Author: Veronica

First you need to decide a few days in advance that making bread doesn’t sound like a half bad idea. Flour is cheap (ish), labour is cheap (mostly) and the bread from the supermarket is starting to taste like crap.

[Is it the cheap ass bread I buy? Or my pregnant taste buds….]

Then you need to shop for ingredients. I may be a whizz in the kitchen, but my speciality lately seems to be roast meat and the occasional soup. Not so much of a baking whizz.

Yeast. Bread flour. Ummmmmm, baking powder maybe? Get home and realise that castor sugar would have been a better option, but whatever. Bygones.

Then you need to actually decide to bake bread on a day when you have most of all your time free.

You do not want to do this the day that your toddler hasn’t had any sleep and is only going to scream [because dammit Mummy, I want to sit in the container with the flour NOW].

You do not want to do this the day after you have a big bleed and have to go to bed early. [Damn pregnancy. Every day is UNLIKE the last!]

You do not want to do this on a day [or a few of them] when your morning sickness may have decided to come back.

But whatever. I said I felt like cooking bread, not that I wasn’t going to be stupid about it.

Somewhere between playing with the yeast and the warm water and actually getting a dough ball to knead, Amy lost her shit. She cried, she screamed, she tantrummed, she even tried to hit me.

I did try [oh lord did I try] to get her to help me knead, but she kept eating my dough. Hmmmph.

Naptime was called for, no matter that she hasn’t napped for nearly 2 months now. Nap time was successful and I thought maybe my head might not explode today.

[Although I still have floury footprints to clean off my kitchen floor. Don’t ask]

Once the bread has been kneaded, you need to stick it into a warm [but not hot] place to rise. Like near the fire, but behind the fire gate. So far? All the animals have tried at least once to eat my damn bread dough.

And then comes the waiting. Waiting waiting waiting. I almost regretted putting the toddler to sleep. At least if she was awake I could spend all my time trying to not let her poke holes in the cling wrap.

Once she woke up however? I regretted wishing that she was asleep. In fact, I would have paid good money for her to go back to sleep.

Eventually the dough was ready to pop into the oven (narrowly missing out on toddler finger holes poked into it).

And the smell? The smell made everything worth it. Even Amy discovering how to get into the flour bin didn’t seem so bad with the smell of fresh baked bread wafting over everything.

Just call me Martha fucking Stewart.

We are going to studiously ignore the mess left in the kitchen and eat warm bread. Mmmmmmm.

The 25 minutes I spent watching Yo Gabba Gabba this morning?

That’s time I will never ever be able to get back.

And is it just me, or does this guy look like a dildo?

Yes, I know the arms would get in the way, but still. A dildo, no?

I sat in my backyard today and let the sun soak into my bones. I felt warm for the first time in weeks*. It was only about 16C (60F), but it was warmer than anything we have had for weeks.

I watched Nathan rake all the crap up into a pile and remove it from the yard.

[This is the yard right before we moved in. This is probably the cleanest part of it. We have done bits and pieces, but today we did a big clean]

So today, Nathan raked up the last of the broken glass and toys (in one half. We only had the energy to tackle half today). Amy played in a recycling bin full of water while I watched and Nathan worked.

And then, we introduced her to the joys that are wheelbarrow rides.

She had a ball. She spent the rest of the afternoon asking to ‘get in please?’.

We plan to use the cleared area of the backyard as a vegetable garden, so after it was rid of glass and crap, we covered it in a foot of spoiled hay.

Why YES! I did manage to wheedle a ginormous bale of spoiled hay** off of our farmer neighbour. He brought it over in his tractor because giving it to us was better than watching it rot on the ground.

It was huge. (I am such a bad blogger, but there are no photos of this).

So by the end of the day, I had a huge dose of exhaustion, a toddler who was covered in water, mud and straw, hay rash and a big sense of achievement.

One shower later and most of that was put to rights.

And damn do I feel good about having half the backyard completed. We had decided that for Amy’s birthday and Xmas, the best gift we could give her was a backyard that was completely safe to play in.

We are getting there.

And I promise, I will take photos of it all eventually.

* I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome [on top of pregnancy, fun!]. One of my symptoms is an inability to get warm properly. I have terrible circulation and I am always cold. Somehow though, sitting in the sunshine is different. I feel warm in the sunshine. Probably why Winter makes me so miserable.

** Spoiled hay or straw has generally been rained on, or has gotten wet in some way. Most animals will refuse to eat it due to small amounts of mould in the hay. Absolutely fantastic for gardens and mulch.