Moving house and parting waters

Oh yes, we disappeared again! Littletree and I have been a little exceedingly busy moving house. In a flood.

Surprise! We have a new home. It’s still in Fern Gully, but on the far side of the caldera.

The new house is gorgeous – it’s like our dream home. We have a large block of land in the bush, rainforest, dozens of fruit trees (mangoes, guavas, rose apples, pomegranates, bananas, papayas, pears, sapotes, and loads more!), established, fenced veggie gardens, a large creek with swimming holes and stretches we can kayak on, and a small, freshwater spring that cascades down little waterfalls in the rainforest – clean sweet water we can drink!

And the house itself is so perfect for us!

The front of the house

The kitchen (all wooden – yay!)

My bedroom,

with extra awesome rainbow window

And my own little balcony to enjoy the morning sun

And a sunroom off my bedroom, that shall be my office :)

Littletree’s room

The most enormous covered deck ever!

Adorable fireplace in the funky living room

Veggie gardens

The gorgeous rainforest…

It’s honestly the most amazing place ever. I go to sleep at night hearing the burbling of the spring below my window, which cascades from one pool to the next…

The only problem is that since Cyclone Oswald, which hit us the day after I got this new house, it’s been raining heavily, and flooded here. The creek has been up over the driveway and we’ve been unable to drive in for a whole month!

At some point, it even got up to waist-deep over the causeway, with a very strong current – at that level, I didn’t even try to cross, having decided that anything over knee-deep was unsafe (and even then it was a bit iffy), and it was deemed only safe for Littletree to wade through if it was no more than halfway up her shins. Definitely not possible to drive poor Sunshine (our van) through!

So, not being able to drive in, we couldn’t move in properly – we managed to get some camp mattresses and bedding up to the house in backpacks, wading through the creek (when it was low enough to do so), and then schlepping up about 200 metres of muddy, rocky hill to get to the house.

We had a good friend come to stay who helped out a lot – she even lugged a little bar fridge through the creek and up the hill for us!

And I did about 57 trips back and forth, down to the van, fill up storage bins and a backpack with stuff, wade through the creek, put storage bins on a cart, and lug the lot up to the house, unload, return with empty bins, rinse and repeat.

We still don’t have furniture at the house, or a proper fridge, but we have what we need, and slowly, one box at a time, I’m getting stuff in. And in the meanwhile, I’m getting a LOT of exercise.

WELCOME HOME!

The housewarming party is yet to come :)

Learning Elvish

Littletree was doing a crossword puzzle today. The clue was "A small fairy who plays tricks on people (three letters)".

She could not, for the life of her, guess this one.

When I told her it's Elf, she said, but Elves aren't small fairies who play tricks on people. Elves are tall and fair, honourable and skilled with bows. They aren't small fairies at all"

Another clue was "a small plant (5 letters" starting with "sh").
She could not guess shrub, and it turns out she didn't know what a shrub is at all. I said, "you know, a small bush, as in bring me a shrubbery!"

She knows what a shrubbery is, because she has a cultural reference for it.
Then she started rubbing my back and saying shhhhhhhh. "I thought that's a shrub: shhhhhh-rub" (yup, she shares my sense of humour).

And she's totally right. I now understand much more why my child, who is incredibly bright and well-educated, doesn't do so well on standardised tests. She not only hasn't spent the past 4 years being trained to do standardised tests, she has a completely different set of cultural references.

It doesn’t mean she isn’t educated – she is very educated, and has a wealth of knowledge in many areas that would put a lot of college students to shame. It just means her sphere of learning follows a different path than the one prescribed.

Stormy Adventures

For those wondering where we’ve been, Littletree and I were hit by Cyclone Oswald – well, not us personally, but the area we live in was heavily affected. It had seemed that the usual January storms weren’t coming this year, and me being me, I hadn’t seen the news, so I didn’t know it was coming.

