Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Stupidly excited

    You guys, look what I bought myself.

    You have not lived until you’ve tried to put together a flat pack greenhouse with 2 children running under your feet, stealing poles, nicking joiners, losing the poles and joiners in the long grass and smacking each other with sticks. Isaac also tromped all over the tomatoes and pulled out a pea plant or two. Kids. Nathan eventually came out to help – not so much help me put it together, but stop the kids impaling themselves on poles.

    Anyway.

    I am stupidly excited about this. A greenhouse is something I have lusted after for years – ever since we put our garden in and realised that Tassie gets barely 3 months of decent growing season, before the frosts come back and kill off the tomatoes.

    With a greenhouse, I’m hoping I can extend our season enough so that I’m growing things for 9 months out of twelve. Cucumbers! Capsicum! Melons! They will all actually ripen.

    I ordered it online from a sales website and worried that it wouldn’t be any good. But it’s sturdy enough and the plastic is mesh filled, to prevent tearing, definitely something I need with small ones (and sticks) running around.

    Now I can grow more tomatoes! Even when it gets frosty!

    Like I said. Stupidly excited.

    Inside are my cucumbers, watermelons, luffa, basil, lettuce, cauliflowers and my honeydew melons. I’ll add tomatoes and probably some more cucumbers in the next few weeks.

    The rest of the garden is doing well too. The heirloom tomatoes are ready to stake and the pumpkins are taking off. Sort of anyway.

    Pumpkin at the bottom, rock melon middle left, basil and collard in the middle, tomatoes through the rest of it, with some bush peas and corn thrown in for good measure. (wide angle lens. the garden is bigger than it looks here.)

    The house garden is going mad too, between the peas and potatoes, I can’t walk through my path in the middle anymore. Somewhere in there are climbing beans. I’m hoping they’ll make it to the surface to flower eventually.

    I’ve been madly picking snow peas and our strawberries are starting to ripen too.

    In the very left hand corner, next to the white plank, you can see a bush? That’s my black currant bush. My two grandmothers struck that for me, before Nan died. I’m so pleased it’s doing well and my great grandmother will be too when she sees it at Christmas. I’ll take cuttings to strike when the new growth hardens up a bit. It’s covered in berries at the moment, we’re just waiting for them to ripen.

    And ducklings.

    Because what kind of blogging duck farmer would I be, if I didn’t share photos of the fuzzy cuteness?

    Platter appearance by Frogpondsrock – it was full of shell grit, but I filled it full of water just after this photo, just for the babies. I really shouldn’t put her ceramics outside for the animals, but it was the only thing I had at the time. Heh.

  • One line bios.

    Anna made me think about One Line Bios and now I sort of hate her for it, because I can’t get it out of my head.

    Sleepless Nights is complex and always has been. That’s okay, because everything I post falls under the umbrella of mummyblogging anyway, even when it’s about hatching a duck egg in my bra, or cutting the heads off my poultry and cooking them (the poultry, not the heads. Heads aren’t my thing). I’ve been trying to think how I’d sum myself up in one line – you know, that one line you use to describe me to other bloggers and they know who you’re talking about immediately. They might not remember my blog name, or my face, but they’d remember my story.

    That’s in an ideal world of course.

    All the ‘big’ bloggers, they’ve got their thing. Anissa had a stroke. Heathers daughter died, sadly. Her Bad Mother is all philosophical (and don’t forget the cupcakes) and Mr Lady is just plain funny – you can’t forget a blog called Whiskey in my Sippy Cup. These things that don’t define us necessarily, but are how we’re remembered in the blogosphere.

    Because Sleepless Nights is so eclectic, I think I’m missing my thing. Is it duck raising? I mean, the ducklings are pretty cute, but it’s not all ducklings, all the time.

    The kids are hard work, but I’m wary of their privacy, especially as Amy takes the steps out into the big world of School in February. She might drive me crazy sometimes (I’m writing this at the expense of a roll of aluminium foil), but some stories aren’t mine to tell. Maybe sharing her Aspergers journey is helpful, but I’m not entirely sure how to blog about it constructively, without it turning into a series of posts about behaviours that leave me pulling my hair out.

    It could be about Isaac and his slide into non-verbal that we’re hoping to halt. Autism though, that’s a hard one. I’ve only got so much energy for squeezing heartbreak out of my fingertips before I can’t think about it anymore. We’re not even sure he’s autistic, his meltdowns, sensory issues and language development suggests he is, but his social skills confuse everyone. He likes to refer back and smile. He masks his behaviours when we’re out – except for the screaming meltdowns – and then spends an hour hiding his face on the couch afterwards.

    Like I said. Some stories aren’t mine to tell.

    It could be Ehlers Danlos and my rapidly falling apart body. All the dislocations and the exhaustion. The insomnia and brokenness. The fight against medical professionals to be taken seriously and treated with respect.

    Maybe I’m just that Tasmanian blogger.

