Just One of Those Days, and How Not to Declutter

Some days are like that... so this morning when I got up the cat had been sick. Then, when that was sorted and I was sitting bleary-eyed  with my first cup of tea of the day, Posy sidled up to me, gazed at me with those big baby blues, and said, 'Mama, when you were a little girl, did you ever imagine you would reach the age of forty one?'

Clearly I looked as though I was about to shuffle off this mortal coil..

And the house, well, it was filthy, though for once not entirely due to my slatternly ways. We have had builders in. Now, don't get me wrong, I love having builders in. Mainly because they build things. In this case, window and door frames, and they also hung doors, so that downstairs, which was very open plan indeed, with arctic draughts whistling up the staircase, is now decently enclosed, which will help along our project to save electricity immensely, and also make using the downstairs bathroom a less nerve racking experience.

But the trouble with builders, however nice they are (and ours are lovely), is that they descend like barbarian hordes, make an enormous amount of noise and mess, and then leave in a cloud of dust. So today was all about removing dust from every surface and mopping, mopping.

While the builders were here this week, and making more and awful noise than I could believe possible (it was raining, so they had to use the downstairs unfinished room as a workshop to rip up all the wood for window frames etc), I kept running next door to seek sanctuary and cups of tea, but eventually I ran out of neighbours to bother, so locked myself in my bedroom at the other end of the house and started cleaning out cupboards. It still amazes me, that although I have ridden myself of so much stuff over the last couple of years, it still manages to accumulate in the backs of cupboards. Most of it, by now, is stuff that I actually want, but it has been thrown in a cupboard for want of a proper storage space. And thanks to the noisiness of builders I cleaned out the art cupboard, the last of the home schooling supplies, and redistributed them in drawers around the house, which gave me some more lovely wardrobe space, ruthlessly thinned out my clothes again, and wondered how twenty seven items had surreptiously made their way onto my bedroom chair.

And it was while I was doing this that I realised how the standard decluttering advice is a trap for the naturally disorganised. Most advice includes the need for bins/bags/piles for rubbish/ recycling/ charity donations/ reorganising, but what happens in reality is that seven minutes into the job, the phone rings, or a child falls out of a tree, and by the time that has been sorted it is time to cook the dinner, pick up someone from soccer, help build a science project out of balloons and juice bottles by tomorrow.... and the next time you return to your decluttering site its volume has actually increased because the bins/bags/piles of stuff have invited more clutter, and the whole depressing cycle starts all over again. Which is why I have developed a much more inefficient but more effective solution.

I never make a pile. Piles are the enemy of effective sorting. They are just Moving Stuff Around. The only effective way I have found to deal with mess is to only handle an item once. If the item on the top of the pile is a piece of paper, I decide what to do with it, and walk it to its new destination, rubbish or recycling bin, or filing cabinet, or receptacle for precious pieces of paper. If it requires action, I do it, transferring dates into my diary, writing a cheque. If it requires more thought than that I put it into my 'inbox' in the hall table drawer, and heaven help it if it ends up there, where paper goes to die. If the item is going to be donated, I take it out to the car and put it into the bag that always seems to be there. The Man calls our van The Mobile Op Shop, but he doesn't realise it is always a different bag. It goes off to be dropped off every week, and replaced with a new one. Actually, these days it does sometimes take weeks to fill up a bag.  And if the item in question needs to go and live somewhere else in the house, I take it there, maybe staying to rearrange a drawer to fit it in.

This is all very inefficient, and sometimes I might get through only a couple of items before the phone rings, child falls out of tree etc, but at least those thing are gone, sorted, never have to be looked at again, and there are no piles of Things mocking me later.. they do mock, you know. Piles are mean.

In other news, I have completely failed to cook breakfast again. Pancakes were literally a flash in the pan. I am using the builders as my excuse. They arrive at dawn and start asking questions about bannister brackets, then making ear splitting sawing noises, and it makes me jittery. They have gone now, so maybe I will be able to devote some headspace to early morning cooking. Maybe.