The wind picked up and the rain came down, and before I knew it, the power went out, and the phone. Littletree and I spent the next couple of days huddled up in the house, while trees came down around us, with no power, and the cellular reception tower went down, we had no way out and no way to contact the world.

The roof leaked terribly, the downstairs flooded (again), the pergola blew away, more trees came down, the road turned into a river and half washed away. The village water supply got contaminated so we had to boil water, and I was kept busy siphoning water out of the downstairs flat, and putting furniture up on bricks.

But we spent our time, playing Dungeons and Dragons, reading science textbooks by candlelight, and making up Minecraft-themed parody lyrics to every song we could think of. We danced to no music, and made handicrafts, and ate tinned food and fried bread. We snuggled and giggled and enjoyed being without phones and electricity and internet.

This river was our driveway

This river was our street

This river was our back patio

This river was the downstairs living room

this river was the garage

This river was the bathroom

The knee-deep water I was siphoning out with a garden hose (and no, I don’t own a siphon pump)

This was the pergola with most of a tree on top of it

The back stairs which have ceased to exist

And this is where there used to be a road, but a tree fell on it, taking out all the power lines and phone lines for a few days

The fallen tree from above

When the storm finally blew itself out and the workers finally came to clear it up,

Littletree took great interest in watching from the balcony with her binoculars

Slowly, slowly, they got it cleared

And it became a street again

And we’re all safe and sound in the end.

Littletree’s Little Business

Littletree’s entrepreneurial talents have been full-speed ahead lately; in addition to her usual brownie and muffin selling, she’s been making loads of earrings and selling them, frantically saving up money.

Faster than I ever would have guessed possible, she had enough to buy herself her current coveted item – an iPod Touch. Well, this was also expedited by Apple bringing out the 5th Generation iPod Touch, and phasing out the 4th Gen ones, which meant that they suddenly became very cheap in stores, and she’s very happy to have it, regardless of being “last year’s model”.

First there was the great unboxing

And the magical moment of peeling off the screen cover

And voila!

Of course, then I had to spend a couple of hours installing iTunes on her computer and reminding myself how much I really hate iTunes and wondering why it has to be so damn difficult…

But I’ll chalk it up to an educational experience.

And Littletree is stoked; listening to music, playing games, messaging her friends, reading e-books, and learning stuff. She even bought herself a cute cover for it.

Now she’s redoubled her savings efforts, with the goal to buy a better telescope.

An Elven Adventure

Littletree has taken to Dungeons and Dragons – I suppose it was inevitable, what with all the geekery already going on in that child (remember we’re talking about a kid who wanted scale plush microbes for her birthday and who thinks drawing up molecular structures is a fun afternoon).

I asked my parents if they could send up some of the old books and dice we played with when I was young, and Littletree got a Player’s Handbook and her own set of dice from the Google SecretSanta at Christmas…

And away she went creating a character.

Lindy, the Ranger Elf.

Lindy has Autumn-ginger hair (oddly, about the same colour as Littletree’s), is fairly short for an elf (go figure), is a skilled archer, and wears leather armour. Lindy also has a keen sense of perception, and a strong connection to nature. She has great skill in climbing trees and in healing (sound familiar?)

So we go on little adventures, and the learning never stops. So much mental arithmetic, reading, statistics, calculations, as well as spatial awareness and strategy. Fun times!

C is for Cookie

Littletree has been doing some workbooks lately, and one of them – a phonics workbook, of all things – included a simple recipe for simple sugar biscuits.

So off she went, measuring,

Sifting (I love the old fashioned retro sifter I found at an op shop!)

Rolling out dough and cutting shapes

and lo! Biscuits!

She even did the dishes :-)

And it was educational too – we learned that it’s better to put two trays in the oven that squish everything together to make it all fit on one tray… and we learned that if you put a leaf-shaped biscuit too close to the bum of a bunny-shaped biscuit it comes out stuck together looking like a squirrel-shaped biscuit!