chickens

Sunny days and study days

| poppypeach

It was back to routine and hanging with the ladies at the farm – this is Ruby and Luna.

Tuesday was an exciting night for my son as he went to his first concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre, just in our backyard – 10 minutes away. We went out as a family to see the Pixies, it was so fun! Ash and I found it a bit loud so we left early and Daddy was left to rock on to Weezer with his friend.

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Kushi and I spent a lot of time together last week where I went to his house (our neighbour) and gave him food and pats while I did my studies. Friday night Missy came with me and we all hung out with Kush and watched Grand Designs Australia together.

The weekend my schedule is rocking with a yoga class with Mark, riding my bike to the studio and back is a great warm up. The weather is perfect bike weather! Sunday I did a long bike ride and saw some egrets doing their Sunday morning training, along with a lone pelican.

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My son drew this cool picture on the whiteboard after his big night out with his friends for a sleepover on Saturday night. I do not know what it is, but I like it!

Going wild in nature

| poppypeach

Well, my first week of the summer holidays was just a dream with catching up on so much stuff – namely sewing! It was so good to feel so free and not have any responsibilities of going to work or even study! I still need the calendar to get the kids to their chicken duties and the like but nothing dramatic. In exchange for credit card points, I got my hands on the Nikon Coolpix P900, this is a recommendation from a friend of mine in Queensland when we visited and I was blown away with the pictures of the kangaroos with their joeys.  This camera has the convenience of a point and shoot camera with a 24mm to 2000mm lens that is lightweight and perfect for travel. The pictures above are a few of the earlier shots in the day of a favourite subject of mine, birds – who knew!!

Here are my little monkeys in a paperbark tree striking their Anime poses – I love this camera to capture these shots when the kids are high up in a tree.

From afar I was checking out the Canada Geese taking their bath on the shore of the lake, the zoom in on the detail of the water over the feathers is spectacular. The best part of this is that we went out for a picnic by the lake for Fathers Day and I had the camera sitting in the basket of my bike as we were on the trail and whenever we found something to photograph we hopped off the trail to check it out – like these ducklings and a mama duck. The butterfly was a random find and I had no idea this little guy had broken wings until I looked at the image later.

The highlight for me for the day was going to see the baby egrets on Shorebird Way where Google has closed off the street for a few months so they can nest in peace high in the trees. I have always wanted to see these birds close up and now I can, it was so exciting! Again we just parked our bikes and hung out with the wildlife show, it felt like a David Attenborough episode in real life.

Afterwards, my son and I enjoyed time out in the big chair at the Google employee park next door with a couple of crocodiles and the bikes of many colours.

Today I was on a mission to take pictures of the ladies at McClellan Ranch as the kids cleaned out the chicken coop. I took a wander around the farm and found baby goats doing yoga on mama. The market pigs are getting ready for their time at the show, I asked Missy what she sees when she looks at the pigs and she said bacon! It is hard for me as a vegetarian but one day they can decide on their own whether they would like to keep on eating animals. Plus I had no idea how beautiful pidgeons could be until I was photographing them today. The quails in the coop are Flash and Steve, they just need a lady friend.

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It has been quite an eventful week after all with the new camera and getting out an about checking out what Mountain View and the surrounds has to offer. The best thing is getting on my bike and photographing whatever I find on the trail, I had been meaning to take my camera down the trail but my Canon camera has such a heavy lens but now I have no excuse for taking a crap picture with my phone camera of a rabbit on the trail. Next stop Australia and I will be taking some pictures of some flying foxes for my friend in O-town.

Journey to a new destination

| poppypeach

Last week it was time to say farewell to my life as a teacher assistant and get back to my life as mama and student. I made little gifts for the 14 1st graders I worked with by getting them a ball of yarn each to do finger knitting over the summer. And for the kinder kids I made them a kumihimo loom with some extra thread to practice counting and to get crafty.

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The staff at Ventana sent me off with this lovely book as a farewell gift, it was sad to say goodbye to all the lovely people who work there. This dinner is a beyond meat sausage with porcini mushrooms and fennel over a bed of brown rice noodles.

