiny kitchen in our "worker's cottage" in the country.
The center of our home, the centre of our lives, much of the time.

Creating with My Cousins

what a fun and creative week we've had with two of Phoebe's cousins, Ben and Briana coming to stay...and the weather being rather inclement. Oh, we had plans!...big plans... to make a huge teepee playhouse outside from all the kindling wood needing to be gathered (two birds with one stone - and fun, too, I imagined!), to go for bush walks, gathering forked branches to then weave with, to paint our new fence with rainbow stripes, to flop in the river when we got too hot and needing refreshment...but Mother Nature had her own plans for us...she wanted to rain and rain and rain and then rain some more, just when we all thought we'd begin to dry out a bit....
...so before mealtimes whilst the cook was busy concocting delectable meals the children spent their waiting time drawing on a large sheet of plain newsprint, a whole roll of which cost the princely sum of $2.00 from the office of the Gisborne Herald. This idea came from the ever-resourceful Amanda Blake Soule and her book "The Creative Family".As it became clear we were in for an extended rainy time we came upon another idea "Calvin's Papier-mache bowls" from Amanda, this time from her second book: "Handmade Home"... and made glue on the stove-top...
...cut up loads of old newspapers and pasted and moulded to our heart's content, outside, under the cover of our (very well used) lean-to, off our downstairs living area. We blended Amanda's ideas by cutting up one of the mealtime art sessions into pieces for the final layer of the papier mache...all ending up with a unique bowl [albeit square bowls!], including pieces of each other's art - something to remember the fun week together in the school holidays...
And, here they are drying in one of the rare moments of sunshine this past week.

Stunning Crisp Cox's Orange Pippin Apples

We have this gnarled, old apple tree, which I'd have to admit was a large selling point when we purchased our property. We think it is a beautiful old variety, the Cox's Orange Pippin. Very tart and very crisp when it is ripe and striped with red over the green. I've always loved the sensation of munching into the first first apple of the new season.
There's something so magical about this great providing tree, standing solidly on the land, changing with the seasons, getting even more beautiful with age, giving shade in Summer and many, many happy hours for Phoebe.
Aaron found an old ladder and has lashed it (gently, yet firmly!) to the Apple's trunk and Phoebe climbs up and hangs out up there in her kid-sized nook. The foot of our large apple is where we chose to site her sand and mud play area - much industry goes on underneath her shady boughs.
And the apples - so many - we've been almost teased by the apple tree this year - so many undersized/immature windfalls falling over the past several weeks - from a bumper crop. It could look like waste, there are so many - they carpet the ground in places - yet we collect them and crush them up for the girls in the Permaculture Chook Dome and send them off in buckets for the neighbouring pigs to feast on. And we've waited and waited patiently for our great old apple tree's apples to finally be ready...
Phoebe's beam says it all - first apples to eat! YUM!

A Very Pretty Experiment...

We love putting bursts of colour around our home. One of Phoebe's favourite past-times is wandering around the garden, cane flower basket over her arm, carefully holding her scissors by the blades, looking for just the right flowers for all of her arrangements. Little smiles pop up all over the house.
We had these 'surprise' Calla Lillies shoot up along the eastern side of our house, after re-locating a huge patch of Rhubarb, lest the painter trample it all, whilst painting our house. [we've finally decided on colours and have gone with a charcoal grey for the main timbers, a dirty white for all the window surrounds and other trims and a Brick Red roof - so still with that country solid strong colour and white demarcation - just not the verdant green I'd originally had in mind!!] Ok - so I digress...so the Calla Lillies artfully placed in the retro milk bottles and holder were looking pretty cool (well, we thought!).
And then an idea... 'cos they were kinda plain...let's add colour to the water!
SO the food colouring came out - with suitable protections in place for clothes, precious ancient terrazzo surface on kitchen bench, etc - and the experiment began.
What we did was create the 3 Primary colours straight and then the 3 Secondary colours from proportions of drops. Very simple, very effective - and a neat home school lesson for Phoebe where she made colour using particular numbers of drops. So we counted as she droppered the colours. Since the instructions on the food colouring packaging for how to create the secondary colours were in different proportions, I worked them out so we would get the same dilution. And then I thought of the extra lessons in the future - adding in the concept of proportion and eventually teach Phoebe how to do this herself. And then another time we could work the tonal concept of colour - with less and less number of drops for a weaker dilution, etc... We love home schooling - and it is still, technically, the school holidays - why oh why do we need a holiday from learning ;-) ?? It doesn't stop in our home!