Breakfast for the Masses

I do not have morning children. Every morning at seven o'clock my babies greet the world with wailing and gnashing of teeth. And when faced with the prospect of actually eating food at that hour, they are inconsolable. 'There is nothing nice to eat,' they wail. 'We're not having breakfast.'

Thus begins the daily tussle of wills, me trying to get them out of the house with full bellies, them determined that no evil breakfast will pass their lips. They have a choice of porridge, cereal, toast, yoghurt, fruit. What is their problem? I have had one slice of wholemeal toast with vegemite and a cup of tea for breakfast my entire adult life. The Boy, who clearly has similar genes, has eaten five weetbix every morning since he was about twelve. Before that, he ate two. The Girl and The Man ring the changes between the above choices with no complaints, but the wee girls just won't play the game.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading my old homeschooling friend Jen's Blog, and she had published a weekly menu with cooked breakfasts. Outrageous, I thought, nothing wrong with vegemite and toast. Then another friend, Monique, commented the other day about her fried fruit porridge breakfast. Now this is the woman who is travelling around Australia in a caravan with three little girls. And they are cooking breakfast! I felt I might be running out of excuses. Then yesterday morning Posy tearfully begged for pancakes. She felt that she might be able to choke down breakfast if it was pancakes...

So at seven o'clock this morning I was frying pancakes and two girls sort of bounced out of bed. There was no crying, and even a couple of smiles. And I quite liked it too. The family ate breakfast around the table, with placemats, and homegrown lemons in wedges, and sugar and cream. Usually, the little girls sit at the breakfast bar, crying and whingeing while I slap sandwiches together at the bench. This felt altogether more civilised than our normal morning routine. Tomorrow, I think we'll have apple crumble with blueberries.

The TV ban is still in place. Posy has been home from school for an hour. She made paper cones for her popcorn snack. The table is covered in popcorn, paper and sticky tape. She is about to put some oil and water in a glass to see if oil and water really does mix...

TV or Not TV

There are days and weeks in our household when the TV is on far too much. Now I am not a TV-hating Luddite. How can anyone possibly do the ironing without watching Grand Designs or Downton Abbey?
 

We all have a show or two that we really like, but sometimes the sheer baby-sitting convenience of wonderful children's television means that TV-creep starts to happen. The favourite show turns into four or five favourite shows, and suddenly the time between home time and dinner has been completely eaten up by ...nothing. That is the depressing thing about serial TV watching. Hours later you realise that time has turned to dust and there is nothing to show for it. And it makes children cranky. There is something about action, creativity, even arguing with your sister, that lets energy flow out and be drawn back in again, but passive TV watching turns our children into their own evil twins. But it is still so tempting. The peace, the quiet, the tidiness of children who are watching TV...

But after a spectacular tantrum before dinner the other night we decided that enough must be enough. No more peace and quiet in this house. We already have a TV ban in place before school, and after dinner until the little girls are both in bed (homework hours), but now after school and anytime after 9am on a weekend morning we will suffer noise and chaos and mess, but hopefully not as many cranky tantrums over nothing. The funny thing is, that after the initial whining while the girls were suffering withdrawal symptoms yesterday when their electronic drug was removed, they immediately found things to do which kept them happy for hours. There was a slight hiccup when I declared that the ipod, ipad and gameboy were also banned, but then Rosy got out her birthday painting kit and has produced two masterpieces on mini canvases, and Posy has been building card castles with surprising patience. She has also made two treasure maps which had to be drenched in tea, then baked with the dinner to give them that authentic olde worlde look, created word searches which I had to fill in, read us all jokes ad nauseum, then started a game where she dressed up in my coat and had Rosy tow her up and down the hallway on her back. My coat will never be the same again. I have read two books aloud, helped make a home movie, and had help cooking dinner. I have broken up several fights and emptied precious treasures out of the vacuum cleaner when I had help with the housework. It is only Monday afternoon.