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This amigurumi koala was made for our sitter and friend L who looked after the kids while I was working. I was so lucky to find her to take the kids to their after-school classes and the like and take care of my kids as if they were her own, they will really miss her too!

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Saturday I was ready for some me time so I got on my bike and rode the trail on a cloudy morning. I found this little guy moving fast as ever on the trail.

Saturday we headed on over to Spring Lake Regional Park in Santa Rosa for a group camping with our school. It was a great weekend away and perfect timing to get away. We stopped off at Petaluma for some delicious pie for lunch both savory and sweet. For dinner it was a potluck and I made a mexican inspired black bean salad which disappeared quickly.

As the group site was booked up when we decided to go we stayed at this beautiful cabin for $98 a night (including reservation fees) – in the pics you can see the interior with a bunk bed and a double bed so it fit the 4 or us perfectly. Friends of ours joined in the fun and camped next door, so a total of 8 people can stay at this spot. There were super cool details, with solar lights on the balcony, a little broom cupboard, a table for your goods plus a seat for your bags so it was super spacious inside. We sat out on the balcony in the morning and enjoyed a mug of oatmeal with mixed nuts and maple syrup watching the hawk hanging out in the tree.

Before we left we went on down to the lake for a swim as it was a hot day and met an evil swan guarding the canoes, kayaks and SUP boards. The kids enjoyed the cool water and if you were there all day you can hang out at the water park for $10.

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We are now back in our regular routine of feeding the chickens and doing the chores each week, it was so good to see the little ladies out and about dust bathing in the sunshine.

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Back to mama time and time in the kitchen I made this delicious crumble with coconut whipped cream and nuts. It feels so good to be free with my time and I am thankful for the time I had with my work but I really appreciated to be a master of my own time now.

 

Spring Breaking

| poppypeach

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We all had a lovely spring break the kids and I. It all started with completing my paper for Uni, and once that was done I had a bit of a breather with hanging out with the kids. Monday I drove them to the farm to do the chicken chores. It was such a beautiful day to be hanging with the chickens, they loved the outside sunshine and snacks with the humans. This Buff Orphington chook is one big lady, she is all feathers and such a sweetie! You can see Snowflake the white chicken on the ground, she was adopted by one of the kids in the 4H chicken project as someone left her at the farm?! She is another lovely lady. While we were hanging with the kids and the chickens in the spring sunshine, we even had our friends from San Jose visit and drop off my son after a sleepover.

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After an intense study period, I like to craft and as I had not switched out my entryway decorations since the last holiday I wanted to bring in something fun to my new garden bell addition. I made pom poms after I found this cool neon yarn and I added it to an embroidery hoop without its buddy so here is the undersea background for the whale. I am now crocheting a blanket which is a lot of fun as I have not crocheted in ages. It all started with a granny square YouTube video when I was kicked out of the lounge room as Missy was playing the Switch and watching Netflix (a cooking show!) with her friends for a girls sleepover.

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Thursday I went in search of a mysterious flat white coffee as an Aussie friend of mine told me about a place downtown Mountain View that had decent coffee. You see, I stopped drinking coffee 12 years ago when I moved here as the only well-made coffee I could find was at Dana Street Cafe (an Aussie barista made a kick-ass flat white). It was inconsistent as she was not always working plus I was not hanging out at the coffee shop with a baby. So after a while, it was no more coffee for me which turned out to be a good thing as I became a kombucha fan down the track…. but that is another story! Anyway, this coffee shop downtown is called 1oz coffee, and it was a super cool cafe to hang out sans the nerds! Actually, there is one in the background! Well, it seems to me that this is a place to come and drink coffee and snack out with friends (delicious pastries from Alexanders down the road, plus Rx date bars and big cookies) rather than sit on your machine all day with that one cup of coffee.