Butterfly Creek

We puzzled to ourselves as we perused the menu of admission entry options about the combination of butterflies, crocodiles and farm animals as we arrived at...Butterfly Creek. Well, I'd have to say that in some weird kind of way - it works...Both Phoebe and her best friend Lulu had a lovely time delighting in butterflies that arrived silently...and rested unobserved mostly... in a special humidity and temperature-controlled 'Butterfly House' where special plants are grown for all aspects of the butterfly life cycle - it was so warm!...cuddling the very relaxed and fluffy bunnies and not so fluffy guinea pigs (make that wirey!)....... spying the prehistoric-looking crocs lurking in their pools, their only perceptible movements, nostrils flaring (this pic is for YOU, Jesh!)...but I'd have to say that the event that got their attention the most was... ...the beautiful white Saanen goat clattering up onto a bench to be milked in front of us all, then nuzzling into 'Michael', her "milkman" to say thank you afterwards...aaaah!

Festive Faces

AS well as meeting up with family, we like to make a little celebration ourselves at home...and this is what it looked like...

Christmas Baking

As perhaps 'incongruent' as it may be seem, one thing that I really enjoy about the 'festive' season is the excuse to make mini Christmas Mince Pies (given that we are in this balmy, sunshiney time of the year, here in New Zealand!). And, I'm doing my best to infuse this into Miss Phoebe...who as you can see doesn't really need too much encouragement! Our particular recipe includes plenty of crystallised ginger and PRUNES added into the usual dried fruit 'mince'. YUM!

Misty day in Morere

I will own this - I would have loved it if
Phoebe was as bewitched by these incredible drops and droplets hanging on everything we looked at as if all the fairies had left their jewels out all over the place in some grand fairy jewellry display - but it was just me!








She was much more excited to get on
and feed the neighbour's pigs and cats for him!

Mavis, Hope and Kevin...

...and the answer is...

...ORANGE JUICE!

We were certain after all our talking about acidity and it's effects that it would either be the Coca-cola (which, by the way, was purchased specifically for the purpose of this Scientific Experiment!!) or the Baking Soda/Vinegar mix.

And the second most effective was...milk! Go figure!

We learned was it was fun to devise a way to find out the answer to a puzzling question right here in the house and to lead ourselves in the direction of the resources we'd need to find out.
We also learned some more about waiting and being patient for the reaction to occur (on it's own!).

Poppy and Pansy Duck!

Our two, sweet, soft yellow bundles of joy, our Pekin x Aylesbury pair are progressing very well - they grow surprisingly faster than chicks!
the photo on the left is of Pansy at under a week, resting happily on my cousin, Anna's hand...with the ever-attendant "nana" Luke.
And on the right, Miss Phoebe is carefully perched up the ladder to her Apple tree, holding Miss(?!) Poppy (at about 3 weeks of age - much larger) 'just so' - we have been having lots of learning about how to handle these precious small creatures - for their own safety and their general wellbeing - ie a sense of security in how they are held, too! There are challenges every day...

Phoebe's Patch

Phoebe's interest in the garden is growing quickly...she is now as interested in growing vegetables as she is in her beloved pansies and poppies (incidentally, the names the new ducks have been given!). So now, as well as her pocket-handkerchief flower garden, she has Phoebe's Patch! This is one of the eleven circular beds in our Permaculture Mandala Garden, which will be visited by our chooks in their dome at the end of December, to do their 6-monthly weeding and fertilising stint. Right now we all decided it needed an end of Spring Spring Clean and spent several hours weeding and mulching - it was surprising how much was growing there. Phoebe is now rescuing anything and everything and fully experimenting with her own vegetable growing!

November Crafts

Here are a couple of products of Phoebe's craft times lately...whilst needle felting a blanket for one of her little 'guys', she found a method that begged repetition, so she made four small, brightly coloured blankets, extremely quickly! After the initial 'buzz' wore off, she noticed they were a bit loose - so with a little tutoring in how to tighten them up, she made them stronger. The next leap was even more interesting to me as she was next to a gloriously-coloured peggy-square knitted blanket, like the ones my Nana Joy makes for charity. Phoebe then joined all four blankets together into one beautiful, larger one. It led to a discussion about what Nana Joy does, what other people in the world have or don't have...interesting!
And, some modelling with a polymer modelling clay called DUKIT - she only has primary red, yellow and blue plus white and is having a lot of very creative time mixing different amounts of colours together to create the ones she wants - and gets some lovely surprises, too! These are mostly for her very small gnomes and fairies in her play area inside...

How do we clean these old moneys, Mum?

A few weeks ago, our wonderful neighbour, Pete, gave Phoebe a collection of his old coins from various travels...interesting...And then on Sunday Phoebe bagan examining them, sorting them, spreading them out, looking at the pretty designs, only they were all covered with...verdis gris and general 'gunk'. So, what to do? Mummy, how do we clean these "moneys"? has now led to our first Science Experiment...Cleaning Coins.We decided on a mixture of Baking Soda and White Vinegar, which we know is good at cleaning all sorts of dirt off all sorts of surfaces. Then, we had a visit from Uncle Ray - he's a geologist and knows plenty about Science! He and Aunty Raema suggested coca-cola and orange juice. And then we considered milk as an alkali liquid to see what might happen with that and then as with all science experiments, you really need to have that thing called a control - so we chose water.