You do see why I like TV.

An Autumn Birthday Tea Party

Because tea parties are deliciously fun even when your age begins with a ....four....and is then also followed by another number. I am loving school. It means I get to have a party with my friends without inviting the children. But don't feel too bad for them. They came home and ate up all the cake, and then I had another party with them later, and they got to eat even more cake.

In the spirit of not accumulating more possessions I asked The Girl to bake for my party as my birthday present. She has recently added biscotti to the long list of yummy things she bakes, and she also made some truly marvellous fig and macadamia fudge.

The Man bought me new compost bins: recycled plastic, Australian made, from our local hardware, my favourite kind of shopping. And The Boy, for my present, spent two hours forking all the compost from my old compost bin, a hulking monster made out of pallets, into the new ones. He is a star. I now have a wheelbarrow full of finished compost for the garden, and lots of new compost brewing. I am one happy, older gardener. Oh, and The Boy chopped up the pallets from the old compost bin so we can use it for firewood. Waste not, want not and no new net possessions there.

Happy Birthday to me....

Cooking, Cooking..

The bulk cooking project continues. Afternoons after school the girls get out the recipe books for an hour's recreational cooking, look at the oven, sigh, then put the books away again. I am SO mean. They have decided that we will be cooking Thursday and Saturday afternoons, because they are free then, and on other days they pore over recipe books, making plans. I do feel rather lucky to have a teenager who orders Traditional Cakes and Puddings from the library, and asks me which one I would like for Mother's Day. It is also a wonder that we are not all enormously fat.

As you can see from above, cheese is a staple ingredient in my cooking. I am a very, very plain cook. I rotate fifteen or so dishes that everyone mostly likes, and sometimes one of the children, or occasionally me, tries something new, and if we like it, we add it to the repertoire. I like big one-pot stews and casseroles, very 1970's, and serve them with lashings of veg, or salad. It is not Masterchef, but it is achievable, and served with love. I think I will be writing the cookbook 50 Ways With Minced Beef. Last week's effort with the mince was lasagne turned cottage pie, this week's was a potato slice-topped hotpot, which, with the addition of frozen corn to the sauce turned into a casserole topped with macaroni cheese, which serendipitously used up left-over cooked pasta. The basis of all of these is the bolognese sauce, blessings on whoever invented it. At our place it changes week by week, depending on what we have on hand. It always has onion and garlic, it mostly has a couple of carrots and celery sticks whizzed up in the food processor. I saute all of these ingredients as long and slowly as possible. Last week it had the addition of a shredded zucchini gifted by a friend (the actual conversation went, 'Please, PLEASE take a zucchini..'), this week I whizzed up what are surely the last few tomatoes from the garden with some of our frozen basil, next week I have a bunch of peeled frozen broccoli stems to puree and add. I also add a handful of red lentils which boil down to invisible in the tomato sauce. So a giant pan of this sauce bubbling away every week makes meals that wouldn't win any cooking contests, but contain vegies, are wonderfully comforting on a cold night, and all the children like them, which makes them magic and golden in my book.

Th other dish is cooked pasta, shredded cooked chicken, salami, sundried tomato, and wilted warrigal greens from the garden, all mixed together with cheese and cream. Because dairy products are important, right? My favourite, probably over-used, seccret ingredient in the topping of all casseroles, underneath the cheese, is flavoured breadcrumbs. Whenever there are breadcrusts that no-one has eaten I store them in the freezer till needed, then blitz them in the food processor with oil, salt, a random spice mixture from the pantry, and something green from the garden (rosemary, parsley, basil, oregano). I store that back in the freezer and use it on top of everything that isn't dessert. It's brilliant for crumbing fish or chicken or potato and vegie patties, and just makes everything crunchy and delicious, especially if you add cheese. Mmmmm, cheese..