After the coffee (see the super cute flat white) I took the kids to look at the caterpillars outside the Mountain View Library. These caterpillars were everywhere, they will one day become the Tussock Moth when they transform. They were all over the sculptures outside the library, and the kids really enjoyed finding them in bunches all going somewhere? The library is always the best place to hang out over break even though there is a remodel happening and the kid’s book selection is minimal. The kids will still come out with a bag full of books especially when they have been banned from the computer for the break! It worked out well as we would have family game time playing Mario Cart and the kids could track my progress and give me high 5s whenever I was in the top 10 – yay!

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The bonus of being off all week was that pretty much every day we would go to the park and hang out with our neighbours! The kids would climb the trees and look for critters and even bring them home to live in a shoebox. The adults would knit on the blanket and drink wine, not long till summer and we can do that all the time!!

I also had the opportunity to deep clean my house to get rid of 3 boxes of books, clean out the kitchen and kids room to sell at the upcoming citywide garage (yard) sale on the 5th May weekend. And after that it will be time to donate everything, it will feel so good to get rid of stuff though we still need to move some more stuff if we have another year or so it is hard for me to donate all the yarn! I did give a local maker space lots of craft materials, and that felt good. Most of my little yarn balls are going to my big granny square blanket that will tell the story of the many pieces I made in the time I have been knitting which is around 12 years that is since I was pregnant with Ash, man time flies when you are having fun!

Chicken sitting

| poppypeach

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This week we are chicken sitting, and we are just loving having a couple of bantam hens in the back garden eating bugs and wandering around. We have a makeshift cage out the back made out of a dog run, and they come inside at night time, just to be safe away from those criminals of the night – the racoons. I have heard some horror stories or racoons and chickens, not good at all. This little cutie is Nova, and she belongs to another friend in the chicken project, so we are taking extra care of her.

Sunday we met our friends from Oakland in the San Francisco Botanical Gardens and I just love this place. Unfortunately, it was full of people looking at their phones participating in a worldwide Pokemon Go tournament. So we walked carefully on the paths making sure we did not run into the Pokemon Go peeps not paying attention to where they were going.

Our first stop in the garden was the Austalia and New Zealand section of plants, and it was like being at home, so we added a lyrebird sound effect to make it seem like we were back in Oz. The ferns were amazing, and the Lilly pilly (bottom centre picture) was in bloom, and they looked delicious and apparently they can be eaten! It really made me homesick and being among native flora really makes you feel like you are there.

We wandered over to the neighbours across the meadow to find a wonderous redwood grove, and it felt just like hiking in the redwoods. The redwood sorrel was in full bloom after all the rain, and the meadow nearby was filled with little white daisy-like flowers.

We kept on coming back to the Australian section each time finding something new like the native Holly which was funny. The kids said look, Holly, this is you! Plus we saw old man Banksia in its stages of growth with its spiky leaves.

The kids were hanging for ice cream as the botanical garden was not as exciting for them as it was for the adults. We then found the twirl and dip ice cream truck across the way and went on over to the Shakespeare garden for an afternoon of flowers and sonnets, it makes me want to read some Shakespeare in my spare time.

Back at school/work today and the kids in the kindergarten class are ready for their next project – bees! It is going to be super exciting with their first exploration of drawing their impression of what a bee looks like to them in their art class this afternoon.

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Later in the afternoon, I wandered over to City Hall to check out the art exhibition from our Arts Focus kids, and I found Ms Hollys beautiful tapestry purse. I will have to find out how she made this little beauty!

Home sweet home

| poppypeach

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The big news that made me so happy last week was the approval of my hubby working remotely in Australia. Now with all the plans moving along it was a hard decision to up and leave a job but now with this in the pipeline and a presentation from our architect in Melbourne shortly I am getting excited to be back in Australia. This illustration was found at the park after I took the kids for a walk as I could not sit still after my hubby gave me the news. Day by day I am patiently waiting for the green light that says now start packing and selling everything it is time to go. But until then I am enjoying myself here and having fun carving out my future career in education.