    A one line bio is hard to come up with, probably because as humans, we’re always going to be more than one line.

    I definitely agree with Anna though, a one line bio, a decent schtick, it helps make your blog memorable.

    We all need our one line, our thing. That thing that makes us different from the other blogs.

    The problem is how to find it, and exploit it.

    ***

    What do you think my one line bio is? What keeps you coming back?

    More to the point, what do you think your one line bio is?

  • The power of the suck

    It’s no secret that I love myself a Dyson. I mean, LOVE.

    When Dyson offered to send me their newest product to trial, I was excited. The digital slim.

    Shiny and blue. Small. Battery operated and with amazing suck. I was in lust.

    Of course, in the month that I’ve had it, it’s had a giant work out.

    Amy likes to climb the cupboards, to see what we might be hiding in the top cupboard, out of her sight.

    It was inevitable that she would tip something out accidentally and I was prepared for that. I wasn’t prepared for her to throw handfuls of flour out of the bag and then use the flour on the floor to make footprints.

    Creative? Very. Also messy.

    The regular vacuum cleaner, also a Dyson, is a pain. I mean, it’s fantastic and all, but it’s big and heavy and I dislocate things hauling it around to clean up messes. And as it’s an older version, the foot isn’t all ballified and doesn’t move easily for me.

    So a tiny little vacuum that I can manoeuvre is so welcome.

    Frankly, I adore it.

    The only down side, is that sometimes, if Isaac has been particularly messy with his cereal and I’m having to work hard to get it all, the battery will go flat mid-suck. That can be the only problem.

    So thankyou Dyson.

    Also, please can I keep it now?

  • The circle of life

    Life and death, intertwined.

    Most of you know that we had to kill one of our breeding ducks yesterday. She’s in the slow cooker now and will go to feed us at dinner time. Death feeding life.

    I woke up this morning and went out to feed the poultry, like always. I wasn’t expecting new babies for another 5 days, as my ducks have been hatching eggs at 40 days, not 35. I was shocked to see tiny little yellow balls of fluff hiding under their mother in the stable.

    We also had chickens born recently. Our bantam hen has an older chicken, two of my other hens are sharing a baby that they hatched together and my most recent clutch of chickens were born on Friday.

    The older chickens, our first clutch, they’re almost fully grown now. The two roosters from the clutch are destined for the table and possibly the hens as well, I haven’t decided yet.

    We’re slowly working towards my ideals of being as self sutainable as possible. I mean, yes, we need another 10 acres of pasture and a cow or two, but we’ll get there.

  • Duck farming

    When we left for the supermarket this afternoon, there was a duck egg sitting in the puddle. Only partially hardened, it was leathery and soft. Only one of our ducks is laying at the moment and I couldn’t see her. I knew that she had laid this morning, because I’ve been watching her clutch and counting.

    I wondered how it had gotten there, in the water, far from her regular nest. Maybe one of my young ducks had started laying? I split it open and fed it to the dog and we went out.

    We got home to find our laying duck in the middle of the driveway, waddling awkwardly and bleeding from her cloaca. A quick glance and I thought she was egg bound – which I also thought was weird, because I knew she had laid an egg this morning.

    Catching a duck is never as easy as you think it will be, even when the duck is sick and moving awkwardly. As I tried to herd her into a corner, I kept checking on her bleeding. Unfortunately, it wasn’t looking like she was egg bound, instead it was looking like a prolapsed cloaca. I chased her around for 25 minutes, with her bleeding worsening before giving up, doing some googling and getting Nathan to help.

    Once we’d caught her, we checked her out. She was definitely prolapsed.

    There are ways you can ‘cure’ a prolapse, but they’re not always going to work. Every time they lay another egg, the prolapse is likely to return. Therefore, the cures involve stopping them laying for a time.

    A starvation diet (just enough wheat to keep them alive) and a dark box, for upwards of 2 weeks is recommended.

    I don’t think that a dark box for anywhere up to 2 months is the way a duck wants to live. I can’t imagine it would be healthy for her either.

    The most common recommendation however, is a humane death and that’s what we chose.

    When we started breeding poultry, we knew that we would have to kill some. We are realistic about this. Our young roosters are destined for the table, as are all our young ducks. I’ve even got the duck I want for Christmas earmarked already.

    I held her and Nathan got the hatchet and the job was done. I got covered in blood, again. The kids watched from the bedroom window inside.

    The slaughter is only gut wrenching until the duck is dead and then it’s just like processing meat. I skun her (I was too low on energy for plucking), gutted her out and that was that.

    It was a bit weird to find the mother chook coming over to show her 4 week old babies what I was doing. They all came around the corner of the fence, looked at me, she clucked at them vigorously and them took them away.

    It certainly wasn’t how I’d planned on spending my evening, gutting a duck and getting bloody, but that’s life with animals destined for the pot.

    But, it looks like I know what we’re having for dinner tomorrow night.

    Slow cooked duck.

    I can’t wait.