Ok, and now a failure, well not a failure so much as a glitch. Last week's cottage pie was.....delicious. BUT, although it sat on the benchtop all day, and then went into the microwave for fifteen minutes or so, and then had its top toasted under the grill, it was still frozen in the middle. In the end we had to scoop servings from around the edge and microwave them again until they were piping hot. So, lesson learned. Freeze dinners in shallow dishes. And always add cheese.

The Mini Farm

The mini-farm is doing its thing, with baby peas (which are my favourite of all baby vegetables. Irresistibly cute) and lettuces mostly. Posy and I were planting out carrot seeds a month or so ago, because I was trying to use up all the old seed packets in my stash. These were way past their plant-by date, and none germinated, so I planted lettuce over the top. Then last week, a lone carrot seedling popped up, so in the tub above I am growing lettuce, peas and one carrot. It is hardly self sufficiency, although I am pretty close to self-sufficient in lettuce. I only have to buy the odd one when there is a planting gap due to vagueness on my part. I have worked out that we need two large pots of lettuce going at one time to keep us in salads, three in Winter, so I rotate greens among all my large pots, lettuce, parsley, baby spinach, peas, all year round, and keep all the pots topped up with compost and well-fed with seaweed extract and fish emulsion.

I love the profligacy of lettuce. I always let the most luscious looking lettuce bolt to seed, then sprinkle the seeds amongst all the pots, then thin by eating them in salads. Fresh seed has an incredible germination rate compared to saved or bought seed, and there are often hundreds of tiny ones popping up all over, in the garden, between paving stones. Like baby clothes, I am always amazed that there is still a market for seeds. There must be billions of pieces of hardly worn newborn baby clothes stashed in cupboards all over the world. I think there should be a moratorium on their manufacture for a few years until they are all worn out. Similarly, seeds ripen and blow about for free by the million billion, there for the taking. It would be criminal for me to buy new ones when every season I could theoretically collect and replant about a thousand lettuce plants. Sometimes I am tempted beyond what I can bear at the nursery though. Like baby clothes, fat little seedlings are so adorable. That is why it is safer for me just not to go shopping. I'll go sprinkle some more seeds around the garden..

Blue and Golden Day

Yesterday was a blue and golden Autumn day, so I walked in the park while Rosy did ballet. There were swift parrots being, well, swift, topknot doves wittering and egrets (I think they were egrets - skinny, grey, long beaks, can't find my bird book) chuntering contentedly together in the long grass. It was a lovely, happy sunny walk, all by myself. A rare treat.

And then I went shopping. I know, I don't go shopping anymore but this was an expedition months in the planning. I have a twenty one year old ironing board, given to us for our wedding by a great aunt, or possibly a second cousin. It is wearing quite well, but the cover was last renewed about twelve years ago when my darling mother-in-law made a new one for me. She was a good country housewife, so everything she made was double and triple reinforced, but eventually even that gave up the ghost, and I was ironing on a cover with holes in it, which was very dispiriting. I briefly thought about making one - how hard could it be, right? But I am a sad sally when it comes to sewing. All the women in my life who could sew have died - my grannies, my mother-in-law. I feel I missed a great opportunity there, because any of them would have loved to have taught me, but it wasn't a skill I was remotely interested in aquiring then.

So I have to endure The Look when, as today, I popped into ballet to ask the gathered ballet mums another stupid question about how to do something extremely basic to make Rosy's latest ballet costume fit her. They are very kind and helpful, and haven't failed me yet, but when I ask yet another daft question they give patient little sighs, before answering in the sort of voice one normally reserves for explaining obvious concepts to six year olds.

So I decided against the world of pain that sewing involves for me, and found the perfect ironing board cover, then waited. I knew it would go on sale eventually, and yesterday was the day. I came home with my fifty-percent-off ironing board cover. The Man thinks I'm mad, but I enjoy my little games, and see  retail price as a challenge to overcome...

Anyway, I spent the evening happily ironing on my new hole-free ironing board, while watching Peter Ustinov twirl his moustaches as Hercule Poirot in an old Agatha Christie adaptation. Priceless.