I was still on a balanced nutrition diet last week had me caving and wanting extra flavour in my food with sriracha and miso mayo. Tacos have carbohydrates that I do not want to be eating in the evening, so I turned Taco Tuesday into a bowl minus the taco of salad, avocado salsa and beer battered fish. I know my diet of no bad stuff, but hey it fitted into my macro plan for the day! The bowl on the right is smoked salmon on a kale salad with miso mayo and spring onions. I am finding with eating fish is helping me reach my protein limit to build muscle, fingers crossed I am doing this thing right! I love food too much to eat bland food all the time…

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At Ventana School where I work we made some pipe cleaner dolls for the dollhouse the kids built, and here they are all ready to be sold at the auction.

Speaking of the auction my hubby and I had a lovely night out on Saturday night at the adults-only event with cocktails, wine and a delicious catered dinner by Opa! It was a game theme, so my outfit was my own interpretation of a Candy Land princess :D. It was a bit wacky but anyway it gave me the opportunity to wear the lovely raw silk vintage beaded jacket (from my fave vintage store in Mountain View, which is now gone!) with a dress I made out of FabMo silk pieces.

The quilt that is pictured was created with help by the 1st-grade class I help teach. A grandma of the students (who is a star quilter) designed and made the quilt, and it is incredible. It was won by the parents of the class and will be shared by the parents to travel with this cohort of children at the school. It is an absolute treasure and captures the spirit of the community at the school.

My daughter came with me to work today, and we had a fun time in the classroom together. She was a bit tired by the end of the day, so she did some reading when I was working with the kindergarten kids. She had a fun time with the 1st grade and enjoyed the tinkering with the kids at lunchtime and ate and played with them all which was so good!

After work, we went to visit the lovely ladies AKA the chickens at the ranch, and they have a new addition an Easter Egger whom we call chicken cheeks which is just beautiful and tiny. Apparently, these ladies lay different coloured eggs which are how they get their name. I cannot wait until she starts laying. I was so happy to spend time with the chickens where at one point I turned around, and the whole flock of standard hens had followed me out into the grass, I am so looking forward to having chickens of our own one day!! At the coop we now have 13 bantams and 10 standard chickens so that is quite a flock and they are all very entertaining, I am sure they remember the people they interact with and most especially whoever gives them the best treats like strawberry tops and kombucha!

Nothing like a holiday!

| poppypeach

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Now we are on holidays and it is so good to sleep in and catch up with so much stuff that has been waiting to be done such as getting rid of stuff for our move! So far I have cleaned out the sewing room but I still do not have a cupboard’s worth of fabric, hey I could be here up to another year so I have to keep some fabric to keep me occupied in my spare time!

Yesterday we did a coop clean out with another 4H family and we came home covered in dust. It was so much fun to see the chickens again, Ruby even got to go on a walk with a chicken leash 😀 Now their coop is super clean complete with an indoor dust bath made from play sand and diatomaceous earth to help keep the feather mites at bay.

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Saturday I went to yoga after weeks and it was a brilliant start to the weekend with my idea of cleaning my house I may as well cleanse my body too with some hot yoga! The spring flowers are starting to pop up but with the current weather with overnight lows of 2-4 degrees, I only see it in the sunshine during the day.

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These lovely watercolour pictures are created with salt on the watercolour to create the sky in the background. This was a discovery for me as I have not had much experience with watercolour. Our art teacher worked on planet paintings with the kids and these were my favourites with the bottom on looking like Salvador Dali.

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Wednesday we had wandering time in the chapel and the kids worked on an exercise of what feelings arise when you look at particular colours and this is what happens when you give a 1st-grade girl the colour brown.

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These made great gifts though next time I will wrap them individually on cardstock so they do not tangle plus they need to be made long so the string can get over the child’s head. In the end one was so small it went on one of the kindergartens stuffies!

Two O 1 8 make it great!

| poppypeach

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Looking through the lens of last year made me realise that we all just carry on with our lives and make the most of the year even though there may be sh*t happening on the periphery. 2017 was off to a dodgy start but then with how everything panned out in the end life really kicked off into full motion and things are now moving along!

