Mud Mud Glorious Mud.

There’s nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. Well the kids had fun with it anyway, after the downpour we had yesterday.

Ahhh, it was so good to get some decent rain. It has been so hot and dry lately, the grass was really starting to get crunchy underfoot.

Sometimes we don’t see the rain coming in our little valley until it is right upon us. We’re often sent into a scurry, dashing around collecting various bits of clothing or toys that the kids have left strewn about, or bringing in the washing or other such things.

Yesterday we found ourselves removing lights from the trees at the last minute. Well, we’d had a party at New Year and we hadn’t got around to getting them down yet, but there’s no motivation like an approaching storm. They probably would have been alright, but I got a bee in my bonnet about it (how many clichés are you allowed to use in one post?) and we got them down.

The other issue for us with the oncoming rain was that we are waiting for a new tank to arrive and had already disconnected and removed the old tank. So half of the water our roof collects had nowhere to go and was going to end up on the ground beside the house. So we needed to attach some extra pipes to direct water further away from the house. But first, I was determined to collect some rainwater for drinking…as our remaining tank is not very clean and we are not drinking its water (we’ve been buying spring water).

So there we were, in the pouring rain, holding a pipe into a bucket collecting as much water as we could and transferring into it various other water containers. We harvested about 100 litres before we ran out of vessels to store it in. Then we had to let the rest of the water flow out onto the grass, towards a couple of trees.

In the meantime, on the other side of the house, the gutters were overflowing and water was running under the house in a steady stream. I could see the gutters were clogged with leaves, but I couldn’t do anything about it, as our ladder recently broke (finally – it was nearly as old as me) and there was no way to get onto the roof. So I raced around grabbing old sheets of corrugated iron and leant them against the house so the overflow would hit it and run onto the grass instead of back under the house. Honestly, sometimes I feel like a character in a comedy skit, trying to do things without the right tools or equipment, with some pretty unusual outcomes. Oh well, whatever works.....

So anyway, I got that situation under control, and managed to relax and enjoy the rain for a minute. I was saturated anyway, and it had been so hot even the rain was warm. It felt so nice on the skin. But after all that, it suddenly stopped. So then it was time for puddle play and a bit of mud slinging, although that ended up with somebody getting an eyeful!

The frogs are also rejoicing in the wet and were out in full force in the evening croaking up a deafening chorus. Here’s a sound byte of how they sounded outside my bedroom window.

They were like that most of the night. The deeper croaking belongs to the big green tree frogs, while the more shrill sounds belong to the orange-eyed tree frogs. We're a bit excited about the orange-eyed little guys, because they are suspected to be declining in population, but we seem to have plenty here at the moment. We caught up with a couple of them this morning, and were happy to see them engaged in active procreation....

I’m sure the trees and the garden will be responding to the lovely rain with lots of new growth, and it looks like there’s more rain coming. I’m off to take a walk around and feel the damp beneath my feet.

I've entered BLOGLAND!!

Well I've finally jumped in. I resisted for along time....but like everything else on the internet, eventually I thought I'd better give it a go. (Lookout YouTube - you're next). I've been meaning to journal our life more regularly, so I thought this would be a good prompting for me to keep it up. Life moves so fast and kids grow up in a few blinks of an eye, so I want to make sure I'm documenting some of this amazing life as we pass through it!

Here's the brief background: my partner and I have been together for nearly 15 years, having met in a share house (who says housemates can't shack up?). We then had some fantastic adventures together in the world of dance music, which was still pretty underground in Australia at that time. My partner produced techno music and played live sets while I Djd and we participated in lots of parties and festivals about the place. We did a stint overseas, including a year in Japan, and it was after coming home from Tokyo that we fled to the rainforest on a mountain to get back to nature and find tranqulity...

Which we did, and our first baby boy was born in that rainforest on that mountain. That was the beginning of a totally new adventure - parenting. A journey that has expanded our universe like we had never imagined! Now that I am a parent, I think I FEEL everything so much more. Now I understand the unconditional love that a mother has for her child, I experience more keenly the pain in the world...everyone is someone's child!

But back to the story, although we could have lived on the mountain forever, we needed to buy our own place, so with a little sadness we prepared to move on and began the search for some land in the country that we could AFFORD.

So that's how we found our valley. If you can't live ON a mountain, you can at least LOOK at one.

In a relatively isolated spot in a rural area, we found the place where we would grow up our kids. Since we moved here 5 years ago, 2 more children have been born. One under the she-oak tree and one in the water.

I'm making it my mission to plant out this place as much as possible and make it lush and lovely. We had a pretty good headstart with lots of good trees already and some interesting features on the land. We really want to make good habitat areas as well, to be a sanctuary for the local wildlife, as this is a farming area, and there needs to be places for the wildlife to seek refuge.

Our lovely froggy friends are our most cheerful tenants. They are well settled in and really enjoy feasting at the frog restaurant every night. (We leave a spotlight on and all the bugs come down and get munched by the frogs). It's so interesting to see the frogs all making their way to the restaurant at about 9.00pm. And they always go back to their same hiding places at the end of the night. They like their routine. Sometimes the kids taxi them to the restaurant and they don't mind that either!




As part of our lifestyle here, we have embraced homeschooling, which suits us so well. We generally follow the natural learning philosophy. We see just about every experience as an opportunity to learn. I guess I'll talk more about this as time goes on....

We work from home, doing various creative projects including a sound design company. My partner also works part-time assisting people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

But our big dream for our valley is to build a solar-powered strawbale studio here, so we can offer musicians the complete eco-friendly recording experience. I can hardly wait! We're not ready to start building yet, but in the meantime we are learning all that we can.

Thanks for visiting!