What makes me happy are these chickens! Who knew that I would end up being a chicken lady who absolutely adores the personalities of these little ladies. We visited them for Christmas day, and we had some kombucha scoby treats for them that they truly enjoyed. The stress these little ladies release is just the best, so when we move home, I am planning to have a small coop with a couple of ladies in the yard!

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Thankful for these Peaches as they have just rolled with the last 4 months of Mama working full time and juggling study fitting in family time when I can. This year is a plan for more of a work, study, life and dancing balance – hey if family time is stretched where we cannot get out of the house we have the Nintendo Switch and Just Dance 2018 to get us all up and about in the lounge room. Quality family time, after all, combining the love of the Nintendo Switch (purchased in Australia) who possessed my family with Zelda.

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We wrapped up the year with a fantastic spread of hummus and pita chips, kale chips, home cooked pizza (Ken Forkish’s dough), salsa and tortilla chips, vegetable lasagne and salad. For lunch, we enjoyed my hubby’s homemade bread, chips and these tasty little goat cheese mini quiches made with my fave dough from A Year of Pies. Missy rolled my dough and put it in muffin tins. I added the filling of goat cheese and leaves or zucchini and gouda, I have to remember for next time to grease and flour the muffin tins for an easier release of the quiche but all in all they looked so good on the table and were quite a treat. We made 32 and have a few left over for lunch this week at work, so that is perfect. Our NYE was a relaxed night with our friends from Oakland coming by after lunch and our neighbours and friends joining us later for pizza, it was a late afternoon and evening of fun dancing, gaming and chatting with old friends and new.

Heres to a year of good health, delicious food, family time, friend time and lots of dancing!

Farewell Melbourne, until we meet again!

| poppypeach

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Our final week in Melbourne was a week of how much more delicious Melbourne food can we eat?

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Melbourne is a foodie city which is why I love it so much, it speaks my language – the language of food in many cuisines. Melbourne is an absolute delight to visit, and there are always many superb restaurants to discover! My sister told me about a place called Lankan Tucker in Brunswick – as one of my last lunches with my foodie friend Cath we went for a feed of pan rolls and stuffed roti, it was absolutely delightful. The day before we had visited my uncles take away Sri Lankan shop and had a pan roll and brought home many treats we had with dinner – the kids wanted more by the time we left, which is always good. Sri Lankan food is always an excellent find – these treats of pan rolls and stuffed roti are quite time-consuming, so it is a real score to find them. At Lankan Tucker, the toilet was the best with some sayings we used to hear all the time from our parents, these sayings were described as “Lankanisms”, an absolute classic! Indeed, we would love to go back for more next time we go to Melbourne, and we will be visiting Uncle Glens take away for an order of pan rolls from Curry and Chips.

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We always find well-made coffee in Melbourne that is just amazing but the kids even score with a beautiful hot chocolate as well – to me it is all about the ritual of coffee and tea, enjoying time over a cuppa. None of this takeout and go business, no thank you!

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On Sunday we celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary – it was a hot day, so off we went to downtown Mountain View for dinner of a $12 salad from sweetgreen – I really like their ethos towards food sustainability and their support of local food and agriculture. I felt like a salad and scored a salad a mighty big one at that, it was chilli hot which added to the salad and our first time there. It was OK, but I think it may have been better with pickles, everything is better with pickles. As steel was the element for our 11th anniversary, I said to my hubby hey we were in a steel aeroplane for a very long time I think that makes a great anniversary gift – a trip home to Australia! Even though I have been living here for nearly 11 years, Australia is where I feel I belong.

So I was very excited to come back and see the ladies at the ranch – I love the chickens, and the Bantams have grown so much, time for some selfies with the chicks!!

On Monday it was hug a chicken day, in our neck of the woods! I don’t think they were that excited to see us but we bought them some treats, so in the end, they were happy. The kids really spent so much time with them and gave them lots of hugs and attention. Now it is back to reality, and I actually start a full-time job in August as a Teacher Assistant, life is going to start to get real busy!!